The strong showing of Respect in a number of areas in the May General Election opens up the prospect of building it as a broad, left wing challenge to the politics of Blair and New Labour.
Establishing the correct political basis for this will be crucial: too limited a political programme will offer too little in the way of radicalism for those who have been jaded and alienated by Labour's politics old and "New": too ambitious a programme could however fail to make the connections that must be established with a potentially wide layer of support in the working class, among ethnic minorities, and among a wide range of campaigns which are already active in opposing New Labour.
Another problem is that a more advanced class struggle programme, in the absence of a higher lovel of actual class struggle can appear as little more than wishful thinking or bluster.
So what contribution can Marxists within Respect offer to the development of a programme which not only builds the necessary broad base for a stronger electoral challenge to New Labour, but also leads in the direction of more developed and explicitly socialist politics?
JOHN LISTER has been looking at some of the lessons from historic turning points in the Marxist movement. A second article, in our next issue, will look at how the same method of approach developed by Marxists to popularising the programme and locating it in current struggles can be applied in the context of today's situaton in Britain. Respect has already recognised the need to go beyond the rudimentary starting point of simply standing as "the anti-war party".
This political ground was of course contested in May by opportunist forces, most notably the Liberal Democrats and the Greens: but it is also clear that simply to offer the banner of opposition to a war that took place in 2003 would run the risk of turning into Retrospect', perpetually harking back to past events rather than confronting the current, and changing needs and issues facing the working class.
Recognising this, in the run-up the Respect's National Council did adopt a much wider-ranging manifesto, which was based on policies adopted by the conference last November, and published on its web site.
The maniesto sets out a radical line on a wide range of domestic and international issues, marking out a position which is on most measures an advance on "old Labour", but which deliberately avoids setting out a full-scale "maximum" programme of socialist revolution which would not only divide Respect, but also offer little if any connection with the wider layer of working class support that the campaign was trying to reach.
The underlying reality driving this approach is one
which the traditional British far left, in all its varieties, has generally failed to establish a broad base of support, while the working class itself is marked in the current period by a historically low level of organisation, mobilisation, political engagement and solidarity.
The issue that demands attention and a new creative approach is how Respect can hope to establish a genuine connection with the most active and dynamic sections of the working class, and on a wider level how socialists within Respect need to popularise their politics in order to maximise their impact.
Today's low levels of trade union organisation are ol course the outcome of grim years of defeats under the Tories, compounded by the cowardice and complicity of their bureaucratic leaders and the TUC.
At national level, with few exceptions, the union bureaucrats - who had the chance to do things very differently -spurned every opportunity to French revolutionaries in Paris 1848 link up and strengthen mass movements, leaving first the steel workers, then health workers and then print workers and eventually the miners isolated in their struggles against the Thatcher government. This brought a historic defeat for the NUM 20 years ago, from which the labour movement has never recovered.
It is this long-term weakness which has brought on the one hand an arrogant Blair who has again outlined a relentless programme "modernisation" the expense of public sector workers, civil liberties and welfare provision: and on the other hand a supine union leadership which has neither mounted nor even discussed ally serious Blair's accelerating privatisation of health care or educa"Our concern cannot be simply to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms
but to abolish classes, not to improve existing society
but to found a new one." tion, and which now routinely accepts job cuts and plant closures with little more than a murmur unconvincing protest
Union leaders will indignantly argue that they are under no pressure from members to take any more militant line: but the political mood and expectations of the working class have been set by 25 years of Thatcherite policies, in which the routine response of empty rhetoric, followed by ungainly retreats and cynical betrayals has become the norm for virtually every trade
The example that proves that another approach is possible was the build-up to the one-day strike of public sector workers against attacks on their pension rights, scheduled for March 23. UNISON chief Dave Prentis argued, perhaps justifiably, that this strike would be "bigger than the 1926 General Strike: but the action was built up with only one aim in view - to force a concession from ministers, in the final weeks before a general election.
When this small concession
- a postponement until after the election of the increase in pension age for local government staff, and talks on the government plans announced, unions rushed to cancel the stoppage, which had already reached well beyond the initial group of local government unions that had initiated it.
A rare opportunity had presented itself to focus the anger
runs through man) public sector workers, and to secure a much more substantial retreat by ministers: but the strikes had been called purely to secure new talks, and that was all that was won. The reelected Blair government will now resume its attacks on public services and public sector workers secure in the knowledge that the union leaders are more frightened of mass action than ministers are. Unfavourable conditions
It may well appear that the circumstances Britain today are exceptionally unfavourable for building any substantial opposition to the Blair government's coordinated and planned neoliberal offensive: but this is to miss out on the lessons of history, which show that some of the most important developments in the programme of socialists and revolutionaries took place in some of the most uncomfortable circumstances.
In 1848 revolutions broke out across Europe, in which half-hearted and unconvinced sections capitalists attempted to exploit the anger and fighting strength of the emerging urban working class to secure a limited extension of democratic rights from absolutist regimes.
Karl Marx, analysing these complex movements, warned that workers should always maintain their own independent organisations, and should seek to exploit this division within the ruling rich to press home the fight for more radical and lasting changes
Marx pointed to the impossibility of the "liberal", "democratic" capitalists and petty bourgeois carrying through a genuine and comprehensive democratic revolution, because they feared the strength and power of the working class far more than they feared the feudal and absolutist rulers they appeared to be fighting against.
"While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible ... it is our interest and our task to make the permanenl [unbroken] until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power, and until the association of the proletarians nas progressed sufficiently far - not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the
- that competition between the proletarians these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers.
"Our concern cannot be simply modify privale property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve existing society but to found a new one"
It should be remembered that these bold phrases were penned at a time when the working class was but a small minority of the population, and they were echoed in the ebb of great revolutions and Marx and Engels drew out lessons for a period which offered much fewer overt openings for revolutionary politics.
In similar fashion Marx and Engels developed an agitational programme designed to link the early Communists with the unass movclIcIl taking shape in Germany, centred on democratic demands, including:
• The whole of Germany to be declared a single and indivisible republic
• Every German aged over 21 to, be able to vote and be elected, 'provided he has no criminal record
• Elected representatives to be paid, so that workers too could afford to stand for parliament
• The whole population shall be armed.
• The estates of princes and other feudal lords, and all mines and pits, etc, shall become state property, with the estates to be used for large-scale agriculture for the benefit of all.
• A single state bank to replace all the private banks
• All means of transport, railways, canals, steamships, roads, stations, to be taken over by the state, and put at the free service of the needy.
• Complete separation of Church and State
• "Severely progressive" Lasanon, and abolition of taxes on consumption.
• Universal and free education for the people.
Each of these demands had a dynamic which linked to
daily needs and demands of the working class, but which also tended to break the bounds of a capitalist system based on exploita. tion and profit.
Creative approach
Just as Marx and Engels became more creative and responsive in the application and popularisation of the programme in a period in which conditions were more difficult, so too the politics of the
Communist
evolved in the concrete situation of the ebb of the revolutionary tide which brought Russian