Are you broad of this?
Broad-frontism and the new mass workers’ party we need
What next for working class political representation in Britain?
Should people who tried to build the left in Labour give up now it is led by the right-wing? Why not try the same left-reformist approach as between 2015-2020 but using the Greens instead of Labour?
What about a united workers’ list of candidates for the general election? Or should different left groups just get on with a new workers’ party right now, without any coordination with others on the left?
To answer these practical questions, we must consider our theory of change and proceed on that basis to reorganise our forces. To this end, we must ask if we need a ‘broad party’ committed to generic leftwing values or a mass party committed to working-class interests?
Party choices
Mike Macnair has posed the choice between a mass workers’ party and a broad left party, asking if we should “build a party of the working class – meaning people who live from wages and salaries (not including ‘executive compensation’, which is a distribution of profits disguised as salary) and related benefits, as opposed to small business-people? Or should the aim be something in the nature of a broad alliance against the current ideological order”? [1]
Often this argument for what might be called a ‘broad party’ or a “broad front” centred on philosophical values rather than material interests comes down to the language used to describe class, capitalism, and the historical traditions of socialism and communism.
For Macnair, this is not at issue:
“I do not think anyone would disagree with the idea that leaflets for broad circulation, interviews on television and so on should be written or spoken in a language that the intended audience can understand.” [2]
He argues that a degree of theoretical development is necessary:
“You need to grasp certain explanatory concepts in order for certain choices to be possible to you.” [3]
Directly related to this, “the history” is unavoidable:
“The idea that we can reach out to large numbers of ‘ordinary people’ if we forget the history and abandon words like ‘socialism’ is more immediately politically foolish: because it supposes that our political opponents, on the right, will consent to not talking about the history. The opposite is true. ‘Talking about Russia’ and Stalin is entrenched in the GCSE history curriculum and endlessly repeated by the rightwing press in response to even the slightest hint of leftwing discourse.” [4]
Labour pains
Writing in 2012, before the growth of the Labour left between 2015 and 2019, Macnair observed:
“There is a peculiarly British political problem with ‘new left formation’ projects, which is the persistent attempt to pretend to be the Labour left.” [5]
A notable feature of the broad Labour Left is its effective subordination to the Labour Right through the need to maintain a united party for electoral purposes. Repeating this approach in the long run is thus not going to be productive.
For Macnair, it’s not enough to be for a mass workers’ party because “there have developed mass parties which claim to stand for the independent interests of the working class, but are actually committed to subordinating those interests to those of the capitalists, either by support for the capitalist state (social democracy) or by strategic commitment to cross-class coalitions in which social democracy and small pro-capitalist groups call the tune (‘official communists’).” [6]
Sects appeal
So there’s a problem: “a sectarianism of a new type, which does not directly counterpose itself to the mass movement, but rather intervenes in it, and poisons any movement in which it has significant influence by its adherence to bureaucratic centralism (and is for the same reason an obstacle to the creation of unity of the Marxists).” [7]
The mass workers’ movement today is dominated by sectarianism by those who “do not abstain from or oppose the mass class movement (in the sense of the trade unions, mass strikes, etc), but actively endeavour to build it.” [8]
This form of sectarianism is perhaps unwitting. Its practitioners are not seeking to put a limit on the growth of the small workers’ parties which they want to build, nor on the mass movement itself, but bureaucratic centralism does just that.
Broadly wrong?
Road Bloc has argued that splits and fusions among Labour Left and independent socialist members of parliament would provide a crucial element in a realignment of British politics which would allow a new mass workers’ party to form as a serious rival to Labour.
A left bloc of MPs forming a new workers’ party with trade union affiliation, in which smaller workers’ parties can also participate as affiliates, would constitute a huge breakthrough in British politics.
It can be argued, using Macnair’s concept of broad-frontism, that the left bloc route to Marxist unity would involve a subordination of working class interests to the capitalist state.
Certainly, the parliamentary wing of the workers’ movement is integrated into the constitutional order and militants elevated to parliament undergo a transformation in their relation to the means of production.
But is it possible to establish a constitutionally disloyal workers’ party, one which demands a democratic republic as the means by which the working class will take power from the capitalist class? The answer is surely, yes.
The formation of a new mass workers’ party out of a left bloc of MPs offers the chance to put into practice the mechanisms of accountability the left has sought in Labour.
Will it be different this time?
Breaking from this trap of broad-frontism requires a serious commitment on the part of individual Marxists to transform the culture of the left and try to build alliances beyond established theoretical traditions and organisations.
This patient work of achieving programmatic unity requires challenging bans and proscriptions and accepting open factions, the contestation of ideas and positions in the workers’ movement.
***
1. Macnair (2013) “Broad parties: Theories of deception”, Weekly Worker 967 [https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/967/broad-parties-theories-of-deception/]
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Macnair (2012) “Liquidationism and 'broad front' masks”, Weekly Worker 920 [https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/920/liquidationism-and-broad-front-masks/]
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.