Labour is dead?
Undead labourism and the birth of a new mass workers’ party
The idea that the Labour Party is dead as a site of class struggle is now common among socialists in Britain.
When the Labour Left was leading the party, most of the left had an orientation towards getting the party into government rather than building a new electoral party to challenge it.
Tens of thousands have now left Labour, including people who were in the party before 2015. Some have joined the Greens, some have got involved with efforts at left-of-Labour parties. Most are instead focusing on trade union activity.
But Labour remains what it has always been: a bourgeois workers’ party. This was its character even when it was led by the Labour Left – it should be obvious enough given that most of the party’s representatives in parliament and local government were for the return of the Labour Right.
Labourism lives
Millions of workers will vote Labour. Class conscious workers will back it rather than the Tories. While the Labour Right are wretched, they have to pay lip-service to reformism to win votes – even the New Labour government offered reforms though many have not endured. This doesn’t mean that we should join in with uncritical cheerleading as the Labour Right would prefer.
There are some complicating factors which give the workers’ movement leverage to maximise the extent of reforms: Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner is a champion of the New Deal for Working People, a package of reforms drawn up in negotiation with Labour’s affiliated unions.
Rayner’s politics are not those of the Labour Left but she rose to prominence when it led the party. She backed Rebecca Long-Bailey to become Labour leader in 2020 rather than Keir Starmer.
Unlike every other member of the shadow cabinet, Rayner cannot be sacked by Starmer. It is possible that he has not purged the Labour Left in parliament – Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs – all in one go (as it is reported that he was privately advised to by Tony Blair at the World Economic Forum in Davos, of all places) because this would lead to an immediate showdown with affiliated unions, risking party finances even further ahead of a general election.
Stop Starmer, start…?
If Rayner has ambitions to be leader, she will need the support of the Labour Left and the affiliated unions to get on the ballot and provide the start-up funding for a leadership campaign.
Even if this is not her career goal, it doesn’t do her any harm to have this idea floating around. It will make her a big player in the next Labour government.
Because of her union background, Rayner’s role in the party is often compared to that of John Prescott, who was deputy leader to Blair and helped provide balance and mediation between the bourgeois forces within the party and the affiliated unions.
But given that the economic situation for an incoming Labour government will not be like that of the 1990s but rather the 1970s, we should look further back and elsewhere in the history of social democracy for comparisons.
The spectre of a split
If Labour is entering power in similarly adverse economic conditions to 1974 but without a strong Labour Left populating the parliamentary party and clinging on in the cabinet until its leading figures are demoted, then Rayner could just as easily be an Oskar Lafontaine – breaking from Starmer to become a fierce critic and even leading a split to form a new party with forces outside of Labour.
If this all seems quite tenuous, remember that the political fortunes of the working class movement in Britain were invested in one man who led the Labour Party between 2015 and 2020. To have them now invested in one woman who is deputy leader of the Labour Party should not require too much of an imaginative leap.
The argument that the workers’ movement has leverage within Labour and at its highest levels does not mean that the focus of people wanting to assist our class in winning political power have to burrow away in the Labour Party.
Towards a left bloc in parliament?
A “workers’ list” of candidates independent from the Labour Right is needed for the general election. It should endorse the sitting Labour Left MPs and call for a critical Labour vote in the most marginal Tory-held seats but field its own candidates in as many seats as possible against the Labour Right MPs.
Such an intervention would be unlikely to result in the election of candidates outside of Labour other than one or two independents who are longstanding Labour MPs suspended by Starmer.
With the collapse in support for the Tories under painful economic conditions, it may be questionable, given the swing to Labour in opinion polls, how much impact could really be made by a “workers’ list” campaign on the outcome for sitting Labour Left MPs and the one or two candidates who have made it through the mostly-rigged selection process.
Even so, the refusal to stand against those who organise in a faction which is separate to the Labour Right sends a strong message to those candidates.
A new workers’ party could emerge under a Labour government, uniting the left groups and parties outside of Labour into one multi-tendency organisation and seeking support from the unions. This strategic goal requires tactics which build sympathy for the idea of a new party, such as making principled endorsements, avoiding “vote splitting”, and running candidates against the Labour Right but not the Left.
Extra-parliamentary party politics
The Transform initiative merging existing groups and the approach of TUSC towards other left groups suggest that there are those in the movement willing to engage in the work of fusing together the scattered electoral projects.
The key to this succeeding would be splits from Labour in parliament. But without electoral reform to make a new party viable in a more competitive political system, the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs and the affiliated unions with left leaders are unlikely to break free of the Labour Right unless there is a free-fall in voter support for the party.
Therefore, the political strength of the workers’ movement in the next few years is going to be in its ability to organise in workplaces and neighbourhoods across party-political lines for specific goals – such as rejecting bad pay deals in the public sector, and trying to win collective bargaining in big private sector employers.
That so many people have a partyist perspective is a good sign. But a new mass workers’ party cannot be declared into existence, it has to be built patiently over time and through open discussion between different groups.
Every experience of building workers’ parties of thousands, tens of thousands, and beyond, has involved fusions.
Unity is strength, after all.