My previous post, the first in a series, pointed to what I see to be a serious lack on the British Left, an absence of sustained thought. One promising counterbalance to this is the excellent journal
Salvage, which I commend to readers as deserving your support.
I say this because what follows was an article written for
Salvage. It would need updating in the light of the NEC election results, and the limited time I have available for political writing makes prevents this. In any case, they have far better and deeper reflections than mine to offer. Still I post it here just in case anyone finds it interesting.
Curb
your moderation
It
is often claimed that the road to hell is paved with good intentions,
but this is nonsense. The infernal highway is, rather, tarmacked with
moderation. If ever a term was ideological in its innocent
everydayness it is 'moderation'. There is nothing wrong with asking
for a moderate helping of pudding, although even moderate exposure to
the oeuvre of Coldplay might prove too much. Support for a football
team can be moderate, just as one's drinking at the office Christmas
party inevitably turns out to be immoderate. The tempo of a musical
performance might be moderate, as might the incline of a hill or the
difficulty of an exam question. Then, of course, politics might be
moderate. It is, we are left in no doubt, good for politics
for be moderate. The moderate shall inherit the earth, although when
they do so their plans will be as consistently moderate as their
expectations.
Moderation
is something for which we should aim. This is particularly the case
now that 'extremism' has been appointed as the folk devil de nos
jours. Like many a brick in linguistic hegemony it is helpfully
imprecise in its application, caring nothing for conventional
political distinctions. Daesh are extremists; so are Britain First
and Jeremy Corbyn. To this last extremist I will return in due
course. Fortunately for the hard-working families of Middle England,
the extremist menace does not terrorise our streets and polling
booths unopposed. Enter the moderates. These champions of
civilisation and rationality are the opposite to extremists, as
celestial in their virtue as the latter are diabolical in their vice:
contemporary ideology is nothing if not manichean.
To
be moderate is to be reasonable, a concept which political
philosopher Lorna Finlayson has keenly subjected to critical biopsy
in her The Political is Political. The moderates are
realistic, prepared to compromise, accepting of the parameters of the
possible, and sensitive – within limits – to public opinion. Most
schools of thought are blessed with their moderates. Since 2001
moderate Muslims have been much courted by politicians. Meanwhile
David Cameron successfully, if somewhat improbably, branded his
version of conservatism as moderate. One can also be a moderate
Corbynite, supporting the elected leader of the Labour Party, but not
in a way that ruffles too many feathers. That, at least is the plan;
it turns out that some feathers in the Parliamentary Labour Party are
as easily ruffled as Boris Johnson's hair. Those content to rain
bombs on the Middle East are, it seems, uncommonly fragile beasts.
For
moderate Corbynites the leadership is to be supported and popular
policies developed on a broadly social democratic basis. Alliances
are to be formed with the centre and old-right in order to secure
Jeremy's position, especially given the current composition of the
PLP. More generally, however, the gains of the Corbyn surge can only
be secured by a gentle approach, reaching out across the breadth of
the Labour Party, reassuring centrists at constituency level.
Jeremy's tent is to be a big one indeed.
The
soft-left
The
soft-left, to give the moderate Corbynites another more familiar
name, are a force to be reckoned with. Key positions within the
Momentum organisation are filled by moderates, including crucially
founder Jon Lansman. The general thrust of Momentum, whilst bringing
welcome demographic breadth and cultural and aesthetic imagination to
the left, has been a cautious one, reinforced at the level of many
local groups, and supported by influential organisations like
Socialist Action. The case for moderation, however, can also get a
serious hearing within parts of Labour customarily thought of as
hard-left – the present author's home territory. Here the refrain
weaves together the celebratory and the weary in a curious harmony:
we have done well, things are immeasurably better, but let's not do
too much – we don't want to alienate the centre. Father Dougal
McGuire once summed up this outlook in a memorable slogan, 'Careful
Now'. As I'll have cause to remark again in a moment, upon analysis
the view turns out to be suggesting that we carry on doing what we
have been doing for the past two decades. Thus a significant
proportion of Britain's organised anti-capitalists at one of the most
crucial political junctures for years.
Nowhere
is this seen more clearly than in the case of Ann Black. A veteran of
Labour's National Executive Committee (NEC), and frequently topping
the poll of constituency members, she has consistently enjoyed the
support of the Centre Left Grassroots Alliance (CLGA), which has been
backed by the Party's left. This might seem surprising given Black's
less than impressive voting record. At important points, the
suspension of Lutfur Rahman in Tower Hamlets and subsequent
expulsions of his supporters being a key example, Black did not act
as might be expected from a left-winger.
In
the interests of fairness it should be frankly admitted at this stage
that Black has never claimed to be a left-winger. Her politics are
those of a social democratic centre that would have been thought
right-wing in the Labour Party of the 1980s: Roy Hattersley is an
exemplar of the genre. The left formed an alliance with this current
in the early 2000s context of Blairism, from a position of weakness,
the cause of defending the basics of party democracy, the welfare
state, and trade unionism. It was, however, an alliance born of
circumstance rather than deep shared conviction. And so, when
Labour's NEC voted in late July to disenfranchise new members of the
Labour Party in the coming leadership election, Black supported the
move, and subsequently oversaw the suspension of Brighton and Hove
District Labour Party. This was too much for the hard-left Labour
Representation Committee (LRC), which put out a statement saying that
it would never again support Black for the NEC.
Less
surprising than the LRC's response was the reaction of some on the
Labour left to that response. This has ranged from discomfort to
anger; I have witnessed some of it myself. The LRC is putting the
election of the CLGA slate at risk, perhaps it is even undermining
the Corbyn leadership. Certainly, in order to improve its position on
the NEC, the left needs to win the hearts and minds of people who
think like Ann Black, and of those who are attached to her as a
representative . On the face of it this is odd, given that the
majority of those voting in the 2016 NEC election are new to Labour
and have probably never heard of Ann Black. However much the flame of
social democracy might still burn in terms of widespread affection
for the NHS, this passion for Bevanism doesn't generally extend to
memorising the names of the doctrine's current proponents. One
explanation of the soft-left discomfort would be that people have not
come to terms with the new reality and that, when they think of the
Labour Party, they still think of the people who went to their CLP
bingo evening five years ago.
To
grasp why the appeal for moderation over matters like the Black case
found receptive ears on the left, we need to understand the Labour
left's recent history. To grasp why the appeal was misplaced, we need
to understand its present reality.
Politics
in an age of waiting
From the mid-80s onwards Labour's left was in decline from the high
point of Tony Benn's 1981 challenge for the deputy leadership.
Demoralised by the defeat of the Miners' Strike and of left-wing
local authorities by Thatcher, it was weakened by the expulsions
around Militant and undermined by policy shifts in a right-wing
direction. Matters were not helped by the fact that the retreat from
Bennism was led by a man who had once been in the left's own ambit.
Neil Kinnock was the soft-left candidate to replace Michael Foot. On
his shift right, he took a number of left-wing MPs, and rather more
party members with him. All of this happened, moreover, in a context
of rampant privatisation and marketisation and of the global
dominance of neo-liberalism. The left's defeat was finalised and
given governmental expression by Tony Blair.
What
was the Labour left to do in these circumstances? It was weak,
defensive, and without the capacity to act as a significant force in
Labour's internal politics. Such circumstances are ripe for
alliance-building, and so the CLGA was born. During this period, from
the mid-90s onwards, much of the Labour left (outside organised
Trotskyist groups, at least) occupied tactically the ground vacated
by the former soft-left, hoping to defend the gains of the post-war
period, retain Labour's status as a trade-union forces, and rally the
remnant forces of labourism. Where Labour
Briefing once carried a
column called 'Class Traitor of the Month' it now ran defences of the
NHS and council housing that would not have been out of place in a
Fabian Society publication a decade previously.
This
shift in position was perfectly reasonable and, as far as I can
judge, correct. Now, Keynes probably didn't ever ask “When the
facts change, I change my mind; what do you do?”, but it is a good
question, and the problem with the stance of much of the Labour left
is that the facts have changed. From the post-Blairite ashes of the
Labour Party a phoenix of sorts has risen. New members in their tens
of thousands have joined to support Corbyn. Salvage
is hardly the place for displays of unqualified optimism, and its
certainly true that the new support is politically uneven and
fragile. What it is not, however, is full of Ann Black clones. It is
culturally disjoint from much of the Labour Party, younger and more
ethnically diverse than the standing Labour left. The tactics that
kept the flame burning throughout the 90s and 00s should now be
cosigned to history. Worrying about how the Corbyn movement relates
to the old Labour centre in the context of present Labour politics is
rather like obsessing about alliances with Andorra when planning a
geopolitical strategy.
The
issue is that the moderate-tempered part of the Labour left doesn't
see things like this. Whether it is constituency left activists who
continue concerned, as they have been for much of their political
adulthood, with winning over the wobbly moderates, talking them round
over real ale and folk music; or whether it is the slicker, more
digitally competent and Zeitgeist
sensitive Momentum
leadership, many of the people most active in doing left-wing
politics in the Labour Party have been formed in the habit of
guarding against steering left, for fear of upsetting the moderates
and losing them to the Blairites. They have grown used to compromises
of a certain sort. Their learned impulse is to suppress their inner
socialist at key moments. Old habits die hard in this respect, and it
certainly must be difficult to start talking about ownership of the
means of production when you've spent the past twenty years talking
about footpaths. In any case, it might be the case that some Labour
leftists have come to like
this way of doing
politics. Perhaps the constituency activist enjoys his regular pint
with the Gatiskellites; it seems probable that the Momentum
leadership like their new found position, even if they political
compass has changed surprisingly little. In practice, certainly, it
directs them to triangulate centrewards, appeasing parliamentary
opinion in the hope of winning reforms.
Unfortunately,
accommodating the centre looks like a bad tactic, even in terms of
the minimal aim of sustaining Corbyn's position. The Labour centre is
irrelevant; what matters is keeping the support and enthusiasm of
those of have flocked to Labour to support Corbyn. Often politically
inexperienced and idealistic, it is difficult to imagine a thing less
likely to appeal to this constituency than buckling under pressure
and perceived sell-outs. Still worse are non-instrumental appeals to
'the unity of the Labour Party'. The unity of the Labour Party is as
real as the Loch Ness Monster, and were this not the case Jeremy
Corbyn would not have been elected in the first place. The Corbyn
moment was born of crisis, a political crisis both of working class
representation and relatedly of labourism, in Ralph Miliband's sense
of that term. There is no possibility of going back to before the
crisis.
The
phenomenon of Corbynism, which is the closest Britain (or, more
accurately, England) will get to a Podemos or Syriza any time soon,
far from being a sign of the revival of labourism is a manifestation
of its death throes. The old coalition that was the Labour Party,
grouped together in the hope of securing reforms favouring the
working class, and of winning a mass of their votes on that basis is
in secular decline now that capitalism can no longer afford social
democracy. The value of the Corbyn leadership is precisely not that
he makes possible a return to the post-war consensus like some kind
of political TARDIS. This is not a bad thing: the rose tinted
spectacles of enthusiasts for social democracy tend not to notice the
signs on doors reading 'No dogs, no blacks, no Irish', nor the
housewife holding back the tears with valium. Corbyn, however
partially and inadequately, realises that some kind of change is
needed. He represents a break with the neo-liberal consensus and
opens up a space in which people can dream again. This is, of course,
threatening to those who see in dreams only a threat to a good
night's sleep.
Moderate
compromise
The
point is not that compromise is not possible, still less that it is
not needed. Any politics grounded in reality requires prioritisation,
alliance building, and negotiation. This is surely particularly true
of socialist engagement with electoral politics under capitalism. The
demand that left politicians never compromise, that nothing short of
their full programme (whatever that might consist in) will suffice,
deserves Lenin's sobriquet 'an infantile disorder' if anything does.
The question to be asked is not whether we compromise but to which
ends we compromise.
Power
at any cost is not a price worth paying. This is as true if the power
in question is wielded by Jeremy Corbyn as it is when some Blairite
nonentity is justifying their betrayals by appeal to 'keeping Labour
in power'. Socialists presented with governmental or party-political
power use it, at least in theory, only in order to transform it and
so to further the transformation of society itself. They use their
platform to promote their own ideas and challenge those which cement
the present order. Crucially, they consider their own position a
lever with which to strengthen those of the working class and
oppressed groups. Attempts to cling to power, moves to compromise,
and the formation of alliances are judged by these criteria, and
only entered into if they succeed by them. The radical left, unlike
the moderates – whether by conviction or habit, does not understand
these things as goods-in-themselves, the sign of a mature politics,
but as tactics towards the end of a human future.
If
the moderate ever do inherit the earth, a prospect which even by the
pollyannaish criteria of liberals looks unlikely in the age of Donald
Trump and Nigel Farage, it might not turn out to be worth inheriting.
For here is the ultimate irony: whatever else moderation in its
soft-left form might be, it is not realistic. Eagleton has more than
once remarked that it is not revolutionaries who are dewy eyed
utopians, but those who believe that capitalism can be made to work
for the majority of the world's population. We live in a world in
which the demand that every child have enough food to nourish them is
an extreme one, which cannot be realised within the constraints of
the present economic system
In
such a world there is an imperative to be an extremist. In Britain,
that means to be an extreme Corbynite.
