socialism

The Dave Osler drinking game

British left, funny
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The Dave Osler drinking game, as inspired by this post:

  • A glass of your favourite for every time Dave brings up a pointless anecdote from the seventies.
  • Another glass for noticing some current political development unfavourably. The more scolding and po-faced the tone, the stronger you can make your drink.
  • Just half a glass for the inevitable tedious history lesson of disjoined examples of why this development is bad; you need to save your liver.
  • Nasty, unnecessary sneer at Respect or the SWP? Just a sip.
  • Empty the bottle when you come to the last paragraph and Dave’s conclusion is that we need a true socialist movement and therefore you need to vote Labour “through gritted teeth” or otherwise.

That’s it, every Dave Osler domestic electionering post ever. Drink plenty of water before you go to bed and have fun with your inevitable hangover the next morning.

Visteon: victory or failure?

British left, Unions
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When the workers at Visteon plants across the UK were sacked back in March without any pension or backpay they didn’t put up with this, but fought back by occupying the factories, finally forcing the company to honour the agreements it had made when it had taken over the factories from Ford. They didn’t get their jobs back, but they did get the redundancy packages they had a right to. The question now is whether this was a victory or a failure when considered in a larger context. At Socialist Democracy, John McAnulty didn’t think so:

Almost 600 jobs were lost at Visteon’s three plants in Belfast, Basildon and Enfield, with staff being given less than an hour’s notice. At the end of a 34-day occupation the job loss stands, as does the loss of pension rights that the workers contributed to. If the union leadership consider this a victory what would defeat look like?

The unions weren’t alone. Sinn Fein, through their cover sheet the Andersonstown News, had front-page headlines proclaiming a victory for ‘Peoples’ Power.’ At an earlier meeting discussing Visteon, Socialist Workers Party spokesperson Eamonn McCann had claimed that there was no such thing as defeat in industrial struggles – to struggle was in itself a form of victory.

[…]

‘Visteon Victory’ means something different to workers. It means that organisations like the UNITE bureaucracy and the Sinn Fein leadership cannot possibly be considered as useful aids in the battle against capitalism and must be removed from the field of play if workers are to have a fighting chance.

At Socialist unity, Andy Newman disagrees:

The recent Visteon strikes are a good example. In an exemplary show of initiative and militancy the workers occupied in Belfast, Enfield and Basildon, which then became the foci of networks of trade union and community solidarity. It was an heroic and inspirational fight, that blew away the cobwebs of inertia that had greeted the closure of Woolworths, and other job losses.

But before we get too carried away with our assesment of the workforces’ bargaining position, let us consider that Visteon were seeking to close the factories, so the occupations were an interruption to cash flow stopping the selling the assets, but were not hitting their production; and secondly that through the use of threats of courts, police and bailiffs, only Belfast was still in occupation at the time a deal was reached.

[…]

Now it is true that the workforce didn’t get their jobs back, and the pensions issue was unresolved. But what were the realistic chances of getting the factories reopened?

To have done so would have needed a political context where there existed pressure on the government to step in. That is not the current political reality, and occupations by relatively small factories in the recession stricken car industry were not going to be able to change that.

On balance I’d say Andy is more right than John. While it is true that union bureaucracy and leadership does often hold back workers’ militancy, in this case the workers were supported by their union and the result was clearly as good as it could be. What John wants to have happened just was not on the cards. There’s this sort of “fantasy football” idea of the socialist revolution where the workers spontaneously rise up, start doing factory occupations and sweeping aside the deadweight of the cowardly union bureaucracy march into the glorious sunrise of the socialist paradise. What John proposes is the Green Lantern theory of revolution, that as long as the workers have enough willpower they can overcome all obstacles. Real life just doesn’t work that way.

Visteon wasn’t a complete victory, but it was an important step towards victory. It showed us that we can fight the bosses and win, even if it didn’t bring the revolution overnight.

The sterility of vanguardism

socialism
Published on 2 Comments on The sterility of vanguardism

Is nicely expressed in the following quote from Morris Stein, one of American Socialist Workers Party’s bigwigs back in 1948, as presented by Louis Proyect in his ongoing critique of vanguardiasm and democratic centralism:

We are monopolists in the field of politics. We can’t stand any competition. We can tolerate no rivals. The working class, to make the revolution can do it only through one party and one program. This is the lesson of the Russian Revolution. That is the lesson of all history since the October Revolution. Isn’t that a fact? This is why we are out to destroy every single party in the field that makes any pretense of being a working-class revolutionary party. Ours is the only correct program that can lead to revolution. Everything else is deception, treachery. We are monopolists in politics and we operate like monopolists.

This idea that there’s only one road towards the Revolution and that the Party is the guardian of this Truth and needs to vanquish its rivals before it can leads a passive working class to the promised land is unfortunately still around in stronger or weaker form today in most, if not all radical leftwing groups and grouplets. You see the results in the dreary unending feuds between various parties whose only real difference lies in such esoteric questions as to whether the USSR was state capitalist or a deformed workers state, or in the obsessive need for every event or development to be neatly slotted into a theoretical framework handed down from GodTrotsky on high. This severly limits the appeal of those parties to people who aren’t Marxist nerds and does nothing to help them create a strong, broad, militant left capable of taking on capitalism.

What too many Marxist groups and grouplets seem to forget is that it isn’t the workers who have to prove themselve worthy to be led by the party, but that the party has to be proven worthy to help the workers. No revolution has ever been won by a vanguard (no, not even the Russian revolution).

Alex calls for the end of “call for”

politics, socialism
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In the midst of a splendid takedown of David Hare’s onemanshow on Berlin, Alex Harrowell articulates his disdain of the phrase “to call for”:

There is a broader issue here; the phrase “to call for” repels me more and more. Its function is to get you out of responsibility for your opinions. I didn’t want war – I merely called for solidarity with the US in fighting terrorism. It also acts as a way of escaping the healthy discipline of detail. It is telling that it is fashionable with the neoconservatives, the Decents, and the hard left all at once – all the retailers of the goods dream-hungry youth demand, according to Leszek Kolakowski.

I call for action on Darfur! But I say nothing of the mountainous problems of projecting force into the roadless and railless interior of western Sudan, nothing of whose infantry are to actually go and get killed there, nothing of who exactly they are meant to kill or threaten effectively to kill, or for what aims. I just called for. Let’s decommission this phrase, like a worn-out nuclear power station – switch it off gracefully, sever the lines and fill the damn thing with concrete, and watch it carefully for a hundred years to see nothing leaks out.

One minor quibble is that by and large the socalled “hard left” (which in any case usually sems to mean whomever is to the left of the speaker) isn’t the main offender in this. Socialists, anarchists, communists all have a healthy, historically validated distrust of relying on the state to further their projects. Social democrats and liberals on the other hand have a history of enthusiasitc support for state intervention. If Iraq and Afghanistan are too obvious, take a look at who the main cheerleaders for intervention in Yugoslavia were.

UPDATE: Interesting discussion of Alex’s post over at Aaronovitch Watch in which ejh takes exception to Alex’s thesis:

The problem comes not when people without power express principle, provided they don’t do so ungenerously: it’s when people do have power and piss about. This is why it’s problematic (though not necesarily entirely wrong) to suggest that Macmillan should have called for an uprising against the bulding of a Berlin Wall, because it would quite likely have been writing a cheque he couldn’t cash*. Geroge Bush Sr wrote a cheque in Iraq 1991 that he probably could have cashed, but then didn’t: that was worse still. But to be honest, in just saying “Stop Apartheid Now” (“Now”? What does that mean, “now?”) more than half my life ago, I wasn’t writing any cheques or taking any risks.

Except the risk of becoming Andrew Anthony. Well, yeah, I’ve met a few. But there’s an opposite but equal risk, that many have also fallen victim to, that people who want to concentrate on practicals to the exclusion of ideals turn into New Labour. That’s what that particular movement in politics was and is all about. Lots of the Anti-Apartheid people ended up like that – and I don’t think I’d err in detecting a large crossover between the people who were most keen to follow the ANC line in toto in the Eighties, and those who were the keenest Blairites ten and twenty years later. I think there are as many ill consequences in going one way as in another.