And they're off!

Our European election address has been approved, and we're going to contest the London region list in the Euros. Vaux Populi is back up and running, expect exciting commentary on delivering leaflets in the rain, again.

On a personal note, this will be my first ever opportunity to vote for a socialist party candidate, I'm so happy.

Vote early

Well, this morning I voted. I voted in the Kentish Town "Arizona by-election" - caused by the Lib-Dem councillor who thought he could represent an inner London ward from Arizona (he went there to get a Phd.).

Given the unrelenting lies of the Lib-Dems - including the dodgiest of bar charts (not to scale, using the last election but one, putting a text box over the bars to disguise where the zero line was, etc. - all to try and make their real challengers in the ward, the Greens, seem less of a threat) - I was sorely tempted to vote to try and get them out.

In the end, though, Party discipline prevailed, and I spoilt my ballot by writing "World Socialism: SPGB" across my ballot paper.

My way of explaining this strategy, this days, is by likening it to strike action. By consciously applying a political picket line, which says: "We are not going to express priorities and preferences, unless and until this great issue of class is sorted out." They need our votes, our input.

Sometimes it might hurts us a little, as all strike action does, but the final goal is clear.

Labour and the unions

Young Master Osler has a wee defence of the Labour/Union link Here.

I reproduce a letter the SPGB sent to the Fire Brigades Union some while ago, when they disafiliated:

A letter to the Fire Brigades' Union:

Dear General Secretary,

At its meeting of 3rd July 2004 our Executive Committee asked me to write to you to express our welcome of your union's recent decision to reverse your historic mistake of affiliating to the Labour Party.

For nearly 100 years the Socialist Party has held a clear and consistent position that trade unions and political parties need to remain separate. We have considered it bizarre that trade unionists in public sector unions should hand over their dues money to their, effective, political employers. Feeding the hand that beat them.

We have observed that trade unions need freedom to manoeuvre and represent the interests of the membership – distinct groups within the working class. This freedom of manoeuvre means getting the best deal for their members within capitalism, often as against the general policy of a political party, which has to at least attempt to represent the general interest of its constituency. Political parties and trade unions only harm each other by shackling themselves to one another.

In the case of the Labour Party in Britain, it is clear that there have been numerous clashes between themselves and the Unions. The Attlee government used troops to smash a dock-workers strike. Wilson's government floundered over the refusal of the unions to accept the 'In Place of Strife' income controls policy. Your own union members were branded traitors and threatened with legislation to deprive them of their freedom to strike in your recent dispute.

This is not caused by individual wickedness of Labour ministers, but by the hard logic of administering capitalism. The same hard logic that saw Labour governments tear up railways and close down more pits than the Tories ever did. Capitalism is founded on the principle of no profit no production, and if a government is to keep capitalism running, it must obey this hard and fast law.

We thus wish to express our hope that your union will not seek to affiliate with any other political party, and most specifically, not try to recreate the Old Labour disaster that has blighted the workers movement for more than a hundred years. We hope you will use all your union's resources and funds to defend your members' interests, rather than those of your political employers.

We further hope that your members will come to understand that any resolution of a pay-deal within capitalism means their continued exploitation by the tiny capitalist class, and that their best interest lies in joining their fellow workers in a movement with the express and single aim of "the abolition of the wages system" and its replacement with common ownership and the free association of producers.

And append this sample of a form:

Cut out the coupon below and send it to your work’s wages office. You can send a copy to your union’s HQ.

POLITICAL FUND EXEMPTION NOTICE

I hereby give notice that I object to contributing to the Political Fund of the union and am in consequence exempt, in the manner provided by Chapter 6 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (consolidation) Act 1992, from contributing to that fund.

Name.......................................................

Union Membership No........................................

Address....................................................

...........................................................

Branch.....................................................

Signature..................................................

Date.......................................................

From the IWW


I think that's answer enough.

Election fever

Well, Vaux Populi is back up and running because we do indeed have a candidate standing in Sarf Landan.

Why I (re)joined the Socialist Party(*)

I suppose I never really blogged on my adventures into reformism. Partly, I think, because some of the issues were background personal ones rather than political theoretical. Partly because I don't think it involved that much of a change of position for me. That much. Anyway, here goes to try and explain my reversion of the masthead of this blog, and my re-application to join the Socialist Party.

OK, my basic political principles are that I am a democrat, and believe that the minimum requirement is to "just get involved" - the mere involvement of millions changes politics. That's important. Involvement plus objective circumstance is what makes things move.

As a democrat, I have to accept when I am outvoted, and argue to change the view of the majority. What difference, thinks I, does it make if I do that from within or without the Labour Party, recognising, as a basic, that it is a part of the workers' movement, and that it does contain socialists (albeit ones of a different tradition). Either way, I will be outvoted.

I suppose, what I missed, or underestimated, was the role of a political party in reinforcing ideology/identity in an organised and communal sense. I tried joining various strands of Labour organisation, but tended to find that unless you were prepared to be a hyperactivist who won your spurs through performative acts of loyalty (leafletting and phone canvassing), you were going to get no-where. How, though, could I canvass when I was profoundly at odds with the thrust of the party's policies (though believing that, at worst, they were better than the Tory/Liberal alternatives).

To stretch an anology, early on, Labour surrendered to the symbollic hegemonic conservative values on entering their first period in office, they won their spurs by demonstrating a loyalty to the existing ordering (including Ruritanian privy council costumes). They pegged for small wins, without overly rocking the boat.

My still small voice was as drowned in the Labour party as it is without it. Except, the problem of politics is how to square the big picture with the day-to-day. Ramsay MacDonald - who can be described as the real ideological founder of the Labour Party, much as he is reviled as its great traitor - Oedipus Rex, anyone? - proposed a tripartite structure - Trade Unions, Parliamentary Labour Party, Independent Labour Party. The latter was to function as an almost purely propaganda vehicle for Socialism, leaving day to day legislation to the PLP, workplace struggles to the Unions. He would chide the ILP for getting too involved in government policy, rather than promoting socialism.

The reality is, that, for many in the Labour Party, there isn't time for a big picture, they hae councils to run and opponents to chivvy and chide. Big politics is scary and a gift to the opposition. But we need the big picture.

Except, for much of the left, the big picture has been a sort of fantastic support, a utopia which make the present possible and bearable - the lunatic derangement of the impossiblist is to think the fantasy can somehow become real and thus pursues it. We're trying to climb up to our castles in the air. But, this willful, instranigent belief in faerie tales breaks the Labour compact, the idea that taking care of the pennies now will win us pounds in heaven.

So, we return to the other vexing question, what does the revolutionary minority do in a time of class peace and majority support for capitalism? They get outvoted, and get themselves seen to be outvoted.

(*)If they'll have me, that is.

Fash bastards

OK, two bits of fash news.

First, from Spain - today's Guardian reports that a monument to British International Brigaders has been stolen by the Falange, read about it here.

A monument to the British dead at one of the bloodiest encounters of the Spanish civil war has been torn down and carried away by rightwing extremists.
The monument is a huge stone plaque to 90 British volunteers in the International Brigades who were killed during the Battle of the Ebro.

And in foreign parts, the fash have managed to close a regular political venue in Manchester, see here - the Hare and hounds has been a regular haunt of SPGB Manchester branch for many years, but as a result of an Anarchist meeting being threatened by the fascists, the owners have discontinued holding political meetings. This is a bad turn, and it symbolises more that politics is seen as an irrelevence, rather than the strength of the Manchester fascists.

...bear it onward till we fall.

Pieter Lawrence, member of the SPGB for over fifty years (part of a family of members) has died after a long battle with cancer.

It's always a choker when old comrades pass.

I was in the same branch as Pieter, and despite fundamental disagreements on policy and theory, he was a solid comrade who could put his case together with cogency and aplomb.

His battle cry was for practical socialism - using making concrete proposals based on observation of contemporary society - such as the food and agriculture organisation being the the basis for a future world information clearing agency for food production. He was proud to have been instrumental in the authorship of the SPGB Pamphlet Socialism as a Practical Alternative(PDF).

On one occassion he and me had a screaming argument - or bellowing argument, I should say. Members on the fourth floor of SPGB HO could hear us raising our voices ever louder - it seemed to me, at the time, that in some way he enjoyed that sort of encounter. He certainly could bellow.

He was the author of the socialist novel The Last Conflict, as well as a book on Practical socialism. In the mid 90's he was instrumental in the debate on sexuality in the party that saw homophobes routed. Later he was central to ongoing debates on the existence of law in socialism.

If anything, somewhere down the line, his arguments for practical socialism played a part in my leaving the SPGB - afterall, if we're going to engage in practical politics then the SPGB isn't really the vehicle for it.

Ave Atque Vale.

Reasons to be impossible

Lunchbreak already - time to start on the new blog. I suppose, I need to define a few terms. Firstly, why Impossiblist?

Well, its the political tradition I belong to, the Socialist Party of Great Britain one of the oldest socialist parties in the world. Impossiblism does not denote that we object per se to the laws of physics and are demanding impossible feats, but to the split that emerged in the early socialist movement between the "possiblists" who believed that socialists should aim for easily attainable reforms as stepping stones to the ultimate goal of socialism, and the revolutionaries who demanded socialism as a first premise.

It is a divide that has been seen in other movements, Scottish Nationalism, German Greens, etc. where the group puts getting into office under present conditions before the central premises of their Party's existence. Hence they get into office, to find that they have been elected to manage, say, a Scotland under the Union by people who do not want indpendence at all.

Impossiblist socialists say if you want socialism, you have to stand for socialism and nothing but: no claims to be able to magae capitalism better than the capitalist parties, no cockamaymee reforms trying to change capitalism without abolishing it - only the clear and constant call for the abolition of the wages system itself.

It is reasonable, only to demand the impossible. More next time.

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