Fighting on all fronts
I recently went to a meeting of the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party (henceforth CNWP), interested to see what they have to say, and what their ‘big idea’ is (other than the obvious). The campaign seems to be driven largely by the steam of the Socialist Party (henceforth SP), but, like all campaigns, draws in people from outside the group(s) that set it up. That the SP are trying something other than the usual ‘join us, all the other sects are bad’ approach is at least to their credit.
Anyway, their ‘big’ idea seems to be getting the Unions to set up a brand new party in the style of the Labour Party as it began as the Labour Representation Committee, forming a socialist challenge to Labour with its roots firmly in the working class. So, I had to ask if they’d noticed what actually happened to that little project. I wasn’t too satisfied with the response, which amounted to “Well, we’ve got to try and try again”. That said, I can’t blame them for trying, it looks like the best hope of sparking a left challenge to Labour in England.
But society can’t be changed from above. The closer a left party gets to power, the more it is forced to choose between its ambition and its principles. And because of the way government works, it’s incredibly difficult to stick to principles once they get their hands on the levers – not just in terms of temptation, but because government is institutionally authoritarian and because it’s also subject to outside pressures such as capital and foreign governments. That isn’t to say there isn’t a role for left parties, though – it’s undeniable that the state is frequently used as a weapon to quell dissent and to intervene in a class war on behalf of the ruling class. Anti-union legislation being a pretty good example. Trying to use the state to effect a revolution simply won’t work, but the point is that you can stop or hamper a the right’s efforts to use the state as its weapon, grabbing what concessions you can for the working class while you’re at it.
Alright, if we’re happy to agree society can’t be changed from above, we still have to deal with another division in how we do it. Can we do it through organising within, or by creating an new society alongside it? Many embrace one and disregard the latter, some do both, not always conscious of why. On the one hand, there’s the argument that we can’t use existing structures to our own ends. On the other, there’s the problem that co-ops and communes are subject to capitalist pressures as well as potentially drying up due to disengagement with the rest of the world. Both criticisms are right. But the conclusions aren’t. We need the communes and the co-ops as research and experimentation to develop models for a new society. But we also need to stand our ground and make advances in order to create an environment in which they can become part of that society.
Ultimately, it seems to me that organising in the workplace, where we actually have power in numbers, is the driving force which makes both a left party and a grassroots project viable and useful. But the other two are necessary – we need to fight on all fronts, and to do that most effectively, we need to link the struggles. We persuade people on the picket line that they don’t need bosses by pointing to the grassroots projects, we build the political consciousness in the workplace by discussing the way legislation affects us, and we make sure the limitations of the projects and the parties are known, reinforcing the importance of the workplace struggle.
So if we want a new workers’ party, the first thing that we need to do differently is to clearly state at every opportunity that the party alone is insufficient. It must be kept in check by a strong working-class with radical unions doing their bit to reclaim the economic side of society, and complemented by grassroots structures which demonstrate and create this other world that is possible. Its mission is not to create a new society, but to provide some cover while make the change ourselves.
