It has always been the tradition of Marxists that we regularly, and on an ongoing basis, discuss perspectives. In the struggle to gain influence and to build a Marxist tendency, it is essential to have an understanding, at least in broad terms, of the direction in which society is moving and the tempo of the movement. We have to be familiar with the political streams, tides and currents in which we are immersed. A key part of having a perspective is an understanding of the political temperature of the different layers of the working class, their level of consciousness and their degree of participation in political processes. We need to be able to answer as fully as possible the questions posed by Marxists in the past: through what stage are we passing now and through what stages are we likely to pass in the future?
Having a clear perspective is the equivalent to having a roadmap and a compass in preparation for a long journey. A roadmap is always helpful, even though we are now living in perhaps the most volatile and unpredictable period in modern political history, so there will always be twists and turns in the road that we cannot possibly anticipate. We should not forget that it is common in the labour movement to find activists, even very good militants, who lack a sense of perspective and who see matters only as they are and not as they will become. Society should not be viewed as a still picture, but as a moving image. The consciousness of workers today is not as it will be tomorrow; the political landscape today will be different tomorrow. This is a particularly important issue because what we see at the moment are historic shifts in the consciousness of workers internationally, although even these will be eclipsed by the tectonic movement that impend in the future.
Developments in Britain have their own peculiarities and features, based on British political traditions and history. Nevertheless, as we wrote in the 2018 perspectives document, “it is no longer possible to talk about the socialist revolution in Britain, France, Pakistan or the USA, but only of the special features of the world socialist revolution as they unfold in Britain, France, Pakistan or the USA.” Many of the features we recognise in British politics are, in fact, general features. There is everywhere a deep suspicion of established political parties and politicians. How else to explain the election of television comedians into key government positions in Italy and Ukraine? The election of Volodymyr Zelensky as president of Ukraine is an astonishing event. Here was a Russian-speaking candidate (as opposed to being a native Ukrainian speaker) who ran a campaign based mostly on social media and a tour of his comedy troupe and whose policies on most issues were completely unknown to voters. Yet such is the distrust of established politicians that Zelensky managed to get nearly three quarters of the popular vote!
In many other countries, particularly in Europe, the relative decline of the ‘traditional’ parties of left and right and the rise of so-called ‘populist’ movements is due to this profound distrust of politics and politicians. The Labour Party in Britain has bucked the trend only because its new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is seen by the mass of members and supporters as different to the usual run of politicians. It is a general feature of electoral processes today, anywhere in the world, that every winning candidate and party – even the most conservative – is only able to win on the promise of “change”.
China-US rivalry dominates international trade and relations
Global geo-politics is dominated by the relative decline of one great economic power, the USA, and the rise of another, China. The current clash between the USA and China over tariffs is less a question of the size of the dollar trade balance, and more about technology transfer and ultimately military and strategic power. China has used its rapidly growing industrial sector and its trading arrangements with European and US companies, to take enormous strides towards the development of a modern, IT-based economy. In the production of photo-voltaic cells, electric vehicles and in Artificial Intelligence applications, China is catching up with or is surpassing the USA. The USA is still the most productive economy on the planet, measured per capita; it is still by far and away the greatest military superpower, but that will not always be the case. A higher level of technology means a higher level of military capability. Beginning in its own back yard, in the South China Sea, China has begun to assert itself militarily and tensions over the islands in the South China Sea and the status of Taiwan will be a feature of future world relations.
The Chinese economy is expected to grow this year at a little over 6 per cent, a huge figure by the standards of most countries, but a relatively small figure by Chinese standards. This growth rate will be a key element in maintaining the modest growth across the whole world economy, as China sucks in raw materials and primary goods from across the world. The Chinese growth is partly fuelled by reflationary expansion of its internal economy and by plans for ambitious infrastructure projects, although to what extent these are realised remains to be seen.
The huge growth of the Chinese working class and its acquaintance with modern technology and communications – at least on a par with workers in the main capitalist economies – will present huge difficulties for the regime of Xi in the future. There is already an ongoing series of strikes, occupations and sit-ins, as workers and youth engage the government in battles over working conditions and civil rights. Students have actively supported the struggles of workers in many towns and cities. What an irony it is that at the same time that the Chinese state is sponsoring a TV series, The Leader, on the life of Karl Marx, it is locking up students and workers for the crime of discussing Marx’s ideas! Other ‘official’ TV programmes include a TV show called Marx got it right and an illustrated programme aimed at 8-14 year-olds on Das Kapital. Some ideas, it seems, cannot be crushed, but at least the government will make an attempt to put its own ‘spin’ on what is Marxism or what it is not.
With the collaboration of Google, IBM, Facebook and the other tech giants, the Chinese government actively censors and monitors social media and the use of the internet. Yet its youthful working population is as engaged and as au fait with technology as their peers are in the west. Although the majority may not notice the censorship or be unaware of it, there is a growing minority who play a never-ending cat-and-mouse game with the state, trying to find ingenious ways around the restrictions placed on information technology. The planned investments into AI and facial recognition applications, in which China will soon overtake even the USA, are aimed at increasing the arsenal of the state in its efforts to restrict free discussion and free access to information. But in the long run, the state will fail.
World economy moves inexorably to a new recession
As regards general developments, we have carried regular articles by the Marxist economist, Michael Roberts, on the world economy (https://www.thenextrecession.wordpress.com/) and comrades should read those articles regularly to get a general understanding of the world economic situation. What is clear, in brief, is that the relative upswing of 2018 is giving way to a downturn in growth, with the possibility of recession towards the end of this year or in 2020.
As the Financial Times put it in April, “When ministers last gathered at a meeting of the IMF, in October, there appeared to be good momentum behind a recovery…six months later, the picture is considerably gloomier. The economies of the EU, the USA, China are all looking weak, and the discussion is increasingly about engineering a soft landing rather than stopping grown flying too high…the view of the global economy can best be described as murky but un-encouraging”
The International Monetary Fund has already cut its forecast for global growth for this year and next, down from 3.9 percent previously, but it is now reducing its forecasts even further. Apart from the gloom in the main capitalist blocks, the IMF also notes the danger of recession in Argentina (where interest rates are 67 per cent), Brazil and Turkey. Pakistan, meanwhile, is negotiating loans from the IMF (its 13th IMF bail-out) and Saudi Arabia, the price of which included a ‘humanitarian’ award to the butcher crown-prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
As a result of the gloomy forecasts for world growth this year, all the main central banks have revised their planned policies. After the recession of 2008, “quantitative easing” – in reality the printing of vast amounts of fictitious capital – gave an artificial boost to the world economies, although much of this financial boost found its way into art treasures, speculative ventures and stock prices and relatively little into long-term investment. As a result, the ‘recoveries’ that took place involved nothing like the growth rates of the first post-war decades. On the back of the relative upswing of 2018, the central banks ended quantitative easing, and they were all on the point of beginning a programme of gradual interest rate increases. But in every case this planned policy has been suspended as dark economic clouds have gathered.
What is significant, as a generalised phenomenon of world politics, has been a growing opposition to austerity and in some cases to the authoritarian regimes that have implemented it. In France, Sudan and Algeria recently, we have seen hundreds of thousands of workers and youth coming onto the streets to protest against government policy. Workers, young people, women, office workers and middle-class professionals have all played significant roles in these movements, all of which have been catalysed by the use of social media.
These movements are characterised not only by their scope and the mass involvement of millions of people, but by the fact that they are slow to subside so that mass mobilisations have gone on for weeks and months on end. “One cannot know for sure what Russia felt like in 1917 as the tsar was being toppled, or France in 1871 in the heady, idealistic days of the short-lived Paris Commune,” wrote a columnist in the Financial Times, “But it must have felt something like Khartoum in April 2019.” (April 25, 2019). It is not so much the economic perspectives of world capitalism that are gloomy – although that is bad enough – for the strategists of capitalism there are also the political consequences that flow from it.
Ray Dalio, billionaire founder of the world’s biggest hedge fund, recently published an essay, in which he warned about the danger of “revolution”. His main target was the USA, but his dire warnings apply equally well to all the major capitalist states. Dalio points to the growing disparities in wealth and income in America, with the bottom 60 per cent falling even further behind the top 40 per cent, the latter, on average, having ten times the wealth of the former. “Disparity in wealth,” he writes, “especially when accompanied by disparity in values, leads to increasing conflict and, in the government, that manifests itself in the form of populism of the left and populism of the right and often in revolutions of one sort or another.”
International ruling class has crisis of self-confidence
The essay by Dalio paints a picture of crisis, including the fact that “wages have been stagnant for decades” and that the “middle class” (by which Dalio means in this case the working class) “earn less than their parents…and the income gap between the richest and poorest is as wide as ever.” He is not telling ordinary Americans what they don’t already know, but he is addressing the wealthy and powerful, when he points out that “wealth increasingly determines the quality of education kids receive”. “Systemic failings” in schools in poor areas, he suggests, are “the equivalent of child abuse.”
“These unacceptable outcomes”, he concludes, “aren’t due to either a) evil rich people doing bad things to poor people or b) lazy poor people and bureaucratic inefficiencies, as much as they are due to how the capitalist system is now working,”. What the super-wealthy author of this essay will not spell out, of course, is that the capitalist system is incapable of reform and that the way it works is necessarily how it will always work. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-04/dalio-sounds-new-alarm-on-capitalist-flaws-warns-of-revolution)
Meanwhile, another recent report, this time by the OECD, bemoans the pauperisation of the ‘middle layers’ in capitalist countries, as their incomes are squeezed and the ultra-rich take an ever-growing slice of the national cakes. In an echo of Marx and Engels Communist Manifesto of 170 years ago, (“Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat”), the OECD complains about the middle classes being “hollowed out”. Working in previously ‘safe’ or professional occupations, skilled or ‘middle class’ workers are experiencing declining prosperity and growing fears of job insecurity. The OECD warns that there will be political consequences for Western countries because, it says, the middle classes in the past have often been the “bedrock of democracy”, but in the facing of rising uncertainty, they are now more likely to support “anti-establishment” movements. It goes on to warn of a destabilising impact if this section of society – defined as earning between 75% and 200% of the average income – continues to feel that prosperity is slipping away.
(Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle Class)
As it was with the Dalio essay (above), many of these researchers mix together professional (“middle class”) occupations with what we would consider to be skilled workers. Hence, in the case of the UK, it suggests that almost 60% of people live in households classified as being in this middle-income group. The report warns of anti-establishment “discontent” driven by a widening income gap.
The OECD report draws attention to the fact that across all the OECD countries, which include most of the big economies in Western Europe and North America, the 10% of highest earners have increased their income by a third more than middle earners. In the UK, it says, more than a third of middle-income households “report having difficulty making ends meet”. In the United States over the past three decades, the top 1% of earners have increased their slice of total annual income from 11% to 20%. The analysis adds that here,
“Middle incomes are barely higher today than they were 10 years ago”. Whereas in the past the middle classes have been important supporters of sectors such as education, health and housing and “good quality public services”, now worsening income inequality could threaten “their trust in others and in democratic institutions”.
Focusing on housing and the fact that the younger generations are suffering from more difficult economic problems than their parents, the report, says that “totems of middle class family life”, such as access to housing and higher education, have become increasingly expensive. The rising cost of property, in particular, has outstripped the growth in income, with parents worrying about the housing prospects for their children. Another traditional middle-class advantage has been job security, but this has also been eroded. “Today, the middle class looks increasingly like a boat in rocky waters,” says the OECD’s secretary general, Angel Gurría
Once again, the OECD report is not telling ordinary workers something they don’t already know. But it shows that the strategists of capitalism: the economists, think-tanks and political commentators are growing increasingly concerned with the shifts in consciousness beginning to affect millions of workers in every country on the globe.
The American dream…of socialism
Even in the USA, the land of the “American Dream”, socialist ideas are more commonly discussed and supported than at any time in modern history. Socialism is now a prominent idea. Who would have thought, even a few years ago, that the Democratic Socialists of America would have an organisation of over 50,000 members? “According to a Gallup poll last year, the percentage of 18 to 29-year old Americans who have positive views of socialism has held steady at 51 per cent, but the percentage saying they have positive views of capitalism has fallen from 68 per cent to 45 per cent since 2010.” (Financial Times, April 23). This is a reflection on American soil of the generalised shift in consciousness across the whole planet, in all areas of politics.
The Financial Times (April 23) even ran a full-page feature on the dread of socialism, the headline: “Capitalism keeps the CEOs awake at night”. Apart from the Dalio example, it cites many other top business people worried about social trends and even calling for increased taxation on the rich – more than a bit hypocritical, coming from the same people who lobbied Trump into the giving away more than a $1tr in tax concessions to business and the rich.
“Why now,”, the Financial Times correspondent asks, “10 years on from the global financial crisis, after seeing stock markets and profits hit new highs and a Republican president cut corporation tax rates and regulations at their urging, do America’s leading capitalists sound so uneasy? One answer, according to some in the thick of the debate, is fear.”
Darren Walker, president of the $13bn Ford Foundation spelled it out even better: “What really scares them is when they look at the data showing younger people comfortable with socialism as a way of organising the economy. That is incredibly frightening to them.” Now billionaires and super-rich CEOs are lining up to cleanse their consciences over tax cuts and tax dodging, by wringing their hands over the huge disparities in wealth between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ and not a few of them are calling for more taxes on the rich. Morris Pearl, the chair of the so-called Patriotic Millionaires group, put it like this: “Given the choice between pitchforks and taxes, I’m choosing taxes.”
In Europe, the head of Volvo, Carl-Henric Svanberg, has also chipped in. He is chairman of the European Round Table of Industrialists, the biggest industrial lobby group on the continent, and in an interview with the Financial Times, he commented that although he believes in the system, “…we have to foster capitalism in a way that actually works for everyone.”
The issue, of course, is not just the obscene disparity in wealth between the 1 per cent (in actual fact, a much smaller percentage) and the 99 per cent. It is a question of who owns the banks, railroads, mines and industry and the economy in general – and in whose interests are these things run and managed. Is the economy to be left to the free play of the markets and the incentives of greed, profit and personal enrichment? Or is the economy to be planned democratically and managed in the interests of humanity as a whole?
We are in a global period of revolution, counter-revolution and wars, with no guaranteed outcomes. In the titanic movements of the future, there will be many opportunities for workers to engage in struggles and to challenge the fundamental basis of capitalist society. The strategists of capitalism are not at all confident. Whereas in the past they would have crowed about the eclipse of socialist ideas – notably in the boom years of the 1990s and after the collapse of the so-called ‘socialist’ economies of Russia and Eastern Europe – they are no longer infused with the same cocky self-assurance.
Regular columnist Wolfgang Munchau, writing about the political environment of the future in the Financial Times (February 25, 2019), writes gloomily, “We have entered an age that will favour radicalism over moderation, and the left over the right. It is not going to be the age of Donald Trump”. What makes the situation even more fraught is the risk of contagion, so dangerous under the conditions of modern mass social media. It will only take a big movement of workers in one large country – for example, a movement of gigantic Chinese working class, or the American workers – for the news and excitement to be transmitted around the world in minutes and then copied.
For British capitalists, the position is worse than that of their peers oversees. The entire history of British capitalism since the Second World War is one of a long and inglorious decline, above all by the measure of economic productivity.
According to the Financial Times, (April 15, 2019), “Britain is the only large advanced economy likely to see a decline in productivity growth this year, according to new research, a development the Bank of England has blamed on Brexit…the figures from the Conference Board, a US think-tank, highlights the productivity crisis that has struck the UK since the financial crash of 2008-09, with the slowdown worse than in any other comparable country” The UK’s annual growth in output for every hour worked fell from 2.2 per cent between 2000 and 2007, to 0.5 per cent between 2010 and 2017, and is likely to be only 0.2 per cent in 2019. The average equivalent growth rate in several dozen other mature economies is expected to be 1.1 per cent. Measured per worker, for example, the French economy, is 16 per cent more productive than the UK, yet French workers, on average, work 13 per cent fewer hours.
Real wealth in the UK rose in the six years from 2011 to 2016 by a total of under 5 per cent, but this is close to zero per inhabitant. In contrast, half a century ago, from 1965 to 1970, it rose by 25 per cent per inhabitant. Last year, the Engineering Employers’ Federation report on UK manufacturing productivity, showed that it had fallen from a rate of 4.7% between 2000 and 2007 to less than 1 per cent a year since the financial crisis…and it has got worse since then.
The only strategy that British capitalism has been prepared to follow in recent years has been towards a low-wage, low-productivity, low-tax economy, with an increasing proportion of the economy based on tourism, services and above all, on finance.
Tories facing a crisis of historic proportions
It is this underlying economic crisis and decline that is the root cause of the historic crisis in the Conservative Party, the most successful capitalist party in Europe for three generations. To find a parallel to the current splits – and looming splits – in the Tory Party, we would have to go back to the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. As it was at that time, the Tory Party is irreconcilably split. There is an unbridgeable gulf between its Brexit wing and its anti-Brexit wing. The Brexit wing harks back to Britain’s imperial grandeur when it was the workshop of the world and a significant force economically, militarily and diplomatically. They are not reconciled to the fact that Britain is now a third-rate power. Whereas the three great economic blocs of the USA, China and the EU (excluding the UK) account for about 60 per cent of global economic output last year, the UK’s contribution was a meagre 3 per cent. This wing of the Tory party knows nothing of economics or real politics and instead they wrap themselves in the Union Jack, to confuse and divide the working class, especially its most backward layers, to gain support. Many of the top Tory Brexiteers are from Oxford, where more students study classics and theology than computer science.
The other wing of the Tory Party seeks to offer a ‘realistic’ pro-business policy. They understand that the ‘sacrifices’ made in terms of ‘sovereignty’ and self-reliance have been an inescapable cost for the greater integration of the British into the European economy over the past 40 years. They are aware that while Britain exports 47 per cent of its goods to the EU, the EU’s exports to the UK are only 15 per cent of its total. They are alarmed at analyses like that of the OECD, which has suggested that a “no-deal” Brexit would wipe out up to £40bn off UK economic growth and they have heeded the warnings of the Bank of England that any scenario that leaves the UK out of the EU would lead to a lower GDP and lower growth.
The problem for this wing of the Party – supported by all the ‘Remainer’ organisations like the Engineering Employers’ Federation, the Confederation of British Industry, the Institute of Directors, the Federation of Small Businesses, etc – is that they have lost an enormous amount of ground to the demagogues in the Brexiteer wing. It has been estimated that the shrinking Tory Party membership – with an average age of over 70 – are 60 per cent in favour of ‘no-deal’, in other words of the UK crashing out of the EU. There is a strong likelihood that Boris (“fuck business”) Johnson, will be the most popular candidate to be the next leader after Theresa May. Nothing personifies better the historic crisis in this centuries-old party than the rise of an ignorant bumbler like Johnson to its top echelons. It is hardly surprising that the Financial Times should carry an articles asking if the Conservatives are “still the party of big business” or that corporate donations to the Tories have almost shrunk to a trickle.
The crisis in the Tory Party over Brexit is now coming to a head with the possibility of European elections in May. The very idea of fighting those elections, nearly three years after voting to leave the EU is anathema to the Tory right wing, many of whom are openly supporting the new Brexit Party set up by Nigel Farage. If these elections go ahead, there will be mass abstentions by Tory voters and many will vote for the Brexit Party. The local elections on May will serve as a warning shot to May, because it is likely here, too, that there will be mass Tory abstentions. So toxic has the atmosphere in the Tory Party become that MPs have even been trying to find a way of changing the Party rules so that there can be another early vote of no confidence in May, something that under current rules could not happen before December.
The only single factor that has (almost) held the Tory Party together in the last three years has been a mutual fear of Labour winning a general election, because while the political processes have been almost wholly consumed by Brexit, for the mass of the British population, the grind of austerity has gone on. Living standards are still below pre-2008 levels. The NHS is run on a skeleton staff. Local government services have been slashed to the bone, and there are still more cuts in the pipeline. The poorest sections of society – including the working poor – have suffered the most. The use of food banks is breaking new records, month on month.
According to the Resolution Foundation think-tank, 4.1m children, 30 per cent of the total, are now living in relative poverty. “The political conversation around austerity may have shifted,” says Adam Corlett, economist at the Resolution Foundation, “but the lived experience of it hasn’t for millions of families”. (Financial Times, March 29). Moreover, the current four-year freeze on child benefits alone will push another 100,000 children into poverty by 2023-24.
By whatever yardstick is chosen to measure living standards: housing, health, education. welfare, public transport, costs of food and necessities, mental health, etc, the prospects facing younger people today – and all workers, but particularly younger people – are worse than they were ten and twenty years ago. The name of game now is uncertainty and insecurity. As we have pointed out in articles on climate change, it is hard to motivate the mass of people about dangers emerging in ten or fifty years from now when their lives are one long emergency today.
The Labour Party
It is the shift in consciousness and the growing anger over relentless austerity that lies behind the election of Jeremy Corbyn and the popularity of his policies today. There have been three waves of new members into the Labour Party, in the leadership elections of 2015 and 2016 and during the general election of 2017. These have brought the membership to the highest level in modern history. The Party now has more members than every other political party in the UK put together. As a result of this influx, the Labour Party is flush with cash and – again for the first time in history – has more money to spend on elections than the Tories, who get more money from the dead (through legacies) than they get through their living members.
It is not only that the membership has increased, but the complexion of the membership has changed. The radical manifesto of 2017 – including the nationalisation of utilities and an end to austerity – are enormously popular among Labour members and supporters. The title of the manifest, and a regular slogan during the election was ‘For the Many, Not the Few’ and this basic idea has percolated down to the deepest layers of the Party and across the working class. In modern parlance, it has become a popular and well-known ‘meme’.
What were once considered ‘left’ policies – like nationalising rail and the public utilities – are now effectively mainstream ideas, such is their popularity. It is a sign of the times, as in the case of the USA cited above, that socialist and even ‘revolutionary’ ideas are ‘on the market’, so to speak. A recent YouGov poll put a whole series of propositions – twenty or thirty in all – to its regular respondents, asking if respondents agreed or disagreed. The statements included the following:
· The wealthy make life worse for the rest of us
· I would like to see workers rise up against their bosses
· The real truth about international finance is being kept from the public
· Reporters, academics and Government officials are involved in a conspiracy to cover up important information about international finance
· Parliamentary politics are a dead end
· There is one law for the rich and one for the poor
· Capitalism is essentially bad and must be destroyed
· This country needs revolutionary change
And so on. It raises the questions, of course, who commissioned these poll questions and will the results ever be published? Whoever devised the poll and for whatever reason, it is a further indication that the ideas of socialism and Marxism are percolating through society as more and more sections of workers are waking up to the iniquities of the economic system.
When large numbers of Labour Party activists come together, such as at the annual Party conference and regional conferences, the very real and concrete problems of working class people are articulated by workers at the sharp end of the struggle. The Party conference in that sense is the authentic voice of the working class, crying out for change and for an end to austerity. One delegate after another went to rostrum to speak about these very concrete issues that affected them personally or people close to them. A future Labour government is seen by millions as the necessary means of solving the day-to-day problems that they face, whether or not it is explicitly contained in the Labour manifesto. There can be no accurate prediction as to when a Labour government will be elected, but we can say that the longer we wait before it does, the greater will be the weight of expectations that are placed on it by its members and supporters.
It is not a radical Labour Party and mass-membership per se that offends the sensibilities of Labour’s old right wing, but the ‘danger’ – as they see it – of such a party winning an election and being expected to carry out its radical mandate. More than two thirds of the parliamentarians in the Labour Party are throwbacks to the New Labour Party of Tony Blair, those who Ted Grant would have referred to in the past as “Neanderthals”. They have no longer any basis in the party for their ideas – after all, almost all of the measures carried out by the Tories since 2010 were initiated by the Blair/Brown government, including welfare cuts, academisation of schools, local authority cuts, the introduction of the NHS ‘internal market’ and so on. The closer the Labour Party gets to office, the greater will be the weight of expectation by workers and the greater will be the sabotage of the right wing.
The right wing are increasingly discredited among Party members but they are hanging on to a critical base in local government and still to some extent within the party apparatus. More importantly, they have the enthusiastic support of the press in undermining Corbyn and demanding a shift back to Blairite ‘moderation’.
In hitting on the completely false charge that Labour has a serious problem of “Anti-Semitism”, the right-wing think they have a gold-plated club with which to beat the left. There is a lot of legitimate criticism of the policies of Zionism and the Israeli government, some of it clumsy from time to time, but there is not an atmosphere of threats or insults against Jewish people in the Labour Party and nor has there ever been. But right wing MPs and councillors – some of whom just happen to be Jewish – have never understood the difference between criticism and abuse nor between being voted down and being bullied. Their shrill denunciations of Corbyn and everything ‘left’ will reach a crescendo in the coming months and years, although they must be surprised at how little traction their efforts have had among Labour member and supporters – it is only the ‘soft left’, ever-willing to concede ground to the right-wing, who have been impressed by their wailings.
We have argued all along that the right wing will split from the party, but it is not possible to predict in advance how and when this will happen. There have been two splits already, with secondary figures going off to find careers elsewhere and then the Umunna group following suit this year. There will almost certainly be more splits in the future. Chuka Umunna’s new party, Change UK (there is that word again, although the whole point of his party is to change nothing) has started as a tiny group, but in upcoming elections it will be subsidised to the tune of tens of millions of pounds. They will get more support through wall-to-wall national coverage in the press and on TV. There will be no difficulty in getting candidates for this new party. As Macron did for his ‘new party’ in France, all manner of professional careerists and middle-class climbers will put themselves forward as supposed representative of ‘ordinary’ people. The last great split from the Labour Party, the Social Democratic Party, which split away in 1981, had a significantly damaging affect on the Labour vote in the 1983 general election. Had it not been for the role of that party, backed by the press and TV, it is possible that Thatcher may not have been re-elected that year. It is not possible to predict in advance what effect Change UK will have in a general election scenario, but we should not rule out the possibility of it being a barrier to Labour being elected in the short term. Having said that, they are competing with other parties on the same political ground and for the moment seem to be gaining very little traction.
Momentum
After the election of Jeremy Corbyn and the first mass influx of new members into the Labour Party, the most important development in the Party was the establishment of Momentum. It was in the beginning an organisation of enormous potential and it could have played a role similar to that of the ILP in the 1920s and early 1930s (when it split) as the main reservoir and focus of the left in the party. However, the capture of the organisation by a tiny self-serving cabal around its ‘founder’ has reduced Momentum to a bureaucratic monolith. Although the leadership claim to base themselves on ‘direct’ democracy, by consulting with the members through on-line polls and voting, in practice they go their own sweet way while their members seethe. On the two key internal Labour party issues – ‘open selection’ and the fake “anti-Semitism” charges – the leaders of Momentum have given ground to Labour’s right-wing, without any consultation with their membership. They don’t dare ask their members about these two issues because, as was evidenced by the CLP voting at Labour Party conference, probably most rank and file Momentum members would be against the leadership.
In the past, the reformist wing of the Labour Party, what we used to call the ‘soft’ left, was represented by the Tribune tendency (named for the newspaper of that name, recently revived), and was notable by its complete inability to organise anything at local level. The Tribune rallies at Labour Party conference may have filled theatres, but for the rest of the year, in the localities, this wing of the party did nothing. Militant documents spoke of the “torpor, ineptitude, incompetence and theoretical and organisational bankruptcy of the Tribune tendency”. In organising around social media and ‘electronic voting’, the Momentum leaders believe they have struck gold, having the advantage of an apparently broad base, but with a minimal need of any accountability.
Based on the most recent membership figures and the modest subscriptions they pay, the Momentum head office must be receiving around £50,000 a month to support its apparatus. That apparatus has organised very successful fringe events at Labour Party conference – The World Transformed – with thousands able to hear (but not participate in) debates and discussions. Momentum has been able to use its tech-savvy supporters and employees to produce a lot of very good videos and social media posts. Not least, it has been able to use social media to mobilise scores of young Labour Party members to campaign in key constituencies during the general election and in by-elections. Their input in key constituencies in the next general election might be crucial, as it was in the last, particularly in reaching out to and mobilising young, first-time voters.
Nevertheless, there is a clear dichotomy between local, active branches of Momentum and the national leadership. It is like two separate organisations. At local level, Momentum groups are effectively Labour Party ‘broad lefts’, involved in discussions, political education and in campaigning for left ideas outside and inside the party. But the local groups have at best a tenuous link to national Momentum and at worst no link at all. In fact, there is no constitutional basis in the ‘post-coup’ Momentum constitution for local groups at all and some groups have actively discussed ‘disaffiliating’ from the national organisation. Where Marxists have influence in local groups, we should advocate joint activity, collaboration and links with neighbouring groups and ultimately the establishment of ‘informal’ regional conferences and structures of Momentum, as there was in its early days. At a later stage, it could even be possible to organise national conferences or events in the name of such a ‘grassroots’ Momentum organisation.
As it is in the Labour Party itself, activity and attendance at local Momentum meetings have ebbed back. In the last year, the heat from two leadership election campaigns and a general election has dissipated and been further cooled by the wet blanket of Brexit. However, when there is a general election (or in the event of a new leadership contest) Labour Parties and Momentum groups will be revived. There will be a new resurgence of activity and membership, especially with new, younger people, and both will be important arenas for discussion and debate. Supporters of Left Horizons will participate in those debates and discussions and will find a very fertile ground for Marxist ideas.
There will have to be a general election at some stage, although it may be delayed until 2022, the latest possible date. It is never guaranteed, even at that point, that Labour would win, but a Labour government looks an inevitability at some stage in the not-too-distant future. When such a government is elected, it will represent a critical defeat for the ruling class, which will use all the means at its disposal to stop it happening. But even the election of Labour will not be a killer blow for capitalism: on the contrary, a Labour government, even one faced with a deepening social and political crisis, will be a government of crisis from the beginning. From the very beginning the capitalism class will be manoeuvring and scheming to regain the lost political ground.
The Labour party rank and file, supported by its trade union base, will be pushing strongly in one direction, but the right wing of the parliamentary party, supported by the media, the judiciary and the Tory opposition, will be pushing in the other. Accepting for argument’s sake that left leaders like Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are sincere in their wish to end austerity and advance policies ‘for the many and not the few’, they will be mercilessly squeezed in between two social forces.
National Government
Last year, John McDonnell, shadow Chancellor, suggested that an incoming Labour government would be fully prepared and able to deal with a run on the pound when Labour comes to office. The pressure of the banks and big business upon the Labour government has been the subject of discussions at the top of the Labour Party. But it is our opinion that John McDonnell and the Labour leadership massively under-estimate the pressure that will be brought to bear upon them. The Bank of England, the big banks and the whole of the big business community will be diametrically opposed to the Labour policies of nationalisation of utilities and expenditure in the development of infrastructure and house-building. The entirety of the press, the TV, the judiciary, and, last but not least, the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party will quickly come to the conclusion that the “country cannot afford” the measures outlined in the Labour manifesto and that more “pragmatic” policies are needed. The leadership of the Labour Party will be pushed in the direction of doing what Syriza did in Greece in 2014 – after being swept to power to oppose austerity, it caved in under the pressure of the IMF and the EU and ended up reinforcing austerity.
While the rank and file of the Labour party and working class people will be demanding and expecting answers to all the problems they have brought for years to the rostrum of Labour conferences, the whole political and economic Establishment will be howling for the brakes to be applied. It is a finished recipe for splits within the Labour government and the Labour Party.
It is important in this context that we read about and discuss the lessons of 1929-31 and the formation of the National Government in 1931, including the role played by Labour’s right wing, the press and even the monarchy, which directly intervened in the political process. It is not that history would repeat itself, at least not in identical terms. But just as diametrically opposed pressures on the Labour government in 1931 led to its betrayal by Ramsay McDonald and to the formation of the ‘National’ coalition, so in broad terms the same kinds of pressures will be placed upon an incoming Labour government today. Almost inevitably, new right wing splits, this time much larger than the miniscule ‘Change UK’ group, will convulse the party. These splits might seem significant at national level because they will involve MPs and perhaps many councillors locally, but the main body of the Labour membership will remain intact.
It is not possible to predict in detail how events will turn out but this must in broad outline be our perspective for Labour coming into office. One thing is sure: it will be a period of great turmoil and debate inside the Labour Party. After the betrayal of 1931, despite the completely misguided policy of the Independent Labour Party in splitting away, there were powerful left-wing currents inside the Labour Party. For the first time, there was discussion about a Labour ‘Enabling Act’ to take over big industries. The party adopted a manifesto in 1934, called Socialism and Peace, in which it argued that “what the nation now requires is not merely social reform, but Socialism”. It pledged a future Labour government to “establish public ownership and control of the primary industries and services as a foundation step”.
Supporters of Left Horizons will participate in the debates and discussions that will characterise the Party at that time and we will play a role in the growth and development of Marxists ideas. The reformist wing of the party will not challenge the fundamental, underlying basis of private ownership of the banks, finance houses and the commanding heights of the economy. Faced with the overwhelming sabotage of the private sector, international finance and the press, they will be forced to backtrack on their much-vaunted ‘reforms’ and ‘improvements’ for working class people, so they in fact become counter-reforms. Even where some benefits accrue to workers – like improvements in the minimum wage, or in trade union rights – what is given with one hand will be taken away with the other. It will not be in the language of political theory, but in living reality that the policy of reformism, of gradually and painlessly transforming capitalism into something benign, will be demonstrated to be utterly false.
Marxists, on the other hand, will be arguing for the revolutionary transformation of society. That does not mean that we are blood-thirsty extremists, but that the emergencies in housing, health, education and living standards can only be solved by emergency measures. Extraordinary times, we insist, demand extraordinary measures. We would argue for Labour to push an Enabling Bill through parliament, backed up by the mass mobilisation of workers in banks and throughout industry, as well as in working class communities, to nationalise the main levers of the economy.
We would argue for a national plan for house-building, for health, for education, for transport and for all aspects of life, with committees of workers in the workplaces and consumers, to democratically monitor and control the implementation of the plans. Against the threats of the banks to organise a flight of capital, we would appeal to bank workers, to open the books and prevent the plunder of national assets. Against the threats of international capital to sabotage and destroy the Labour government, we would appeal to workers in Europe and the world. We would insist that the Labour government use the enormous wealth of the country – not to mention the skills and ingenuity of its workforce – for the benefit of all and no longer for the profit of a handful. We would invite workers in Europe and elsewhere to follow our example.
The Labour party is a fertile ground for the growth of Marxist ideas today, in 2019. But it will be a considerably richer field in coming years. We are confident that in the language of facts, figures and arguments, and in the light of hard experience, our ideas will get a wider echo. We must always approach discussions and debate in the Labour Party and among workers in general in the most friendly and comradely fashion. We must “patiently explain”, to use the words of Lenin. Even in our criticisms of the ‘soft lefts’ and those in the party who ‘cave in’ to the pressure from the right-wing and the capitalist media, we stick to political ideas and arguments and we do not trade in personal issues or insults. If the leaders of the left give ground and dilute the programme of the party for the benefit of the banks, it is “more in sorrow than anger” that we criticise them. But we will not be silent and nor should we waste any time or any opportunity to build a significant base for Marxism, at least on a par with the base that Militant had in its best years in the mid 1980s.
The trade unions
Compared to its hey-day in the 1970s, the TUC has lost half of its membership. From over eleven million affiliated members, it has shrunk to less than six million. This is a reflection of the collapse and disappearance of tradition industrial sectors where trade union membership was strong and in many cases was 100 per cent. Thus, coal-mining, ship-building, heavy engineering and labour-intensive dock work have almost all gone. This is where the so-called ‘heavy-battalions’ of the working class would have been found in the past. In the generally well-organised public sectors like the civil service, local government and the NHS, jobs have been lost in the tens of thousands. In the place of these jobs, we have zero-hours contracts, minimum pay rates and the ‘gig’ economy. It is in the private sector and among younger workers where trade union membership is weakest.
That does not mean that there are not important sections of workers that lack industrial clout. In modern-day terms, transport workers, workers in utilities like power and water and all of those industries still in large-scale manufacturing are in this category. Nor does it mean that the working class has less ‘social weight’ than was the case in the past. On the contrary, the working class, particularly its organised sections, have a greater social weight than ever before. It is still the case that key sections of workers, numbering even hundreds, can bring industry to a halt. Many white-collar and ‘professional’ workers are being drawn into the trade union movement. Three years ago, many junior doctors were surprised to find themselves at meetings and rallies with trade union members who were the main organisers of support for them. The links established at that time will not die away quickly. It was no surprise, following the junior doctors’ strike, that for the first time ever there were official British Medical Association banners on TUC a demonstration. Now, even barristers are discussing strike action.
Even school teachers, in a part of the public sector where there is a very high union density, have some industrial muscle, when it is used properly. There may not have been any national strikes of teachers in the recent period (leaving aside ineffectual one-day strikes a few years ago) but at any one time up and down the country there are half a dozen schools on strike over workload and working conditions. What is more, these local strikes are almost always won by the teachers, leaving the unions more confident, better organised and better able to defend conditions in the future. In many cases, even the threat of a strike is enough to win: no headteacher wants the ignominy of 1200 students running around local streets because of their own intransigence.
Like the Labour Party, the trades unions are organisations that face in two directions. The mass of the membership, particularly the quarter of a million local reps, shop-stewards and lay officials, reflect the interests of their members, not always perfectly, but at least in broad terms. But there is also a huge amount of conservatism at the tops of the unions – with a couple of notable exceptions – characterised by a lack of confidence in their members and in their willingness to struggle. This leads then to timidity in the face of attacks and a reluctance to call for action. Too many of these leaders are too comfortable in their roles, with the high salaries and prestige that goes with them, to risk rocking the boat. The official leadership of the TUC and the big unions have enormous power, if they would only choose to use it. In 2011 they lifted their little fingers and got an enormous demonstration in the centre of London, one of the biggest demonstrations in the post war-period. The issue of a 24-hour general strike had crept onto the agenda of the TUC general council, via the annual Congress, but it was left as a dead letter. Lacking any confidence in the willingness of union members to engage in concerted action against the Tories, and fearful of the consequences if they did, the union leadership have largely sat on their hands over the past eight years of Tory government. In the months and years to come, they will not get the easy ride they have had to date. Having said that, we will not join the shrill denunciations of the ultra-left sects, who see every union official, at any level, as a ‘sell-out’. We must put forward instead, soberly and consistently, our programme of union democracy, including the election of all officials and for all officials to be paid no more than the wages of a skilled worker.
Trades unions will be shaken by events
As the political parties will be shaken to their foundations in the storms and stresses that lie ahead, so too the trade unions will be affected. We have seen the first glimmers of union organisation among younger workers and those in fast food and the gig economy. Those movements will multiply in the future, as the strikes and struggles of the general and unskilled sections of the workforce did at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, leading to the formation of the giant Transport and General Workers Union and the General and Municipal Workers Union. A similar movement of newer, fresher trade union members shook up the AFL in the United States in the 1930s.
We should take note of the lessons of the teachers’ strikes in the USA last year. These took place in states where it was illegal for teachers to strike and where the union structures were weakest. It was the self-organisation of the teachers through social media, ignoring the union leaderships, and together with other education workers, that built up enormous strike movements spreading from state to state like wild-fires. Every one of the early strikes was very popular among the public and especially with parents. The education workers not only raised the issues of their own pay and working conditions but also the meagre amounts of money spent on books, school buildings and equipment. It was for this reason that the strikes were successful. These early strikes – unofficial, spontaneous and energetic – were in contrast to the later strike in California, where the bureaucracy of the teachers’ union was more powerful and where it was able to use its authority and influence to moderate the course of the strike.
From top to bottom, the trades unions in Britain will be shaken by events. Older, more conservative shop-stewards will be pushed aside. More militant and younger delegates will attend conferences and come to run committees, branches and districts. As it was in the USA, there will be ‘unofficial’ movements and struggles of new unions like those now organising among hospitality workers in central London. But there will also be strikes and movements running through the official structures of the unions. Marxists recognise the great significance of the official organisations of the workers’ movement, their stature and their authority in the eyes of workers, so where there is a good basis of support, we should challenge the old guard for leading positions in the unions, at district, regional and eventually at national level.
It is not for sentimental reasons that Marxists put organised workers in a central position. The conditions of life and of work necessarily engender a sense of solidarity, affinity and mutual support within any group of workers. This is the basis of their struggles to improve their conditions and wages and ultimately to use their industrial power to change society. There is nowhere else in society where a sense of unity better cuts across divisions of sex, age, race, religion, nationality or ethnicity, than in the workplace. That is not to suggest that every workplace or trade union group is perfect; far from it. But it is in the organised movement of working class people that we see the sense of community upon which a future society will be built. At bottom, all workers want the same things: decent housing, decent working conditions and decent education, health and facilities for themselves and their families. These are not outrageous expectations. There are all kinds of political and social movements that come onto the stage of history from time to time, but for Marxists, the most important social force – the central social force – that will provide the shock troops to batter down the walls of the old society and build the new, will be the organised working class.
Marxists will always participate in the trade union movement as the best activists and the most loyal members of the group. We will always try – as in the Labour Party – to win over a point of view in the language of facts, figures and argument. The fundamental struggles of the trades unions revolve around conditions and wages in the workplace. From time to time this extends to campaigns on closures or jobs. But Marxists have the responsibility, while always supporting a fight for better conditions, to raise the wider political issues. In a capitalist society, there are no ‘permanent’ gains or ‘permanent’ victories. Improvements in wages or conditions are given with one hand and taken back later with the other.
In grouping together to form the Labour Party over a hundred years ago, the trades union leaders of that time were acknowledging that workers faced problems in the daily lives that needed political solutions. That is no less true today. Marxists would be in favour of the greatest possible involvement of the trades unions – and the rank and file particularly – in activity in the Labour Party. Unlike the ultra-lefts, we are in favour of the affiliation of all trade unions to the Labour Party. As members of affiliated unions, we would demand of our union leaders that the intervention of our delegates at Labour Party conferences and on the NEC of the Labour Party properly reflect the wishes of the membership. Had this been the case with the Unite delegation at Labour conference last year, for example, then open selection would have been agreed.
Building support for Marxist ideas in the work-place is not a hundred metre dash. It involves long-term, patient work. It involves gaining the respect and the confidence of other workers on bread-and-butter issues and on simple union representation, as well as on political questions. But just as we should seek to build solid bases for Marxism inside the Labour Party, we should seek to make the trade unions bastions of socialist ideas where we can.
Youth work and climate change
More than at any time in recent memory, young people are extremely political, although they are not as closely tied to traditional political parties as their parents and grandparents. Where they are motivated and inspired by events, young people have come forward and been involved in great numbers, as during the Scottish referendum campaign or the abortion campaign in Ireland, or in the two Labour leadership campaigns and the 2017 general election. But even these movements have left relatively few young people actively involved in politics afterwards, at least in political parties. That will change with events and as inspirational movements unfold. As opinion polls have shown over and over again, young people are overwhelmingly radical in political and social issues. There is almost a direct straight-line correlation between age and intention to vote Labour; the Tories hanging on to a majority only with the over 45s.
Climate change and global warming are particularly powerful motivational issues with young people, as we have seen with the Extinction Rebellion blockades in London streets and with the school strikes taking place simultaneously in many different cities. There is a sound argument for saying that global warming should be at the very top of this document on perspectives. After all, other than nuclear war, it is the single most important threat to the continuation of the human species. How can global warming not be a prime element in any perspectives discussion? As we have explained in articles on the Left Horizons website, some commentators believe that climate change is such a pressing and urgent issue that, as a result of it, large-scale social upheaval is not only possible but is even probable in the next ten or twenty years. No wonder it is something close to the hearts and minds of the youth – it is them who will face the consequences for their forebears’ neglect of the planet.
There is a growing awareness of the significance of climate change within the population as a whole, but it has not yet become a primary motivating issue for the mass of the population. Only when climate change seriously affects food production or sea levels or when it creates even more serious weather events (hurricanes, typhoons, floods, etc) – more than it has already – only then it will begin to be a serious political issue in its own right for the mass of the population.
We have argued, and still maintain, that climate change is not an issue that stands separate and apart from other political and social issues. All the malign effects of global warming will feed their way through the political and economic system, adding to the intensity of the crisis facing the mass of working class people. Many of the mass movements that are arising today have been triggered by energy price rises or food price increases and such ‘triggers’ will become the norm rather than the exception in the years to come. Just as much as we have argued that solving the issues of housing, education, health and living standards are a question of changing the social system, so too the same would apply to climate change. The capitalist system is only capable, at best, of limited, inconsistent and faltering steps towards carbon reduction and a ‘new deal’ for the planet. Only the socialist revolution can put humankind in control of science and natural resources, to be able to plan these things for the benefit of all.
Marxists in the past neglected issues like the environment or pushed them aside as ‘petit-bourgeois’ issues. That was wrong then, but it would be a hundred times more wrong today. On the contrary, Marxists must advocate measures to address climate change as a key part of a socialist programme. We must develop a programme of transitional demands and have regular articles on the website that link to climate change and to other environmental issues. A socialist government, we should argue, would address issues like energy production, transport, food production (and consumption) and many others related to climate. In our daily political work and activity, we must be ‘experts’ on this issue as on other political questions, and therefore the strongest advocates of measures to combat climate change and to save humanity. But in doing this, we can and we must draw young people towards the organised working class, as the only vehicle capable of taking the reins of society in its hands.
Identity politics
The central role of the working class has been brought into question many times in the course of political movements in the last decades. Most recently, it has been challenged, or at least there is a perception that it is challenged, by what is broadly term identity politics. Groups of women or black, Asian or ethnic minority, or LGBT activists have organised campaigns on issues that are particularly important to them. Once again, in the past most Marxists (including the Militant Tendency) down-played the significance of such movements and we were wrong to do that. If the campaign around abortion laws in the Irish Republic largely by-passed the official labour movement, if the Black Lives Matter campaign in the USA stands aside from organised labour, if the LGBT community organise their own vehicles for campaigns – it is largely because of the conservatism (with a small ‘c’) of the labour movement in taking up these issues. In Ireland, nothing has had more effect in galvanising young women and bringing them into politics than the abortion referendum campaign – as the ‘Me Too’ movement did in different ways and at different times across the globe. Nothing has more electrified young black workers in the USA than the marches and demonstrations around the issue of police violence against black people. We cannot simply shrug our shoulders about such big issues and ask that people ‘wait’ for the labour movement to catch up.
It ought to be the organised workers movement that embraces all these issues and makes itself the champion of anyone who feels themselves neglected or part of an oppressed group. It ought to…but it doesn’t always. And sometimes it doesn’t at all. Marxists should argue within the trade union and labour movement that the organised workers’ movement should be the natural home of all working class people and youth who feel disadvantaged or oppressed on account of their sex, race, religion, heritage, age or sexual orientation.
The organisation with the biggest number of women members in the whole of Western Europe is a British trade union, Unison. Why, we should ask, isn’t that union the unchallenged leader in the fight for women’s rights, for equal pay, against violence against women, and so on? Why is Unison not the ‘go-to’ organisation for the press, TV, media, campaigns, on all the issues of women’s rights? We have to do our best to make that happen and in the meantime, we should not be dismissive of women who feel that the organised workers’ movement is not yet ready to do the job. Marxists will participate in the women’s movement, as in LGBT and BAME organisations and campaigns, but we do so openly and honestly as representatives and advocates of the organised workers’ movement. It must remain the central tenet of the Left Horizon Tendency that it will be the united and organised working class that will be the fundamental vehicle for revolutionary social change. It is essential, therefore, that Marxists face primarily towards the organisations of the working class, put down roots within them and create unbreakable bonds between these organisations and Marxist ideas
In the months and years to come, there will be many movements of workers attempting to change the conditions of their daily lives for the better. In the recent past, these movements, as often as not, have been spontaneous and inchoate, often organised through social media and without clear aim or purpose. Workers in Egypt rose in their millions in 2011 and again two years later, only to end up with a military regime as bad as the one that was overthrown in the first place. There will be no questioning the willingness of workers to struggle in their millions and tens of millions in the coming years. But we cannot shy away from the vital question of leadership. The commentator quoted above likened Sudan in 2019 to Russia in 1917. There is one crucial element that he did not mention, however, and that was the presence of the Bolshevik Party. That political movement, also drawing in the best elements of the socialist and anarchist left, provided a sense of direction and purpose over the months from February to October. Without the Bolsheviks, the ‘February revolution’ of 1917 would have ended in bloody failure, like the regime of General Sisi in Egypt. The Bolshevik Party had a programme, a policy and a method, moreover one that drew on years of experience and accumulated respect and authority in the workers’ movement. It was this that energised the most active workers in their millions and gave the revolution its direction and trajectory.
We cannot shy away, therefore, from the question of leadership. It is a highly unlikely scenario that a ‘leadership’ will arise spontaneously from a movement itself, unless from pre-existing organisations with long-established roots in the working class. It does not follow that just because a mass movement is broad and powerful in its sweep, that its very size will be the guarantee of ultimate victory. If that were true, there would have been no need for the Bolshevik Party after February 1917. Moreover, there has been no evidence of this in any of the mass movements in recent times, like in France, Algeria or Sudan, although we wish it were so. With leadership and the sense of direction it gives, the struggles of the working class have a chance of success. Without leadership, there is no chance of success,
Left Horizons might play a minor role in the development of a Marxist movement and a Marxist leadership in the future or it might play a major role. We don’t know, but ultimately it is a question of political ideas and the correctness of those ideas. We are where we are; and are who we are. There is no other role we can play, except to clarify ideas as best we can, work out what we think is the best way forward for the labour movement, discuss with and convince other activists of our ideas and thereby to go forward. We discuss, we educate ourselves, we listen to workers – the best test of ideas is in practice – and we organise. Marxist ideas have been around for a century and three quarters but in terms of support and a mass following, we are confident that the best years are still to come.
May 2, 2019
