Lamentable Labourism

During his interview with Sophie Raworth on Sunday morning, Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy attacked industrial action due by British Airways workers. With all the arrogance of an ignoramus, he declared that serious parties of government do not send its leading figures to picket lines. This after Keir Starmer issued his widely ignored instruction banning shadcab members from showing solidarity with striking workers. Today, he was forced to eat humble pie. Replying to a letter from a constituent, Lammy admitted his error, saying he did not realise BA workers had temporarily given up 10% of their pay to keep the company afloat and were taking action to have it restored. Even then Lammy couldn't say he was backing the workers, but his apology restores him to the studied silence he usually observes when it comes to industrial disputes.

As we've discussed recently, despite Labour being set up by the trade unions who provided the resources, the heft, and the organisational experience from the beginning the party has always had a less-than-straightforward approach to industrial relations. Leading figures from the party, even those who came from the labour movement, have had attitudes ranging from enthusiastic embrace to pragmatic support to outright hostility. None of this began with Tony Blair and New Labour. It was Alan Johnson of all people, on a Question Time many years ago in response to a leftwinger in the audience, who summed it up best. He said Labour was set up by the trade union movement as a national party. This was certainly true of the first Labour Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald and first Labour chancellor, Philip Snowden, but what does this even mean? It suggests Labourism harbours a fundamental political weakness.

What Johnson said out loud was an implication that Marxists have always known, that there is a fundamental antagonism between the interests of the workers and the national interest. I.e. the collective interests of the ruling class, the state, and their system. Except in the Labourist imaginary the worker interest it's supposed to articulate and prosecute is sectional, special, and particular. It concedes that it's separate from the nation and is illegitimate compared to the universal interest the nation supposedly represents. In one way, the roots of this lie in the strict separation of economics and politics the labour movement organises around. The unions have the job of organising the workers, defending terms, conditions, wages, etc, and are accustomed to incremental change via negotiations and industrial skirmish. As fundamentally pragmatic organisations of workers who deal with the situation in the workplace as they find it, accepting this as the terrain of struggle is the immediate, and therefore sole purview. Labourism as a politics represents the moment when the labour movement realised its interests could only be furthered by combining their efforts in a political party, and therefore was a crucial advance in that sense - hence why Marx and Engels were keen for the British working class to form their own party and break with the Liberals. Labourism was the moment workers saw past the coal face and fixed their eyes on the horizon.

But you could also say Labourism recoiled from what it glimpsed there. Economic struggle, as per Lenin's critique of economism, was fixated on how much the wage should be, not its abolition. Conditions and working hours were about "fairness", not contesting the employer's right to run matters as they see fit. This "common sense" approach to class relations at the point of production carried through to politics. Parliament, royalty, the constitution, these were rules of the game to be accepted in exactly the same way as the reality of the workplace. Labourism in politics replicated the subordination of Labourism at work, and therefore it meant taking the bourgeois definition of permissible politics and what constituted the nation as read. Hence the craven conservatism, the social climbing, the presentation of respectability, the support for empire were features of Labourist political strategies and habits of trends within the party. All too often in the party's history, these were not means to an end but ends in themselves. Opposition to industrial struggle from this quarter is the self-loathing inherent to Labourism, of it being a distraction from the proper vote-winning business of the party, or a fear its electoral chances will be tainted by the crudities of chanting pickets and burning oil drums.

Lammy, despite his working class background, entered parliament after a brief legal career. There was no trade unionist record or familiarity with the labour movement as per so many of the intake during the Tony Blair years. And, in his damning Raworth interview this was shown up when he observed that "We're called Labour because we want to associate ourselves with working people", as if the name was a bit of marketing that had no more a relationship to the party than a disco has to a brand of crisps. And nor should we be surprised. As a careerist who puts an equals sign between the parties to an industrial dispute, or is only interested in workers' interests when they're nullified by a consumerists framing and inconvenienced by grounded flights, this very middle class, liberal stance on stoppages fits seamlessly into a tradition historically proven to be scared of its own shadow.

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