Of course I'm voting Labour. I am an active party member of five years standing. I've spent the bulk of my activism this year working in marginal seats (mainly Stafford). And there's the small matter of 261 posts on this here blog that have obsessed over the party's twists and turns since back before I hung up my paper selling boots. Whether I need committing I'll leave others to judge, but I'm committed, certainly. Yet drilling down, like everyone else voting Labour tomorrow, I have my reasons. Labour's manifesto doesn't tick all my boxes. Far from it. I don't like the capitulation to received wisdom - if it can be called that - about immigration, though it is reasonable to argue that communities with the highest inflows of migrant workers should receive more resources. I don't like the surrender the scrounger rhetoric, of conceding to the Tory view that generous benefits (what? where?) are to blame for joblessness, not lack of jobs. But I do agree with Labour's plan to abolish youth unemployment with a job offer at the end of a period of dole - something far superior to the Tory plan who will banish the problem by not allowing the under 25s to claim JSA. And Trident ... well, we won't go there. There are some policies that are steps in the right direction. The minimum wage. The repeal of the Health and Social Care Act. Reversal on work tribunal fees. Free childcare. Workers on corporate remuneration committees. More devolution. No EU referendum. A partial break with austerity. The beginnings of a better plan for a different capitalism. Yes, I'm a tough cookie to please. Then again, this election isn't about me. It's about others. Others like the woman I spoke to the other week in Stafford. She gave birth to her daughter in a motorway layby, because the Tories had stripped out maternity services and sent them up the road to Stoke. Others like the grieving family of a woman who died from a heart condition, shortly after failing her work capability assessment. Others like the autistic man terrified of losing his council house because of the bedroom tax. The woman who'd had her mental health support worker withdrawn, despite suffering a lifetime of horrifying sexual abuse. The chap victimised by his "responsible" employers for questioning his shift patterns. The single mum trapped in a house so damp her asthmatic daughter's bedroom ceiling caved in. If the Tories get in again, the lot of millions of people in these situations will not improve. As the Tory assault on what remains of social security provision widens, more people are set to get dragged into the bedroom tax. More profit will be extracted from public medical services. The most vulnerable will be hammered even more to pay for tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy. I don't know about you, but that is a society unfit for human habitation. A Labour or Labour-led government offers many of the people at the bottom immediate relief. Yet people who put up with this crap are not hopeless victims. Voting Labour is not an act of charity on behalf of the powerless, of the political equivalent of sticking 50p in a Children in Need tin. It's a necessary act in helping our movement get its act together. Be no doubt, if Labour doesn't win tomorrow, if by some jiggery-pokery combination the main party of the trade unions is locked out of power that is a defeat for the labour movement. But with Labour in power, there is more room, strategically and tactically. Socialism, if it means anything, is about boosting the the well being and political confidence of our people: those who have to work for a living, those who have to get by on social security, those retired after a life time of labouring, and those too vulnerable to fend for themselves. That is what mine - and your - class is. Tomorrow's poll is a very modest step on the road to building a better society. If we win, the hard job of continually rebuilding Labour into a proper mass party, of drawing millions back into the labour movement and giving people the confidence to stand up and fight stands before us. it's hard work, but it's much easier if the poisonous Tories are turfed out of office. I'm voting Labour. And if you are a campaigner, a labour movement person, a socialist; you should too.
The Ministry of Sound ran an ad in the yoof press (NME, Mixmag, More) back in the mid-90s. Pictured in black and white tones was a filthy-looking pub bog typical of boozers pre-Brewers Fayre, and there scrawled on the wall was a racist legend like 'Pakis Out'. The strap line underneath read "Use your vote. He will." Effective? Did it get the young 'uns out to vote? It's hard to say, though youth participation in 1990s elections were higher than the 00s. But I'm not interested in that, I'm interested in the right wing scepticism (some might say fear) of the state. Those of you who've been through far left organisations, which is a good chunk of this blog's readership, know that the tradition from which we hail doesn't take elections particularly seriously. The lowest form of class struggle, as I think Lenin put it. At best it's an occasion for making propaganda, as per his latter day disciples, at worst a distraction from the serious business of revolutionary politics. Anarchist traditions, notwithstanding Class War's dalliance with electoral politics, reject voting outright. Underlying both stances is an analysis positioning the state as an instrument of class rule. Taking his queue from Engels, Lenin and most Marxists ever since view it as "bodies of armed men". That is regardless of the appearance a state assumes, their essence remains the same. Britain, Russia, and Egypt for instance have different political systems, different histories of democracy and mass opposition, and range along a scale from relatively liberal to dictatorial. Yet, despite these differences, those states in the final analysis exist to preserve private property, the social relations on which capital depends. There are plenty of establishment politicians and commentators who have been and are genuinely appalled at the brutality of Putin's and Sisi's governments, but were less so when police invaded miners' homes to give them beatings, ran undercover operations on direct actionists, and connived with businesses to blacklist hundreds of trade unionists. Democracy is so much window dressing. Or is it? Rosa Luxemburg penned the classic tract against parliamentary socialism, arguing this course of action by the revisionist socialists of her day was not just naive, because they took the slow democratisation of states for their substance, not their ephemera; but also they set themselves up necessarily as managers of capitalism, setting themselves at odds with the movement they came from. For 'reformists', be they social democrats or Labourists, the argument goes that they see the state as something that is essentially neutral. If classes exist, and by no means all in the centre left accept the political salience of class, then the state arbitrates between them. If they are not relevant, the state is a means for securing certain policy outcomes consistent with social justice. At least that is the formal stall set out today. For Luxemburg, social democracy was the view that socialism could be legislated for peacefully through parliaments. That the state is something more than committee rooms and chamber debates was aptly demonstrated by her own murder at the hands of state-sanctioned paramilitaries, a state that had a Social Democrat government. The truth, in my opinion, lies somewhere between these positions. To use the old language, the state is - confusingly and simultaneously - an instrument and object of class struggle. It is, thanks to the plenty of brutal examples furnished us by history as well as the few touched on here, an instrument for forcibly subsuming living labour - proletarians, workers, whatever you want to call them - under the dominance of dead, congealed labour: capital, business. This, however, is where the classical Marxism from Lenin and Luxemburg, through to Trotskyism, ends. State power and its ultimate abolition is conceived as the objective of revolutionary struggle, but that is it. However, using the same schema, when you have the two main parties contesting an election who map respectively onto the labour movement and the main representatives of capital, what is that if not an example of class struggle? Their objectives too are state power, to use the machinery of government to pursue the interests of the constituencies they represent as articulated, however badly, by their programmes. There is room for this within the present institutional set up. The barriers to a radical reform agenda and the depth to which it can penetrate, for instance, is not based on an ideal typical understanding of the state but always and everywhere conditioned by the balance of forces. And this brings me to the right and their relationship to the state. The far left take it for granted that the state is arrayed against them but also, in many ways, so do the right. I'm not talking about the racists and the fascists that exercised the Ministry of Sound, but mainstream Conservatism. It would have you think that Nineteen Eighty-Four themed totalitarianism is a heartbeat away. The EU is a Stalinist monolith bent on collectivising Britain's agriculture. The agencies of the state themselves always threaten to subsume plucky entrepreneurs with taxes and red tape. And it's standard now for them to favour a smaller state, one in which the provision of public services are pared back and privatised, where business accountability to the state via laws and regulations are culled though, of course, it's rare that what Althusser called the repressive state apparatus, those bodies of armed men, come in for similar attention. So far, so staple. But consider the desperation of the Tories during the short campaign, even to the extent of talking up their own very British coup. We know from received revolutionary wisdom that the state is on their side, so why are they pulling out all the stops to keep the Tories in power when the programme Labour has put forward hardly drips with deepest red? Is it simply because they're stupid? No. Another element of the Marxist theory of the state can help us understand what's going on. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx notes that the state is a general committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. The owners of big capital as a whole do not exercise political power directly to complement their economic power, it is delegated to their representatives who are organised in parties that strive in part or in whole to condense and articulate those interests. This is because capital, as it competes with one another, tend to be driven by the short-term goals this necessarily engenders. Without politics negotiating and tying together a common will, their general interests - chiefly the security of private property, the persistence of markets, the inviolability of wage labour - might be threatened by coordinated action by labour movements. Of course, no one is suggesting that Ed Miliband is going to scoop capitalism into the chamberpot of history, regardless of what the Daily Mail might say. Rather, what is at stake is a rather narrow range of interests within capital itself. Here's the story. New Labour, for all its faults, nevertheless broke the Tory Party's raison d'etre as the go-to political vehicle for big capital and small business. A chunk of the former have drifted back, especially as Labour puts distance between 2015 and 2010 (and 1997), but their monopoly is finished. However, while New Labour basked in widespread support from industry and financial alchemy, the Tories increasingly concentrated the politics of a much narrower range of capital. It benefited from the neoliberal settlement that Blair and Brown maintained, but were also a peculiar mix of the superficially dynamic but socially useless (hello speculators and hedge fund managers), and the most uncompetitive and/or labour intensive. They're not fussed about the long-term. They're not fussed about investment in education, skills, and genuinely useful infrastructure. Lo and behold, the Tories come to power with a little help from their yellow friends and push policies counterproductive from the standpoint of capital-in-general. Labour doesn't represent a break with capital, far from it. Yet what its current programme does represent is those general interests of capital. A low waged economy with poor levels of investment may suit the immediate interests of Tory backers, but not the commonwealth of business. Ditto for allowing media power to remain in the hands of those allied to sectional, counterproductive interests. Ditto for rent and house building. Ditto for zero hours contracts and insecure work. Ditto for even more brutal cuts to social security. And on it goes. What terrifies the right is that a Labour government will be able to use the machinery of the state to dismantle the hegemony of one - their - section of capital and replace it with another more attuned to the demands of business as a whole. And what really gives them the terrors is that the custodianship of capital's general interests is passing to a party based on the labour movement, one that could, they fear and if driven from below, start making inroads into property, markets, and maybe even wage labour itself. It's not socialism, but for the Tories and their friends, they know a Labour-directed state could wreck them and their schemes. This is why the election is getting treated as an existential question. And it's why the right generally don't trust state power: it can and might be used against them.
Last Tuesday took me back to my old stomping ground at Keele University. The occasion was the inaugural professorial lecture for Brian Doherty, who was my supervisor during the trials and tribulations of the jolly old PhD. Our shared interests were the sociology of social movements, and in particular the process of activist commitment. To most normal people, activism seems so much like work but without the compensation of cash. It can be tiring, tedious, stressful, and very occasionally, dangerous. So why do people stick with it, and what is the effect of activists who've been around the block a few times on the social movements and protest groups they're involved with? This is the question Brian's lecture set out to shed some light on. The lecture, Occupy, Blockade, Debate: Traditions of Protest in Movement, was also a polemic of sorts. Too often, social movements are understood as upwellings from below that, at some point in their development, are co-opted and institutionalised. The labour movement, and the clutch of 1960s 'new' social movements - women's liberation, anti-racism, gay liberation, environmentalism - share this fate. However, there is a wider 'direct action' tradition that crosses movement boundaries and is typically invisible from the perspective of mainstream politics, that is until it emerges into the open and is feted/condemned as something new and shiny. In fact, there are always subterranean connections and activity at work. For instance, when in 2011 Occupy rolled up outside St Paul's the core organisation and coordination was accomplished by networks of activists who'd been on the direct action 'scene' for many years, but were often engaged in projects outside the public eye. Also, Occupy was 'novel' from the perspective of the mainstream because it didn't have any point, as such. The sorts of left wing politics that do get an airing in the media are vertically organised and often instrumental. Voting the Tories out this Thursday is about achieving x, y, z objectives. Organising a campaign group about the closure of a children's centre has a line of authority and a set number of goals. Occupy, as an example of direct action, was more an exercise in visibility. As a temporary protest community organised along horizontal lines, it tried to demonstrate the possibility of alternatives by being that alternative. It therefore drew on a tradition of activism that rose to prominence after the so-called Battle of Seattle in 1999, and occasionally made itself felt via anti-capitalist protests ever since. How then is this tradition maintained, especially from one generation of activists to the next? In vertical organisations, such as Trotskyist parties, tradition is maintained by a regular repertoire of actions (paper sales, regular meetings, demonstrations, intervening in campaign groups, standing in elections, etc.). Even in the Labour Party and union branches, we are a touch looser as organisations, the formalities around and respect for the received way of doing things can bridge the gap and transmit the lessons of the past to the present, albeit not always successfully. How does it work across decentralised networks of activists, given that formality is lacking? Brian talked about his own experience as a direct actionist coming of age in the 1980s. His formation as an activist took place in CND, which was getting a second wind with heightened Cold War rhetoric and the siting of missiles on American military bases. Brian was involved with Peace Action Durham, which combined anti-nuclear activism with wider social justice concerns, such as miners' solidarity, and other anti-militarist activity. PAD wasn't a formalised organisation as such; it was fractious and turbulent but part of a 'structure of feeling' that traversed different movements and recognised its concerns were part of a wider movement. When Brian and his partner moved to Kent, he joined Horne Bay CND. The difference was stark. When putting together a newsletter, they included a notice for an upcoming anti-apartheid demo. Two of the long-standing local activists made their unhappiness about it pretty clear. For them, their CND was solely about nuclear weapons - wider concerns, the sense their activism took place in a wider context of struggle was both alien and unknown to them. Direct action traditions, however, do not comprise an ideology as such. Sociological understandings of its depth and breadth have typically tried to associate direct action with anarchism, though this is too narrow. Not simply because direct action is a repertoire crossing movements; there are a large number of organisations that have been integrated into the state and local government and/or receive funding that originated from the activist milieu and retain links to them. Housing associations and women's refuges spring to mind, for instance. Direct action is not consistently anti-statist and therefore cannot be anarchist. Furthermore, many groups sitting in the tradition reject formalised sets of ideas a la Trotskyist outfits and anarchist collectives. Again, returning to the example of Occupy, it stumped commentariat and media alike because all it did was articulate a space for the sharing of ideas and experience. It did not present a frontal assault on British capitalism, as some intentionally misread it. While direct action is not an ideology, the tradition does hold a number of features in common. First of these is what Brian termed the 'politics of the first person'. It's punk as politics, or DIY citizenry. It is non-representative in that the emphasis is on the individual activist to take responsibility for whatever cause(s) exercise them and do something about it. Direct action also has a certain ambivalence towards violence. While most, including the infamous 'black bloc' of anarchists who come together at certain demonstrations, rule out violence against people (unless provoked) violence against (corporate) property is a legitimate tool of protest. Direct action also tries to reach outside the activist ghetto and effect change in more immediate ways, as per the sorts of organisations and services mentioned earlier. Then there are intentional prefigurative institutions, not unlike Occupy and before it the Social Forum movements, and lastly direct action is the antithesis of identarian politics. i.e. Among many things, British Trotskyism can be regarded as identity politics - being part of an organisation here means assuming a particular brand. Direct action is far looser and fights shy of forming groups that project themselves in this way. Of course, common features mean common problems. Problems arise over the setting of strategic priorities, leading to variegated movements pointing in different directions simultaneously. Similarly over diversity f tactics - is it wise to tolerate a black bloc on a march when the interest of the police and the actions they take are likely to see the media focus on the excitement of violence over and above the plodding safety of the message? Similarly, how can the direct action grass roots, pulling in different directions, disagreeing and debating, doing their own thing, ever manage to pull off something requiring collective effort? Well, it does manage, and this is where the weight of radical tradition comes in. All activists are stamped by their experiences, and usually activists have - very broadly - similar experiences via working in certain political conjunctures, being involved with certain actions, mobilising against certain common causes, and so on. One can speak of generational cohorts that share a great deal - for example, people who got into the direct action movement via the huge huge mobilisations against the Iraq War might be more sensitive to issues around war and peace and favour more traditional methods of mass protest, alongside die-ins and protests against visiting dignitaries. Activists politicised off the back of the student protests might continue to prefer occupations. The weight of experience is something that is shared. But there are general features that characterise activist cohorts. Brian talked about his previous work on activist networks in Manchester, and noted they tended to live political lives, that their employment was consistent with their commitments. There were also strong ties, obviously forged in the experiences of campaigning past, between people within the cohort. However, those ties are much weaker across generations and this brings with it the problem of transmitting knowledge and experience from the established to the incoming. These are typically available through texts, such as this example of a protest survival kit where police violence is likely, and the internet has sped up the spread, availability and circulation of this kind of knowledge. But tradition in decentralised networks is untidy and haphazard - for example, many of the debates in feminism now repeat what went before in the 1980s. This is partly because some of those issues remain to be resolved, but also many of those experiences and lessons are not, for whatever reason, easily available to younger women getting involved now. It still remains the case that the sociology of social movements has a bias toward how movements mobilised and what's going on when large numbers of people are politicised. It's unsurprising, as the broader policy context whittles about the radicalisation of would-be terrorists and the maintenance of social order. Small wonder academia unconsciously reflects this. Commitment, how people stay involved in the long haul, tends to attract less attention, again, probably because the eruption of new movements and the collective action of masses of people tend to be of short duration before normality resumes. This is still largely virgin territory so far as political sociology is concerned, and with his inaugural lecture, Brian gave us a way in to think about one of the tricky and slippery concepts that might help us make sense of commitment.
When you didn't think the election could get weirder, it takes an even more bizarre turn - and it's the red team that are at the centre of it. In case you've been doing something positive with your Sunday, such as knocking on doors, the media blizzard surrounding Labour's latest stunt may have passed you by. This morning, Ed Miliband literally set the party's six key promises in stone - by unveiling a policy monolith. Yes, a eight foot tall slab of rock was commissioned, and is set to be installed in the Downing Street garden should Labour make it over the finish line on Thursday. And if it doesn't, it'll make an interesting piece of political memorabilia for someone. Okay, it is a load of old bollocks, and it's a moment that has had seasoned Ed watchers scratching their noggins. Labour's campaign hasn't put a foot wrong so far, and then we have this. Smart move or folly? What's the devil is happening? What were they thinking? Firstly, people who are hoping this is a 1992 Sheffield rally/Kinnock moment, like this pair, are going to be disappointed. As CCHQ's daily bulletin, the Telegraph are following a line of march, though I have to concede that "There's measuring curtains, and then there's ordering an 8ft stone monument for the garden" is a good line, provided you're one of the political cognoscenti. For most people though, it's not going to register. Yes, it's weird. Yes, it's silly. But will it portray Ed Miliband as an arrogant so-and-so who thinks the election's in the bag? No. Not least because his new found popularity, if it can be called that, is the very opposite of arrogance, especially when set against our air-brushed, debate-dodging, poltroon of a prime minister. Second, I can understand the reasoning for it. "We etch our policies in stone as the Conservative Party deletes theirs." It's supposed to send a message about Labour's seriousness. As we know, the Tories are tossing tax payers' cash into the air like so much confetti. Factor in their ludicrous pledge to pass a law to prevent them from raising taxes, it's very difficult to see how Dave and co can keep to their promises. There then we have a clear dividing line. The six pledges, whatever you think of them, are short and vague enough to be fudged a little if needs be. All that Ed needs is a chisel to tick 'em off as and when they're legislated for. Third, it's commanded the media's attention. Like most people, I'm fed up of hearing about Scotland. This isn't the SNP's fault, it's all down to our Tory friends. Had the pledge stone not come along, the media schedules would again be leading with their Little Englander scaremongering. Instead, the stunt has not just focused attention on what Labour's done but what the party plans to do. Tomorrow morning, the print editions of the Tory press will carry a picture of the monolith with the six pledges clearly visible and, party strategists hope, makes sure popular attention is on policy as we enter the final stretch.
* There were no by-elections in Scotland. ** There were two by-elections in Wales. *** There were no independent clashes. **** 'Others' this month consisted of Llais Gwynedd (148 votes) Overall, 2,615 votes were cast over three local authority (tier one and tier two) contests. All percentages are rounded to the nearest single decimal place. A total of five council seats changed hands. For comparison see March's results here. With only three contests to play with, there was scarcely any point keeping an eye on this month's by-elections - unless you're some sort of politics nerd. As such the results are over the place - with such a small sample you can't say anything. I mean, 15% for the LibDems, really? Blame the general election. Speaking of which, next Thursday sees a total of 54 by-elections rolled into the general and local elections taking place the same day. I can hardly wait.
Hands down this is the best and most absurd thing I've seen this election.
Is it fan made? Is it something spawned by the press department? Who can say, except whoever authored it knows the internet and knows how fandoms work. At seven pm from this day forward - until election night anyway - the aims is to get #MilibaeTheMovie trending. When 19:00 hours strike I will be there doing my duty.
What did you think of last night's grilling of the main party leaders? As much as I detest Dave and his Nick Clegg mini-me, I think they performed creditably by the criteria one judges media appearances. The Prime Minister was polished and a little bit sweaty, but his question dodging body swerves saw him through the half hour. Clegg, who is probably the most telegenic and eloquent of all the mainstream politicians ate a bit of humble pie but made a good case, by his standards, for why the electorate should give the LibDems another punt. And Ed Miliband was, once again, his confident, assured self. Though tripping as he left the stage was a classic Ed moment. Of the three, it's fair to say the Labour leader had the hardest time from the audience. Indeed, two of his toughest inquisitors who were supposedly floating voters were actually Tories. If you have to lie about your affiliations to get your points taken seriously, that's just how toxic the Conservative Party have become. However, venturing onto social media after the broadcast I found plenty of lefties cluttering up my feeds and status updates denouncing Ed as useless, spineless, inept, and all the rest of it. Restating his commitment to Trident replacement, to cuts, to immigration controls weren't the problem. It was about his comments regarding the SNP. Asked again about deals with the SNP post the general election, Ed ruled them out completely. There will be no coalition. No confidence and supply. No backroom footsie over individual votes. He even went so far to say that if government meant treating with the SNP then he'd prefer Labour to not be in power. Cue denunciation. Alas, comrades who've gone Stur-crazy over the SNP have taken leave of their senses. This is an entirely sensible position for Ed to take given the circumstances Labour finds itself in. In Scotland, a pre-election deal would plunge Scottish Labour even further into the shit, it would effectively be handing the mantle of anti-Toryism to Nicola Sturgeon. When so much territory has already been ceded, it makes no sense at all to surrender your remaining positions. In England, formally agreeing to keep the Tories out is electoral suicide. It would be nice were it not the case, but when the Tories and UKIP are pushing English nationalism it's out of the question. That's what nationalism does you see, it divides people up and stirs up imagined sleights and irrationalities - something the SNP's socialist cheerleaders have purposely forgotten. What Ed and Labour plan to do then is not hand power to the Tories. Alongside the SNP to reject a Tory administration. And Labour will attempt to form a minority government of its own, which the SNP will not dare vote down. And this will be how it is for however long the show lasts. The SNP's social democratic turn limits its strategic and tactical options. If every parliamentary vote is more or less a vote of confidence, they're stuck. Likewise the Tories - on those element of Labour's programme most left wingers have problems with, such as Trident and immigration, it's hard to see from the safe distance of now how the Tories can't but vote along with Labour to ensure these elements of its manifesto are implemented. It's quite canny, really. One last thing, while Ed is getting cursed for ruling out a deal, no one has taken the First Minister to task for not calling for a Labour vote elsewhere. She wants to deal with a Labour government, her lefty supporters hope the SNP would keep it honest, but in Wales and England it is Plaid and the Greens that have Nicola's seal of approval. If you want a Labour government because you think it's the bees knees or the least worst option, you've got to vote for it.
The most popular posts last month were: 1. The Far Left and the 2015 UK General Election 2. The Socialist Party's Erratic Marxism 3. Green Party Candidates at the 2015 UK General Election 4. On Weaponising Ed Miliband 5. Notes on Nicola Sturgeon What a month. Since Google Analytics started tracking stats for Blogger blogs as standard round about summer 2010, April has revealed itself to be my most popular month ever with a figure north of 60,000 page views. Small beer against the big kids of the commentariat, but not bad for a wee blog kept going in my free time. In fact, I'm a little bit chuffed. So cheers for tuning in. The question whether this is a blip or a confirmation of a trend beginning around the time of the Scottish referendum can only be answered in the coming months. As per, I've plucked one post out from last month's pile for another airing. And that would be Lenin and Hitler Vs Grant Shapps. A silly title, yes, but this super serious post explores the role of the individual in momentous historical processes, and what their character says about the movements they represent.
