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Open letter to the Left

Dave Stockton and Richard Brenner | 27.08.2008 12:05 | Workers' Movements

Workers Power publishes this as an open letter to the left. With a back drop of rising class struggle caused by the rampant inflation, with a recession looming, the possible electoral collapse of Labour at the next election and the increasingly frequent calls for a new workers party, The Convention of the Left in Manchester offers a real opportunity for open and honest discussion on the way forward.
Sent to: AWL, CPGB, CPB, SWP, SP, Socialist Unity, Revolutionary Regroupment, Permanent Revolution

Dear Comrades,

Given the mounting economic crisis, the disarray of New Labour, rising levels of industrial resistance and the coming Convention of the Left in Manchester, Workers Power would like to make some proposals for coordinating the activity of the Left in the period ahead.

We attach a document, Unite the Resistance, which sets out a series of proposals for a united front, around what we think are the most pressing actions needed to resist the crisis. It also identifies measures we think the movement should be demanding from the government, and suggestions for how we might unify and organise the struggles.

We have grouped these proposals under 10 main headings, both for convenience and by way of responding to other sets of “10 Demands”, in particular the “People before Profit” charter initiated by Socialist Worker with the support of a range of subscribers including Tony Benn.

While we do not disagree with anything in the “People before Profit” charter, we do feel that if these proposals are to be a guide to action, they would need to specify not only measures to be implemented by government, but also the forms of action that workers can take from below to resist the crisis. That is why we have prepared a set of proposals of our own, which we would like to present to the movement for discussion and, we hope, action.

In support of these suggestions, we’d like to summarise our view of the political situation, which we are sure all sane organisations on the left will agree are characterised by a serious economic crisis which the capitalists are trying to force the working class to pay for, alongside and at the same time as the decay of the Labour government and a massive falling off of its support in core sections of the working class across Britain.

We believe the main features of the situation in Britain now and in the next year or two are:

• An impending recession. The crisis phase of the industrial cycle has already run through several stages, including a crisis of mortgage-backed securities, the credit crunch and general financial upheaval, bank collapses and bailouts, and a worldwide inflationary spiral in food and fuel costs (two or three times higher than the official inflation figures). Now the Bank of England predicts stagnant economic growth in the UK this year. With unemployment already rising, it seems sensible to assume a significant recession is coming with accompanying job losses and cuts in public spending.

• The completely predictable response of both private employers, councils and of course government is to make the working class pay the maximum cost of the crisis by holding down wages well below inflation. It is reasonable to expect that the private and public employers alike are preparing for significant lay-offs and closures of ‘uneconomic’ workplaces and/or the running down of public services because of falling tax revenues in an economic downturn.

• The Labour government - whether under Brown, Miliband or even Cruddas - will act as the general staff of the capitalists against the working class, both as a public sector employer and as coordinator of economic policy. As ever more people are realising, the Labour Party is not just depriving workers of political representation, it is being used as a weapon against us.

• The leaders of the major Labour-affiliated unions, whilst occasionally complaining of the government’s actions,¬ are not only handing over millions of pounds of our money to this anti-working class government every year, but also systematically delay, fragment and divert our fightback against the government’s attacks. The leaders of the big three Labour-affiliated unions are in particular determined to prevent an all-out indefinite strike against pay restraint or united action across the unions for any significant period of time. They put the stability of the government above the interests of their members and the success of the battle against pay restraint. The Warwick 2 agreement secured nothing more than another set of empty promises from New Labour to make superficial improvements to employment law ... after the next election.

Yet inflation always changes the conditions of the class struggle. Rising prices are putting the union leaders under sustained pressure from below. The response of the rank and file to the public sector strikes in April and July was tremendous – and the limitations of one and two-day actions become ever clearer. The Shell tanker drivers’ victory shows what other sectors of workers can expect to achieve if they strike for long enough. The huge Scottish local government strike, the PCS’s commitment to weeks of action this autumn and the action on the tube, buses and rail, show that the possibility is there for a serious industrial challenge to the government. Tensions will continue to mount between the big three union leaders’ support for Labour and the membership’s need for action on wages, pensions and jobs.

Despite the exceptionally favourable conditions for exposing and breaking the hold of Blair and Brown (the most right-wing Labour government on record, in power for 11 years), despite the fact that militant unions like the FBU and the RMT have broken with Labour, the forces of the Labour left and their supporters in the Communist Party are unprecedentedly weak and marginalised, unable to mount any serious challenge to Brown or even a pretence of “reclaiming Labour.”

In such conditions we might have expected the revolutionary left to take serious steps forward. Yet despite militant anticapitalist and antiwar movements, despite the recent revival of trade union resistance, the socialist and communist groups have clumsily missed opportunity after opportunity to launch an open fight within the trade unions and among the youth to rally the forces for a break with Labour and for the formation of a new fighting working class party across Britain. In one way or another, despite winning support in some areas and proving that the potential was there for an alternative to Labour, initiatives like the Scottish Socialist Party, the Socialist Alliance, Respect and their various fragments, all avoided this basic task. They chose get-rich-quick schemes involving adapting to nationalism or to religious leaders, instead of a systematic fight within the labour and trade union movement for a break of real forces away from New Labour.

Likewise the left have done little to build an independent democratic opposition to the union leaderships amongst the rank and file, when the former are hampering our resistance to privatisation, rationalisation, inflation and increasingly job losses. A National Shop Stewards Network has been formed, and an Organising for Fighting Unions conference has been held. However, neither set themselves the task of establishing a permanent network of rank and file trade unionists able to act with the union leaders where possible but without them where necessary – which is surely the most pressing task in an environment in which even the more left-wing of the union leaders (as in the CWU postal strike last year) are perfectly capable of acting to restrain action and of negotiating and recommending unfavourable deals for their members.

Yet all is far from lost. Indeed the miserable endgame of New Labour, and the disillusion of millions of Labour supporters with Brown (and doubtless very rapidly with any Blairite successor to Brown if they dump him), present both the opportunity and the burning necessity to rally the forces for a new fighting party of the working class.

The Convention of the Left – if it brings together a broad spectrum of militants not only from the socialist groups but also from the unions, the Labour left and the campaigns – has the opportunity to address two immediate and closely connected tasks:

(i) How to organise a powerful and increasingly united resistance to attempts of the employers and the government to make us pay the cost of the crisis, and how to challenge and overcome any attempts by the official trade union leadership to undermine, divide and sabotage the resistance in order to save Brown and Labour.

(ii) How to present a powerful and united political challenge to Labour not only in by-elections and the general election that is due within two years, but also by mobilising on the streets, in solidarity with strikers, against new wars, against state racist persecution, against fascist attacks on immigrants and refugees.

In our view these tasks are inseparably linked. The first step in addressing them is an honest and open discussion – which we can begin at the Convention in Manchester - about the objectives we fight for, the tactics we need to win and the changes we need to make to our organisations in order to succeed.

For a combined process of discussion and united action we need more than one national convention or assembly - we need such assemblies and conventions not only of the left-wing groups but of the militant labour movement. And we need them in every town and city, drawing in activists from every current struggle and campaign. In some places it will be a matter of convincing existing campaigns to combine to organise local assemblies, in others trades councils could take the initiative and in each case the major political organisation in the locality will doubtless play a vital role.

In such meetings we need to thrash out a platform of practical steps and political demands to repel the attempts of government and bosses to make us pay the costs of the crisis, and to unite the maximum forces in direct action to win them.

For example, we could launch a campaign this autumn for a united public sector strike against the pay restraint – and we could start bringing the forces together from below. Of course we’d have to address the issue of indefinite action. The Unison leadership’s disgraceful attempt to intimidate health workers into accepting the rotten three year pay deal, by warning that a successful campaign would require a long period of sustained action, proved that even opponents of all out action like Dave Prentice know very well that one-day strikes are not enough to win. The left can’t counter this by dodging the argument: we need to say explicitly that an all-out indefinite strike across the public sector is nothing to be afraid of – in fact it is the way to win. That argument could be conducted all the more effectively if we were at the same time actively bringing union members from across the public sector together at a local level to discuss the way forward and to coordinate their campaigns.

However we should not hide from anyone the fact that successful resistance to the offloading of the crisis onto our backs will intensify the economic crisis and give it an ever more generalised and political character. The question of which class can solve the crisis will be posed more and more urgently. Only a workers party, a mass organisation of workers fighting for political power, can answer this question.

Unlike Old Labour, a new workers party should not be based mainly on its parliamentary representatives; and these representatives should not be free to make up policy on the hoof and ignore the decisions of the working class membership of the party. Instead it should be an activist party, with a membership campaigning in workplaces and communities on wages, jobs, housing, and against racism and discrimination against women and the young. It must take the party into all existing struggles and draw the activists of those struggles into the party.

To be a serious force capable of convincing working class people that it is not a pressure group but really wants to form a government, the party would need to have a clear strategy for taking power, a programme which publicly outlines its perspective, its demands, its tactics and principles, its goals and the forms of action and organisation it proposes.

In the process of forming a new workers party there will be a wide-ranging debate between two basic strategies: the strategy of ‘socialist reforms’ enacted through parliament, in which extra-parliamentary actions come second to winning a mandate for government within the confines of the capitalist state apparatus, and the strategy of revolutionary class struggle, aiming at the seizure of power by breaking up the capitalist state and replacing it with a state under the direct democratic control of the workers.

Would this just be a squabble between leftwing groups? Not if it takes place among masses of workers breaking from Labour and trying to define the programme of a new party, not if it takes place as part of an attempt to clarify how to fight back against the crisis now and how to break the hold of the official labour and trade union leaders, and not if the debate is open, honest and democratic.

If - faced with a capitalist crisis and a Labour Party heading for an electoral meltdown - we do not create even the beginnings of an effective working class party in the next year or two, then a tremendous opportunity will be lost. We may have to endure severe punishment for letting it pass. But if we can agree to work together to unite the resistance in common action to bust the pay restraint, to organise a network in the unions capable of acting without the union leaders where necessary, and to bring the forces breaking from Labour together in a project to build a new working class party, then we have a real chance of securing lasting steps forward for the working class – steps forward that will massively improve the balance of class forces in the heightened period of struggle that seems to be opening.

Dave Stockton and Richard Brenner
- e-mail: workerspower@btopenworld.com
- Homepage: http://www.workerspower.com

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