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Hello Alasdair and all

Marie Lynam
13th October 2009 at 11:08
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An address from the Posadists in Britain to the Convention of the Left (COTL) - 15.09.09

HELP OFFICIAL WORKERS’
AND SOCIALIST CURRENTS
FORM IN THE LABOUR PARTY!

The Convention of the Left is holding its Second Annual Conference as an alternative to the Conference of the Labour Party. This is positive inasmuch as it recognises the utter importance and centrality of Labour. But it raises now a new question: Is it the wish of the Convention of the Left to help transform Labour?

Capitalism shows ‘How Not to Manage Society’. When the comrades of the COTL endorsed The Peoples Charter, as they did, they probably thought this was the least they could do. But the Charter says the banks must be taken over.

Where is the leadership capable of such a thing?? There is a thin line between holding an alternative Labour Party Conference and seeking to build an alternative to the Labour Party. The debate around The Peoples Charter highlights this, but it also reveals a staunch resistance to creating such an alternative. Many organisations, CPB included, recognize that the process demands change at the (Labour) centre.

The British working class is traditionally highly centralised. To counter this, capitalism instigated an equally centralised bourgeois-reformist structure in Labour and the Trade Unions. But the Russian Revolution has changed everything. From 1926 onwards, the fight against capitalism in Britain became the fight against the bourgeois-reformist structure of the workers movement in the British Isles.

A big-small matter of social organisation:
Capitalism tries to break the proletarian centralisation of Britain with de-industrialisation and devolution. But proletarian unity is growing in the world. Venezuela links Cuba & Latin America with Africa, Iran, Eastern Europe, Russia, China and the Middle East. This anti-imperialist and internationalist link transcends the revolutionary patriotic interest of each country. It seeks to put the world economy (and partly finances) at the service of humankind. This wondrous development is the background to the process in Britain. The far-right gets excited, but what else to expect?
The forces for change are no longer just those of the working class and its organisations. In the world, and indeed in Britain, immense layers of professionals, civil servants, artists, technicians, religious leaders (Paraguay), sectors in the probation and the police services (Britain) - and even sectors in the capitalist armies (Venezuela) – feel, or realise, the superiority of anything that is planned and collective. They see that production in capitalism is blocked by distribution based on the capacity (to buy) instead of on need (as in Cuba). This block is a very big problem today, but historically, it is only a small matter of social organisation.

‘Labour Machine’ versus ‘Centre for Change’
The Unions that support the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) mostly support Labour too. When the ‘Labour machine’ expelled the RMT, it knew it could count on this centralisation continuing. But should the ‘Labour machine’ resort to such expulsions as a method, it will be left behind. It will become separated from the individuals, the Trade Unions, the currents and the leaderships now preparing to remove the capitalist obstacle.

But what does ‘Labour machine’ mean in this context? It means a series of organisms in the Labour structure - somewhat like ladders. Put an earnest foot on a first rung, and you end up in Local Government, the Parliamentary Labour Party, the Administration, some Ministry - the Privy Council, the Supreme Court, the Lords, ah, not to forget Europe, or a nice diplomatic job. All organisms of finance capital - or submitted to finance capital! Even Mandelson – Sir – has patently no powers over the banks. The present inner structure of Labour (and in part of the Trade Unions) is a one-way ladder up to these servile clubs.

Having said this, it is not wrong to enter these ‘clubs’ in order to fight the class traitors there. Some do it in parliament - but there are not many such instances higher up. Such a fight happens each year at the Labour Party Conference against Ministers and Regional officials who use the powers of the State, and of the Labour apparatus, to pressurise delegates. When conscious of this, and organised, Labour delegates do fight back. But the Conference arrangements are themselves determined by a State-and-Labour-apparatus-power, a power not very different from that which Stalin used against the Bolshevik Party (and Soviets) when he took power in the USSR. J. Posadas has written at length about this*.

When LRC comrades say: ‘Let us regain democratic accountability’, they must define who is ‘us’. ‘Us’, is the proletarian, intellectual and Labour vanguard. In this COTL Conference, ‘us’ needs to be clearly defined as having to do with Labour. The LRC is not one more organisation in the COTL, it is the link between the COTL and Labour. It is in the interest of the COTL to help the LRC obtain its recognition as a Socialist current in the Labour Party. Indeed, deep down, this is the task - now, during, and after the (May?) elections.
Should this not happen now, it will eventually happen.

Official recognition for the Labour’s Socialist currents
‘To regain accountability’, one must have had it in the first place. But when was that? The bourgeois class spent more than a century trying to keep the people from the vote, and when it finally yielded, it trashed the vote. The only ‘us’ to gain accountability now is the Labour proletarian class, because the Tory-Labour bourgeois class is incapable of, and fears like the plague, any republican-bourgeois aspiration**.
The difference between government and parliament in Britain is uniquely small, leaving no means of restraining the power of the Executive. Faced with the French Revolution, Britain went backwards. This weakened it, and now, it is dominated by the other capitalists. Government/Parliament in Britain is subservient to the monarchs of finance capital (who lend it trillions), whilst the European Commission and the U.S. justice system dominate its judiciary***.

Outside the Workers States and the Revolutionary States, Parliaments and governments are tied to finance capital because they owe it money and have the same class interest. No good begging them to control the banks!! In Britain, a kind of Finance feudalism has joined hands with the lingering feudalism of the stunted British bourgeois State.

The class to transform Britain is the working class. It has changed in composition but it is still the overwhelming majority of the population. Rare are the Trade Unions today that do not support Cuba and Venezuela. Should the COTL help the Left currents in the Labour Party, the Left itself, the Trade Unions and the working class struggles would have more force to take Labour over, and transform it.

Global, constitutional, structural and industrial changes are bound up with the matter of the socialist transformation of Labour. The greatest weapon in this transformation is Marxism. Marxism - and the Russian Revolution - has demonstrated that the present historic obstacle in the way of progress is overcome when the proletariat takes society’s reins. Who else, supported by the mass of the population, has the power to expropriate the companies and the banks?

The Posadists in Britain reckon that capitalism cannot grant the Peoples Charter demands. As things progress, the Peoples Charter will develop too. But even as it stands, it can already bring the population and the Unions together, if the task is to invade and transform Labour. Should the Charter not serve, this sort of thing will happen in some other way.

Socialist currents need to take the fight to New Labour inside the Labour Party but outside its machine. The COTL could unite all the climate, jobs, war-peace, ecology groups, with the Trade Unions and the population, around the simple Peoples Charter programme. The withdrawal of the troops figures in the Charter, a good opportunity to draw-in CND, Labour CND, StW and many others.

The fight to transform Labour is revolutionary and not just electoral. The Labour electorate voted massively in 1997 to stimulate the fight. Foiled and disappointed, it abstains now by the millions, but it does not join other parties.

Scotland, Wales and all of Ireland cannot be ignored. The Labour Party remains the historic structure with the traditions, the links and the possibility to draw together the British Isles on a socialist basis. The Stalinist (but doomed) Labour machinery is distinct from the traditional Labour centre. The working class and its Unions seek to revolutionize that centre. It wants from it a leadership capable of building the Socialist Federation of the British Isles.

The inner Labour ‘ladders’ will start tumbling down when campaigns start the direct fight to get Conference resolutions passed and implemented; against the Royal Prerogative, the Secrets, the unelected gurus, the hereditary rights. The British masses and workers will take over their traditional organisations and make them serve.

15.09.09
* Read: The Process in Britain, Stalinism and the organisation of the Left in the Labour Party, 26.4.79, J. POSADAS.
** Republican bourgeois aspirations: equality and the sort of liberty that enables it - leading to fraternity, that feat of the human relations that capitalism has no knowledge of.
*** Obvious in the matter of US-GB-US extraditions.

http://www.quatrieme-internationale.posadiste.org - (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)