27/02/2008 by admin.

By Bill Jeffries

If Unity is Strength, then the Left is very weak, not only has it suffered from three decades of defeat, but since the late 1990s has systematically failed to take advantage of the many opportunities for it to substantially extend its influence.

Most notably out of the enormous stop the war movement it failed to build a mass alternative to New Labour, rather the opposite, the anti-war movement, in spite of its many awe inspiring achievements, consolidated the Left’s fragmentation, its general retreat from class politics and overall decline. 

Faced with this situation it is a good time to re-think where the Left has gone wrong, what are the lessons and the next concrete steps we can take together to re-build the movement. There are obviously many different answers to these questions, but first among them must be, in a general sense, an appreciation of the situation and the tasks that it posed activists.

Notwithstanding the scale of the anti war movement, and growth of climate change activism, the anti-capitalist movement, ESF/WSF and so on, the overall level of class struggle remains weak. Strike figures are lower than the 1950s. Trade union organisation is down when compared with the 1970s/80s.

The Labour Party left is a shadow of its former self, while the various left regroupment initiatives, the SLP, SSP, Socialist Alliance, CNWP, Solidarity, Respect, Respect Renewal, LRC etc. without wanting to get into the specifics, have failed to unite the whole left within them. 

Faced with this fragmentation, what can the Convention of the Left do? 

Firstly it can provide a forum for the Left of all shades to discuss their differences and what unites them, their assessment of the world, where they think the priorities for struggle are, what are the key issues that face working people today. 

Secondly it can start to co-ordinate activists within these areas to make their struggles more effective. 

And finally in the light of its success with steps one and two it can consider future options.

Posted in Power and politics, Statements, Planning | 6 Comments »

27/02/2008 by admin.

By Roy Wilkes 

We now have almost universal agreement that Climate Change is happening and that it is a result of human activity. It was the IPCC’s 4^th Assessment Report, published less than a year ago, which drove the final nail into the coffin of climate skepticism. 

Up until then public opinion was seriously divided on the issue, even among sections of the left, and this was mainly due to the massive PR effort of the fossil fuel and auto industries.   

Of course, the vested interests that promoted climate skepticism for so many years still exist, and they are as rich, powerful and influential as ever. Globally, the top 10 corporations in 2006 by revenue were, in order of size: Exxon Mobil, Wal-Mart Stores, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, General Motors, Chevron, Daimler-Chrysler, Toyota, Ford and Conoco-Phillips, i.e.  4 oil companies, 5 auto manufacturers, and Wal-Mart.[1]

Royal Dutch Shell went on to post profits of £13.9 billion for 2007 (which works out at over £1.5 million per hour) – the biggest profit ever recorded for a UK company.[2]  These are very powerful forces. And although they are no longer taken seriously in promoting climate skepticism, they still exert a huge influence, particularly on US government policy. So instead of denying anthropogenic climate change, as he did until very recently, Bush now insists that, although the problem exists, it is best addressed through voluntary measures undertaken by business, and by the development of techno-fixes.    

But a recent survey of 500 top global corporations showed that climate change ranks only eighth in the concerns of big business, below increasing sales, reducing costs, developing new products and services, competing for talented staff, securing growth in emerging markets, innovation and technology. [3] 

And of course, as the recession bites deeper, climate change will fall even further down the agenda of big business, whose raison d’etre is and always has been to generate profit, and for whom everything else will always remain secondary.    

Even those governments that do claim to take climate change seriously, such as Gordon Brown’s New Labour, still rely on market mechanisms, in particular carbon trading, to ‘solve’ the problem. Unfortunately there are many within the environmental movement who harbour similar illusions in the capacity of the market to resolve this crisis.  Contraction and Convergence, the official policy of the British Green Party, is based on tradable emission rights. [4]   

But emissions trading schemes simply don’t work, as has been amply demonstrated by the EETS, although they do deliver big windfall profits, including to the biggest polluters. [5]   

And they don’t work for a very simple reason: there is a fundamental contradiction between the driving force of capital – which strives for infinite growth and accumulation – and the preservation of a delicately balanced and finite ecosystem.   

Alienation   

So why aren’t we all responding to this enormous danger, which many scientists now regard as the greatest threat ever to the survival of humanity, with a greater sense of urgency?  It seems irrational somehow.  But what this apparent irrationality illustrates very clearly is the depth of our alienation.    

Capitalism starts by alienating us from our own labour power, that is from our capacity to work, which is the most human of all our characteristics.  It therefore alienates us from our own nature, from our ‘species being’ as Marx describes it.  And by forcing us to compete, each of us against everyone else, in every sphere of our lives, it alienates us from each other.    

Of course, it serves the interests of capital for us to exist as atomised individuals.  And it serves the same interests to encourage an atomised response to climate change, one in which we are exhorted to examine our individual ‘carbon footprints’, and made to feel guilty about the way we as individuals live our lives.  This is yet another attempt to make us pay the price for a crisis that is not of our making, to divert our attention from those who are truly responsible. 

Unfortunately many environmentalists fall for this con trick, hook, line and sinker, and thereby inhibit the growth of a real mass movement.  But most workers don’t fall for it, realizing instead that reducing our individual carbon footprints will not make one iota of difference.  A different level of response is required, a collective response, a political response at the level of the state. Climate change is not nor has it ever been an issue of ethics, it is fundamentally an issue of politics, of power.    

As workers we don’t choose our conditions of life: we don’t choose where and how our electricity is generated, we merely flick switches as powerless consumers; we don’t choose to spend hours stuck in traffic jams, with the only alternative a privatized, overpriced and inadequate public transport system; nor would we choose poorly insulated, private housing if we had any real alternative. These conditions are imposed upon us.   It is only by collective action that we will we be able to develop real solutions to a threat as momentous as climate change.

And this collective action begins with collective struggle, mass struggle, and will lead, if we are successful in our struggle, to collective planning, to collective control over the resources of the planet, so that we can allocate those resources not to generating profit for the few but to the satisfaction of real human need, beginning of course with the need to repair the enormous damage done to our habitat by centuries of capitalism.     

But capitalism doesn’t just alienate us from our own labour power and from each other.  By its drive to turn everything into a commodity, including now the very air that we breathe, capitalism alienates us not only from our own nature but from all of nature.  Commodity fetishism casts a veil of mystification over the products of our labour, masking the real social relations behind their production, masking even the nature of production itself as the metabolism of humanity with nature.  An artificial rhythm of daily life is imposed upon us – we sell our labour power, within strictly enforced time frames, we buy commodities (often on credit), we consume them, we worry about debt and fractured relationships, we seek distraction from the bourgeois mass media and its deified celebrities – and all of this gives us the illusion that we are separate and apart from the natural world, that we are insulated from that world.    

But of course, we are not separate from nature at all, we are very much a part of nature, and as such we are utterly reliant on our natural habitat, on our environment.  But our social consciousness is a product of these multi-layered alienations, and this is especially true in the imperial heartlands, in the so-called ‘developed world’. And social consciousness will be transformed into ecological consciousness not through an academic process of pure reason but through a process of struggle.   

And this struggle for a sustainable environment will inevitably become a central aspect of the global class struggle.  As IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri observed, “It is the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit.” [6] The poor blacks of New Orleans would certainly concur with that.  And increasingly it will be the poor in Britain, those who cannot afford houses other than in the flood plains, those who cannot afford the ever rising home insurance premiums, who will suffer first and most from the freak weather events that will undoubtedly increase in frequency and intensity over the coming years.   

So ecological consciousness will develop hand in hand with class consciousness, as it becomes increasingly clear that capitalism not only generates war, poverty and insecurity, but that it also threatens our very survival as a species.    

We are starting to see the emergence of a mass movement on this issue, a truly global movement. And although its fiercest battles will initially be in the global South, for example among the indigenous peoples of Latin America, who are fighting to defend the rainforests from the incursions of big agribusiness and the logging companies, nevertheless their repercussions will be felt globally, and will impact on social consciousness even in the imperial heartlands.   

 Eco-socialism 

 Marx and Engels were ecological thinkers who developed a profound understanding of the environmental impact of capitalism and of humanity’s alienation from nature. Of course they weren’t aware of the greenhouse effect, but they wrote extensively on those aspects of environmental science that were known at the time, Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England, and in Dialectics of Nature, and Marx in his writings on the dislocation of the soil cycle that arose with capitalist urbanisation. 

 Indeed, Marx’s studies of Epicurus and the materialist conception of nature preceded and gave rise to his materialist conception of history.[7]

Some of the most advanced ecological thinking of the twentieth century was developed by early Soviet scientists, such as Vernadsky, who published The Biosphere in 1926, several decades before western environmentalists re-discovered the concept.    

So, why have western Marxists concentrated almost exclusively on social science rather than natural science in their thinking for the past half century or more, to the extent that eco-socialism seems like something new?  This is one of the more unfortunate legacies of Stalinism, which has distorted so many of our traditions.    Stalin purged an entire generation of Soviet conservationists, including Uranovsky and Vavilov. Ecology was condemned as a bourgeois pseudo-science (and how many socialists since then have fallen for this terrible and dangerous distortion, and not just from within the Stalinist traditioin either?)  But why did it happen? 

The theory and practice of socialism in one country required the Soviet state to try and ‘outgrow’ capitalism by using economic planning to generate more output than could be attained by the market economies of the West.  Ecological ideas got in the way of this policy, which is often described as ‘productivism’, and which was of course doomed to fail, with the Soviet Union itself degenerating into ecocidal tyranny.  

 Eco-socialism is about freeing Marxism from the distortions of Stalinism, it is about reclaiming a Marxism that is both humane and ecological, and whose goal is the thoroughgoing disalienation of humanity through the agency of its only truly progressive class, the proletariat.    

One of our first priorities as eco-socialists is to encourage the growth of an ecological class consciousness within the organized labour movement. Historically there has been something of an antagonism between environmental activists on the one hand and trade unionists, or more precisely the trade union bureaucracy, on the other. Trade unionists have tended to regard environmentalism as a threat to jobs, and environmentalists distrust the unions because they defend even the most polluting industries.  Both sides are right about the other but for the wrong reasons.   The trade union bureaucracy allows capital free reign to direct production in whatever way it sees fit, as long as it provides their members with jobs; indeed we often hear trade union leaders proclaiming the need for ‘our’ industries to be ‘competitive’; in other words they explicitly accept the imperative of capitalist accumulation and rarely question what is produced or how it is produced, except from a narrow health and safety perspective (or more recently from the perspective of ‘greening the workplace’.)   

 Many environmentalists, on the other hand, have taken managerial jobs within the big corporations in a vain attempt to reform them from within, while others continue to advocate pro-capitalist solutions to the environmental crisis.  As eco-socialists we have to organize to change this situation.  We want trades unionists to be a leading part of the mass movement on climate.  And we want environmental activists to recognize that to be effective their allegiance has to lie with organized labour, not with capital.    

300 trade unionists from every region of Britain and from a wide range of unions attended the Campaign against Climate Change Trade Union Conference on 9^th February. This was a historic event in that it started the process of resolving the antagonism between the unions and the environmental movement, by drawing trade unionists into the heart of the movement on climate change.    

But of course, we want to go further than this.  And in recognizing that capital can offer no real solution to this crisis, we start to raise the question, well who does have the solutions, and what will those solutions look like?  We want trade unionists to recognize that the solutions lie with themselves, that they need to start developing alternative plans of production, or at least to start thinking along those lines, to start thinking about taking control of production. There is no law of nature that says that trade unions have to be defenders of wages and conditions within the narrow confines of capitalism. 

At certain historic junctures unions can play a more progressive, even a revolutionary role.  And in the context of climate change, we are asking trades unionists to be nothing less than the agents of human survival.    

Roy Wilkes is a member of both the International Socialist Group and Respect Renewal.  He is secretary of the organizing committee of the Campaign against Climate Change Trade Union Conference.   

[1] http://www.endgame.org/corps-ranked.html

[2] Independent 31 Jan 2008 

 [3] Independent on Sunday 27 Jan 2008

[4] http://www.gci.org.uk/

[5] European Emissions Trading Scheme. http://www.sinkswatch.org/pubs/2007%2009%20Lessons%20from%20the%20European%20Emissions%20Trading%20Scheme%20_2_.pdf

[6] http://www.america.gov  6 April 2007

[7] See Marx’s Ecology, John Bellamy Foster, New York, 2000

Posted in Planet | 1 Comment »

25/02/2008 by admin.

Politics, Power and Participation: what does it mean to democratise power? by Hilary Wainwright

The Labour Party’s commitment to the common ownership included the commitment to ‘the best obtainable system of popular administration and control’. Here was a recognition, buried in labour movement history that democracy is something more than parliament: it’s also about popular control over how public resources and institutions are run. When Labour did finally bring parts of the country’s infrastructure and heavy industry into public ownership, the idea of ‘popular control’ was pretty much forgotten. Public control meant state control; socialism became increasingly identified with the state.

Traditions of popular participation and popular power were rediscovered – often in new ways – in the 60’s and the 70’s with the radical workplace trade unionism across Europe and through movements for social liberation: of young people, women, black people, gays and lesbians. A new impetus has been given recently to the idea of popular power by movements and radical political parties in Latin America in particular in the muncipalities of Brazil and the aspirations of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela.

These experiences in the South have inspired citizens in the North who find the possibilities of exercising democratic control over politics diminishing daily. People are demanding the right to share power with elected politicians. We are no longer prepared to trust them to act on our behalf. But as politicians sense the decline in their legitimacy, they too espouse the rhetoric of partcipation: communities and different social groups are being consulted ad nauseum while real power relations – of state and economic domination remain untouched. How do we develop the autonomy and strength of community groups and social and labour movements to challenge power rather than be incorporated by it?

We need to rethink left politics to answer this. Grass roots social movements of recent years – feminism, black movements, the global justice movement, gay and lesbian movements and radical parts of the trade union movement offer some tools for this rethinking. In practice they distinguish between two radically distinct meanings of power: on the one hand, power as the capacity to transform and on the other hand power as domination.

Historically the major parties of the left have tended to be built around a benevolent version of the second understanding of power: around winning the power to govern and using it paternalistically to meet the needs of the people. This has meant a politics focused around legislation and state action.

The social movements’ assertion of power as transformative capacity produced a break with this narrow definition of politics. It led to a far wider understanding of the scope of politics, way beyond the traditional focus on state, government and legislation, and involving the struggle for justice and dignity in all the relationships and institutions of our daily lives.

Posted in Power and politics, Statements | 5 Comments »

13/02/2008 by admin.

The Manchester “Convention of The Left”, from the 20th -25th September, will bring together opponents of New Labour’s neo-liberal warmongering to discuss how we can develop unity in action - just a stone’s throwaway New Labour’s party conference. 

We want an entirely different world. One built by the working people for the working people, not based on profit, environmental destruction and oppression, but a socialist society.  We bring together people from different radical traditions - greens, lefts, internationalists and communists, civil liberties campaigners, anti-deportation fighters and trades unions, peace and public service campaigns – but united in our determination to combine our strengths and open a debate about how we can rebuild the left today.    

The Manchester Convention steering group invites anyone who wants to participate in, shape or promote the event to join us in Manchester on Sunday 24th February, at the Friends Meeting House, Mount Street Manchester between 3.00-6.00pm. 

There is obviously no final agenda as yet, but the loose proposal is that through the course of the Labour Party conference week, the Convention will organise a counter conference and actions.

The Convention will start on Saturday with a full day for discussion and debate between activists to see how we can work together better and co-ordinate our struggles, followed on a week of discussion possibly themed around;  

Peace – how we organise our struggle against imperialist wars and support the just struggles of peoples against national oppression  

People not Profits – how we oppose the privatisation of public services – and how we would run the services of the future  

Planet – how we can fight global warming and environmental destruction  

Power and Politics –how the struggle against oppression means fighting for power to change our lives  

If you would like to attend the Convention Organising Group, then feel free to come along, all welcome, individuals and groups or groups of individuals, or if you can’t make it on the day, then get in touch with our e-mail (john at conventionoftheleft.org) and we will be happy to facilitate your involvement in any way we can.  

Over the next weeks and months in the run up to the Convention we will be trying to shape a debate around the issues that face the left today.  

Yours, John Nicholson 

Convenor, Convention Organising Group 

Posted in Planning | 11 Comments »

13/02/2008 by admin.

By Richard Searle

The economic system we all live under was born, as Marx succinctly put it, ‘red in tooth and claw’. The arms trade, the defence industry, security interests, national interests, which every way they call it,  they  are all prefaced on killing.   

There’s no polite way of putting it: for this economic system to succeed, continue and renew itself, others must die. The wars of the 20th century have killed millions. We have turned it ‘art of war’ into an industrial process   

In the eight short years of  21st century, and estimated one million more have joined the tally of war dead, from Central Africa and the Middle East, to the Caucuses and the Andes    How far we come from the slaughter of the trenches of WW1?

We now have high-tech wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where missiles fired from pilotless drones are directed from thousands of miles away in command rooms in the USA.  Those who fire the missiles never have to step foot in the country of those they kill. This is the iron fist of globalisation.

We can now turn on our televisions or Log-on and see wars being fought in real time.   Our society puts its best brains to work finding more efficient ways of killing people. Our governments subsidise the arms industries, gives bribes to the purchasers and justify this by saying it’s protecting jobs.  There exists an absurd and obscene contradiction at the very heart of capitalism. It provides the potential to extend life but is driven to end life. The combined defence budgets of the world for one year would eradicate world hunger, provide clean drinking for every person on the planet, an education for every child, could provide the medicine for every person with HIV and still have plenty of change left over.   Resistance to this logic, this drive to destruction, has always been there. It has been resisted by passive and active means. There have been those who have refused to fight and those who have turned their guns on their masters.  The 15th February 2003, turning point in modern history.   The convergence of global protests on one day in 2003 marked a first in human history. Protests moved through 12 time zones around the world, Those protests were organised from the grassroots up. They combined differing forces, movements and traditions. Those protests joined up the world as never before This is our immediate heritage not an event from another era.  It showed how far we have come together, our potential, our ability to communicate with new technology but it showed us how far we still need to go.    

Those protests were at once a victory in mobilisation, but within short space of time some participants read the 15th February as a defeat. The threat of war that had brought them on the streets had gone ahead. ‘We had marched in our millions but the bombs still fell’.   

Un-ravelling all the lessons, layers and contradictions of the 15th February 2003 provides the key to developing our strategies to stop the masters of war.   

What is the impact of 15th February ? Is it too early to tell?  

Discuss

Posted in Peace, Statements | 1 Comment »

13/02/2008 by admin.

By Declan O’Neill

When Labour dumped its formal commitment to “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange” it was the final straw for many in the Labour party who still regarded themselves as socialists.    

In practice, of course, Labour had never challenged the dominance of the market or the supremacy of private property but few, would have predicted how quickly new Labour would rush to privatise those bits of the economy still in public hands. 

 In opposition it was “our air is not for sale” and a commitment to renationalise the railways; in government it was selling off air traffic control and cuddling up to Virgin Rail. Private good, public bad became the new mantra.  As Mark Steel has written in their worship of the market today’s politicians “sound like ancient pagans expressing fear of a bad crop brought by angry gods. And once it descends, all we can do is offer a sacrifice, of a few million jobs and lives ruined and thousands made homeless until the gods are satisfied with our gifts and we can start all over again.”  

New Labour is so desperate to avoid anything that smacks of” old- style nationalisation” that Gordon Brown would rather give Northern Rock to his mate Richard Branson than contemplate taking it into public ownership.  The latest obscenity is the Virgin group’s attempt, responding to the government’s “reform strategy” for the NHS, to move into Primary Healthcare.  

So what is the alternative?  What is wrong with running public services on the basis of peoples’ needs not private profit? Decisions about how and where we use those resources should be made by the people themselves through democratic means.  This does not mean a return to old style nationalisation. In practice the old nationalised industries aped the private sector: their management boards were composed of the great and good – neither workers or users had any real say in the day to day running of public services, never mind strategic direction. 

Yet even at their worst the old nationalised industries were a thousand time better than the privatised chaos we now face. 

The society we aim to build is not one built on ever increasing production and consumption but one democratically run to meet the needs of all humanity. Reclaiming our public services is an essential first step in this process.  We have the resources to do this: our task is to build a movement to transform the system from one built on private greed to one that meets the needs of all humanity.   

Posted in People not profit, Statements | 1 Comment »

13/02/2008 by admin.

By Peter Allen

In the last two or three years a near consensus has developed around the view that something dramatic needs to be done to ensure the survival of the planet. The few remaining “climate change deniers” in the scientific community increasingly have the near pariah status of “holocaust deniers”.

However although there is an agreement that “something needs to be done” there is far less agreement about what and how. In particular there is a recognition that our consumer society and individual prosperity is based on resource intensive production and an assumption of never ending growth. How can living standards be (at least) maintained in the relatively rich economies and societies whilst reducing, minimising or ideally eliminating the risk of environmental destruction?

At least as importantly how can those economies/societies (most of the world’s population) be given the chance to enjoy the benefits of advanced industrial society if the planet’s ecosystems are so fragile? The question raises issues for socialists as well as for supporters of the free market.

Socialist orthodoxy, starting with Marx, holds that socialism cannot be built in conditions of poverty, and that rational economic growth(democratically controlled perhaps and planned rather than left to the free market, but growth nevertheless) is necessary to provide abundance for all. If the finite resources of our planet mean that notions of never ending, resource intensive growth need to be questioned, and yet most people remain poor, then What is To Be Done?

We might have come to the view that we can’t have socialism without saving the planet .Our task is to persuade others that we probably can’t save the planet without socialism. By socialism we probably mean a society based on co-operation rather than competition, production for need rather than profit and a system of government based on genuine participation and democracy.

We need to engage others in a debate about the best way of distributing what we have, distinguishing between what we really need and what we have been persuaded that we might want and deciding things for ourselves, individually when appropriate and collectively when necessary.

Such a debate needs to involve discussion not just about the way we produce electricity or solve our food and transportation needs but about the way we live our lives and how we can ensure an equitable sustainable future for our planet.

Posted in Planet, Statements | 3 Comments »