Marxism Today's 'New axis'
International (Socialist Outlook site)1980sPhil HearseScanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.
Just how far rightwards is Marxism Today prepared to go? The evolution of Britain's two-bit 'curocommunist' sect would be irrelevant were it not for the support for their pernicious ideological 'innovations' in wide sections of the labour movement. PHIL HEARSE looks at the issues. MARXISM TODAY has become a br-word in the labour movement for putting forward right wing ideas as a new ind 'creative' strategy for the Icht. Typically Marxism Today has polemicised not only against far lett groups like the sWl', but also against a whole range of left wing forces, including Eric Hetter and Tony Benn, the Campaign Group of Mrs, Arthur Scargill and the NUM leadership and others.
But Marxism Today writers have often been cov about the precise political concluvons of their analysis. In some of Eric Hobsbawm's articles it has seemed that d coalition with the sor was beg advocated, and indeed Marxism Today recently carried an article by Mike Rustin which explicitly advocated such a course. Now it has begun to spell our the consequences of its ideas for the trade unions, in articles by John Lloyd (March 86) and Communist Party industrial organiser Pete Carter (April '$6).
John Lloyd, a writer for the Financial Times, discussed the problems and opportunities for the trade union movement in the light of the print dispute at Wapping. Llovd suggests that there is a straight choice facing the unions either the road of Arthur Scargill and confrontation class struggle or, alternatively, the road of Eric Hammond and the EEPTE! what Lloyd calls 'market based trade unionism. The strong implicaton of Lloyd's argument, since he makes it very clear that he regards Scargill-style class struggle as an unmitigated disaster, is that the trade union movement has no alternative but Hammondism with all that it entails. Iloyd adds that since Kinnock wants innovation and efficiency on the Japanese model, then there is no alternative to Japanese-style trade unionist as well -- business unionism. He says:
'In embarking on a productivist crusade whose slogan is efficienot, productvity and output, and whose role model is the
Japanese, Kinnock... will need as an indispensable, but far from sufficient condition, a collaborative style of industrial relations which -- as the
Japanese one seems to do •-- subordinates nearly all cconomic needs to the needs of the company, and above that, to the needs of the country? (p. 16)
This may well be the logic of Kinnockism, but is it the position of Marxism Today? Indeed it seems almost obscene for a journal which claims to be Marxist to publish, at the INTERNATONAl No. 4. Mayiune 1088r
The miners' strike created a real broad popular alliance
'New Axis'
height of the print dispute, an article which appears to suggest that Hammond and the LEPTU have the only viable way forward
Evidently fearful of this, CP industrial organiser Peter Carter weighs in to give Lloyd's ideas a vagucly left gloss in the next issue. No, says Carter, Hammondism and Scargillism are not the only viable alternalives: there is a 'third way'. This third way between the right and the ultra-left is 'the broad left of British politics. This group, which has an urgent need to assert itself includes the Labour Co-ordinating Committee, and a host of personalities like Bickerstaffe, Sawyer, Knapp, Livingstone and Blunkett. This group is contral to winning the central ground of the labour movement.
This broad left, according to Pete Carter constitutes a 'new axis' against the ultra-left which includes the 'Militant tendency, the Campaign group of MPs, the Communist Campaign Group and the Morning Star' -un ultra-left coalition which has no concept ot broader alliances outside the labour movement. Carter suggests that the broad left of which he talks will have the quality of 'generating popular struggles"
No doubt Carter's idea of creating a 'third force' against the hard left and the extreme right of the labour movement is one which many, including the Tribune group of MPs, the now-style Tribune newspaper and even Neil Kinnock himself might agree with. But our objection to it is not basically that; our objection is that putting this third force forward as a viable grouping to lead the movement in a socialist direction (we assume that Carter wants some sort of socialist direction) lacks any basis in facts. Indeed it contradicts all known facts about the forces he names and the way in which ideas and consciousness develop in the labour movement
Let's take the question of generating popular struggles. Does Carter seriously think that the Labour Co-ordinating Committee, Tom Sawyer, Rodney Bickerstaffe et are genuinely interested in 'gencrating popular struggles? The icc, being faithful supporters of Kinnock, want to close down popular struggle in order to concentrate on clectoralism. Bickerstaffe, Sawyer and Knapp will run a mile from the first sign of struggleamong the members of their respective unions. And Ken Livingstone helpfully suggested recently, in an interview with Marxism Today writer Bea Campbell, that the hard lett in the Labour Party should be shot. He and Blunkett are two of the main people responsible for heading off the struggle against rate capping.
It might also seem a little bit strange to Carter, if he thinks about it, that the most gigantic popular struggle in Britain in recent years was led not by the motley crew of his third force bur by the 'hard lott' ultras round Arthur Scargill!
The miners' strike is worth pondering on. It created the broadest popular alliance outside the labour movement and the trade unions scen in recent years. It involved an alliance of political parties, tens of thousands of women, whole communities, hundreds of support groups encompassing people from 27
every walk of life. This was par excellence a broad alliance stretching beyond the trade union movement. This was not because Scargill is a strategic genius, but because the struggle and the alliance were indissoluble. The alliance was created by the exemplary character of the tight put up by the miners, its obvious justice and moral superiority over the government, and the fact that the unlike so many sections of the "broad left', were actually prepared to raise the banner of struggle against the Tory
The miners' struggle also involved an openness to support from other sections of the community, including womens groups, lesbian and gay groups, and black organisations, which was very far from the insinuations of sectarian narrowness and crude workerism which Marxism Today makes about the very large group of people in Britain it calls the 'narrow, sectarian left'.
Since Carter mentions Sawyer, Knapp and Bickerstaffe, it is worth making the point that only the NUM leadership has voted in far our of black sections in the Labour Party, while Carter's broad left', so keen to make alliances, did not.
The thing which really unites the personalities listed by Carter as being the core of a third force is that they are all furiously i commodating to Neil Kinnock. This of course Today's own accommodation to Kinnock. This accommodation has been signalled in two recent articles in the February 1986 issuc: one by Michael Rustin advocating a coalition with the SDP/Liberal Alliance in the event of a hung parliament, and the other by Sam Aaronvitch saying 'goodbye' to the Alternative Economic Strategy --. from the right.
'there is a straight choice facing the unions: Scargill
For Hammond'
Rustin takes the same line as Anthony Barnett in a recent Guardian article — that Labour should be a bit tougher in the policies it puts forward in order to be in a better bargaining position when the time to create a coalition with the Alliance comes. superior to glorious opposition'.
Rustin's strategy, again not contradicted by Marxism Today's editors and echoing a of articles suggesting coalition, hopelessly utopian. What on carth moves Barnett and Rustin to imagine that the Alliance will be in the slightest bit prepared to take on board any radical, anti-capitalist clements from Labour's programme if a coalition is formed? Surely the price tor such a coalition would be the ditching of every last remnant of radical policies? The picture of messrs. Steel and Owen bargaining with Kinnock over which radical policies will in fact be implemented by a coalition is one of the least convincing scenarios to be dreamed up by even Marxism Today's broad range of contributors.
Sam Aaronovitch, one of the CP's key 28 theorists of the AES during the 1970s, puts forward a new economic strategy which makes significant concessions Kinnockite thinking. Stressing the limitations of what any Labour government could have the resources to achieve, he argues for the trade unions to police their own incomes policy; for 'investment and modernisation' without any measures of social ownership of industry or the banks; and for a 'reconsideration' of the left's opposition to the LEC. Space does not permit a detailed discussion of Aaronovitch's positions, but they obviously involve a sharp shift to the right on the positions on the AES defended by much of the Labour left and Cr for the past titteen
Today
Hunger Amidst Plenty
Aaronovitch, Andrew Glyn's Million Jobs « Ycar pamphlet published by the Campaign group of MPs looks like the last word in ultra-leftism on the economy (which is doubtless what
The pro-Kinnock logic of what Marxism Today is now saying couldn't be clearer. On the one hand you have the bashing of the hard left as unrealistic and sectarian, on the other hand a stressing of the policy objcetives of job creation and welfarism through investment in the existing structures of British capitalism. And on the international level you have, through Aaronovitch's explicit questioning of opposition to the bEC, and a thoroughly false analysis by Jon Bloomfield (December "85 issue) that Europe is standing up to Reagan, a promotion of the 'European' option for British capitalism.
Despite Pete Carter's invocation of the 'broad left' of British politics, it is obvious that Marxism Today and through it the 'Euro' wing of the cris expressing a marked shift to the right even in its own traditional positions. In factthey now occupy a political position well to the right of a really broad swathe of the British left. And let it also be said that in addition to providing the theoretical ammunition for a rightward moving section of the labour burcaucracy, their chosen alles - the LCC, the NUP! leadership and so on are among the leading witch hunters of the hard left in the Labour Party and the trade unions.
The agenda for the ever-more-right wing thinking of Marxism Today was set by Stuart Hall in his article 'Realignment — for what?' (December '85 issuc). Hall says that 'the ritual expurgation of the "hard left" is not what realignment is all about'. Neither, he says, is it about supporting hinnock. l is bout making socialism more reterant to the cra in which we live, and particularly to the realities of modern day Britain. This oper ales on a number of lords. Oneisthoncedlo 'Teminise' socialism. Another is recognsing the constraints under which ans Labou government would realistically bave to oper ite. But most of all it is about creating the alliances which correspond to the real cha acter of society today, and the workforce which actually exists. We have to break with a conception of socialist strategy which corresponded to a period when the majorin of workers lived in nuclear families, worked in heavy industry, and lived in a period of capitalist boom and prosperity.
Stuart Hall knows as well as anvone I suppose that Marxists judge individuais and political currents not by what they say about themselves, or even what they think about themselves, but what ther actualls do. So one response to his 'manifesto of alignment' might be to say that despite his protestations, Marism lodes i rightisin is obviously abour bashing the hard left and supporting Kinnock. But we can't leave it there, because the probiems of making socialism relevant that he mongons are real ones. It's self-evident that there has bech recomposition of the workforce. with none intellectual labour, the rise of a new, and impoverished white collar proletariat. It's also true that the old nuclear lanuly is no longer the pre cminent and unique form of family of the working class. Likewise, the struggles of women. black people, lesbians and gays — and conscious ness of their oppression -.. have become more central to socialist thinking.
These changes of course pose many challenges on the lovel of analysis and strategy for socialists. Above all chet pose the challenge of building o ami capitalise alliance which can articulate the needs and
'bluntly, Stuart Hall is engaged in a con job' demands of broad sections of the population who are neither industrial workers, male or white. All that is truc. But what is not self-evidently truc, and what amounts to a sequitur in Wall's line of is that such a reworking of socialist analysis and strategy leads to a shilt and to an endorsoment of Kinnockite political themes.
To put it blundly Start Hall is engaged in a con job. If you define the 'hard' left as inherently incapable of coming to graps with new rcalities, and vou define the creative application of Marxism as moving to the right, that as sure as might follows day, that you arrive at the neat equation coming to grips with new realities - moving to the right, QED. The irony is that a Kinnock government, or a coalition, will have some rude shocks for anyone who wants to champion the interests of the oppressed They'll have an awful lot of 're thinking' to
INTERNAL ONAL
let, and santed a sestomarie polomic with exist between them have systematically
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