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Compass‘Be the change you wish
to see in this world’ Mahatma
Gandhi
Compass
3rd Floor Magdalen House 136 Tooley Street London SE1 2TU E: gavin@compassonline.org.uk T: +44 (0)20 7367 6318 F: +44 (0)20 7367 4201 M: +44 (0)7900 195591 Compass is the democratic left pressure group, whose goal is to debate and develop the ideas for a more equal and democratic world, then campaign and organise to help ensure they become reality. We have over 1200 members across the UK. The organisation was launched in 2003 with the publication of our founding statement A Vision for the Democratic Left. It was the first stage in a process to develop a more coherent and radical programme for a progressive left government. The primary focus for Compass is the Labour Party and the international, European, national, regional and local institutions in which it operates. Compass is open primarily to people who are eligible to be Labour members, but we constantly seek to engage with all members of society who support building a more equal and democratic world. Those who are members of political parties other than the Labour Party can still join as non-voting associates. More importantly Compass is building a bridge to the 200,000 or so who have left the Party and to many more who have never joined. What is distinctive about Compass is that: • An umbrella grouping of the
progressive left whose sum is greater than
its parts.
•
A strategic political voice - unlike think-tanks and single
issue
pressure groups Compass can and must develop a politically coherent
position based on the values of equality and democracy.
•
An organising force - Compass recognises that ideas need to be
organised for and will seek to recruit, mobilise and encourage to be
active, a membership across the UK to work in the pursuit of greater
equality and democracy.
•
A pressure group focussed on changing Labour - but recognises
that
energy and ideas can come from outside the party, not least the 200,000
who have left since 1997.
The articles below are illustrative of the current thinking driving Compass. COMPASS CONSTITUTION What is the’ democratic left’ Gramsci and Us See also COMPASS CONSTITUTION 1.Name The name of the organisation is ‘Compass’. 2.Objects 2.1 The principal object of Compass is to promote debate and discussion of ideas and values, initially as set out in the founding document, with a view to developing a programme for a progressive government. 2.2 In support of this objective Compass shall have power to carry out any lawful activity whatsoever, provided always that its activities shall not be inconsistent with its members being, or being eligible to be, individual members of the Labour Party. 3.Membership 3.1Membership shall be open to individuals who are, or who are eligible to be, individual members of the Labour Party. Members of other political parties in the UK, other than the Cooperative Party, are therefore not eligible for membership of Compass. 3.2The Management Committee may admit as associate members, individuals who are not eligible to be members of the Labour Party, but who support the object of Compass. Associate members shall have only such rights as the Management Committee shall decide, and shall not be members of Compass. 3.3The Management Committee may refuse membership to any person if they consider it in the interests of Compass to do so. 3.4 A member’s membership shall end if they fail to pay their subscription by a date set by the Management Committee. 3.5The Management Committee may end the membership of any person if they consider it in the interests of Compass to do so, provided that they state their reasons and allow the person concerned to make representations to them before making a final decision. 4.General Meetings 4.1The Management Committee shall call an annual general meeting of members at least once in each calendar year, and may call additional general meetings. 4.2. Members shall each have one vote at a general meeting 4.3. Members shall be able to vote by postal or electronic proxy on all substantive matters voted on at a general meeting. 4.4The following powers are reserved to the members in a general meeting: 4.4.1The amendment of this constitution. 4.4.2The merger or dissolution of Compass. 4.5General meetings shall be governed by standing orders approved by the Management Committee. 5.Management Committee 5.1Compass shall be managed by a Management Committee. 5.2 Six members of the Management Committee shall be elected by and from all members of Compass. 5.3One member of the Management Committee shall be elected by and from members resident in Scotland. 5.4One member of the Management Committee shall be elected by and from members resident in Wales. 5.5The election of Management Committee members shall take place once in each year. It shall be conducted as a plurality (first past the post) election in each category. The election shall be conducted by a ballot issued to all members at their registered addresses. Electronic means may be used for distribution and voting. The Management Committee shall approve the detailed arrangements for the election. 5.6The Management Committee may co-opt up to four further members of the Management Committee, who shall serve for a period of one year. Members may be co-opted on more than one occasion. The Management Committee shall have regard to the need to secure a reasonable gender/ethnic balance on the Management Committee when making co-options. 5.7Only members of Compass may be members of the Management Committee. 5.8The Management Committee may exercise all powers and duties of Compass, other than those reserved by this constitution to the members in a general meeting. The Management Committee shall exercise its powers in a manner consistent with any decision of members in a general meeting. 5.9The Management Committee may delegate any of its powers and duties to one of its members, or to a sub-committee of two or more of its members. 5.10The Management Committee shall, at its first meeting after the annual election of the Management Committee, elect a chair, vice-chair, secretary and treasurer from among its members. The Management Committee may from time to time elect such other officers as it may decide. 5.11The National Organiser of Compass shall be entitled to attend and speak at meetings of the Management Committee, but will have no voting rights. No paid employee may be a member of the Management Committee. 5.12The Management Committee shall regulate its own conduct, whether by adopting standing orders or otherwise. 6.Finance 6.1Members and associates shall pay a minimum annual subscription set by the Management Committee. 6.2The Management Committee, normally acting through the Treasurer, shall ensure that proper controls are maintained over the funds of Compass, that proper accounting records are kept and that annual accounts giving a true and fair view of its financial affairs are submitted to a general meeting. 6.3No distribution of any surplus shall be made to members of Compass. 7.Amendment This constitution may be amended by a resolution of a general meeting carried with twice as many votes cast in favour as are cast against. This clause, clause 6.3 and clause 8 may not be amended. 8.Merger and dissolution 8.1Compass may be merged with another organisation with similar objects, or dissolved, by a resolution of a general meeting carried with twice as many votes cast in favour as are cast against. 8.2On dissolution of Compass, its assets shall not be distributed to its members, but shall be distributed to one or more organisations with compatible objects specified in the dissolution resolution. If this is not done for any reason any assets shall be given to the Labour Party. 9.Initial arrangements 9.1Until the first election of the Management Committee under 5.2 is held, Neal Lawson shall be the Chair of Compass, and the individuals he appoints shall be the members of the Management Committee. Adopted by the Management Committee on 18 February 2005 Signed:
NEAL LAWSON, CHAIR, COMPASS Compass has styled itself as ‘direction for the democratic left’. There were other descriptors we could have gone for; progressive, centre-left, social democratic or democratic socialist. So why did we chose this one? In part because we felt it was less loaded. Progressive is too weak as is centre-left. Defining and separating social democrats (especially given the SDP) from democratic socialists is too problematic. So what does the ‘democratic left’ mean and where does the term come from? What follows are two takes on the term. The first is from David Purdy who was once in the Communist Party but through its reform wing ended up in an organisation called The Democratic Left. David worked on the Alternative Economic Strategy in the 1970s and is working hard now on the Compass manifesto. Paul Thompson is editor of the Labour journal Renewal and was the Chair of the Labour Co-ordinating Committee – the soft left organising body. Their articles show we come from a tradition, that we have a history that is both inside and outside of Labour. Compass is in part an attempt to unite these traditions into a force that can build on this history to create a more equal and democratic future. We are also pleased to publish a complementary article by Andrew Pearmain called Gramsci and Us which explains the contemporary relevance of probably the greatest socialist strategist ever, the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci. Most of you reading these articles will be Labour Party members. Hopefully, some of it will be new and interesting. What you will get from all three is a sense of the way in which the democratic left inside and outside of Labour compliment each other. Those outside think more expansively about issues such as politics and culture. Those inside focus more on power and state politics. We can and must learn from each other. It is a fusion that links Gramsci, Hobsbawm and Hall to Cole, Tawney, Crosland, Kinnock and Cook. The rejection of vanguard politics, the belief that a small elite can change the world for the benefit of all, whether it be revolutionary Leninism or reformist Labourism (often referred to as parliamentary Leninism) provides a common platform for future thinking and activity around a new democratic left that Compass is helping to shape. More than anything Compass is the recognition that democracy and equality are two sides of the same coin. We can’t have a democratic society that isn’t equal because people give up on democracy if they are not equal citizens. It is no coincidence that the high points of equality and democratic participation coincided in Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s. Democracy is the means by which people can mange their world by doing it together. The more liberal, equal, green and solidaristic society we want to create is only possible through democracy – there is no perfect society, we never arrive we just keep going on a journey to extend democracy and embed equality. There can only be a left that is democratic – this is our compass. Neal Lawson 1.
Between Labourism and Communism:
Precursors of the Democratic Left in Twentieth-Century Britain Under the impact of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, the Second Socialist International, which had managed to maintain a fractious unity since its foundation in 1889, split into two irreconcilable camps: one committed to electoral-legislative politics within the framework of liberal democracy, the other dedicated to defending the Soviet Union and promoting world revolution. Until the collapse of communism in 1989-91, this schism became a basic reference point for the whole of the left. No socialist or ‘labour’ party and no conception of socialism – whether as a form of society wholly ‘beyond’ capitalism or as a transforming presence within it – could avoid defining where it stood in relation to social democracy and Soviet communism, just as in an earlier era Christians had to choose between Catholicism and Protestantism. This was just as true in Britain as in other countries, though the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) never posed a threat to the Labour Party’s electoral and parliamentary predominance. Indeed in the 1920s, dutifully heeding Lenin’s strictures against ‘infantile leftism’, the CP made repeated attempts to affiliate to the Labour Party, each of which was firmly rebuffed. One barrier to left unity was that the Labour Party was a broad church in which committed socialists who aspired to build a classless society beyond capitalism were no more than an influential minority. Another was that social democrats and communists disagreed about the strategy for achieving socialism, the former favouring a gradualist parliamentary road, the latter insisting on the necessity for a revolutionary transfer of class power and the creation of a workers’ state. Yet many socialists in both parties continued to believe that these were different routes to the same ultimate goal and that, whether the transition was gradual and seamless or involved a sharp – and possibly violent – break with the old order, socialism could not be established without bringing the commanding heights of the economy into public ownership, replacing the profit motive by production for use and substituting central planning for market forces. More generally, both dominant formations of the left were statist and party-centred: neither paid much attention to the problem of rooting the process of social transformation in the institutions and norms of civil society, bringing it closer to the relationships and routines of everyday life. Thus, in principle, there was room for an alternative political project combining the characteristic socialist commitment to equality and human solidarity with the civic republican ideals of positive freedom and democratic self-government. Guild Socialism The first attempt to create a form of self-managing socialism in Britain was the Guild Socialist movement that sprang up during the later stages of the First World War and flourished briefly until it was undermined by the collapse of the post-war economic boom in 1921. Inspired by the example of soviets in Russia, there were similar, equally volatile experiments in ‘council communism’ elsewhere in Europe during these years, including the factory councils movement in Northern Italy, in which the future leaders of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti, won their political spurs. For the Guild Socialists, the really damning indictment of the capitalist system was not that it subjected workers to material deprivation, but that it reduced them to servitude. The unequal relationship between waged workers and the organisations that employed them was a major obstacle to economic democracy. And there was no reason to suppose that nationalisation and state socialism would do anything to remove it. In advocating workers’ control, the Guilds sought to transform the workforce – including its managerial, technical and white collar strata – into an active body capable of taking responsibility for production and investment, not just within each enterprise, but across the economy as a whole. They envisaged that as impersonal market forces were gradually supplanted by democratic social control, the pursuit of profit would give way to the satisfaction of human need as chief aim of economic activity. This in turn, they believed, would make it possible to reconcile the consumer’s interest in product quality with the worker’s interest in job satisfaction. The Guilds’ chief theorist, G.D.H. Cole (1917), argued that progress towards economic democracy would be greatly accelerated if all citizens were paid a tax-financed ‘social dividend’, pitched at subsistence level, adjusted to take account of special needs such as disability, and distributed independently of people’s other sources of income. The institution of a citizen’s income would, he believed, make workers less dependent on the employing class, diminish the divisive consequences of organisational hierarchy and, more generally, foster a spirit of social solidarity. Likewise, the notion that a new distributive regime could not suddenly displace the old, but would have to be introduced gradually, fitted in well with the Guilds’ evolutionary strategy of ‘encroaching control’. Guild Socialism was short-lived and contained much that was wildly impracticable. Moreover, like the labour movement as a whole, it was gender-biased, focusing entirely on the male preserve of paid employment and paying no attention at all to the unpaid work of women within the household. Nevertheless, the Guilds produced ideas of lasting significance: the vision of economic democracy, the concept of citizen’s income, the importance of the workplace as a social institution and the distinction between useful work and useless toil. These ideas disappeared into the political underground once the post-war conjuncture passed away, and had to be rediscovered by later generations searching for a flexible, decentralised, democratic, popular and vital form of socialism that would, in Gramsci’s words, attend to the urgent problems of the present, while sowing the seeds of the future. The Popular Front At its Seventh Congress in 1934, the Communist International (Comintern) gave its approval to the strategy of the united popular front as an attempt to re-unite the left and reach out beyond the industrial working class to the middle class and the professions, in order to rally a broad popular alliance around the objectives of defeating fascism, defending democracy and promoting social reform. The best known cases were those of Republican Spain and France, where communists and socialists joined forces with anti-fascist liberals, though in both countries the resulting alliances were ultimately defeated. More successful instances of popular mobilisation and alliance-building were the social bloc that sustained Roosevelt’s New Deal in the US and the strategy pursued by the Swedish Social Democrats who, after winning a watershed election in 1932 and forming a coalition with the Agrarian Party, pioneered the use of deficit-financing to overcome the prevailing economic depression and laid the foundations for what was to become the world’s most advanced welfare state. The main lesson to be drawn from these various episodes is that in a democratic society with a complex social structure, entrenched civil liberties and competing political parties, major shifts in the balance of power and the direction of policy need to be backed not just by a majority, but by an overwhelming majority of citizens, for measures which are passionately opposed by powerful minorities can only be implemented if they enjoy extensive popular support that cuts across the boundaries of party, class and cause. Even then, as the experience of the post-war Labour government shows, once the foundations of a new political settlement have been laid, a reforming government may stall, especially when its conception of politics is rigidly electoralist and statist, its room for manoeuvre is limited by military and foreign policy commitments, and the social bloc on which it depends starts to disintegrate under the impact of conflicting sectional demands. The New Left The decades that followed the post-war settlement saw renewed efforts to devise a left-wing alternative to Labourism and Leninism that was at once radical, democratic and popular. What Michael Kenny (1995) calls the ‘first New Left’ emerged in response to the dramatic events of 1956: Khrushchev’s revelations at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, the Suez imbroglio and the suppression of the Hungarian uprising against Soviet domination. Hungary, in particular, was a devastating blow for the CPGB. The party, whose membership was already 50 per cent down from its wartime peak of 60,000, lost a further third of its members, including most of its leading intellectuals. Some of these regrouped around the New Reasoner, a journal edited by Edward Thompson and John Saville, who set out to develop a humanised and thoroughly English socialist politics, imbued with home-grown traditions of radical democracy, freethinking communism and the practical virtues of the self-taught and self-activating northern working class. Other left-wing intellectuals, who leaned more towards the Labour Party and were based in Oxbridge and London, reacted rather differently to the international conjuncture. This group, which included Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and Mike Rustin, saw the turn of events as an opportunity not only to break out of the frozen postures of Cold War politics by campaigning for nuclear disarmament and positive neutrality, but to rethink the entire socialist project in the light of post-war experience. Two developments in particular concerned them: the record of socialist governments, both East and West; and the emergence of an affluent, consumerist society in which class division, though still a prime source of social inequality, was neither the sole nor even the main source of social consciousness. These issues were explored in the pages of Universities and Left Review (ULR), a journal that anticipated the themes and ideas taken up by Marxism Today in the 1980s. The Review covered much the same ground as Anthony Crosland’s classic ‘revisionist’ text, The Future of Socialism, but its approach and conclusions differed sharply from his: notably, as regards the significance of the Keynesian revolution in economic policy, the separation of ownership and control in the modern corporation, and the need to make the nationalised industries and public services more democratic and accountable to their employees and users. In Britain at this time, the work of Gramsci was little known: a representative and decently translated selection of writings from his Prison Notebooks was not published until 1971. Nevertheless, in retrospect it is clear that the terms in which contributors to the Review sought to engage with the predicament of the British left resembled the key concepts that Gramsci had developed as he struggled to understand the rise of Italian fascism, the defeat of Italian communism and the fate of the Russian Revolution: the distinction between state and civil society; the role of hegemony or moral and intellectual leadership in winning and retaining political power; the difference between a slow-moving war of position and a volatile war of movement; and the conception of the revolutionary party as an ‘organic intellectual’ whose task is to integrate diverse and fragmented forms of opposition to the prevailing social order into a cohesive social bloc. If all this sounds heavily cerebral, it should be recalled that the first New Left was a cultural and artistic movement as well as a forum for theoretical and political debate. New Left clubs sprang up in most major British cities, providing a meeting place for political activists, intellectuals, the cultural avant-garde and popular musicians and entertainers. Indeed, in 1960 when the New Reasoner and the ULR merged to form New Left Review (NLR) with Stuart Hall as editor, it was envisaged that the new journal would become the organ of the clubs, voicing their ideas and co-ordinating their activities. This hope was never realised, partly because of personality clashes between leading participants, partly because of underlying tensions among the diverse groupings which the journal was intended to serve – which stretched from anarchist advocates of civil disobedience to communist shop stewards schooled in the mores of workplace bargaining – and partly because of the sheer difficulty of navigating a ‘third way’ between or beyond the gravitational fields of labourism and communism. For a while, NLR moved into the orbit of the Labour Party, sensing hegemonic potential in Harold Wilson’s bid to apply the “white heat of the technological revolution” to Britain’s antiquated polity and ailing economy. In Towards Socialism, an anthology published in 1965 as the newly elected Labour government was getting into its stride, Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn produced a bold and original account of the peculiarities of British history, the pre-modern nature of the British state and the anti-intellectual proclivities of the British labour movement. But these attempts to engage with Labour’s political leadership were abandoned after 1966, as the government, wrestling with Britain’s mounting economic problems, embarked on a collision course with the trade unions. The growing rift in the labour movement prompted a sharp response from members of the first New Left, who revived the network of local discussion groups and produced the May Day Manifesto. This was a spirited, but sober statement which carried forward the movement’s earlier analysis of modern capitalism and Cold War politics and outlined a democratic socialist alternative to the policies of the Wilson government. The first version of the Manifesto, jointly edited by Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson and Stuart Hall, appeared in 1967. A second, expanded version, edited by Williams alone, was published as a Penguin Special in May 1968, just as French students and workers were taking to the streets in a direct challenge to the government of General De Gaulle. Here, the story of the ‘second’ New Left merges with that of the more general mutiny against the post-war order that erupted in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with mass protests against the war in Vietnam, near civil war in Northern Ireland, industrial strife on a scale not seen since before the First World War, widespread student revolt and the emergence of new social movements organised around gender, sexuality, race and the environment. As an attempt to rally the disparate forces of the left against the rightward drift of the Labour government, the May Day Manifesto must be considered a failure. It did manage to organise a National Convention which, despite fierce sectarian in-fighting, came out in support of the Vietnamese NLF and in opposition to the proposals for trade union legislation contained in the government’s White Paper In Place of Strife. But the standing Co-ordinating Commission set up by the Convention, to which nearly all socialist groups sent representatives, fell apart as the 1970 general election approached. Some groups argued that however bad Labour had been, the Tories would be worse, while others wanted to run Left Alliance candidates in opposition to the Labour Party. As Raymond Williams (1979: 375) remarked drily, “A strategy of common activity could survive anything except an election.” The Final Years of British Communism The CPGB was always much more than an outpost of Soviet communism. That it survived at all after 1956 suggests as much and subsequent events confirmed that despite its small size, the party was not only rooted in the traditions of the British labour movement, but was also responsive to, albeit bewildered by the new social movements. From 1964 to 1977, the party underwent an unexpected renaissance and for a few turbulent years, as British capitalism foundered and the post-war settlement collapsed, it came to play a minor, but significant role in the British trade union movement and, to that extent, on the wider stage of British politics. During these same years, it also served as a repository for the hopes and energies of many radical students, feminists and intellectuals. The party thus found itself hosting two antithetical political projects which Geoff Andrews (2004), in his recent history of its final years, calls militant labourism and British Gramscism, respectively. From 1966 onwards, British capitalism began to show signs of deep dysfunction as economic growth faltered, real take home pay stagnated, profits were squeezed, inflation accelerated, unemployment rose and, despite the devaluation and later depreciation of the pound, the balance of payments remained in persistent deficit. This dismal performance was the result of two interacting forces: the defensive strength of organised labour and the competitive weakness and complacent insularity that were the legacy of Britain’s imperial past. The most pressing economic problem was inflation. This was not so much because of its narrowly economic consequences, though these were serious enough once the rate at which prices were rising ceased to be low, steady and tolerably predictable and became high, variable and worryingly uncertain. Rather, the recurrent distributional conflicts that drove and were continually reactivated by inflation threatened to destabilise society and provoke a right-wing backlash. As the Swedish social democrats had warned in the 1940s and as subsequent events confirmed, “inflation is the deadly enemy of socialism”. If the left and the labour movement failed to acknowledge that trade unions were involved in causing inflation and failed to take responsibility for controlling it, the only feasible alternative was for government to abandon the commitment to full employment that had formed the centrepiece of the post-war settlement, institute an old-fashioned deflationary purge and allow unemployment to rise to whatever level was necessary, as Marx once put it, to “curb the pretensions of the working class”. The CPGB, whose industrial department orchestrated campaigns to defeat both “anti-trade union” laws and successive incomes policies, maintained that these policies were an attempt to force the working class to pay for the capitalist crisis. This position was condemned as intellectually bankrupt and politically irresponsible by a small group of economists on the party’s economic advisory committee who advocated a “socialist social contract” in which pay restraint would be traded off against structural reforms aimed at democratising economic decision-making: within the enterprise as well as at the macro-economic level; in private firms as well as in the public sector; and with respect to strategic issues, such as corporate investment and product development, not just the day-to-day management of the workplace. A democratic alternative economic strategy along these lines offered a way of combining the creative energy of the new social forces with the disciplined strength of the industrial working class in a hegemonic bid to tackle Britain’s economic crisis and prefigure the socialist future. Students, feminists and others who had imbibed the politics of Gramsci welcomed this approach as a shining example of how to conduct the war of position, which should be emulated throughout the party’s work. The party leadership and most ‘industrial comrades’, however, wanted no truck with ‘capitalist’ incomes policies, insisting that trade union militancy was the royal road to socialist consciousness – a proposition that would have outraged Lenin – and disinterring the old syndicalist idea that, sooner or later, if the workers remained united, refused to be co-opted by the state and screwed up social tensions to breaking point, the capitalist system would be brought down and a new age would dawn – a proposition that was blatantly at odds with the gradualist, democratic logic of the party’s programme, The British Road to Socialism, and had more in common with the views of its Trotskyist detractors. Neither this specific controversy nor the wider ideological divide from which it sprang was ever resolved. The fate of incomes policy – and, indeed, of traditional social democracy – was sealed by the gradual decay of the Social Contract, the catastrophic blows suffered by the Labour government in the winter of 1978-9, the victory of the Conservatives at the subsequent general election and the neo-liberal counter-revolution for which this paved the way. The fate of the party was to remain deadlocked as the embattled camps waged an increasingly bitter and costly civil war which culminated in a de facto division of the party’s remaining assets: the Gramscians took control of Marxism Today; the party officials retained control of a hollowed-out party apparatus; and the proponents of ‘class politics’ held on to the Morning Star and the party’s declining industrial base. In effect, the party was over long before the formal decision to disband was taken at a special conference in 1991. This is not quite the end of the story, however. In the final part of his book, Andrews (op. cit.) reviews the death of militant labourism, with the defeat of the miners’ strike in 1984, and contrasts it with the outstanding success of Marxism Today which was transformed by its editor, Martin Jacques, from a rather worthy and obscure theoretical journal, little read outside the CP, into the house magazine of the British left, with a circulation of around 10,000 and a reputation for cutting-edge analysis and debate that sometimes reverberated in mainstream politics and the mass media. Apart from its fresh design and breezy style, the appeal of Marxism Today lay in its twin central concerns: the historic decline of the British left and the emergence of a neo-liberal new right in the form of Thatcherism, which had succeeded where the left had failed in building a broad popular alliance and was using its command over the state to push through a programme of regressive modernisation. Though the magazine operated at arms’ length from the party, despite receiving a hefty subsidy, its themes and arguments prompted a final attempt to replace the British Road to Socialism with a programme that reflected the sweeping changes that were taking place in the world economy and in the social structure and political landscape of Britain. The result was The Manifesto for New Times, which performed the obsequies on militant labourism, appraised Thatcherism as a hegemonic project and outlined a Gramscian approach to the task of building a new, democratic left. Appearing in 1989, on the eve of the collapse of communism, this document became the party’s swansong. Conclusion There is an obvious sense in which socialism, whether as a popular movement, a form of society (real or imaginary) or an approach to public policy, was the chief political casualty of the twentieth century. Whether there is a future for the democratic left is another matter. Certainly, in each of the four historical episodes reviewed above, the traditions of labourism and communism hampered efforts to renew the visions and strategies of the left. Now that these traditions are dead or dying, the democratic left may come into its own. This can only happen however, if those who reject New Labour’s neo-liberalism, but have no desire to return to the old religions are willing to learn from the past. Socialists were mistaken in assuming that workers are fundamentally a homogeneous class who share a common interest in improving their material conditions under capitalism and, in the long run, are destined to become its gravediggers. All but the most primitive human societies contain multiple, intersecting social divisions and political behaviour is never pre-ordained. Far from being inscribed in the social structure like parts in a play, social interests are formed through social interaction over long periods of time and although, once formed, minds are not easily changed, the possibility of change is ever present as people acquire new experience and encounter new ideas. The perpetual ‘battle for hearts and minds’ takes on particular importance in democratic states where winning or retaining political power, whether in defence of the status quo or in order to challenge it, depends not on the use or threat of force – though the state’s monopoly of legal violence remains a factor in any situation – but on the relative capacities of rival political actors to persuade or induce sufficient numbers of people to support them. And while spin and deception play some part in this process, the dark arts matter far less than the interplay of ideas and policies. To be sure, the playing field is not level and political outcomes are affected by structural bias, vested interest, institutional inertia and unequal resources. But these are handicaps that opponents of oppression and injustice have always had to contend with and are best countered by seeking to extend and strengthen democratic institutions and norms, not by resorting to coercion. At any given time, then, those who wish to see a fairer, greener, happier, less divided and more democratic society must find ways of rallying a broad alliance of social and political forces around these objectives or, to be more precise, around ideas and policies that encapsulate them. Here it is important to distinguish between short-term policy programmes and long-term projects: the former are tailored to the changing circumstances of day-to-day politics and typically follow the electoral cycle; the latter seek to make sense of the past, identify the problems facing society in the present and propose a general strategy for tackling them, incorporating guidelines for developing policy and deciding tactics. To be effective, any political formation needs both these things – flexible policies and a firm project – but the latter is vital for two reasons: it provides a sense of direction and purpose which is essential for maintaining morale in the face of unavoidable compromises, setbacks and defeats; and it serves to integrate diverse and potentially conflicting interests, values and views into a cohesive social bloc. Of course, in the long run, history moves on, projects have to be renewed and some of us, at any rate, will be dead. In the meantime, to paraphrase Bernstein: the final goal is nothing, the project everything. David Purdy
2. Labour’s Democratic Left
The democratic left, as David Purdy shows, has shown emerged from fault lines within and between social democracy and communism. My focus is on the former and takes its starting point from more recent events. Where to start then? My view is that the most pertinent event to return to is Labour’s landslide defeat in the 1983 general election. Up to that point the left of the party had been relatively united. It had tried to come terms with Thatcherism, but preferred to believe that the solution was to change the party’s leadership and policies rather than come to terms with changes in society and culture. The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, supported by the vast majority of the left, won a variety of measures designed to create a structure of mandates and accountability (such as mandatory re-selection) that radicalised structures and policy – leading, amongst other things, to the eventual SDP split. The proof of the pudding, however, was not to everyone’s taste. A left wing leader and manifesto managed 28% of the vote. The left split. Benn and his hard left followers saw nothing wrong with the policies and were determined to carry on their campaign to impose a Leninist structure on the party. The rest of us came to our senses and the fault lines were on organisation and policy. Now shorn of most of its more leftist components, the Labour Co-ordinating Committee accepted much of the new forms of accountability, but increasingly focused on the policy of one member, one vote and an outward looking, campaigning mass party. With CLPD opposing OMOV and defending only the rights of activists willing to dedicate their lives to revolutionary socialism and attending endless meetings, the contrast was clear. A crucial turning point in the ensuing civil war was the realisation by most Labour members that Militant really was an entrist, anti-democratic party that deserved to be expelled. From this crucible of a struggle against vanguardism, the term democratic left began to be used within and beyond the LCC. However, the term also had an ideological content. The left also divided on whether Thatcherism represented a new political project that both reflected and created significant social change. For large sections of the left, Thatcherism was business as usual and socialism did not need to be rethought and revised. Amongst their lines in the sand were a defence of nationalisation and state planning, and of what was dubbed ‘class politics’. The LCC began to re-thing key policies after the 1983 debacle. It argued that Labour was now massively out of touch with the electorate and society. Socialism had to make a clearer pitch to the individual, to democratic rights and the environment. Whilst at this point it was more about ideology than policy, at least the politics of this emerging democratic left became more coherent. Based on a Labour Activist (the house journal of the LCC) that set out a wide-ranging ‘Strategy for the Democratic Left’ which was debated and supported at the 1987 AGM. The conference noted that the ‘Hard left had ‘no project for building a popular majority in society’ and said that the ‘shallowness of their perspectives, gesture politics and authoritarian methods have helped set back the socialist project’. The new perspective argued that Labour’s approach to power in the past was based on welfare state paternalism and corporatism, whilst the record of previous Labour governments on issues of civil liberties was ‘scandalous’. The left needed an approach to power based on an extension of democracy and individual freedom, including citizenship rights, an extension of civil liberties and equal opportunities. Policies on the extension of democracy and the decentralisation of power drew from the more innovative practise of Labour councils, such as neighbourhood offices and consumer-influenced services. This may all sound mundane now, but it is difficult to grasp from 2006 just how much as break such ideas were with existing left thinking. Together with other Labour groups such as Clause Four and Chartist, an attempt was made to set out a Third Road between Leninism and old-fashioned labourism. Whilst this was many degrees to the left of later attempts to carve out a Third Way, it brought together a number of key themes. In particular, it embraced the ‘firm belief in a pluralist society with respect to parties, organisations in civil society and forms of ownership’ and the need to ‘create forms of popular participation, extending political, industrial and social citizenship’ (from Labour Activist). There was an attempt to influence early policy reviews initiated under the Kinnock leadership. LCC’s shadow groups did some innovative work, particularly on the democratic agenda. Such thinking ran in parallel and in some senses converged with what was emerging from within the reform wing of the Communist Party and its journal Marxism Today. It was becoming clear that the divide was wider than hard and soft left within labour. The new labels were fundamentalist versus democratic left. Such a formulation was explicitly accepted in the LCC ‘Strategy for the Democratic Left’ document. Each of the ‘wings’ had its own battles to fight and were more likely to work together in new ‘broad lefts’ within trade unions than on general political terrains. But the ideological commonality was unmistakeable – anti-vanguardism, a critique of statism in its Leninist or labourist forms, and of the need to recognise a variety of social divisions and identities that went beyond a simplistic ‘class politics’. What had produced this ideological mix was not just a combination of Labour left revisionists and Euro-Communists. The democratic left was influenced by a third current that had its roots in the new left that emerged from the struggles and social movements of the late 1960s and 70s. Turned off by their experiences in or with the far left, many had joined Labour, but as genuine seekers for a radicalised social democracy rather than as entrists. They added a much more libertarian ideology and experience of community politics and building from below into that mix. This combination of democratic left ideas and experience was present in the LCC, in the journal Renewal, and even more so today in Compass. Most of these forces inside and outside Labour supported the Blair revolution, some more sceptically than others. Labour had to change, we were prepared to be part of a modernising coalition and Blair was the necessary catalyst. But given the origins and ideology of the democratic left, the seeds of differences were always present. In 1993, LCC put out a pamphlet – Modernising Britain. – that has a now familiar ring. Modernisation had become devalued by becoming a mere shorthand for dumping supposedly unpopular policies. Real modernisation was about actually changing things – a stakeholder economy, a new constitutional settlement, electoral reform. Blair and New Labour were irredeemably scarred by the wilderness years and saw Britain as an inherently conservative country. We also discovered along the way, that New Labour’s commitment to a democratic politics and organisation was decidedly skin-deep. In sum, there is a growing need for a democratic left, one that is inside Labour, but can reach out to wider social movements and campaigns, and one that has a modernising left project. Compass is part of the history of the democratic left and has the chance to make some history of its own. Paul Thompson
References Anderson, P. (ed.) (1965), Towards Socialism (London: Fontana/ New Left Review) Andrews, G. (2004), Endgames and New Times: The Final Years of British Communism 1964-1991 (London: Lawrence and Wishart). Cole, G.D.H. (1917), Self-Government in Industry (London: Hutchinson) Crosland, A. (1956), The Future of Socialism (London: Cape) Kenny, M. (1995), The First New Left: British Intellectuals After Stalin (London: Lawrence and Wishart) Williams, R. (1979) Politics and Letters (London: New Left Books) Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was born and brought up on the (then) remote Italian island of Sardinia. His family was cast into dire poverty by the imprisonment (on probably trumped-up charges) of their father Francesco when Antonio himself was still small. Disabled from infancy, Antonio excelled at his studies and eventually won a scholarship to Turin University in 1911. He began writing articles soon after for socialist journals and newspapers, and in 1916 left university to work as a journalist for the Socialist Party newspaper Avanti! He was swept up in debate and agitation over the First World War, then the insurrectionary upheaval that peaked in the Soviet Revolution. The highpoint of the Red Years in Italy was the wave of factory occupations in 1919. The biggest and best organized were in Turin, where Gramsci helped to found the weekly Ordine Nuovo to direct and coordinate the struggle. In the wake of defeat by the employers’ organizations, and amid bitter recrimination, the Italian Socialist Party split in 1921. Gramsci, already a convinced and committed Marxist, joined the newly founded Communist Party. Soon after, he became a member of the Communist International Executive and spent much of 1922/23 in Moscow, where he met his wife Giulia. Back in Italy, the ex-socialist Mussolini and the Fascists seized power and began harassing the Communist Party and arresting its leaders. Gramsci returned to Rome in 1924 as party leader and elected MP with parliamentary immunity, leaving his wife and two sons in Moscow. Two years later, after much agonized debate on the left about whether its response to fascism should be democratic or revolutionary, Mussolini established effective and lasting dictatorship. Gramsci and other communist leaders were arrested or forced into exile. Gramsci spent the remaining 10 years of his life in various fascist prisons, often in ill health and appalling conditions. In that time, he wrote 33 tightly packed notebooks of reflections on the history of Italy, Europe, the USA and the Soviet Union, on Marxist and liberal philosophy, and much else besides. He was, for obvious reasons, preoccupied with the defeat of proletarian revolution in Western Europe, and with the ways in which the ruling classes had managed to restore or maintain their rule. He also maintained regular, insightful, and often deeply moving correspondence with his wife, sister-in-law, sons and other relatives and friends, though he never saw his wife and children again (his younger son was born after Gramsci’s imprisonment, and never met his father). The notebooks were smuggled out of Italy on Gramsci’s death in 1937, and published in Italy in 1948-51. The PCI had emerged from the war a mass party, with enormous influence and prestige, and a commitment (partly based on Gramsci’s analyses) to democratic majority rule, and struggle on every front – not just economic or industrial, but cultural and political, and at every level of society. Within the international communist movement, this was a highly unusual approach, leading towards an explicit anti-Stalinism and what became known as “Eurocommunism”. The PCI was able to survive the Cold War, and remained through the 1960s and ‘70s a major force in Italy. Gramsci’s legacy survives, despite Berlusconi and the various modern incarnations of fascism and reaction, in the “Olive Tree coalition” and the rich political culture of the Italian left. Gramsci in Britain There has been more interest in Gramsci in Britain than any other country outside Italy, partly because of the strong historical parallels between the two countries, most obviously their partial “bourgeois revolutions”, which left them with sizeable aristocracies incorporated into their ruling “historic blocs” (the French just chopped their heads off). The first English translations of Gramsci appeared in the 1950s, but interest in Gramsci really took off in the 1970s, with the publication of Selections from Prison Notebooks, brilliantly translated, edited and introduced by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. In the aftermath of “1968 and all that”, there was an appetite for the kind of open-minded, libertarian Marxism Gramsci seemed to offer. He was untainted by Stalinism and Trotskyism (ironically because of his imprisonment by Mussolini, early in the tormented life of the Communist International), and insistent upon the importance of cultural, social, political, ethical and ideological “superstructures” alongside the classically Marxist economic “base”. Gramsci was consistently “anti-positivist”, which in a Marxist context set him against any notion of the “historic inevitability” of socialism. He insisted on the primacy of political action – this was Gramsci’s most obvious common ground with Lenin, though Gramsci was plainly uncomfortable with Bolshevik vanguardism. He also consistently criticized the “economism” and “corporatism” of exclusively trade union or industrial action, and the idea that “wage struggle” was somehow inherently revolutionary or even progressive. He did, however, retain a deeply humanist commitment to the idea of historical progress, and insisted that all political regimes (even fascism) embodied some progressive, constructive impulses. Two “centres” of Gramsci studies emerged in the ‘70s in Britain, around New Left Review and the “Eurocommunist” wing of the Communist Party, offering quite different and sometimes conflicting interpretations of Gramsci’s writings. The Prison Notebooks in particular can be cryptic and internally contradictory, largely because of the circumstances of their composition, but also because Gramsci was unusually open to other, non-Marxist traditions and prepared to change his mind. Into the 1980s and ‘90s, interest in Gramsci waned, along with the fortunes of all wings of the British Left. Until recently, Gramsci only seemed to feature as a passing reference on Cultural Studies courses. There are signs now of a revival of interest in Gramsci across academia, especially in history and development studies, and in the wider world. Certain key Gramscian concepts have proved especially resonant in Britain, though they’re not always properly understood and deployed. Gramsci is more often bandied about than read in the original. In particular, the term hegemony is far richer than simply electoral defeat of your opponents, but represents a whole system of domination and collaboration which reaches into every aspect of life and human society. Crucially, it relies on the consent as well as coercion of subordinate or subaltern groups, and through a subtle blend of encouragement and intimidation, constructs a common sense about the way the world is, and how it can and cannot be changed. Custom, tradition and culture are central elements of this hegemonic “common sense”, which assembles a dominant historic bloc of social and political forces. The leading British Gramscian Stuart Hall made much use of the term national-popular, to demonstrate how such successful historic blocs invariably connect to patriotism. The role of intellectuals is crucial to the process of hegemony – both traditional intellectuals undertaking traditional intellectual functions in education, the law, religion and so on, and organic intellectuals, who take upon themselves responsibility for organizing change, and provide a crucial point of contact between ruling elites and the masses. Periods of history are characterised either by war of movement, where change occurs rapidly and at particular points in society (the Soviet revolution was Gramsci’s most obvious example), or by war of position, where change is much slower, broader and deeper, and less dramatic. This is the more typical situation in the west, with its relatively developed and established (less “gelatinous”) economic, political and cultural systems. Finally, optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect, which became a kind of Gramscian watchword or motto in the 1970s, and has helped to see more than a few of us through dark times. In fact, the phrase was coined by the French author Romain Rolland, and appreciatively appropriated by Gramsci. I’m sure it helped him not just to endure imprisonment, but to keep working whenever he was physically and mentally capable. We could do with some of his endurance and determination, ruthless honesty and reasoned hope, right now in these, our ever darker times. Why Gramsci? Why now? Gramsci, over all other left wing theoreticians, helps to explain the political defeat of popular forces and the restoration and maintenance of ruling class “hegemony”, especially in advanced, democratic, complex capitalist societies like our own. What changes and what remains effectively the same? What is truly significant (“epochal”) and what is contingent or trivial (“conjunctural”)? What action is best conducted through “civil society”, and what should be done to or by the state? Gramsci has, I’m aware, been cited by some of its luminaries as an inspiration for New Labour. His name and ideas pop up in the strangest places, from Radio 4 profiles of government ministers (the briefly communist John Reid) to published memoirs (Philip Gould makes pivotal use of the term “Conservative hegemony” in his seminal New Labour text “The Unfinished Revolution”). There is a tenuous thematic connection between Gramsci and New Labour, via the latter-day Marxism Today and the “New Times” analysis of “post-Fordism”, but I would argue that Gramsci offers a means of making sense of rather than for New Labour. In particular, Gramsci helps us see the historical continuities of Labourism, the ruptures wrought by Thatcherism, and New Labour’s curious (if often unacknowledged) relationship with both (and for that matter with the past in general). These historical themes run far deeper than the daily doings of parliamentarians and journalists, what passes for the stuff of contemporary politics; crucially, they also condition what politicians can and cannot achieve in any particular time or circumstance. For us now, they help to explain why New Labour has turned out such a major disappointment and, arguably, missed historic opportunity. A lot depends on how you see post-war British history. Stuart Hall and other prominent Gramscians have argued a consistent and (I find) compelling narrative. The post-war social democratic consensus of Keynesian economics and welfare statism was broken in Britain in the 1970s, because the trade-off between capitalism and the welfare state was no longer sustainable. Thatcherism set about its dynamic, destructive/creative project of “regressive modernization”, producing an entirely different political and economic, and above all ideological climate. This culminated in the domination of neo-liberal capitalism and its associated “politico-ethical” framework in Britain and much of the rest of the world. Along the way, “national-popular” support was won for a whole range of measures, which would have previously been anathema, such as the sale of council housing, privatization of utilities, cutbacks in public services and benefits, and limitations on trades union power. This approach has been characterized as “authoritarian populism”. Certain key events served as intimidatory/educative jolts (recalling Gramsci’s pivotal couplet of coercion/consent) to public feeling, like the Falklands War and the 1984 miners strike, or the late-‘80s “big bang” of financial deregulation. Fundamental shifts took place in our social ethos - from the collective to the individual, from the public to the private, from society to family, from we to I, from production to consumption – and congealed into a new, all-embracing and almost incontrovertible (i.e. hegemonic) “common sense”. New Labour explicitly accepted this new settlement, and set itself the task of reshaping the people to suit the needs of the new global market economy, thus inverting the logic of orthodox social democracy. From privatization and deregulation, mass redundancy and unemployment, it was but a short step to Welfare to Work and MacJobs, via the popular folk-devil of the “scrounger” and the politer terms “underclass” and “dependency culture”, and now the darker-hued bogey of the “asylum seeker”. As such, New Labour represents a “transformist” or “molecular” adaptation of the continuing Thatcherite “passive revolution” (radical change imposed from above), to use particularly resonant and apposite Gramscian terms. It remains to be seen what comes next, some kind of “new” New Labour or a “new”, Cameronian, Conservatism that proves a more comfortable political fit on the lingering, still vigorous ideological corpus of Thatcherism, even while rhetorically ditching the legacy of Thatcher herself. We are clearly due another transformist stage in what Gramsci always insisted was the dynamic process of hegemony. It will be especially interesting to see whether the electoral “winners” pursue Thatcherism’s more authoritarian or libertarian impulses, or forge some new national-popular combination (as the “high” Thatcherism of strong state/free market so effectively did). In the meantime, the democratic left could do a lot worse than take a close, hard look at our own recent history, see where we went wrong, and as Gramsci would insist, take full responsibility for our own (generally inglorious) failures. In the meantime, dig out your dusty old copy of Prison Notebooks and have another look. Every reading of Gramsci yields some new insight. Here’s one of my current favourites, written about early 20th century Italy but so readily applicable to our own rather tired culture and society – “Hence, squalor of cultural life and wretched inadequacy of high culture. Instead of political history, bloodless erudition; instead of religion, superstition; instead of books and great reviews, daily papers and broadsheets; instead of serious politics, ephemeral quarrels and personal clashes” (PN, p.228). Andrew Pearmain is a
research student in History at UEA. He was a
member of the Communist Party between 1975/85, and more recently a
Labour City councillor in Norwich.
Suggestions for further reading Selections from Prison Notebooks, A. Gramsci, edited by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith London 1971 (Lawrence and Wishart). The Antonio Gramsci Reader, edited by David Forgacs, London 1988 (Lawrence and Wishart). Antonio Gramsci – Life of a Revolutionary, G.Fiori, translated by Tom Nairn, London 1970 (NLB) Prison Letters, translated by Hamish Hamilton, London 1996 (Pluto) The Hard Road to Renewal, Stuart Hall, London 1989 (Verso). See also Charter 88 Lords Kaput? Libertarian Alliance Death of Liberty in Britain Eroding civil liberty - governments tap into fear of terrorism Conspiracy theory Liberty is a subject they won't teach in Brown's nurseries Chris Tame |
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