To criticise workers’ strikes from the left is the ultimate taboo. In the 1980s, the Eurocommunists, led by Martin Jacques, organised a successful coup d’etat against the dusty old Stalinist organ Marxism Today. The rest of the Left joined together in an unusual show of unity to decry the new ideology emerging from a journal previously known to hardly anyone outside of the Communist party itself. Under the leadership of Jacques, the magazine prided itself on it’s willingness to say the unsayable. From being read by less than 2,000 hard-core party members, it became the most widely read political magazine for a short while in the mid 1980s. The magazine was quick to attack Arthur Scargill and the British miners in 1984 for failing to hold a ballot early on in the strike, and in the wake of the eventual defeat of the N.U.M. and as each disasterous election of the Thatcher years piled up on top of the labour movement like a car-crash, Marxism Today was more than willing to add fuel to the funeral pyre that was old Labour. After their trojan horse had been completely smuggled in, and the New Labour project came out in full, embracing as it did the old Thatcherite ‘greed is good’ philosophy, only then did Jacques and his entourage stand back and take stock: perhaps new wasn’t always good, they admitted.

In 2008 some still get a tear in their eye at the sight of a trade union placard or demonstration. With record days lost to strike action in 2008 since Labour were re-elected, some hope this summer is the sign of the stirring ’slumbering giant’ - the working class, the universal subject, back on the stage. In 2008, to criticise a labour movement that has been asleep so long leaves a bad taste in the mouth for anyone with memories of the Marxism Today agenda and what it applauded. Another mad-cap scheme, with less success than Jacques’ Eurocommunism were the Living Marxism ideologues. They also proclaimed the end of the working class, but through the lens of Lenin’s century old analysis, where imperialist power had succeeded in neutering militancy, and so struggles on the old periphery were thrown centre stage. This particular bunch of heretics eventually gave up on the universal class altogether, and now, as ‘the Institute of Ideas’, consider the subject of liberation technology and science, which, like some kind of Hegelian geist, should be left to it’s own devices, free from the state’s dumb meddling.

The anarchist left has never really been solid enough to get its act together to produce anything like a coherent outlook. The ‘Freedom’ newspaper lurches on; famously brave enough to criticise the miners in 1984, by daring to suggest that coalmining was actually a dirty, dangerous, exploitative and polluting industry, (’so why bother saving it?’ was the sub-text) - it was a position typical of a certain English liberal anarchism, and a sentiment close to the heart of William Morris’s socialist tradition. Unfortunately, the macho (mostly Leninist) British Left are extremely unforgiving of such tactical ‘naivety.’ And so it is that the Leninist zombie survive and continue to stalk us to this day. The Marxism Today crew survive on the Labour frontbenches, and the annoying Stalinist wasps in the shape of Jack Dromey worry them for a windfall tax. Many are wondering if old labour flexing their muscles could just be the one hope left for a re-emergence of the Labour party in the face of the resurgent Tories, but most know it’s probably too late now.

Living on a pittance in 2008 is no joke. The public sector workers on strike garner a lot of sympathy from many people everywhere, but the old Leninist corpse lives on in the spectre of a Left unable or unwilling to think critically. For them, the workers they one day fantasise about leading are too stupid to engage in thinking about life beyond a pay rise. Only on the eve of the revolution will workers suddenly wake up and start to think about life beyond the drudgery, they dream. Even the remnant of the anarchist left, who brought out a one-off magazine in July supporting the public sector workers’ strikes, were unwilling to really nail their colours to the mast, or at least contemplate the current situation in anything more than a flabby knee-jerk shout of solidarity (’Tanker drivers lead by example’ ‘ Tea Break - Irregular workers bulletin, July 2008) And so it remains that all the ortho-marxists remain undistinguishable from each other: “Why is it always the workers that bear the brunt of the recession?” they cry. Well, actually, in 2008, they don’t. As we have pointed out previously, capitalist development devastates the basis of survival for large layers of the population, and so helps to ensure (even if against their will) that many workers occupy a privileged position within the pecking order. HGV drivers actually produce more accidents statistically than any other road user, and it is those who are without work that actually pay the real price of the capitalist implosion - whether they happen to be the ‘monetary subjects without money’ in the slums and favellas, or the workless pensioners, disabled and single parents much closer to home. They are outside of the circuit of production, hence they have absolutely no bargaining power. In 2008 the situation is shaping up to be more a case of who constitutes the excluded rather than the exploited - but the Left are too punch-drunk to come out and really confront what is staring them in the face, so they prefer to stick to the old macho ‘up the workers’ sloganeering instead.

               

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 10:33 pm and is filed under Critical Fragments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.