discussion started by Tony Benn's 'Labour's alliance for socialism'.
IS THIS debate in Socialist Action about politics now, or is it not? And is it really a debate about new alignments some fairly habits and assumptions on some parts of the left?
I suspect it is the latter. And that makes it difficult to take seriously.
If the content of the debate isn't serious — and I think that much of it teresting, insofar as it is? The only thing seems to be that there is a new alignment on the left taking place across some surprising boundaries.
What seems unite tagonists along one side of the trench is that the traditional notions of class struggle processes described the struggle for socialism are untouched by anything that has happened in recent life, in particular the trauma of the last five years since the hatcher reoime was elected.
All those who dare to suggest that Thatcherism is a specific phenomena, on the one hand, and that the left itself is in a bit of a state, not to say a crisis of purpose and pracuse, banished to the swamp of Gaitskellites, reformists, revisionists and whatever, lending aid and comfort to the demoralisers and defeatists, if they aren't actually the demoralisers and defeatists themselves.
Cheer ир, says Tony Socialism! says Socialist Action, all is well really, there's nothing new under the sun. Thank Godfor the GIC and Sheffield Liverpool and miners, they all go to show that the left is alive and well and definitely not in crisis. Eight million people voted for the Labour Party, which means socialism, we weren't defeated at the last election at all.
seems to be that there are those who, like Eric Heffer, think that the structural struggle within the Labour Party is complete, and therefore - since the DATO CONCCL — corrected and we're on to a winner if we can only hold on to our nerve.
The re-alienment between some democrats, munists and some Trotskyists isn't surprising — they've always shared similar assumptions. So maybe their historic compromise is historically inBut many others, I suspect most of the left, don't share their complacency, nor do they share the party chauvinisms of some of the debaters It is among them that the bold quesaround unreconstructed inthe proBenn.
the really Thatcherism to be understood.
Tony Hobshawm's cent structural hardly adequate. come ComTries. people. 1o ask the must be asked.
and among has appealed to something - and that something has Benn's answer concern about Thatcherism and his suggestion that the relong battles within the Labour Party do not describe recent structural changes within the working class or the progressive movement is Indeed, it doesn't touch the body of Hobsbawm's worWhat Hobsbawm is trying to get at is the enduring crisis of the Labour Party's inner Me as a party. and the problem of its awful relationship to the people, a relationship which has often pacified and disempowered the question isn't defeatist, it is simply the question that ple and the party is sufficient to win the next election. I think the answer to all those questions is negative, Benn is right to remind us of the historic snilt lo the Labourist consensus and he is certainly right to remind us of the disastrous consequences of the Labour leaders' support for the Falklands invasion. But his notion that eight million people supported a radical programme for socialism is unsupported.
What is surely true is that Labour enjoys the enduring support of eight million people who voted for it in the last election, and that this probably describes a core of class allegiance to Labour in its old fortifications. But that isn't the same thing.
Hobsbawm not repudiate the left. More likely he is suggesting that the left hasn't changenough, hasn't recognised the depth of the current political crisis and too often confuses two distinct - the party and the people. What he's worried about is the isolation of the left and the Labour Party from many of the popular movements and fissures within popular culture. tional left. Nor have they noticed how men and women and whites are easily able to forfeit their class loyalty or interest for sexual and racial privilege authenticated by the party of their rigal l these shifts in the party but they just mismatch I'm describing. Things in the party have changed, he says, take for example the powerful movement for women's rights.
women, and some people on the left seem to have noticed it. Himself in. cluded. But that 'support' amount to a powerful campaign. saying: Demands What is obvious, powertu movement rights has blossomed outside the political parties. Kinnock genuflects their direction puts children first. And at the same time he movement within his own party.
gress'.
alliances agined. automatic faced what called the tried lually, face organised be sexes.
it.
Benn attempts to register some of left.
itself.
The mon feminists is that the for seems to by saying the groundwork for such a Well, brilliantly filiation to it. He sees the Labour Party itself as 'the true alliance of pro The point about the debate aboul which has taken place among socialists outside the Labour Party for the last couple of decades is that something quite different is imThe rehabilitation of traditional notions of class struggle is in compatible with such an alliance, if it is to be an alliance between equals.
Let's start with feminism. In its assertion that the relationship between men and women is not reducible to class oppression, the movement has shown that there is no unity between men and women. Indeed, within the working women are subordinate and have been subordinated by the men of their own class. Much of men's class struggle has been exercised at the exof although remainer resilient fighters on their own behalf within the working class, we have constant!
willam nompson la 'sexual Toryism' of the working class men's movement.
The far left and the men on the left in the Labour Party have consistent!!
suppress this fact. The movement cannot be affiliated to the Labour It is the height of Labourist chauvinism to suggest it. Feminists engage with the Labour Party - ac.
Other fight for women in the of the movement's resistance, which has been organised within the Labour Party itself. Problem The Labour Party is certainly an arena in which women fight for allies.
it is a party feminism should like to transform, but the party is also part of feminism's problem. The implications of that cannot be understood by the kind of position which asserts that men and women are united when the!
manifestly are not. Sure, they should but the men's movement culpable for the division between the That's some feminists within the Labour Party themselves are saying — it hardly takes me to say The condition of the renewal of women's offensive is the autonomy of : feminist movement outside the The collapse of autonomous feminism has historically always been matched by the collapse of feminism as a force within the Labour Party Autonomy is not a sometime thing, nor is it a matter • of conve.
the survival of feminist energy to fight within the left is contingent on the renewal of autonomous feminism itself.
energy of Greenham Comdidn't come from socialist - but it has clearly energised the spirit of those fighting within the left for the left's transformation. There's a lesson in that somewhere. One of the difficulties for left men be that thev can't see themselves and their movement as a problem. It's typical, I suppose, of a white, metropolitan, male experience in the oldest labour movement in the world created in the oldest capitalism in the world — it carries with it the egotism and smugness and sense of superiority which British imperialism exported throughout the world. thinks it doesn't have anything to learn from anyone.
the oldest labour movement in the world loses two general elections to one of the most primitive right governments in the world maybe it ought to learn that it's time it learned something from someone else.
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Winner The great divide in the debate