[A-List] Re: EWP

["D OC" <donaloc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

First of all, I sent the mail offlist to Mark Jones as I didn't really want
to stunt the discussion here. Secondly, I didn't want my identity covered
up. Third, the style and content were just me thinking about things without
being careful as it was written as an informal comment.

>The offlist response to the above is too afflicted by pessimism of the
intellect.

A searing analysis of where we are at is a pre-requisite to action. If
that's considered pessimistic then sobeit - I didn't offer such an analysis
but I did assume it.

>The difficulties outlined are undoubtedly real and very serious
indeed, but I am little enthused by the alternatives proposed by our
correspondent. I'll tackle these in the order they appear in his/her
response:

My point is that your alternatives seem to offer little new to that which
the left cults have offered for decades. A programme which will attract the
masses because of the widening crisis of capitalism. Perhaps, but then again
I don't hold my breathe. Success is built on hard work on the ground, dogged
determination and discipline. To me, this programme was like a parody of
what is really needed. Nothing in it that is wrong of course, just the fact
that it is as a document and that we need to start with where the people
are.

>>It looks just like another small sideline thing.

>They all do, don't they. The real question concerns the ambition informing
the project, and there is plenty of that.

The project is ambitious, sure ambition and will are necessary but they are
certainly not sufficient. That requires appropriate orientation.

> An EWP would be a logical response
to the demands placed upon progressive forces by the internationalisation of
capital and the competing and collaborating imperialisms that form the
international political economy. Local struggles, national struggles and the
like are all very worthy and necessary (in principle at least) but many lack
the sort of big picture thinking that the old Internationals had, providing
local struggles with a necessary internationalist reference point.

IMO, the problem with the old international was that it did not recognise
the contours of national specific struggles. I certainly recognise the
potential for EU-wide collaboration on the broad anti-imperialist left, but
it will be national progressive organisations which form the basis of that
collaboration. Groups will row and have different strategies, but that will
be the basis on which we will build a credible opposition not some pan-EU
worker's party. With time, things will change - particularly if the EU
integrates further. It is the contours of the popular EU consciousness which
should determine campaign lines (although not ultimate objectives). If
people want to build a EWP (probably more realistically European People's
Network) over 20/30 years then that's a good thing - but that's my estimate,
if people think its pessimistic perhaps, I would love to be proved wrong.
Parties don't win popular support overnight. The first step to building it
would be to identify the constituent bones (possibly multiple) within each
country and in countries where there are no serious vessels, these need to
be built. In all cases, that's going to take time and lots of hard work.

> Mark and I are not at all interested in tired old sectarian debates which
condemn
promising projects to perpetual sidelining, nor are we interested in
doctrinal purity for its own sake. However it is important that such a party
be founded upon and work within the Marxist paradigm, for reasons I'll
explain below.

That's okay. Just realise that to get marxist realities accepted will
require serious long-term work. People will need to respect marxists as
consistent and serious fighters for their interests on local as well as
national and international stages. That means near continuous work on the
ground and often involvement in messy 'reformist' actions.

>That's part and parcel of any kind of organisation, and what we are doing
here can hardly be regarded as a substitute for it, unless we were
participating in a dry, intellectual exercise. Instead, given the range of
expertise and opinion on the A-list (and beyond), we're using this forum as
an aid to organising and network-formation of the kind you mention.

I don't know what level of expertise actually resides on the A-list.
However, it's not clear to me that a group of 100 or so people throughout
Europe, could do this irrespective of their personal abilities. If people
here are to have an impact, orientation within existing structures is the
best shot; if anyone has any detailed analyses of the way forward for them
locally - that I would find interesting and important.

>I see where you're coming from with this and a part of me still sympathises
with points that I would have wholeheartedly endorsed not so long ago.
However there is such a gaping vacuum politically at the moment, caused
largely by the migration of former social democrats to the "centre" (i.e.
social liberalism) and conservatives to the right (market liberalism), in
which the paradigm of neoliberalism is taken as a given and the question is
simply do we unleash the entrepreneurs (Washington consensus) or should the
state play an active role in assisting them (Stiglitz). The social basis for
social democracy has been and is evaporating (see Phil Ferguson's points to
this effect on Marxmail), while the Greens, for all their undoubted energy
and sincerity regarding the environment, have no adequate conception of
capitalism capable of informing their policies should they achieve positions
of power; hence the disastrous performance of the German, Swedish, Finnish
and French Greens in recent years.

The tasks traditionally associated with Social Democracy have largely been
proscribed due to the development of globalised imperialism. Therefore, we
capture those tasks (which remain popular) and counterpose them to the
imperialist structures (doesn't that task seem easy to sell to the ordinary
five-eighths?). What Phil suggests is as the social basis for social
democracy has evaporated, the social basis for social democratic tasks has
also evaporated. I just totally disagree. Now more than ever, we need to
focus on these and other tasks (such as opposing imperialist war and
ecological damage). In doing these very basic and popular things we will
develop a more widespread consciousness that the true difficulties lie in
the IMF, neo-liberalism and market capitalism. Our greatest enemy is
ignorance. I saw statistics yesterday which indicated that the overwhelming
majority of Britons could not name 5 world leaders (only 83% could name Tony
Blair). While that clearly mightn't be pan-EU thing, it is indicative of the
'dumbing down' of popular culture which has occured. If we are to operate in
the mainstream (which is necessary if we are to reach our target
constituency) then we will need to hone our words and actions. We need to
learn a little craft. Is that a little like Blairism, perhaps but that's
what's needed to win power.

> The Greens will continue to gain electorally, however, because of
deepening concerns at ecological degradation and their specific highlighting
of these, but their
accommodation of neoliberal verities (as with Joschka Fischer's efforts to
pull Schröder further right) will make them more acceptable to capitalist
interests which will use the Greens as a new kind of social democrats,
paying due accord to environmental concerns (analogous to the capital-labour
accord post 1945) whilst continuing to liquidate our collective inheritance
in the pursuit of accumulation. Thus Green, in order to be at all effective
in even purely Green terms, needs to be infused with Red for it to have any
real impact on capitalism. We cannot and should not surrender Marx and
Marxism on the basis of the fallout from the Soviet Union. In fact, despite
what I consider to be the travesty of Marxism that was the USSR, Marxism (or
whatever you might call the Soviet system) looks a damn sight better today,
considering the utter waste and degradation that has occurred since the
Soviet collapse, a point readily appreciated by most even remotely aware of
what's happened there since 1991. And the travesty of Marxism that was the
USSR can only be understood *in the context* of a perpetual state of war
declared by international capital from the outset of 1917. Meanwhile
throughout Europe the disillusionment of ever-greater numbers in mainstream
politics is well understood by the far right, who bear no shame in being
associated with symbols and words that were supposedly excised from the
realms of acceptability after 1945, and which is campaigning aggressively to
fill the gap left by the "rush to the centre" that is a common feature of
European national politics.

The Green's are not associated with Communism. The fact that they have not
done better is perhaps what we should be looking at more than why they have
done so well. Europeans would rather vote for a shade of centre-left or
centre-right than the objectively sensible and acceptible radicalism offered
by the Greens. They are not considered 'dangerous' like authentic
revolutionary movements but they still can't grow pass 20% anywhere. Why is
this? And can we learn any lessons from this?

>Given the complete subjugation of the British Labour Party by interests
utterly inimical to even the old-style diluted social democracy that was
once on offer, working internally in such an outfit, however clandestinely,
seems to me to be unlikely to produce much of promise, other than earning
one an expulsion. And the very thought of actively campaigning *for* New
Labour whilst working within to change it turns my stomach. Under very
particular circumstances such a course of action would be respectable -- if
your MP were Alan Simpson, Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, George Galloway or
Alice Mahon then fair enough. Having them in parliament rather than some
identikit accountant/lawyer of impeccable New Labour credentials is much to
be preferred. But when people like Dennis Skinner deliberately block the
re-entry of Ken Livingstone on the grounds of the latter's lack of adherence
to party rules, and "leftist" Tony Banks stands for London mayor simply to
spite Livingstone, then you know that, ultimately, even the rump that
remains of the Labour left cannot be relied upon to act with any coherence
or logic, but instead with all the strategic foresight of the worst
trotskyist sect. And since most of what is recognisably "left" in Britain is
still re-living its anti-Europeanism of the 1970s, it seems to me much
better to create a vehicle for interests that are suitably adjusted to the
realities of the conjuncture, rather than indulging in fantasies of winding
the clock back to 1975 and implementing policies once advocated by the likes
of Wynne Godley and Nicholas Kaldor when there was a small chance of their
success (until that window was closed rapidly by the US/IMF in 1976,
whereupon Godley and Kaldor left the Treasury).

My first defence is that I sloppily offered only involvement in a mainstream
social democratic party as the only potential action. There are rakes of
other things, independent left actions, anti-war actions, trade union
activism. The point I was making was that working in an operation like the
Socialist party (I think that's the right name) in the Netherlands is the
sort of thing we need to be at. In England, there is little alternative
between New Labour and the miniscule Socialist Alliance. I don't know if
working outside new Labour is a runner. With the rising militancy of the TUM
and growing internal opposition - I don't see why we have to call it quits.
IMO, the CIA captured the leadership but it isn't going to be there always.

>The Left Alliance in Finland is hopelessly compromised by its participation
in the so-called "rainbow coalition" government spanning left and right and
featuring the Greens, who themselves are part of an administration that
recently authorised the construction of Finland's fifth nuclear reactor, by
the way. The Left Alliance engages in the electoral equivalent of the sort
of mealy-mouthed parlour-socialist talk of the kind identified by Mark Jones
as originating from WBAI. The inverse relationship between its enhanced
political "credibility" and diminished electoral clout is evidence enough of
the consequences of accepting the present political paradigm as a given. The
same is true of the Swedish Left Party, which lost votes while the Social
Democrats gained them, and now remains propping up the same Social Democrat
government implementing the same Third Way policies willy nilly.

True, but are you saying activism within these left alliances is
compromised. Are we to give it all up and start over again? Better to have a
loose network of activists in various parties pushing the same way. Build up
and together within the stream.

>Germany is more interesting. Apparently former PDS leader Gregor Gysi is
considering his options following the re-election of "hardline" leader Gabi
Zimmer. In other words, he's thinking of jumping aboard the Social
Democrats. Possibly a vehicle like the PDS would be a natural ally in an
EWP-like project, but I'd need to know more about what's going on there.

The PDS is a positive party, no doubt, like RC in Italy. But they have been
hammered in the polls recently. All the same, I would look to them as
potential components of any pan-EU alliance.

> Nevertheless, it seems that few existing parties of the centre-left are
remotely well equipped ideologically for their members to respond positively
to the sort of agenda we are interested in promoting, even if stripped of
references to Marx and the like. Clandestine operations were tried most
notably by Militant in the UK, and that experience hardly bodes well. Such
operations also entrench a culture of secrecy and conspiratorialism and
sectarianism that we would best avoid, given the sort of task we've set
ourselves here. In other words, the very dishonesty at the heart of
projecting a non-Marxist appearance in a non-Marxist party whilst trying to
advance Marxist agendas within same will, inevitably, undermine whatever
gains that might be achieved in the short term. And remember Thatcher spent
over a decade blackening the word "socialism", which is now so dirty in a
British context (apparently) that even Tony Blair uses it only very
sparingly, despite leading the *Labour* Party. Which tells you a lot about
the current state of the Labour Party, actually.

What I suggest is not dishonest. It is the excision of terminology to
describe events which ordinary people don't understand. Use it, where
appropriate, in internal discussions, but in dealing with the people, keep
it simple. 'Peace, Land, Bread' wasn't it?? Those aren't exactly Marxist
terms are they?? Whatever works. I don't say to project a non-marxist image
(whatever that is?), involvement in a non-marxist party is a necessity
unless someone can show me one which gets more than 5% of the vote and
advancing a progressive agenda rather than a marxist one is what I am
talking about. What is a marxist agenda anyway?

>It is possible to finesse the name and programme of a party in such a way
that it is more immune to caricature than the typical Marxist sect of yore,
but I think we are at a stage now where honesty about our orientations and
goals is a sine qua non of effective political progress, given the
fundamental crisis of legitimation afflicting all EU member states, and the
lack of a left party up to the job of filling the political vacuum that has
developed over the last decade. We would like the EWP to be that party.

Honesty about our orientations - like we want decent public health service,
we want a decent public education service, we want living standards of
universal benefits, we want localised democratic control over economic
development, we want nationalised electricity, water, transport, we want
money for community-led regeneration in deprived areas, we want actionable
human rights legislation which guarantees minimal social and economic rights
(e.g. right to a decent job) and we don't want any imperialist wars. Those
demands are simple, that's what we stand for. Is is populist, yes (thank
goodness). Can that be adopted across Europe, yes. Can that provide the
basis of a common programme in the larger leftist parties, yes. That's the
way forward.

D OC.