Oppositional possibilities in the UK

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

My understanding from the report was that Tariq Ali was calling for
"genuine oppositional movements, dissident currents from below"

My ear is not especially close to the ground on this, but I am not
aware in England/Britain of anyone serious on the left "lining up
support for the Labour Party on the grounds that it's the lesser of
two evils". I am not sure that it is even considered in these terms
which may now be ahistorical, and of course the circumstances are
different in the USA compared to the UK.

You must remember that even many of those who opposed the imperialist
war of aggression are fully signed up liberal interventionists. Indeed
virtually every day there are stories of intervention by the European
Union, the USA or the "international community" in one country after
another.

Blair may be pushed out within the Labour Party in favour of Gordon
Brown, but that battle will take place there. One of Blair's
techniques is to make the battles within the Labour Party semi-public,
and to take up his stance within the Labour Party always with an eye
to what the focus groups say nationally.

Although the Conservative Party attacks him on untrustworthiness he
has an extra card in his defence if Bush falls. Geopolitically the UK
has for the last 50 years always had to adapt to US dominance, even
though it had its own (imperialist) reservations, and Blair did enough
to show he preferred a multi-lateralist rather than a uni-lateralist
solution. And prefers a Middle East peace settlement. It would be just
if he were dumped and many are no doubt calculating with the Labour
Party whether this will enhance of diminish their prospects of
re-election.

Some oppositional forces on the left in the UK pin in my opinion too
much hope on changing things within the Labour party, which I think is
a fallacious strategy because a) it puts faith in one political party
in the bourgeois two party system, and b) Blair and those around him
are much more skilful at playing off oppositional movements within
Labour that they are. So they always get subsumed and co-opted into
the
contradictions inherent in the system. It makes the revolutionary
constituency the Labour MP's who get told quietly that if they break
ranks too much maybe their seat will not be in danger at the next
election, but their friend and colleagues probably will. It is clever
stuff, and part of pretty developed policies for managing the Labour
Party.

Oppositional forces outside the Labour Party like the Alliance and
Respect are hoping for votes in the elections for the European
Assembly this summer where the voting is by proportional
representation. This can give them a showing but has the disadvantage
of appearing to put the main revolutionary strategy on an electoral
system that is still bourgeois.

The problem is not faith in particular political parties. Electoral
support for Labour is very soft, and the issue at the election will be
what percentage of its vote it gets out. It may lose because the
disillusion is just so great.

On the other hand voting has become very tactical in the UK for a
politically alert 10% of the electorate. They are likely to vote
against the Conservatives. Labour voters are likely to vote
substantially in favour of Liberal Democrats to defeat Conservative
candidates (particularly because Liberal Democrats opposed the war,
and are revolutionary enough to suggest a tiny increase in income tax
on those earning more than 100,000 a year)

There will be a web-site to facilitate this.  But this is so frankly
tactical that I cannot see it runs risks of raising blind faith in a
bourgeois imperialist party, even as the "lesser of two evils". It is
just one of a few things people can do who know they are powerless.
But two million may be prepared to spend a day on the streets in
response to a global crisis.

Although the Conservatives are scrambling back to the centre of the
beach with their ice cream stall, (they have just symbolically been
promoting their new gay-friendly image), the centre of the political
agenda is therefore likely to lie more between the Labour Party and
the Liberal Party.

No serious revolutionary in the UK is going to promote the Liberal
Party as the "least of 3 evils". Although some of its policies are
more rational and progressive on paper, its activists are petty
bourgeois discontents who tend to campaign effectively on local issues
of a parochial nature, and may conceal a streak of fascism (sorry I
cannot justify that in what is already too long an e-mail)

What the revolutionary left, if it exists, and the non-revolutionary
left as well as the Conservatives, have to adapt to, is the massive
managerial competence of New Labour in the total management of the
economy, and the total management of public opinion and the perceived
parameters of debate.

Yes Blair is a particularly brilliant and seductive tight-rope walker
who is skilled at getting up on the line, balancing out the opposing
factors and making you gasp as to when he is next going to fall off.
So he converts some of the shock at his outrageousness into sympathy.
But history is not made just by one human being. There is a whole
stratum around him who learned, mainly I think in the hard school of
managing local authorities during the grim times of the Thatcher era,
how to handle budgets and expectations in an increasingly consumer
orientated society. They use modern techniques which are impossible
without computers. Their natural allies are the big liberal finance
capitalist corporations. Indeed they are used to running budgets of
millions admittedly in not-for profit positions, but it means they
merge well with the high technical intelligentsia which finance
capitalism now relies on for its real extraction of surplus value.
This is a whole layer of modern late capitalist 21st century society
some of whom could be interchangeable with members of this and similar
lists in class terms and competence, whatever their political
leanings.

All this has transcended terms of debate about the lesser evil, which
seem to me to go back at least half a century, and perhaps a century
to an era when a substantial chunk of the working class would
consciously and proudly say they are working class and would debate
which parliamentary party they would vote for. Now they scramble for
commodities that bring a little luxury and a little social status.

My gut feeling is that virtually no one in the UK has a vision of a
parliamentary road to socialism and there is a lot of disillusion, as
Doug picks up. But that may be a good thing and it may help people
decide what little they can do. The longer term effect of this is to
pressurise the government even more to sort out concerns and pre-empt
potential fury. So it reinforces the pressure on New Labour for total
social management.

But perhaps this is another way of saying that with the advance of
capitalism to pretty integrated global finance capitalism an
institution like the UK Parliament does not provide a chamber for
class conflict, but for revising and adjusting the management of the
country.

The arena for class struggle is better seen outside the representative
assembly, which can only partly respond to it. Which is what we should
expect.

Regards

Chris Burford



----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, April 03, 2004 8:41 PM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Tariq Ali


> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> >On the other hand, we should take note of the fact that Ali says he
> >would be delighted to see Tony Blair defeated in Britain.  I'm sure
> >that the British equivalent of the US Anybody But Bush/Nader crowd
> >are busy lining up support for the Labour Party on the grounds that
> >it's the lesser of two evils.
>
> My New Press editor, Colin Robinson, just told me that the UK
> political scene is even more depressing than the U.S. because there
> is absolutely no alternative to Blair, drawing an explicit contrast
> with Kerry v. Bush. Of course, Colin used to be an editor at Verso,
> and, like Tariq, might be suspected of that creeping NLR
"liberalism."
>
> Doug
>