Positioning yourself to the left of One Nation Labour, as it
now prefers to be known, is an easy enough task. Building a new party that can
mount a successful electoral challenge to Ed Miliband’s austerity-lite
“responsible capitalism” crew is more fraught.
Left Unity, launched at a weekend conference, has set out
along a parliamentary road which many others continue to tramp. It’s a crowded
space that already includes the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, Respect
and the Socialist Labour Party.
An initiative launched by former members of Respect, leading
ex-members of the Socialist Workers Party and other organisations, with film
director Ken Loach, Left Unity has expressed the desire for a change and a way
out of a political logjam.
The impasse is not, however, simply the result of the
convergence of the three mainstream parties around the imperatives of the
capitalist market economy, which stubbornly remains in recession. The blockage
is also a constitutional one, with the parliamentary state a clear obstacle to
further social progress.
Disengagement, dissatisfaction, distaste, despair, disgust –
they all express the degree to which a majority of new generations and a
substantial minority of older people have switched off from the present political
process. You can’t say it often enough but that’s why Russell Brand’s tirade
against the system has had 10 million views on YouTube.
Although couched in negative terms, these sentiments present
an historic opportunity to advocate a revolutionary political roadmap. It’s a
moment to put forward new forms of real democracy, participatory and direct,
that go beyond the compromised representative system and to debate how we get
from A to B.
Left Unity, unfortunately, passed up that chance. A clear
majority favoured a “broad left”, non-revolutionary approach that sidelines the
vital issue of the state and political democracy. The new party hopes, instead,
to capture votes from disillusioned Labour supporters at the next election. Some
even see the party as a the “left’s Ukip” in its potential to win votes from
the disaffected.
This is a fundamental misjudgement of where we are today. Instead
of reinforcing the parliamentary status quo by proposing a “left” version of
what we have already, this is a historic opportunity to put forward
alternatives for a different relationship of state to people. That means a different
kind of state altogether. Not of voters who have no power – a democracy in name
only – but where people can determine their own futures within a new
constitutional settlement.
In Scotland, the constitutional issue has come to the fore
as a result of the independence campaign, which Steve Freeman pointed out in
moving his Republican Socialist platform. A movement has emerged around the
referendum which is faced with what kind of constitution Scotland should have
if it is to achieve an independence which is anything more than a transfer of
power to another elite.
Throughout Europe, the capitalist state has enforced
austerity, sometimes relying on the International Monetary Fund and the
European Central Bank to browbeat elected governments. Repeated general strikes
in Greece and elsewhere have failed to dent this arrangement. Coalitions of the
left like Syrizia in Greece (which Left Unity sees as an example to follow)
have failed to distinguish themselves .
The plain fact is that support for all political parties is
plummeting, partly because they are identified with the status quo. Increasing
numbers clearly feel that the existing parliamentary parties have little
relevance to the realities of their life and that voting will not change
things.
This has created a crisis of legitimacy for the existing
political structures and therefore for the state itself. That process was
behind the formation of the Occupy and movements in Spain, Brazil, Turkey and
the Arab Spring itself.
The major challenge for all of us, not just Left Unity, is
to deepen our understanding of where we are in history, analysing the diverse
impacts of corporate-driven globalisation on politics, the economy and the
eco-system and demonstrating how a return to the Labour of 1945 is impossible.
We have an obligation to put forward comprehensive
alternatives whose content is a transition beyond capitalism. Thinking about
and working on what kind of democratic, networked organisations are needed to
reflect these aspirations and support their achievement is where we should
direct our energy.
Corinna Lotz and Paul Feldman
