Marxists (particularly in England) need to do two things.

First, they need to study the main strategy that some have had since the 1990s – of creating a new mass party/political front to represent the now unrepresented working class. (Other marxists never embarked on any of the various efforts made to develop this strategy preferring more eternal verities.)

Second, like the social democrats (see Pickety’s book on Capital) marxists need to discuss their marxist contribution, its roots, its failures and successes, a modern basis for its future existence and its priorities.

First things first. Of course in one, rather decisive sense, the Labour Party never politically represented the working class. It was a party formed by the labour bureaucracy (small l) based on an ‘historic compromise’ with its own ruling class, over empire, over monarchy, over war, over the survival of the capitalist system. But in another sense it did represent the working class movement. Millions of working class people voted Labour. Hundreds of thousands were rank and file leaders of the labour movement. Even a solid clutch of MPs (often the most right wing) came from the shop floor via the union bureaucracies. Working class people could recognise and identify with at least some of their Labour leaders. Drawing out the contradiction in the Labour party and the wider labour movement between its working class base and its leadership which dominated the party’s policy framework and its compromise culture, formed the main axis of marxist work over decades.

Since the 1960s, as the Empire collapsed and concessions from the ruling class table became harder to come by, Labour began to lose its monopoly hold over its traditional base. Global shifts created a radicalised generation in the west, including in the UK. Simultaneously working class organisation at the base came under enormous attack as British capital tried to compensate for loss of its imperial possessions. A huge rank and file movement grew up in the unions. 250 000 shop stewards took the lead in a battle to maintain previous conditions. An argument blew up among marxists between a reform perspective in the unions and the Labour Party on the one hand and on the other, a clean break policy with the goal of establishing an explicitly open revolutionary marxist party. Benn managed to bridge some of the gap for a few years with the mass socialist movement in the late 1980s.

By the 1990s the British working class movement had been thoroughly defeated. Indeed the wholesale reorganisation of paid work itself had begun to take place. Personal contracts (the petit-bourgeoisification of labour) had begun. (Today 4.5 million are self-employed ‘cleaners, handymen or nannies’, Telegraph 11 June - and there are many more millions on part time, short term or zero hours contracts.) The remnants of organised labour were concentrated in the diminishing public sector and were on defencive retreat. Into that world stepped Tony Blair.

Some years prior to Blair and the first steps towards Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party a new debate had started among marxists, not so much about the historic possibility of the reform of the Labour Party although some stalwarts remained (and remain) convinced of that view – but whether any part of any future wave of radicalisation both inside and outside the labour movement would consider such a perspective as realistic or worth the candle. The focus sharpened around the debate about affiliation to Labour by the trade unions. This was never an argument about the need to work with left Labour MPs etc – and even less about whether to work with their supporters. It was a debate about the way marxists should organise politically and how they should present to others who battled with the system the best way for them to organise politically.

Since then we have seen a succession of attempts to create the basis for a new working class political party – to ‘fill the vacuum’ left by the Labour Party. The latest of these are the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, TUSC, led by Dave Nellist with the official support of the RMT for some of its candidates and linked to the Socialist Party’s campaign for a new mass working class party. Then there is the newly founded Left Unity, founded by Ken Loach and primarily inspired by the emergence of leftist parties, now growing in response to the crisis in several European countries.  (Left Unity are currently having a rather acrimonious debate about the worth of joining forces with TUSC – which some see as an old fashioned front for the Socialist Party.)

But we are now in a position to take a more general stock of this nearly 20-year-old project.

Every step in the ‘replace  Labour’ strategy’ that the marxist left has been pursuing in Britain has had different characteristics and different immediate triggers. All of them had partial critiques of the previous efforts that had failed. Lots of important points were made in these criticisms that deserve further thought but the overarching question was never addressed and this was because marxist analysis was not used – to analyse the marxists' own project!

Temporary movements and campaigns emerged which objectively challenged the role of the Labour Party from 1995 until today – the greatest of which was the massive movement against the Iraq war. The mobilisations that took place in that campaign came the closest to the creation of a new political current in the new, evolving working class in the UK. And it was this new political current of hundreds of thousands, even millions that created the material basis for the emergence of Respect through its various incarnations. (Scargill’s SLP had thought to rest its existence on the old Benn/Scargill current which it transpired was finally dissolving just as the SLP lifted off.) And this is the root of the matter. The tremendous significance of the anti-war movement was not that it ‘floated’ Respect but that it brought together the leading elements of the working class, in a potentially new political and social re-composition. It began to create a new, albeit temporary, class identity. We learned that great units of industrial production did not have to be the essential component of the creation and growth of a new working class. A class ‘for itself’ could be called into history under a political banner (as indeed the original Charter had in the 1830s and 40s.)

However the anti war movement arose in a context where the West including the UK in particular, were consolidating their decades of economic and political offensive and, no longer concerned by the Soviet Union, on the biggest military roll since Viet Nam. Western political stability was unaffected (although Blair was mortally wounded.) The anti-war movement proved unable in those conditions, to lead the country. Unable to move forward, out onto the economic and political terrain, its potential to focus a new class wide identity subsided and then broke up. And Respect was beached on an ebbing tide – turning eventually into a one-person farce.

The anti war movement should have changed the debate among the marxists about the actual condition of the actual working class in Britain. Instead it argued about the sectarianism of ‘the other’. It was not in itself the continuation of the war and the weakness of attempts in the West to succeed in stopping it that began to disaggregate the great alliance built to challenge the war. It was rather the absence of impact on the politics in Britain that undermined its attraction here. The global context pressed on, and attracted, the most committed youth more than ‘local’ events. The leaderships that emerged in the anti-war movement were unable to consolidate an agreed direction. And, yes, the absence of a continuous social and economic unity, impressed by daily life among participants in the movement, enhanced its fragility.

Since then no new and significant working class movement has emerged at a national level, until that is the very earliest shoots of a possible national movement to defeat austerity that are only appearing now.

TUSC believes that it can switch the affiliations of the remains of the TU movement away from Labour and to the TUSC, but this is an organisational and administrative fantasy that takes no account of the political problem of the characteristics and political structures of the new working class. Unions need to disaffiliate from Labour. Trade unions need to be independent. But that can only make sense to those who sacrifice and risk so much to keep them going if it is part of something that is better; i.e. that it will link them to wider forces in society, not isolate them more.

Left Unity identifies a (partial) European trend in the emergence and progress of parties of the left like Syriza and Die Link. They claim to share the need to fill the same vacuum left by the rightward moving social democracy in all West European countries. They ignore the significance of the collapse of the communist tradition in the countries concerned and the great well of potential support for the left project that remains as its legacy, which is entirely unavailable in the UK. The only British roots offered for the Left Unity project is a return to 1948. Again this is a construct resting on wishful thinking.

The political vacuum left by the definitive shift of Labour to ruling class consensus has not ‘sucked up’ the left in Britain. And it is not the lack of the right policy, or particular tactic, or absence of sectarianism, or exclusivity, or idol worship that has promoted or prevented the magic Hoover from doing its progressive work. It is the painful and debilitating reorganisation of the working class following momentous defeats over a generation and echoed on a world scale. Large units of production, at least in the UK, will remain few and far between. The enormous majority of the working class has changed utterly. New principles are required to regroup a working class movement and these are as likely to emerge on the political, as on the social and economic stage. The first task of marxists is to elaborate and try to put into practise these new principles. And while we measure our advantages – for example the political system is now in a deep crisis and is thoroughly despised, we should also recognise the facts, including the fact that first political regroupment of a significant section of the working class has already happened – around the UKIP banner and saloon bar fascism. The vacuum has already done its work. The 20 year ‘new mass party’ experiment is over.

The second part of this blog will look at what marxists should discuss about marxism.