Can Labour survive?

1. The British Guardian newspaper has recently conducted a poll revealing support for Labour's new possible leaders. In the poll of 1059 Labour members, taking into account the possible stages of the election, they strongly backed (Sir) Keir Starmer, shadow Brexit secretary, against all other potential candidates.

Starmer (as with a couple of other candidates) has so far been careful not to distance himself from Corbyn's 2019 Manifesto. The large membership of the Labour Party was, until now at least, mainly Corbyn supporters. Ken Livingston has promoted Starmer's candidature. Nevertheless Starmer voted twice against Corbyn as leader and, at one stage, walked out of the shadow cabinet in order to force the Party to propose a new referendum as part of its Brexit policy. He will not be carrying on with any sort of 'Corbynism'.

2. Labour as a whole lost in 2019 but Labour's left has also had a resounding defeat however delicate Starmer's footsteps fall. And the Guardian poll is a very shaky and very early prediction. More significant is the real meaning of the distribution of the votes during the 2019 General Election. Labour polled 10 million and the Tories polled 14 million (a shade higher than ex PM May's vote in 2017.) The data also shows that 18 to 24 year olds would have put 544 Labour MPs into Parliament and 4 Conservatives. The Lib Dems, despite their support for the EU, were basically irrelevant for this group. From 24 to 49, voters would have put 310 Labour MPs as against 240 Tories into Parliament - again, because of the Corbyn program and despite the significant desire that sector had to remain in the EU. The Lib Dems were more successful here. (If only 65 year olds and older voted then Labour gets 35 MPs and the Tories 575.)

3. Labour membership still runs into the hundreds of thousands. And 10 million voted Labour. Most important Labour is still the overwhelmingly dominant mass party of young people. Yet the serious debate in Labour and across Labour voters in general about 'what really went wrong' has yet to be opened up. Most Labour leader contenders (including Starmer) are determined that the MPs should lead and control any real discussion about Labour's future. It is to be through the leadership candidates' votes that any realistic debate will be heard. Starmer's efforts, if he decides to stand, will be just another attempt to close down debate among party members and Labour supporters. 'Let's reunite the whole Labour Party' he will headline, while meaning let's unify Labour's MPs by not opening any real debate among the party: by not opening the most important political debate today in Britain.  

4. Aside from the pantomime leadership election, what will happen to Labour?

The answer is discovered through a study raised by wider question. What will happen now to British politics in general - and to British society?

At the end of 2019 the Hansard Society published surprising research which showed that 37% of Britons believed 'the system' needed 'a great deal' of change - 10% more than the previous highest record, in 2010, when MPs were setting up austerity and fiddling about in their expenses scandal. This is how the Economist Magazine 'Predictions for 2020' put it;

'Britain saw relatively few public protests between the arrival of democracy in 1918 and the referendum in 2016. Now it sees marches almost every week. The same could happen with political violence, the relative lack of which made Britain such a peaceful place.' 

Although the Economist's correspondent has failed to notice the defeat of the Heath government via the trade union movement in the 1970s and Thatcher's fall after the Poll Tax riots, Boris is not going face any sort of a calm future. Big changes, mass actions and reactions are going much faster than the second half of the 20th Century. There are now many more blocks to any sort of smooth progress in Britain's politics. All of the coming swerves and crashes will also shift society. Britain's fragility is greater now than any time since the World Wars. Britain's society has been captured by its uncertain and incoherent politics. The fate of Labour will only be determined by its political capacity to mark out and lead the shift in society best suited to the working class and its allies.

5. We already know that this year a 'no deal' with the EU may still be possible. A huge political struggle, in society, outside Parliament, could follow at the end of 2020.  But there are many other, even more drastic obstacles for the rulers of Britain. Another new British politics that could smash up its society was first hinted in September 2019 when a (small) majority of voters in Northern Ireland stated they were in favour of Irish unity. So far, Britain's mass media have been promoting the coming battle between Boris Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon over Scottish independence. But seeing no further than the 'right' of Westminster, eg Boris's 'right', to refuse another referendum in Scotland, Westminster believes the problem is solved. However the significance of Sturgeon's demand, that the Scottish Parliament should have its own right to decide whether to hold another referendum, starts to break down Westminster's domination. Again politics goes outside Westminster. The point is that another part of the UK already has its own right to independence. If the SNP win a solid victory in the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood in 2021, it is inconceivable that Scots will not demand, and act on their 'right', to vote for their future - just as the Northern Irish can. 

2020 in Britain will not only face the next EU treaty and the national question, it will face Trump's election and his drastic measures to prove that 'America is great' again. Trump will do literally anything to defend his slogan, including short term measures that accelerate the West's weakening economy. Britain is exactly in the wrong place in relation to a major economic decline across the globe. Already Boris intends to drop EU law that defends workers' rights. Already the courts have smashed the biggest majority vote for action ever polled by Postal workers. Already Boris has backed one of the worst railway companies that reneged on its deal with Britain's most militant union, the RMT. Already Boris publicises  plans to withdraw the right to strike by transport workers.

So far nurses in Northern Ireland, Postal workers, Railway workers, Amazon workers, etc, etc have begun a fightback. Outside Parliament.

6. This is the picture that faces Labour as it now stands. If the 2020 EU Boris deal (or no deal) becomes toxic for Labour, another Labour break is inevitable and not just among Labour's MPs. It is one thing to support Corbyn despite your favourable view of EU membership. It is entirely different when a mini pro-Blair leader tries to concoct a new Labour 'solution' as Boris pushes through his anti-working class objectives in his new deal with the EU.

But the crisis of Scotland's independence is still worse for Labour's MPs. Corbyn's leadership did not resolve the Scottish question in the Labour Party or among its supporters - although a shift had begun. The obvious answer would be to accept the right of the Scottish people to decide their own future and for Labour to actively seek an alliance with the Scottish government on shared core issues.

Labour too will have to face mass action outside Parliament and the probability of economic downturn. Will the debate about Labour's defeat raise the need for the Party to join the battle of workers and their organisations, given a debate that is focussed on the next leader and 'business as usual.' Again Labour finds itself in a two part turmoil.

7. The developing future for British capitalism is being created out of these and other crises. The shape of Britain's social and economic future is emerging out of the leadership of the the most right-wing government since Thatcher. The critical centre of that future is the new structure that needs to be built to maintain and to gain globally accumulating wealth. The EU cliche, now a year old, of Britain's future as 'Singapore on Thames', a global tax haven, has already become more mature and refined. The latest version of the new Britain is emerging as part of the 'Anglosphere', America, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, (as opposed to the Sinosphere; China and its mongrel puppies.) The Anglosphere countries are now all heady market players, they spy together on everybody else (it's called 'five eyes'!) France, Germany and Japan are out of the Anglosphere clique. Its shared intention is the consolidation and control of the non-Chinese world's wealth. And Britain's City of London hopes to become the pearl in the Anglosphere's crown - a prized centre to challenge China's future. And the British people? The successful ones will service this prize and the rest of us will serve the servers.

There will be no real avenue in Britain for the next five years, opening to a new society based on a new green revolution. Work is going to be more tied to service. Work will be more and more unregulated. State health, education and welfare will be more and more polluted by the market. The crown jewels will remain in London.

8. Against this future the Labour Party has so failed to show its alternative - or even, so far, set up the debate required, as the petty-leadership epithets begin to fly, providing substitutes for real discussion and action. There are two fundamentals that the Labour Party must face to survive and have any chance to lead society. First, part of Labour's failure in 2019, including by the leadership of Labour's left, was its virtual silence about where Britain's wealth truly was (including its tax havens in the great corporations and in Britain's islands in the sun) and how they might be taken back to Britain's people. Second, Britain's Parliament no longer serves any real democracy, let alone the needs of society as a whole. 

Labour should focus its hundreds of thousands of members, its ten million voters and society's young people on an attack against the billionaires and their wealth. That is the prime question for Britain's society. It is the core of the future. And it will be fought successfully only in mass action as, even in the West, the current unsuccessful democracies fail to provide any platform for that crucial step. 

Second, the form that the failure of Britain's democracy takes is that it does not represent the overwhelming majority of the people. Simply look at the proportions of votes for any UK government. Meanwhile the House of Lords keeps expanding. Voting is completely unfair in the bit of Parliament that people can vote for. Two of the four countries that make up Britain are moving to independence because they are not represented. A growing percentage of the population, enough to win a British Parliament's government, regard the 'system' as unsuccessful. To really win an alternative to Boris's crew, Labour needs to attack the current Parliamentary system in favour of a democracy that distributes power to people, not where a quarter of the electorate gives the little bits away that are on offer every five years.   

9. What should be done (and what are the new Labour leadership likely to do?) 

There are some crises to come that will be shared by Labour and Johnson's Tories. But, as in the case of Scotland, and Northern Ireland, the new Labour leadership is likely to flow in entirely the wrong direction. Then there are other crises which are truly Labour's own. The defeat of the Corbyn left is now beginning to swing back to Blair's love of the 'centre ground'; the 'Tory light' version of the 1990s and early 2000's. The reason why Blair succeeded for 10 years was he replaced the non-functioning Tory Party - which had become no use to either of Britain's two main classes. It eventually failed because it was a version of the Tories. It failed a working class that was dealing with its retreats and defeats across the board. It failed through its half-baked nonsense of the unity of the market (read a collection of Dell-boys sharks) and the UK's public institutions. It failed because the classes (not just in Britain) were polarising without any interest from the Labour leadership, between poverty and wealth. It will not be able to be reconstituted. The polarisation has happened. Any future Labour potential support will not feed from its dismal history. Boris's success proves that.

And what therefore should be done? The defeat of Corbyn is not replaceable or reversible. The new leadership of the Labour Party will buttress the current state of society and offer a traditional Tory-lite project. (This is already emerged as would-be Labour leadership candidates start comparing their version of English patriotism with Boris's! No contest.) 

What should be done? What has to be done? The membership, the Labour voters and the youth have to be coalesced in a mass-action political current that fights the new Tory government. The two key headlines; 'No rich and no poor! We need Real Democracy.' They would build a Labour faction, 'Real Labour', that organises independently of most Labour MPs and what will be all of its shadow cabinet. They would draw strength and experiences from the battle in France, the new Italian squares movement, the anti-fascist movement in the US. They would continue to fight at Labour's conference. And if necessary, they would form an independent organisation.

Tailending the Parliamentary Labour leadership's direction; compromising the battle that has to be had to shift the wealth in Britain, will begin to turn the Corbyn defeat into the defeat of Labour's members, their voters (who stood by Corbyn and the shaky 2019 Manifesto) and most of all, millions of young people. 'Real Labour' has to be critical of the 2019 faults but bold and most of all practically active in their answers. The first demand that 'Real Labour' should make from Labour's would-be leaders is that Britain's undemocratic Parliament, dominated by a mini Trump, must be brought down and replaced as soon as possible.  

Labour Party future?

When Teresa May, Britain's new Tory Prime Minister, announced her programme after Brexit, she dropped a large part of the 2015 Tory Manifesto. (Which is another reason why there should be an early General Election.) Ex Chancellor of the Exchequer, Osborne, quietly announced that the government debt targets had been dropped and George's main economic policy, the 'long term plan', duly caught a cold and died. 'Austerity' has suddenly dissolved. May wants an 'industrial policy' (a swearword for the previous Tory Cabinet), workers on company boards and share holders to have binding rights to limit company manager's salaries. May is pointing to a post Brexit future via ideas  from the early 20th century and Lloyd George!

The significance of all this for the future of the Labour Party goes right to the heart of its current struggle. And the first thing to understand is that the battle for Labour's leadership is a decisive class battle.

Following Brexit and the latest, large-scale contradictions erupting within globalisation, by no means has the Tory Party finished with its own changes in the turmoil of ruling class politics in the UK. Tory grandees are full of fear, wondering what they can base UK ruling class politics on when the City of London demands, as a first step, a major cut in its annual £67 billion tax payment, and the £1 trillion annual foreign investment figure shrivels. They also look over their shoulder at Farage's 4 million voters in the UK, and Trump's presidential prospects in the US, with further alarm. But what frightens them most in their particular world is what is happening in the Labour Party.

The Tory's specific evolution (and ruling class politics in general) depends, indeed at the moment essentially depends, on the reaction of the global and the UK working class movement, facing those same national and international convulsions. The major economic shifts and cracks post Brexit are certainly coming. But today the line of class conflict in Britain is most obvious in the country's political struggle. It is centred in the fight in the Labour Party.

Lenin's 'bourgeoise / workers party' was always an algebraic formula for the Labour Party. That is to say Lenin's description did not of itself provide a measure of the content and weight of the two different contradictory aspects of the party during Labour's development through its history. By the time of Blair's premiership the content of the second part of Labour's contradiction had little, if any, substance. It was then that the overall crisis of the Labour Party began in earnest, with its losses in Scotland and to UKIP (for without its contradictory character it could find no particular role in late capitalism's political spectrum.) As reality is always richer than a thousand theories, so Labour's empty halls marked 'workers' suddenly began to fill from a new layer of hundreds of thousands of active trade unionists and from the mass movements against war and austerity that had bedevilled first Blair and then Cameron.

Today Labour is a party where society's two major classes are contesting, over nothing less than the leadership of the working class, going into the next stormy period. And despite all the jokes and the trivia, Britain's rulers are terrified that a new, radical, working-class based party could be born.

As many have guessed but only suspected we now have the first ever generation to record lower lifetime earnings than their predecessors. Today’s 27 year olds (born in 1988) are earning the same amount that 27 year olds did a quarter of a century ago and have actually earned £8,000 less during their twenties than those in the preceding generation. (Stagnation Generation: the case for renewing the intergenerational contract. Resolution Foundation. 18 July 2016.) At the same time mass movements have been built and unions have fought back. A new working class in Britain is also 'becoming' itself, underpinned by the new brutal material conditions, but now focused ideologically by this process of the end of traditional social democracy in Britain, and the search for a new political leadership.

The economic factor, the relationship of labour power to the means of production, remains essential in the creation of the working class, but historically this has gone through many forms. Today the working class movement, the best unions, the mass campaigns, bring together a new working class experience summed up in action against war and austerity and now in a first stage but still critical battle over which class (the 'labour' representatives of a ruling class status quo or those who want a different society) should win the political leadership first of the whole of the working class and then of society.

Which brings us back to the new PM's dumping of her 2015 Tory manifesto.

On July 18 in Parliament Corbyn argued and voted against the £32 billion submarines that float Trident nukes. Another wave of Labour MPs were 'shocked' that their elected leader did not 'stick to official Labour Party policy.' And some did just argue the case to keep Britain's nukes. Every Labour MP was able to speak for their own opinion. But what wretches are these parliamentary tribunes of Labour's holy writ as they turned on Corbyn! And how revealing is the force of the policy argument in this Labour Party battle.

Teresa May unceremoniously dumped the Tory Manifesto and spelt out her new platform. Of course Labour Conferences are sovereign over Labour's policy but now the leadership battle has officially started in the party the hesitation over Corbyn's main proposals for post Brexit Britain must stop and his policies presented, front and centre. Millions of working class people in Britain have no idea, bar opposing nukes, why Corbyn's leadership struggle is so important to them. And, following Brexit, the submergence of Farage and the destruction of Johnston and Gove, means that working class people who might have been attracted to an anti-immigration political course and a new right wing in Britain, are in flux and open to bold arguments, unavailable in any official defense of a decaying and anti-working class EU during the referendum campaign, but available now.

The left and Corbyn need to nail exactly what no more austerity means, given that everybody is now forced to sit on that particular carpet. Now is the time to denounce the gap between the rich and poor by promising to implement a basic living standard for all citizens, with priority community regeneration plans in the most deprived areas, with across the board standards for housing to health, from employment to enjoyment. In this context it makes a huge difference to the argument that Britain should share labour and its future with anyone in the world who wants to, or who has to come to the UK.  Finance needs regulation and control. National and regional investment banks focussed on key infrastructure projects and subject to popular accountability would begin the fight to 'bring down' the City. Some experts are already arguing for a legally fixed proportion of the nation's overall wealth, on a sliding scale according to need, for the health service. It is a principle that is open to a democratic consensus and and might be widened to all the key services.

One critical policy must be the total renovation of a decrepit, corrupt and remote political system; starting with elections, like the EU referendum, where every vote counts.

The new leadership of the Labour Party, based on its members and the best unions, have a chance to show what a new Britain would look like if they use the platform of Labour's leadership election in the outward, hopeful, inclusive and radical way they should. And if the result of this campaign results in winning the leadership of the Party, many, perhaps the bulk of Labour MPs may be lost to hopes of positions in a future National Government, but a new political expression of a new working class will have a national voice and be at the heart of mainstream politics as the crisis of the system unfolds.

Brexit and Labour's crisis

The paradox of political crises is that they are rarely resolved - unless they are broken through by the new. Efforts directed at simply re-establishing the status quo invariably fail. The existence of the original crisis does not itself create a new reality. It is only human interaction, with and inside the existing crisis that has that potential. The British Labour Party is exactly in that position today.

174 Labour MPs have voted 'no confidence' in Labour leader Corbyn. (40 voted in favour of Corbyn's leadership.) It is obvious that by this means the right wing of the Labour Party, concentrated in the parliamentary section of the party, was trying to lever Corbyn out, starting by trying to avoid a vote by the whole party on who should be its leader, but which the rebels have now to face. (This is a maneuver fraught with dangers as a big vote to keep Corbyn as Labour Party leader would mean that those Labour MPs who have struck their blows at his leadership instantly become a group identified as anti Labour Party as a whole.)

What is this division in Labour based on? The first thing to note it has little to do with Corbyn's efforts, or lack of them, on behalf of the 'remain' (in the EU) campaign - or his supposed inability to win elections - or his mild manners and 'poor show' in Parliament. (Attlee who led the country into full employment, the welfare state and the state ownership of basic industry was generally described as modest and shy. ('He has a lot to be modest about' scowled the post war election loser Churchill.) In fact Corbyn has presided over a couple of good results in by-elections; a great result for London Mayor and, according to polls, 'won' 63% of Labour voters to the 'remain' cause (much more than several of his most prominent opponents managed in their own constituencies.) This attack has been planned by Labour's right wing and started by Hilary Benn, in an organised, last ditch effort to remove Corbyn, as right wing Labour MPs realised that they might have to go into an early General Election as a result of Brexit. Their original timetable for their coup was premised on the time they had available given a 2020 election.

But Britain's political crisis exposes in detail the real dynamics of the Labour Party. Close to the time of Labour's foundation a minority of the international left analysed the British Labour Party as a 'bourgeois, workers' party; supported by the working class at its base; led, organised and politically operated by those who supported the system. The friction, contest and finally the battle between these two forces would, in the end they surmised, seal Labour's fate.

This original class character of the British Labour Party has moved on from the time of Lenin's considerations. Most recently, Blair's efforts destroyed the traditional loyalty of millions of working class people for 'their' party. And the removal of the famous Clause 4 of Labour's constitution, which called for the workers 'by hand or by brain' to have control over the means of production, duly replaced by liberal managerial drivel, marked the point where the British Labour Party had abandoned the seminal idea that it stood for a different sort of society than that which was offered by capitalism. Accordingly, the active base of the Labour Party shriveled and virtually died. This of course followed the halving of trade unionism as a result of a decade of terrible defeats.

Nevertheless, despite the SNP's victory in Scotland and despite UKIP's 3.6 million votes and despite taking the blame for the Banker's crisis, the Labour Party still mobilised 9 million votes in the 2015 general election. Among millions of blue and white collar and service workers and their families, Labour was still the choice made against UKIP, the Liberals and the Tories in England and Wales. Meanwhile an enormous anti-austerity movement had grown up and it rolled forward, dramatically confronting a weak Tory victory in 2015. Realizing that the political system must change to block austerity, tens of thousands of mainly young people and those disgusted by Blair's warmongering then flooded into the empty Labour committee rooms under the new rules to vote for the new leader. Naturally they wanted an anti-war and an anti-austerity Labour leader.

This almost entirely new base of membership of the party suddenly reproduced some of the internal conditions of the Labour Party at its origin. A new contradiction between the classes roared up, bottled for the moment inside the Labour Party. From a position of almost unassailable (if empty) domination of the party by a post socialist, rich-loving cabal, the Labour leadership found itself under siege from its own membership. The roots of the decaying post Blairite leadership in the British ruling class were always temporary and proved utterly fragile at a single assault from several hundred thousand young people who had walked through the Party's door. From the point after the 2015 election where they made a lot of sound and fury about the need to restore Blairism, those would-be leaders toppled, almost without a push, in the party leadership elections.

Now, this time perhaps as 'farce', Labour's right wing MPs, still scared of the future, still aching for a quiet turn back to the 1995 status quo, have launched an all out assault ... on the party membership! And the historic friction and ultimate class contradiction of Labour re-emerges, as the remnants of a bourgeois, worker's party fight out which sections of society should be represented by the Labour Party. But this time there is no 'Imperial preference' to pay off a vast labour bureaucracy and the aristocracy of labour, there is no Keynsian compromise to be made with globalisation, there is no forced 'consensus' between the wealthy and the rest on the requirement for a social wage. Therefore this has turned into a fight to the finish for Labour.

The British Labour Party has lost Scotland. Even the critical left that is (rightly) emerging in Scotland sees Scottish Labour as part of the problem. Large sections of Labour's traditional vote, especially in the North East and in Wales are on the cusp of losing the remnants of their loyalty to Labour. Part of the Labour right wing MP's enervation, even hysteria is spawned from the dawning realisation that Labour has little chance of forming a government in the foreseeable future - outside coalition - whatever they manage to do with Corbyn and the left. The truth of it is that 'traditional' Labour has run its course. It is done. That is the unbearable vision of the future, opened up by the current crisis that has terrified 174 Labour MPs, who, up to now, were full of ambition and their own sense of entitlement.

Time to create a new fact.

To create a new political fact it is necessary to see clearly the existing ones. No wonder Lenin described facts as revolutionary. First, the historic shift of the Scottish working class and intermediate layers of society away from the Labour Party and towards the SNP is unlikely to change back outside of an entirely new social convulsion. Certainly Brexit shows no signs of signaling such a convulsion among the Scots. On the contrary, it is taken as further underpinning the argument for independence. The Labour Party has lost at all three levels; the leadership, the membership and the social base of support, in Scotland.

In the North East, the East Midlands and in Wales a measure of the traditional Labour vote had already deserted to UKIP in the 2015 election. This was consolidated broadly in a nationalist and racist direction by the 'exit' vote in the EU referendum. Unlike the call for Independence in Scotland, the Johnson, Gove, Farage perspective does not constitute a general political project with a new version of society and remains very contestable especially in the very likely context of worse austerity, more rationing of services and no change in the gap between the rich and poor. But, so far, that contest has not been had and the consequences of denial of the current reality grow larger for the Labour Party as the 'return' to a fantasy British history festers.

If Labour's 174 anti-Corbyn MPs had an SDP to join (the party that emerged in the 1980s to defeat Labour led by Michael Foot and Tony Benn) they would join it. Even so their attack on Corbyn takes place despite their secret knowledge that the traditional Labour Party may never again be able to form a government (and therefore they will not get a government post and the ladder into the City of London etc., will not, after all, be let down for them and therefore Lord Mandelson and his hero Blair are to be the last of the golden Labour spiv generation accepted by Britain's real rulers who hold wealth and power.)

If these people nevertheless win Labour's husk and defeat their own new Party membership, they will not confront racism in the Welsh Valleys or in Sunderland; they will avoid it and then concede to it. They will not be able to open the door to a new left in Scotland, accepting the right of independence, making alliances with the SNP on Trident and austerity and driving that through in ways that expose the limits and concessions that the SNP leadership constantly make. Instead they will try to tackle the SNP from the right! Their vote will drop substantially from the 9 million that Labour scored in 2015. In the final analysis they will become a wing of a 'national government' to 'defend Britain' together with the new Tory Party right wing, either by a worked through agreement, de jure, or in day to day practice, de facto.

But it also has to be accepted that Labour's left, even should it win the present battle and isolate its new right, will not be able to form a new government autonomously. A new government from an early General Election is more than possible against the reeling Tories. A freed up left would be able to reach directly into some of the traditional Labour heartlands with a bold new emergency programme - completely unavailable to their opponents in the Party. However, the old certainties are over and Labour's left leadership, even were it to hold the 9 million, will still need to face some of its own MPs opposing its measures, it will need to build a government in alliance with the SNP and the Greens and Plaid Cymru on its radical programme. Old Labour, and its false unity, circa 1950s to 2007, is dead. Blair, Brown, Miliband and the current battle have made sure of that. In other words, a new type of working class based political formation is required in mainstream politics and Labour's left leadership can be in a position to begin that construction. Better smaller, but better.

This is the end for the Labour Party, as it has existed since 1900. The choice is how can its best elements, its membership against austerity, poverty, war and racism; its leaders who will fight for the disadvantaged; its voters in the past and in the present, can win out over those who would serve the system first. Of course it is better if all of the Labour Party can be won to challenge the failures past and the failures to come from a system that just doesn't work and has not worked for years for the majority. Unfortunately (and from its birth) that schism has run through Labour. Now it has broken wide open. It may well mean a smaller group of MPs and Labour leaders have to speak to the largest classes in society after this battle. But the words will be heard if they are clear and sure. No more austerity: New wealth taxes: End poverty: Protect the poor: Build our services and communities: No foreign war and no nukes: Get rid of racism: Houses for all; and, after the power of the referendum, let us continue with - Fair Votes. This would be how to build a potential new fact that can break through the crisis.

Will the Labour Party split?

Both 'no' and 'yes' would be the wrong answers. A split does not describe it. Something new is on its way.

When Western European, Russian and US socialists who were in favour of the overthrow of capitalism first looked at the British Labour Party at the beginning of the 20th century they thought it very odd indeed. They thought that a mass working class party, set up essentially by trade unions and clearly establishing itself as the political expression of the (privileged and relatively secure) trade union bureaucracy, with a distinct leaning towards the defence of Empire, was anything but an anti-capitalist party. There was an argument about whether the UK Labour Party should be allowed to join the Second International.

The new International was a precious gain according to its members. Not only was it spearheaded by the immense German Social Democratic Party, but its resolutions included the emphatic decision that in the event European rulers began to look for war, an international General Strike would be called by the International to stop it. Looking at the rise of militarism across Europe and the growing international tensions, the Second International's resolution was an immense relief for millions.

Members of the International, like Lenin, spoke amd wrote in favour of admitting the British Labourites. He argued that the Labour Party was part of an international process, albeit thoroughly infected by the British capitalism's immense advantages through Empire, of mass working class movements becoming organised not just economically but also politically.

Even after the Russian revolution, and the setting up of the 3rd International by those who had opposed WW1 and supported the Russian revolutionaries, Lenin suggested to the new British Communist Party that they should seek to be part of the growing and inevitable division between the working class base of Labour and its leadership in Parliament and in the headquarters of the trade unions. It was, he argued, 'a bourgeois/workers party.'

Trotsky and others who followed Lenin, when they had time to consider internal British politics, emphasised the need to exploit this contradiction, running like a fault line through the British working class movement.

The greatest achievement of the Labour Party was its reform programme following WW2. British and European capitalism was so weak, and the pressure of the victorious USSR so strong, that a Labour government delivered. Their initiatives were never driven forward. Never developed as part of an organised population beginning to sort out the big problems for themselves, but still immensely valuable in the lives of ordinary people.

In the modern period the conditions for a reforming Labour government have collapsed. Labour governments have managed, here and there, to catch the tail end of a more liberal international wind in favour of important social reforms, abortion rights, more recently equal pay and the extension of marriage, opposition to racist attacks etc. They have (reluctantly) spent more on upholding social provision and maintaining the status quo against increasingly fierce attacks on living standards and the social wage. But since the 1980s they have not ventured to reverse any anti-union laws, or the de-nationalisations, or the use of the private sector in state activity. They have accepted, in every chance of government that they have had, the defence of what is, even when 'what is' has come about as a result of a ferocious attack on working class people. They have never reversed, once in government, any prior retreat or a defeat for the class whose votes they have depended on.

And then there was Blair. There was nothing special about Tony Blair as such. He dealt with the decline of the trade unions by abandoning them and rooting his political operation in the vast new management apparatus of the social sector. He adopted the status quo established by Thatcherism and he destroyed Clause 4 of Labour's constitution, the last symbol of the idea that the working class, a separate and exploited class, should have their own independent economic and political programme from that of capitalist society. Blair's Labour Party was the final, political part, of the social and economic destruction of the traditional working class that had been wreaked by Thatcher and the general, international offensive by international capitalism. And, as a result, he destroyed the remnants of the Labour Party as a bourgeois/workers party.

Blair's Labour Party dissolved its own internal structure and its mass support among an increasingly demoralised and socially atomised working class. Instead it placed itself as the real representation of the new 'white van men' (while the self-employed are still only 17% of the labour force) and defined itself in government as a predominantly classless new management.

The curious consequence, today, of this break up of Labour's traditions, policy structure and organisation at its base has been the emergence of the 'unity of opposites'. Blair and his followers  carried through the attack on the working class in Britain by consciously dissolving the material basis for the old Leninist, contradiction at the heart of the Labour Party. In the course of which it left a largely empty shell topped by a parliamentary party. But that empty shell at the base has, in turn, suddenly become a new vehicle for the current political resurgence of the left. The new left in Britain has found itself in a largely vacant, but still, apparently, politically mainstream vehicle, as a means of expressing its political opposition in society. The bulk of the old parliamentary party now sit on top of a base, with its own leader, drawn from a new left. And the result is chaos.

Whatever this is, it is not the replication in modern life, of Lenin's original view of the Labour Party and how it would resolve its central contradiction. The new left in Britain, with important trade union links and the capacity of effective mass action, is not yet anywhere near the day to day leadership of the still scattered, still disorganised and super exploited British working class. And what remains of the Labour Party in Parliament is in an increasingly unlikely condition to form any sort of government. It is neither an attractive political proposition for large hunks of what is the working class movement (eg in Scotland or who support the Greens, or who are against war) nor for the establishment, because in the absence of their ability to lead labour in general, they bring nothing (but crisis) to the table. Already, without Corbyn's victory, right wing Labour MPs twig their uncertain future. It is literally only because they have no sight yet of an independent project that prevents their shift to more hospitable circumstances now. Certainly, in a potential world of coalitions, many of these MPs would offer themselves like a shot to work with a new minority Tory government under the right conditions (like Lord Adonis.)

Blair has done his damage. He summed up the change in the Labour Party from a bourgeois/workers party, to a fully bourgeois (but weak) party, still supported in part by more and more alienated working class votes. The fragility he bequeathed coincides with a moment of a new eruption and growth of the British left. The old mass Labour Party died. The question is, will a new mass Labour Party, with the principle and purpose to re-gather and re-animate a political working class movement and a new anti-capitalist vision, now be born?

Some of the preconditions for such a development are obvious. For example there needs to be a mass movement, working in action, rooted among the ordinary people - that is mobilising and drawing society together in a challenge to the way we are all expected to live. Alternatives to our economic and political system have to become a new common sense. More narrowly and concretely in the scope of this article, there needs to be a direct challenge to those MPs who want to defend the status quo and yet who also wish to be part of the new party and the movement it allies with. It is not a question of whether there will be a split in Labour to build this new party; there has to be a split. It is another precondition.

Taking one example; Constituency Labour Parties and affiliated unions will soon be discussing their resolutions to the 2016 Labour conference. When the Tory government calls on Parliament to vote on Britain's nuclear weapon, Trident, and its renewal, the Tories will hope for Corbyn's isolation among his own Parliamentary party, which will certainly happen. The bulk of current Labour MPs will vote for renewal. Corbyn, representing Labour's new base, will not. The new members will want to deal with Trident in their resolutions to Labour's conference in two ways. First they will want to stop Trident's renewal and second they will want a conference that is allowed to force Labour MPs to carry out their conference decision in Parliament. Some of the delegates will call this resurrection of the old rights of Labour conferences. In reality difficult conference decisions were always sabotaged by Labour's leaders. This time, for the first time ever, because of the new base in Labour, because of Corbyn, that will not happen. Labour MPs who support the sort of country which flourishes nuclear weapons will need to decide where their allegiances lie. And, of course, Labour's right wing know this, and although toppling Corbyn will not solve the problem of Labour's diminishing power to form a future government (it will make it worse) it will make their future leverage with those that can that much more solid.

What can solve Britain's political crisis - in favour of the majority? The Labour Party question is now at the heart of Britain's general political crisis - and energetic socialist initiatives can be a giant step to resolving it. Labour can take a turn backward to the already declining party, already unable to create a majority in society or even form a government. In reality the old Labour Party right wing embraced the reality of medium term dissolution. Or, instead, a grand new party might be built. When Blair brought the Labour Party's historic contradiction to its end, he inadvertently cleared the ground for something new. Lots of little left parties tried their hardest (and some are still trying) to get themselves 'sucked up' into prominence by the vacuum that Blair left behind. It did not work. While, in Lenins' terms Blair had pushed out the 'workers' bit from the 'bourgeois/worker' party, there remained only a social and political hiatus and nothing inevitable about the future politics of a shattered (economically, socially and even geographically) working class movement in Britain.

Today, mass movements, headed by the Peoples Assembly have been built and are knitting together a new voice of hundreds of thousands of the left. And the real vacuum inside the Labour Party's dying organisation (an organisation that had to allow non members to elect its leader) has, finally, 'sucked up' this new left. And, now, a new set of alliances in politics and a new mainstream party heading them, can be built. There is no prospect of resurrection here. Just like the reality of the old Labour conferences, the old fantasies surrounding Labour's history in 1945 - 8, cannot be repeated or even sought out. Labour is not 'returning' to its history. It is breaking from its history or it will fail. A new government, headed by the left, requires linking with the left of the SNP and opening to Scottish independence and a UK federation, allying with the Greens and their base, and drastic reform of Parliament and on, and on. Britain's current political crisis cannot be resolved by Britain's establishment. It can only be resolved by a new mass party, creating new alliances and striking out in the direction of an entirely new and different sort of country.

Resurrecting Labour?

In a thoughtful and perceptive contribution, Neil Lawson, chair of a Labour Party based think-tank, 'Compass', (publicly associated with Jon Cruddas MP) has made the most useful analysis of Labour's real, post May 7 condition so far. Here is a link to his pamphlet, 'Downfall,' Labour Pamphlet. 

The standard of discussion in the Labour Party more generally about their crisis has been pitiful. Andy Burnham, the front runner for party leader up to now, has gone so far as to declare that the debate about Labour's crisis is already over! His answer to the future? Labour needs to draw from both Ed Miliband AND Tony Blair. Genius. (See the Observer 14 June.)

Bearing in mind Neil Lawson's contribution, let's start at the beginning.

On May 7 just under 15 million Britons voted for the Tories or Ukip. Just under 12 million voted for Labour, the SNP, the Greens and Plaid Cymry. The latter group voted for austerity lite or no austerity at all. 2.4 million voted for the Lib Dems. Even if some would be inclined to add the Lib Dem votes to Labour's pile in this division, common sense surely dictates that the Lib Dem base in Britain has been politically atomised, and was not at all regrouped by its coalition 'compromise' with austerity. Even on May 7 exit polls showed numbers of erstwhile Lib Dems turning to Ukip for example. The Lib Dems have been broken by the May 7 polarisation. They too will struggle to find a new political purpose and will have to use the coming EU referendum as a temporary means of hiding their absent heart.

The above voting breakdown shows that the political balance of forces in society have shifted significantly to the right in society since 2010. The essence of this shift (albeit expressed in terms of the least representative voting system available) is that at the same time as Labour first 'won' a significant sector of the middle classes under Blair (and even marginally increased that position in 2015 under Miliband) Labour has 'lost' 3 million or more working class votes, mainly in England and mainly to Ukip, since the leadership of Blair, Brown and now Miliband. This disaster for Labour is becoming a disaster for the whole of society.

In Lawson's argument he hits some of Labour's real weak spots. He steadfastly and honestly faces the disaster that hit Labour on May 7. He rightly denounces the sectarian character of labourism. Lawson points out the absence of Labour's initiatives towards the campaigns on climate, on housing etc. He notes the general crisis of social democracy across Europe. He insists that neither a 'return' to Blair nor to Attlee is relevant, even if it were available. The weakest part of his comments are the proposals that he makes for thorough going reform of Labour. And some of those weaknesses stem from faulty assumptions in his diagnosis. As those mistakes are seminal to the overall argument about the future of the British Labour Party it is necessary to address them frontally.

In the first place Neil Lawson does not place Labour's problems in the context of the British political crisis as a whole. Despite the Tories only needing to score 34 000 votes per MP they only 'won' a majority of 12. (When the Tories redraw electoral boundaries it is worth knowing that Labour had to score 40 000 per MP on May 7, leave aside the democratic 'deficit' for Ukip and the Greens. Most Labour leaders will not raise this fact in the argument about constituency boundaries of course, as they still have the forlorn hope that they will benefit from it.) The main political event scheduled in Britain for the end of 2015 and 2016 is a referendum on a crisis ridden EU. The leading party of the British establishment, the Tories, are completely vulnerable when it comes to the future of the UK and its relations with the EU. Propped up by the US since it retreated from Suez, the British Tories now find their own ruling class dissolving into the international diaspora of billionaires, leaving them without access to the material sources of wealth which for so long underpinned Britain's political stability and, at the same time, their global protectors are losing wars, status, influence, markets not to mention their major proportion of the wealth of the world.

The British political system and its parties are spent.

Not recognising this context Neil Lawson tells us that in Britain today cultural identity has become as important as class. He develops some thoughts about the cultural role of a successful future Labour Party in this context. In part this is an attempt to recognise the importance of the SNP, but he is making a wider point about cultural and even confessional identity now submerging self identification as working class for millions of people. The old class parties he tells us, are over.

The most 'anti-class' based political party in Britain for the last 85 years has been the Liberals. They, if anything, emerged more shredded than Labour. Neil Lawson correctly describes the decline of the traditional working class movement, but he misunderstands that class politics do not go away because, as it happens, all of the main classes in society have changed dramatically. And while it is true that many working class people are struggling to understand where they belong in modern Britain, that unions only represent a small minority, the new definitions of the class ridden world that people who have to sell their labour have to inhabit, are surfacing once again. So. In the case of the working class people who voted SNP it was as much to do with inequality, with the hope for an economy that served society first and the wealthy second, with the sense that they could define a space where they might be able to create a hopeful new society, as with any sense of national 'identity', that meant they dumped Labour and went for the SNP. Labour were seen as the establishment in Scotland.  

The Scottish example shows something of the evolving contradictions and complexities of 'class consciousness' in our modern world. But to confuse that evolution and development in peoples' minds with the end of the reality in life of the terrible burden of class politics and class economics - which continues to crush the life out of our societies - is a big mistake. A new Labour Party would need to be based on new class politics.

The first attempts at political organisation of the working class, as a class, for itself in Britain, were the Chartists. They called together hand loom weavers in villages, factory workers in towns, mining families off the moors, agricultural workers from the fields, women and men and children, and brought together a force, created an identity capped by a political hope for a new society.

At this very moment in developed countries in Europe like Spain and Greece and Ireland political parties are emerging that seek to allow the working class people and the dispossessed of society to rise up and lead the whole nation.

Neil Lawson makes a point that outside of the Labour Party progressive and radical politics are flourishing. In Scotland the political centre of that process today is obviously the SNP and in England it is the Greens. In both countries in the last election these parties explicitly led the challenge to austerity politics and economics. (One of Neil Lawson's six themes for Labour's renewal is the need for Labour to support a democratic voting system.) During the election the SNP proposed an anti-austerity alliance going into May 7. Labour should have been at the front and centre of that alliance. It should be there today. Including electoral reform there are some interesting suggestions in Neil Lawson's six suggestions for Labour's reform (and others that are exactly a return to 1997.) But the crucial point is missing. Today, now, the Labour Party needs to break definitively with austerity, with big capital's investment strike now impoverishing British industry and infrastructure, with production and energy that poisons our future, with a totally undemocratic voting system, with the costs and dangers of maintaining Britain's (fake) great power status, to face the crisis in the Middle East and Africa in part created by wars we promoted, to break away from the British establishment, and to lead. First lead the mass movement gathering on June 20 against austerity, then help the new working class recompose itself and rise up again to lead all the nations of a Britain that it will help re-make in the name of the future.