Greek solidarity - on the ground.

The massive solidarity (not charity) structure in Greece is a great achievement. (See last blog.)

The anti-austerity Popular Unity split from Syriza polled 2.9% of the popular vote and failed to get into parliament in the September elections. But the absence of a national political lead for the Solidarity movement has already been discussed by Greek activists.

Here is the view of one Greek activist on the future for Solidarity under the new conditions. 

Greece elections; what has changed?

Syriza's ex economics minister, Vourofakis, wrote in the British 'Guardian' (22 September) that the economic deal made by Alexis Tsipras with the Troika would fail. Indeed his argument was that it has been tried already, over 6 years, and 5 General Elections, and that it has already, definitively, failed.

Syriza gained 2.2 million votes in the elections in January 2015 and 1.9 million in September.  They therefore lost 15% of their vote between the two elections. (The overall Greek vote declined by 13% from January.) Syriza now leads the government in coalition with ANEL, a right wing party opposed to austerity, as it did after January's election, when it opposed any more deals with the Troika.

What has changed?

Back in June, when the Greek people voted on the Troika's latest proposals in a referendum, 64% of the Greek voters voted. 2.2 million voted 'yes' and 3.6 million voted 'no', despite the 'no' vote almost certainly requiring Greece to leave the Euro and repudiate their debt mountain. Alexus Tsipras then led Syriza in the opposite direction to the Greek peoples' decision and accepted the most recent Troika plan.

As Vourofakis has explained, the Greek people now face another impossible economic mountain to climb. But there have been other, political, changes that flow from the Tsipras led Syriza rejection of the referendum result.

1. 'Nothing to vote for.'
 After the results of the June referendum were dumped by the Tsipras leadership there was nothing to vote for in the September General Election. The new Syriza leadership ( a third of its 149 MPs resigned) were simply, in effect, another pro-austerity party. And some sort of EU organised austerity plan was now the only choice. The new Syriza made much in the election of their 'new politics' and there was some truth in the fact that they had made a fight with the EU and that they had been open with the Greek people about that fight. But there were many attempts made by the new Syriza in the election campaign to 'soften' and to 'spin' their latest concessions and the previous hope and enthusiasm of the anti-austerity electorate had dissipated according to all the main Greek political commentators. Popular Unity, led by the Syriza anti-austerity rebels, failed to make an electoral impact.

While 'Golden Dawn' (Greek's fascists) only slightly increased their vote, they are Greece's third party with 18 MPs despite a leadership that has just come out of prison still on bail for murder and other serious crimes. They are now the major 'anti-austerity' mainstream party, albeit that the (mainly) magnificent reaction of the Greek people to the refugee crisis so far shows that all is far from lost.

2. Erosion of the mobilisation of the Greek people.
The tremendous efforts made at the base of the movement for change in Greece, the 'Solidarity for All' structures that provided health care, teaching, shelter and food, have been hit. At its height in the summer more than 3 million Greeks were using these self organised resources and facilities. While it was never the plan of the organisers of the solidarity movement to stand in for what should be any modern state's responsibilities, nevertheless the tremendous inspiration created by the movement suggested to all that the Greek people could, and would be able to organise a new type of society.

The Solidarity for All umbrella for the movement seems to have blown out by Syriza's turn. At the most severely practical end of the spectrum the health clinics, at least in and around Athens, seem to be the least effected so far.

3. A critical social/political alliance has been pulled apart.
Greek polling (except the post election night polls) are notoriously innaccurate. Nevertheless pre election polling consistently showed that Syriza had lost its majority among the unemployed and among young people aged between 18 and 24. (Indeed the latter group showed a consistent majority for Golden Dawn. GD's previous base among young people in Greece had been largely overturned by the time of the January 2015 General Election.)  The new Syriza did not poll a majority among 18 - 44 year olds either.

Additionally, Syriza's radical wing, the 'conscience' of the party, certainly the group with the most history of involvement in the Greek squares movement and in Solidarity for All, in other words the group with the most contact with the Greek peoples' daily lives and resistence, have now been definitively cut out of the Syriza alliance.

4. A new/old leadership emerges.
Tsipras's leadership of Syriza has always been a major factor in the popularity of the party. Indeed part of the left in Europe has 'theorised' this new type of leadership phenomena (see blog re Podemos leader, Pablo Iglesias, 8 September). But the contact that popular leaders like Chavez had with the Venezuelan people, were premised on the enormous self activity and mobilisation of the poor and disadvantaged, who could see, in practice, how the leadership directly and concretely supported their efforts and their aims. At the same time, the oligarchs and the 'great families' were confronted and denounced.

While popular and displaying a 'common touch' (no frills and no social pretensions) Tsipras never displayed such radical charactersitics (despite being 'suspected' of them.) But since the June referendum his personal leadership style has turned into its opposite. Tsipras's eldest son enrolled into one of Greece's most prestigious, expensive, private schools in September. Tsipras and his family spent part of the summer in a villa owned by a wealthy Greek shipowner and commuting to Athens by helicopter. (See Financial Times, 19 September.)  Earlier in the same week Tsipras posted a Twitter cartoon of himself as the messiah which was captioned
'There may not be any miracles if you abstain.'
It's just a joke! Yes, but it suggests how Tsipras now sees the role and function of the Greek people in their own future.

These and other changes in Greece's political life do not (yet) amount to a definitive defeat. But they are signs of a major stepback. And we will see in the October elections in Portugal and the December elections in Spain what the Greek retreat means for other anti-austerity political forces in Europe.

Corbyn, Labour and Scotland

Jeremy Corbyn told the parliamentary Labour Party (14 September) that Tom Watson, Labour's new deputy and he would be visiting Scotland at least one day per month in order to boost Scottish Labour's vote before the May 2016 elections for the Scottish parliament (Holyrood.)

Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the SNP, told the media that she hoped Jeremy Corbyn's victory in the vote for the leadership of the Labour Party would mean that Labour would collaborate with the SNP to build a common front against austerity and to oppose Trident - Britain's nuclear weapon. She also told the Scottish media that as Jeremy Corbyn was unlikely to win the 2020 British election, the only way for Scots to escape future Tory rule was to achieve full independence in Scotland.

Behind this opening salvo there is a tangled web of confusion among different parts of the anti-austerity movement in England, Wales and Scotland. There is, undoubtedly, a debate to be had. If Scotland wants an end to austerity, surely it should vote for a UK wide Labour Party, for Corbyn. Indeed, without Scotland voting Labour there is little chance that Corbyn's Labour Party could win any General Election. On the other hand surely Corbyn's leadership is fragile. It would be better to ensure the end of austerity in Scotland if it were independent. On top of that, is it not 'more progressive' for Scotland to be able to decide its own political future anyway?

The debate will rage and roar away. Without in anyway intruding on the right of the Scots to determine their own future here are some (hopefully clarifying) thoughts.

Some (influential) supporters of Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party are completely convinced that the national question in Scotland (and therefore the SNP) are now a dangerous, 'blind alley' for the real 'battle for socialism'. Scotland must get behind Corbyn's chance to become a Labour Prime Minister for the whole UK and the SNP 'diversion' should be totally defeated. Such opinions in England are found most forcefully represented among some of the leadership of the left unions. (In fact this stance is actually an extension of their previously held views about the Scottish referendum campaign.)

This blog has argued before that Scotland is not a colonial nation dominated by English imperialism. But there is no doubt that Scottish politics is dominated by Westminster. This is not the same as the political conditions in Newcastle or Liverpool. Scotland has a national, political identity which means that just as Greek and Spanish anti-austerity movements call for the establishment of the people's sovereignty over remote and wealth-serving institutions that drive the EU, so millions of Scots tie their domination by the Westminster political class to the possible freedom that might be offered by the achievement of their own national sovereignty. In Scotland, the poverty question, the question of inequality, of Trident and of welfare, in other words the class questions, are not the opposite or alternative to the national question. They are now inextricably linked.

Unfortunately for this perspective, the Scottish Labour Party (despite the removal of the hapless Jim Murphy) is now led by another ex-Blairite. In Scotland most people voted SNP in the last General Election (May 2015) because, unlike Labour, the SNP argued for an end to austerity and to Trident. Kezia Dugdale, Scottish Labour leader, attacks the SNP in Scotland over education results, over 'pushing' for a new referendum, over a long list of things — but not over the absolute need for no Trident and an anti-austerity Scotland. Scottish Labour is unlikely to be promoting Corbyn's politics anytime soon.

Just as it was the anti-austerity, anti-war movement in England that toppled the traditional leadership of Labour in favour of Jeremy Corbyn (and certainly not some long term mushrooming campaign inside the Labour Party, or even inside the unions) so the same trend in Scotland has, up to now, associated itself with support for the SNP - albeit critically (including many of the Scottish members and activists in those same left unions whose leaders are hell bent on burying the national question). This is because Labour has been more than tried, and then tested to destruction, over decades in Scotland. And what the Scots have learned is that Labour cannot defeat the Tories in England - even if they hold Scotland. Worse, that they have tried to become them. They note Corbyn's victory and are glad for it. They also note Corbyn's weak social base and the political fragility of his leadership, and they feel the absolutely decisive requirement to get away forever from Tory governments of both the Conservative and the Labour kind. And more; to get away from the distant, overbearing and corrupt Westminster political class, with its thousands of representatives in the leadership of all three traditional parties.

Can Corbyn's tremendous victory mesh with, even push forward a more radical perspective and political movement in Scotland?

Undoubtedly. But not by trying to unwish the hard political experience of the Scots. (Although some of Corbyn's English well wishers will need to learn the value of modesty.) It is perfectly reasonable, from any point of view, to promote the requirement for Scottish Labour to take its own 'independence' from Westminster. An independent Scottish Labour Party might then stand more than a fighting chance to take on the SNP's programme — from the left. If the Scottish Labour Party removed the issue of an independent Scotland from the agenda — by supporting it — then the social question, the class question would determine the direction of Scottish politics, to the benefit of the Scots - to the benefit of Scottish Labour and to the benefit of the rest of Britain.

A determining socialist presence in Holyrood would transform the political debate in all of the rest of the UK, while breaking up the power of Britain's political class and the over-mighty post imperial ambitions of its rulers. England would be a smaller country and with smaller European countries in mind, it might even begin to learn to behave itself better. The key is that the movement in England, against war and against austerity, that has already pushed over the rotten leadership of a decaying mass party, as another aspect of Westminster's political crisis erupts, would be immensely strengthened. And that is good for all our futures.

John McDonnell MP

'Corbyn gives top job to IRA sympathiser: New Shadow Chancellor who wanted to kill Margaret Thatcher to push through plans for taxes on middle-class families'

This is the British Daily Mail's headlines on Jeremy Corbyn's appointment of John McDonnell as 'shadow chancellor.' The Daily Mail lives up to its reputation.

Elsewhere McDonnell has been described by commentators as 'factional' to those who he disagrees with, as 'further left than Corbyn' (see 'Today', the BBC morning news programme, 14 September.) It seems that 'General Secretary' Corbyn has lined up his new Beria to frighten the enemy and begin the internal purges.

Anyone who has ever met or worked with John McDonnell, (not to mention the 27,000 voters he won in the 2015 election, representing 60% of the vote - a rise of 4% in his constituency, Hayes and Harlington) knows him as a kind, interested, supportive person, with clear ideas and a heartfelt sense of the injustice of our society.  But we wait (with trepidation?) as this bureaucratic monster gets to work cutting his way through the Labour Party MPs who fail to fall in love with 'big brother' Jeremy.

Good grief.

What does Corbyn's campaign mean?

The British Labour Party emerged, like the German Social Democratic Party, at the turn of the 19th and the early 20th century, as a new mass workers party from the heart of one of the three most powerful capitalist countries in the world.

This fact, a fact in the British case underpinned by the enormous wealth of its Empire, gave a particular character to Britain's new party. Two key features of the Labour Party's political structure flow from the effects of Empire. The first was that a significant social layer of worker's leaders had already risen above the general conditions of the ordinary worker. This layer was concentrated in the trade union bureaucracies who had established the habit of privilege among themselves over decades. The prospect of advancing within the unions inevitably acted as a pull to the most articulate, active (and self-seeking) trade unionists from the ranks. The employers often found it helpful to use the trade union bureaucracies as a filter in their relationships with their employees and encouraged the growth of this more malleable layer.

Second, when social and economic concessions appeared to blunt rebellion, even political concessions, could be allowed to the working class and their organisations (albeit after some ferocious struggles) - based on the vast profitability of Britain's Imperial wealth.

Socialists, mainly outside the UK, described the British working class as capped by an 'aristocracy of labour', a group of workers who saw themselves as in a 'trade' or special sector, with particular skills. They acted as a material base for the expression of narrow, sectional interest, often crystallized by the trade union bureaucracy in 'special interest' arguments, and which provided a social basis for the bureaucracy to lean on both from social classes for their continued influence and survival.

Many British trade union leaders from that time publicly praised and defended Empire. They obviously understood where the butter for their bread came from. In 1921 Walter Citrine (the head of the TUC, known for his meticulous pamphlet on chairing meetings and later ennobled) accompanied the leaders of Britain's main industrial and transport unions to a meeting with Prime Minister Lloyd George after 'Black Friday', a one day General Strike. He wrote in his memoirs;
'The Prime Minster said, "Well gentlemen, the power is yours!" At that moment I knew we had lost.'

Although it was not inevitable, the trade union bureaucracy, its foundations in Britain's aristocracy of labour, proved the decisive force in the creation and control of the early mass Labour Party. Lenin, among others, saw the Labour Party as a party whose leadership, policy, structure (the dominance of the parliamentary party over the rest etc.,) was wholly, indeed irretrievably, rooted in the defense of capitalist, Imperialist Britain. The base of the Labour party, its voters, its campaigners, its participants in the clubs, coops and most of all the millions in the affiliated unions, were the real agency in the defense of the independent and potentially revolutionary interests of the working class.

Nothing remains the same. The Labour Party arrived at its zenith after WW2 with the creation of the NHS and the welfare system. It slid through the crises of the 1960s and 1970s gripped in the clutches of a cold war labour movement bureaucracy. But the post 1984/85 Miner's Strike period began to mark a change in the fundamental class character of the Party. First Thatcher smashed up the main industrial unions and their industries. Then Tony Benn led a movement for Labour reform, which peaked and was then destroyed. (Benn remarked a year or two later that if he, with a still powerful labour movement behind him, could not win the deputy leadership of the Party, he doubted that the Party would ever be winnable by the left.)  There followed a decade where Labour's leaders tried to turn to becoming Britain's Democratic Party to the Tories Republicans.

Blair's leadership and then premiership confirmed a qualitative shift in the class character of Labour. It still fostered within itself an old social democratic trend, and it still paid court to some, by now, diminished trade union leaders with lots of historically accumulated cash, but the relationship with them was much in the style of the of the US Democrats. The aim of Blair's Labour Party was not to rebuild the labour and trade union movement; it was to replace the Tories; to become a long term prospect for government, securely based on the newest sectors of capitalist development in the south of the country, combined with the support of state employees, the media and of at least part of the most globalised sector in finance, rooted in the City of London. The famous Clause 4 was dumped. The working class in Blair's society was, for the first time since the emergence of the early 19th century Chartists, to have no public, independent programme of its own.

Since Blair and now with the destruction of the Labour Party's base in Scotland, the British Labour Party has been in deep, perhaps terminal crisis. It has no identity. Its base of voting support is breaking up, both to the right and to the left. Paradoxically Jeremy Corbyn's successful campaign, while of immense value - and a real breakthrough since the demise of the Benn/Scargill left current of the 1980s - in reconstituting a left political, even activist current in Britain's mainstream politics, including in the unions, is a part of that Labour Party crisis. Whatever else it is, it is not a sign of the renewal of the British Labour Party.

The main approach adopted by British socialists towards the Labour Party in the first part of the 20th century was to try to bring its mass base into collision with its leadership, structures, parliamentary dominance and defense of the establishment. From the late 1960s onwards, socialists began to stress their independence from the Labour Party, summed up in the 1980s by Benn's thousands strong Socialist Movement, which combined the Labour Party left with the left outside the LP. From Blair and the Iraq war onwards, socialists in Britain, particularly in some key unions, believed a fight inside Labour was more likely to be a result of struggles and campaigns and even new parties built by a new left outside the Party than any internal Labour Party fight. And that appears to be what has happened.

An anti-austerity / anti-war left has emerged across Britain in the last ten years. In Scotland it has found some space in the SNP-led independence campaign. In England and Wales it has emerged from the mass movements created to oppose war and austerity, and partly found political expression in support for the Greens. It has now lit up the sky in the battered Labour Party by driving behind Jeremy Corbyn's candidacy, (backed by the remains of the anti Blair forces still inside the Party.)

It is worth repeating that Corbyn's campaign is immensely valuable in consolidation of an anti war, anti austerity current in society. But it will not 'win' the Labour Party. The Labour Party is run through Parliament. Jeremy's 20 MPs will not hold the line. The Labour Party leaders will do their best to ruin Jeremy.

But the most significant point here is not that Jeremy's campaign cannot 'win' Labour (despite all the utopian plotters now lining up 'the right' candidates for the delectation of the myriad Labour internal committees.) It is that while Jeremy's campaign is giving political expression to a new, vitally important current in society, that current is still a tiny minority. Even if Jeremy wins the leadership of Labour, even if he avoids or defeats internal attempts to remove him, it is the electorate that will in next May's elections and beyond, destroy him. Yes, Jeremy will argue that internal dissension, media bias etc is to blame and that will be partly true. But the main reason why Jeremy's possible leadership would drive Labour support in the polls to single figures is that the anti-war, anti-austerity political current in society has not yet conquered its first task - to show that today's economic, social and political crisis can be, has to be, overcome by new politics and new economics and new mass organisations.

Such a mass political current can, will and has already influenced mainstream politics, dramatically in the case of Jeremy Corbyn's candidacy. But it is only beginning to take its role in Britain's history.

Empire (but not support for Imperialist wars and takeovers) has long gone. The British 'labour aristocracy' is no longer a social base for a vast and homogeneous labour bureaucracy. The remaining labour bureaucracy is in decline and is changing as a political force. The current Labour Party, like many of the European Social Democrat Parties, is cracking and flaking as it hollows out. A new left is growing as an old society, and all its associated junk, sinks. It is emerging in action and without preconceptions, trying anything and everything. What do socialists do?

They show how a minority can become a majority. How a political current can become a mass organisation. How the paralysis of the past can be broken. How the huge new changes and their accompanying fears can be managed and dealt with. How new political and economic systems - and a new society - are entirely possible.

We are a great grandmother!

Mrs Thatcher, British Prime Minister for ten years, first came out with the phrase
'We are a grandmother' in the 1980s.
Britain's queen has been a great grandmum for a while now. She has not made any personal announcements about it. After all, she's not the daughter of a grocer.

A range of the not very great and the far from good (Dr David Owen, John Major on the phone and a couple of history professors) were rounded up this morning by the 'Today' programme on BBC 4 - the only TV or radio station that still plays the national anthem when the queen AND her husband have official birthdays - to tell us all how simply spiffing it all was that Britain's current queen had reigned over the Brits for longer than any of their other monarchs.

But they all struggled to explain in what Elizabeth's (the second's) greatness lay. In the end they found different ways of repeating that she had gone on and on and on - and that was, well, bloody marvellous!

'She has secured', stated the sonorous Doctor, 'three generation of the royal succession.'

There you have it. The purpose of a good monarch in a nutshell.