LRC: Labour Representation Committee or Lefties’ Recreational Club?
This coming Saturday will see the annual conference of the Labour Representation Committee. For those of you who don’t know, this is a body mainly composed of Labour Party members and affiliated bodies, whose basic purpose is to provide a forum via which people can try to resurrect a socialist politics within that party.
Some good friends of this blog are LRC members, and some (MarshaJane Thompson, Maria Exall and Sue Press to name but three ) are even running for elected positions – against each other! Furthermore, some admirable figures, such as John McDonnell MP, are prominent within it.
I know we’ve had this debate before, in similar posts on this blog and elsewhere. However I think it’s worth re-visiting. In spite of repeated conferences, meetings and other things on various policy areas, successive years have not seen the LRC gain any mainstream traction within the party, or noticeably shift its politics at all, as far as I can see. To an outsider such as myself, it looks like people gather, debate a raft of motions, elect each other to positions, get pledges of affiliation from various organisations, then go to the pub. All good fun, and no doubt much of the discussion is very interesting, but what’s the underlying plan?
LRC figures have been heavily involved in the drafting and promotion of the “People’s Charter”, an admirable initiative which aims to build a coalition behind a set of basic demands to improve the daily lives of working people in the UK. Amongst its signatories is Tony Woodley, joint General Secretary of UNITE, the union of which myself and Mr Denham are both members. The problem with it is that it has little or no existence outside of the world of conference rooms and committees. There has been little or no evidence that the several national unions which support the charter have any intention of acting forcefully on its demands, and as for “People’s”, most of the people have never heard of it, let alone signed up.
I have heard more than one person give various explanations as to what they think is the purpose of ongoing Labour Party work. These have ranged from the idea that it is still possible for the left to win traction via the various internal party processes (candidate selection etc), to more speculative ideas like the prospect of things “kicking off” inside the party after the 2010 election. The people saying these things, incidentally, are not generally stupid fantasists but sincere and decent men and women of the left.
I just can’t see any of these things happening. If we could win anything within the party via any process under the present circumstances then we would have done so. As for things kicking off after the next election, I fail to see who realistically is going to be doing the kicking. The Labourite left in the unions has thus far failed to bite, even where it controls national executives or general secretary’s posts. The revoltionary left in Labour-affiliated unions is too weak and fractured to make anything much practical happen. The active constituency membership, on the other hand, is (with local exceptions) perhaps more right-wing than it has been at any point in the party’s history.
On reflection, the title of this post may seem a little harsh. I would certainly not wish to attack the integrity or commitment of most LRC supporters. Perhaps what I need is to be convinced that the LRC is, or can be, anything much more than a gathering where people can air their grievances at the political system before heading off to remnisce over a beer. There’s nothing innately wrong in that, but surely the LRC was meant to be so much more.
Mark P said,
November 12, 2009 at 11:39 am
No, the title isn’t too harsh. Neither is their any contradiction between being “sincere and decent” and being a “stupid fantasist”.
The LRC is a completely meaningless body, of interest only because by getting the rump of the Labour left together it displays just how small and directionless that rump is.
woodlandian23 said,
November 12, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Small and directionless?
Unfortunately that description fits most the left outside of the Labour Party as well.
Matt said,
November 12, 2009 at 4:02 pm
‘resurrect’ is a fitting word to describe the attempt to revive the leftt wing of the Labour Party as a force in politics, the chances of it happening are about as likely as the JC story 2,000 years ago being true: LRC could also easily stand for ‘Lefties Retirement Club’.
The “People’s Charter”, rather than being an ‘admirable initiative’ is a classic Stalinist-populist response to the capitalist crisis, no wonder it’s won the support of the ‘Morning Star’ types in UNITE. Rather than being a problem, the fact that “it has little or no existence outside of the world of conference rooms and committees. ..as for “People’s”, most of the people have never heard of it, let alone signed up. ” is actually a good thing.
Simon said,
November 12, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Not harsh, no: we need an honest debate on the Left about the way forward. But I don’t agree with you. Of course, if people don’t get involved in initiatives like the LRC then there will be nobody around post-2010 to do the ‘kicking’. But that’s an argument *for* getting involved in the LRC. In any case, what’s your alternative strategy? Like it or not, the Labour Party exists, and remains tied to the British working class and its institutions. It fails to represent these, certainly, but it retains the ties. That fact has to be faced when thinking about socialist strategy in Britain.
voltairespriest said,
November 12, 2009 at 4:35 pm
I certainly don’t have a pre-packaged alternative strategy, Simon. However, I don’t see how it follows that one should therefore default to inside-of-Labour strategies and tactics which have been (let’s face it) failing for decades. In fact, I don’t think anyone would deny that the left in the LP has been losing ground for decades, in part precisely due to defaulting to the same things it’s always done in the absence of a “3-minute ready meal” alternative being presented to it.
As for the union links, it strikes me that these haven’t produced much in the way of tangible gain, certainly during my living memory. Technically if my own union were to really throw its weight around, we could already cause an earthquake within the party. We have a left-controlled GEC and one of our two gen secs is someone most people in the labour movement would view as at least friendly to the left. Yet our Labour NEC representatives haven’t shown me much evidence of speaking out loudly, and as for UNITE-sponsored MPs… well, I haven’t done an analysis of voting records but there are enough obvious examples to show that we don’t have a huge amount of clout for our cash.
All I really see at the moment is hundreds of thousands of pounds of members’ money being channelled via the union’s bureacracy into a “Labour Party” which does not govern in the interests of working people. Therefore I think it’s a bit too abstract to want to preserve “the link” for its own sake, because in and of itself it does nothing.
Jack haslam said,
November 14, 2009 at 1:38 pm
What is needed is a revolutionary socilaist organisation which is rooted in the working class and the trade unions.
A middle class radical left strategy based on permeating labour structures is as pointless and irrelevant as one centred on building an electoral alliance against Labour. Both strategies have failed and are guaranteed to do so.
The fact is that a working class socialist organisation would of necessity work inside the Labour Party because of the link between the main manual unions and the the party.
Lenin used to say that the way to defeat the agents of capital in the labour movement is to go deeper in to the working class.
A measure of how far away from doing this broad sections of the far left are can be seen from the hostile attitude that most of the far left (with the honourable exception of the SP and Socilaist appeal) took to the construction engineering strikes.
Rebuilding the unions,organising the un-organised and restating some of the basics of working class militancy and solidarity are the pre-requisite of any genuine advance in the prospects for socialism. A serious orientation to this kind of work would also force the left to re-think virtually everything else it does. Most of which is self evidently pointless ephemeral stunt politics conducted at a frenetic pace that makes it structurally impossible to integrate working class people into the so-called revolutionary groups.
voltairespriest said,
November 14, 2009 at 5:04 pm
I almost completely agree, Jack. You’re certainly right about the toytown approach of much of the social-democratic left in simply seeking positions in Labour Party and wider labour movement structures for the pursuit’s own sake. I also agree with you about the howling-in-the-wilderness of some of the microgroups, and I’d also add in the SWP’s apparent willingness to look for quick-fix substitutes (apparently of any kind) for a class-based approach to political action.
However, do you really place so much weight on the union link, in the present day and age? It seems to me that it’s become a very expensive political appendix to the body of the labour movement, which after all could create its own political expression if it so chose. I simply don”t believe that the LP is, or even any longer could be, that political expression of working people.
Jack haslam said,
November 14, 2009 at 9:15 pm
Voltie,
I think you’re looking at the question the wrong way round. The labour party has never been a political expression of the working class.It is a capitalist political machine sitting on top of the bedrock working class organisations.
The issue isn’t whether or not the labour party can be turned into an instrument of socilaist transformation, it can’t. the question is how the working class can go beyond the stage of development represented by labourism.
Revolutionary socilaists in the trade unions have to address the fact that there is as yet no significant support within broad sections of the class , and therefore in the unions, for a positive political break from labour. In this situation the thing to do is to get the unions to assert themselves politically, both inside and outside the labour structures, and see what happens.
working class socilaists have to reckon with two basic factors;
1) the scope of the attacks a tory government will unleash on the unions and the working class and;
2) the strong objective push this has towards a resentful pro labour electoral ‘lesser evilism’ amongst those union militants who aren’t just a-political.
Messing about with anti-labour electoral coalitions just further isolates the left from what still exists of the core trade union movement.
Jack haslam said,
November 14, 2009 at 9:29 pm
One more point..
The trade unions as they actually exists couldn’t just create their own party. The pre-requisite for an advance of that kind would be a pretty thorough transfomation of the unions along militant class struggle lines away from the present reality of concession bargaining and business unionism.
Just think of the ‘syndicalist revival’ that went hand in hand with the development of the Labour Party after 1900.
voltairespriest said,
November 15, 2009 at 12:13 am
Then surely that, and not fruitless LP work, is where the left in the labour movement should be placing its energies?
Jack haslam said,
November 15, 2009 at 10:12 pm
Trade union action on its own is by definition limited. A political dimension is needed.
Most forms of committee based resolutionary socilaismis ls pretty fruitless most of the time, This is as true of tiny unrepresentative union branch meetings as it is of labour party wards. .
A focus on building a base in workplaces and communities and leading struggles to actually win things is what is required.
There can be times when it might make sense to do this through the Labour party.
Take the question of restoring the full right to strike and take solidarity action. I can’t see any other way of securing this other than by a campaign by the unions and the socialist left to commit the labour party to this policy. And to put things bluntly, if the unions aren’t in a positon to win this,or at least make a half serious go at winning it, then we are miles away from creating a new trade union based party.
Gareth Hughes said,
November 15, 2009 at 11:08 pm
I was at the conference yesterday. The conference had a warm, friendly atmosphere, quite unlike some other meetings of the Left, but we weren’t there to engage in cosy recreation. I’m in the LRC because I’m fed up with the non-Labour Left’s inability to do anything very much (join and split, float a new party that gets nowhere, join and split). The LRC is doing a half decent job at bridging the gap between the Left in Labour and those on the outside, and it’s especially good at keeping a connection with the disaffiliated unions. After all, the Labour Party still has a left wing, which has solid grassroots support, and is the only platform that gives us socialists in Parliament. Now, I think all things are seriously important, and I don’t think many of the groups on the Left are worth the membership fee. If you want to see socialists making a difference, you’ll see it in the LRC.