A New Cold War - Rivalry To Grow Between China, Russia And The USA As Globalization Ends

Mike O'Sullivan

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I cover the economic and financial world outside the USA, for the USA.


Activists carry placards during a protest in front of the Chinese consulate in Manila on February ... [+] AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

The upturn in the world economy and the assured arrival in power of the Biden administration will have many commentators pondering as to whether globalization is back, after a violent interregnum during the Trump years.

I believe globalization is finished. To take trade as an example, if trade bounces back it will have changed in two important ways, both of which make the world less interdependent.

Trade will change

First, trade and state led investment will be driven by the notion of ‘strategic autonomy’ – that they should be structured so as to reinforce a country’s geopolitical power as well as its prosperity. Second, advances in technology and the corporate strategy lessons from the coronavirus crisis mean that business models can be more technology driven, more decentralized and arguably less labour intensive, something that may impact many south Asian countries.

Another important element is that the one aspect of globalization that many ignore is political. Globalization happened because of a shift in political models – communism fell, and thereafter the ‘American’ model traversed the world (again especially Asia), the number of democracies rose, and human development improved manifestly across the world.

Yet, this sense of ‘one system’ is now at an end – the global financial crisis and the Trump Presidency have sapped its credibility. Moreover, globalization has not transformed the world politically in the image of the American model. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the flourish in ‘democracies’ has halted and is reversing. Take for example the the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index which in 2020 fell to its lowest level since 2006, and with 70% of countries covered showing a deterioration in the quality of their democracy.

In this respect there are two vital cognitive errors that ‘Western’ commentators make. The first is to assume that all countries prioritise their economy over geopolitics and social needs – Russia shows that this is not the case. The second is to believe that economic progress will naturally beget a desire for democracy. China, and the relative success of its Communist Party show that this is not the case.

Hong Kong

What is now important and noticeable is that more and more events are occurring that push back and check the liberal democratic model. The most prominent of these is the quenching of Hong Kong’s ‘two systems’, and event that bookends the fall of communism. The failure of liberal democracies to support the pro-democracy movement in Belarus is another and is the dereliction of many world institutions such as the WHO (World Health Organisation).

The abject failure of Josep Borrell’s diplomatic mission to Moscow and a surge in military posturing in and around the South China Sea (for example ‘scrambles’ of Japanese fighter jets are at a record, averaging three per day) also point to a hardening of political arteries.

Against this backdrop, a new model is emerging to challenge that of liberal democracies and for the first time since Ronald Reagan bemoaned the ‘evil empire’, we have two competing ‘ways of government’. I call them the Levelling and Leviathan models, drawn from the mid 17th which was formative period for the emergence of the nation-state, elaboration of democracy and thinking on how government should work.

Levellers

The Levelling model (from the 17th century English movement who crafted the ‘Agreement of the People) is based on the popular rediscovery of liberal democracy in the light of all of the challenges our world throws at it – indebtedness, climate damage and the penetration of social media into mindsets. Most of Europe, including the UK and the Democratic Party in the USA and naturally the Biden administration are in this camp. Indeed, on Friday President Biden staked a claim to revitalise liberal democracy when he stated he would ‘make a strong and competent case that democracy is the model that can best meet the challenges of our time’.

On the other side, are the Leviathans – who following the sense of Thomas Hobbes’ 1651 book ‘Leviathan’ see the need for a ‘supreme’ actor to control a country’s fortunes and where its citizens enter into a bargain with that leader. China today is a ‘Leviathan’ – its citizens exchange liberty for prosperity and national prestige, and there are growing signs that its President covets a long, unchallenged (ask Jack Ma) period in power. Its not clear to me that Russia for instance is a ‘Leviathan’ country, given the lack of a cohesive national project and the lack of a real developmental contract between Vladimir Putin and his people.

A world defined by ‘recuperating liberal democracy’ and ‘tough managed democracy’ will have many implications. Rhetorically it will make the role of the likes of Joe Biden easier if he can frame world affairs along these lines. It may also force the debate on European values – eastern European states may be forced to give up the illusion that they can pick and choose the variety of democracy they adhere to.

Finally, the battle of the competing attractions of the ‘Leveller’ versus ‘Leviathan’ model will be played out across many emerging nations. Ethiopia is one such example, where an open economy and the beginnings of a stable polity were beginning to take hold but that has recently lurched towards a more controlling, and brutal style of government. Think also of Nigeria – where inequality is growing and where unrest could become a serious socio-political issue. Nigerians may soon ask themselves if they want to replicate China’s success or whether Britain is a model for them.

Mike O'Sullivan
I am the author of a book called The Levelling which points to what's next after globalization and puts forward constructive ideas as to how an increasingly fractured world can develop in a positive and constructive way. The book mixes economics, history, politics, finance and geopolitics. Markets are the best place to watch and test the way the world evolves. Most of my career has been spent in investment management, the last 12 years at Credit Suisse where I was the chief investment officer in the International Wealth Management Division. I started my career as an academic, at Oxford

E.P. Thompson at 100

An interview with

Jeremy Corbyn John McDonnell Kate Hudson

06.02.2024

At Saturday’s Palestine solidarity protest — which took place on E.P. Thompson's centenary — Jeremy Corbyn, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's Kate Hudson and John McDonnell remember the pioneer of ‘history from below’ and the debt owed to him by the anti-war movement.

E.P. Thompson speaks from the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival, 1986.

INTERVIEW BY Owen Dowling

This Saturday, the 3 of February 2024, saw a diverse crowd of 200,000 people descend upon Whitehall in the Eighth National March for Palestine since the onset of Israel’s genocidal latest assault upon the people of Gaza. Mustered by the longstanding coalition around the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the bustling demonstration demanded a ceasefire in Gaza as a step towards negotiations for a just political settlement, and for Britain to withdraw all military and diplomatic succour for Israel following the ICJ’s ruling last week.

Joining a platform hosting Palestinian representatives and campaigners, and progressive British activists, MPs, and trade unionists, RMT general secretary Mick Lynch addressed the impassioned crowd:


No matter what our background, no matter what our community, no matter what our religion, we are all working people together. They are working people in Gaza and in the West Bank, and we must show our solidarity. We call on all of the trade unions, and all of the socialist movement, and our Labour Party: stand up and support the people who are being massacred, stand up against the slaughter, stand up against genocide — and build the bridges of peace on behalf of the people of the world, and especially the people of Palestine!

The mobilisation of the working-class movement in its tradition of internationalism against war and oppression and for peace and freedom was also a paramount concern for the celebrated Marxist historian E.P. Thompson (1924-1993), whose centennial birthday fell upon the same Saturday as London’s latest Palestine march. Author of a foundational classic of radical history-from-below, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), Thompson was also a leading champion and protagonist of popular protest in his own time — against exploitation, war, state repression, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

With centenary celebrations for this legendary founder member and former vice-president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament coinciding serendipitously with the occasion of another massive national demonstration against the greatest international injustice of our own age, co-organised by the CND of today, Tribune’s Owen Dowling spoke to several of the rally’s speakers about Thompson, his tradition as both historian and campaigner, and his significance for Britain’s socialist movement in its solidarity with Palestine today.
Jeremy Corbyn
OD


Looking back today, on the centenary of his birth, what has been the significance for you and your socialist and antiwar commitments of Edward Thompson, as a historian and as a peace campaigner?
JC


I always thought of him as E.P. rather than Edward; his children lived in my constituency and I obviously knew them. His role in political history and historical writing was fantastic, and I was brought up on his books, if you like, politically. And then when he wrote that absolutely brilliant polemic, Protest and Survive, against the government’s ludicrous Protect and Survive pamphlet in 1980, an absolutely brilliant riposte, that inspired a whole movement of people.

We should remember that the intellectual, academic, challenging historian has an incredibly powerful place in our movement and in our society, because if we don’t look at history from the point of view of popular movements and the growth of common causes, and only look at it through the prism of the interests of states, the military, royalty, and establishments, then we lose so much. And I think that Edward Thompson was one who did that. I thank him for that, and his legacy will last forever for all of that.

Dorothy Thompson [socialist historian and campaigner, author of The Dignity of Chartism among other works, and Edward’s wife] I also knew quite well. Dorothy and I had a very interesting relationship; we used to go to a secondary school in Marleybone, Quintin Kynaston School, which had an annual ‘balloon debate’ where you had to go into ‘the balloon’ playing a particular character, and then would vote on who would be ‘thrown out’ and who would ‘survive’ to the end. I was there being Karl Marx, and Dorothy was there playing Queen Victoria. She was absolutely brilliant at being Queen Victoria, and managed to create a sort of almost feminist narrative around Queen Victoria’s life. At one point we got into a sort of repartee, she was saying: ‘Mr Marx, you don’t even want my head to be on my shoulders’, and I was just saying: ‘Your Majesty — no, I’m not calling you “Your Majesty”, you’re just a person, you’re Mrs Saxe-Coburg-Gotha!’ It became a big joke, the whole thing, and we got on really well. She was actually brilliant at bringing out Queen Victoria in the role of the monarch during all the social movements of the nineteenth century; she would say things like: ‘I suppose, Mr Marx, you support the Chartists?!’
OD


Do you think E.P. Thompson’s life and work has an importance for those of us in Britain marching for peace and in solidarity with Palestine today?
JC


E.P. Thompson would absolutely be here today, right at the front of the march, because he would see the connection — as there is an obvious connection — between the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to bring about a nuclear-free world, and the cause of Palestine solidarity. Israel is an undeclared holder of nuclear weapons; Mordechai Vanunu suffered eighteen years imprisonment for revealing the truth about Israel’s nuclear aspirations. And Thompson would also have been supportive of a campaign which for many years many of us raised at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of a Middle East weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone, in order to bring about the possibility of talks between Iran and Israel, about Israel getting rid of its nuclear weapons in order to discourage Iran from developing them. So yes he would absolutely be at the front of it.

I think the whole peace movement, the labour movement, the socialist movement needs to thank people like Edward Thompson.
Kate Hudson
OD


As General Secretary of CND, which is one of the cohosts of today’s march and has been part of the coalition behind these Palestine demonstrations for some years, how do you see the politics of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament aligning with those of the movement for solidarity with Palestine?
KH


Well this movement is overwhelmingly for peace, for justice, for a negotiated political solution to the crisis for the Palestinians, and that is fundamental to the type of politics that CND has. We’re always looking for a peaceful solution, we’re always looking for an end to weapons use, to the weapons trade, and so on, so it aligns very closely. Of course for us, one of the points which we do try and draw out is that Israel is a nuclear-armed state, it has nuclear weapons, and there is a danger if the conflict spreads more widely in the region that nuclear weapons may be used.
OD


From the time of its inception in 1958 through the 1980s to today, CND’s politics have also had an anti-imperialist orientation. Do you see that as reflected in its contemporary solidarity with Palestine?
KH


Well, very, very clearly; we draw out a number of strands around this. There’s a really strong developing movement against nuclear colonialism, raising the question of where nuclear weapons have been tested in the past, where uranium is mined — largely on the lands of indigenous people — so there’s a big issue around that. But again it comes back to the question of justice and freedom. If a small number of countries, maybe they have nuclear weapons, maybe they go around invading other countries, start stamping on other people’s rights — we’re absolutely opposed to that, because you can’t have a world of peace while you continue to have that kind of power inequality in the world.
OD


On the centenary of E.P. Thompson’s birth, how do you see his legacy in relation to the internationalist and antiwar practice of CND today?
KH


It’s really fundamental to it, E.P. Thompson was one of the great figures in our history. But he’s not just a historical figure; his values, his whole ethos, everything he fought for is central to our movement today, absolutely. Those concepts of peace, socialism, and internationalism — those are at the heart of the labour movement, and that’s what we want to ensure, that peace and anti-imperialism remain central to the labour movement.
OD


Since the 1950s CND, and in the 21st century the Palestine Solidarity Campaign have both entered into the canon of British popular social movements from below that E.P. Thompson of course helped recover historically: from the Levellers and the Diggers through the Chartists, the trade union movement, support for Republican Spain, and beyond. Do you think Thompson would be marching with us today if he were here?
KH


100 percent. He was in that fantastic tradition — of the people, from the grassroots, organising, working together, solidarity. He would have been here now.
John McDonnell
OD


Today would mark the 100th birthday of Edward Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class and lifelong CND and peace activist. You’ve written on and engaged publicly with that school of history-writing. What has been the significance for your politics and conception of radical history of E.P. Thompson?
JM


When I was a student, I came off the shop floor and then went to a university after night school, and one of the key texts you did in politics and political theory and history was E.P. Thompson’s book. It was one of the most fundamental analyses of how the working class was forming itself, how it was recognising itself in all its different strands. And then for a number of years it was one of those books that you read as a text that were so enjoyable, so enlightening.

Then years after, during the pandemic, I discovered a reading group [‘Casualties of History’ (2020) with Alex Press and Gabriel Winant, from Jacobin Magazine] reading a chapter a month of Thompson’s book, and it was so enjoyable re-exploring it all again. It shaped an understanding of the class relations of our society, about how they were formed from their origins, and the very title — The Making of the English Working Class — about how the working class were making themselves, and they still are.
OD


In the 1980s, when you were on the Greater London Council, did you have any involvement with the CND movements of the time in which Thompson was prominent as a campaigner?
JM


You and I are talking outside in Whitehall at the moment. When I was a GLC councillor I came out of County Hall to greet a CND demonstration, and they had a band, and they decided as part of the protest that they would sit down in Whitehall. So I was arrested and spent the night in the cells and came out the next day, and it was one of those occasions which you always remember — because at that point in time we were again on the edge of a nuclear war because of the rearmament that was taking place. And it was people like Thompson and others who held fast in convincing people that that wasn’t the way to go and that we needed peace.
OD


Having led several enormous demonstrations through these London streets against NATO’s installation of US cruise missiles on British soil during his time, would Thompson have been in support of today’s demonstration for Palestine?
JM


Yes he would, he was an internationalist, an antiwar internationalist. He was about changing society, transforming society, but not just here in terms of British politics: he was an internationalist who wanted a global transformation. That whole generation of the New Left would be here, definitely. Because one of the things that they emphasised was how working people can come together and then exert their power to secure peace.

We haven’t come as far as we wanted to in terms of the CND campaign, but people haven’t gone away; the concerns that people have about war and instability in the world at the moment demonstrates how necessary it is to get rid of nuclear weapons, and I think that’ll come back on the agenda. There’s a new wave, a new generation of political activity now, and I think it’s important that we seize this opportunity and insert again the nuclear weapons debate into that.

About the Authors

Jeremy Corbyn is the member of parliament for Islington North.

John McDonnell is the Labour Party member of parliament for Hayes and Harlington.

Kate Hudson is the General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
About the Interviewer

Owen Dowling is a historian and archival researcher at Tribune.

 

UK

Hatfield Main Pit: Never Forget, Never Forgive

Forty years after the start of the historic miners’ strike, Bryn Griffiths returns to Yorkshire, where members of his family once mined coal.

 On Saturday 9th March 2024, I had an emotional return with my family to Hatfield Main in South Yorkshire to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Great Miners’ Strike. My Grandad and other family members of that generation had worked in the local pits during the earlier successful strikes of 1972 and 1974. I spent the 1984-85 strike as an activist in the Brighton Miners’ Support Group but my heart always lay with the militant miners of Hatfield Main. Emotion was the order of the day for everyone. As we made our way through the streets, people came out of their houses to clap and show their respect. I spotted one woman shed a tear.  

Ken Capstick, a Vice President of the Yorkshire NUM during the strike, wrote to event organiser Mick Lanaghan: “In all my 50 years as Branch and Area Official of the NUM (Yorkshire Area) I have never attended a miners’ event so full of emotion… to receive such a warm welcome from so many wonderful people will remain with me a as a special moment and the proudest moment of my life as a Yorkshire Miners’ Leader.”

Capstick went on to put the Hatfield miners alongside “the Chartists, the Levellers, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the suffragettes.” We were all attending an important event and we knew it.

We gathered at a packed Broadway Hotel, in Dunscroft, and in the very best traditions of the miners we set off towards the Hatfield Main Pit Head with the Doncaster and East Yorkshire Pipe Band leading the way.  The Hatfield Main Branch Banner featured AJ Cook, the Miners Federation of Great Britain and of course Keir Hardy from the Independent Labour Party and a founder of today’s Labour Party.

The Doncaster and East Yorkshire Pipe Band

We stopped at the Hatfield Main pithead, one of the few winding gears left standing after a campaign by  the Hatfield Main Heritage Trust.  The head gear was constructed in 1922 and now, thanks to the community campaign, has official Historic England Status.  At the pithead we were entertained by the Hatfield and Askern Colliery Band. 

The most important speech at the pithead was delivered on behalf of Dave Douglass – one of Hatfield’s most prominent militants who appears on one of the Hatfield Main banners alongside such greats as Scottish NUM leader Mick McGahey, local miner Freddie Matthews who gave his life on the picket line in 1972 and none other than Rosa Luxemburg.

Dave’s speech in absentia drew from his must-read working-class miners’ historyGhost Dancers. Dave put the strike of 1984-85 in its historical context. Taking us back to the miners’ strike in 1912 he reminded us that, “Churchill put machine guns at the pitheads, and tanks on the streets,  armoured cars on the docks and swore to drive us back down our holes like rats… and when Arthur Cook [Miners’ Federation of Great Britian leader] said we would let grass grow on the pulley wheels before we’d submit to longer hours and still more wages reduction, Churchill said he’d make us eat the grass.”Dave, the South Yorkshire picket organiser in 1984-85 is unwell so I wish him a rapid recovery.

We were joined by Arthur Scargill, the former NUM president, as we marched to the site of the Battle of Hatfield  where the local community was attacked by riot police as a few scabs were escorted into the pit in 1985.  The day is memorialised by the broken stump of a lamppost that met its end in the mayhem that ensued.

The site of the Battle of Hatfield

At the Pit Club we heard keynote speeches from Rose Hunter, North Staffs Miners’ Wives Action Group, and Arthur Scargill.  Arthur wore a Palestine badge and stood proudly, alongside Ken Capstick (on Arthur’s right), in front of a tall Palestinian flag.  Arthur opened his speech to loud cheers saying the “slaughter of more than thirty thousand innocent people including children and the unborn in Gaza is nothing less than genocide.” 

Arthur Scargill (centre) with Ken Capstick (right) at the Hatfield Main 1984-5 Strike commemoration

Arthur Scargill’s leadership of the NUM ended with some  controversial wrangling within the union and the creation of the ill-fated Socialist Labour Party adventure, but every militant supporter of the miners’ strike would praise him as a great trade union leader who stood with the rank-and-file miners to the very end.  This anniversary event was to mark our labour movement history and Arthur has an important place within it.

Gathering in the Pit Club to hear Arthur Scargill

Scargill’s speech was serious, long and intently listened to by the old miners. He recounted how, had NACODS, the pit deputies union which struck in September 1984, stood firm, the strike would have been won. He argued that there should have been a greater focus on starving the steel works of coal and maintained that the Battle of Orgreave could have been won had the pickets been maintained and built upon.  To this day he stands by the decision by the NUM not to hold a ballot and instead recognise the legitimacy of the Area actions in accordance with the union rule book to defend their jobs.

Arthur made a “particular tribute to the young miners.”  He also made a point of praising “the magnificent Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC) who were at the forefront of our struggle.”  On 12th May 1984 Arthur attended the first WAPC march in Barnsley and he said: “I confess that I anticipated that if we were lucky 500 would appear… I couldn’t believe my eyes – 10,000 women were in Barnsley.” He recalled, with admiration, how the women completely ignored police instructions to march away from the centre of the town.

George Galloway’s presence on the day has been noted in some coverage of the event. I did not spot him on the march but he did appear for the photo calls and stood behind Arthur like ‘Where’s Wally’ at the end. He was not a speaker; according to press coverage, he was not invited by the organisers and his main activity seemed to be posing for selfies.  Galloway is marmite and I never put it on my toast! 

For me the most inspiring speaker of the day was Rose Hunter from Stoke who was an important figure in the Women Against Pit Closures movement.  She started by remembering Davy Jones and Joe Green, the miners who were killed in the 1984-85 strike who as ‘Donkey Dave’ reports in the link had been remembered in Barnsley earlier in the day. Doreen Jones, Davy’s Mum, played an important role in the women’s movement. Rose said of Doreen: “The heartbreak of losing a bloody son never left her but she along with Mark Green [Joe’s Dad] continued to fight for justice… Her strong and defiant spirit lives on.”

Listening to Rose I was transported back to the strike as she introduced Liz French from Kent whom I met back in the 1980s. Rose told us that the Women Against Pit Closures were prominent at Wapping during the printers’ strike and were labelled “Scargill’s slags”, a badge she said they “wore with honour.” 

Women Against Pit Closures was the greatest working class women’s movement I have ever witnessed and, as Rose said, turning to the younger women in the room, “This is your legacy.”  She ended her speech by leading a thunderous rendition of the song Women of the Working Class, as many in the room choked back yet more tears.

I have marked the fortieth anniversary in the Labour Left Podcast with Mike Jackson, the co-founder of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners who was portrayed in the film Pride.  Mike was an excellent guest to take us through the political, cultural and industrial legacy of the strike. In the interview with Mike we explored Mark Ashton’s legacy, compared Kinnock and Starmer, re-examined the awful Clause 28, considered the importance of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign today and shared our deep-seated loathing of Margaret Thatcher.

Click to watch it on You Tube here. You can also listen to it on all your favourite podcast platforms such as Amazon, Audible, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify etc. Just search for Labour Left Podcast.

The day was not all serious stuff because as well as choking back the tears we had a lot of laughs.  Even the visit to the men’s urinals was marked by a memorable experience! As I looked down, I was met with a requirement to engage in target practice with a picture of Margaret Thatcher.  I laughed so much I almost missed.  As in the title of the event, we must never ever forgive.

Decoration of the Stainforth Pit Club Urinals

Bryn Griffiths, pictured below, is the host of Labour Hub’s spin off the Labour Left podcast which he produces with Luke Robinson, the podcast editor.  They are both activists in the labour movement, Momentum and The World Transformed in North Essex. Bryn writes regularly for Labour Hub. You can find all the episodes of the Labour left Podcast here  Bryn Griffiths will be speaking at a University of Sussex, UNITE and Sussex UCU event on Wednesday 20th March  to consider How Sussex Supported the Miners.

Bryn Griffiths in front of the Hatfield Main NUM Banners.

Photos: Bryn H Griffiths

Afterword to Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program

BY PETER LINEBAUGH
NOV 11,2020 COUNTERPUNCH 

Photograph Source: david__jones – CC BY 2.0

To the memory of Noel Ignatiev.

Dixi et salvavi animam meam. With these Latin words Karl Marx concludes his Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) – “I have spoken and saved my soul.” One is unaccustomed to religious expression from the great communist, unless it be sarcastic, yet here he uses it to conclude a devastating analysis of the program of German workers party. What is Marx’s soul? How did he save it? And what about ours?[1]

These Latin words from two and a half millennia previous were distilled from a ‘brazen and stubborn’ prophet, Ezekiel, who with bizarre, way-out visions of animals, jewels, and wheels within wheels heard these words whispered from the heavenly vault.[2]

If I pronounce sentence of death on a wicked person and you have not warned him or spoken out to dissuade him from his wicked ways and so save his life, that person will die because of his sin, but I shall hold you answerable for his death. But if you have warned him and he persists in his wicked ways, he will die because of his sin, but you will have discharged your duty.

Perhaps Marx learned this in childhood. The oracular voice and the prophetic role came easily to him. Dixi et salvavi was used by Engels too writing thirty years earlier in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844) when it expressed bourgeois contempt. The phrase from Ezekiel became part of pompous boss-talk as the boss clears his conscience and walks away. And for a moment Marx and Engels considered walking away from the nascent German socialist party, but hung on in there, despite his criticisms. Marx, however, at this moment of obligation refers to capitalism and its wicked ways.

Salvation depends on speaking; it is the moral imperative. Black Lives Matter speaks truth to power; Extinction Rebellion’s slogan is “to tell the truth;” and women in north America form “speak outs” in recovering from male violence. Indispensable to the revolutionary project is calling out the wicked ways. Black Lives Matter (BLM) has pointed to the murderous effects of white supremacy. #MeToo has pointed to the violent degradations inherent to patriarchy. Extinction Rebellion (XR) has taken direct action against the political and economic causes of planetary warming. At Standing Rock indigenous people attempt to prevent pollution of the waters. Racism, patriarchy, settler colonialism, and destruction of the planetary earth system are the “wicked ways.” These are four destructive structures of capitalism. With them in mind we look back to select what is useful from Marx’s Critique bearing in mind, so to speak, that Marx also looks to us!

Engels published (and revealed) the Condition of the English Working Class in 1844. That year too found Marx publishing an earlier “critique,” not of a political program but of a political philosophy. A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in which he described religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” “Criticism has plucked,” he writes, “the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.” To unmask self-estrangement he must turn to the criticism of actualities, and turn to history “to establish the truth of this world.” The two revolutionaries, Marx and Engels, one a critical philosopher and the other an empirical investigator, formed a partnership as revolutionary communists.

A year or so later they write, “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”[3] And that real movement in dissolving the world market abolishes alien property relations and restores mutual human relations. It is for us to see that real movement.” He makes the point again in The Critique of the Gotha Program: “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs.”

The goal is the commons, the means is the proletariat. What did these words – commons, proletariat – actually mean to him or to us? How are they part of the “real movement which abolishes the present state of things”?

Instead of proletariat he will write of producers or labor power. He’ll refer to serfs, to slaves; he’ll include employed and unemployed (the active army, the reserve army); he’ll refer to peasants, to artisans, to small manufacturers. All people who have lost their organic connections to nature, that is, to land, its creatures, its grains; to the waters and pastures; as well as to the geological resources lying beneath the land. All people who have been expropriated from the means of life, the means of production, the means of subsistence, this is what he means. It only remains to organize! “It is altogether self-evident that to be able to fight at all the working class must organize itself at home as a class…,” he states in this Critique. Yet this ‘class’ is constantly changing in its composition.

By the 1860s as the worker’s movement revived after the defeats that followed 1848, socialist parties were formed in Germany, and Marx helped to organize in 1864 the International Workingman’s Association, or the First International. It culminates with the Paris Commune of 1871, two months of self-rule by the French working-class, the first proletarian revolution.

The Gotha program says that labor is the source of all wealth. No, it’s not, says Marx. Nature is just as much a source of material wealth as labor. The single negation, right at the beginning with the little word “no” is the key that opens the door, for us in the twenty-first century, to planetary warming and the sixth extinction. We walk right in with the eco-socialism of Joel Kovel, Michael Löwy, and John Bellamy Foster .[4] We are present at the edge of the abyss staring into the “ecological rift.” Marx wrote of the “irreparable break” between nature and society. Or, he’d call the nature-humanity relation “metabolism.” The mass slaughter of the bison, the deforestation of the Great Lakes, the depletion of nutrients from the soil were some of the underlying phenomena of “the metabolic rift” in his day. The concept from Das Kapital of “the organic composition of capital” expresses in terms of economic quantities this rupture or rift.

Looking back to 1875 we see hints of Nature becoming self-conscious (as Elisée Reclus might say). About the time Marx was composing this critique the first “Arbor Day” (22 April 1875) celebrated by planting trees was announced in the USA and John Muir was walking in the Rockies and asking “How Shall We Preserve Our Trees.” While these were only “flea-hops” as Marx might say (see below) they were signs of what lay ahead.

Nature is the beginning both of life and of capitalism. “The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor since it follows precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature that the human being who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other human beings who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work by their permission, hence live only with their permission.” In Das Kapital this will be called expropriation and exploitation. In the young Marx it will be called alienation. Marx lifts the veil. To our world, to nature, to the biosphere, to creation, to the commons. Only the working class, he writes in the Gotha critique, can “lift this historical curse.”

Between the two critiques, 1844-1875, lay thirty years of class struggle, revolution, war, empire, and massive constructions of iron and steel, and Marx indeed threw away the imaginary flower to pluck the living flower. After the failures of the revolutions of 1848 he turned his attention to the demolition of the bourgeois divisions of politics from economics in perhaps the greatest critique ever made in the Grundrisse (1857) and Das Kapital (1867). These outlined the “wicked ways” of capital and established “the truth of this world.” They provide the means of plucking the living flower.

Could this critique become the soul, the heart, the sigh of the oppressed? It is no longer a philosophical or spiritual question; it is a political question.

One of his principle forms of critique is to describe the arguments of his opponent as “words” or “phrases” denying to them any substance in reason or factual evidence. He does this repeatedly in the Critique of the Gotha Program.(a sentence “limps,” “hollow phrases,” “bungled in style,” “mere phrases,” “obsolete verbal rubbish,” “false Lassallean formulation,” “a newspaper scribbler’s phrase”). Yet the critique contains two signature phrases of the Marxist outlook. One of them is both a profound summary of the fundamental opposition to capitalism and a fighting slogan for the banners of revolution, “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”[5] This is the seed of the living flower.

The physician, Luke, describes these early Christians who “had all things common” (Acts 4: 32) “and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need” (Acts 4:35). When threatened with famine during the reign of Claudius relief was obtained from “every man according to his ability.” (Acts 11:29).

What is it that abilities are creating? What is it that needs are accepting? Are we to interpret these two processes as production and consumption? In capitalist society production and consumption form a whole, the economy, regulated by the market, whose unit is the commodity, and whose lingo is money. This is “the historical curse.”

If you think about it, there seems to be some mysterious agent who measures out those abilities (senior management? HR?) or who doles out according to needs (Amazon? retail?). It is this mystery which can only be described in the future, “after the revolution.” Is it traditional institutions of civil society – family, work, government? Is it revolutionary assemblies – the congregation, the city the square, the soviet, some new version of the tribe? Is it some other social organization? Elinor Ostrom formulated it as ‘the governance of the commons.’[6] Marx relies neither on Providence nor on Progress for the realization of the future. The mystical former relies on divine agency and the abstract latter depends on Victorian technological and utilitarian belief. It does not happen automatically or inevitably. Earlier in the Grundrisse (p. 325) he had written “of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself”.

He refers to the “the common satisfaction of needs such as schools, health services, &c.” He refers to “the common stock.” The French revolutionary socialist, Jean Jaurès, said “Just as all citizens exercise political power in a democratic manner in common, so they must exercise economic power in common as well.”[7] Communist society, Marx writes, “emerges from capitalist society which is thus in every respect economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.”

What is the relationship between the statement of principles and the enumerated points of the program? In The Communist Manifesto (1848) the relationship was mediated by the history of class struggle. In the Critique of the Gotha Program the relationship depends on that critique of political economy found in Capital (1867) and the Grundrisse (1857).

In analyzing Marx’s thought we remind ourselves that thought is in motion. His ideas at any one time are not fixed in an eternity of truth. On the contrary they are very much of his times. So in understanding the problems of 1875 in the Gotha program, we can both think back to earlier phases of his thinking and forward to their subsequent development. We go back to the ‘young Marx’ and forwards to the ‘old Marx.’[8]

The ‘young Marx’ is all about alienation; he gives us both a spiritual and philosophical lens. The ‘old Marx’ is all about the commons; he gives us a lens in revolutionary anthropology and immersion in the so-called “backward” countries where indeed the air is better. Together the ideas of the young and the old Marx provide us with a way to read The Critique of the Gotha Program. We are no longer confined to the realm of political economy. We can approach both the meaning of communism and the anti-capitalist transition to it in ways that might be helpful in the twenty-first century.

The ‘mature Marx’ remains central which is to say that the critical analysis of the capitalist mode of production and the critique of political economy are what he is all about as he disentangles the hopeless web of error and bad politics found in the Gotha Program. Its guiding author, Ferdinand Lassalle, was formerly a follower of Marx who however allied with the Junkers, the German landlord class. Yet, the lords of the land turned nature into a commodity, a means of constant capital, and thus an instrument of extraction and exploitation. Such are the wicked ways.

The preface (1867) to Das Kapital, volume one, boldly proclaims, “Just as in the eighteenth century the American War of Independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, so in the nineteenth century the American Civil War did the same for the European working class.”[9] The American Civil War sounded the death knell of slavery with the horn of the jubilee. That tocsin will ring to the European working class with the Paris Commune (1871) and reverberate with the working classes of the world on going.

In the Paris Commune the abolition of the death penalty and the burning of the guillotine, the destruction of the Vendôme column to the Napoleonic empire, and the formation of the Women’s Union provide during the seventy-two days of its life an idea of working-class self-government, or the political imaginary of commune.[10] Said Marx, “The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence.”[11] As a result of the Commune Marx revised The Communist Manifesto to include the sentence, “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for their own purpose.”

In the summer of 1871 Peter Kropotkin (“mutual aid”) was in Finland, William Morris (“fellowship”) was in Iceland, and Karl Marx in London was studying the Russian language and reading Chernyshevsky’s Essays on the Communal Ownership of Land. His guide was the young Russian exile and Communard, Elisabeth Dmitrieff who besides leading Marx to the study of the peasant commune in Russia (the obshchina), was also the organizer of the seamstresses, laundresses, and dressmakers of Paris into the Women’s Union for the Defense of Paris and Aid to the Wounded. In Geneva discussions took place among veterans and exiles during the 1870s that produced the idea of “anarchist communism,” or the dissolution of State, Nation, and Capital.

The Commune was at the center of world-wide revolt. The writing of The Critique of the Gotha Program coincided with the hanging of nineteen coal miners (the “Molly Maguires”), with the police riot at Tompkins Square in New York, with the internment of the Navajo nation, the expropriation of the Comanches, the cultural war (‘kill the Indian, save the man’), Geronimo (“I was born where there were no enclosures”) escaping the San Carlos Reservation, and the African American military mobilization as ‘buffalo soldiers’ to annihilate the bison who had provided subsistence for the indigenous people of the plains. Thus did capital create and then utilize our divisions. The path was cleared for the global seizures and massacres in Africa, Asia, and Wounded Knee.[12]

The Kabylie revolt in Algeria against French conquest and confiscation of the common lands occurred at the same time as the Paris Commune. 250 tribes rose up, village assemblies providing the base along the coast, up the mountains, to the desert. It was led by Cheikh Mokrani. The infamous law of 1873 expropriated communal lands in Algeria, “tearing away the Arabs from their nature bond to the soil….”[13] At the end of his life in 1882 Marx spent two months in Algeria hoping that the commons of air in north Africa would heal the damage done to his lungs by capitalist externalities, i.e. London smog. Marx expressed his admiration of the Algerian Muslims for “the absolute equality of their social intercourse.”

Likewise, the defeat of the European working class (the two month Commune concluded with the bloody massacre of 20,000 – 30,000 communards) signaled the advent of Jim Crow, the end of Reconstruction, the KKK, the Colfax massacre, and the betrayals of 1875 Hayes-Tilden presidential election the year following. Virulent counter-revolution and violent suppression of textile workers of the north and railway workers of the west. “A new slavery arose,” wrote W.E.B. DuBois.[14] “The system of wage labor is a system of slavery,” wrote Marx in his Gotha Critique.

In a letter to Bebel in March 1875 Engels proposed replacing “state” everywhere by “Gemeinwesen, a good old German word which can very well convey the meaning of the French word “commune.” The Paris Commune four years earlier was, they said, “the glorious harbinger of a new society.” The mixture of commune, commons, and communism was a heady semantic mix concealing a revolutionary riddle not yet solved.

“The question then arises, what transformation will the body politic undergo in communist society? In other words what social functions analogous to present state functions will remain at that juncture. The question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word people with the word state [as Lassalle did in the Gotha program]. Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” We can say that this is, at least, a flea-hop.

The second key phrase in The Critique of the Gotha Program is “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” In 2020 Mike Stout, the Pittsburgh steel-worker and singer-song writer, gave one explanation: “the only ‘dictatorship’ I envision is one that doesn’t let the greedy 1% and their class drive us into indebted servitude, while squandering and hoarding our wealth and natural resources, and stops them from destroying the whole planet.”[15] Frederick Engels gave a similar explanation. In the same year that Engels published Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program (1891), he asked, “Do you want to know what the dictatorship of the proletariat looks like?” and answered, “Look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Marx had used the phrase once before in a letter (5 March 1852) to Joseph Weydemeyer (1818-1866). “My own contribution,” wrote Marx, “was (1) to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; [and] (3) that this dictatorship, itself, constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”

Weydemeyer went to America and became a lieutenant colonel in the Union Army. He surveyed Central Park, and he designed the defenses of St. Louis while distributing copies of Marx’s Inaugural Address to the International. Marx’s address addressed the ditch diggers and hod carriers of these earthen works, pointing to the day “like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart”!

“To conquer political power has therefore become the great duty of the working classes,” he wrote just as Black Reconstruction was beginning. Success depended not on numbers alone but upon knowledge particularly of solidarity, and that led to the formation in 1864 of the International. Emancipation of the working classes entailed “the abolition of all class rule.”[16]

We are familiar with the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie: the democratic Levellers of the 1640s were followed by the dictator Cromwell, the insurgent Jacobins of the1790s were followed by the emperor Napoleon, the Russian Bolsheviks of the 1920s were followed by Stalin. Marx had learned from the Paris Commune that the proletariat cannot simply take over the state and use it for its own purposes. It must smash the state.

W.E.B. DuBois intended to call his chapter on Black reconstruction in South Carolina, “The Dictatorship of the Black Proletariat in South Carolina” but changed it simply to “The Black Proletariat in South Carolina.” He made this change after it was brought to his attention that “since universal suffrage does not lead to a real dictatorship until workers use their votes consciously to rid themselves of the dominion of private capital. There were signs of such an object among South Carolina Negroes, but it was always coupled with the idea of that day, that the only real escape for a laborer was himself to own capital.” Dictatorship is a “stopgap pending the work of universal education, equitable income, and strong character.” He writes of the “dictatorship of capital” in the North, a plutocracy. When DuBois chose not to use the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” it was because the suffrage was used to promote individual rather than collective ownership.

We now write ‘history from below.’ The expression includes histories of the oppressed whether that is labor history or women’s history or indigenous people’s history or African American history or even (to use an old term) natural history. In every example the ‘below’ implies an ‘above.’ It implies a contrast or an unspoken opposite, namely ruling class history which is reified as economic history, then history of the state, then history of war. These are aspects of what the Zapatistas call the war of oblivion. Indeed, deliberate forgetting is one of capital’s wicked ways.

The anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, asked, “Will perhaps the proletariat as a whole head the government?” Marx answers, “There will in fact be no below then.” History from below comes to an end just as class rule comes to an end.[17] Class rule over the resisting strata continues “until the economic basis that makes the existence of classes possible has been destroyed.”

The view that Marx and Engels “rigidly refused to paint pictures of future communist society,” as Eric Hobsbawm says, is only a half-truth. Marx did not paint pictures with brush and oil; he took photographs. That is to say, he sought the commune in the real movement. This is the significance of Chernyshevsky, of Henry Lewis Morgan, of his stay in Algeria, of his letters to Zasulich. Hobsbawm says that Marx was provoked “into a theoretical statement which, if probably not new, had at any rate not been publicly formulated by him before.”[18] It wasn’t a question of “new” or not. To Marx theory generated the project of revolutionary investigation.

The Ethnological Notebooks are one of the major works of the ‘late Marx.’ They contain, among other things, close study from Lewis Henry Morgan of the five nations of the Iroquois, or the Haudenosaunee. The Notebooks delighted the Chicago surrealist, Franklin Rosemont, who took joy in Marx’s multiple references by the Iroquois and Muscokees to the species of ‘Turtle Island’ – elk, raccoon, buffalo, turtle, eagle, wolf. Marx insists on the importance of imagination to the elevation of human beings. It and the poetic spirit, the spiritual as such, lead us to the real movement.

Marx took note of the Iroquois whose “democratic assembly where every adult male and female member had a voice upon all questions brought before it.” “The women were the great power among the clans,” he copies into his notebook.[19] The same text inspired Engels to refer in The Origin of the Family to “the world-historic defeat of the female sex.”

In February 1881 Vera Zasulich initiated a correspondence with Marx on whether the rural commune, the obshchina, could “develop in a socialist direction or whether it was destined to perish as an archaism. Marx wrote several draft replies including a lengthy consideration of common property in history, as a constitutive form (assembly, kinship, clan), and in various ecologies of forest, pasture, meadow. He concluded “that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia.”[20]

“The rebuilding, whether it comes now or a century later, will and must go back to the basic principles of Reconstruction in the United States during 1867-1876 – Land, Light, and Leading for slaves black, brown, yellow and white, under a dictatorship of the proletariat”[21] It is not quite synonymous with ‘proletarian hegemony.’ The values of the material institutions of society have to change to become the ground of government. Hence, the decisive importance of the northern “schoolmarms” or the women who went south during Reconstruction to arm former slaves with the tools of reading, writing, and criticism.

Marx did not publish his Critique of the Gotha Program. But five years after he wrote it the French socialist, Jules Guesde, visited him in London in May 1880 and asked him to write the preamble to the program of the French Parti Ouvrier or Worker’s Party. Marx did so in a dense sentence with many thoughts: the productive class will emancipate all human beings without distinction of sex or race. They can be free only by possessing the means of production collectively. This must be accomplished by revolutionary action which may include universal suffrage as an instrument of emancipation rather than deception. The aim is “the political and economic expropriation of the capitalist class and the return to community of all the means of production….”

Here is the commons, here is democracy and universal suffrage, here the phrase “return to the community” implies something lost or expropriated. The term community refers to the collective, cooperative social forms which Marx was studying at the time (the Iroquois, the obshchina, Algeria) or what we might call the commons. It is not the state, the market, or the nation. The door is always open for the “real movement.”

Labor is organized by capital to work. When labor, employed or unemployed, organizes for itself it becomes a class and thus able to save its soul. So, the four structures of capitalism and their wicked ways – white supremacy, patriarchy, settler colonialism, and privatization – have caused risings among black and brown people, women, indigenous peoples, and the rebels against extinctions. The immanent possibility arises of these insurgencies becoming components of “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things….” This is not just an electoral or economic process. We can pluck the living flower to recreate the commons.

Ann Arbor, Turtle Island 2020.

This essay forms the “afterword” to PM Press’s forthcoming edition and new translation of Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Program.”

Notes.

1) I thank Wendy Goldman, Geoff Eley, and John Garvey for help with bibliography, Riley Linebaugh for suggestions, and Monty Neill for editing. ↑

2) Ezekiel 3:18-19 or 33:7-11 ↑

3) Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (Lawrence and Wishart: London 1965), p. 48. ↑

4) Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World (London: Zed, 2002), John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review, 2000), Michael Löwy, An Eco-Socialist Manifesto (2001) ↑

5) The phrase is not original to Marx. Louis Blanc had employed it in the 1848 Revolution, it was the epigraph to Saint-Simon’s journal, L’Organisateur, and Étienne Cabet used it in his utopian fiction, Voyage en Icarie (1845). ↑

6) Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutios for Collective Action (London: Cambridge University Press, 1990). ↑

7) Quoted by Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (Oxford Univrsity Press, 2002), p. 21. ↑

8) E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, refers to Marx’s “increasing preoccupation in his last years with anthropology, was resuming the projects of his Paris youth.” ↑

9) Capital, translated by Ben Fowkes (Penquin; London, 1976), p. 91 ↑

10) Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (Verso, London, 2015). ↑

11) Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, (1871) ↑

12) Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper, 1980), and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon, 2014). ↑

13) John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, “Marx and the Indigenous,” Monthly Review (February 2020) ↑

14) W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935) ↑

15) Mike Stout, Homestead Steel Mill The Final Ten Years (Oakland: PM Press, 2020), p. 8. ↑

16) Karl Marx, The First International and After: Political Writings, volume 3, David Fernbach (ed.) (Penguin: London, 1974), p.73-84 ↑

17) Karl Marx, “The Conspectus of Bakunin’s Book State and Anarchy,” ↑

18) E.J. Hobsbawm, How To Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism (New Haven: Yale U.P., 2011), pp.47 and 58. ↑

19) Composed in 1880-1882 and published in English for the first time in 1974, see Lawrence Krader (ed.) The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1974). Frankilin Rosemont, “Karl Marx & the Iroquois,” Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, 4 (1989), and republished as Environmental Action Series 5 by the Red Balloon Collective (199?). ↑

20) Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism (Routledge, 1983). ↑

21) DuBois, op.cit., p. 635. ↑


Peter Linebaugh is the author of The London Hanged, The Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (with Marcus Rediker) and Magna Carta Manifesto. Linebaugh’s latest book is Red Round Globe Hot Burning. He can be reached at: plineba@gmail.com

UNINTENTIONAL IRONY

UK

‘Starmerism is not a Blairite project. New Labour’s liberal quality is under threat’

Jon Cruddas

© Rupert Rivett/Shutterstock.com

In 1995, at a key moment in the creation of New Labour, Tony Blair gave a speech to the Fabian Society to mark the 50th anniversary of Clement Attlee’s 1945 victory. In his speech, Blair embedded New Labour within the work of philosophers such as JA Hobson and LT Hobhouse, pioneers of early 20th century New Liberalism.

The purpose behind Blair’s embrace was to reunite liberal and socialist traditions, a modern ‘LibLabism’ that earlier in the century had resulted in Labour’s first MPs in 1906 and the common campaigns of 1910. For Blair, the objective was a new progressive alliance to avoid a repeat of the Conservative domination of the 20th century and to build an anti-Tory coalition to win and retain power.

Labour’s 1992 defeat meant many modernisers remained fearful that the party might never again secure an outright victory. After that defeat, Blair had begun to meet privately with Alliance leader Paddy Ashdown to explore the future reconstruction of the left. Once leader, he privately stated to Ashdown that his preferred option was to include Lib Dem representatives in his government.

The landslide of 1997 removed the electoral imperative behind such changes. Yet Blair offered Ashdown membership of a joint cabinet committee to consider constitutional change, chaired by Blair himself, with equal representation from the two parties. Moreover, in December 1997, Blair established the Jenkins committee to recommend alternatives to the voting system.

Labour’s pluralist, liberal tradition has a rich history

The long-standing liberal left pluralist tradition within the party influenced the early phase of New Labour. There are three basic elements to this tradition.

First, a focus on questions of legal equality best expressed in the five decades of equalities legislation enacted by successive Labour governments from the 1960s culminating in the 2010 Equality Act. 

Second, the promotion of human rights derived from post-war concerns to defend and enhance human dignity and freedom given wartime experience of genocide and totalitarianism, reflected much later in the 1998 Human Rights Act. 

Third, confronting questions of constitutional and electoral reform to challenge the power of the state in the name of liberty and to advance citizenship. Initiatives such as reform of the House of Lords, devolution and freedom of information – all under the Blair government – reflect this emphasis.

This pluralist, liberal tradition has a rich history. It was on display with the pioneering social reforms of the 1960s under the guidance of Roy Jenkins. In the 1970s and 1980s, campaigners such as Tony Benn referenced the contribution of the Diggers, Levellers and Chartists when making the case for modern democratic and constitutional renewal. In the 1980s and 1990s, Charter 88 attracted widespread support from across the liberal, social democratic and socialist left. Above all, it can be identified in the embrace of human rights and constitutional reform by John Smith as Labour leader. In his first week as Prime Minister on July 3rd 2007, Gordon Brown argued for a written constitution.

This liberal plural tradition is under attack in the modern party

Today, this liberal plural tradition is under attack. Neal Lawson, a member for 44 years, is one of the most high profile advocates of pluralism in Labour. Neal is Labour through and through. In all the 30 years I have known him, he has continually demonstrated the Labour values that our party was built on: respect, tolerance, compassion and, importantly, pluralism. 

The soft left has historically been the group most committed to political and constitutional reform, to questions of liberty and freedom in their understanding of socialist justice. Compass, the think tank Neal leads, is the organisation most associated with upholding this tradition. Neal must have been targeted and threatened with expulsion for this reason.

My point is that what we are witnessing is not just an attack on Neal or Compass or the soft left. It is an attack on a liberal and pluralist tradition of justice pursued through democratic, constitutional and political reform and the pursuit of individual and human rights.

The right-wing faction who appear to be running the party, singling out Neal and deciding who is and is not a candidate or member come from a very different tradition – colder, more authoritarian and utilitarian, in which politics is all about state capture and factional control. Different political traditions have always coexisted around Labour. Every Labour leader has accepted this cohabitation.

Factionalism threatens our ability to challenge the status quo

Today, many see Starmerism as a New Labour restoration project. I don’t. New Labour had a liberal quality which is under threat in the modern party. The enduring features of New Labour’s first term – the Good Friday Agreement, devolution, new legal rights to equality, the Human Rights Act, freedom of information – show its liberal, plural quality.

After the next election one small, Leninist section of one party has no hope of tackling the huge issues facing our country, whether on climate, inequality or rebuilding our crumbling public services.

The threat to our party, and by extension the country, from this factionalism cannot be overstated. This is much bigger than Neal Lawson. It is about the character of the modern party and upholding the liberal, pluralist tradition within Labour. Neal is threatened, but something much more significant is at stake: our capacity to democratically challenge the existing social and economic order.

Jon Cruddas

Jon Cruddas is MP for Barking and Dagenham and chair of Labour Together.

@JonCruddas_1

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