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No, Trans Rights do not contribute to Women’s Oppression

Trans women are not being advantaged by identifying as women. And suggesting that they are only perpetuates right wing myths


11/07/2021

It is argued by gender critical leftists that there is a material biological component to women’s oppression. Does this mean that women’s oppression predates the rise of class society, and is therefore an insoluble issue?

I don’t see any reason society couldn’t be organised so women don’t bear the brunt of childcare. Indeed, that process was started in Russia following the Bolshevik revolution. Communal launderies, restaurants and nurseries were set up. In the UK, provision was made in wartime to enable more women to work. It was withdrawn rapidly afterwards. Indeed, magazines went from how to cook a quick meal to much more elaborate ones in the 50s. It was a conscious shift by the establishment to get women to feel their place was back in the kitchen and out of the formal workplace.

Other aspects of women’s oppression also take particular forms under capitalism. The media and social obsession with appearance, the commodification of sex, marketing of ‘beauty products’, obsession with motherhood etc. It’s only a few years since the advert with the slogan ‘that’s why mums go to Iceland [the budget supermarket]’ disappeared from UK TV screens.

Trans women do not gain advantages by identifying as women. Professor Joan Roughgarden, who transitioned at the age of 52 in 1998, recently wrote in ‘New Scientist’ magazine about the difference it made to her academic career. She had to fill out far more applications to get less funding. Questions from sponsors changed from presuming competency to not.

It has been suggested that men would use self identification (as a trans woman) to access women to abuse. But this ignores the fact that abusive men seem to access far too many women to abuse, without changing their legal gender identity. No country where legal self identification is the law, has seen an upsurge in trans women abusing non trans women. It’s reminiscent of the ‘gays are paedophiles’ lie that was widespread in the 1980s. Trans women, statistically, are at least as much as risk of abuse from cis men, as cis women are.

I still want to know how people who advocate excluding trans people from single sex spaces (and it’s almost always trans women that are mentioned) see this being done in real life. In Florida, I understand that legislation is now being passed that allows genital inspections to ensure trans exclusion. And those most likely to be inspected are women who don’t conform to gender stereotypes. Hardly liberating. The logic of this is the reinforcing of gender stereotypes. Or genital inspections for all women, or everyone entering a single sex space.

Of course, this ignores the fact there are intersex people. Are those against trans self identification ok with the surgical interventions on babies and children, who cannot consent, to try and ensure they fall more neatly into ‘male’ or ‘female’ categories? If they are against such surgical intervention (which I think all socialists should be) how can they demand that everyone be classified as male or female?

Athletics federations and sporting bodies are using hormone levels to determine gender identity. Again, in a misogynistic fashion – men aren’t all tested, and those missing the arbitrary hormone level aren’t ordered to participate in the women’s competitions.

This is the logic of an abstract position on trans exclusion – how will it be enforced? In practice, it reinforces gender stereotyping. People will have to conform to gender stereotypes in order to avoid being challenged.

People who don’t conform to gender stereotypes – ‘butch’ women, ‘effeminate’ men, and androgynous people – are already being abused and attacked by transphobes.

The presumption all humans fit exclusively into ‘male’ and ‘female’ categories isn’t scientific. ‘Biological gender’ is a spectrum with a primarily, but not exclusive – bimodal distribution.

This doesn’t mean that the social identification of gender identity doesn’t have real consequences, including oppression. As does the denial of an individuals right to determine their gender identity, as male, female, non binary, intersex etc.

The alternative to genital inspections and/or hormone (and chromosome?) testing would be ID cards. But then, someone would have to determine what gender was on the ID card…

I’d really appreciate it if people advocating trans exclusion could tell me how this would work in practice, without further oppressing women in particular. So far I’ve had abuse, but not a single answer.

Dutch Socialist Party Expels its Youth Section

As one of Europe’s biggest Left Social Democratic parties implodes, what are the lessons for the Left?


09/07/2021

The crisis in the Dutch Socialist Party (SP) has reached a new low after the Party Council ratified the leadership’s decision – taken in December – to cut all ties with ROOD, the SP’s now former youth organisation. According to the party leadership, the youth wing suffered a hostile takeover by ‘attic room communists’ who were plotting a violent civil war. The media were eager to embrace these wild accusations that were especially designed to connect to far-right conspiracy theories. The reality is very different however. The split between the SP and ROOD is a symptom of the deep crisis that has been developing in the party over the past years.

The SP, originally a Maoist party, made quick gains in the late 1990s and early 2000s as an anti-neoliberal force and as a left alternative to the GreenLeft (GL) and social democrats (PvdA) that had supported both neoliberalisation and NATO’s bombardments on Yugoslavia. At their high point in 2006, the party had over 50.000 members and won 16,6% of the vote in the parliamentary elections. The party’s hope of entering a coalition government were shattered as the neoliberal parties had no reason and no inclination to work with them.

The ‘trauma’ of 2006

As they were the only party outside of the broad neoliberal consensus in parliament, the outcome was predictable. The SP-leadership did not foresee it, however, and thus could not prepare their membership or their constituents for it. After the ‘trauma’ of 2006, the party entered a long period of stagnation. The movements against neoliberal globalisation and the war against Iraq receded while the SP tried to moderate its profile and to prove itself as a dependable partner in a future coalition government.

This meant that the party emphasised the reasonableness of their views in order to persuade other parties and their constituents that a government coalition with the socialists was a realistic possibility. The result was that the SP did next to nothing to distinguish themselves from other parties, even though they were still the only party on the left that was consistently opposed to neoliberalism.

The campaigns the SP organised focussed more and more on economic single issues, such as their campaign for a National Health Fund. These campaigns were organised by the SP alone, so they could be controlled from above, and they only served to generate publicity for the SP and their ideas. The only way the leadership could conceive of actually winning any of these demands was through government and so everything was subordinated to election results.

The result was that these proposals started to sound more and more utopian, as there was no realistic strategy to win. At the same time the focus on single issues meant that they didn’t figure in a broader leftist or socialist world view. A political critique of capitalism or even neoliberalism was at best only implicitly present in the SP’s politics and a positive vision of what socialism should be was altogether lacking.

The lack of a persuasive political narrative and political strategy was further emphasized by the fact that the party mostly ignored important political issues such as the struggle against oppression and climate change – Jan Marijnissen, the party’s historical leader, who led the party until after the 2006 coalition negotiations, even denies that climate change is caused by human behavior.

Social-democratised Maoism

An analysis of their stagnation was lacking however, which is in large part due to their political tradition, which does not view internal debate or even making political analyses as useful or legitimate. The SP did ‘de-Mao-ise’ from the late 1970’s onwards, but it retained some traits of Maoism that fit well with their reformism. One of them is a very monolithic and undemocratic internal regime. The SP’s highest decision making body is not their Party Congress, but their bimonthly Party Council, which consists of the chairpersons of local branches who lack a specific mandate. Internal fractions are strictly forbidden and none of the SP’s media even provides space for discussion or debate.

A second leftover from Maoism is an essentialist understanding of class, which means that political analysis is useless at best, because all knowledge comes straight from ‘the people’ and self criticism can only mean going into neighborhoods, talking to people and accepting their opinions. As the SP and the rest of the established left is hardly even present in ideological debates and doesn’t provide political answers from a left perspective, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the opinions they encounter are more and more influenced by the right.

The reasons given for the party’s bad results were threefold: the lack of charisma of the party leaders after Marijnissen; the ever insufficient discipline and work-ethic from the membership; and an insufficient focus on bread and butter-issues as opposed to ‘divisive’ political issues. Indeed, the SP even complained that they lost elections because ‘their issues’ (healthcare especially) weren’t on the political agenda, which is another way of saying they were not able to provide socialist answers for the political questions that mattered.

When Covid finally put ‘their’ issues in the spotlight, the SP decided they had to show their responsibility by fully supporting the government’s disastrous policy. For months the party kept quiet about underpaid and overworked health care workers who weren’t given PPE while the government was gambling with people’s lives with their ‘herd immunity’-strategy which had no scientific basis and was dictated by their commitment to corporate profits.

From stagnation to decline

When Lilian Marijnissen, Jan’s daughter, became party leader in 2017 hopes were high that her new energy and charisma, combined with a silencing of internal critics that supposedly undermined the party’s performance and an emphasis on a social-chauvinist rhetoric would yield results. What happened, perhaps unsurprisingly, was the exact opposite.

Marijnissen’s political vocabulary tried to appeal to the lowest common denominator, with abstract calls for ‘justice’ and naive indignation at the right’s antisocial policies taking centre stage. At the same time the party ramped up it’s nationalism, even sacrificing their previous opposition to neoliberalism in the process. For example, the SP opposed equal unemployment benefits for migrant workers. The party also supported the racist burqa-ban and took harsh actions against party representatives that dared to speak out against the far right.

For young people on the left, that become radicalised mostly around feminist ideas, antiracism and the climate movement and are looking for big ideas in order to better understand the tremendous problems the world and their generation faces, there isn’t much the SP has on offer.

On the other end of the spectrum, rather than winning back far right voters, the SP’s political line functioned as a bridge to the far right. Of the people that voted for the neofascist Forum for Democracy (FvD) in the national elections in March, no less than 8 percent had been SP-voters four years previous. They were the biggest group after those coming from Geert Wilders’ racist PVV, those that already voted FvD and previous non-voters. Only 5 percent came from the liberal-conservative VVD and 4 percent came from the conservative Christian-democrats (CDA).

In other words, relatively the SP in opposition lost almost as much to the neofascist right as the two most right wing parties in government combined. Other left parties and even progressive liberal parties only lost very few voters to the far right.

Electorally, the SP did badly, losing all their seats in the European Parliament in 2019 and falling back to just below 6 percent of the vote, or 9 seats in the parliamentary elections in March of this year – the lowest figure since 2002. The repressive internal regime; the lack of commitment to combatting racism, climate change, and the far right; and the abysmal results led many experienced members to leave the SP over the last decade. Despite a massive membership-campaign in 2019 and 2020 that reduced some of the damage, the party’s membership now sits just above 30.000, down roughly 40 percent since 2006.

The leadership has shown no signs of changing its course however. In spite of clear proof of the opposite, they remain convinced that their chauvinism, cheap moral indignation, and ever more modest demands will finally pay off, when all critical members are gone and those remaining will no longer be demoralised by their ‘negativity’.

Split

The problems of the SP’s political line are most clearly felt in the big cities and among the youth, which is why branches in urban area’s and ROOD were the parts of the SP that were most critical of the leadership. The problems within ROOD started in 2019. Arno van Veen had already been in the ROOD-leadership and was being prepared to be the youth wing’s next chairperson in 2019, when he spoke out at a Party Council meeting for solidarity with refugees, implicitly criticising the SP’s support for the murderous anti-refugee agreements between the EU and Turkey and Libya.

The party leadership immediately dropped all support for him. Arno was told by the screening commission that they rejected his candidature as he ‘did not know his place’. Arno still ran for chairperson and was elected, despite the party leadership going out of their way to mobilise inactive loyalists to vote against him.

This gave more space for discussion within ROOD, which played into the hands of a group called the Communist Platform (CP), that was already clandestinely active within ROOD. As the only organised group within the youth wing, they were quickly able to win over the majority of ROOD for their proposals that focussed mostly on democratisation of the party.

Part of their attraction was that they did try to provide socialist ideas and organised discussions around them. A year after Arno became chairperson, CP pushed forward their own candidates. The SP leadership then sounded the alarm and expelled the six CP members they could identify, including Olaf Kemerink who ran for chairperson. ROOD refused to yield to pressure from the SP-leadership and allowed the CP-candidates to stand. When CP-member Olaf Kemerink was elected as the new chairperson, the SP immediately cut ROOD’s funding, cut access to their website and publicly broke with their youth movement.

Show trial

Many critical SP members were appalled by the leadership’s conduct, not in the least because of the bizarre smears the leadership used to cause a scandal in the far right press. They were not able to mobilize a majority however. During the Party Congress in December, over a third of the attendees voted against the split.

The leadership almost immediately started preparing the founding of a new youth organisation, but in an attempt to appease parts of their membership, they issued an inquiry by a group of prominent members, led by Nine Kooiman, a former MP, who is now vice chairperson of the police union. As is to be expected, the commission’s conclusions are in line with the Party leadership’s views and their reasoning is downright laughable.

The report concluded that the split was irreparable. The leadership had made a mistake by not intervening in ROOD quickly enough. The biggest problem, however, was structural. The fact that ROOD was even allowed to make their own decisions was a design-flaw. ‘In retrospect, the decision, made at the time, to place the youth organisation completely outside of the party’, i.e. to allow it to make its own decisions, ‘has been an unfortunate one’, the commission concluded. The new youth organisation should therefore be organised ‘within’ the party. In order to prevent the youth from reading dangerous literature, their education will have to be the responsibility of the SP’s central leadership.

However, the commission writes unironically, the new youth organisation will also have to be ‘autonomous’. While they won’t be able to make any decisions or take political positions, they will receive the right to choose which points from the party’s programme they will build their campaigns around. The new chairperson will also gain a seat in the national leadership, but because the leadership acts as a bloc within the party, in practice this only means that the national leadership will gain direct control over them. At the Party Council in June 87% of the members agreed with the commission and sanctioned the expulsion of ROOD.

No quick death

The break with their youth underscores the SP-leadership is willing to go to extreme lengths in order to insulate themselves from criticism. The SP had never been good at educating cadre that’s able to make analyses and to think critically and the present leadership is certainly proof of that. But by cutting themselves off from young people who – despite everything – have tried to turn the SP into something better, they now also cut themselves off from their last hope of regeneration as a socialist party. Young people that remain in the party will be driven by political ambition and will be exclusively judged according to their loyalty.

That doesn’t mean that the SP’s role is completely played out. The party will probably play a role in parliament and in elections for years, perhaps even decades to come. They will however have more and more trouble differentiating themselves from the traditional social-democrats, especially as the memory of the social-democrats in office fades. When it comes to cheap leftish demagoguery, social-democrats are after all much more experienced than the SP.

And there is also BIJ1, a new antiracist party that, though it is focussed primarily on parliamentary work, not on extra-parliamentary struggles, is doing an admirable job at taking a principled left stand on many issues that the established left has remained silent on, such as the government’s Covid policy, racism, and the rise of the far right. Though their social-economic profile isn’t as strong as the SP’s once was, for people craving a principled left, BIJ1 is far more attractive.

Where next for ROOD?

The future of ROOD is more difficult to predict. ROOD, and especially CP, have been very much focussed on the SP itself, they haven’t taken up their place in the social movements and other struggles and only rarely take up positions in current affairs. Some remaining left SP-members are now trying to get elected in the national leadership under the banner of the ‘Marxist Forum’, which has not been expelled from the SP, but might well follow. The chances of their attempt succeeding – even if they’re not expelled before November, when the elections take place – are slim if not nil.

ROOD seems to want to stay in the SP as much as they can, as more critical branches will still tolerate the youth and most ROOD-members have not been individually expelled from the SP. The focus on trying to change the SP from within, even now that it’s hardly even a theoretical possibility anymore, can only lead to the disintegration of ROOD as it will stall their development as an independent organisation with their own standpoints and their own political praxis. This is exactly what the SP-leadership is gambling on.

The continued orientation on the SP is pushed by the Communist Platform. CP is a Kautskian organisation that believes the only way to make any progress is to turn the SP into a ‘Party-Movement’ that will make all other parties and movements obsolete. This they see as a necessary prerequisite for basically any political struggle. Existing social movements they denounce as small and insignificant. But their rejection of building social movements is based on politics as well.

Party like it’s 1891

CP, for example, believes climate change can easily be stopped by switching to nuclear power and especially thorium. They therefore support the nuclear lobby in favour of building the climate movement. Completely ignoring the development of the women’s movement over the past century since universal suffrage was won, the CP rejects feminism as a bourgeois phenomenon, insisting that ‘the women’s question’ (as they call it) can only be solved through an independent proletarian struggle for women’s liberation, which in turn requires some mythical Party-Movement. Whether by coincidence or by design, the CP’s standpoints in regard to current struggles always come down to a ‘radical’ renunciation of ‘class collaborationist’ social movements and struggles with a view to ‘real’ struggles in the distant future.

The CP itself will sooner or later have to revise their dogmatism when their last hopes to reform the SP are finally shattered. Then it will either have to join the struggles that they now ridicule or they will have to proclaim themselves as (the nucleus of) the new Party-Movement so as to allow themselves to continue to combine verbal radicalism with practical political passivity.

The fact that CP is the only organised force within ROOD and therefore influential does not change the fact that many ROOD-members have chosen to stand firm against the SP-leadership precisely because they were fed up with the SP’s isolation and rejection of social movements and are eager to finally put their weight behind them. It is possible that they will try to give ROOD a political orientation focussed on working with others to build the movements and the struggles that are now being built and fought. This is far from guaranteed, however, and it is perhaps more likely that many of these members will simply vote with their feet.

Can Proportional Representation save Labour? And would that be a good thing?

Proportional Representation (PR) should not be the Left’s main demand; a “Progressive Alliance” would be terrible. But a new voting system could help the Left


28/06/2021

The discussion around Proportional Representation (PR) is gathering steam among part of the Labour Left. The Independent reports that three-quarters of Labour members now support PR. 228 Constituency Labour Parties have signed a call for electoral reform. The call for PR has even been taken up by the left-wing faction Momentum. The current discussion has been provoked by two recent incidents.

First is the leadership election for the UNITE trade union, following the retirement of left-wing general secretary Len McCluskey. After leftist Howard Beckett withdrew, there are now two candidates from the left of the union – Steve Turner and Sharon Graham. This leads people to worry that the right-winger Gerard Coyne will slip through and win the election on a minority vote.

This is not the place to discuss the intricacies of the UNITE elections, but the election shows the danger of the First Past the Post (FPTP) system. The person with the most votes takes all, even if they are disliked by a majority of the voters. This is why many UNITE activists are calling for a Single Transferable Vote (a form of PR) in future elections.

Slump of Labour vote under Starmer

But the main reason for all the PR chatter is in reaction to “Sir” Keir Starmer continuing to lead the Labour Party into political oblivion. Two years ago, under Jeremy Corbyn, the party suffered unprecendented attacks from the press and sabotage from many people working for the party. Starmer supporters followed Tony Blair in sneering that “with any other leader, Labour would be 20 points ahead”. The results since Starmer took over have been derisory.

Just last month, there was the Hartlepool by-election, caused by the resignation of sitting Labour MP Mike Hill following allegations of sexual harassment and intimidation. Hartlepool is a working-class seat which has had a Labour MP since 1964. Any Labour candidate should have won easily – even Starmer’s choice, the Saudi-loving sexist Paul Williams.

It is very unusual for a ruling party to win a by election in a constituency that it lost in the previous general election. By elections tend to show protest votes against the incumbent government. Before Hartlepool, the government party had only ever retaken a seat in a by election 17 times – and only 5 times since the Second World War. Yet Labour still managed to lose Hartlepool to the ruling Tories.

Hartlepool was followed by Chesham and Amersham. Starmer’s apologists had said that Labour could not possibly have won Hartlepool, because prime minister Boris Johnson was benefiting from a “Covid bounce”. Yet the Liberal Democrats won Amersham with a 25% swing. Labour won only 622 votes – reportedly 2 more than the number of Labour party members in the constituency. It may be worth noting that in 2017, under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, Labour won 11,374 votes.

Since the election debacles, a number of people who should know better have been gleefully welcoming the defection of former Tory MP John Bercow to Labour. It should be pointed out that while Bercow has criticised Boris Johnson, he has not issued a single statement to say that his own politics have changed.

At the same time, these same people wilfully ignore the facts that: some Labour activists are leaving the party; others are staying in for the while but are withdrawing from activity; while other socialists are still being expelled on trumped-up charges. Even Jeremy Corbyn is still not allowed to sit as a Labour MP.

Time for a “Progressive Alliance”?

This is the background to a swath of articles in the left-leaning media, calling for a “Progressive Alliance”. This is where Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens and maybe the SNP agree to stand down in elections, to enable a single anti-Tory candidate. Neal Lawson from Compass wrote in this week’s Guardian “there is no other way to stop a record fifth straight Conservative election victory, and the slide into a one-party state, than through a progressive alliance.”

Lawson’s example of a successful Progressive Alliance is the “remarkable relationship” (his words) between Tony Blair and former LibDem leader Paddy Ashdown. He also argues that “the societal challenges we face – of climate, culture, care, technology, ageing and inequality – simply can no longer be met by any single party.”

The campaigns for a Progressive Alliance and for PR are closely connected. In an editorial supporting a Progressive Alliance, the Guardian argued “Proportional representation is a way of redistributing power more fairly and encouraging consensus to be built across party lines.” Similarly, the organisation Reboot GB argues that PR “is an anchor for any Progressive Alliance”

A Progressive Alliance seems to have two main types of supporter on the Left. First there are the deluded, who believe that Lib Dems will break with the habit of a lifetime and support a full socialist platform. There is absolutely no reason to believe this. Remember that as recently as 2010-2015 the thoroughly neo-liberal Liberal Democrats were eagerly propping up a Tory government. And yet they would have the power of veto over any Progressive Alliance.

As for the social democratic nationalist parties, it is not long since Labour joined the Conservatives in the Better Together campaign aimed at preserving the Union and blocking Scottish independence. There is little evidence that Labour has moved from this position. Why on earth would the SNP or Plaid Cymru sign up to that?

Wouldn’t anything be better than Boris Johnson?

Then there are the desperate, who believe that Boris Johnson’s Tories are so qualitatively bad that anything must be better than this, even neo-liberalism lite. This view has the advantage that it acknowledges the reality of who the Lib Dems represent, and what they stand for. Note that it is no coincidence that Amersham is the 531st least deprived of England’s 533 parliamentary constituencies.

How things have changed since the heady days of Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy Corbyn’s 2017 election manifesto was both radical and popular. Labour Party membership tripled to 550,000 and between 73% and 83% of voters supported his plans to nationalise water, electricity, gas and the railways.

Even this manifesto was only possible in the face of opposition and even sabotage by a large number of Labour Party workers and a majority of Labour MPs. The idea that the Lib Dems would campaign for such a manifesto, or even allow it to come into being is a fantasy. Any Progressive Alliance depends on Labour having a programme which promises no fundamental change.

So what we are left with is a set of bland statements promising nothing more than “at least we’re not Boris Johnson”. In other words, the unsuccessful policies that Starmer has been following since he became party leader. This has not just led to a haemorrhaging of support for Labour. It also means that the many activists who were keen to campaign in 2017 will not be inspired next time round.

A “Progressive Alliance”, which handed power to the Tory enablers in the Lib Dems would reproduce the worst experiences of Starmerism, without offering voters any positive reasons to vote Labour or even giving party members a good reason why they should campaign. This will damage Labour’s vote even further.

Why now?

The current obsession with PR and “Progressive Alliances” is, at least in part, a hangover from old discussions about Brexit. A large part of the liberal-Left believed Brexit to be the most important political idea of the day. That meant that their conversation shifted away from the progressive demands in Corbyn’s manifesto.

It also caused many Labour members to seek alliances with a Liberal Democratic party, whose leader was not sure whether Gay sex was a sin, and whose 2019 election manifesto was described by the BBC as being more austere than the Tories’. This may have gone down well in the middle class clubs attended by Labour’s movers and shakers, but appalled working class voters, particularly in the North of England.

Allying with the Lib Dems was always a mistake. When Brexit was being pushed by the media as the only story that mattered, it was at least understandable. Now that Brexit no longer dominates political discussion, Labour has a chance to return to the class-based politics which caused people to enthusiastically campaign for a Corbyn government. Or, on the other hand, it can continue to cozy up to the Lib Dems.

Notwithstanding any criticism we may have of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, tens of thousands of people were enthused to go out on doorsteps to campaign for a manifesto which promised to change the world. Could we seriously expect similar excitement for an election campaign which has been approved by the Lib Dem’s hapless leader Ed Davey?

Does this mean that PR is a bad idea?

I used to be a fervent supporter of the FPTP system. We were living in slightly different times then. The Conservatives were clearly the party of Capital and bigotry. Labour – in part through its links with the trade unions, and often despite its political practice – was the party of the working class. The other parties didn’t stand for much at all, and rarely had any serious link with progressive politics, let alone class struggle.

This meant that it was generally a ‘Good Thing’ that elections were contested by the parties which represented – however vaguely – the two sides of class struggle. Even though Labour rarely implemented serious change (and when they did it was more likely to be restricting immigration than fighting racism), a Labour victory was seen as a win for ‘Our Side’. This was something which positively affected workers’ confidence to fight back.

Then a number of things happened. Perhaps most important is what has been called the Pasokification of European Social Democratic parties. This was most noticeable in Greece, but was a trend in most European countries. “Pasokification” involved social democratic parties like Labour shifting to the right as a reaction to falling votes.

In Britain and Germany we saw the Blair-Schröder paper attacking the rights of workers and the unemployed. Britain also experienced Tony Blair’s enthusiasm for the Gulf war. That led to a decreasing number of working class people identifying Labour as being “their” party. Even my mother – a lifelong Labour member – asked me who she should vote for now.

Partly as a result of this, some nationalist parties – like the SNP and Plaid Cymru – which had traditionally had fairly right wing programmes, started positioning themselves as social democrats. They overtook Labour on the Left. Other parties – like Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party or Respect – emerged, leading to the hope for a serious left-wing challenge to Labour. A main reason for their lack of success was FPTP.

Will PR save Labour? I hope not

The main argument currently used for PR seems to be that it is necessary to revive the Labour Party. Only under PR, the argument goes, will we have a chance of a Labour government – albeit in coalition with the Lib Dems. Without PR, Labour will never govern again. As Polly Toynbee argued in the Guardian, “If Labour doesn’t fight our broken electoral system, it could be out of power for ever.”

My argument for PR is quite the reverse. I want PR because I want to destroy Labour and replace it with something better. The last year under Starmer has proved the party to be unfit for purpose. Even under Corbyn, there were too many unelected functionaries who were able to block progress. Even the great 2017 manifesto was seriously flawed, with promises like 10,000 extra police.

I want a party that is more democratic, more anchored in social movements, more socialist. The problem is that, because of the electoral system, it has proved impossible to create such a party from scratch. The closest we have come to this was with the formation of the Respect party, and the election of the first MP left of Labour since 1950.

There were 2 problems with these developments. First, that MP was George Galloway, whose politics can be politely described as inconsistent. He made some great speeches against the war, but has more recently been seen palling up with Nigel Farage and urging Scottish voters to vote Tory to preserve the Union. His defence of Julian Assange against rape charges was that “not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion”.

Second, there was no serious break from Labour. Galloway was the only leading figure who moved from Labour to Respect. Most other people who opposed the war either stayed in Labour or moved into inactivity (often both). Respect aspired to be more than an electoral party. And yet its inability to win elections (with one exception) meant that it lacked the basis to become a mass party.

PR alone is insufficient

Under PR this could be different and we might see the basis for the emergence of a British SYRIZA, Podemos, or even die LINKE. We must attach several caveats to this statement. Firstly, the recent experience of all these parties shows that the formation of a new Left party is not a cure-all. Radical formations can still quickly descend into parliamentary cretinism and compromise.

Secondly: PR will not automatically benefit the Left. There is a reasonable argument that one reason that the next French President may be an outright fascist is the PR system. And in Britain, Ell Foran from Stats for Lefties estimated that UKIP, which won just one seat in the 2015 general election, would have won 79 seats under PR.

So, it would be a great mistake to advocate PR as a way of solving all our problems. PR opens an arena in which the Left can gain exposure and support. But it opens the same arena to more pernicious and dangerous forces. Merely changing the voting system is insufficient without political change at the basis.

A new party which unites the people who joined Corbyn’s Labour with the radical Left outside the party would be a massive step forward inside British politics. Yet, while I believe that parties are important for bringing activists together, without activity at the basis of society, Left parties are impotent. This means that any campaign for a different voting system must be secondary to action from below.

How can we change society?

The key thing lies in understanding how we can change society. Only this week, we have seen the unprecedented conviction of policemen responsible for the racist murders of George Floyd and Dalian Atkinson. This is testament to the ability of movements like Black Lives Matter to effect change. Similarly, the fact that the environment is on the political agenda is the result of the international mobilisations by Fridays for Future.

Even parliamentary reform is dependent on extra-parliamentary struggle. In 1974, Tory prime minister Ted Heath called a general election under the slogan “Who governs Britain – the unions or the government?” Striking miners and other social movements showed Heath that it wasn’t him. The reason that Starmer’s Labour is in decline is to a large extent because it no longer has any organic link to movements outside parliament.

So, a campaign for progressive politics should not start with a demand for PR. This is not least because the implementation of PR would depend on the votes of a Tory government which is perfectly happy to profit from the current system. The best way to challenge the Tories is not by moral outrage but by building social movements which challenge everything they stand for.

If we build up these movements, other changes will follow.

Thanks to Hari Kumar, Carol McGuigan and Anna Southern for comments on an earlier version of this article.

Why “autonomous” strategies are doomed to fail

Autonomist politics are a short cut – as we can see by the experience of the German Left but also in Hamas in Palestine


21/06/2021

I’ve already often written why I don’t regard autonomous strategies to be constructive. Here, I’m using the word “autonomous” much wider than it is generally understood. Autonomous ideas are based on the actions of a little group, which – isolated from the masses – deploys violence (and other force) against an over-powerful enemy. For me, this does not just what one today identifies with the masked autonomists, but also with “communist” groups like the RAF.

[translator’s note: the Rote Armee Fraktion / Red Army Fraction, sometimes better known as the Baader-Meinhof group, was an organisation which emerged in Germany after the decline of the 1968 movement. Despite their somewhat moralistic politics, they won the support of a significant number of German leftists. If you want to know more, see Uli Edel’s film “The Baader-Meinhof Complex”, Stefan Aust’s book of the same name, or Jillan Becker’s book “Hitler’s Children”]

As I have often stressed, I find the goals of the RAF (als part of an international anti-imperialist war at the time of the Vietnam war) to be completely legitimate. And the violence is to me benign and irrelevant compared to the violence of their enemies (who dropped more bombs on Vietnam then the whole of the Second World War, including firebombing women and children. This means that I cannot judge them morally, but I have a serious strategic criticism.

Anyone who decides to join the underground, and as a result to fight against an unassailable enemy in inevitable isolation, can never win. Even the best weaponry and education of the RAF was unable to defeat the powerful US Army – and, as became quickly clear, not even the state power of Germany. Furthermore, such autonomous strategies inevitably lead to turning away from the masses, resulting in not being able to integrate them in the movement, as an illegal group is unable to organise public stalls where they can approach normal people.

This isolation from the masses leads to a further problem. Because of the lack of feedback from the outside world, a sort of “spiritual incest” develops, in which a cadre organisation states that it is politically relevant without being able to be corrected by outsiders who report their mistakes. The result was that towards the end, the RAF developed absurd “analyses”, claiming that the German state was fascist – an assertion that many automonists hold today – through which an isolated group was able to believe that it could conquer the centralized state power. But no educated élite acting alone will be able to overthrow the capitalist state. This can only be achieved with resistance from the broad masses.

Let me go further, and extend it to groups which are not left-wing, such as the resistance against the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Exactly as with the RAF, I find the violence used by Hamas to be incomparable to that of their enemies. Palestine’s right to self-defence and resistance against occupation (including violent resistance) is covered by international law. I also find the goals of the resistance against the illegal occupation to be absolutely legitimate, even when I criticize the strategies used. Armed resistance, first from the PLO, and later from Hamas, has never achieved its goals, because even the best educated groups were never able to bring such an unbelievably militaristic, highly trained state, which was unconditionally supported by much more powerful states, to its knees,

The most recent actions of Hamas clearly show the weaknesses of their forms of action. Before the misslies were fired, there were mass mobilisations of Palestinians against the new ethnic cleansing by the Zionist colonial state in Sheikh Jarrah – that is, exactly what gives me the most hope. Hamas’s meaningless firing of missiles stabbed the mass demonstrations in the back, by driving attention away and making it easier for the Western media to talk solely about the missiles and to ignore the mass mobilisations.

Of course it is clear to me that Western politicians will always find a reason to demonise the Palestinian resistance. Even exemplary non-violent forms of action like BDS do not attract great enthusiasm (because the focus is no longer on violence but on left-wing forms of action), but on the contrary are demonised more than Hamas. But this does not change the fact that firing missiles at Israel abruptly stopped the protest and made it easier for the media to stay silent.

Injustice will never be ended by a small group – only the masses can do this. In factories with strikes, or by a reignition of the Arabic revolutions, in which democracy in Egypt offered solidarity with Palestine, and in a short period of time achieved more for Palestine than all the negotiations and resistance which came before. This resistance was drowned in blood by the mass murderer Al-Sisi, but still serves as a much better template for the liberation of Palestine.

Translation: Phil Butland

Greens plan election campaign based on “Inclusive Capitalism“

The recent Party Conference of the German Green Party shows that they are fully compliant with the needs of German Capitalism


20/06/2021

Annalena Baerbock was wrapped in a dark green coat, in her hand two large stone tablets with ‘Ten Commandments’, which the Greens apparently want. Below the Moses display, in an advert it was written in capital letters: “why Green Commandments won’t lead us into the promised land.” This prominent ad appeared on the Friday before the Green Party Conference on the pages of the FAZ, the SZ and Zeit Online [the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Stuttgarter Zeitung and die Zeit are all major German broadsheet newspapers]. The ad had been placed by the neo-liberal lobby organisation Initiative Neue Soziale Marktwirtschaft (INSM); which is mainly financed by the metal and electronics industry. The advert achieved its goal – all hell broke out on Twitter, various newspapers took up the subject, editorial boards produced fact sheets.

At the same time large parts of the economy are anything but afraid of the Greens. The party demonstrated this spectacularly at the Party Conference, in adopting the election programme. Pragmatic, constructive, eye to eye with the boardroom, two thirds of the delegates rejected a resolution that planned a €200 increase to Hartz-IV benefits. The abolition of the Schuldenbremse (debt ceiling) similarly failed to make it into the programme, and there will be no nationalisation of real estate corporations under the Greens. A resolution to increase the top tax rate to 53 per cent was also defeated – the Conference decided a “moderate” increase to 48 per cent. The rich could breathe again. The car industry also had reason to celebrate: cars with combustion engines won’t be banned till 2030, not from 2025 as originally planned. And the defence industry was pleased to here that the Greens do not categorically rule out deploying combat drones.

Former Siemens boss Joe Kaeser gave a guest speech. The new chairman of Siemens Energy, describes himself as a “Believer in Inclusive Capitalism.” He insistently campaigned at the Conference for a ‘social-ecological market economy‘ – as an alternative to socialism. He appealed to the Greens not to miss the big chance to promote the head of the Environment department into the executive board of Germany.

Early praise from the Capital Fraction

Private banks also show no fear of Baerbock and Co for a long time. At the beginning of May, the federal association of German banks showered the following praise in Handelsblatt [a major newspaper of German big business]: the Greens are perhaps the first party to have understand that the change to a sustainable economy is only achievable with the support of the banks and the capital markets.

At the end of May, the UBS bank published an analysis of the coming General Election. A government containing Greens would be no cause for concern for investors. It would actually yield possibilities: developers of renewable energy plants would profit, as would car manufacturers with a focus on electric cars, semiconductor companies and companies providing green energy. A government coalition with the CDU would be the most likely scenario to gain support from the Euro and the deployment of certain competencies to Brussels.

With so much early praise from important fractions of capital, its not surprising that the Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände (BDA) [Confederation of German Employers’ Associations] has criticised the INSM campaign. “Personal attacks and a false use of Christian imagery is not a reasonable way of dealing with the necessary competition for political content.” Apparently this is not the style of the BDA.

It seems that the INSM has not yet got the capitalist class message: the Greens and their leader Annalena Baerbock could lead German capital into the “Promised Land”, in a country where a ‘Green-varnished’ capitalism has a future.

This text was first published in German in the weekly newspaper der Freitag Reproduced with permission. Translator: Phil Butland.