[p2p-research] a political strategy piece by hilary wainwright

Sun Jul 18 16:51:45 CEST 2010

to appear in red pepper ..

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Hilary Wainwright <wainwright.hilary at googlemail.com>
Date: Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 9:45 PM

[head] Our favourite Miliband

[standfirst] Hilary Wainwright reveals which Miliband caught her fancy

[pullquote]  The ideas of Miliband senior are of central importance for
thinking about political strategy today

I’d better come clean. For some time now I’ve been a closet Milibandite. No,
not the renegade Westminster branch of the tendency. It was the late Ralph
Miliband, father of Labour leadership contenders David and Ed, who impressed
me.

It was not just Ralph Miliband’s ideas but also his approach that persuaded
me: a notable modesty, refusal of sectarianism and a combination of deep
socialist conviction with constant interrogation of established views,
including his own. Such characteristics meant, incidentally, that the only
kind of leadership in which he was ever interested was teaching and
encouraging others, in every possible form.

The ideas of Miliband senior are of central importance for thinking about
political strategy today. They have been developed, modified and practised
by many influenced by him. But the profile of these ideas is not always as
high as it should be, since no organisation, quite appropriately, has ever
been formed around them, beyond open, non-bounded, eclectic projects such as
the international annual journal *Socialist Register* since 1964, the
Socialist Society in the 1980s, the Socialist Conferences and Movement in
the 1990s and *Red Pepper* over the past decade and a half.

An ironic side effect of the distinctly tarnished campaign for the Labour
throne (tarnished by the toxic record of New Labour – a group of
privatisers, torturers and warmongers as far removed from the founders of
the Labour Party as fire from water) is that Ralph’s thinking has once again
been able to shine.

Ralph Miliband was a lifelong socialist. This fact shaped his intellectual
biography and his analysis of the Labour Party came through the prism of
envisaging a political strategy for socialists in the UK. As far as the
Labour Party is concerned, Ralph developed a distinctively complex and
nuanced position – in a context where much of the British left has been
bogged down in endless wrangles on simplistic dichotomies of whether to work
inside or outside the Labour Party, whether to set up/declare a new party
immediately or not, and so on.

[subhead] Labour and socialism

His classic analysis of the Labour Party, *Parliamentary Socialism*,
analysed the ways that the party’s deep attachment to parliament, and with
it to the British state, overrides episodic and largely rhetorical
commitments to socialist change, and leads to an under-valuation, and indeed
often an outlawing, of extra-parliamentary, social and industrial struggle
and politically oriented civic organisation.

In the first edition, Ralph left open the possibility of transforming Labour
into a party able to lead a process of socialist change. But after observing
Labour in government in 1964-70 he concluded that the DNA of the British
state – the reliance on the financial interests of the City and the primacy
of the relationship with the US in shaping foreign policy – had become the
DNA of the dominant institutions of the Labour Party too. But that was not
the end of the Labour Party for socialist strategy.

His analysis of the party’s history, in particular its relationship with the
unions, led him to understand that large numbers of socialists were active
in it as the only means of working class political expression. They
believed, however misguidedly that through the complex and often opaque
institutions of party democracy they could make it their own. He was also
realistic about public opinion. Since he clearly recognised that the mass of
working class people were not socialists, he rejected the idea that the
workers were merely betrayed by its leadership; the main defect of the
leadership, in his view, was how little it contributed and how much it got
in the way of helping people understand the relevance of socialist policies
to their needs.

This analysis led his strategic thinking and engagement in three
complementary directions. First, while not remaining a member of the Labour
Party, he argued for socialists inside and outside it to collaborate
closely, including on broad, non-electoral, political projects. After all,
he insisted, they agreed on more than they disagreed. And he put this into
practice, working through the Socialist Society with Tony Benn and others in
the Campaign group.

At the same time, and without contradiction, he argued that a new party of
the left was needed. It couldn’t be simply declared, he made clear, and it
would be the result of political processes that we could only in part
control, including a change in the electoral system and political
collaboration across party divides.

Third, what was needed in the meantime, he argued, were persistent projects
of socialist education and consciousness-raising through every possible
means, reaching to the grassroots of the trade unions and other social
movements. Here again he worked to put these ideas into practice,
collaborating at times with Ken Coates, among others who shared the same
view (see page 21) He talked frequently about making socialism the ‘common
sense of the age’.

[subhead] Useful compass

This creative strategic thinking provides a useful compass. It needs to be
updated to take account of three distinctive features of today’s context.

First, the things that for so much of the 20th century kept socialists
active in the Labour Party – more or less democratic policy-making
structures at the constituency and conference level, along with the party’s
explicit commitment to socialising the means of production (the original
clause 4) – have been destroyed. They have been replaced by weak
consultation processes and by vague pledges to fairness and opportunity
amidst a culture that discourages debate, dissent and disagreement – the
lifeblood of an active party. Would-be Labour leaders court votes by
referring to ‘this great party’ but in many localities the Labour Party, as
an organisation, has, under New Labour, become a rump.

Second, we are now surrounded by the carcases and fading memories of
numerous attempts or memories of attempts to create new parties of the left.
They have foundered on familiar rocks of sectarianism, narrow mindedness and
impatience with regard to the conditions under which a party to the left of
Labour would be feasible. These failures have been costly in terms of
energies and resources. They have discredited an idea that needs a long
period of preparation through collaboration of a non-electoral kind,
experimenting and building trust and a common political culture.

Third, the defining issue for the coming years will be the defence (which
must also mean imaginative strategies for improvement) of public services
and decisive steps towards public control over finance and investment in a
green recovery. This has significant strategic implications. More than 60
per cent of TUC affiliates are now public sector unions. (Where Thatcher
sought, in good part successfully, to destroy the mining and manufacturing
unions, the present right intends to destroy these public service unions.)

A majority of these are not affiliated to the Labour Party (only around
400,000 of Unison’s 1.2 million members are affiliated to the Labour Party;
neither the civil service nor teachers unions have political affiliations).
This means that on a highly political issue – the future of public services
– these unions have to create ways of having a political impact other than
through direct influence in the Labour Party.

Thus material and political imperatives converge for all those broadly on
the left to collaborate outside of electoral politics. The need presents
itself in a more acute way than ever it did in Ralph Milliband’s lifetime to
create an independent political force far wider than the Labour Party – and
reaching out to social liberals (see page 16), as well as to environmental,
feminist and community activists – whose leadership and primary political
orientation must be rooted not in Westminster but in communities and
workplaces in every city, town and village.

There is nothing inevitable about such a new dynamic. People are still dazed
at the enormity of the threat to our social well being. But there are signs,
to be interpreted cautiously, of bold and strategic public sector alliances
(for example in the north east) addressing the wider economic strategy
necessary to sustain public services.

Ed Miliband talks of ‘renewing the movement’. Movements are never abstract.
What leads people to move is a cause affecting their daily life. What better
way of building a movement than for leadership candidates to throw
themselves into the political movement emerging for the future of public
services and a green and socialised economy that could sustain them?

This would mean breaking from the parliamentarism that Ralph Miliband so
rigorously anatomised. It would also mean breaking from a culture that has
become so self-referential under New Labour that if parties had arses the
obvious metaphor would apply. (And so far, the leadership campaign shows
little signs of widening the perspective.)

There is no shortage of intellectuals who have the same limitations of
vision. The distinctive feature of Ralph’s work came from his absolute
determination to demystify the ideas that made inequality ‘normal’, to
uncover the reality, to clarify and to explain and to reach out to those who
had the material power to transform that reality. It is for this reason that
I am convinced that in the years to come, it is his books and ideas that
will come to the fore when the name Miliband is mentioned.

[box]

Ralph Miliband: a select bibliography

*Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour* (Merlin Press,
1972)

*The State in Capitalist Society* (Quartet Books, 1973)

*Marxism and Politics* (Merlin Press, 1977)

*Capitalist Democracy in Britain *(Oxford Paperbacks, 1984)

*Socialism for a Sceptical Age* (Polity Press, 1994)