Can we change society via the ballot box

I am less and less convinced by the week. As various left projects to stand in elections have come and gonea nd political representation for workers is still absent from todays offerings i thought i'd take a look at where we go from here and the lessons we can possibly learn. I dont claim or even pretend to have all the answers i dont believe anyone does. I am not keen on those boasting to have all the answers and a ready made blueprint to change. Those who think we just need better leaders miss teh point in my view now it is the leaders as their role in mediating struggle which are the issue not who are the leaders as such. Much like with Trade uUnions political parties be them of workers organisations or not are there to over see struggle not to transform society as such. A excellent article i have read over at the Communea fantastic blog i've strumbled across gives a good analysis of electoral politics and its limits. what follows is Dave Spencer's excellent analysis of the failure of socialist electoral coalitions over the past decade and why organisation from below has far more to offer than vanguardism. The most striking feature of British politics over the last decade has to be the disenfranchisement of the working class. The working class has little or no voice at national, regional or local level. Our task is to be part of the reversal of this situation. But this reversal has to come from below, from the linking and networking of the campaigns and struggles of the working class itself. Unfortunately the organised left does not see it this way. As convinced vanguardists and elitists they see themselves as providing the leadership with all the answers that the workers must follow. They have had a decade in which to show leadership, but have failed dismally to build a broad united movement to fill the vacuum to the left of New Labour. It is not as though material conditions have been unfavourable, given the biggest economic crisis for over 100 years; global warming which threatens the very existence of the planet; two unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and MPs and bankers being shown to be on the take.But there have been attempts to build an organisation. In 1996 we had the birth of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) and the Socialist Alliance (SA) “ all before the 1997 General Election which New Labour was expected to win. The SLP started well with a mass meeting of over a thousand in Camden Town Hall. Arthur Scargill addressed meetings of 300 to 400 in the large cities. In the 1997 general election the SLP stood 64 candidates and got just under 2% of the vote. The SSP stood 18 candidates and gained about the same percentage. The Socialist Party threw its weight behind the Socialist Alliance, mainly to form an alternative to the SLP which they saw as a serious rival.Clearly there was potential in these attempts, given that workers were voting New Labour to get the Tories out and nobody knew quite what a rat Blair was to become. Given 14 years to the general election of 2010 surely some solid progress should have been made. What happened? Scargill insisted that joining the SLP meant you left every other organisation. There was no scope for factions in the SLP. Worse still Scargills bureaucratic approach was demonstrated at the post-election SLP Conference when it came to light that a Mr Hardman was sitting in the conference with 3,000 votes – more than the rest of the delegates put together and using those votes to get through Scargills policies and also to get Scargills men on to the National Committee. People seized the microphone, led by comrades from Cardiff who had achieved the best SLP vote in the election. Why bother to have a secret ballot? they demanded. Why not ask Mr Hardman which policies he supports and be done with it? In fact why bother to have a Conference at all? Over half the Conference walked out. The SSP also made a good start and drew in a wide variety of enthusiastic members. In contrast to the SLP they quite rightly allowed minority factions. Both the SP and SWP joined as platforms of the SSP. However when Tommy Sheridan dragged the party into the courts, both the SP and SWP supported him and undoubtedly advised him to split the SSP. In my view this was no matter of principle, but a cynical manoeuvre on their part to wreck the SSP, which they saw as a rival. Left groups cannot stand competition.The same political approach of narrow sectarianism based on an elitist vanguardist view of the party was used by both the SP and SWP in the Socialist Alliance. At the general election of 2001 the SA fielded 98 candidates and the SSP 72 candidates. This was ambitious but shows the potential to build a broad movement. The SP insisted on a federal structure for the SA which meant that decisions were taken by contacting the National Committees of the various left groups involved and individual SA members had no say. The SP left in a huff when the SA decided against federalism; they refused to stay in and fight their corner. That left the SWP in charge. In February 2005 the SWP closed down the SA in order to concentrate on Respect. What a depressing sight to see SWP members, sheep-like, queuing up to join the SA at the conference, only to use their new membership cards to close down the SA which some of us had been members of for 13 years!What can we learn from this pitiful history? The first thing is that back-room deals by leaderships are not the way forward. There has to be democracy and accountability and nothing less. And the working class must be involved. And we have to have a healthy distrust of left groups. Some SSP members now argue that they should never have let the SWP and SP join as platforms. I think they are right. They had no intention of building a broad movement in which they could play an important role. They were there to sell their papers and recruit anybody new to their own organisations. Any dealings with any British left group must now contain the health warning Watch your back!This week in a large local residents meeting where I live, called to protest about cuts in bus routes, one resident stated, The cuts are going to get worse. After the election there’s going to be a slaughterhouse! Nobody disagreed. Every day in our local paper there are photographs of groups of people protesting about something. This is a new phenomenon brought about by the economic crisis. Some means of linking these struggles and grassroots organising must be found as a matter of urgency at local and national level. Some of these links already exist.As Chair of the residents’ group mentioned above I have had to learn very quickly about the transport system and how it works in order to propose our petition of protest to the Council. A few months ago we had a protest petition about a proposed PFI waste incinerator in our area. We had to find out about that. To learn about the workings of local government and their various operations is an eye-opener, believe me. All this information needs to be shared and we need to build up expertise on specific subjects like health, education, climate change etc.In the course of defending public services and jobs we should start debates within the campaigns on how these services should properly be run with the workers concerned and with the public. How would it be under communism?The questions of democratic workers’ control and self-management and accountability should be raised. After all some members of the public will argue that some public services are crap – which they are. Nationalisation is not the complete answer “ we need democratic control and accountability by workers and the public. Informed debates within protest campaigns has to be one method of building from below. It is a question of dialogue with the people involved, not of preaching from the rostrum.The last decade saw the working class sidelined. Those claiming to stand for workers rights failed because they started by insisting that they knew the answers and the workers had to follow. The new decade must be one of focussing on building communism from below.

Capitalist leaders desperate to calm economic turmoil

this excellent article posted on www.socialistworld.net the website for the CWI, Committee for workers international and is written by international secretary Claire Doyle.

As their system continues to slide into its worst crisis since the 1930s, the frantic efforts of world capitalist leaders to reverse the process are farcical, contradictory and ineffective.

"Is anyone in control? Is this a runaway train?" asked a presenter on a British news programme on Monday evening - the day Wall Street crashed by 6% and markets everywhere plummeted.

In a matter of weeks, more than $5 trillion has been wiped from equity market values worldwide - half of that total in the past week. The creditworthiness of the most powerful economy in the world has been questioned.

Eurozone leaders are stumbling from one summit to another without being able to solve the crisis.

Last Friday (5 August) the credit rating agency, Standard and Poor, down-graded US government bonds from AAA to AA+. This, they said, was due to the debacle between Democrats and Republicans over the debt ceiling for the US - now standing at $14 trillion - the highest in the world.

Then S&P found its sums were wrong (by a mere $ 2 trillion!). But, extremely pessimistic about growth prospects, they still maintained that lenders would have doubts about buying US government bonds.

But, apparently, those who have the most invested in US 'Treasuries' - namely the Chinese Government, with two-thirds of its foreign reserves of $3,187 billion in dollars - have no intention of selling! It may be diversifying more into Europe and elsewhere but, like most other creditors to the US government, they are not pulling out, and the cost for the US of borrowing money has not increased dramatically.

Nevertheless, the official Chinese 'People's Daily' newspaper took the opportunity to suggest that the US government should not "become blind to the great risks that a weak greenback could pose to the world's fragile economic recovery by lifting dollar-denominated commodities prices...It is time for the US to tighten its belt and solve its structural problems, in order to resume its reputation and restore world confidence".

The biggest concern in relation to the US economy is now whether it is facing a 'double dip'. There are fears that the austerity measures needed to tackle high levels of debt in the US and some eurozone countries, could actually stifle their already weak economic recovery.

There are renewed expectations that the Federal Reserve will announce a new round of quantitative easing, or QE3, in response to forecasts of the US having a 50-50 chance of entering recession before the end of the year.

Fears about the future of the world economy have been reflected in the price of gold and oil. Gold, always a favourite in uncertain times, jumped to a new nominal record of $1,720 an ounce by the end of Monday.

The price of oil has considerably declined on concerns that weak global growth could lead to a fall in demand.

As the CWI has explained on many occasions, the very feeble recovery, due to massive injections of public money, has not been accompanied by any sizeable growth in gross domestic product.

Apart from some notable exceptions it did not bring jobs for the tens of millions of unemployed nor stem what seems like a war on the poor - massive cuts in public spending.

Further cutbacks and downturns in the prospects for young people lie behind the outbursts of anger seen this week on Britain's streets. Seriously prepared strikes and general strikes are urgently needed in a series of countries now to stem the attacks on pension rights.

The CWI warned that, without the trade union leaders giving a clear lead in the struggle against cuts - across Europe and in other countries - clashes with police and attacks on property could erupt in the most deprived urban areas.

In Britain now, analogies are being drawn with the 'riots' under Thatcher in the '80s and the uprisings of the dispossessed in the 'banlieus' of Paris two years ago.

Looting and arson tend to harm the very communities in which the most oppressed live. But it is entirely understandable that the pent up anger of young people against the system and against the corrupt and often racist police should break out on the streets.

Attacks on the real looters - the bankers and big business - are more to the point.

A programme of jobs and homes for all has to be accompanied by a struggle for the nationalisation under democratic workers' control and management of the banks and big monopolies can channel all the anger and frustration of youth and workers against the system.

Crisis measures
Two weeks ago, there was a special meeting of Eurozone finance ministers to agree on another bail-out for Greece. Within hours it was clear this would not solve the underlying problems of that country or prevent a default on the national debt. (See article: Eurozone: Last-minute rescue package)

Before the July 21 agreement can even come into force, it has to be ratified by all of the Eurozone governments, mostly through their parliaments, which are not in session during the month of August.

Willem Buiter of Citigroup made the comment that, "getting 17 eurozone parliaments to support major changes is like getting a centipede hurdling"!

Only two weeks after this - last Sunday - under pressure from the Eurozone leaders, especially Merkel and Sarkozy, the European Central Bank was forced to announce new measures to try and prevent the stock markets going into a tail-spin after Friday's news from America! The previous policy of buying Italian and Spanish bonds on the open market was reversed.

This has reduced, at least temporarily, the rates on these countries' borrowings. Other discussions have taken place about expanding the powers to intervene by using the €440bn in the European Financial Stability Fund but they are hampered by the need for unanimity across the zone.

Just these two governments alone need to find an extra €840bn over the coming 18 months - more than the total of bail-outs already found for Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

The ECB measure will ease the situation in relation to the debts of Italy and Spain. But the strings attached will bring them into head on confrontation with their populations.

Tobias Blattner, a former economist at the European Central Bank, said on Monday that the ECB's intervention had done little to help the crisis of confidence gripping the share markets.

"This reflects the fundamentals that growth is in a very bad situation on both sides of the Atlantic and this is why the ECB's interventions will not change anything".

Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, last week tried to give the impression there was no major problem in Italy. But his country has one of the biggest debts as a percentage of GDP (nearly 120%) and an economy which has failed to grow more than a fraction of 1% for the past two decades.

He has now agreed, with his government, that the budget cuts planned for 2014 (well after the next general election) will be brought forward to 2013 - still after the next election is due! Berlusconi himself has said he will not stand next time round, but he desperately needs a government in power that will not allow three major court cases against him to proceed.

Spain's prime minister, Zapatero, has also declared he will not stand in the next election, sensing the widespread dissatisfaction with his inability to get Spain's economy back into healthy growth.

He has nevertheless agreed to increase austerity measures as a condition of the new loans. The massive level of youth unemployment and a feeling of utter neglect by politicians has been behind the mass movement of the 'indignados' - young people disillusioned with political parties and looking for radical, even revolutionary solutions.

David Jones, an analyst at the firm IG Index, believes that investors will remain unconvinced about putting their money into anything, despite the various attempts by leaders and international authorities to reassure the markets.

"It hasn't changed the feeling that politicians both in Europe and in the US are always a few steps behind where the crisis is," he said. "Markets still think there is a lot of talk from politicians but not much action".

This he sees as a major political reason "why the markets have been so weak over the past week".

Richard Hunter, a broker from Hargreaves Lansdown, said: "The markets are looking for a concrete plan out of Europe and the US in terms of how they are going to deal with their deficits." But because of private ownership and the states' role in defending the national interests of their own capitalists, a clear plan is something that capitalism, by its very nature, can never provide.

Capitalist anarchy, socialist development
Trying to control an anarchic and blind system, none of the measures they take seems to stem the downward spiral into the worst crisis since the 1930s.

The measures they take to try and rescue their system will mean yet more cuts and austerity, yet more suffering and anguish for the vast majority of the world's population.

As it is, according to a medical journal, the Lancet, as a direct result of economic collapse in Greece and Ireland, the suicide rates have soared in the past two years by 16 and 14% respectively.

The accumulating crises - economic and political - of the last few weeks, have only served to underline the chaotic and wasteful way in which capitalism works...or fails to work.

Only 58.1% of Americans of working age now have a real job. Tens of millions of people world-wide - young and old - are on the scrap-heap when they could be producing goods and providing services.

On the basis of public ownership and democratic planning, all the human and physical resources of society could be harnessed for the benefit of the vast majority instead of the increasingly rich minority.

The stranglehold of the banks and capitalist politicians over the lives of millions, in fact, billions, has to be broken. Mass movements including general strikes will show the power that the working class can wield in society.

Linked with the energy and anger of the youth, new mass workers' parties can be rapidly built. Confidence in the idea of a socialist alternative to capitalism can and must be renewed without delay.