Why I won’t be voting this may

I have voted in the past and have even stood in an election myself but this year I feel no enthusiasm at all to go and vote at all. Let’s look at my options Tories. Well lets not even go there I’m so unlikely to vote Tory you may as well bet your mortgage on it they do not represent me and never have done. Lib dem, really? Seriously not worth bothering with, Tories in yellow ties. Labour. I was once a member of this party believe it or not and many working-class people will continue to vote labour till they are blue in the face. Fair enough what else is there in all honest? But if the only thing they have to offer come May and next years general election is well we’re not the Tories in name then don’t even bother. UKIP. Well the nastier more racist version of the Tories. Tories on steroids I heard them described as once quite apt I thought. TUSC and other left parties. Not worth bothering with in my opinion. I do not feel voting changes things and voting for a so called radical calling themselves a socialist or whatever may make you feel like you’ve done your bit but what can they really do inside a capitalist system riddled with ways of silencing any who try and change things from within. I have no intention of voting this year. It’s clearly something a lot of good people still look towards but for me you’re banging your head against a brick wall. People say power is with elected officials. It is not it’s with the capitalist as it always has been. Remember the old phrase if voting changed anything they’d make it illegal. It’s not so please draw your own conclusions. Best thing we can do is get organised in our own communities, workplace’s and lives. Join a trade union. Talk to your work mates or local neighbours. There is much to be angry about right now without a political election campaign to trouble people and divert good resources and time and money into. Let’s begin today by building solidarity and strength in our own actions. We do not need leaders to represent o us we can represent ourselves very well already without self appointed leaders looking to rise to power on the backs of the poorest in society. Say no and don’t vote this may.

Another march from A to B is the best Britain’s Unions can offer this year

So the TUC will be holding another set piece demonstration/march from A to B this October the 18th. This for me shows where we are at on so many levels. It’s the last thing we need another arch in central London to go to Hyde Park to listen to Ed Miliband once again and all go home feeling thoroughly deflated. This will be the third big national demonstration since the con-dem government came to power and I do suspect the size of this one could be smaller still. The first demonstration march for the alternative back on March 26 2011 I went on full of optimism that this could be the start of things has quickly faded into my mind. The feeling after that demo and all the militant talks by union leader after union leader that we must strike together now after marching together rings rather hollow. Also who can forget in 2012 Len Mcckluskey of Unite calling for a general strike by a show of hands almost seems laughable now that people actually took that seriously at the time. For me this is all rather depressing it feels like we are going around in circles and in many wyes we are while the government and the state run rings around us laughing all the way to the bank quite literally in many cases. The title for this year’s march from A to B will be called Britain needs a pay rise so we're no longer marching for an alternative just a bit of a pay rise. How much it’s not clear. Clearly this will be channeled into voting for labour next year for this to happen no doubt. So you may ask what I think should be done instead if March’s don’t work? Well I think that fighting for ourselves not looking towards leaders to lead us all the time taking control of our own struggles where we can be it in our communities or our workplaces. Many people are at breaking point that will be able to afford to come up to London to go for a march again anyway? Will those being threatened with eviction due to the vicious bedroom tax which still rumbles on despite labours claims to abolish it be able to come along for a nice day out listening to Mr. Ed? No doubt many of the trot parties out there will talk this up as the chance to prelaunch the anti cuts movement and cease it as another hot bed to sell papers and recruit some poor souls who can be easily mislead. As Karl Marx once said it is for the workers and the workers themselves to change society not a self appointed top down leadership. Also I’m sure we will hear those calls for a 24 hour general strike from the usual suspects again. This is just not going to happen by calling on the TUC to organize it from the top down. Of course it would be welcome but we’d be far better building it from below going around the union tops if need be. Let’s start today by organising in our towns and cities without the tired old leaderships. We have the power when we get together to affect change. A march in a cold October will change nothing and the unions know this. It’s a way of letting off steam. Lets by pass them.

What should the working class do?

I had a really interesting and thought provoking question earlier tonight. I was asked well how I think the working class should be organised. This sparked interest in my mind and instantly I thought well why not turn it on its head this question. Why not ask ourselves how can the working class organise itself? Which is precisely the question in my mind right about now. I think leadership is important but not necessarily the concept of leadership we are used to. As a free thinking socialist I like to look at things from all angles so when someone says to me what about leadership and organisation I reply well those are both important but what type of leadership and organisation do we want and what should we strive for? It’s not that I believe that leadership and organisation are flawed but it’s the question to me well what kind of organisation should we look for and what kind of leadership do we need? Do we need one who looks and tells us what to think and act all of the time? Or as I do believe those workers and those who want change the progressives if you like can and will act and think for themselves. As marxists many do think a vanguard or a self appointed elite of workers or a so called advanced layer will need to lead the mass's to think and act for the greater good but I personally hold far more faith in the workers the mass's the down trodden if you like than most Marxists. I personally feel that we should not treat the working class as dumbed down backward thinking people but forward thinking free thinking even mass's who can grasp the situation at hand. As we speak the ruling class are rolling back all the concessions that the power of the organised working class has won from the state. The state is just the enforcer of capitalism, and making that enforcement more naked at the expense of ordinary people doesn’t benefit anybody except those with political and economic power. The real alternative is a world without either the state or capitalism – libertarian communism. To get to that, we need to replace state-provided social welfare with voluntary cooperation and mutual aid. But you can’t have that in a profit system founded on private property, and so in the present its state services or a privatised nightmare-version of 21st century feudalism. As far as the alternative to the vote, what has the ballot box gotten us? Even the vote itself was won through direct action, and the greatest gains of the 20th century – the welfare state and the NHS – were not a result of putting an x in a box. They were concessions offered to appease the strength of our class. “If we don’t give them reforms, they’ll give us revolution,” in Tory MP Quintin Hogg’s words. The alternative to the vote is that threat. The willingness to use direct action, not only for concessions in the present but also to push for a better world in the future. This is what we must keep in mind when asking the question about the working class it is not simply a thing we can mess with and manipulate for our own ends these are actual people with individual thoughts and feelings. I think as Marx always taught us the working class is the only revolutionary class and that class alone can only be the one who changes its own situation. I am not sure that a vanguard of workers those who have appointed themselves without a mass popular vote and decision can be the ones to take us all forward we need mass precipitation and engagement with democracy at all times. Let’s be wary of those who claim to speak for us and their real aims and objectives. We must remember workers have nothing to loose but their chains.....

The question of leadership

I have been in organisations with strong and weak leadership and have come to the conclusion that leadership itself is fundamentally flawed in many ways. During my time in the socialist party we were told the working class needs new fighting leadership but I am not sure this is quite true on many levels. Of course we were told while a member of such sects that Trotsky’s famous quote that the crisis facing the working class is the crisis of leadership and some seem to have taken this particular quote to the point of dogma and frozen it in time and done little with it sadly. I am a believer that we are our own leaders and that leadership as a concept is a concept for bureaucracy. I think we all have it within us to lead and control our own struggles now. Why do we need a self appointed leadership to control and manage our own struggles they are ours for a reason surely? I have firm belief that the working class can lead its own struggles and battles without a leadership. In fact leadership starts from within and some take it further but if we all lead our own struggles by not giving our struggles over to some far distant appointed body we can remain in control. In fact I believe now that if we reject the concept of leadership in the term understood today anyway which of course can and will change in time is no blueprint for success at all. I do think that if we, we own and control our own struggles we cannot and will not be sold out by leaderships and bodies looking to act and speak on our behalf. Only us the workers the rank-and-file of the movement and the world can control and affect change. Lets be honest when has a leader ever acted in our own interests. Once we have given permission to someone else to decide what is best for us we have in affect already lost because we can no longer affect change ourselves it is down to someone else not us. Leadership as a concept is not a bad thing but it is how that power of change and understanding shifts from us to a body of people we are trusting to act and speak on our behalf. I am naturally dis trustful of leadership due to my experiences some may have good experiences but I do think in the end we will all see leaders or those who claim to be our leaders in the light cold light of day for all to dsee as opportunists . The mass's have the answer and will not be fooled some may be some of the time but not forever. Workers and those at the bottom of the pile will have nothing to loose very soon and then you will see a fight back and this will be spontaneous and leaderless. For this to succeed people will need to learn for themselves and take each step at a time if they loose they must take that on the chin and learn from it not look to leaders to make things better as they simply will not they will act in their own interest as they always have done and always will.

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.

Comments on the state

The state as a Marxist understanding is a group of armed individuals being that of the police or the army this is something which looks to be the guard for one class over another. As we stand capitalism is protected by the state and by the police and the army they will come to protect capitalism and its rule no matter what. State ownership is not communist or not even socialist when you think about it. Looking for the state to run things on our behalf is like handing the keys to your new boss not your old boss. The fact is they are still your boss. I oppose state capitalism in all forms it cannot and will not be our friend in any shape or form. Many revolutionary parties are it the SWp or the socialist party call for the public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy which is in affect calling for the capitalist state to take over and run these organisations on our behalf while keeping the boss’s in place. This is not good enough in my opinion as a boss is a boss wheatear they are claiming to be socialist or not. For over a century now all sorts of social democrats, Stalinists and Trotskyists have espoused the view that the state can be used to bring about a communist society through reforms and/or seizing the state on behalf of the workers. This has often been dubbed by libertarian communists as “state socialism”. One of the staple demands of this statistic strategy is the nationalisation of banks and other industries, bringing them under the direction of the state. This is usually disguised in leftist terms like “public” or “social” ownership, offering the illusion of a “worker’s state”. However, state ownership of industry is in no way a communist measure – by communism we mean a society free of state direction and based on direct democracy, common ownership and production for need, not want. Nationalisation takes control out of the workers’ hands and into those of the state, which bolsters the rule of class over class. In the Soviet Union, as in the West, there was still a small boss class who gained profit from the labour of the mass of the population. Nationalisation is not only the preserve of the left. Other “state capitalist” ideologies exist which use nationalisation as a tactic. These include those on the right (such as the Nazis) and so-called “democratic” governments (such as Roosevelt’s with the “New Deal” and the Labour party prior to 1997). Often, nationalisation has been a tactic for large scale industrial restructuring. It was used in 19th century Europe to develop infrastructure. A classic example is the railways, built at a time when it was believed that market forces would reward the good and useful and eliminate the bad or socially useless. However, it was necessary, as early as 1840, for the government to regulate and supervise them, simply to protect the public. In Russia, after the revolution of 1917, the Bolshevik regime used state ownership to develop Russian industry defending it as socialist by saying that fully fledged capitalism was required for socialism to be achieved. In post-war Europe nationalisation was used to restructure devastated economies. Attlee’s Labour government, elected in 1945, brought the Bank of England, coal mining, steel, electricity, gas, telephones and inland transport under state direction. It also developed the “cradle to grave” welfare state. However, in the past 30 years, nationalisation was thought to have dropped off the mainstream political agenda. The rise of neo-liberalism, the fall of the Soviet Union and the Labour Party’s dropping of its commitment to state ownership before its 1997 landslide, were, for many, the final nails in the coffin. Too many people’s surprise though, nationalisation has made a comeback. Facing the worst downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the near collapse of the banking sector has forced the state to once again openly intervene in the economy. With workers’ militancy at a low ebb, leading to a low wage economy, the growth in credit provided the money to keep consumers spending. This was coupled with the UK economy’s reliance on banking and “mortgage derivatives”. So when the housing bubble burst credit dried up, banks teetered on the verge of collapse and the economy went into recession. This was most spectacular in the case of Northern Rock with the first run on a bank in over a century and its eventual nationalisation. Since then, the state has also rescued Bradford & Bindley and the Royal Bank of Scotland, while the Anglo-Irish Bank was bailed out by the Irish government. The car industry has also been hit with renewed calls from some on the left for its nationalisation. However, governments do not nationalise industries because ministers heed the calls of small leftist groups. They do so because of a need to prevent a banking collapse and its inevitable consequences – economic disaster, falling profits and the danger of social unrest. This use of state intervention by so-called free marketeers like Brown and Bush isn’t new. Accord-in to one expert, Ronald Reagan, great that defender of the individualistic free market, “presided over the greatest swing towards protectionism since the 1930s”. In essence, American workers bore the brunt of “free market discipline” whilst the rich benefited from the actions of the state. Laissez faire principles didn’t apply to the working class in that they had no freedom in opposing their exploitation. In Britain, after 17 years of Thatcherism economic gospel, public spending was still the same, 42.25% of GDP, as it had been when she took over. Meanwhile sustained attacks on the working class continued which saw the breaking of militancy and chronic levels of poverty. Unsur-prisingly, finance and industry did very well for themselves. In this recession conditions for ordinary working people are coming under further attack. Redundancies, unemployment, wage cuts, cuts in public services and home repossessions are all on the rise. Benefits are also being targeted with the unemployed, single mothers and recipients of incapacity benefit, among others, in the firing line. At JCB workers voted for a £50 a week pay cut to avoid redundancies only for the company to make workers redundant anyway. With repossessions hitting record levels the government has even had to ask banks to go easy on mortgage defaulters. So, yet again, we see attacks on working people as a small minority of fat cats get billions in state aid. We would thank anyone to point out to us what function, if any, the state can have in an economic organisation, where private property has been abolished and in which parasitism and special privilege have no place. The suppression of the state cannot be a languid affair; it must be the task of the revolution to finish with the state. Either the revolution gives social wealth to the producers in which case the producers organise themselves for due collective distribution and the state has nothing to do; or the revolution does not give social wealth to the producers, in which case the revolution has been a lie and the state would continue. Diego Abad de Santillan So, with all this state intervention, why are we no closer to a glorious socialist future? Why are we actually seeing peoples’ lives devastated by homelessness and unemployment? Simply put, nationalisation is not, and cannot be, a tool for achieving a communist society. Nationalisation by state socialist regimes has never eliminated capitalism. In the Soviet bloc there were superficial differences with the West. Most capital was owned by the state; there was no free >>> market in labour; the poor had the “right to work”. Fundamentally though, the conditions of life for the working class were the same as in the West. Capitalism still existed, because workers sold their labour power and consequently were dispossessed of the means to freely create the conditions of life. As in the West, there was a ruling class which lived off the surplus produced by the workers – this class consisted of a central Party elite which owned the state. Peter Kropotkin argued that: Everywhere the State has been, and still is, the main pillar and the creator, direct and indirect, of Capitalism and its powers over the masses. Nowhere, since States have grown up, have the masses had the freedom of resisting the oppression by capitalists. . . The state has always interfered in the economic life in favour of the capitalist exploiter. It has always granted him protection in robbery, given aid and support for further enrichment. And it could not be otherwise. To do so was one of the functions – the chief mission – of the State. So when left wing groups today call for the nationalisation of the banks and other industries (as the Socialist Party of England and Wales and their local councillors do) they are not arguing for socialism. After all, state intervention Has historically been a way to save capitalism from itself as it expands and dominates. After a decade of the Labour Party claiming there was no alternative to the free market, an alternative was soon found once the capitalism system faced the threat of collapse. Thus we argue for the socialisation of the economy, not its nationalisation. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

What is meant by a rank-and-file organisation?

The rank-and-file in a union or a work place truly hold the power in a struggle if they decide to flex their muscles and act independently of the union leadership they can be a very powerful force within the work place. Over the years various rank-and-file organisations have been set up and have had their day but today in 2013 there is a need for them once again. I am less than convinced with the left wing attempts at rank-and-file organisations with much emphasis being put on being taken over and run as anti cuts groups which in themselves are fine and do a job but workers are still left with little to no organisation to join or to lean towards if they are in struggle in a workplace or a community. If they do not wish to blindly follow their union leaders line if they wish to control and own their own struggles there is no organisation there they can turn to right now. The NSSN the National Shops Stewards Union could have been this but is now another anti cuts group which is up to them of course but does not negate the need for a truly rank-and-file owned and controlled movement if not organisation operating from below. The NSSN which has turned itself through the leadership of the socialist party has turned itself into a propagandist group organising regularly lobby’s of the TUC to call for this or that recently it has been to call on the TUC to call a 24 hour general strike. This as I’ve explained before is a failed strategy which’s quite frankly going no where anytime soon. Why appeal to the TUC in the first place who are a load of highly paid bureaucrats and secondly if this so called 24 hour general strike actually happened which I admit is highly unlikely in the coming period although if it happened I would welcome it of course what would it actually achieve? The socialist party actually admit that a 24 hour general strike will not stop austerity although reading much of their recent literature on the lobby’s and the like you’d be forgiven for thinking one day all out will see off this government and the cuts in one fail swoop. No no no comrades where do they get all this from? A genuine real rank-and-file organisation would start from the premise that we are at a very low period of class struggle pretending anything else like some left groups do that we are just on the verge of mass class struggle and anger is to dress thins up as fiction I’m afraid we are not in a pre revolutionary period and are as far off that than ever in my view. Of course things can change but recognising where we are not where we want to be has got to be a start and that for me is a very low point and must be built on. Building workers confidence in taking action and actually winning is key. Pointing to the likes of the sparks and the Hovis workers who have won against 0 hour contracts recently is key to winning the argument for acting and action from below.  Decision-making by mass meeting  Recallable delegates, not representatives, where necessary  Local control of strike funds  Rank-and-file controlled strike committees  Direct action On which basis, people can learn the power in their own hands and to act on their own initiative. Mass meetings on a democratic basis are just a start any workplace any area of struggle must be held accountable from those below. Handing power and representation to those above loose’s you that power. Do beware of those looking to act and represent you. DO they really have your best interests at heart? Ultimately, if the aim is to have ordinary people taking action for themselves, then the ideas are the most important part of the equation. We can promote a culture of resistance, but by the nature of the beast we cannot produce a formula or a rigid programme. If people are to take control of their own struggles, they must decide how for themselves. The role of militants within the workplace is simply to be part of that, and to argue and demonstrate that it can be done.