Despite Starmer’s efforts Labour will always have a left
The efforts of Labour Party HQ to remove the left from the party are perpetual. Arguably the first occasion was the formal refusal to recognise the young Communist Party as an affiliate in the late 1920s. The most recent purges have included Socialist Appeal and various groups opposed to the expulsion of critics of the current leadership.
The reality is however that the left was present at the formation of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 and will be around for as long as there is a Labour Party or equivalent organisation.
Two left organisations were present at the LRC meeting in Farringdon St in 1900, the Independent Labour Party a broad socialist organisation and the Socialist Democratic Federation, dating back to the early 1880’s and styling itself as Marxist.
The ILP stayed in Labour as an affiliate until 1932. The SDF had disengaged by 1910 and some of its members were amongst the founders of the Communist Party in 1920. Members worked with Labour and Saklatvala was elected on a joint Labour and Communist ticket as MP for Battersea North in 1922.
Labour excluded both the ILP and the CP but the left remained present.
Those around Nye Bevan both before 1939 and again after 1945 formed a left group in Parliament and in the wider party. Expulsions and battles with the Labour right were a common feature. Bevan died in 1960 but the successor to his Parliamentary seat Michael Foot himself became a leading left-wing critic of the Labour leadership particularly around issues of nuclear disarmament.
One way of understanding how the Party has worked and on occasion got elected is that leading left-wing figures are eventually accommodated and go on to become Party leaders.
Harold Wilson who in the 1950s had been a supporter of Bevan succeeded Hugh Gaitskell as leader in 1963 as the left candidate. Likewise Michael Foot became Labour leader in 1980 but led the Party to defeat at the 1983 Election. He made way for someone with a fiery socialist background, Neil Kinnock.
Starmer himself was a leading figure in a magazine called Socialist Alternatives in the 1980s. It was a broad organisation but it had a revolutionary socialist ethos. He has yet to be expelled however.
The impetus to reform market capitalism to reduce inequalities and make it fairer is something that can be seen in various forms across the world, whether a party is seen as social-democratic like Labour or perhaps describes itself as radical or Green. It makes sense to many that it must be easier to make capitalism better than replace it with a socialist society through a revolution. What however is the extent of change needed? Will it challenge capital’s profits or not?
This tension is played out in a minor key in the Labour Party which helps to explain why however many times the right purges the left it invariably re-appears.
Writing in New Left Review as long ago as 1960 Ralph Miliband noted:
the Labour Party has given the distinct impression that it was less and less sure, not about its ultimate purposes, but that it had any ultimate purpose at all.
That does seem to sum up Starmerism. However material conditions, for example the decision to cut Universal Benefits, create demands for radical policies and real change. This will be promoted by the left but it comes from the pressures capital itself creates in society whether the Labour leadership recognises it or not. If it doesn’t offer at least a promise of change as demanded by the left, it fails.
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