- Jeremy Gilbert - An inevitable division: the politics and consequences of the Labour split Archived Message
Posted by johnhol
on February 20, 2019, 10:38 pm
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I don't agree with all of this but it's worth a read. Extracts: It’s interesting to try to parse the precise political affiliates and character of the eight. The collection of MPs who have left might seem to come from notionally different strands of the Labour Right. Although he has flirted with a Blue Labour, anti-immigration position (as he has with many others), Chuka Umunna has had most success at convincing Blairite true believers that he is their natural leader: cosmopolitan, pro-business and rich. Mike Gapes, by contrast, belongs to that strand of the traditional, Gaitskellite Labour right that has never really got over its disappointment at the end of the cold war, and tries to compensate by hating pro-Palestinian campaigners and millennial Corbynites as much as they once hated the USSR. But they both nominated Blairite candidate Liz Kendall for the leadership: as did all of the eight apart from Chris Leslie. In fact what seems apparent is that the notional difference between an ‘old right’ tradition represented by the Labour First organisation and the Blairite faction represented by Progress has now almost entirely broken down. Since the moment of Corbyn’s leadership election the two networks have been acting entirely in concert in their efforts to prevent Momentum from gaining influence in constituency parties and to undermine Corbyn and his supporters at every available opportunity. There is no longer any clear or stable ideological difference between them, and it seems evident that the clearest way of understanding their position is in basic Marxist terms. They are the section of the party that is ultimately allied to the interests of capital. Some may advocate for social reform and for some measure of redistribution, some may dislike the nationalism and endemic snobbery of the Tories more than others; but they will all ruthlessly oppose any attempt to limit or oppose the power of capital and those who hold it. One reason for the erasure of difference between them is the changing composition of the British capitalist class itself. Going back to the 1940s, the old Labour Right was traditionally allied to industrial capital: manufacturers and the extraction industries. The Blairites have always been allied to the City and the Soho-based PR industry. But the long decline of British manufacturing, and the financialisation of the whole economy, has left a situation in which industrial capital is now an almost negligible fraction of that class. Today, in the UK, all capital is finance capital. So on the Labour Right, they’re all Blairites nowadays. A very similar process can be observed taking place in the centrist mainstream of US politics right now, as anti-Trump neocon Republicans and Clintonite, Third Way Democrats increasingly converge upon a common political agenda (this observation was made very persuasively by Lyle Jeremy Rubin on the latest episode of the Chapo Trap House podcast). ... As I’ve pointed out before most of the Blairite MPs became Labour MPs on the basis of a particular implicit understanding of what that role entailed. According to this understanding, the purpose of a Labour MP is to try to persuade the richest and most powerful individuals, groups and institutions to make minor concessions to the interests of the disadvantaged, while persuading the latter to accept that these minor concessions are the best that they can hope for. That job description might well entail some occasional grandstanding when corporate institutions are engaged in particularly egregious forms of behaviour (such as making loans to very poor people at clearly exorbitant rates), or when the political right is engaged in explicit displays of racism or misogyny. But it doesn’t entail any actual attempt to change the underlying distributions of power in British society; and in fact it does necessarily, and structurally, entail extreme hostility towards anybody who proposes to do that. Full article: https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/jeremy-gilbert/inevitable-division-politics-and-consequences-of-labour-split |
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