La Lutte Continue

After the generally disastrous general election, the struggle continues...

Kick the Tories Out - but sorry Russell, you are wrong about Ed Miliband

The Marxist theorist John Molyneux wrote an excellent piece back in 2013 in which he noted the tendency for the ostensibly opposing political currents of autonomism and left-reformism to come together to find common ground - and how this was because both political tendencies had more in common with each other than they did with any kind of strategy based on working class self-emancipation and building revolutionary democracy based on workers' power - which is at the heart of revolutionary Marxist politics. To quote Molyneux:

  an anarchist/autonomist type strategy which downplays the role of the state (Hardt and Negri) or rejects the taking of state power altogether (see John Holloway’s ‘How to Change the World without Taking Power’) can more easily coexist with a strategy of a reformist government of the left than either of these strategies can coexist with a revolutionary Marxist perspective of building a revolutionary party and smashing the capitalist state. They, the anarchist/autonomists, do their thing at the base, in the localities etc., while the reformists do their thing at the level of government. Two interesting historic precedents for this are: 1) the early 20th century ‘economist’ tendency in Russian Social Democracy who argued that the job of Social Democrats was to restrict themselves to supporting the economic struggles of the working class and not get involved in political struggle which, as Lenin explained at the time, meant leaving politics to the liberal bourgeoisie; 2) the Spanish Revolution where the anarcho-syndicalists refusal to take state power (on the grounds of being opposed to any kind of dictatorship) morphed into support for the bourgeois liberal/ Communist/reformist Popular Front government.

 Russell Brand's dramatic switch from a kind of eclectic autonomism (mixed with spirituality) which was highly critical of electoralist compromises and parliamentary corruption and instead called for a 'Revolution of Consciousness',  to now openly calling for radicals to vote en masse for Ed Miliband's Labour Party (except in Scotland and Brighton where he is obviously happy to go with the tide and support the SNP / Greens respectively) is just one more demonstration of the political truth (or 'trewth' to use Brand's term) highlighted by Molyneux. Another was relayed at a meeting the veteran socialist theorist Colin Barker did in Leeds earlier this year - he recalled meeting a young unknown Spanish anarchist academic who came over to the UK a few years ago to give a talk on Rosa Luxemburg, and who was highly critical of parliamentary politics. When Barker next heard the name of this young anarchist academic he was surprised to learn that he was now an MEP and the leader of the left-reformist Podemos party in Spain - his name was Pablo Iglesias.

 Today serious revolutionary politics - which understand the strategic problems posed by any perspective of the left thinking it can try and take control of the capitalist state as though that state was somehow neutral - are so apparently intellectually unfashionable in Britain that even the likes of Richard Seymour give their support for the left-reformist Green Party (incidentally, in Leeds, many of the 'autonomists' I know personally joined the Green Party during their recent membership 'surge' while one is now standing as a parliamentary candidate for the even less radical single-issue party Yorkshire First).

 And so now we come to the spectacle of Brand endorsing Ed Miliband -  with Miliband being surely one of the very few people who thinks the blood soaked war criminal Tony Blair might still be an electoral asset to the Labour Party - and someone who would apparently prefer a Tory government than going into coalition with the SNP to keep the Tories out - and someone who has just decided to effectively build his political gravestone - sorry 'Ed stone' - which is a pitiful mixture of platitudes ('a better future') and racism ('controls on immigration'). I guess we should be grateful that Ed Miliband didn't raise Gordon Brown's 'British Jobs for British workers' slogan but nonetheless Miliband's vision is so uninspiring he can't even bring himself to write phrases such as 'welfare not warfare' or 'no to privatisation' on his headstone, let alone (God forbid!) the words 'democratic socialism'.

Of course in many places on Thursday radicals and socialists will have to hold their noses and vote Labour to either try to block the Tories or UKIP - or try to punish the Lib Dems - but lets be honest -there are only a handful of Labour MPs and prospective candidates that are actually worthy of the votes of socialists.  In safe Labour seats - what on earth is the point of the Left voting for careerists who like their leader Miliband himself (during the 100 day Care UK strike which took place in his own constituency of Doncaster) - wouldn't go near a local picket line of striking health workers to show solidarity but would find time to travel all the way up to Scotland in an effort to save the Trident nuclear submarines and to save the British imperialist state from breaking up? In Leeds for example we have the likes of Shadow minister Rachel Reeves, who wants to cut benefits for the unemployed, and another Shadow minister Hilary Benn, who was part of Blair's cabinet which took us into the criminal and disastrous Iraq war, surely it is absolutely right for socialists to stand against them as part of TUSC?  And that is before we get to some of the real renegades, racists and charlatans who exist among the roster of Labour MPs standing again as parliamentary candidates, at least one of which (Frank Field) is so right wing he has worked happily with the Tory government as a 'poverty tsar'  and others (like Simon Danczuk) who were considering defecting to UKIP not so long ago...and may well still do so in future if UKIP is not blocked.   My goodness, even Blair's partner in war crime Jack Straw - whose arrogance, ignorance and pomposity are legendary- would have liked to have run for parliament again until his own greed meant he was gloriously hoisted by his own petard recently.

I understand that Russell Brand is still learning about politics - and to be fair to him he is a good learner and no doubt he will ultimately come to chalk this one up to experience and come to realise the error of his ways sooner rather than later after Thursday - so I don't want to be too harsh on the lad - especially given his eloquence and brilliance in using the platform he has as a celebrity to amplify all manner of critical struggles and providing a powerful moral critique of the capitalist system and the destruction it causes to people's lives and to the planet - all of which is so badly needed in the current period - but it is not as if these political questions of revolutionary organisation, strategy and tactics are all completely new - there is a whole history of the Labour Party and what Labour governments are like in power out there on the record - which it might be interesting for Brand to begin to acquaint himself with at some point.   As as aside, one of the limitations of left-reformist thinking is how it is so intrinsically a-historical  - its kind of ingrained - one simply has to place the whole past record of failure where Labour governments are concerned in the 'memory hole' and believe naively that somehow, almost mystically, the next Labour government will be better than the last - just because they can't imagine how it could be any worse.  Even though the record of Labour governments ever since 1945 have all been worse than their predecessors - and a Miliband government will be even worse than Blair's given the scale of cuts and attacks on workers that he will have to drive through given the depth of the capitalist crisis.

Given this, reading some of Ed's dad Ralph for example might be well worth Russell Brand (and others) sitting down and doing at some point - Parliamentary Socialism not being a bad place to start.


'Milibrand' - if only Russell was more into Ralph than Ed...

 When Ed Miliband became leader of the Labour Party - I highlighted some of Ralph Miliband's words which Brand might reflect on if he genuinely believes that Ed Miliband is going to be interested in listening to voices like his - and wider democratic grassroots movements - once he is in power:

 In 1966, Ralph Miliband for example, commenting on Harold Wilson, noted that 'when Mr. Wilson so unexpectedly became leader of the Labour Party, many people on the Left thought that their situation had been drastically changed, and that left-wing voices would at long last be effectively heard at the highest reaches of Labour policy-making.' Such illusions were soon to be proved wrong - not least after Wilson became Prime Minister in 1964.

But for Ralph Miliband, the idea of 'parliamentary socialism' itself brought about through the Labour Party was a flawed strategy - and socialists would be better off trying to build up a socialist alternative to the Labour Party from below:

 'It is absurd to think that the men who now rule the Labour Party, and who will go on ruling it, will ever want, or would agree under pressure, to push the Labour Party in socialist directions, and to show the resolution, single-mindedness and staying-power which such reorientation would require. Carthorses should not be expected to win the Derby. To believe, against all the weight of accumulated evidence, that the Labour leaders can, for instance, be made to adopt a “socialist foreign policy” if it is presented to them in sufficiently alluring terms is pure delusion, on a par with Robert Owen’s hope that Metternich would act on the plan for a Co-operative Commonwealth of Europe which Owen presented to him at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818...'

Miliband went on:

'What this amounts to is that the Labour Party is and will remain as much of a non-socialist party as it has ever been, with its leaders providing a Lib-Lab, non-socialist alternative to the Conservative Party. This does not mean that the two parties are now “the same”. They are in fact very different, in terms of the kind of people who mainly vote for each party, in terms of their membership and the aspirations of their activists. But the parliamentary leaders of the Labour Party (and the point applies, though to a lesser degree to the leaders of the Conservative Party) have always been able to attenuate the political expression of these differences to the point where they do not, in concrete terms, endanger the “neo-capitalist” framework which both party leaderships now accept as permanent... This reproduces, though at a different level, a situation which endured for the best part of the nineteenth century as between the Tory and Liberal parties. These parties were not by any means “the same”; but, as Lord Balfour noted in a famous Introduction to Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution, their “alternating Cabinets, though belonging to different Parties ... never differed about the foundations of society”...'

The task for radicals and socialists in the current period is surely not to line up behind Labour ala Brand but to try and unite to build a genuine socialist alternative to this cosy capitalist consensus - and prepare for the class struggles to come whoever wins on Thursday. The more votes that the genuine socialists, radicals and revolutionaries like TUSC get the stronger the Left will be to fight austerity and cuts after the election. Our slogan should be - 'Vote to Kick the Tories Out - but vote Left to build the socialist alternative where you can'.

That said and done, I should really stop blogging about Brand and get out there campaigning for TUSC myself.  I will leave you with some more reading which is timely - a critique of the first five years of Tony Blair's government from 1997-2001 (so pre-Afghan and Iraq wars) by the late socialist journalist Paul Foot - Why You Should Vote Socialist (2001).

The Histomat guide to the General Election

This blog was started almost ten years ago, just after the 2005 general election - so I didn't comment so much about that election, but you can read some of my thoughts before and after the 2010 general election here, and its result here. This time round, my brief guide to the state of play is below (those wanting a more indepth Marxist analysis of what is going on should read Alex Callinicos in the latest International Socialism journal) - anyway, my take on it here:

The Tories: ''The government is led by a clique of toffs who have neither respect for their colleagues, nor empathy with the average voter. Their born-to-rule mentality means they have a greatly over-inflated view of their own capabilities, which deafens their ears to the advice and warnings of others who might actually know better. They are nothing like as good at governing as they think they are. And this...is now inflicting serious harm on the country...'' - this was the view of Tory MPs about the leaders of their party - back in 2012 - and little over the last three years has changed this basic reality. Remember that David Cameron is so posh that his career with the Conservative Party began with the help of a phone call from Buckingham Palace saying "I understand you are to see David Cameron ... I am ringing to tell you that you are about to meet a truly remarkable young man." It will be interesting indeed if we are faced with a very close election result - as looks likely - whether Cameron will just refuse to face reality and try to hang onto office as long as possible simply because as a leading member of the ruling class - related to the Queen - he just thinks that he is somehow entitled to remain in office in a position he thinks he was born to have - regardless of the small matter of the electorate.

 More critically, how can 'a clique of toffs' - who have waged open and blatant brutal class war on behalf of the rich who run Britain against the working class (both in and out of work) through austerity, massive cuts to the NHS and welfare state, and presiding over growing inequality and attacks on workers pay - still be in with a reasonable chance of remaining in office and making up the government after 7 May, five years on? Basically, because the Tories have relatively successfully pushed 'divide and rule' at every point over the past five years - dividing public sector from private sector workers, the able from the disabled, those in work against those out of work, and increasingly scapegoating immigrants in a racist fashion. Why have the Tories been relatively successful in this pernicious campaign? The answer here is...

The Labour Party, who have instead of standing up for the working class - ie. doing its supposed job as the party of 'labour' - instead gone along the 'austerity myth' and accepted the need for cuts - and more critically, gone along with every 'divide and rule' policy of the Tories - and echoed Tory rhetoric and logic - including when it is racist (eg see the Labour 'control immigration' pledge / mug). The only positive pledges of reform offered by Labour - eg scrapping the bedroom tax - have generally only come about because of the pressure of grassroots campaigners below - often undertaken against local Labour councils.   Ed Miliband's supporters and defenders will try and point to times when Ed has 'stood up' to the rich and big business - but every time Ed has say, criticised Rupert Murdoch, the right wing press have just gone on the attack the next day, and Ed has retreated and returned to eg. proudly holding up copies of the Sun. The only two people Miliband has effectively sacked from his Shadow Cabinet remember were Diane Abbott and Emily Thornberry - both essentially to appease racist voters. If Miliband is this weak in standing up to racists, rich and big business before he is elected - imagine how weak he would be once he was Prime Minister - with all the closer links to the capitalist state etc that would follow from that position - unless there was serious major pressure on his government from trade unionists etc below.

 More critically, it is important to see Labour's weakness historically, as Mark L Thomas does here, pointing out that Tony Cliff once noted that 'Since the Second World War every Labour government has been more right wing than the one before'. In fact, given the level of cuts that a Miliband government would try and carry through amidst the capitalist crisis, it is quite likely that this sorry story would continue under Miliband - even if his foreign policy would be a slight break from Blair (though the fact that Miliband is happy to have Blair himself involved and sponsoring Labour's election challenge this time around does not bode well at all). And if we do have a weak Miliband government making cuts, then only people likely to be smiling are the racist populists of UKIP - just look at the Hollande government in France and how the fascist Front National has flourished.

However, it is wrong to suggest - as Richard Seymour seems to do here - that Labour's commitment to cuts means that what we are already seeing is its 'Pasokisation' - ie like Pasok in Greece, facing its electoral demise because of its pro-austerity politics. We are not quite at this stage yet. As Mark L Thomas notes, 'millions of workers will still vote Labour — not because they love austerity but because they hate the Tories and desperately hope Labour will blunt the worst of the attack'. Labour has not (yet?) done what Pasok did in Greece and entered a 'grand coalition' of austerity with the Tories (and a UKIP style party). A 'grand coalition' of austerity in Britain might possibly be on the cards after the election (its interesting that neither the Tories or Labour have definitely ruled out going into coalition with each other) - but it seems rather unlikely as the level of the capitalist crisis is not as severe as all that (yet). However, Labour's leaders could well consider a coalition with the Lib Dems which brings us onto...

The Lib Dems: What is there to say here? Its worth remembering that liberals (eg the Guardian, Laurie Penny etc etc) urged the Left to vote for the Lib Dems in 2010 in order to keep the Tories out. That worked out well. However, Nick Clegg's basic 'category error' when forming a coalition with the Tories was that he thought he was still living in the 19th century - when an electorate might well have looked more kindly on a Tory - Liberal coalition forming in the 'national interest' (code for the interests of the British capitalist class) - because the electorate back in the 19th century was essentially just rich men of property. However in a mass democracy when rich men of property are a minority of the electorate, the Lib Dems face being punished very harshly for Clegg's basic category error here - and rightly so. I would love to see students in Sheffield Hallam flood to the ballot box to 'decapitate' Clegg himself in 2015 - this really would be a highlight of the election night if it happened...

As a postscript, it is worth noting that if Labour go into coalition with the Lib Dems, that will go down very badly with the trade union leaders who fund Labour so generously - and could lead Unite union for example to end their funding of Labour - which all bodes well for...

The Green Party / SNP / Plaid Cymru: The 'new kids on the block' as it were, even if none of them are particularly new parties. The rise in popularity for these currently effectively social democratic parties have been a very welcome and refreshing new addition to British politics, given how far the Labour Party has moved away from not just socialism but just basic social democracy over the years. The 'election debates' on TV have been actually almost watchable affairs in this election precisely because of the inclusion of these party leaders and their rhetorical attacks on austerity and the racism of UKIP - which have pulled the whole tone of the election debates at least to the Left (even if the corporate media ensures that a right wing narrative dominates in the press - see Richard Desmond of the Express giving £1 million to UKIP and pushing UKIP propaganda in his 'paper').

However - with the possible exception of Plaid Cymru about which I know little - while the Greens and SNP have challenged the need for cuts in their official policy - they have both implemented Tory cuts at a local level over the last five years (eg cutting council jobs in the case of the SNP - and attacking refuse workers in the case of the Greens in Brighton council). Though some socialists - like Richard Seymour - urge the Left to vote Green in this election, and while some Greens are excellent socialists - in reality the Greens are not a socialist party who can be guaranteed to fight for workers - in Leeds where I live for example, it was not so long ago that the local Green Party councillors joined the Tories and Lib Dems in a 'Rainbow coalition' which attacked refuse workers pay - forcing them to take strike action (as in Brighton more recently). The Greens have apparently ruled out joining a Tory coalition after May 7 - which is very good - but socialists should only vote Green if there is no socialist candidate standing, if the local Green candidate is worth voting for, and actually better than say the Labour Party candidate - not all Greens are.

UKIP: Essentially right wing Tories, but more dangerous as the growth of this racist populist party has followed wider European trends which has seen the growth of racist and fascist parties - and UKIP have pulled much of official British politics to the right - as the mainstream parties go out of their way to try and 'out UKIP-UKIP'. The importance of building opposition at the grassroots like Stand Up to UKIP are doing will be critical in the weeks, months and years ahead.  The long term division and crisis of Conservatism over the European Union means that UKIP are sadly likely to be around for a while (however many times their leaders and candidates shoot themselves / machine gun themselves in the foot through idiotic beliefs and grotesque behaviour flowing from their blatant and disgusting racism / sexism / homophobia etc). The rise of UKIP is also dangerous in that it will give confidence to the currently very fragmented and splintered British fascists - and give them an audience and milieu around which to try and re-group and re-organise - which is why there can be no complacency about the threat and potential threat they pose.

TUSC / Left Unity / Scottish Socialist Party / Respect - Almost if not quite as fragmented as the far-right, the socialist left in Britain is nonetheless mounting a timely and important (if inevitably rather ignored by the state and corporate media) challenge as 100 percent anti-austerity parties in this election, with the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) leading the charge with a remarkable 136 parliamentary candidates, 600 local council candidates and an election broadcast - the sixth biggest party in this election. It remains shameful and tragic however that the left is not stronger and more united so that radicals and socialists could raise the red banner of resistance and hope amidst the prevailing cuts, misery, racism and despair even higher and in every constituency. However the crisis and debate over the lack of working class representation in Britain is not going to go away - and indeed is likely to intensify after May 7th - and the fact that there are quite a few joint 'TUSC / Left Unity' joint campaigns underway in this election shows the potential exists already to begin to form a more united left after the election. This is surely the task for revolutionary socialists in Britain in this election - building independent working class organisation and building the vote for the Left - not tailing the SNP or Greens.  Whoever wins on May 7 - the cuts will continue to come - and the need for a united working class fightback in response will be as great as ever - voting for TUSC and the wider Left will send a clear signal that the mood to resist is there.



 Watch the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition broadcast on Friday April 17th..... BBC2: 5.55pm... ITV: 6.25pm... BBC1: 6.55pm... Channel4: 7.55pm - and join the TUSC campaign on the streets!

One Hundred Years of Labourism

After Rachel Reeves's shockingly explicit comments about how the Labour Party are not about political representation for unemployed workers, I was reminded of this quote:

  ‘Respectability is the death of all working-class movements. With the change in the public attitude towards trade unionism came a change in the social standing of the officials. 
‘They too became respectable, and with their new position came their divorce from the working-class point of view, the growing breach between the official caste and the rank and file. 
‘Divorced from manual labour, the leaders ceased to understand the needs of the wage-earner, and with the crowning camaraderie of the House of Commons died the last semblance of the old unity. 
‘The Labour leaders entered the governing classes, and Labour was left, perplexed and unmanned, to find new leaders from its own ranks...’

Who said this?  Was it perhaps Ken Loach, critiquing Ed Miliband's New Labour Party?  Perhaps the late Paul Foot, savaging Tony Blair?  Maybe Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein, in their 1996 work, The Labour Party: A Marxist Analysis?  Perhaps the late Ralph Miliband, in his classic 1961 work Parliamentary Socialism?  Was it Leon Trotsky maybe in his 1925 work Where in Britain Going? No - the answer  is G.D.H. Cole, from 1913 – in chapter vii of his book The World of Labour: A Discussion of the Present and Future of Trade Unionism.  

The problems we face today are not new, and go deep into the history of the labour movement, and so if we don't want another 100 years of Labour trying to preside over the management of a manifestly declining capitalist system, the importance of socialists organising an independent challenge to Labour in the coming elections remain as critical as ever - every socialist who can should support the growing campaign of the the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition and others like Left Unity.  If Labour are - as Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt put it, an 'aggressively pro-business party' - then the need for a new 'aggressively pro-working class party' has never been greater...

How Blair can help the Labour Party win

The fact that Ed Miliband seems to think that Tony Blair might be an electoral asset tells you everything you need to know about the desperation, weakness and general uselessness of Miliband's leadership. But Tony Blair has offered to 'do whatever it takes' to ensure a Labour victory in May - given this, here are a few things any Labour leader who actually wanted to win should suggest Blair goes and does:

1) Resign from the Labour Party
2) Call for any remaining Blairites in the Labour Party to do the honourable thing and also resign
3) Resign as Middle East Peace Envoy, and from all his lucrative advisor posts to big business / banks / dictatorships internationally - and give his riches to charities such as the Red Cross and Medical Aid for Palestinians
4) Apologise for the Iraq War
5) Hand himself into the International Criminal Court and ask to be tried for war crimes

Marxism 2015: Ideas for Revolution

From The Marxism 2015 office:

Marxism 2015 - Thursday 9 - Monday 13th July, Central London.

Marxism 2015 is a five day political festival bringing together thousands of activists, trade unionists, students, writers and academics.

There are over 160 meetings on everything from Palestine to UKIP, climate change to socialist alternatives. Speakers at last years Marxism festival included John Pilger, Gareth Peirce, Darcus Howe, Peter Hain MP, Billy Hayes, Sheila Coleman, Michael Roberts, Janet Alder, Ronnie Kasrils and Louise Raw.

At Marxism 2015 there will be plenty to discuss. It will take place only a few weeks after the General Election. Although at this stage none of us can predict the outcome, it looks set to be one of the most racist election campaigns witnessed in Britain. Whatever the result, the question will remain of how we can build a bigger and more united left in Britain and take on the racist scapegoating of UKIP. Events in the United States have shone a spotlight on the issue of police racism and violence. At the same time over 100 years on from the start of the First World War, questions of imperialism remain. From Gaza to Iraq, Syria to Ukraine, bloodshed and destruction continues and so does resistance to war.

We will explore all of these issues as well as many others at Marxism 2015 and welcome ideas for the event - Check out the Facebook page

Edited to add:
 Marxism as a political festival has been an annual event for a good few years now - I recently came across the following advertisement for Marxism '85 - thirty years ago, which I thought I may as well add on Histomat as from the line-up of speakers alone it looked like a pretty damn good event (as an aside, it might be noted the fact that Ralph Miliband was speaking at it means there is I think a reasonable possibility that this was one of the Marxism events that the young Ed Miliband came along to in order to listen to his dad debate with the SWP...not sadly that Ed Miliband appears to have learnt much about socialism from this experience...):  

The passion of Ed Miliband

Ed Miliband rarely shows any passion about anything - so to see him revealing his passionate desire to preserve the unity of the British imperialist state while giving a speech in Scotland warning against independence - came as a bit of a shock to the system.  It is a damning indictment of Miliband that he refuses to show 0.0001 percent of the same passion when it comes to supporting striking Care UK workers in his own constituency of Doncaster, which he refuses to do despite the fact these workers are victims of NHS privatisation, which Miliband is supposed to be passionately against...  perhaps the reason he shows such newly discovered passion about the Scottish referendum is because his own job as Labour leader will be threatened if Scottish people vote Yes?

John Newsinger on Owen Jones

Guardian columnist Owen Jones was recently described by comedian Russell Brand as 'Our generation's Orwell' in an endorsement for Jones's new bestselling book The Establishment. It is therefore perhaps only fitting that John Newsinger, author of Orwell's Politics and a general authority on Orwell was asked to review Jones's book in the latest Socialist Review. The review itself is well worth reading and a good analysis of Jones's politics - check it out here. My personal wish with respect for Owen Jones is for him to at some point explain to the rest of us exactly how he sees the transition to socialism coming about through Ed Miliband's Labour Party, given its history as - in the words of Ed's dad Ralph - being at best 'a party of modest social reform in a capitalist system within whose confines it is ever more firmly and by now irrevocably rooted' and Ralph Miliband's argument that 'the belief in the effective transformation of the Labour Party into an instrument of socialist policies is the most crippling of all illusions to which socialists in Britain have been prone' ...

Edited to add: Another review of Jones's book by Paul Blackledge in Marx and Philosophy Review of Books

A quick salutation to Miliband

No, not Ed - but Ralph:

[The] ‘acceptance of the legitimacy of military intervention on the ground of the exceptionally tyrannical nature of a regime opens the way to even more military adventurism, predatoriness, conquest and subjugation than is already rife in the world today.The rejection of military intervention on this score is not meant to claim immunity and protection for tyrannical regimes... Tyrannical regimes make opposition extremely difficult: but they do not make it impossible. And the point is to help internal opposition rather than engage in military ‘substitutism’...

On David Miliband's departure from British politics

From the BBC report

Labour leader Ed Miliband says his brother David's decision to quit as an MP and move to a US-based charity leaves UK politics "a poorer place".

Certainly does - David Miliband has been one of the richer UK politicians having made so much money over the last few years while moon-lighting on the side as an MP he had to set up his own company, 'The Office of David Miliband Limited'.

David Miliband announced he was to accept the "new challenge and new start" of running the International Rescue Committee in New York... In his letter to his constituency party chairman, David Miliband said the International Rescue Committee was founded in the 1930s at Albert Einstein's suggestion to help people fleeing the Nazis. And his own family history - his parents both fled Germany in the 1930s - meant "I feel that in doing this job I will be repaying a personal debt".  "This job brings together my personal story and political life - it represents a new challenge and a new start," he said.

David - any chance before you go of having a quiet word with your brother Ed Miliband, reminding him of your family history, and trying and stop New Labour joining the Tories in playing the race card and attacking migrant workers today?

The former foreign secretary, 47, was beaten by a narrow margin by brother Ed in the 2010 Labour leadership contest.

Yep, I remember it well - one of the funniest moments in recent British politics.  David Miliband could have won that election easily if he had dared to deviate just one milimetre to the left from Blairism. 

David said it was "very difficult" to leave Parliament and UK politics.

I bet it was - like his brother, David Miliband was always a careerist first and foremost.

But after serving as an MP for 12 years, he said: "I now have to make a choice about how to give full vent to my ideas and ideals."

Ideas? Ideals? Well David's dad certainly had some ideas and ideals, but if David ever had some,  I agree they didn't get any vent - let alone 'full vent' - while he was an MP, so there is at least some logic to this argument. 

Tony Blair, former Labour leader and prime minister, said: "I congratulate David on his appointment to a major international position. It shows the huge regard in which David is held worldwide. I'm sure he will do a great job. He is obviously a massive loss to UK politics.
"He was the head of my policy unit and then a truly distinguished minister in the government and remains one of the most capable progressive thinkers and leaders globally. I hope and believe this is time out, not time over."

Such praise from a mass murdering war-criminal like Tony Blair says everything you need to know about David Miliband's 'contribution' to UK politics - lets hope David Miliband's departure is not only 'time over' for this complete and utter Blairite standard-bearer, but for Blairism in general. 

David Miliband's former cabinet colleagues, Lord Mandelson and Jack Straw, said they did not think it was the end of his political career.... Mr Straw said he would be "welcomed back into the Labour movement".

The Labour movement?  I guess with a capital 'L', it is reasonable to talk of the 'Labour movement' in this manner - as in a 'movement' devoted to the Labour Party getting power.  But Labour movement with a small 'l'?  As far as the labour movement in the sense of trade unions and working class people collectively organising to change society goes, surely both Jack Straw and David Miliband - sorry the 'The Office of David Miliband Limited' -  left that a very long time ago...

Anyway, lets hope the British Left can unite in order to give the voters of South Shields a socialist alternative  to the austerity politics and racism on offer from the main three parties in the forthcoming by-election...

International Socialism # 137

Internationalism seems to be the theme of the new ISJ (full contents here), with Phil Marfleet writing on the latest stages of the Egyptian Revolution, an interview with Pete Alexander about the Marikana massacre of mineworkers in the new neo-liberal ANC led South Africa, Mike Gonzalez on politics in Latin America which once again hang in the balance given Chavez's illness, as well as other pieces including Jane Hardy on 'new divisions of labour in the global economy. There are also other treats, including Alex Callinicos's review of Neil Davidson's epic work on bourgeois revolution, a piece on how the German Left failed to stop the rise of Hitler's Nazis to power 80 years ago this month, as well as Ian Birchall on Ed Miliband's new hero, the 'One Nation' Tory Benjamin Disraeli.

Some early reflections on 'One Nation Labourism'

Or, how can socialists challenge the 'new conservatism' of Ed Miliband?

The official British labour movement is supposed to be marvelling at the intellectual genius of Ed Miliband this week - for a) doing what anyone involved in acting at any level can do, i.e. learn the lines of a speech written for him and deliver them in public, b) noticing there is a paternalistic historic political tradition called 'One Nation Toryism' dating back to Disraeli (that along with 'Old Labour' died something of a death when British capitalism stopped growing from the 1970s onwards and so making some meaningful positive reforms to benefit the poor was no longer easily done), and c)  noticing that no previous Labour leader has tried to invent a new tradition of 'One Nation Labourism' (perhaps because if anyone else before him had tried to raise this banner many people might have thought 'Hang on, isn't "One Nation Labourism" a bit too close to, er, "National Socialism"?' - something  Ed Miliband can just about get away with because of firstly Disraeli's own Jewish heritage and secondly Ed Miliband's own Jewish heritage and the experience of his family fleeing the Nazis).  Miliband's 'One Nation Labourism' looks as if it is basically 'Blue Labour Re-loaded' - but with less stress on appealing primarily to a 'white [supposedly racist] working class' up North and more stress on trying to win a [supposedly] nationalistic middle class in the South of England.  In other words, the solution for Ed Miliband is not only to adopt Tory policies (acceptance of cuts, public sector pay freeze etc etc) but now also use Tory rhetoric about how Britain is really apparently 'One Nation' (an 'imagined community' if there ever was one at the best of times but a sick joke at a time when inequality is at a record level in Britain) - as well.    So what is to be done, aside from building the fight back by marching for 'a future that works' on 20 October and trying to build a new tradition of political trade unionism independent of Labour among the rank and file of British trade unionists by supporting initiatives like Unite the Resistance?  Here I think we can learn something from the late Marxist intellectual Ralph Miliband - Ed's father - in an article he wrote in 1987 for Socialist Register with Leo Panitch on 'Socialists and the "New Conservatism"'.  Speaking of the social democratic parties like Labour (this is before the rise of New Labour - so his criticism applies doubly today), Miliband senior noted that:

These parties, or at least their leaders, offer at best a return to the days of the Keynesian/welfare state, a reflationary fiscal policy and corporatist-style relations with the trade unions. In effect, they boast of a ‘new realism’ which promises an even more thorough accommodation with capitalism than before. A cloudy rhetoric mingles some of the catch-phrases of the new conservatism with the theme of ‘social compassion’. Thus, Neil Kinnock offers ‘efficiency, individual liberty, wealth creation, patriotism’ as the guiding tenets of the Labour Party, and then adds ‘justice, compassion, and equality’ for good measure. This is supposed to ‘reassert democratic socialist values as an effective body of values for modern needs rather than a ghost from the past’. (The Future of Socialism, Fabian Tract no.509, 1985) But this verbiage, and the policy proposals which accompany it, leaves altogether untouched something which is not ghostly at all, namely the existing structures of power, property and privilege of ‘late capitalism’, and the structures of domination which it is the purpose of socialism to dissolve.

This is why an essential task for socialists is to conduct a sustained, principled and informed critique of social democratic leaders, the result of whose endeavours is not to advance socialist transformation but to retard it. Making this critique presents many problems in the light of diverse electoral and political considerations; and there is always the danger that such a critique will turn into ineffective vituperation. Nevertheless, the socialist case has to be affirmed and developed if it is not to be lost in a fog of obfuscating rhetoric.

The difficulty of the task is underlined by the fact that socialists in Britain have to support the return of a Labour Government; and American socialists, presented with no alternative in many states, may even have to vote for Democratic candidates. In the constricted choice offered at the present time, it is clearly of great importance that the most reactionary bourgeois politicians [e.g. Cameron, Clegg today - Ed] should be driven from office. But socialists have long been aware that elections alone do not determine public policy. The outcome of elections has certain effects, and that is a virtue of capitalist democracy. But the reforms that may flow from electoral outcomes are limited and vulnerable. This is why the purpose of political action for socialists must not only be the achievement of immediate defensive victories, but the widening of the basis of support for reforms which open the way for more fundamental transformations.

We are under no illusion that the institutions of capitalist democracy provide the mechanisms of a smooth achievement of such reforms. Even if a government pledged to radical changes of policy at home and abroad were to be brought to office on the basis of a substantial electoral and parliamentary majority, we have no doubt that it would meet fierce resistance from conservative forces, international as well as national. But this is not the issue before us today in the countries of advanced capitalism. On any realistic assessment, the coming to office of such a government is not an immediate prospect, to say the least, and this makes speculation on the likely ‘scenario’ when such a government does gain office not very relevant to the immediate tasks facing socialists in these countries. Speculation on the degree of opposition even to the re-establishment of something like the Keynesian/welfare state might be more in order.

In this connection, we note that there are many people on the Left who believe that the goal of the Left today should be to establish a Swedish or Austrian-style social democracy in countries like Britain or the United States. Even if this were the appropriate goal for socialists to pursue, it is our view that this fails to address the structural factors which prevented the emplacement of a hegemonic social democracy in the past. It was not that the leadership of the British Labour Party did not look to and admire Sweden; this was always the ‘beacon’ of even right wing social democrats. But the structural position of British capital in the world economy, the leading role of financial capital, the international function of the currency, all underwrote capital’s opposition to anything more than the tepid Keynesianism which the British Treasury practised in the postwar decades. The same factors account for capital’s successful opposition to effective trade union involvement in economic decision-making and the extensive ‘decommodification’ of services of the kind seen in Sweden and Austria. What is true of Britain in these respects is a fortiori true of the United States.

It was precisely such factors which rendered the advances that were made so vulnerable to the attacks of the ‘new conservatism’. In this view, those people on the Left who do want Swedish or Austrian-style social democracy, but who reject a confrontation with capital as too ‘extreme’, are simply refusing to face reality. In the conditions of ‘late capitalism’ in these countries, radical reform inescapably entails such a confrontation.

This means that socialists have to take a long-term view. Two closely related issues are involved. How do we go about convincing more and more people that there are socialist solutions to the shortcomings and derelictions of capitalism? And what are the agencies which will enable socialists to contribute collectively to the advancement of specific struggles, to the spread of socialist ideas, and ultimately to the struggle for power? 

...Social democracy, for all practical purposes, has long given up any such project. When forces within social democratic parties have arisen – and they repeatedly have – to push their leaders to the left, these forces have sooner or later been defeated, among other reasons because leaders under challenge could always claim that the Left was not only unreasonable, unrealistic, etc., but also that its challenge must be fatally damaging to the electoral chances of the party, given the spectacle presented to the electorate by a divided and squabbling party. Electoral considerations, in this respect as in many others, are inevitably of great help to party leaders, since these considerations push followers to want a ‘unity’ which is of great advantage to those who are in control of the party. Social democratic parties will long remain major actors on the political scene of capitalist democratic regimes; and as we have already noted, they are always to be supported against conservative parties. The important point, however, is that on all the evidence that has accumulated over many decades and in many countries, these parties cannot be expected to address seriously and effectively the task of education, mobilisation and struggle which any party truly committed to socialist transformation must undertake.

 There are many people on the Left today who strongly feel the need of a party free of the various shortcomings which have burdened the socialist movement in the past. At present, the will to embark on such an undertaking is stymied by the thought of past failures and disappointments, and by the sense that what matters above all is to support the existing parties which, however inadequate they may be, offer a chance to get rid of reactionary governments. But it is perfectly possible to give such support and yet to envisage the coming into being of new socialist formations that would seek to fulfil the many tasks that now go largely by default.

There is, however, a different sort of inhibition which has in recent years prevented many socialists from thinking seriously about socialist alternatives, in this and in other realms, and to which we have already made reference. This is the loss of confidence and even belief that the socialist project is more than a utopian vision; and with this goes a great deal of self-flagellation and breast-beating about the sins of omission and commission with which the Left charges the Left. Self-criticism is of course very necessary; but much that goes on in this vein is not so much self-criticism as self-indulgent political masochism, accompanied by further retreat from socialist purposes and policies.

All this will pass; and the crying need for new agencies of socialist transformation will sooner or later come to be seriously addressed.  In large measure, it is the deficiencies of social democratic and Communist parties which have produced the ‘new social movements’ of the last two decades – movements whose focus is sexual and race oppression, ecology and peace. These movements have undoubtedly enlarged and enriched the meaning of socialism. All such movements are an essential part of the coalition of forces on which a socialist movement must depend.

However, no such ‘new social movement’ can obviate the need for a socialist party (or parties). Nor can they replace organised labour as the main force on which a socialist movement must rely. Here, and in the actual or potential support of the working class in general, is where the main strength of such a movement has to be found. The ‘working class’ in advanced capitalist countries includes some three quarters of their population – blue collar, white collar, service and distributive workers, men and women, black and white, skilled and unskilled. The task of a socialist party is to afford a degree of coherence to a class which is inevitably fragmented and divided, and to do so without any pretension of achieving a necessarily artificial and imposed ‘monolithic’ unity.

In the coming years, two tasks are in this respect critical. The first is to persuade those workers who have moved electorally to the Right that the new conservatism [ie. Miliband  - Ed] is their enemy. The second task is to persuade those many members of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ working class who have never supported the Left that their interests and aspirations are bound up with the struggle against capitalism.

This is the necessary perspective for anyone committed to the task of socialist transformation. Any other perspective exposes those who harbour it to disillusion, despair and retreat. But long-term though the perspective is, it is not ‘millennial’: for the socialist project is solidly grounded in the growing awareness of vast numbers of men and women that the system cannot deliver on the promises which its apologists so generously dispense. The central problem for socialists is that this awareness is not accompanied by the conviction that there exists a socialist alternative to capitalism. It is this which must be overcome; and it can only be overcome if the socialist case is articulated and developed in a mode of thought and speech which is rigorous, fresh and accessible...

We are well aware that nothing which has been said here provides a blueprint for the solution of the many practical problems that socialists have to resolve if they are to make headway with the socialist project. Our justification, if one is needed, is that at this point of the struggle for socialism in the countries of advanced capitalism, there is need for more than a concentration on the nuts and bolts of the enterprise. At least as important, and in some ways more important, is a clear perception of the structure which the nuts and bolts are intended to keep in place. In other words, what is also needed and badly needed, is a reaffirmation of the principles and values which make up the socialist project, and an insistence that there are radical, rational and feasible alternatives to the ways of life dictated by a system whose own needs are ever more sharply in conflict with human needs.

The Arab Spring Hits Bradford

Histomat salutes George Galloway and Respect for their triumphant and historic win in the Bradford West by-election yesterday - very many congratulations to the people of Bradford West for showing such exquisite political taste and judgement. As Galloway put it, "We have won the most sensational victory in British political history … Labour has been hit by a tidal wave in a seat they have held for many decades and dominated for 100 years. I have won a big victory in every part of the constituency, including in areas many people said I should not even compete..."

Earlier this year I was doing a bit of a spring clean and came across a box of Respect badges under my bed - dating back a few years to when as an SWP member I was part of building Respect*. The box looked kind of sad, and basically redundant. Respect had seemedly all but collapsed as a party itself - and while I did think about posting it off to their national office I gave it to my local SWP organiser in Leeds instead in case he had time to do something with it. Yesterday that very same organiser phoned me up and asked me if I wanted to go over to Bradford to help on the last day of Galloway's election campaign - it was by then clear that he had a good outside chance of winning - or at least polling very respectably. It was a glorious sunny day, I had the time and so for a few hours yesterday I went over to campaign. On the way we popped into a local bookies and put down a cheeky bet on Galloway winning ('a flutter on the GG') - the odds then were 5/1. We thought briefly about betting the whole SWP district finances on Galloway, but decided a) it would be undemocratic to do so and b) the other comrades might not be too happy to hear about this decision afterwards if it went wrong...

Anyway, we got allocated to covering a polling station on Thornton Road in what must have been by the presence of the Tory poll counters at the station one of the supposed 'Tory areas' of the constituency - though this being part of Bradford West it was a largely working class, multi-racial and multicultural area. What was clear was the amount of support for Galloway among voters going in - and from all sections of the community. Every Asian woman - young and old - that passed said they either had voted for Galloway or were voting for Galloway - for some he was their 'hero' - and they mentioned issues like the war (Galloway expressesly declared on his publicity that he was for troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and pledged to oppose any new imperialist war on Iran). I did not take them all at face value at first - from past experience campaigning in Bradford for Respect years ago - people might say they were voting for the candidate you were campaigning for to your face but it didn't necessarily mean they would. There was much in the campaign earlier about the strength of 'Bradree' - communal or family loyalties which were apparently rock solid for Labour after years of this kind of paternalist networking - and so I didn't want to get my hopes up. However, by the end of my shift I thought that if indeed every Asian woman at least did vote for Galloway he would at least poll very well.

But it wasn't just Asian women who told me they were voting Galloway - a young Asian bus driver stopped his bus on the road I was on just to collect a flier from me. There was supposed to be an issue about the fact that Galloway was not 'local' - compared to the other candidates - but as Galloway himself declared being a Bradford outsider is an advantage, given the "utter failure" of 38 years of representation by Labour MPs.

"It's no electoral benefit at all to be the local candidate here," he said last week in his campaign headquarters at a Bradford solicitors' office. "People look around them and see a city that's sinking into the big black hole down there in town," he said, referring to an abandoned building site where a Westfield shopping centre was supposed to be built – an eyesore Labour blames on a Conservative-Lib Dem coalition in the city council in the first decade of the new millennium. "The city centre is filled with pound shops, pawn shops and payday loan shops. There is mass unemployment. I think somebody coming from outside and offering a new start is an electoral plus." Galloway said that support for him had "flowered like daffodils in spring".

One elderly white woman told me that all the other candidates were local councillors who had done nothing - and she had read what Galloway had written and listened to what he had said and that she agreed with him. I was reminded of the old saying 'sometimes you gotta shake the tree to see what falls out' - well, the tree of Labour-controlled politics in Bradford was given one hell of a shaking by Galloway's campaign and was found very wanting indeed. Galloway's campaign literature spoke of 'a new start in Bradford', 'an industrial policy which will bring jobs back to Bradford', an end to 'tuition fees' and stopping 'the break up of the NHS' - as he put it 'you know that, while standing for Respect, I am the real Labour man in this election. I will be a strong voice for all in Bradford'.

The only other evidence that other parties were even running in the area I was campaigning in was four young Labour-supporting student canvassers who walked past, looked dejected when they saw I was campaigning for Galloway - and a car that passed - also full of Labour activists who booed when they saw my Galloway literature. I think many in Labour secretly knew they were beaten even by that point. But no-one could have predicted the late surge of support - particularly among the young - which gave Galloway to describe the victory as an 'uprising' against the mainstream parties - and to dub this the 'Bradford Spring'. The reality is that support for Galloway came from across the constituency - and from all sections of society - and that is what is so uncomfortable for the mainstream parties about this result - it reveals just how weak the bases of all the mainsteam parties have become - even in their most 'safe seats'.

In many ways the result is a reflection of how volatile politics is in Britain just now - and across Europe as a result of the economic crisis. We see the slow polarisation of politics away from the 'centre' towards the socialist Left (as Galloway here - or look at Greece where the left of Labour parties together are now polling about 40 percent in opinion polls) and far right (eg Marine Le Pen in France). The basic fact is that Galloway won because he promised real opposition to the Tory cuts and attacks on the working class - something New Labour under Ed Miliband can't deliver at all. As one comrade put it to me in a text this morning, 'the Tories have a real opposition now and Moribund et al are in the shit'.

Finally, Galloway's win raises the question about possible future left re-alignment in Britain. Ideally it would I think be great to see a unification of Respect and the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition - 'Respect: The Trade Union and Socialist Coalition' anyone? - but this may not happen that quickly. Nonetheless, the echoes of history are here for all to see - the Independent Labour Party had its beginnings in Bradford in the 1890s - lets hope that Galloway's victory in Bradford means that 2012 sees the resurgence of 'independent Labour' - independent working class - politics in Britain again. You can almost feel what the early ILP socialists liked to call 'the rising sun of socialism' again...

Yes, spring is in the air, politics in Britain has just got interesting again after the earthquake that has just hit Bradford - and I am off to Greggs to celebrate my winnings - there are not many times when it feels like you are with the majority of opinion as a socialist - but today is one of those rare moments - and it should be savoured...

*George Galloway in a public meeting once kindly described me as a 'smart cookie', because I was apparently the only person in a room of hundreds of people who knew anything about the political career of one-time Labour Defence Minister Geoff Hoon (a.k.a. 'Geoff Who?')

Edited to add: The comments here seem to be not working so well, so in response to the challenge that this post is too optimistic about the result and its implications, I would say yes, I probably got carried away a bit here by the sunny weather - Galloway is not a revolutionary socialist, and his campaign team was noticeably very male-dominated - though also very well organised it has to be said. Nonetheless, as I think Kevin Maguire has noted, all the other political parties' votes put together couldn't have stopped Galloway here, and I think he will have learnt some lessons from his past experience as a Respect MP that mean he will be more of an asset for the socialist left this time around...

Edited to also add: see Lenin's Tomb for more analysis. The final thing I would say while I am here - and without wishing to stroke the ego of Galloway too much - is that the speed of the campaign and its unexpected victory is a little bit reminiscent of the Cuban Revolution - stealing a march on the American Empire and the British Establishment under their very noses as it were... I'll leave you with that thought...

Edited again to add: Comment from
Tariq Ali, Charlie Kimber for the SWP, and the man himself.

Regime Change Begins At Home

To come within the orbit of imperialist politics is to be debilitated by the stench, to be drowned in the morass of lies and hypocrisy...Now, as always, let us stand for independent organisation and independent action. We have to break our own chains. Who is the fool that expects our gaolers to break them?
CLR James, 1935

Sadly, there are one hell of a lot of such fools around at the moment, willing to suspend disbelief and hope against hope that a classic imperialist adventure in Libya can somehow bring liberation, even after the bloody criminal disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan. Those wars are now clearly to be consigned to the 'memory hole' as if they did not happen or are not still happening. It is as if a tidal wave of forced amnesia has swept over the British political elite and its allies in the corporate media. A Western intervention in the Middle East? Yes, fine, what could possibly go wrong? As the Guardian's Andrew Rawnsley - an ever loyal servant of power - observed of the House of Commons when David Cameron announced the UN was going to war:

After his Commons statement, Conservative MPs saluted their leader. Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne sat on the front bench, nodding approvingly. A Lib Dem member of the cabinet says proudly: "We have taken as forward a position as the Conservatives. We have argued the same way Paddy Ashdown did over Kosovo. To stand aside in this sort of situation would have been unconscionable." Iraq has left deep and still not entirely healed wounds in the Labour party. It would have been less risky for Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary, to sit on the sidelines. So they deserve some credit too for putting Labour on the right side when a fascistic dictator threatens slaughter on his own people. Mr Cameron will get a resounding endorsement for his position when MPs vote tomorrow.


The Guardian on Saturday reported just four out of 650 odd MPs supported the Stop the War Coalition's position on this. For all the talk about Gaddaffi as a 'fascistic dictator', it is almost as if we are the ones living in a totalitarian state - yet we are supposed to be the ones bringing 'democracy'. Moreoever, as Robert Fisk notes, 'there is a racist element in all this'.

The Middle East seems to produce these ravers [like Gaddaffi] – as opposed to Europe, which in the past 100 years has only produced Berlusconi, Mussolini, Stalin and the little chap who used to be a corporal in the 16th List Bavarian reserve infantry, but who went really crackers when he got elected in 1933 – but now we are cleaning up the Middle East again and can forget our own colonial past in this sandpit.


For Cameron, an old Etonion brought up on British imperial mythology and legend, this war is a classic means of trying to distract attention away from his failing and unpopular economic agenda of cuts and privatisation at home - in the finest traditions of Margaret Thatcher's 'Falkland's moment'. In trouble at home with lecturer's strikes and looming strikes over public sector pensions, facing a mass demonstration by trade unionists and students in London, what better timing for a war? And just like the British ruling class over a century ago predicted at the outbreak of the Boer War in South Africa that 'it would all be over by Christmas', so Cameron reassures us that this war will be speedy. Yet, just as the bloody Boer War was in reality about securing gold and diamond reserves - so this war is a classic imperialist adventure to do with securing Libya's oil.

The hapless Clegg's Liberal Democrats, in supporting the racist Tory warmonger Cameron, are following more than just the tradition of Paddy Ashdown - they are standing in the dishonourable traditions of the racist warmongering Liberal Lloyd George , who once noted in his diary in 1932 after an attempt by some in the League of Nations to outlaw aerial bombardment, that the British Empire 'reserves the right to bomb niggers'.

And as for Ed Miliband's parliamentary Labour Party - well, what does one expect now from such a party? Despite Ed Miliband's claims to have 'learnt lessons' from Iraq, it is now manifestly clear that he and his party have learnt next to nothing. The silence of the likes of Diane Abbott is thunderous - political power and patriotism before principle it seems is the order of the day. Even some ordinary Labour Party members who on any other day would proudly wave the red flag of socialism are now lining up under the likes of the Stars and Strikes and the Union Jack. So David Osler tells us that 'once in a while there is a more or less accidental coincidence between what the US wants to see happen in a country and the interests of working people that live there. Libya, here and now, is one of those times.'

History here goes out the window. Can he give us any previous examples of such halycon days when 'what the US wants to see happen in a country and the interests of working people that live there' coincided?

Instead Osler tells us that 'the stark fact is that without external support, the forces that have put their lives on the line in the current uprising against Gaddafi face certain defeat, and a reactionary regime will brutally and triumphantly consolidate its rule, perhaps bringing the revolution in North Africa and elsewhere in the Muslim world to a total halt.'

The 'certain defeat' of the Libyan Revolution was far from certain - Gaddaffi's forces would have found it almost impossible to take and hold a city like Benghazi - and would have faced guerrilla war across Libya even if they did - while it is not only Gaddaffi's regime but the US and its allies that have a material interest in 'bringing the revolution in North Africa and elsewhere in the Muslim world to a total halt'. As Tony Blair puts it, the Western ruling class 'cannot be a spectator to the Arab Revolutions' - what he means is that they have to get in there and stop this 'outbreak of democracy' spreading further across the region - which is why Blair is so proud of Cameron for embracing 'the principle of intervention'.

Socialists have to maintain our independence from such imperialist politics - soaked as they are in blood and oil - and stress instead that the No Fly Zone Is No Way to Free Libya - liberation and emancipation can only come from the mass actions of the oppressed and exploited themselves -as the Arab Revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt have so beautifully demonstrated up to now. For those of us in the West, Regime Change Begins At Home - and in Britain that process of transformation has to begin on March 26th - Turn Trafalgar Square into Tahrir Square!

Edited to add:
Richard Seymour: A Humanitarian Intervention?
Karl Sharro: 'The No-Fly Zone in Libya: Hijacking the Arab Uprisings'

Edited to add:
* Protest on Budget Day. This Wednesday March 23rd Stop the War and CND are participating in a protest outside Downing Street on budget day. We will be demanding David Cameron stops pouring money into yet another futile and destructive foreign war at a time when he is trying to force through the most drastic programme of spending cuts in generations. Welfare not Warfare - protest on Budget Day
Assemble 5pm Trafalgar Square and March to Downing Street.

* Come to the Public Rally - Hands off Libya, Hands off the Middle East. 7pm Wednesday March 30th.
Conway Hall, Red lion Square, London WC1
Speakers include Tony Benn, Lindsey German, Sami Ramadani, and Jeremy Corbyn MP.