To
vote or not to vote: what should socialists say about elections?
INTRODUCTION
Elections are a
fraught subject for the left. Those to the left of us, the
ultra-left, often reject bourgeois elections completely as a
distraction or, worse, capitulation to capitalism. Those to our right
often urge uncritical support for the Labour party during an election
period as the only viable alternative to the Tories. This election is
going to be one of the most important for a long time, because there
are significant shifts occurring in the support for the established
parties of the current political class, so the need for socialists to
adopt the right strategy towards the ballot box is more urgent than
ever.
If
you read our paper, Socialist
Worker,
you may have seen our weekly 'Where We Stand' column, which tries to
unambiguously set out the SWP's political purpose and strategy. We
say:
The present system cannot be patched up - it has to be completely
transformed. The structures of the parliament, army, police and
judiciary cannot be taken over and used by the working people.
I stand by this – as a member of the SWP, as a revolutionary
socialist, I cannot agree that parliament can deliver the democratic
rule of our class. But because we are a serious revolutionary
organisation, we cannot ignore elections either. For the majority of
working people in this country, elections are seen as the main, or
only, way to enact political change. We cannot afford to ignore them,
or to pretend that it makes no difference whatever whether the Labour
Party or the Tories are in office. We must be rooted in the class,
and as long as workers have illusions in parliament we must play an
active role in affecting the outcome of elections. The 'Where We
Stand' column goes on to say:
Elections can be used to agitate for real improvements in people's
lives and to expose the system we live under, but only the mass
action of workers themselves can change the system.
In this speech I want to briefly examine the nature of elections in a
capitalist society, the arguments of those to our left and those to
our right, and recent debates within the SWP as to the correct
strategy to adopt towards elections in general and the 2015 general
election in particular.
THE VOTE
Almost
200 years ago, in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre, when an
armed group of middle-class men on horseback cut down hundreds of
peacefully protesting and picnicking men women and children, the poet
Shelley described the rule of the political class of Britain as
'anarchy'. He meant this not in its modern sense, but in the sense of
a situation in which there was no law because the law was embodied in
an autocratic and violent body of men. His poem, The
Mask of Anarchy,
describes a procession of Tory ministers who embody various
manifestations of moral evil: 'I met Murder on the way - / He had a
mask like Castlereagh'. Behind this procession of depravity follows
Anarchy himself, who rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.
And he wore a kingly crown,
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw -
'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW.'
Why
were MPs able to rule in such a violent way? Why were the possessors
of property able to cut down working people with impunity? Partly at
least, it was because of what we would today call a 'democratic
deficit' – that is to say that MPs were accountable to less than 5%
of the country, and all of this electorate were members of the
propertied classes. Much of the struggle for working people in the
19th
century was for representation in the institutions of the ruling
class – and these struggles were sometimes with, and sometimes
against the struggles between members of the ruling class with
different interests. On the day of the Peterloo massacre, for
instance, the demonstration was part of the Chartist movement, which
called for universal male suffrage and annually elected parliaments –
radical demands which the bourgeoisie would suffer no more than the
aristocracy. Yet little more than a decade later workers in Derby
were forcing aristocrats to cower in their homes and burning down
prisons over a parliamentary bill which would have given suffrage to
only 10% of the country. In the case of the Great Reform Act, the
ruling class were split, with the bourgeois Commons pushing for what
the aristocratic Lords could not stomach. But the internal wranglings
of the ruling class are useful to us for one purpose only – how far
such crises can be used to further the interests of the working
class. In Derby's case, although the workers may not have obtained
suffrage, only a year after the Great Reform Act finally became law
workers at the Silk Mill had the confidence to organise for one of
the world's first industrial strikes, a conflict which lasted a year
in its own right.
It
is easy to forget that we have only had universal suffrage on an
equal basis in this country for 85 years (the voting age for women
was only lowered to that of men in 1930). It is a national myth that
parliament is equal to democracy, when for almost its entire
existence it has been open only to the privileged and election itself
to the wealthy few (a property qualification has almost always been
attached to the franchise). What has the ballot box achieved in the
last 85 years? In some ways it has achieved a lot: national
insurance, council housing, pensions, the NHS, universal free
education, social services, taxes on the wealthy, Health &
Safety, anti-discrimination laws, the Equal Pay Act. However, it has
also scored victories for the ruling class – low corporate
taxation, privatisation of public services, removal of capital
controls, anti-trade union laws, lax enforcement of laws to protect
workers, and of course, austerity, the set of policies enacted by a
rhetoric of togetherness and belt-tightening but in reality aimed a
massive transfer of wealth from the bottom of society to the top; at
penalising and criminalising poverty. It has driven up suicide rates,
impoverished the disabled and is being used to destroy public
services like the NHS, social services and the NHS by deliberately
understaffing them and changing the systems to make it impossible to
work within them. Every advance has been won at a time when capital
is comparatively weakened, but when the forces of capital are
desperate they often strike out ferociously to protect their
interests. In 1979 it was Thatcher, in 2008 it was Brown and 2010 it
was Cameron. Attacks on workers' living standards have been
ferocious, as capital seeks to restore the rate of profit without the
destruction of capital accumulation that a crisis on the scale which
we have seen requires.1
The vote has not protected workers from the class war being waged by
capital.
One of the problems with the vote as it now stands is that it is
within a framework created by the ruling class and it is designed to
limit the participation of people in making the decisions that affect
their lives. In fact it is limited to the election of people for long
periods who may or may not do something that is in your interest.
More fundamentally, elections take place within the context of a
class-divided society, in which the interests of capital have a
powerful voice through control of the mass media, lobbying and direct
employment of political representatives (many MPs hold second, third
or fourth jobs as directors of various companies, for example). So
every five years every person in this country has an equal
opportunity to elect someone who will spend every working day of the
next five years subject to powerful social pressures to conform to
the demands of capital.
This is not to say that working class interests have no influence on
political representatives. Some Labour MPs, for example, are still
sponsored by trades unions. But unions, because of their positions as
arbitrators of disputes, seek to compromise with capital, not to
destroy it. They want to improve the conditions of exploitation, not
to remove the exploitation altogether. So the working class voices
that affect these representatives are unlikely to be those demanding
the transformation of society that socialists want to see.
This
is not a new issue, and not one which is confined to the UK. Since
Marx's Critique of
the Gotha Programme
in 1875, revolutionaries have warned against the rise of reformism,
seeking to bring about social change without the working class taking
control of the levers of power for themselves. Yet reformism has
always had a powerful allure, offering the tempting prospect of
change now, not waiting for the workers to become an organised
revolutionary force. However, its effects have had a mixed impact on
working class consciousness, due to the conflict between the promise
of change and the lived experience of workers. In the introduction to
his book The Vote:
How it was won and how it was undermined,
Paul Foot quotes a nurse he was speaking to in 2003. 'my mother used
to tell me it was our duty to vote, out of respect for the people who
fought for it. I've always followed her advice, but now I'm not so
sure.' [Foot:2012: xiv]
THE ULTRA-LEFT
AND ELECTIONS
I have no wish to be sectarian, and what I present here is a broad
summary of ultra-left arguments, rather than an address to any
particular group, and show why I think that this attitude is
mistaken. The main purpose of this section is to draw out why
socialists should not ignore elections in a capitalist society,
rather than to straw-man another party or left group.
It is tempting, when you see that Labour have no intention of
creating a socialist society, and wax lyrical about the importance of
business, how even 8 years after Blair left office a Milliband
government would still be intensely relaxed about people getting
filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes – but now even the tax
money would just go back to buying nuclear weapons and keeping
financial institutions afloat, rather than ending the devastating
cuts to the services that working people deserve and rely on; it is
tempting to sack off the whole electoral arena as a bad job.
More than this, a socialist can quite reasonably point to the ways in
which socialist governments elected under a capitalist system have
been destroyed when they threaten the capitalist order. In Chile this
was at the barrels of Pinochet's tanks. In Nicaragua through the
wholesale manufacture of an opposition by the US government. In the
UK, the very moderate Wilson government was subject to plans for a
coup d'etat by forces within the British Army and MI5. Capitalist
societies use a mixture of consent and coercion to maintain their
rule. Usually they prefer to give the impression that a government is
democratic and the choice of the people, but when their interests are
threatened, the mask falls away – as the Syriza government and
Greek people are finding out for themselves at the moment.
Given these practical problems, a serious revolutionary may well want
to leave the politicians to their own devices and focus solely on
building within the working class, ignoring the ballot box to build a
revolutionary democracy. Certainly we in the SWP would agree that
real power lies within the working class. This is the class of people
who are exploited by the system and therefore those without whose
labour profit cannot be made. This gives workers the power to change
the world.
However, this ultra-leftist thinking must be challenged. For a start,
we must start from where the class is now, and for the majority of
workers the main political parties and parliamentary elections are
politics. Voting is seen as an important enough activity for 6 out of
10 people to vote in national elections, even after 30 years of
declining turnout (turnout was above 80% for the immediate post-war
governments but has been steadily dropping since the neoliberal
consensus of the late 1970s was formed). If we want to be seen and
heard we must engage with the political arguments that most people
hear on the radio, read in the papers and see on the TV and web.
Secondly, elections are the only time where big political questions
about what kind of society we want can be put, certainly as far as
the media, MPs and councillors are concerned. When the votes are in,
governments tend to act as though they can do as they want – and
why not? There is no way to recall an MP, no councils to which they
are themselves accountable, and a government with a parliamentary
majority has the immense powers of the state, both in terms of
persuasion and coercion, at its command. But a general election is a
time when there is the public space, however limited, to articulate
an alternative to the politics of capitalism. If we can field
candidates to stand in these elections we can be much more visible.
Thirdly, whilst other parties will tell the electorate that they can
solve their problems, as socialists we can demonstrate our politics
in a better way. We can fight – and be seen to fight – for
reforms and improvements to workers' lives, but we can also be honest
with constituents about why our current system prevents us from doing
more, and help build the confidence of workers to fight. This is what
councillors like Michael Lavalette in Preston have been able to do.
Fourthly,
this election in particular is unusual. The polarisation of society
that austerity has produced, the extreme levels of inequality, the
palpable unfairness of Tory measures like the Bedroom Tax and
persecution of benefits claimants, the wage cuts taken by workers and
the massive increase in wealth of the richest, have created anger and
unrest. The inability of the Labour Party to articulate an
alternative to this, and indeed the commitment of the Labour Party to
Tory spending plans and unpopular and unworkable ideas ranging from
Trident to free schools, have left much of its working class base
unwilling to turn out to vote for it. As I mentioned earlier, turnout
has been dropping for some time.2
In the last election it dropped below 60% for the first time. When 4
out of 10 people do not vote there is a large constituency who are
not being represented. This time, with Labour doing its level best to
promise to do nothing about any of the most important things which
affect working people's lives, the gap is potentially even bigger.
Into this vacuum are stepping a range of groups, like the Greens and
nationalists like the SNP and Plaid Cymru. They can seem – and in
some cases are – progressive candidates with a more positive
vision, but fundamentally they are at best reformist and at worst
hold pretty much the same set of interests or reactionary views as
the current ruling class, such as pro-business SNP and the bigot's
current party of choice, UKIP. Anyone who has taken part in anti-UKIP
activity will be familiar with the refrain from those who are
determined to support UKIP: 'they're better than the other lot –
they say what they think', and indeed what they think is that the
people most vulnerable to discrimination deserve to be victimised at
national policy level. This fragmented political landscape is still
new territory for many of us, who have spent all our lives under the
Labour / Tory hegemony. We must seize this opportunity where we can
to put an alternative vision forward, one which is based upon genuine
equality and democracy, and rejects the immigrant-bashing,
homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic finger-pointing of reactionary
distraction that diverts working people from their real class enemies
and encourages them to turn on members of their own class.
THERE IS NO
ALTERNATIVE: THE ARGUMENT FROM THE RIGHT
There is a right-wing argument which anyone on the left will have
heard in various forms – you must vote for Labour, as there is no
realistic alternative to the Tories other than them. Britain is not,
after all, on the brink of a socialist revolution. There are no
soviets, there is no dual power, the working class fightback to
austerity has been sporadic at best, anaemic at worst. At elections
we must remember the differences between the Tories, the party of
capital, and Labour, the party of the unions, and grit our teeth and
vote for them. Even Tony Benn, who spoke at many Marxism festivals,
was President of the Stop The War Coalition, and once wrote in his
diary about an election event in 2001 'like all these great events,
they're organised by the Socialist Workers' Party. The Labour Party
organises absolutely nothing in support of any campaign ... The
Socialist Workers' Party organises' [Benn 2003:661] remained loyal to
the Labour Party to the end of his life. This has certainly been put
forcefully in previous elections, and a softer version of it is all
over social media this time around.
This time around, the argument is at the weakest it has ever been. In
addition to all this psephological upheaval I have just mentioned
people have learned that coalitions don't end the world, and much of
the election conversation is about future coalition possibilities.
This gives the left our best chance to grow electorally for a long
time, and although this cannot replace a focus on the working class
and working class power, it should not be taken to mean that a
serious socialist electoral presence will damage the ability of
socialists to organise – quite the reverse. As one of our Central
Committee members, Marxist academic Alex Callinicos, has pointed out:
the main parties ... share of the vote continues to decline, along
with their membership and their reach into a society that ... has
become much more atomised since Thatcher's advent in 1979. Weakened
social moorings at the base are matched at the top by leadership
staffs slavishly loyal to the neoliberal elite consensus and
obsessively geared to staying ahead of the news cycle. ... when
things go wrong, with an activist base too thin to hold the line,
votes can haemorrhage easily to smaller parties outside the
consensus. [Callinicos 2013:5]
However, things are clearly not as dire for the Labour Party as all
that. Len McCluskey, the leader of the biggest trades union in the
UK, Unite, has not let the very public attempt to attack Unite
members in Falkirk distract him from the vital mission to 'reclaim'
the Labour Party for the left (although the Labour Party has always
been very much a product of the right-wing of the labour movement),
and even high-profile outspoken critics of austerity such as Owen
Jones have joined in this crusade. In addition, although UKIP is
definitely taking votes that would normally have gone to the Labour
Party, for the Tories this effect is two or three times worse.
Nevertheless, although we are not seeing a collapse of the Labour
Party or anything like it, we are seeing the effects of a long period
weakening of support related directly to its refusal to defend
workers effectively, let alone push for more workers' power. We must
not let the electoral arena remain uncontested by socialists,
especially in such (relatively) favourable conditions.
RUSSELL BRAND AND THE VOTE
Russell Brand's
Newsnight announcement that he doesn't vote and wouldn't encourage
others to either has created one of those debates that the capitalist
media likes to indulge in from time to time, in which an apparently
dangerous idea is toyed with on the comments pages of berliners,
tabloids and the broadsheet, before being quietly put away once the
clickbait dies down. I thought that if we're talking about the vote
in 2015, there should be some mention of the printed furore that he
sparked. Brand also comes from an unusual place, as he is patently
finding his political feet and frequently veers between autonomism,
socialism and anarchism in his politics, so in dealing with his
argument we see slight variations in both the argument from the
ultra-left, and from the right. In his book from last year, Brand
clarified his point – that the system is broken, and that
participation in a broken system does no good at all. Instead, we
should work to replace that system in its entirety, not legitimise
the capitalist state by giving it our vote.
There is something
attractive in this argument, and when I first heard it, I thought to
myself, 'I quite agree with that, actually.' But here's the problem
with that: not voting won't stop the election of a government whilst
a majority (or even a large minority) still have illusions in the
system. We are patently not at that point. If we were, this country
would be in a pre-revolutionary state of dual power. We clearly are
not. So I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with Brand's sentiment,
and I can understand his line of argument, but I think that if we are
serious revolutionaries then it is no point putting ourselves so far
ahead of the class that no one can see us.
DEBATES WITHIN
THE SWP
The
question of elections has been discussed and debated within the SWP
over the last few years, not least in the pages of our magazine,
Socialist Review.
Just prior to the last elections, contributors both to articles and
the letters pages argued about the extent to which socialists should
call for support for Labour at the ballot box, but over the last few
years we have seen two electoral formations around which the British
left, notorious for its history of sectarian struggles, has begun to
coalesce – Left Unity and TUSC. The two are different kinds of
electoral vehicle in terms of the way in which they are composed, but
both seek to establish a parliamentary left alternative to Labour. As
Left Unity doesn't permit the membership of organisations, we have
put our organisational support behind TUSC, which involves a
combination of political parties such as ourselves and the Socialist
Party, and trades unions such as the RMT.
Unfortunately the SWP has not been without internal problems over the
last few years. Politically there developed a split in the party
between a majority which retained its focus on the working class as
the agent of change, and a minority which wanted to shift the focus
to movements, which have had a significant impact on the political
landscape in recent years, from the anti-capitalist movement that
began in Seattle to the Stop the War Coalition and environmental
movements. After a fairly acrimonious split, we have moved towards
the view that there is a genuine prospect for left of Labour
candidates in parts of the UK, particularly Scotland, where the
Radical Yes campaign was widely supported and where Labour's support
for the union and austerity has effectively destroyed its electoral
chances. We have sought working alliances with other political
parties and groups from the Communist Party to Left Unity to the
National Health Action Party to this end. As our National Secretary,
Charlie Kimber, noted in an article in Socialist Review last
November, we are standing in the tradition of Marx, Engels and Lenin
in so doing. Often in my talks I end with a quote, because if someone
has said it well, it hardly seems worth saying it poorly, so here is
some Marx, Engels and Lenin.
Even though Lenin was no fan of the British Labour Party, saying that
it 'is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of
workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of
reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the
bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists
to systematically dupe the workers.' [Jones 2010] He also agreed with
Marx and Engels on the subject of parliamentary politicians when they
said:
These poor, weak-minded men, during the course of their generally
very obscure lives, had been so little accustomed to anything like
success that they actually believed their paltry amendments, passed
with two or three votes' majority, would change the face of Europe.
They had, from the beginning of their legislative career, been more
imbued than any other faction of the assembly with that incurable
malady, parliamentary cretinism, a disorder which penetrates its
unfortunate victims with the solemn conviction that the whole world,
its history and future, are governed and determined by a majority of
votes in that particular representative body which has the honour to
count them among its members. [Kimber 2014]
However, they also
said:
Even when there is no prospect whatever of their being elected, the
workers must put up their own candidates in order to preserve their
independence, to count their forces and to lay before the public
their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint. [ibid.]
A point which
Lenin echoed when arguing with a member of the Italian ultra-left.
You say that parliament is an instrument with the aid of which the
bourgeoisie deceives the masses, but this argument should be turned
against you, and it does turn against your thesis. How will you
reveal the true character of parliament to the really backward
masses, who are deceived by the bourgeoisie? How will you expose the
various parliamentary manoeuvres or the positions of the various
political parties if you are not in parliament, if you remain outside
parliament? [ibid.]
In my view, the current trajectory of the party is correct; however I
would also say that we should have begun trying to build bridges with
the other left groups much earlier, as we enter the election still
without a fully-united left front, which gives us a lower starting
point than we would like. If it had not been for the internal crisis,
itself born of decades of defeats and defensive battles against the
neoliberal consensus, perhaps we would have been able to do so.
However, we are moving now and comrades have been putting
considerable energy into campaigns in various parts of the country.
By the next general election we will hopefully be starting from a
point of some good left votes and networks of socialists who have
experience of working together, without losing sight of the purpose
of these elections: to galvanise working class self-activity and
enable us to go on the offensive against the system which exploits
and oppresses billions of people around the world.
SUMMING UP – CLIFF
There is an
interview with Tony Cliff, founder of the SWP, on Youtube. He covers
a wide range of topics in half an hour (my personal favourite being
where he compares the choice between Major and Blair as between being
sold a choice between contracting syphilis and cholera), but at one
point is asked about elections. He says that the SWP had stood
candidates in the 70s and that it was a massive mistake, because our
votes were derisory. We could pull thousands to campaigns and support
for strikes, but at the ballot box Labour held a solid grip on the
working class. I agree wholeheartedly with Cliff: that standing
candidates is not wrong itself, it is wrong tactically, when a
bourgeois social democratic party is confident and holds significant
hegemony within the class. This was the case in the 1970s. In a
month's time this prediction may look hilariously naive, and
following press stories over the last few weeks show that Labour is
able to gain traction by belatedly condemning the excesses of the
super-wealthy (even while never mentioning the word 'class'), but I
believe that there is a considerable body of evidence to suggest that
Labour's ability to claim the vote of the working class is weakening,
and that our electoral future is looking more fragmented. Such a
landscape may offer fertile ground to socialists, providing that we
never forget that the class and the workplace is where true power and
democracy reside, and that parliament is not the end of any serious
revolution.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Benn,
Tony. 2003. Free
At Last! Diaries 1991-2001.
Arrow Books.Brand, Russell, 2014. Revolution. Century.
Callinicos, Alex. 2013. Where is the British left going? International Socialism, 139. Available at: http://www.isj.org.uk/www.isj.org.uk/indexa531.html?id=901&issue=139
Cliff, Tony. 1996. Interview, found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XOcAW64kAQ retreived 15/04/15.
Foot, Paul. 2012. The Vote: How it Was Won and How It Was Undermined. Bookmarks Publications.
Gott, Daniel. 2010. Should socialists argue for a vote for Labour? Socialist Review, 344. Available at: http://socialistreview.org.uk/344/should-socialists-argue-vote-labour-0
Jones, Jonny. 2010. Should socialists argue for a vote for Labour? Socialist Review, 344. Available at: http://socialistreview.org.uk/344/should-socialists-argue-vote-labour
Kimber, Charlie. 2014. The crisis in mainstream politics presents a challenge for the left, Socialist Review, 396. Available at: http://socialistreview.org.uk/396/crisis-mainstream-politics-presents-challenge-left
Shelley, Percy. 2003. The Major Works including poetry, prose and drama. OUP.
Socialist Workers Party, Where We Stand, SWP Online: http://www.swp.org.uk/about-us. Retrieved 09/04/15.
1This
point relies upon a Marxist analysis of political economy, and one
which would require a more in-depth discussion than would be helpful
to the subject of this talk. I will briefly summarise it in this
way: capitalism goes through periodic crises of overproduction which
in the usual way leads to the mass closure of businesses and the
cheap sell-off of their assets, which helps towards restoring
profitability to the system. In the case of the current crisis
however the complex financialisation which capitalism has produced
in its old age has been used to prop up failing businesses, and the
use of public debt to allow the banks to continue in business has
propped up the financialisation. This has created a long, drawn-out
crisis where mass unemployment has been comparatively low, but
profits have not been restored either.
2
Mainstream politicians like to call this voter 'apathy', but as
someone who spends a lot of time on the streets doing political
activity I feel safe in saying that although few people may be fully
paid-up revolutionary socialists at the moment, people are not short
of political opinions. What they are short of is a party which
expresses their opinions or aspirations.
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