We’ve seen this happen before, and it always ends in failure. A small number of Labour Party members leave the party in disgust, an even fewer number are angry enough and motivated enough to form a new party. It either fizzles out due to burnout, or gets invaded by Trots and destroyed from the inside.
The one example I can think of that’s survived for many years is Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, formed in very similar circumstances to now: a decaying, corrupt, widely-hated Tory government almost certain to lose the next election but the leader of the Labour Party (i.e. Blair) was in no way left wing or promising any socialist policies.
The SLP was set up in 1996 and is still going. After nearly 30 years, how much electoral success has it had? How many people other than ultra-committed political obsessives (such as us!) even know of its existence?
It’s pretty much assured that Galloway will be part of this, and the trots absolutely loathe him.
TIL Scargill is still alive.
I did A level politics in 99-01. I didn’t even hear about SLP once. I’ve heard of Scargill but didn’t know he’d setup SLP.
He ought to join either the Lib Dems or the Greens so as not to split the vote
I think his bringing up Gaza a lot might make them a bit too nervous.
Neoliberals and neoliberals on bikes aren’t left wing.
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I loathe that the left always have to debate between “splitting the vote” and actually voting for what we believe in.
TBF the right does too, as parties like UKIP and the whole brexit fiasco illustrated.
Divide and conquer.
Well I hope they don’t split the vote enough to keep the Conservatives in power.
Do these guys not know how to play FPTP? Or maybe any dark money coming in behind them does… Would be not the first time they have played the left to keep them out of power. Like Conservatives joining Labour to vote Corybe leader.
There’s a conservative with dark money behind him leading the so called “labour” party right now.
I’m sorry he’s not left enough for you, but he’s nothing like the current Conservative party.
Another one, huh?
There is one Labour party and that is the party that is actually funded by the labour movement. Everything else is just another bourgeois party because it draws its money and its activists from people who have money and time to spare, i.e., middle-class people. It doesn’t matter what it calls itself or how it describes itself. It doesn’t matter what it says it’s going to do in the near-impossible scenario in which it gets elected. The material reality of such a party is that it’s middle-class. By contrast, the Labour party is the Labour party. It is imperfect because it’s real. It might not even be the best that a party-of-labour hypoethically could be. But it is the party of labour. Everyone else is just a poser. That’s it.
We’ve already seen the RMT and BFAWU de-affiliate, union funding has slumped and private donors like Lord Sainsbury now make up the majority of funding.
Private donors will make up 100% of the funding to this new party.
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It would be better if Labour only took money from the unions and from co-ops, but that would be a really quick way to go bankrupt, unless lots of other unions decide to affiliate. So, while Labour doesn’t get enough of its money from unions, this new party will get literally all of its money from middle class people. I think a party funded in part by the unions is better than one funded entirely by middle-class people.
There is no point in continuing to strictly adhere to Marx’s language when trying to understand and discuss our society. When Marx was writing, the proletariat were majority wage (not salary) earners who didn’t have bank accounts. Virtually none of them were property owners, almost by definition. They didn’t have the vote and collective bargaining was basically illegal. The material conditions - what Marx actually cared about, to his great credit - have changed completely. The idea of a ‘working class’ made up mostly of people who drew salaries, had bank accounts, pensions, and even owned their own homes would have been quite alien to Marx. I think he’d have been impressed but not entirely surprised to find just how flexible capitalism was in this regard!
The unions, however, do represent the actually existing working class, and the only party they fund is the Labour party.
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Your distrust of the middle-class isn’t completely unfounded, I don’t think, as it’s very easy for middle/upper-class folks to be manipulated into believing that policies designed to benefit billionaires/corporations are also of benefit to them.
It’s not about people being manipulated; it’s about the fact that in aggregate people will vote for their class interests. This is why the country’s most successful left wing bourgeoisie party, the Greens, is basically a NIMBY party who spend most of their time strongly opposing green development. Their members haven’t been manipulated, they’re just voting in their own interest as, by and large, wealthy homeowners. Labour, because it still has some funding from the working class as working class people is capable of proposing policies that will, e.g., allow more housing and green developments, while the Green party just isn’t. That’s class politics at work, and that’s why we need Labour.
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How big does a movement need to be to describe itself as “mass”?
I’m not sure that any party that wants to participate in the Westmister House of Distraction is anything other than riddled with state security services operatives.
