Why we need a new anticapitalist organisation

As the Tories put forward policies of austerity, many believed Labour would come to their rescue. With hopes in the Labour Party fading, Dan argues the need for a new left.

Since the ConDem coalition came to power, many progressive and working-class people had hoped that Labour would stand up for them and oppose the vicious cuts that the Tories and Liberal Democrats want to push through parliament. A lot of these people have been seriously disappointed, and left without any kind of party they can support.

At the recent Labour conference, party leader Ed Miliband (made party leader by the trade unions, who funded his campaign and voted for him in huge numbers) promised the bosses of Britain that he would not support ‘irresponsible’ strike waves. At the March 26th demonstration of 750,000 people, he refused to say he opposed all the cuts and said the only way to stop the Tories was by voting Labour. In an attempt to win the support of young people, Labour recently announced their policy to bring top-up fees down to £6000, reducing the currently outrageous £9000 by merely 2/3.. Labour’s attitude to cuts has also been shown in local councils, where their councillors have voted in cuts budgets and slashed local services and jobs.

We don’t have any illusions that Labour is a ‘nice’ party or even fundamentally ‘better’ than the Tories (they brought in university fees, sold off our public services and declared several wars last time they were in power), but the fact that Labour has become so right-wing means that a huge number of people feel that they no longer have a voice in politics. Those people who thought the Lib-Dems might represent them had their hopes quickly shattered by the betrayal over the fight for free education.

Some of the larger socialist groups call themselves ‘parties’ (Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party, Communist Party of Britain, etc.) but in reality number no more than a few hundred activists. What is even worse, many of these groups refuse to work with each other and jockey for position to be the biggest fish in a small pond. We have three national anti-cuts campaigns, each controlled by a different socialist group, each afraid that unity might cause them to “lose control” of the anti-cuts movement.

This is exactly what the working-class doesn’t need. Facing one of the most serious attacks on our standards of living, public services and democratic rights since the 1980′s, a failure to work together now could lead to the outright destruction of the NHS and the welfare state. People’s anger at these attacks on their jobs, pay, services and conditions, and their lack of a way to fight back politically helped fuel the riots we saw in August.There are thousands of people who hate Labour, who think the capitalist system doesn’t work, who want to fight back in an organised way, but don’t want to join a tiny Trotskyist group.

If the left is serious about providing an alternative to the cuts then we need to think about forming an alternative to the “Big 3” parties. This can’t be done just by getting the old left together in a room and forming an alliance based on a lowest-common-denominator manifesto. We need to engage the electricians taking wildcat strike action, the students who occupied their universities up and down the country, the disabled who take to the streets against every attempt to demonise them and kick them off benefits, and the trade unions who can’t or don’t want to fund Labour.

We need a new party which can unite anti-capitalists of various ideologies, backgrounds and traditions, which can give people an alternative in the elections and support strikes, occupations and protests to stop the Tories’ attacks on the working-class. Many young leftists have turned away from the idea of political parties due to the sell-outs and lies of the “Big 3” and the petty infighting which poisons the far-left. We have to discuss and debate with many about the importance of being organised in a party and what kind of party it should be.

REVOLUTION believes we need a revolutionary party, based on the ideas and traditions of the Bolsheviks (the only group to successfully lead a working-class revolution), but we also understand that a lot of people don’t. Lets work towards the united organisation that we all want, and through that process revolutionaries can put forward different ideas about how it should work and what its manifesto should be. It’s time for a new anti-capitalist party to shake up the status quo and provide a real alternative to bourgeois politics.

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A reply to Ed Miliband: change begins at home