By virtue of not being at the planning meeting I ended up with the job of speaking for Socialist Resistance at yesterday’s event we organised with Green Left. Someone else can do a fuller assessment but there were lots of faces I’d never seen before and those who sat through the day were very positive about it at the end. All the sessions were recorded on video and will be available over the next several days.
Here’s a, more or less, verbatim record of what I said. If I were preparing the same speech today I would integrate the points that were made in the discussion about feminizing the movement and giving women’s role a more central place.
The opening gambit took quite a few participants by surprise but it worked.
I’d like to begin by doing something that speakers in a closing plenary session don’t usually do. I’m going to shut up for a minute or two. I would like you to turn to the person beside you and say what struck you most about today’s discussions. Was it something that you hadn’t known before? Was it a fresh insight on the tasks that face us? Was it something about the ways in which people organise?
There are serious reasons for that little exercise. The first is elementary pedagogy. You learn a lot more by talking, reflecting and doing than by passively listening. You’ve had to take in a lot of information today without necessarily getting a chance to process it. Giving you a little bit of time might help with that.
The second reason is bound up with the politics of the way we organised today’s event. We very deliberately set out to make it internationalist and pluralistic. As you will have seen it was a genuine collaboration between Socialist Resistance and the Green Left. Both of us brought something of our own approach. Neither side was interested in “poaching” a couple of the other’s members. I’m not privy to their inner secrets but I’m guessing that Green Left is not planning entry work in Respect anytime soon and we won’t be joining the Green Party either. It has been a genuine example of two currents who agree on the importance of ecosocialism working together.Nothing more and nothing less.
The result has been a better event than either of us could have pulled off left to our own devices. Being in separate organisations is a lot less important than agreeing on many aspects of the politics and the event today shows that it is possible to organise together around those parts of politics on which we have a shared understanding.
Learning needed
That’s significant because if we are to are to build a mass movement to successfully challenge the climate change that capitalism is creating those of us on the traditional Marxist left have to admit that we have a great deal to learn from those individuals and organisations which have taken the issue much more seriously than we have for a great deal longer than we have. We need to become as familiar with the science, the debates and what the possible solutions are as some in this room are with what to many people, er, most of the working class, are the arcane debates in the Bolsheviks before 1917. You don’t do that without listening to our guests from the Climate Camp, the Campaign Against Climate Change, Harcan Clearskies and the experiences of those for whom climate change is already a life or death in the global south.
Marxism was greatly enriched by the women’s movement. It has as much to learn from the environmental movement if it is to retain its relevance as an instrument for changing the world in the coming decades. If you have not realised that today you can’t really have been paying attention.
It also means that Marxists have to get away from the increasingly bizarre and unsustainable idea that integrating ecology in a meaningful way into political practice and programme is in some way a retreat from class politics motivated only by a desire to either recruit a tiny number of members of the Green Party or an abandonment of class struggle. In a very modest way Visteon and Vestas have shown us that an understanding of the link between capitalism and climate is penetrating the minds of workers who come into struggle.
Fragile understanding
This is a fact which confronts us with a dual problem.
The first is that we are still in a situation in which tiny disputes like Visteon and Vestas absorb the whole left’s attention because they are still so exceptional. All the evidence is that the working class in Britain is responding to the recession by accepting cuts or freezes in their pay, carnage to their pensions and working conditions. This current crisis of capitalism is being accepted almost as a natural phenomenon over which workers have no control.
The second is the fragility of the ecological understanding. Tony Woodley, top bureaucrat in Unite, took to the TV a few days ago saying that the British government really must do something about protecting the jobs of the car workers in Ellesmere Port. This rather throws open the question of just what Woodley thinks his job is but we can explore that point another time.
I learned a couple of days ago that, given the scale of world car output, if you parked all the cars being built today on all 6 lanes of the M4 from London to Bristol and back it would take you just 40 hours to fill the whole motorway. The next time you’re on a date and conversation is flagging you might want to drop that into the conversation.
Anyway the point is that Woodley could have said something along the lines of “there are already enough cars in Britain. Let’s use the skilled workers producing for a market that is saturated to make things that are socially useful and carbon neutral.” If I can put in a plug for the current issue of Socialist Resistance the Lucas workers came to that conclusion over thirty years ago. You can see what the man meant when he said “the world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat”. Nothing much has changed.
Those of us who are supporters of Socialist Resistance are, by and large, also members of Respect. More than once we’ve all been asked why. The short version of the answer is that we are committed to building a mass class struggle party to the left of Labour and that we see Respect as a future component of that party. We know that Respect will be standing in next year’s general and local government elections in some parts of the country. Exactly where is still to be decided.
Elections plus
We also think that it is necessary to offer the largest possible electoral challenge to the three neo liberal variants that will be on offer. Not just that. In some parts of the country UKIP and the BNP will be offering the solutions of the far right to unemployment and poverty. Now we can relativise the importance of electoral politics all we like at but we cannot get away from the fact that in Britain, a country with a long established Labour Party, elections are still an important part of the way most people think about politics. Socialist Resistance supporters will be getting involved in a range of left electoral challenges across the country and the Green Pa
rty too will be standing. In some areas such as Tower Hamlets and Salma Yaqoob’s part of Birmingham it is obvious who the left challenge to New Labour is and it is reasonable to expect the left in those areas to support Respect candidates. In other parts of the country there will have to be a lot of discussion. In the European elections both Respect and Socialist Resistance called for a vote for Peter Cranie of the Green Party. No doubt our call for a vote for Labour’s John Mc Donnell will guarantee that he is certain to get re-elected next year.
One of the smaller things at stake in next year’s elections is the left’s ability to show that it can get its act together and begin to produce a coherent message to millions of people at election time. This message will be about defending public services, tax hikes for the rich and so on. It also needs to be making easily understood demands that connect with the environmental crisis. The Manchester campaign for free public transport can teach us something there. In Tower Hamlets and many more inner city areas the demand for environmentally sustainable public housing has to be part of any manifesto, along with so many of the idea that we’ve heard about today.
We will use our involvement in these elections to bring ecosocialist politics to a working class electorate. It’s a modest step but a necessary one. But election campaigns are short lived and even if you do get someone elected we all know that it doesn’t mean you have much clout when it comes to what they do and say later. It’s what you do with the election campaign that can make it important and we can use these upcoming elections as part of the process of building a mass movement against climate change. Those of you who don’t fancy getting involved in any the electoral initiatives can still organise hustings and local meetings, getting together a group of people locally who will get the climate into the broader discussion, using some of the concepts and solutions that you’ve heard about today.
Three parts
There are three essential parts to building a global movement to prevent catastrophic climate change.
At the moment its leadership is to be found in the global south. The people who die to prevent deforestation and strip mining.
We saw the second at the Climate Camp on Blackheath. These are the young people who have grasped that all the horrors that have been described today can happen in their lifetimes. They have no memory of past defeats and are irrepressible in developing new forms of political action. They are learning the power of organisation and the state is determined to teach them that it cannot be ignored..
The third is the organised working class.
Next year again the Campaign Against Climate Change will be organising its third conference. It is likely to be pretty upbeat, uplifted by the example of the Vestas struggle. We have to make sure that next year’s is the largest ever. The union movement cannot just allow the debate to be dominated by greenwashers, Woodley, Mandelson and Milliband.
Ecosocialists need not just to start organising delegations to Copenhagen from their union branches, though that has to happen too. At every level in the labour movement we have to begin fighting to win not just handfuls or dozens but millions of people to an understanding of the need to offer a working class ecological solution to climate change.
This is the class which produces. It is the only social force which is capable of creating a response to catastrophic climate change which benefits the overwhelming majority of humanity. It is the working class on which we have to rely and it is among that class and its organisations that we have to make our programme its common sense.
Liam redux 
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