Socialism Today Issue 258 June 2022

The recent national congress of the Socialist Party, held from 14-16 May, began with a discussion looking at global developments and perspectives for national conflict, economic crises, and the struggle for socialism. Here we reproduce the introduction to the discussion, made by the Socialist Party general secretary, HANNAH SELL.

Today we are assessing the world that is emerging on the other side of the Covid pandemic. It threw all aspects of society into flux. It has created enormous economic uncertainty and increased tensions between nation states, different sections of ruling elites and, above all, between classes.

Of course even now the pandemic is not over. Part of the reason that the Chinese regime has set its lowest growth rate target in three decades is that it is struggling to deal with a huge surge in Omicron. There are currently 290 million people in harsh total lockdowns, which are increasingly ineffective and unpopular. There are numerous reports of people in Shanghai protesting because they have been locked down without food for days at a time.  Nonetheless, on a global basis – while Covid is still an ongoing cause of stress in people’s lives, and a disruptor of the economy – it is increasingly becoming seen as an endemic disease: one more problem that society has to deal with.

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Despite his efforts to portray himself as the dashing war leader, there was no Ukraine bounce for Boris Johnson in the 2022 local elections that took place across 200 councils in England, Scotland and Wales on May 5.

The contrast with the performance of Johnson’s heroine, Margaret Thatcher, in the 1982 council elections held during the war with Argentina over the Malvinas/Falklands Islands, could not be starker. In 1981 the Tories lost over a thousand seats and control of the then Greater London Council. Come 1982 Thatcher increased the Tories’ share of the vote to 40% while Labour, on 29%, had a net loss of 225 councillors, losing control of nine authorities including Birmingham, Bradford, the Lothian region in Scotland, and the London boroughs of Lambeth and Waltham Forest.

This year the Tories’ projected national share of the vote was 30%, down from 36% in the 2021 local elections, with a net loss of 485 councillors and eleven councils. Johnson’s alleged electoral ‘magic touch’ is coming to an end. And with it the glue that has been holding together a Tory party that has become a collection of different sectional capitalist interest groups, containing within itself the basis of at least two parties that could crystallise into being at some point in the stormy events that lie ahead in Britain and internationally.

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The Scottish council elections saw the Tories suffer major losses as their share of the first preference vote fell to 19.6%, with almost a quarter of their councillors being wiped out. Since 2007 the single transferable vote system for local government elections has been used in Scotland.

Despite the huge class anger over the cost of living crisis and Boris Johnson neither Labour nor the Scottish National Party (SNP), however, made significant gains. Turnout was also down, at just 43%. 

Scottish Labour – now led by the pro-capitalist right under Anas Sarwar, dubbed the millionaire tendency – gained only 19 seats and ended up with a vote share of just 21.7%, marginally ahead of the Tories. Labour now have 281 councillors across Scotland, to the Tories 216. 

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The stand-out development in the May elections was Lutfur Rahman’s victory as an Aspire party candidate in Tower Hamlets’ mayoral contest, unseating the right-wing Labour incumbent. Aspire also won a council majority, with 24 seats to Labour’s 19.

In April 2015 Lutfur Rahman was unjustly removed as mayor by an election court hearing – and debarred from standing for office for five years – as the establishment parties ganged up against him. Council spending had fallen by £172 million during Lutfur Rahman’s 2010-2015 administration as it faced a central government squeeze, but Rahman, and his then Tower Hamlets First party, were still not trusted to uncomplainingly deliver by the Con-Dem coalition or New Labour.

Seven years later the same establishment parties still rule in Westminster and they won’t give Lutfur Rahman, or the new council, an easy ride now. What role Aspire can play in the fight for a new, mass national vehicle for working class political representation is a discussion that the Socialist Party will fully engage with in the period ahead.

Here we reprint as background analysis an article by HUGO PIERRE, first published in the June 2015 edition of Socialism Today, No.189, which examines the lessons of Lutfur Rahman’s previous mayoralty and the campaign against him.

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Vocal for Local: Why Regional Food Systems are the Future

By Isabelle Thompson, Rebecca Laughton and Tony Little

A report by The Landworkers’ Alliance, 2021

Reviewed by Iain Dalton

With the rise of protest movements around climate change in recent years, an increasing spotlight has been shone on the question of food production and distribution.

On one hand, global food production is estimated to account for 18% of carbon emissions according to a 2006 UN study, while including the global food system as a whole accounts for as much as 40%. On the other hand, the impacts of climate change on food production are already being felt, with both heavy rains and droughts in different parts of the world limiting wheat harvests adding to the already high wheat prices as a consequence of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Increasingly the question of how to ensure a stable and sustainable food supply is posed by such developments. It is to answer this question in the UK that the Landworkers’ Alliance produced their report, Vocal for Local: Why Regional Food Systems are the Future. The Landworkers’ Alliance is a union of small farmers and other land-based workers (such as forresters) established in 2012, with a membership of around 1,200, and is the UK affiliate of the 200 million-strong La Via Campesina peasants movement, mainly based in Latin America. They are particularly interested in the role that the members they represent would play.

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Continuing a debate with Woman’s Place UK that started in the pages of The Socialist, the weekly sister paper of Socialism Today, on whether the fight for trans rights conflicts with women’s rights, we print below a further contribution from WPUK and a response by the Socialist Party executive committee member, SARAH SACHS-ELDRIDGE.

We think that Michael Johnson’s reply to Woman’s Place UK (United struggle for LGBTQ+ and women’s rights is integral to the wider struggle to change society, The Socialist, No.1166) clarifies two fundamental, and perhaps irreconcilable, differences in approach between us and the Socialist Party.

Every major advance in women’s rights – from suffrage, access to abortion and a legal entitlement to equal pay – has been won not because women waited “for the maximum unity of the working class in struggle”. They happened because women identified the problem, organised and struggled without waiting for male union bureaucrats or politicians to decide that the time was right and maximum unity (whatever that might mean) had been achieved. These things were often done despite opposition from some working-class men.

There are direct comparisons to be made with lesbians, gay men and black people. These minorities often faced immense hostility from bigots and racists inside the working class and if they’d waited for “maximum unity” they’d still be waiting. They organised and fought, changing both laws and social attitudes through their struggles.

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A defining feature of Marxism which sets it apart from other political trends is its theory on the state and its programme and policies for dealing with it, as PAULA MITCHELL explains in the second instalment of Socialism Today’s Introduction to Marxism series.

In modern society, the term ‘state’ is used in many contexts. People might think of the ‘welfare state’ – the NHS, pensions, benefits, etc. Or they may be familiar with references to ‘state intervention’, for example the payments to furloughed workers during the Covid pandemic. Also, it is often a term used when referring to geographical territories which have their own government and boundaries, whether national, or sub-national in the case of countries like the United States of America.

The main sense in which Marxists use the term ‘state’ is to describe the institutions through which class rule is maintained. We live in a class society where a small ruling-class minority at the top doesn’t represent the interests of the whole population, but its own interests in maintaining its power and privileges – and exploiting the majority. It has to try to conceal this situation, or to persuade, and at times force, the majority to accept it.

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