The Trade Union Movement, New Labour, and Working-Class Politics

48. SHOULD THE FBU HAVE STOOD CANDIDATES? “There is another issue. Which concerns the advocacy of trade union candidates against Labour, without the preliminaries of a fight for the Labour ticket. This is an area of great confusion. For instance, we still await a clear answer from John Bloxam and John O’Mahony on whether they wanted the AWL to intervene into the current fire fighters dispute by calling on the FBU to stand official union candidates against Labour in the recent local government elections (which we think would have been a disastrous counterproductive diversion), or whether they...

57. “THE SECTS” AND PROLIER THAN THOU PHILISTINISM “With the class or with the sects? Bloxam and O’Mahony fail to focus clearly on the tasks before the class. The entire logic of their argument is that because we cannot control what happens — a mind-numbing banality — we should not even aspire to play a role in initiating, organising and preparing the ground for what they describe as the “epochal” battle for control of the Labour Party. No, that is for the future and to be organised “from above” by the official leaderships.. We must know our place. We build the new party “from below”. In the...

1: A workers voice in politics? — Sol. 3/29 (2003) 2: The case for revolutionary realism (by "J & S") — Sol. 3/30 (2003) 3: Solidarity editorial, August 2002 4: “Organise the awkward squad”, Solidarity 11 October 2002 5: The Labour Party in perspective (1996) 6: A workers’ government (2001) 7: Class, union and party: a summary (27 March 2004) 1: A workers’ voice in politics John Bloxam and John O’Mahony, Solidarity 3/29 1. The Labour Party is still what Lenin called it in 1920, a bourgeois workers’ party. In the last decade, there has been an enormous shift within this contradictory phenomenon...