Hi, George. Hi, Kate, how are you doing? Very well, thanks. How are you? Very well. Thank you for your time. That's all right. Kate, just a quick question before we begin. Are you okay with me recording the conversation so I can take notes afterwards? [00:00:30] Yeah, that's fine. Great, thank you. Just a couple of quick preliminary questions about, well, actually before we begin even, what's your title, yeah, what's your title within either Left Unity, or what do you go by? Well, I'm media office of Left Unity. Right, and do you hold any other positions? Not in Left Unity, no. Okay, but in any relevant, sort of related political [00:01:00] parties or... No. Okay. No. Okay, and so with regards to Left Unity, I just did a quick, just researching just very briefly today I saw that in 2016 you had something like 1,000, 1,200 members. I was wondering if you had an updated figure for that? Yeah, just my quick question first, as well. Just, you said this is [00:01:30] for Wiki something or other, but what's the purpose of it and where will it be posted? I'm a staff reporter with WikiTribune. WikiTribune is a digital-only news agency that was started by the same person that started Wikipedia, but Wikipedia and WikiTribune are, legally speaking, totally separate companies. The article would be for publication there, and it's about basically [00:02:00] a look at kind of the relevance of Marxism in today's world, really. Yeah, that's basically the gist of it. Page 1 of 10
Okay, and is it, would it be kind of objective reporting, or is it likely to be hostile reporting, or what's the tenor of it? Well, I mean, we operate under a neutral journalism policy, so we're, [00:02:30] we intend to be as evidenced-based and neutral as possible. Okay. We don't have a voice in the same way that The Telegraph or The Guardian do. We try to just stick to the facts, stick to what people tell us, and then use language that is nonsubjective as possible. [00:03:00] Okay, that's fine, that's good. Thank you very much. Yeah, so going back to the question, I was just wondering how, what's the sort of the 2018 or 2017 figure for members at Left Unity? Yeah, well, we're now down below 1,000. I can't, I don't have the exact up-to-date figure, but we've lost a few hundred since that last figure, so we're [00:03:30] down below 1,000 [crosstalk 00:03:32]- Is that due to the election of Corbyn as- It is.... Labour leader? Right. It is, yes. I mean, in our appeal as a party, our attractiveness as a party, I suppose there were, it has kind of two attractions. One, our links with the European Left Party and the bodies of the radical left in Europe, [00:04:00] which presumably you're familiar with what I mean by that. Yes. Yeah, so that was one of the kind of founding principles, and the kind of international coordination and European coordination being part of that wider movement, that was- A more internationalist sort of socialism? Yeah, yeah, but also very much sharing the objectives and kind of identity [00:04:30] of those radical left parties, so drawing on different left traditions and green traditions, feminist traditions, and so on, and being very democratic and open and pluralistic and all that sort of thing, so it's that, that kind of radical left culture is something that we kind of share and embrace and all of that. That has been an attractive thing, and that is what very much remains as our identity. [00:05:00] At the same time as that being a kind of founding element, I suppose within the foundation of the party there were, it also included people who were very disillusioned with the Labour Party at that time, and Page 2 of 10
felt that there needed to be a party which somehow captured the kind of post-second World War vision of the Labour Party around the welfare state, and that kind of thing, the founding of the welfare state, [00:05:30] and sort of left social democracy, progressive social democracy and left social democracy and that kind of thing, so the party encapsulated those two things somehow. With the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader, many of the people who'd joined in particular because they felt the Labour Party had let them down and didn't provide any future for [00:06:00] the kind of, for a more progressive politics and sort of left social democratic politics, I think many of those obviously left to kind of give Labour a try, or another try. I mean, we have people who had formally been Labour councillors and things joining Left Unity, who were disillusioned. If, I mean, in a sense, what's the, what are you, what is Left [00:06:30] Union trying to accomplish nowadays, because it seems very, well, just with under 1,000 members and no representatives, if you will, in Parliament, what is the sort of- Yeah. [crosstalk 00:06:45]... what's your party hoping to achieve? Okay. Okay. Well, first of all, obviously, because of the electoral system in Britain, it's virtually impossible for any party other [00:07:00] than one of the main parties to get into Parliament, so that wasn't, that's not a particular aspiration of ours. I mean, the Green party, which is kind of a long-standing party with a quite large membership and profile, they've only got one MP, but that's because we have the first [inaudible 00:07:18] system, so we don't measure our contribution to politics, British politics and society in terms of whether or not we have elected representatives, so just to clarify that. [00:07:30] Our view is that we occupy a different part of the political spectrum to the Labour Party, even under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, so our analysis would be that Labour had become, essentially embraced neoliberalism in terms of its economic policy and so on since the 1990s like [00:08:00] most, if not all, European social democratic parties, okay, so that had happened, no longer really accurate to call it a social democratic party. Jeremy coming into the leadership of the party will have an uphill struggle, and is having an uphill struggle, to try and sort of recapture the Labour Party for social democracy, and [00:08:30] never mind, left social democracy or any kind of radical left politics. If he does manage to win Labour back for social democracy, that will be an enormous achievement, and it's not something that's ever been achieved thus far by other social democratic parties in Europe, so... That leaves [crosstalk 00:08:54]- Can I just ask you quickly, what do you mean by social democracy, [00:09:00] not because I'm trying to be tricky or anything like that, I just had a conversation with someone who gave me a very different definition from what I understand it to be, but I just wanted it in your words. Page 3 of 10
Well, I suppose kind of fair organisation of capitalism, with a kind of a more redistributive approach to the economy, so it doesn't mean that you, [00:09:30] with some things, some elements of state planning, some elements of nationalisation as we saw after the Second World War here in Britain, so we've had a National Health Service and so on, so state social provision and progressive taxation to kind of raise the living standards of the majority of people, free access to education, all that sort of thing, but without fundamentally challenging the class structure [00:10:00] in society, I suppose, or the nature of the establishment, or the dominance of private ownership, proper efforts to sort of have state investment in society for the benefit of all. Obviously, we saw that happening after the Second World War, we've seen that eroded and brought down from Thatcher onwards. [00:10:30] Obviously, Jeremy would like to reverse some elements of that, reintroduce nationalisation of the railways and properly fund the National Health Service and all that sort of thing, so, but we argue is that there is a more radical left politics on the political spectrum, which is articulated across Europe by the radical left parties, and that includes, obviously, shares some of the elements of kind of the Corbyn [00:11:00] vision- Mm-hmm (affirmative), but go a bit further.... but goes beyond that in terms of a greater democratisation of the economy, greater internationalism, dealing with things like, for example, against nuclear weapons, against war, against NATO. Those are manifestations of kind of international policy, none of which would be embraced [00:11:30] even by a Corbyn-led Labour Party, so a different vision of relations between states and peoples, yeah, a greater democratisation of the economy, greater democratisation of the polity and governance and so on, an end to public schools and their domination of kind of commanding heights of politics and economy and all that sort of thing, so all the kind of things you would imagine, and also, a recognition [00:12:00] that to deal with the kind of environmental problems that the world faces requires international cooperation and democratic planning of resources and so on, so seeing it also in a kind of much more global scale. Also in favour of free movement of peoples, that's a very important thing for us, don't hold with Labour's attitude towards immigration controls [00:12:30] and so on, so all the kind of things... We think, even though we're small, it's important that kind of politics is given expression because it won't get expression through the Labour Party. It just won't. I have no doubt that hopefully when Jeremy gets in he will be able to properly fund health service and improve things for homeless people and those [00:13:00] kinds of things, but he won't be, Labour will not have policy to address some of those wider things, and it's important that the kind of political and economic case for those wider things continues to be made. Right, and moving on to the subject of Marx, is Marx still relevant nowadays, and if so, why? Yeah, so, as a party we all see ourselves as [00:13:30] informed by Marxism, as well as other progressive thought, like feminism, environmentalism, that kind of stuff, so we're Page 4 of 10
not kind of strictly speaking a Marxist party, but we draw on Marxism. We think that, well, I'll tell you what I think because we don't have specific policies stating this as such, but as a generalisation, [00:14:00] I would say that we would think largely that Marx's economic analysis and his class analysis is extremely relevant, it's as relevant now as it ever has been, and if you look at the kind of increasing wealth and concentration of wealth in the hands of a kind of small number of people and the kind of poor becoming poorer in large swaths of the world, [00:14:30] that is the kind of, that is understandable through Marx's economic analysis. I think Mark Carney from Bank of England recently made some comment about Marx's prescience and all that, and I think whether or not people and analysts and so on think that he is right in his conclusions about the role of the working class and what kind of society he would like to say, nevertheless they think that [00:15:00] his understanding, sort of structural understanding of capitalism and all that sort of thing has really got a lot to contribute. It's also interesting how, if people, if they haven't read Marx or don't consciously think of themselves as Marxism, to kind of think about the last five years or so to the kind of 99%/1% kind of dialogue, sort of narrative around the wealth and [00:15:30] all that [inaudible 00:15:31] in society, I think that's sort of drawn from Marxism in a sense, that understanding of the kind of disparity in society and the conflict that that gives rise to. Can you try to reconcile for me the sort of, if you want, the paradox of, well, I don't know if it's a paradox really, but the sort of, on the one hand [00:16:00] we've seen in the last 30 years a precipitous decline, if you want, of left or radical left ideas in particularly the global economy but also at a political level, and the sort of, the lunge, the sort of how long, well, the fact that Marx is still being spoken about and the fact that, [00:16:30] is this a case of, and I say this with all due respect, someone, a party, a leftist party trying to re-stake the claim, or is there an argument to make that, in your view, Marxism is back on the rise? Well, I suppose, but yes, this is a sort of longish answer- Okay, so-... but [00:17:00] I suppose- Yeah, yeah. I suppose I would put it like this, that since, well, since the, let's say, since the Second World War, after the Second World War there was obviously, well, there was an expansion of kind of national liberation struggles, in the kind of postcolonial [00:17:30] period, countries struggling for national liberation, very often with left-wing ideas or with communist parties in the leadership or whatever as a kind of national liberation, national sovereignty thing from colonialism, and kind of revolutions and so on still taking place and struggles against dictatorship, whether in Southern Europe or Latin America or [00:18:00] East Asia or wherever, so a kind of sort of very kind of dynamic struggle, where the left was kind of in the ascendancy, let's say, because it was articulating and Page 5 of 10
helping to, yeah, express the desires of ordinary people because, in third world politics and so on, communism, that's the small "c", was a kind of sort of liberation idea. [00:18:30] It gave a kind of theory about not only about, well, understanding how colonies had come about, explaining racism, Leninism was about how to organise and so on, so that was a kind of a wave that took place, particularly after the Second World War. With the defeat of the US in Vietnam, for example, that wave was kind [00:19:00] of further consolidated, and there was the kind of revolution in Cuba, so that was the kind of dynamic. The kind of desire by capitalism, let's say, or the US and the West and so on to kind of expand their economy, you see, because the dynamic of capitalism means that you need to kind of expand and invest and all that kind of thing, to sell and all that, produce, [00:19:30] sell, and so on, that whole kind of relationship like that, their desire to expand was kind of somewhat held back by the expansion of kind of national liberation stuff and kind of socialism and all that stuff into different parts of the world. Then [inaudible 00:19:50] of course you get into the kind of, into the 1980s, and you have the rise of neoliberalism, militarism, [00:20:00] Thatcher and Reagan and all that kind of stuff kind of going onto the class offensive, as it were, to kind of roll back, I mean, in particular, the Thatcherite thing and so on in Western Europe, rolling back the welfare states and the kind of, let's say, socialist-influenced gains that ordinary people had made through welfare states and all that, rolling that back. Then you have the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then the sort of opening up of much larger [00:20:30] parts of the world to capitalist development and capitalist economic forms through privatisation in Eastern Europe and structural adjustment policies in Africa and all that kind of thing. You have this kind of, what I consider to be a progressive wave after the Second World War of national liberation and so on, and then from the '80s you have the kind of surge of neoliberal economics and the kind of [00:21:00] narrative of kind of liberal democracy and freedom and all that sort of thing that went with that. At the same time as you have that, and then of course in 1989, '91 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, you have the kind of end of history narrative, and about socialism or communism or whatever has been defeated and that social democracy has been defeated too because that had a sort of link with socialist [00:21:30] ideas and all that's finished, so you have the embracing of neoliberal economics and stuff by social democratic parties. We had sort of Blairism and all that sort of thing here and similar types of things across Europe. In Britain, from the '80s, you had systematic defeats of the organised working class, deliberately so, by Thatcher with the miners' strike, [00:22:00] the smashing of the dockers' trade unions and the printers, the kind of sort of big battalions, partly an intentional thing, but also, I guess, in some sectors, partly because of the changing nature of production and new technology and all that sort of thing, that is kind of waves of defeat in a class struggle. I mean, that's how I would see it, a kind of class struggle taking place over a long period of time, [00:22:30] and, during that time, the discrediting of Marxist ideas or kind of socialist, emancipatory, and redistributive ideas, a sort of Page 6 of 10
trashing of those, as if it's about lazy scroungers and spongers and all that sort of thing. The dominant narrative became the kind of Thatcherite thing, or expressed in different terms subsequently, but after the 2008 economic [00:23:00] crash and crisis and all that kind of thing. In Britain, we had a government election in 2010 that was all about austerity and austerity policies, you have to cuts and all that, cuts in the poorest sections of the population, in a totally sort of bogus and specious kind of argument that people had to, "We have to save money as a nation," and all that and had to stop spending, when there was obviously plenty of money. [00:23:30] It was just being spent on other things. This was a kind of further wave of the kind of Thatcherite thing about rolling back the welfare state, rolling back free healthcare and all that kind of stuff, and cutting back on benefits, which saves negligible amounts of money compared to what you could make if you had a more progressive tax system. Then, I mean, what the Jeremy Corbyn thing shows, really, [00:24:00] not withstanding any kind of constraints upon it, is the amount of support out there for those emancipatory and redistributive and fairness ideas, which obviously draw on Marxism, if they're sort of not theorised and don't go as far some people might like, but basic, decent things that completely go against the whole kind of Thatcherite idea. [00:24:30] The ideas and those desires for a different type of society are there, and they are very strong. It's just a question of rehabilitating them almost. Can I just cut in with a quick question? Yeah. Do you see any of the, do you see any echoes of the time in which Marx was writing with what's happening now? Because I was just quickly looking at [00:25:00] the Carney story that you just told me about what he said, and I was wondering what do you think the 21st century will be like for the left? Well... I don't know. I mean, there are huge challenges now because the capacity, [00:25:30] or the kind of... the kind of narrative and kind of trashing of socialist ideas and ideas of justice and equality and so on, they've been so comprehensively trashed and all that kind of thing that when we face the big challenges that we face today, which is that the rise of the far right, the rise of racism and anti-immigrant intolerance and Islamophobia and all that [00:26:00] kind of stuff, the left has what I would consider to be the right answers to those things, and accurate answers about, I mean, like immigrants have made an extraordinary contribution to British society and economy, and the idea that their presence undercuts wages and all that sort of thing is just factually wrong. Nevertheless, even people in the trade union movement [00:26:30] or whatever, good, well-meaning people, they believe that kind of stuff, so it's like solutions that can be presented by the left, or are being presented by the left aren't getting the hearing that they should have because of the media and the way the left's been trashed. That means Page 7 of 10
that you have the rise and the kind of acceptance of the ideas of the right and the far right. I mean, since Brexit [00:27:00] in Britain, we've had the collapse of UKIB because a lot of the ideas of UKIB, you know what I mean by UKIB, yeah? I do, yes. Yeah, sorry, I'm not quite sure whether you- No, no, no, that's all right, I mean-... live in the States or what, yeah, so a lot of their ideas have been embraced by the Conservative Party, so that is good that UKIB's [crosstalk 00:27:22]- Well, what I want to address-... not good that, so the dominant ideas have moved to the right, so the left has to [00:27:30] win back ground and show that it has the answers, and not only does it have them, it has the answers that will result in a more just and fair society, which is to the benefit of everybody, not a kind of narrow nationalism which is all about hatred and driving people out. Terrible. Yeah, I think that's really, actually, there's one quick question, really, I think in a sense, and so too if you could answer this, but [00:28:00] what do you think Marx would have made of the world in 2018, with former communist bastions like Cuba and China not, kind of opening up their colonies, China for a while now actually, Vietnam. What do you think he would have made of the state of affairs as they are now? [00:28:30] Well, it's hard to say, but I mean, I mean he thought that capitalism would expand, didn't he, it'd have an extension of capitalism formed throughout the world, or the dynamic in capitalism is expansion, isn't it, and he could see that, even though when he was first writing, and he really had capitalism in very small pockets, with the type of capitalism that we understand as capitalism- "Tends towards accumulation" was what he said, I think. What did he say? " [00:29:00] Tends towards accumulation." Yeah, so I don't think he'd be surprised by the scale of it, or anything like that, and of course he was writing before the existence of what I would probably call state socialism, so- Do you think he'd have been disappointed by what, by how his ideas were interpreted and put into political action? Page 8 of 10
I don't know. I mean, he... [00:29:30] I don't know. I think it's, you can't really secondguess things like that. No, I know, it's a tremendously ahistorical question, but I'm just interested in how you think, what you make of it. Yeah, but I mean, so, for example, things that I take from Marx, which he may not have seen like I've seen, like I understand it, that you have, that working class organisation is paramount [00:30:00] in order to bring about change which will benefit everybody. Collective ownership of the means of production is essential for a democratic economy and an economy that functions in the interest of all, that planning, an element of planning, is necessary to overcome the anarchy of capitalism. We've seen the results of, some of the results of that in things like climate change and war and nuclear weapons and all that kind of stuff, so [00:30:30] those things. I mean, you could say that, for example, in the Soviet Union, where working class organisation, collective ownership, and the means of production and planning, they attempted to implement those in society in the interest of all. One could have a big, long historical debate about why they didn't develop as well in [00:31:00] ways that they could have done, why there was a tendency, particularly at certain points, towards a kind of more repressive and much less democratic system than, I'm sure, Marx would have liked to have seen and so on. To what extent was that to do with the global situation that the Soviet Union was facing and having put so many resources into a world war and then trying to rebuild in the context of a massive arms [00:31:30] race and hostile superpower situation, one could have a long discussion about that, and it's impossible to know what Marx would have thought about that. I mean, in terms of what he would think today, I mean, he might think, I mean, there's obviously a debate about the nature of the Chinese economic reforms, and obviously some similar types of things in Vietnam, and Cuba and so [00:32:00] on. Some people would say, "Oh, that's just the introduction to capitalism." Others would say, "Well, it has a very large amount, a large element of state planning within those economies, which is why the Chinese economy, let's say, for example, why it's able to continue with its economic growth and lifting, according to the World Bank or whatever, lifting [00:32:30] so many hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and it allows those, the kind of market elements in there and kind of private investment elements in there, but it doesn't allow them to completely dominate the economy, so there's a kind of limit to the anarchy of capitalism within that frame, and a kind of security or the kind of direction the economy is going in. I mean, I don't personally take the view that [00:33:00] China's become a capitalist country, or I don't think Left Unity has actually got a position on this, I'm not absolutely sure of that, but there is a debate out there, and it's an important debate, because obviously the Chinese model has been embraced in many places and is having similar, kind of positive economic growth results in lifting people out of poverty, [00:33:30] so [crosstalk 00:33:31]- Yeah, I'm really sorry to cut you off- Page 9 of 10
[crosstalk 00:33:33] Sorry, I'm really, really sorry to cut you off, but I actually have to jump into a different meeting. Okay. Again, thank you so much for your time, and yeah, I hope we can keep in touch. Yeah, you too. You've got my email now so- I do.... if you need to get in touch, just drop me a line. Okay, wonderful. Thank you so much. Oh, you're very welcome, bye-bye. Bye. Bye. Page 10 of 10