The job of the serious left is to ignore these posturing ninnies, and get on with the job of fighting Blair and New Labour.

1 Labour moving quickly in the direction of becoming a neo-liberal party.

2 An understanding among many militants that it is no longer a party that delivers reforms for the working class.

3 An anti-imperialist, anti capitalist consciousness that has been sharpened by the wars.

4 The relative success of similar projects in some European countries.

5 The good votes that Respect got in some working class areas.

6 The existence of all sorts of radical networks, blogs and organisations that want an alternative but don’t see a viable one yet.

Is there a ‘do not’ missing from that sentence?

What are the favourable conditions in your view?

I obviously know nothing about the situation in Stoke, but it could be a plausible explanation, surely?

It’s got really very little to do with “paper sales” or “rebuilding the basic organisations of the class” when the whole thrust of what I said is that currently, by and large, “the class” neither thinks of itself as such nor wishes to see those organisations rebuilt.

Isn’t that a Trades Council???

What can we do?

For socialists now paper sales and suchlike is nowhere near sufficient for turning the situation around. Instead the situation demands we rebuild the basic organisations of the class, and in so doing we will build ourselves.

One of the things we’re putting into motion into Stoke is building a trade union forum where TUists from whatever background can get together, network, listen to presentations (and no, not from SP HQ in case you were wondering), coordinate activities, and so on. I hope this cooperation will pay future dividends for the local labour movement and help the class find its feet again.

All these are true and important but I don’t think one should underestimate the degree to which feelings and ideas of working-class solidarity, and the political practices arising from them, have really shrivelled over the past two decades. This is a really deep-seated process, it’s really not anybody’s fault (though that won’t stop the Left from denouncing one another for being responsible) and it means that the audience to which the Left, for more than 150 years, was primarily trying to speak, is much diminished. Organised labour doesn’t mean all that much now. Compare the situation when people like myself of the author of this blog were young and becoming socialists – it’s unrecognisable.

Now this may well change over time: the great struggle of us and them has a tendency to remake itself over and again and I’m certainly not mtrying to tell you the working class has disappeared or that left v right is a thing of the past or that “modernity” has supplanted old-fashioned politics. But we need to face up to it: in some countries, at the moment, the audience simply isn’t there, regardless of what line we take or what organisations we create, and what we’re doing is much more defensive. Defending the welfare state, defending the public sector, defending egalitarian ideas. Standing up for the NHS, for social housing, for comprehensive education. A more general approach, rather than “forward, comrades!”.

http://www.tuc.org.uk/law/tuc-11539-f0.cfm

I think that we may have to wait on a group of workers is willing to take on its own bureaucracy and the anti union laws and then draw very sophisticated political conclusions. Maybe it’ll be the BA staff. Here’s hoping.