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this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
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UK Politics
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General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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Another one, huh?
There is one Labour party and that is the party that is actually funded by the labour movement. Everything else is just another bourgeois party because it draws its money and its activists from people who have money and time to spare, i.e., middle-class people. It doesn't matter what it calls itself or how it describes itself. It doesn't matter what it says it's going to do in the near-impossible scenario in which it gets elected. The material reality of such a party is that it's middle-class. By contrast, the Labour party is the Labour party. It is imperfect because it's real. It might not even be the best that a party-of-labour hypoethically could be. But it is the party of labour. Everyone else is just a poser. That's it.
We've already seen the RMT and BFAWU de-affiliate, union funding has slumped and private donors like Lord Sainsbury now make up the majority of funding.
Private donors will make up 100% of the funding to this new party.
It would be better if Labour only took money from the unions and from co-ops, but that would be a really quick way to go bankrupt, unless lots of other unions decide to affiliate. So, while Labour doesn't get enough of its money from unions, this new party will get literally all of its money from middle class people. I think a party funded in part by the unions is better than one funded entirely by middle-class people.
There is no point in continuing to strictly adhere to Marx's language when trying to understand and discuss our society. When Marx was writing, the proletariat were majority wage (not salary) earners who didn't have bank accounts. Virtually none of them were property owners, almost by definition. They didn't have the vote and collective bargaining was basically illegal. The material conditions - what Marx actually cared about, to his great credit - have changed completely. The idea of a 'working class' made up mostly of people who drew salaries, had bank accounts, pensions, and even owned their own homes would have been quite alien to Marx. I think he'd have been impressed but not entirely surprised to find just how flexible capitalism was in this regard!
The unions, however, do represent the actually existing working class, and the only party they fund is the Labour party.
It's not about people being manipulated; it's about the fact that in aggregate people will vote for their class interests. This is why the country's most successful left wing bourgeoisie party, the Greens, is basically a NIMBY party who spend most of their time strongly opposing green development. Their members haven't been manipulated, they're just voting in their own interest as, by and large, wealthy homeowners. Labour, because it still has some funding from the working class as working class people is capable of proposing policies that will, e.g., allow more housing and green developments, while the Green party just isn't. That's class politics at work, and that's why we need Labour.