Socialists of every stripe and indeed complexion will be familiar with debates about the different roads to socialism: gradualist and reformist, parliamentary; insurrectionary, revolutionary, syndicalist or what have you – in which different strategic conceptions of how to get from here (capitalism) to there (socialism) are considered. But I had not, myself, previously come across the hundred-tables road, as expounded today in an interview in G2 with Ken Loach:
Does he think there’s a chance of a revolutionary moment in the UK, after the financial crisis, the MPs’ expenses scandal, the phone hacking revelations, and the exposure of the cosiness between the police and the Murdoch empire? “It just needs leadership,” he says. “It’s like a head of steam. The steam won’t drive anything unless there’s an engine, and somebody to stoke it, and to drive the wheels around.” The moment in recent history, he thinks, when a proper movement could have been launched, was at the march against the Iraq war in 2003.
“At the end there should have been a hundred tables, here’s a pen, give us your name, we’re anti-privatisation, anti-war you know – it’s Lenin’s bread, land and peace. If you sign up to that, you’ll be organised and it’ll be democratic and there will be no vain personalities trying to take it over, and we can articulate a programme and a movement that might become a party on that basis. There was a huge feeling across the country. None of the politicians spoke for us. That was the moment, but it was missed.”
It would be funny if it weren’t so deluded. No, I’ll rephrase that: it is funny because it’s so deluded. First, there’s the notion that a mobilization against one particular war expressed the possibility of a movement general enough to answer the question put to him about ‘a revolutionary moment in the UK’ (my emphasis). Second, there’s the claim that only leadership was lacking, as if this lack in itself didn’t express a deeper problem about the politics of the sort of left that Loach would like to see doing the leading. Why wasn’t it there, or there with sufficient foresight and clout to do the necessary? Third comes Loach’s conjunction of the name of Lenin and the assurance that things would be – of course – democratic, without any sign that some people, even including amongst the marchers of February 2003, might see this conjunction as a problematic one.
There is a very long way to go before any wide movement in this country (to say nothing of anywhere else) is willing to place itself behind an avowedly socialist political programme. One of the things that makes it more difficult to envisage than it is anyway is the clearly deluded nature of what passes for socialist advocacy much of the time.