Once again on the attitude of the Troto-Revisionist fraternity towards social democracy
Introduction
The question of the
attitude that communists should adopt towards the Labour Party has been, and
continues to be, of crucial importance for the development of a truly
revolutionary proletarian movement in Britain. While important all the time,
this question assumes particular importance in the run-up to, and during,
elections. The general election held on 6 May 2010 was no exception. In this
article, we wish to deal with, and expose, some of those who advocate support
for the Labour Party as the party of the British working class.
Troto-revisionist
rationale
On the question of which party deserved the
electoral support of the British working class without fail, and not
unexpectedly, the Troto-revisionist gentry came down in favour of supporting
Labour. The Trotskyite and revisionist justification for supporting Labour has
been that Labour has organic links with the working class; that a labour
victory would give confidence to the working class in its own fighting
capacity; that a Labour government under pressure from the working class could
be forced into enacting progressive measures; and that a Conservative victory
would be interpreted by the latter as a mandate for attacking the working class
with added ferocity. With the passage of time, and the experience of several
post-war Labour administrations, these arguments have become so threadbare and
patently false that even the counter-revolutionary Trotskyites are less
inclined to employ them these days. Instead their new strategy is to support
Labour in the name of keeping the openly racist British National Party out.
Whereas the Trotskyites have moved somewhat away
from the above rationale, their revisionist cousins continue to cling to it
with zeal worthy of a better cause. Here are a few specimens of the type of
‘argument’ put forward by the revisionists to justify their position as the
tail end of social democracy in the working-class movement.
Stance
of the Communist Party of Britain
Writing in the Morning Star, the organ of
the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), and with an eye to the then forthcoming
general election, a certain Solomon Hughes wrote an article entitled ‘A storm
is coming’. In this article he reproduced the following dialogue between
himself and his children:
“‘A Tory government will rule for the rich and
try to force us to pay for the crisis. Working people get pay cuts to pay for
bankers’ bonuses’, I say.
“They reply: ‘No Dad, tell us what a
Conservative government looks like – we know all about Labour” (Morning
Star, 11 December 2009).
All the same, flying in the face of reality,
ignoring the nearly one-century-long betrayal of the working class by social
democracy, and treating his young children’s precocity with condescension, our
sage goes on to say that it is still worth supporting Labour because a Tory
victory, especially a decisive one, will make the Nasty Party more confident
about slashing and burning wages and conditions.
Knowing full well that one cannot put a cigarette
paper between the policies and programmes of Labour and Conservatives,
acknowledging that Labour too will cut public expenditure as much as the
Tories, Mr Hughes meanders thus:
“Labour politicians might be ready to carry out
similar cuts, but they know the vote for them means the electorate does not
agree with those plans.
“How trade unionists and campaigners resist
these cuts makes a huge difference but the election sets the scene.” (ibid.)
Sheer stupidity, ignorance, self deception and
utter renegacy lie behind the above words of Mr Hughes. Since it would be
difficult to find many voters who actually vote for cuts, it is mindless to say
that Labour leaders are aware that the electorate does not agree with their
cutting plans. This equally applies to the Conservative leadership – it too
knows that those workers who voted for the Tory party did not vote for the
cuts. To the extent that the leadership of any bourgeois political party is
only too ready to interpret a vote for it as a mandate for its policies, this
applies just as much to Labour as it does to the Conservatives.
True, it is the resistance to the cuts which stands
any chance of preventing their implementation, but how, in God’s name, does a
Labour electoral victory make such resistance more effective? On the contrary,
would it not be truer to say that the leadership of the trade unions, with its
close connections with the Labour party, is only too likely not to resist a
Labour government so as not to rock the boat and embarrass its ‘own’
government? Whichever way, and from whichever angle, we look at it, Mr Hughes’
argument is meaningless.
Moving on to the hoary revisionist argument that “Labour
still has a biological relationship with the trade unions”, Mr Hughes comes
up with the following drivel, which for its coarseness and banality must surely
take the palm:
“Labour has been embarrassingly keen to show off
its new corporate chums, like a middle-aged bore with a trophy wife.
“The unions have been treated like an
embarrassing uncle with ‘funny’ habits or a grandparent with a touch of
flatulence – they get invited around for the Xmas meal, but they are stuck on
the edge of the table and hustled out of the house somewhere between the
Queen’s speech and the big blockbuster movie.
“But they were invited.
“And this has left some marks on the government,
such as the minimum wage and increased social spending.
“The Tories do not have these links and this
changes how they rule.
“A strong Tory government elected by millions of
workers is going to be more aggressive than a weak Labour government that was
forced, to some extent, to articulate the feelings of the working people (ibid).
Any self-respecting uncle, grandparent or worker
would be disgusted at even the thought of receiving the kind of invitation that
our wise Mr Hughes is asking them to accept. Yes, Labour has been a partner in
killing over a million Iraqis and is waging a genocidal war against the Afghan
people; admitted it has been “embarrassingly keen to show off its new
corporate chums”, but don’t forget it has thrown in our direction a few
crumbs, such as the minimum wage and increased social spending, which
incidentally it harbours every intention of taking away. In view of these
crumbs it deserves our vote. At least we have been invited! What banality!
What monumental renegacy! The working class must keep its gaze firmly on these
crumbs, on getting invited. It must never go for the prize of its own social
emancipation through the exposure of the malign and treacherous role of social
democracy and the overthrow of capitalism.
The position of the New Communist
Party
Just as the reader, after acquainting himself with
the absurd and reactionary assertions (for that is what they are) of the CPB’s
Solomon Hughes in defence of his and the CPB’s support for Labour, is beginning
to think of the near-impossibility of an even more stupid and ludicrous set of
assertions in support of the same stance as that taken by Mr Hughes, step
forward the dolts of the twitching corpse that passes for the New Communist
Party (NCP) of Britain.
In the NCP schema, working class parties can be
divided into reformists and revolutionaries. The former fight for reforms, the
latter for revolution. The former participate in parliamentary politics, the
latter must on no account indulge in the arena of parliamentary struggle. The
fight for reforms must be left solely to the reformist parties, as must
participation in parliament. And until the day of the revolution, the working
class must unfailingly support the reformist party, must vote for it during
elections, must on no account stand candidates against this party – for to do
so would be to break the unity of the working class, quite apart from the fact
that putting up candidates in parliamentary elections is a compromise with
capitalism and fosters illusions amongst the working class as to the
possibility of reforming capitalism. By following this absurd, this patently
reactionary, rigmarole, the NCP hope (don’t laugh for it is not a joke!), all
of a sudden, to lead the proletariat in the revolutionary overthrow of
capitalism.
While telling the working class that a “clear
victory for Brown’s Labour – with all its faults – is the best hope for the
working class in Britain”, in a desperate attempt to hoodwink the gullible,
the NCP asserts:
“Our only real option is to keep educating,
agitating and organising among the workers [and telling them to vote Labour
so as not undermine unity with it?] until we have a movement strong and
united enough [how is that movement to be built without an exposure of
opportunism and the treacherous role of Labour?] to throw over this sham
parliamentary ‘democracy’ and establish a working class democracy.” (Daphne
Liddle, ‘Style over substance’, New Worker,23 April 2010).
Having uttered these blood-curdling and brave
words, Ms Liddle takes fright and reveals the real opportunist politics of NCP,
its continued desertion to the camp of opportunism and betrayal of the working
class by concluding thus: “That [i.e., the overthrow of capitalism]
will take time. In the meantime voting Labour is the least we can do to
support our class”.
In other words, we’ll think about such trivia as
the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism on the day of its overthrow. Meanwhile
we must continue to support Labour, vote for it, not stand candidates against
it, and not do anything to undermine unity with this bloodthirsty imperialist
party.
Elsewhere, in a similar vein, and pursuing a line
of thought that defies all logic, the New Worker denounces any attempt
to put up candidates during elections in opposition to the Labour Party as “trying
to compete with social-democracy on their own terms”! Let the New
Worker speak:
“… Socialism can only be achieved through a
revolutionary party and a working class that understands the need for
revolutionary change. But that party and that understanding can never be built
by trying to compete with social-democracy on their own terms.
“The lesson of the revisionist ‘British Road to
Socialism’ and its countless variations embraced by countless miniscule left
parties in Britain is that you cannot build a revolutionary party along these
lines and that working people are not prepared even to vote in any significant
numbers for these idealist and utopian platforms” (‘A stark choice’, 9
October 2009).
There is a bush in our garden and my uncle is in Kiev – so runs a Russian proverb. The NCP’s above assertions are a perfect
personification of this proverb.
To paraphrase, and adapt, Engels, the reader can
read anything into the above-quoted assertions of the New Worker, but he
is on safest ground to read nothing into them. Notwithstanding its outcries
against the revisionist British Road to Socialism (BRS), the
NCP’s political line is even more reactionary than that of the BRS, for at
least the latter considers it legitimate for communists to stand against Labour
in a few constituencies, something which is an anathema to the NCP. How
opposing Labour candidates at elections serves as a hindrance to the building
of a revolutionary party, the NCP and God alone know.
True, working people in Britain are as yet not
prepared to vote in large enough numbers for these left platforms, but even
where they are, as for instance in Germany, where the left formation Die
Linke secured 12% of the vote and 76 seats in the German parliament, the
NCP, as we shall later on see, still denounces them for having weakened the
German social-democratic party.
Nothing arouses greater fury on the part of the
NCP than any attempt by any organisation of the left, in Britain or abroad, to oppose and undermine counter-revolutionary social democracy – all
under the hoax of achieving socialism through the building of a revolutionary
party!
Vile slander against
Marxism-Leninism
Here are a few more gems from another NCP luminary:
“Since its formation in 1977”, wrote Neil Harrison
of the NCP, “the New Communist Party has always refused to stand in bourgeois
elections, not as a tactical boycott but as a matter of principle”.
And the reason for this queer principle? Here is
the NCP’s answer:
“At one level, standing in bourgeois elections is a
compromise with capitalism we are not prepared to make. At another, it
fosters illusions amongst the working class that winning seats in Parliament
brings the possibility of reforming capitalism, when in fact only governments
acceptable to the bourgeoisie are able to win ‘power’. As ever the choice is
between reform and revolution, social democracy and communism.”
(‘Communists in today’s world, New Worker, 26 March 2010).
For anyone in the least
literate, in the least educated in the history of the international
proletariat, as well as the theoretical postulates of Marxism-Leninism, the
implication of the above-quoted words of this NCP doctrinaire, Neil Harris, is
that Marx, Engels and Lenin, through their advocacy of proletarian
participation in bourgeois parliaments as a tactical measure, “compromised
with capitalism”, which compromise the NCP defenders of ‘revolutionary’
principle are not, and will never be, prepared to make. Further, the
implication is that, whereas the founders of scientific socialism and the
inspirer of the Great October Socialist Revolution “fostered illusions that
winning seats in Parliament brings the possibility of reforming capitalism”,
our heroic ‘defenders of principle’ – the morons of the NCP – would never stoop
so low.
It never occurs to this feeble-minded gentry that
there could be another purpose – a revolutionary purpose – to the proletariat’s
participation in bourgeois parliament, namely, to expose and discredit
bourgeois parliamentarism with the sole aim of doing away with it altogether.
“For Marx, however,” writes Lenin in his
brilliant work The state and revolution, “revolutionary dialectics
are never the empty phrase, the toy rattle, which Plekhanov, Kautsky and others
have made of it. Marx knew how to break with anarchism ruthlessly for its
inability to make use of the ‘pig-sty’ of bourgeois parliamentarism, especially
when the situation is obviously not revolutionary; but at the same time he knew
how to subject parliamentarism to genuine revolutionary-proletarian criticism”
(FLP Peking 1965, p. 54).
In his controversy with German ‘Left’ communists in
the spring of 1920, reverting to the question of participation in parliaments,
Lenin makes the profound observation that “…participation in parliamentary
elections and in the struggle on the parliamentary rostrum is obligatory
for the party of the revolutionary proletariat precisely for the purpose
of educating the backward strata of its own class, precisely for the
purpose of awakening and enlightening the undeveloped, downtrodden, ignorant
… masses”.
Referring to the experience of the Russian
Bolsheviks’ participation in the elections to the Russian bourgeois parliament,
the Constituent Assembly, in September-November 1917, Lenin argues with
remorseless logic that “…participation in a bourgeois-democratic
parliament even a few weeks before the victory of a Soviet republic, and even after
such a victory, not only does not harm the revolutionary proletariat, but
actually helps it to prove to the backward masses why such parliaments deserve
to be dispersed; it helps their successful dispersal, and helps
to make bourgeois parliamentarism ‘politically obsolete’”. (‘Left-wing’
communism, an infantile disorder, FLP Peking 1965, p.54)
Thus it can be seen that on the question of
proletarian participation in the bourgeois parliament, a deep chasm lies
between the profound teachings of Marxism-Leninism, on the one hand, and the
empty doctrinaire assertions of the NCP, on the other hand.
Labour
– a bourgeois party
Having slandered, albeit implicitly, the
Marxist-Leninist teaching on participation in bourgeois parliaments, and having
asserted loudly the NCP’s ‘revolutionary principles’, Neil Harris makes a dash
for his, and his party’s, opportunist support for Labour. “We call on the
working class to vote Labour”, he writes, “not because we have any
illusions that it is anything other than a social democratic party or that its
leaders can be won to revolutionary politics”. Oh no, God forbid! He
continues:
“We support Labour in elections because it still
has a mass membership of working class trade unionists, affiliated through
their unions. This mass membership and the votes the party receives as a
result are what make it a class-based party in spite of its opportunist,
petty-bourgeois leadership”.
On this question, too, a deep chasm lies between
the teachings of Leninism and the renegade propositions of the NCP. At the Second
Congress of the Comintern in August 1920, Lenin had the following to say on
precisely this question apropos the British Labour Party:
“Of course, for the most part the Labour Party
consists of workers, but it does not logically follow from this that every
workers’ party which consists of workers is at the same time a ‘political
workers’ party’; that depends on who heads it, upon the content of its
activities and its political tactics. Only the latter determines whether it is
really a political proletarian party. From this point of view, which is the
only correct point of view, the Labour Party is not a political workers’ party
but a thoroughly bourgeois party, although it consists of workers, it is led by
reactionaries, and the worst reactionaries at that …”
In another one of his writings, Lenin says:
“One of the most common sophism of Kautsky is
his reference to the ‘masses’; we do not want to break away from the masses and
mass organisations! But think how Engels approached this question. In the
nineteenth century, the ‘mass organisations’ of the English trade unions were
on the side of the bourgeois labour party. Engels and Marx did not conciliate
with it on this ground, but exposed it …” He went on to say: “…it
is not so much a question of how many members there are in an organisation, as
what is the real objective meaning of its policy: does this policy represent
the masses? Does it serve the masses, i.e., the liberation of the masses from
capitalism, or does it represent the interests of the minority, its
conciliation with capitalism?… (‘Imperialism and the split in
socialism’).
From the above, Lenin concludes that it is
imperative for the socialists to expose the opportunists, who betray and sell
out the interests of the masses, who are in fact agents of the bourgeoisie in
the working-class movement. Emphasising the necessity of breaking with
opportunism, Lenin concludes:
“To explain to the masses the inevitability and
necessity of breaking with opportunism, to educate them for revolution by a
merciless struggle against opportunism … is the only Marxian line to be
followed in the world labour movement” (ibid.).
Let it be said in passing that the NCP has very
little faith in the leadership of the unions – the very unions whose affiliation
to the Labour Party is the sole basis of its stance in support of Labour. In
its editorial of 4 July 2008, by which time Gordon Brown had just completed his
first year as prime minister, the New Worker noted that, in view of the
dramatic rise of the Conservative Party in the opinion polls, “…all New
Labour’s wealthy business friends [were] abandoning the sinking ship
leaving the party significantly short of millionaire donors”, and “…once
again dependent on its founders”, the trade unions, for funding. Labour’s
dwindling fortunes and its precarious finances, argued the New Worker,
gave the unions “some real power over the Labour leadership” and to
demand policy changes, such as restoration of trade-union rights. Instead of
using their strength to demand those rights “which could be in their grasp,
like rabbits they have dropped the demands”, whinged the New Worker.
With an eye on the crisis of overproduction
engulfing the capitalist world, the attempts of the bourgeoisie to pass its
burdens on to the backs of the working class, and the total lack of any attempt
by the leadership of the unions to lead the workers’ resistance to the
capitalist onslaught, the New Worker concludes thus:
“So at a time like this the workers need the
strongest, most assertive and demanding unions – not a bunch of compromisers
and class collaborators who cannot use an advantage when it falls in their lap”
(‘What Labour could do…’)
These words are nothing short of a self-certificate
of the bankruptcy of the NCP’s political line. Verily, this political line is
based on the insane assumption that a bunch of proven “compromisers and
class collaborators” in the leadership of the unions will, somehow, push
the imperialist Labour Party to the left and reclaim it for the working class.
Fostering
illusions in Labour
Far from learning from the above pronouncements of
Leninism, the NCP, which claims to be “in the mould of Leninism”, is, on
the contrary, doing its best (worst would be more correct) to do all in its
power (which admittedly is not a lot) to foster illusions in the Labour Party,
“to reconcile the proletariat with the ‘bourgeois labour party’, to preserve
the unity of the proletariat with that party and thereby to uphold its
prestige…”.
In August 2009, a whole 9 months before the
election, and expecting a crushing defeat for Labour, in a rambling editorial
entitled ‘Labour and the coming election’, the NCP says that the “sickening
thing” [nothing sickens the NCP more than the prospect of defeat for the
imperialist Labour Party] is that the Labour Party could easily “completely
turn the situation around”, that Gordon Brown could “easily win the next
election”, if he “…were to launch a massive council house building
programme to house the homeless and those about to become homeless because of
the recession; if he were to scrap Trident; if he were to pull out of the
Afghan War; if he were to reverse privatisation; if he were to stand up to the
banks and if he were to get Britain out of the EU”.
This is a breathtaking attempt by the NCP at sowing
illusions that a bourgeois Labour government could “stand up to the banks”
– when the chief function of such a government is to safeguard at all costs the
interests of British finance capital – and that such a government could
look after the interests of the homeless and the destitute at the expense of
the robber barons of finance capital! If only pigs could fly!
Instead of exposing the fraud of bailing out the
bankrupt banks, at great cost to the taxpayers, the NCP whinges that although
Gordon Brown had “nationalised a couple of banks” [i.e., nationalised
the banks’ astronomical debts], “…he still had no more control over the
bankers” – as if the purpose of the bail-out was to control the banks
rather than to prevent a catastrophic meltdown of the British imperialist
financial system.
The New Worker asserts in another of its
leading articles that there is no realistic option, other than to vote Labour “until
we have a revolutionary situation”, that voting for “fringe left parties
will help Cameron, especially in marginal seats” and that even when they
get the odd person elected, as for instance Respect’s George Galloway, “there
is very little he can do, isolated in the House of Commons…” It adds
that “…even if we could fill every seat in the House with genuine Left
MPs, we would still be in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Such a government
would still be forced to bail out the banks”, that such a government would
not be able to “impose conditions on the banks in return for the bail out”, for
“the banks would ignore them”, and that the “banks will rule until
they are overthrown by a rising of the workers”. “In the meantime”,
that is, until the overthrow of capitalism, “it is a choice between Cameron
backed by Murdoch or Brown, still backed by most of the unions” (‘Vote
against Murdoch’, 19 March 2010).
The above meaningless meandering amounts to this
self-contradictory and self-annihilatory gibberish: on the one hand, voting for
fringe parties is pointless because MPs belonging to them will be so few in
numbers that they will be isolated in parliament; on the other hand, even if
all the MPs in parliament were genuine left MPs, it would still not do to vote
for them as we “would still be in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”.
That being the case, best to vote for the candidates of the imperialist Labour
Party, fold our arms uselessly and wait for the day of revolution.
However, in another leading article, six weeks
prior to the one cited immediately above, the New Worker stated, for the
thousandth time, the NCP’s commitment to the “election of a Labour
government and to ensure the maximum socialist representation within it”. It
urged its “supporters” (a rare and dying – if not dead – breed) to “help
in the Labour campaign effort across the board and assist in the campaigns of
those candidates who are members of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs
and those who supported John McDonnell’s leadership bid in 2007” (‘Countdown
to election’, 29 January 2010).
Thus it can be seen, that whereas in one leading
article our oracle informs us that it makes not the slightest difference even
if every seat in the House of Commons was to be occupied by genuine Left MPs,
but in another the NCP supporters are urged to help the Labour campaign,
especially of those who belong to the SCG and who supported John McDonnell so
as to have maximum socialist representation within the House. The clear
implication is that the presence of SCG MPs and McDonnell supporters would be
helpful to the labour movement because of their alleged socialist convictions.
If that is indeed the case, why should the presence of MPs from left fringe
parties be any less helpful? Even more, why should a House of Commons, every
one of whose benches is occupied by genuine left MPs, be less helpful to the
proletarian movement than a House with a majority of Labour MPs, including a
handful of those belonging to the SCG – all of whom would have been elected on
a Labour platform?
The essence of the above drivel is this: the only
party worth voting for while the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie lasts is the
imperialist Labour Party, that the only left parliamentary candidates worth
supporting are the ‘left’-wing of this imperialist party, and that the only
socialist representation in the British parliament worth having is the one
connected with the SCG. In other words, unquestioning and servile support for
social democracy – this deadly enemy of the proletariat and an inveterate
defender and a cringing flunkey of British imperialism.
There is not even a hint in the above renegades’
logic of the NCP even desiring to prepare the proletariat for revolution
through the exposure of the bankruptcy of capitalism and the latter’s political
parties, including the Labour Party. The ‘Leninists’ of the NCP are totally
‘forgetful’ of Lenin’s injunction that since the opportunist and
social-chauvinist tendency, represented by the bourgeois labour parties, can “neither
disappear nor ‘return’ to the revolutionary proletariat”, the only Marxian
line in the proletarian movement is to wage a determined and merciless struggle
against such parties. If the NCP, and other outfits following a similar line,
are more comfortable inhabiting the social democratic dungheap, let them do
so. We shall, for our part, continue to expose the Labour Party as the
imperialist party it has been, is, and shall be. We shall continue, too, to
expose the likes of the NCP as the tail end of social democracy.
NCP’s
support for social-democracy abroad
Not only in the context of Britain and the Labour
Party, but elsewhere also, the NCP is committed to the defence and preservation
of counter-revolutionary social democracy, with any attempt to undermine it
drawing its wrath. In an editorial dated 9 October 2009, the New Worker
stated that the then-impending British general election was about electing
either a Tory or Labour government – a simple choice that “some outside the
Labour Party refuse to understand”; swathing themselves in “red slogans”,
using “revolutionary rhetoric” and calling themselves Marxist or
communist while actually such people “are essentially social-democrats”,
for they are “talking about forming yet another socialist slate” and,
crime of crimes, “they’re drooling over the ‘victory’ of Die Linke (the
Left) in Germany”.
The New Worker, trying to be sarcastic, goes
on to ask: “But what is Die Linke and what has it achieved?” It answers
this question thus:
“The German Left Party is a merger of the
revisionist east German Party of Democratic Socialism and left social-democrats
who broke away from the mainstream Social Democrats. They stand on a left
social-democratic platform which accepts the European Union. At the general
election last month Die Linke took 12 per cent of the vote and won 76 seats in
the German parliament, almost entirely at the expense of the Social Democrats
who lost 76 seats and their place in the coalition government.
“German workers are worse off than they were
before the election took place. All that Die Linke has achieved was to ensure
the election of an even more right-wing coalition determined to ensure that
German workers pay even more for the capitalist crisis…”
If this reactionary argument means anything, it
means, first, that those who oppose the Labour Party or the German Social
Democratic Party (SPD) are social democrats, while those who support them are
revolutionaries. Second, it means that those who take their stand by a
political programme far to the left of social democracy and, on the basis of
such a programme, oppose social democracy during elections, are social
democrats, while those who with unquestioning servility support social
democracy, on the spurious excuse of maintaining the unity of the working
class, are revolutionary. Third, it means that while it is the height of
revolutionism to work for the strengthening of the ‘left’ within the Labour
Party or the SPD, it is nothing short of reactionary sabotage to organise such
a left outside and independent of official social democracy.
The New Worker attempts to belittle the
electoral success of the German left, which secured 12% of the vote and won 76
seats in the German parliament, for no other reason than that this success was
achieved at the cost of “mainstream Social Democrats”. Why should such
an outcome be regarded as a misfortune for the German working class? Why
should the reverses of the SPD, resulting in the replacement of the Social
Democratic and Conservative coalition by a Conservative-Free Democrat
coalition, hand-in-hand with the entry of 76 left members into the German parliament,
be interpreted as making the German workers “worse off” than prior to
the election? Surely the 76 lefts in parliament would, at the very least raise
their voices in support of the German working class and against their
government’s genocidal war against the Afghan people, as well as on a host of
other issues, far more vigorously than those belonging to the SPD.
Labour
– an engine for oppressing the working class
The rest of this editorial, in a style
characteristic of the NCP, is full of reactionary nonsense, incomprehensible
rigmarole, in which each sentence contradicts the preceding sentence and each
argument annihilates the one preceding it. “Social democracy cannot resolve
the problems of capitalism”, it says; it is “at best…simply a machine to
mobilise organised labour to procure reforms from the ruling class”, adding
that “…these reforms can defend and strengthen the working class”.
Even the NCP, which lives in a fantasy world of its
own imagining, must know that social democracy has stopped mobilising the
working class even for the limited purpose of procuring reforms from the ruling
class. Over the past 30 years, especially since the demise of the Soviet Union and the eastern European socialist states, it has opposed every single strike,
every major struggle of the working class. The aristocracy of labour, which
dominates the trade-union movement, over which the NCP wax so lyrical, has
increasingly moved away from collective representation of the working class to
the provision of personal services which can only be utilised by the sections
of the labour force with higher-than-average incomes. The trade union
leadership and its political wing, the Labour Party, fear like the plague any
action that crosses the limits set by the draconian anti-working class
legislation put on the statute book by the Tories and left untouched by the
Labour government during its 13 years in office. Most important industrial
struggles have been defeated by police violence, or drowned under the weight of
legal cretinism, or been simply betrayed by the TUC-Labour leadership.
One exception to this was the heroic coal strike of
1984-85, during which Britain’s miners, led by a courageous, militant and
incorruptible leadership, carried the banner of struggle on behalf of the
entire working class against unemployment and for better conditions and
challenged the power of capital to treat workers as so much disposable
garbage. In doing so, while reviving all that is noble, heroic and
self-sacrificing – the spirit of collectivism – in the long history of the
struggle of the British working class, they at the same time roused the frenzy
of the bourgeoisie, the Furies of private interest. Further, they roused the
wrath of the Labour and TUC leadership, who feared like death the miners’
victory – for by their example the miners threatened to infect other sections
of the working class with a spirit of resistance and rebellion against the
dictates of capital. So the Labour/TUC leadership joined forces with the
Thatcher government, the National Coal Board, the police and intelligence
services, the judiciary, the bourgeois media, and the blacklegs from the
Nottinghamshire coalfields, in order to isolate and defeat the miners. In the
end this ‘exotic’ range of forces arrayed against the miners proved too much
and the miners, deserted by other sections of the working class thanks to the
treachery of social democracy, were starved and beaten – literally beaten –
back to work.
Thus it is clear that, far from “a machine to
mobilise organised labour to procure reforms from the ruling class”, social
democracy presently is an open and blatant engine of British monopoly capital
for frustrating every working-class endeavour to improve its conditions of
existence – an engine for the oppression and suppression of the working class.
Only the stupid and blind renegades of the Troto-revisionist fraternity, the
NCP included, can maintain otherwise and urge the working class to support this
deadliest enemy within, to wit, social democracy.
A few
facts about Labour
During its 13 years in office, Labour dropped more
bombs on oppressed peoples than did the previous Conservative governments
during their 18 years in office. It has waged criminal predatory wars against
the people of Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan and has, along with US imperialism, the blood of over a million people on its hands.
In office it was “intensely relaxed about [some]
people getting filthy rich” (Peter Mandelson’s words) and Gordon Brown
schmoozed wealthy representatives of monopoly capitalism, such as Bill Gates of
Microsoft and Sir Richard Branson of the Virgin Group. It awarded knighthoods
to the likes of Philip Green, a retailing tycoon whose wife is resident in the
tax haven of Monaco for the purpose of reducing the family tax bills, and
Stelios Haji-Ioannou, an aviation tycoon also resident in Monaco but active in the UK. In the run-up to the 1997 election, which was to bring Labour into
office again after 18 years of exile, senior Labour politicians, including Tony
Blair and Gordon Brown, wooed, and secured the support of, finance and big
business, including Rupert Murdoch’s media empire and Sir Ronald Cohen, a
venture capitalist.
After taking office it basically followed the
economic policies of Thatcher and John Major. Labour’s commitment to the
depredations of the market and private ownership was boundless, and its
opposition to state intervention obsessive, while its magnanimity towards the
rich was underpinned by cheap loans and soaring property prices.
The Labour government made Britain even more of a surveillance society than it had been hitherto. Decimation of civil
liberties, especially those of ethnic minorities – with the Muslim community a
particular target – was one of Labour’s shameful achievements.
In the heady days of soaring real estate prices,
booming stock markets, and brisk business, Gordon Brown was foolish enough to
claim that he had abolished the old boom and bust and ushered in an era of
unending prosperity and rising incomes. It was during this period that
government expenditure on health and education rose considerably, which the NCP
never ceases to remind us of; but it was also during this period that huge
funds were channelled into the hands of monopoly capital through the PFI
(Private Finance Initiative) and other backdoor privatisation rackets.
After the party came the hangover. There followed,
like the falling of a house about one’s ears, the deepest slump since the war.
Gordon Brown’s government averted – only just – the meltdown of the banking
system with an £850bn bail-out which has left Britain with a budget deficit
amounting to over 11% of national income. Instead of the financial crisis
being over, the “banking crisis has turned into a potential sovereign debt
crisis”, to use the words of Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England.
To restore public finances, all three major bourgeois parties agree, it is the
working class that must bear the burden. Labour, had it won the election,
would have taken the same sort of measures as those the present
Conservative-LibDem coalition government is planning to put in place.
Contradictory
incantation
Yet in the NCP’s renegade reasoning, Labour still
deserves the support of the working class. An editorial in the New Worker
entitled ‘Tories in trouble’ dated 5 March 2010, presents the reader with a
splendid display of contradictory eclecticism through which the NCP attempts to
justify its support for the imperialist Labour Party.
“Admittedly Labour under Gordon Brown’s
leadership has been far from friendly to the working class [was it ever
friendly to the working class?] and we have no illusions that it would adopt
what we would call socialist policies”. Having stated this, a few short
paragraphs down the same column of the same editorial, the reader is informed:
“We must get out campaigning [this is sheer hyperbole, for the NCP has
neither the strength nor the inclination to do anything, let alone campaigning]
to make sure the Tories do not get in and we must use the opportunity to
push Brown towards genuinely working-class-friendly policies”.
The above two mutually exclusive statements amount,
if they amount to anything at all, to this self-annihilatory incantation: on
the one hand, we (the NCP) have no illusions that a Brown leadership would
adopt socialist policies; on the other hand, we must campaign for the return of
a Brown government to prevent the Tories getting in and “to push Brown
towards genuinely working class-friendly policies”! Comrades of the NCP,
make up your minds! Either ‘we’ have no illusions that a Brown government
would adopt socialist policies, or ‘we’ think it can be pushed “towards
genuine working class-friendly policies”. If the latter is not true, and
it patently is not, by asserting that it is, the NCP is engaged in fostering
illusions that a Labour government is capable of adopting socialist policies.
In the same editorial we are informed that the
Tories blame Gordon Brown for Britain’s massive fiscal hole, which was
acquired, as the editorial correctly says, “to bail out the banks last
year”, for, had that not been done – as the Tories know only too well – it
would have meant a complete meltdown of Britain’s banking system. This stance
of the Tories, namely, blaming the Brown government for the gargantuan fiscal deficit
is the reason, we are told, “…why so many capitalists are also alarmed at
the prospect of a Tory election victory and why many of them are now working
hard to ensure it does not happen”.
Obviously the NCP is not the insignificant corpse
that evil-minded people in the movement believe it to be, for it has been
joined by the serried ranks of “many capitalists … alarmed at the prospect
of a Tory victory and … working hard” to prevent such a victory. Oh
happy days! NCP, hand in hand with many capitalists, working tirelessly to
prevent a Tory victory, which could prove so harmful to British capitalism.
Whereas earlier we were told that a victorious Labour under Brown could be
pushed into adopting “working class-friendly policies”, now we are told that
the Tories, if returned to government, would damage the prospects of British
finance capital – hence the alarm of many capitalists at the prospect of a Tory
victory “and why many of them are now working hard to ensure it does not
happen”. Hence, presumably, too, the opposition of the NCP to a Tory
victory. It would thus appear that the NCP’s support for Labour rests on
Labour’s well-proven ability to serve the interests of British imperialism,
interests for which, it would equally appear, the NCP has such a tender heart!
Ordinary workers, with ordinary human reasoning,
may be forgiven for reaching such a conclusion, which follows quite logically
from the NCP’s argument cited immediately above. This is the reactionary mess
into which the NCP’s attempts to justify, and persist in justifying, the
unjustifiable have landed it.
Irrelevant references to
Murdoch’s empire
But yet again, maybe the NCP did not mean what it
said above, for in the very next sentence we are told that the “…Conservative
Party is the natural party of the ruling class [a party, the prospect of
whose victory alarms “so many capitalists” and to such an extent that
they are “working hard” to prevent it], and its defeat “would also be
a defeat for Murdoch and …Ashcroft”, which would be “enough reason to
vote Labour” although the main reason for voting Labour, as ever, is that “this
is the best way to build working class confidence, awareness and unity as the
essential prerequisite to building a revolutionary movement and getting rid of the
whole capitalist system.” (ibid.)
It is never explained by the capitulationist
advocates of this line why a Labour victory would serve to bolster working
class “confidence, awareness and unity” and how it would furnish the “pre-requisite”
– no less – to building a revolutionary movement capable of overthrowing
capitalism. Far from it: as long as the working class continues to entertain
illusions (which are actively encouraged and propagated by the shameful
revisionists and Trotskyites) in the imperialist Labour Party and support it,
the chances of building a revolutionary movement capable of overthrowing
capitalism are very poor indeed. One needs to go no further than to look at
the 20th century history of Britain, where some of the most militant
struggles of the working class, for instance the General Strike of 1926, as
well as the Miners’ Strike of 1984-5, took place during Tory administrations.
Labour’s main contribution, even from a position of opposition, was to
sabotage, sadly successfully, these heroic struggles, From its very inception,
Labour cast its lot in with British imperialism; it has never wavered from that
position and will never do so in the future. It is time that people, who call
themselves communists, who wish to be regarded as communists, gave up their
support for this party of imperialism. Failing that, they will end up in the
camp of imperialism in the pleasant company of their beloved Labour Party.
In its editorial of 29 January 2010 entitled
‘Countdown to election’, the New Worker says:
“State welfare and the NHS must be defended and
expanded and the public sector must be restored. We need a massive council
house building programme to end homelessness and cut unemployment. The
anti-union laws must be repealed to allow a return to free collective
bargaining. It can all be paid for by taxing the rich at the levels that
existed under Labour in 1979.
“The Brown leadership is opposed to even these
modest reforms but they are winnable and they could be implemented by a future
Labour government if there is sufficient pressure and demand form organised
Labour.”
The empty-headed editorial writers of the New
Worker do not even raise, let alone answer, the obvious question: during
the Labour governments of the past 13 years, why has the public sector not been
restored, why has a massive council house building programme failed to
materialise, why has unemployment, instead of being cut, reached 8% of the
workforce, i.e., 2.5 million, why have anti-union laws not been repealed to
allow a return to free collective bargaining, and why has there not been in
evidence “sufficient pressure and demand from organised labour” so as to
win and implement these “modest reforms”? What evidence is there that
they would be winnable under yet another Labour government, or that the
formation of a Labour government would act as a spur to the exertion of “sufficient
pressure…from organised labour” for the implementation of these “modest
reforms”, or that, given the existence of such working class pressure, a
Tory government would be more capable of resisting the implementation of these
reforms than a Labour government? One has only to raise these questions to
reveal the utter bankruptcy of the assertions of the NCP and other similar
renegade outfits.
In a number of articles and editorials in the New
Worker, the NCP repeated the assertion that Gordon Brown had been “making
some small, tentative steps in a leftward direction” since the September
2009 Labour Party Conference. Though small, these steps, says the NCP, were
“…enough to lose him the support of the Murdoch press empire” (see
‘Labour’s sabotage’ by Daphne Liddle, New Worker, 8 January 2010).
In another piece, the same blessed Ms Liddle told
us with an air of profundity verging on banality that “…Labour has broken
the link with the Murdoch media empire that supported Blair…”, that in “many
ways ‘New Labour’ died at last September’s annual party conference and Brown” had
“taken a few steps back towards traditional Labour”. In view of all
this, a “…clear victory for Brown’s Labour – with all its faults – is the
best hope for the working class”. For good measure, Ms Liddle told us that
we must educate the workers and build “…a movement strong and united
enough to throw over this sham parliamentary ‘democracy’ and establish a
working class democracy”. That, however, will take time. “In the
meantime voting Labour is the least we can do to support our class” (‘Style
over substance’, New Worker, 23 March 2010).
The above assertions of Ms Liddle are empty, false,
hypocritical and dishonest. It is not Gordon Brown’s Labour that broke the
links with the Murdoch media empire, it is the latter which parted company with
Labour, for Labour had become discredited and many monopoly capitalists,
including Murdoch, who had supported Labour for over a decade, switched back to
the Conservatives, not because of any policy differences between the two major
parties of British monopoly capitalism, but because, they believed, a new
government, with fresh faces and not directly tainted by the horrible actions
of the Labour government, would be better able to serve their interests. This
is the racket that capitalism long ago put into place, whereby an unpopular
bourgeois government is replaced by another momentarily less unpopular
government which in turn, having become just as unpopular, makes way for its
predecessor. And so it goes on as long as capitalism lasts.
Second, the link between Labour and Murdoch’s media
empire, or any other corporate entity, is totally irrelevant to the argument,
since it is the proud, and shameful, boast of the NCP that ever since its birth
it has called for a Labour vote, that to do otherwise would be to undermine “the
unity of our class”. Since the NCP still called for a Labour vote when Labour
had a warm relationship with Murdoch, it is beside the point that Murdoch no
longer – at least for the time being – finds it useful to lend his support to
the Labour Party.
In the period leading up to 1997, which was to
bring Labour into office after a break of 18 years, the NCP was calling for the
election of a Labour government, “even a right-wing one”, headed by Tony
Blair, who was, even according to the NCP, the “employers’ choice” – not
just Murdoch’s – for the election of such a government, we were told, “…will
raise the morale” and “expectations” of the working class.
Thus it can be seen that there is not the slightest
difference, not even in the wording and the formulations, between the policy of
the NCP back then in the mid-1990s and its policy now. It can equally be seen
that the NCP’s references to Labour’s break with Murdoch are a meaningless
irrelevance designed merely to hoodwink the unwary and an attempt at diverting
attention from its continued capitulation to the imperialist Labour Party – its
continued desertion of the camp of the proletariat to that of the bourgeoisie.
This is the essence of the New Worker’s
editorial of 19 March 2010 entitled ‘Vote against Murdoch’ – an essence which
is best summed up in the NCP’s own words: “Voting Labour is the least we can
do to support our class” (‘Style over substance’, Daphne Liddle, New
Worker, 23 April 2010).
Old and new Labour
Third, one of the sophisms used by all the
revisionist and Trotskyite capitulators to social democracy is to invent a
fundamental difference between old and new Labour; to assert that old Labour
stood for socialism and the emancipation of the proletariat; that only with the
advent of Tony Blair and the new Labour, of which he and Gordon Brown were the
two chief architects, did Labour change colour; that all the same it is
perfectly feasible to revert to old Labour and reclaim in for the working
class.
The truth, however, is that Labour never has been,
is not now, and will never in the future be, a party of the British proletariat.
The truth is that it was formed to defend the interests of the privileged upper
stratum of the proletariat (the labour aristocracy) and that since the
privileged position of this stratum depended on the loot from the Empire and
the extraction of imperialist superprofits from abroad, Labour, right from its
birth, was committed to the defence of the British Empire and British
imperialism alike, for it could not defend the one (the privileges of the
labour aristocracy) without defending the other (British imperialism).
Therefore Labour has, throughout its existence, as its record over a century
amply demonstrates, been an imperialist party, a “bourgeois labour party”,
to use Engels’ remarkably profound expression. Labour has throughout defended the
interests of British imperialism and of the labour aristocracy.
The composition of this labour aristocracy has
changed remarkably over several decades, but the labour aristocracy as such
remains. If in former times it was composed of skilled craft workers,
presently it consists mainly of skilled white-collar workers, administrators,
labour and trade-union functionaries and those in supervisory and managerial
positions. But what this new labour aristocracy shares with the old labour
aristocracy is its total contempt for the poor, the disadvantaged and
downtrodden at home and abroad. And this is so because such destitution is a
necessary condition for the maintenance of its privileged and parasitic
existence – an existence which explains its philistinism, its vile subservience
to, and its contemptible sycophancy in the service of, the imperialist
bourgeoisie.
The Troto-revisionist fraternity find themselves in
the reactionary mess because of their asinine refusal to accept the continuing
validity of Lenin’s thesis concerning the profound connection between
imperialism and opportunism in the labour movement. Imperialism engenders a
split in the working class by singling out a tiny handful of exceptionally rich
and powerful states who plunder the entire world and who are thus able to use a
portion of the superprofits so extracted to bribe the labour leaders and the
upper stratum of the working class, who act as “the principal social
prop of the bourgeoisie” and who are “the real agents of the
bourgeoisie in the working class movement, the labour lieutenants of the
capitalist class, real channels of reformism and chauvinism” (Lenin,
Preface to the French and German editions of Imperialism, the highest stage
of capitalism).
On the basis of its monopoly profits, and the
bribing of its labour aristocracy, the bourgeoisie of each imperialist country
long ago begot, nurtured and secured for itself a bourgeois labour party.
Since monopoly developed much earlier in Britain than elsewhere, the British
bourgeoisie was the first to secure such a party. The Labour Party was
precisely such a party. It is, as it always has been, a party of opportunism
and social chauvinism, which is totally alien to the revolutionary
proletariat. And unless a determined ruthless struggle is waged against this
party, it is pointless and hypocritical cant to talk about the struggle against
imperialism, about the socialist labour movement, or about proletarian
revolution, for, in the words of Lenin, “…the fight against imperialism is
a sham and humbug unless it is inseparably bound up with the fight against
opportunism”, (Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism).
The Troto-revisionist fraternity continues to deny
the existence of the split in the working class, for the denial of this split
is crucial to its support for the Labour Party as the party of the entire
British working class, as the recognition of this split cannot fail to force on
it the recognition that Labour represents the interests of British imperialism
and of the privileged layers of the working class. In denying this split, this
renegade gentry also deny, albeit implicitly, the imperialist character of
British capitalism. (For a more detailed treatment of this subject, the reader
is requested to look at Harpal Brar, Social-democracy – the enemy within).
For decades, the capitulators to social democracy,
to wit, the revisionist renegades to the cause of the emancipation of the
proletariat and their Trotskyite counter-revolutionary cousins have been
supporting the imperialist Labour Party, urging the working class “to elect
a Labour government committed to socialist policies” or “under pressure
from the working class to carry out socialist policies”. Absolutely
nothing beneficial to the working class has resulted from such support for
Labour. They refuse to stop to ponder why, for several decades, life has
passed by their beautiful daydreams. They avoid facts and references to
concrete reality, to the philosophy and century-long practice of the Labour
Party because unfortunately for them concrete facts and reality refutes their
dogma, mercilessly refutes their pompous, not to say ponderous, catch phrases.
Their refusal to confront concrete reality has
served, as it was bound to do, to make them irrelevant, and to bring their
organisations to the verge of extinction. Many Trotskyite organisations are on
the fast track to oblivion. The CPB and the NCP, with their social-democratic
politics, have no basis for an independent existence. The revisionist NCP is,
even in the words of someone who until very recently was the organiser of the New
Worker supporters group in Manchester, “almost extinct” and a “shell
of an organisation around a ramshackle office in London”, for “if it was
a real communist organisation, it would be building its own organisation and
not wasting valuable time and effort tailing the Labour Party”.
There is next to no chance of such sane advice
being heeded by our capitulationists. By their persistence in carrying along
the road of subservience to social democracy, they are making themselves
irrelevant, thus clearing the way for the building of a real communist party
capable of leading the British working class in the revolutionary overthrow of
British imperialism.
Renewed
attempts to create illusions in Labour
Now that Labour, having lost the general election,
is out of office, all its apologists, from trade-union barons to various
Trotskyite-revisionist cliques, are busy attempting to rescue the Labour Party
by creating illusions among working people that it can be reclaimed for the
working class. They are even voicing criticism of the Labour governments
during the past 13 years for the sole purpose of hoodwinking the working class
into believing that a successful effort can be made to capture this imperialist
stinking corpse for the working class.
Thus, Tony Woodley, the co-leader of Unite, Britain’s largest trade union, criticised the outgoing Labour government for its
failure to scrap anti-union laws. Speaking at his Union’s Conference, he said
that it was a “scandal that at the end of 13 years of Labour government the
right to strike is still hanging by a thread”, adding that Labour’s failure
to remove these laws was “… a lasting mark of shame on 13 years of New
Labour government, that the party founded to rescue unions from the hands of
the judges should pass us on to the Con-Lib coalition hemmed in by the courts
at every turn”.
Mr Woodley also said there was no road
back for Labour until the party apologised for taking the UK into the “illegal
and unjust” Iraq war and called for the troops to get out of Afghanistan
(quoted in the Financial Times of 1 June 2010, ‘Labour attacked over
anti-union laws’).
Shameful and scandalous though the Labour
government’s record during its 13 years in office was, the truth is that Mr
Woodley’s 1.6 million strong union made a financial contribution of upwards of
£11m to the Labour Party during the 4 years immediately preceding the recent
election. It also sent 6 separate constituency-related individual letters to
its members, in which Mr Woodley and Derek Simpson (the other co-leader of
Unite) put the case for voting Labour. Obviously Mr Woodley was urging his
members to vote for the return of a government with such a scandalous and
shameful record on working-class questions – the same Labour that had
stubbornly refused to remove the anti-trade union laws from the statute book.
In short, he was asking the working class to support the very party that stood
for its subjugation to British finance capital.
As to the question of the predatory
imperialist wars waged by Labour, Mr Woodley would do best to maintain a
discreet silence on the subject, for he was one of a group of top trade union
leaders who, at the Labour Party Conference at the end of September 2004,
rallied round the war criminal Tony Blair and helped defeat, by a majority of 6
to 1, a constituency motion calling for an “early date” for the
withdrawal of British occupation forces from Iraq. The trade-union bosses, Mr
Woodley included, even managed to stage a standing ovation for Blair.
More than that, this disgraceful bunch
even invited to the Labour Party Conference Abdullah Mushin, an Iraqi quisling
from the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU). Set up under the protection
of imperialist guns in May 2003, IFTU supports the imperialist occupation of Iraq and condemns the Iraqi resistance. This traitor to the cause of Iraqi liberation
canvassed the delegates and begged them not to vote against Blair, for the “multinational
force [was] there to help our democracy” and its withdrawal would be
“a terrible blow for free trade unionism, and would play into the hands of
extremists and terrorists”.
Not only was Mr Woodley’s Unite a
co-signatory to the letter inviting this despicable Iraqi flunkey of
imperialism, it also contributed with its block vote to defeating the
constituency resolution demanding an “early date” for the withdrawal of
British troops from Iraq.
It is a bit rich for Mr Woodley now to
demand an apology from the Labour Party for taking Britain into the “illegal
and unjust” Iraq war, when he and his Unite, among others, have contributed
through their actions to the prolongation of that war and all the destruction
and misery inflicted by that war on the Iraqi people. Before asking the
criminals of the Labour Party to apologise, it is incumbent on him to himself
make a similar apology for his disgraceful and shameful conduct in support of
this predatory war. Mr Woodley must delude himself into thinking that other
people don’t have long enough memories to remember the part that he and his ilk
played in support of Labour’s predatory war in Iraq, not to mention the Afghan
and Yugoslav wars.
Socialist Party
The Trotskyites of the Socialist Party
(formerly the Militant), who stood candidates at the last election as part of
the Trade union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) slate, issued an election
supplement on 15 May in which, inter alia, the question of shifting Labour to
the left is dealt with.
“Since the election,” says the
supplement, “some have argued that there is a possibility of shifting New
Labour to the left now that it is out of power”, adding: “We do not
think this is on the agenda”, for “New Labour, … unlike the Labour
Party of the past, is a capitalist party”. The Socialist Party Trots
obviously do not wish to lag behind the rest of the Troto-revisionist
fraternity, all of whom, flying in the face of facts, maintain that it is only
since the domination of the Blairites that the Labour Party has become a
capitalist party. The Chinese wall that they have artificially erected between
old and new Labour serves them as a convenient device for reconciling the
British proletariat to counter-revolutionary social democracy.
In response to the declaration by Len
McCluskey, general secretary candidate for Unite, that his union would initiate
a major campaign to reclaim the Labour Party under his leadership, the
supplement characterises it as a “mistaken strategy”, instead arguing
for Unite “to stop funding New Labour and to begin to build a new party”. Having
expressed their reservations about the McCluskey strategy, and having called it
“mistaken”, the Socialist Party supplement goes on to say:
“Nonetheless, a serious campaign to
reclaim New Labour by affiliated trade unions would be a huge step forward on
the current policy of the majority of the union leaders of clinging to the
coat-tails of the Brownites and the Blairites”.
But “to stand a chance of reclaiming
capitalist New Labour for the working class [what a profundity – reclaiming
capitalist New Labour for the working class!] it would take a mass influx
into the party – of trade unionists and young people – determined to rebuild
the democratic structures which have long been destroyed”, ‘forgetting’ to
add that the democratic structures of which the Socialist Party Trots speak
were destroyed long before Blair was even born by the 1918 constitution which,
through the block vote, gave complete control to the Union bosses over the
election of the National Executive Committee as well as conference policy. Thus,
what our Troto-revisionist coterie of renegades characterises as labour’s
historic links with the masses in fact amounted to the creation of a rotten
borough which, while denying all say to the workers, handed control to an
exclusive clique of union barons who always acted in the past, and will
doubtless also always act in the future, in defence of the interests of British
imperialism, a defence on which rests the defence of their own privileges and
those of the upper stratum of the working class whom they represent.
The provisions of the 1918 constitution,
including its infamous Clause IV, were part and parcel of Labour’s declaration
of war on socialism and Bolshevism. Only the Troto-revisionist gentry, with
their vision blinkered and thinking stultified through the practice of decades
of opportunism, are unable to perceive this truth.
To continue with the supplement: “A
serious campaign” to reclaim Labour “would have to demand that Labour
adopts a socialist programme”. As to the contents of the ‘socialist’
programme, “key demands would include the repeal of all anti-trade union
laws and opposition to all cuts in pubic services …” The Socialist
Party’s socialist programme amounts to no more than a bourgeois democracy with
the right to strike and moderate spending on public and social services. Gone
are all references to the emancipation of the working class through the
revolutionary overthrow of capitalism! And this from people who endlessly
mumble about world revolution!
Further, such a campaign would have to
demand the expulsion of the pro-capitalist and pro-war Blairites and Brownites
from the Labour Party, accompanied by “…the rebuilding [!!] of
democracy within the Labour Party”!
The authors of the supplement do not
believe in the chances of success of such a campaign. If, however, it were to
succeed “we would turn towards such a development”. But if the attempt
fails, the affiliated trade unions must draw the conclusion that “New Labour
could not be reclaimed and take the road of building a new mass party of the
working class”.
The supplement concludes by arguing that
in the Labour leadership election currently under way, “all affiliated
unions, if they are serious about fighting to reclaim New Labour, should
mandate their sponsored MPs to back” John McDonnell, for he is “almost
certain to be the only candidate [he has dropped out of the contest since
then] that stands in defence of workers’ interests”.
We have quoted at length the Socialist
Party’s supplement, from which it emerges that, although kicked out of Labour,
its heart really is in Labour; that it too, like most of the revisionist and
Trotskyite outfits, is firmly of the view that only New Labour, “unlike the
Labour Party of the past” is a capitalist party; that with a vigorous
campaign there is the possibility of reclaiming Labour for the working class.
Not much has changed. From the Militant, through the Socialist Party, back to
the Militant and into the fold of the imperialist Labour Party. What a
progress for these lost souls who, having wandered from place to place, are
dying to return to their much-beloved shrine – the imperialist Labour Party.