Politics in Britain is entering into its greatest period of change since the First World War. The changes involved are more fundamental even than those of 1945 which ushered in the 'welfare state'.
Two developments — the split in the Labour Party and the process which will break the Tory Party in its present form — are immediate and striking. Others — proportional representation, Welsh and Scottish nationalism, renewed struggle over the EEC and Britain's relation to the world — are more subtle but equally far-reaching in their implications. Taken together they will transform the shape of British politics during the 1980s.
The left in Britain is extremely unprepared for these developments. In this article, based on a talk given in July 1980, John Ross looks at the emerging features of Britain's political crisis and situates them in a broader historical context.
THE IMPERIALIST PAST
One simple fact holds the key to understanding the specific character of British society: Britain is not just any capitalist society in general. It was for two centuries the greatest of the capitalist powers and the first imperialist state in the world. This has affected the very foundations and every single aspect of every major social layer of the country. It created for the ruling class enormous reserves with which to buy off the working class. Part of the problem for the ruling class now is that it can no longer afford all the concessions it has made over the years. What is more, the very success of British imperialism, the construction of the empire with its enormous finance and banking capital, has helped create the conditions for Britain's spectacular decline today as all its international contradictions so to speak 'implode' in the domestic economy and society.
Britain's imperialist history also explains why the British bourgeoisie was the first in the world to develop what Trotsky described as the perfected, finished form of bourgeois rule. By this he did not mean Margaret Thatcher or her counterparts of his day. He referred rather to an interlocking system of two elements: bourgeois democracy, a state presenting itself as the representative of the people as a whole but in reality serving the capitalist class, based on a labour bureaucracy controlling the working class and preventing any challenge to the bourgeois democratic system from that quarter.
Contrary to the 'conventional wisdom' of the labour movement, it is this bureaucracy rather than the Tory Party which is the ultimate and chief bastion of British imperialism and the British ruling class. Without the labour bureaucracy, they could not survive one major crisis. We will look at some of the implications of this later. First, however, let us put the Tory Party in its correct place and perspective.
The Tory Party
The Tory Party is the oldest continuously existing political party in the world. Its origins go back directly to the period 1685-8 and can be traced indirectly to 1640. It was never the chief party of the British industrial bourgeoisie; that role was played by a section of the Whigs and later, and more centrally, by the Liberal Party. The Tory party represented the most backward, archaic and reactionary forces in the most economically and socially advanced country in the world.
How did this political dinosaur come to be the chief party of the ruling class? Prior to 1848, the Tory Party found itself split over the repeal of the Corn Laws, reduced in parliament to a rump and perhaps historically threatened with disappearance. The Liberal Party looked a much more likely candidate to emerge as the dominant party of the ruling class.
What ensured the Tories' supremacy inside the ruling class was that British capitalism had created for itself a monster — a working class which by the 1840s, in Chartism, was beginning to take on a political life of its own. To confront this social threat to its power, the bourgeoisie set out to build a coalition of every possible force in society — no matter how archaic, decrepit or 'medieval'. The stable, fixed and utterly reactionary core of this coalition was provided by the obscurantist sections of the ruling class — the most backward of the aristocracy and landowners and their allies — who constituted the historical nucleus of the Tory Party. The modern Tory Party was built by a process of adding layer upon layer to this core: reactionary Protestant forces in the north of Ireland, the petit-bourgeoisie, the military hierarchy, and then, with the political genius of Disraeli followed by the organising skills of Joseph Chamberlain, a significant section of the working class — in the twentieth century around a third in terms of votes. The economically dominant force in the party was banking capital.
The problem for the ruling class was that while the Tory Party was able to maintain the political grip of British imperialism over society, it was at the expense of great damage to the domestic economy. The specific ruling class orientation embodied in the party, that of international banking operations, high exchange rates and concessions to the working class internally to maintain its firm political base, constitutes one of the chief historical roots of the present economic crisis of British imperialism.
The Working Class Movement
The working class movement in Britain was, at the time of its formation, as advanced as any in the world. For quite a long time, indeed, it was the only working class movement existing on a mass scale. In its politicisation, internationalism, development of revolutionary currents and its breadth of support as a class movement, Chartism — the basic organised expression of the workers' movement from the mid 1830s onwards — was, in its time, second to none.
With the development of imperialism from the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the ruling class achieved an economic room for manoeuvre which allowed it to buy off and change the character of the working class movement. By a strange dialectic, the same imperialist process created the conditions for the British working class to become organisationally the strongest in the whole of Europe while simultaneously one of the very weakest politically. On the basis of its huge expansion, British capitalism had the potential to afford substantial concessions to the working class. Of course, the capitalist class would give nothing voluntarily — no ruling class ever does; but it could afford to let the working class win important concessions.
The working class built colossal organisations to struggle for such concessions. Today, we see the results: over twelve million members organised in trade unions; organisationally the most powerful trade union movement in Europe in the most proletarianised country and with the most favourable relationship of forces.
But at the same time, its ability to grant concessions allowed the bourgeoisie to maintain a political domination over the working class. It never had to engage in head on confrontation. There is no British equivalent of the Paris Commune, the German revolutions of 1918-19 or 1923, of Hungary in 1919 or of the Spanish Civil War, let alone of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The General Strike of 1926 — the nearest British equivalent — was anything but an open fight for power.
Because the working class never faced such a confrontation with the bourgeoisie, the question of organising every oppressed layer of society against the ruling class was never a pressing one. It was able to get away with a chauvinist policy internationally, with failing to support the demands of the struggle in Ireland and so on. The political domination of the bourgeoisie was consolidated on all these bases.
The problem, judged historically, for the ruling class is that the material basis of the backwardness of the workers' movement is disappearing. Needless to say, the British working class is not genetically backward or stupid. It is no worse and no better than any other working class movement in this respect. Its historical backwardness has derived from the material strength of British imperialism, its ruling class, and the powerful bureaucracies created in its ranks. The material decline of British capitalism creates the conditions for a transformation of its consciousness, although as always consciousness lags behind the changes in objective reality.
The crisis of British imperialism therefore creates the following 'race' which summarises the problems of the British class struggle in their most general political form: Will the ruling class succeed in using its political strength to smash the organisational strength of the labour movement before the working class, to defend its social and organisational gains, is forced to break with its existing political consciousness?
The task of revolutionaries is to fight within the working class for a break with its existing political consciousness and the development of a movement adequate to the needs of the objective situation. This is no small problem and the solution cannot simply be plucked from the history of the working class as it has existed in Britain for the last 130 years and writ large: ie. economic struggles, bigger economic struggles, a grand fight against the Tory government etc. This is not an adequate strategy for socialism. Naturally all these elements have to be part of a revolutionary strategy; but they in no sense comprise either its totality or its framework. The working class will have to confront and overcome a far deeper and more complicated crisis of British imperialism than anything it has faced in the last century and a half.
Political Crisis
Looking at the nature of a really serious crisis allows us to distinguish underlying features of such situations compared to periods of stagnation. It is, therefore, instructive, to get an indication of what precisely will develop and in fact is already developing, to look back to the most acute crisis that British imperialism has suffered in its history which unfolded in the period leading up to, during and following the First World War.
What characterised this period was not simply that there were major struggles on trade union and economic questions — although these did indeed take place on a massive scale. It was that a general social, economic and political crisis developed of not merely national but international dimensions.
The first was the developing struggle, and then war, of national liberation waged by the Irish people against British imperialism — the first successful anti-colonial struggle waged against the British state since the American war of independence. The second was the rise of the movement on a decisive question of women's oppression at the time — the Suffragette struggle for the right to vote. A third dimension was the impact of the war itself both in the direct effects of the slaughter and in its repercussions throughout British society. Fourthly, there were big changes in the party political system with the split and decline of the Liberals and the rise of the Labour Party. Fifth, there was the impact of the Russian Revolution and the role this played in bringing into existence the British Communist Party. Finally, all these were welded together with a frontal attack on working class living standards and trade union organisations.
In short, this period, on a less developed scale, showed the characteristics of every serious revolutionary crisis: the coincidence of a multitude of economic, social, political, national and international elements creating disorganisation in the ruling class, radicalisation among the intermediate strata of society, and major struggles of the working class. What differentiated this British political crisis from revolutionary crises in Germany, Russia or Spain was first that the objective crisis was not qualitatively so deep and secondly the hopelessness of the overwhelming majority leaderships and traditions of the working class. With a few honourable individual exceptions, there was an almost total failure to develop a coherent revolutionary strategy combining struggle around all the elements of the crisis.
There was no serious campaign of solidarity with the Irish war of independence — on this even the early Communist Party had a not particularly creditable record. The Suffragette movement was treated with indifference and sometimes even hostility by the majority leadership of the labour movement. As in the other combatant countries, there was a generalised capitulation in the face of the imperialist war; a tragic symbol of this is provided by the fact that tens of thousands of miners who had engaged in tremendous class battles before 1914, rushed to enlist when war broke out. Very few of those active on one particular issue made serious attempts to link up with people struggling on others.
The outcome of these failures was not merely that the working class missed its objective opportunities but that the ruling class was able to turn these opportunities into positive weapons against the labour movement and oppressed. In Ireland, the British ruling class had been brought by 1914 to the threshold of civil war posing the most serious internal crisis it had faced at least since 1832. The failure of the working class to mount mass solidarity with the national liberation struggle which developed out of the 1916 Easter Rising and the 1918 Sinn Fein election victory allowed the ruling class to create the utterly reactionary Orange state in the north of Ireland. The result was the establishment of a reactionary hegemony in the protestant working class and the creation of a counter-revolutionary force permanently aimed potentially against the Irish struggle and British working class.
In relation to the Suffragettes, the working class had an even clearer opportunity. The movement's leadership initially gravitated spontaneously towards the labour movement and its political organisations. But the leadership and majority of the workers' movement refused to take up the cause. The result was the historically ridiculous fact that it was a Liberal-Conservative government which, after decades of bitter opposition, legislated votes for women. If the Labour Party had been identified as the party of women's rights, the whole shape of British politics in the inter-war period could have been significantly different. Instead the Labour leadership positively handed the Tory Party a new and important element for its electoral bloc with women, including working class women, casting a much higher vote than men for bourgeois parties.
Finally, the leadership of the workers' movement as a whole was totally unable to deal with the political crisis which was created by the war. The explosion of strikes, mass discontent in the army and dislocation of the police in the immediate post-war period was allowed to pass, or worse defused, by the Labour and trade union leaders. They then allowed successive governments — Labour and Tory — to make preparations for the General Strike of 1926 and ensured by their actions that the strike would not succeed. The result was a working class movement defeated for a generation.
The failure of the working class to take advantage of its opportunities graphically illustrates a fundamental law of politics. The existence of a crisis of the capitalist system in itself determines nothing about its outcome; it merely indicates that the existing situation is untenable and must be altered. If the working class fails to exploit the contradictions and crises of bourgeois society then these will be used by the ruling class to attack and weaken the working class and oppressed.
The Crisis of British Imperialism
Turning now to the present, I will not try to deal with all the elements which will develop before the emergence of a full blown revolutionary crisis threatening the rule of the capitalist class. Firstly, nobody can tell in advance exactly what they will be and secondly such a crisis is in any case quite some time away. What I do want to consider are the political lines of fissure along which the struggles of tomorrow are being prepared; here, the basic trends are already clear.
The first is an incipient political crisis in the Tory Party. The Thatcher Government is not just an 'ordinary' Conservative government but a last attempt to keep together the historical Tory bloc. Its failure is written into the whole relationship of class forces; it will not just spell the end of a particular administration but of the whole basis of the party, especially if it takes place in the context of an explosion of working class militancy and struggle. This will be the last government of the Tory Party in its present form.
I do not want this to be misunderstood. I am not predicting that the defeat of Thatcher will be followed by a glorious succession of workers' governments — quite the contrary. Nor am I suggesting that the Tories will disappear never to hold office again. The point I am making is simply that the fall of Thatcher will not lead simply to a 'swing of the pendulum' but will rather initiate a process breaking up the old pattern of British politics.
The Tory Crisis
To understand this point, it is necessary to dispose completely of the idea that that interests of the Tory Party and the ruling class are identical, that a defeat of the Tories is the same as a defeat of the ruling class, that 'Tories' equals 'bourgeoisie' and 'Labour' equals 'working class'. On the contrary, as we have already discussed, the Tory Party historically did not represent the most important and dynamic sections of the domestic bourgeoisie but particular and sectional interests. Its appeal for the ruling class as a whole lay in its success in containing the working class. Its formula of political reaction plus economic concessions both embodied the domination of foreign investment and banking capital which is the historically specific form of British imperialism and gave a tremendous political hegemony to the bourgeoisie.
The problem now facing the Tory Party and the ruling class is that this neat combination of economic orientation and political strategy has been undermined by the erosion of Britain's colossal profits from financial operations overseas and the domestic inefficiency of the economy. The most rational economic strategy for British imperialism today is roughly that represented by the Heath wing of the Tory Party and the Liberals: wage controls, state intervention to build investment, sharp increases in the rate of exploitation etc. These forces, however, have no political strategy for dealing with the working class as the Heath Government of 1970-4 conclusively showed. Thatcher, in contrast, has got a political strategy which she used extremely skillfully in the period leading up to the 1979 elections. It is one pioneered in a more grotesque form by Powell ever since 1968. It consists of using the political strength of the ruling class to regenerate every type of reactionary campaign imaginable — against 'the Communist threat', 'Irish [illegible]', 'immigrants', 'the breakdown of law and order' and so on — to outflank the Labour leadership; in short, to use the historical backwardness of Labour and labourism to win support for the Tories.
The trouble with this orientation is that it has no coherent and acceptable economic policy. This was very obviously the case with Powell whose attempt to create a real political dynamic involved policies — withdrawal from the EEC, ultra-monetarism, etc. — economically quite unacceptable to the ruling class. Thatcher is trying to get the best of both worlds with reactionary campaigns lacking Powell's incitement of mass mobilisation plus less extreme monetarist economic policies which do not involve the total deflation and confrontation envisaged by Powell. In reality, of course, she will finally get the worst of both; an economic policy incapable of decisively shifting the class relation of forces, and one pushed increasingly towards pragmatism, together with an insufficient reactionary mobilisation to protect her from the unpopular consequences of her economic policies. The whole Thatcherite package is doomed although this will not prevent it imposing some serious defeats on the working class before it collapses. It is its inability to find a coherent combination of an economic formula and a political one which is creating a major political crisis for the ruling class.
The Crisis of the National State
The British bourgeois state is incomparably the longest continuously existing one in the world. With the major exception of the liberation of the south of Ireland, its essential form has not changed since the bourgeois revolution of the seventeenth century and the unification of the Scottish and English states which followed it. The major subsequent changes, above all the extension of the franchise and the incorporation of the working class politically into the system, were all within the basic framework of institutions which flowed out of the final bourgeois victories of 1688 and 1707. The elimination of a serious Welsh bourgeoisie and unification with the Scottish one and the maintenance of a bourgeois democracy with a monarchy, a strong two-party system based on a stable electoral arrangement, and a 'non-political' civil service, were its underlying features. The last major problem for the British state, that of integrating the leadership and bureaucracy of the working class, was successfully achieved within this framework during the period before and after 1945.
The combination of British economic decline with the problems of the Tory Party now threatens to throw this system into crisis. The first effect is that in the areas worst hit by economic decline, the Conservative Party is already incapable of holding together its historic bloc. This is most obvious in Scotland where it has been reduced from the majority party to a peripheral force; even in the 1979 election, Scotland swung to Labour and against the Tories. The same basic process, however, is also affecting the industrial north of England. As economic decline strikes deeper the Tory Party is being threatened with the loss of its historical base in the working class.
The second effect is the promotion of splinter bourgeois parties. As long as the Tory Party was strong and its working class base intact, there were big constraints operating against other parties of the bourgeoisie, both against the Liberals and against any new formations. With the weakening of the Tory bloc, there is a new tendency for splinter bourgeois groupings to emerge corresponding to fissures inside the ruling class.
The first example of this process is the steady rise of the Liberal Party since its low point of the early 1950s. At the parliamentary level this is obscured by the electoral system, which is precisely designed to prevent the emergence of third parties, and by the particular features of the 1979 election. However, taken in terms of underlying trends the pattern is clear. Throughout the 1950s the Liberals were a bourgeois irrelevance. In the last years of the Macmillan government of 1959-63, with the onset of the first serious economic problems of the post-war period and the emergence of crises inside the Tory Party, they began to revive. By 1970, and more strikingly in 1974, their share of the vote started to rise. The Lib-Lab pact gave them their first de facto foothold in government since the war.
The economic policies of the Liberal Party, as we have already noted, today correspond more closely than those of any other party to the interests of industrial capital; it is therefore not altogether surprising that in 1974 they received for the first time some financial contributions from bourgeois sources. What is more, their traditional financial problems will be significantly further reduced with the introduction of state funding of political parties. The institution of any form of proportional representation would earn them an almost permanent role in bourgeois coalition governments.
The second splintering process is internal to the alliance which constituted the Tory Party itself. The reactionary Orange bloc in the north of Ireland has historically been the staunchest ally of the Tory core in England. The party even presented itself in elections as the 'Conservative and Unionist Party'. The new rise of the Irish struggle after 1968 has shattered the Unionist connection — first splitting them from the Tories and then marginalising the old official Unionist Party.
The third such process is taking place in Scotland. The setbacks suffered by the SNP in the 1979 elections led the bourgeois media and a significant section of the left to conclude that the question of devolution and nationalism was closed. The short sightedness and absurdity of such a perspective is indicated by the SNP's performance in the first Glasgow by-election under the Thatcher government and in the positions on devolution adopted by successive Labour Party Scottish conferences. In reality the SNP has evolved during the 1970s from a lunatic fringe sect to a serious party while the Tories have become a marginal force in Scotland.
More important, there is a real social basis for this development. Economically, sections of the Scottish bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, particularly those tied to the emergence of oil as a key element in the economy, have distinctly different interests to those of the bankers of the City of London who play an important role in guiding Tory policy. Politically, the intense hatred of the Scottish working class for the Tories makes it impossible for them to win a major share of the urban vote in a period of decline. Only another bourgeois party can prevent a clean sweep in Scotland by the Labour Party. Finally, underlying all else, Scotland is a separate nation from England — even if not an oppressed one. The 'Scottish question' will not recede but will become more prominent an element in British politics as the 1980s go on.
The central thrust of all these developments, and others in Wales, is not just to break up the historic Tory bloc. Combined with a crisis in the Labour Party, they will recast the whole shape of British politics and threaten the present form of the British bourgeois democratic state.
The Crisis in the Labour Party
The crisis of British imperialism does not only affect the institutions of the ruling class. Because every class was formed and moulded by Britain's imperial greatness, so every class is shaken and transformed by its decline. It is, therefore not surprising that we are entering a crucial period in the crisis and development of the Labour Party of which the present split is merely one stage. The basis of this split is the existence inside the Labour Party, especially since 1945, of a layer, represented by Jenkins, Williams etc., which has a social base fundamentally different from the traditional base of the Labour Party. Their base is not the trade union bureaucracy of the working class but parts of the state apparatus and nationalised industries, and even marginal sections of the bourgeoisie itself.
Why the split is developing now is not simply or even chiefly determined by the gyrations of the Jenkins layer itself but by the situation inside the unions. It has never been Fabianism, of which the Jenkinsites are the rightful inheritors, that has dominated the party. That is a myth of the petit-bourgeois intellectual layer they represent. It was the trade union bureaucracy which established the Labour Party and it has always ultimately controlled it. They were prepared to give prominence within the movement to people whose ideas fitted in with their own. But they have never allowed anyone but themselves the final power to decide what went on in the party. When they put their foot down, as they did for example in 1968 over In Place of Strife, then the party leadership came to heel.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, this situation caused no problems for people like Jenkins and Gaitskell. On the contrary, they found themselves aligned with the trade union bureaucrats against the Bevanites and the constituency left. As long as the 'new right' did not go too far — as they did, for example in attempting to remove Clause IV of the party constitution — the trade union bosses were quite happy to let them dominate the party.
The accelerated decline of British imperialism, however, undermined the basis of this alliance. The chronological turning point was the struggle over In Place of Strife. By 1968 the bourgeoisie was not offering concessions but rather demanding an open attack on the organisations of the labour movement. The Jenkinsites naturally rushed to comply. The trade union bureaucracy, on the other hand, under pressure from its base and fearing for its own position, rejected the proposals. As always, when it came to the crunch, the party leadership finally fell into line with the union bureaucracy — leaving the Jenkinsites isolated and creating rage in the ruling class. From that moment on, the Jenkinsites, to their surprise, have found themselves to be a relatively powerless clique and it was only a matter of time before they split.
The policy issues on which they have fought in the party have been those which are most unacceptable to the ruling class: withdrawal from the EEC, unilateral nuclear disarmament and any threat that the labour movement might develop a democratic internal structure. The combination of continued pressure in the unions, which prevents a total retreat by the bureaucracy and imposes 'leftist' positions on certain questions, and the need of the bourgeoisie for more and more open confrontation creates the conditions for an explosive crisis in the Labour Party.
Bennism
This is the background against which we must analyse the emergence of Benn and 'Bennism'. Left wings inside the Labour Party are, in themselves, nothing new — previous examples were the Socialist League of the 1930s and the Bevanites in the early 1950s. But these previous lefts generally emerged either when the working class had suffered serious defeats — as after 1926 or 1931 — or when capitalism was entering a boom period — as in the 1950s. Their organisation was largely restricted to the constituencies which count for little inside the party. The parliamentary leadership, in concert with a right-wing trade union bureaucracy, could easily keep the situation under control.
Not since the National Left Wing Movement of the 1920s has a left wing developed in the Labour Party in a situation in which the working class has not been qualitatively defeated and the ruling class cannot grant serious and lasting concessions. What is more, today as in the 1920s, the radicalisation extends into the unions to the extent where there is serious pressure on the bureaucracy from below.
It is this latter aspect which most alarms the ruling class and gives Bennism its real significance. A few protests in the constituencies can be easily lived with but the trade unions are something quite different. They are enormously powerful instruments of struggle — potentially more powerful than governments as the ruling class rudely rediscovered in 1972 and 1974. Of course, the bourgeoisie has few illusions that its 'labour lieutenants of capital' are in themselves likely to overthrow the bourgeois order. But it does fear the consequences of actions they are pushed into either on the field of mass struggle or through their controlling position in the Labour Party. Above all, it fears the creation of expectations which might lead to their supporters getting out of control.
The distinctive characteristic of Benn himself is precisely that he understands that the left must base itself primarily in the unions. This is reflected not merely in the political themes he identifies with — the alternative economic strategy, workers co-operatives, workers 'control', etc., but also in his organisational orientation. From 1968 onwards, symbolised by him marching at the head of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders demonstration, Benn set out to build up political support inside the unions with the perspective of forging an alliance with the emerging 'left' sections of the bureaucracy. His whole orientation, from his left words to his decision to stay in the government in 1975 because of the position taken by Jack Jones, was [illegible] leaders' backing for his bid for the party leadership. Given his lack of support in the Parliamentary Labour Party, an integral part of his strategy had to be to wrest the leadership election from its exclusive domain — a policy incidentally cementing the alliance he wanted in that it further increased the direct power of the union bureaucracy inside the party.
What alarms the ruling class is that this orientation will prevent the infliction of any easy defeat on the Bennites. The right wing success and consolidation in the AUEW was a significant victory but, taken as a whole, the trade union bureaucracy today is still very far removed from the old reliable right wing monolith that defeated Bevan. Confronted with Thatcher's attacks, faced with a radicalisation in sections of their own ranks, even if they do not go all the way with Benn, some sections of the union bureaucracy will still go too far for the ruling class. The immediate orientation of the Labour Party leadership, of course, will be to orient to a direct alliance with the ruling class, and particularly the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), against 'Tory madness'. But in the medium term, any such orientation is unviable and only total capitulation of the 1975-9 variety or Bennism represent coherent alternatives. The choice between these options will increase dramatically the tensions in both the base and the leadership of the trade unions and Labour Party.
The combination of a right wing split and the emergence of a 'new left' is a major destabilising element inside the Labour Party. For the first time in several decades the mass of the working class can see a clear 'left' alternative to the traditional policies of recent Labour governments. The importance of this fact cannot be overstated. For the working class movement within the framework of the bourgeois democratic state, the Labour party is the decisive element in politics. Whether a question is discussed inside the party determines for hundreds of thousands of workers whether it is one of legitimate or of 'fringe' politics.
The combination of the objective decline of British imperialism with the crisis in the Labour Party has the potential enormously to speed up the process of politicisation inside the working class. It is in fact the precondition for building a mass revolutionary party in Britain. As Trotsky said, when you talk about a revolution any figure of less than ten million people is of no significance. Once you begin to talk about a politicisation of the masses then only a differentiation in the Labour Party is important. We are, as yet, nowhere near the type of crisis and differentiation which poses a mass revolutionary party. But it is, nonetheless, developments in the Labour Party and, in particular, the emergence of Bennism, which will dominate working class politics in Britain in the 1980s.
This can be clearly seen by comparing the present situation to the 1970-74 struggle against the Heath Government. The political situation then was overwhelmingly dominated by open mass trade union action: the strikes against the Industrial Relations Act, the 1972 miners' strike, the freeing of the Pentonville Five, the second miners' strike of 1974. Developments in the Labour Party had some influence but not a guiding one; the development of a new Bennite left had begun but was still relatively limited as an active factor in politics.
Today the situation is quite transformed. It is not that the mass struggle has disappeared — it is on a lower level than in 1970-74 but the working class has suffered no qualitative defeat; it is, however, today combined with the most general effects of the political crisis and in particular with the developments in the Labour Party. We have seen and will see not only big economic strikes like the steelworkers but also struggles against militarism, women's oppression and racism, confrontations over labour movement democracy and a continuing deep crisis in the north of Ireland with all these issues increasingly penetrating the political and policy discussions of the Labour Party.
Proportional Representation
The most dramatic development in the 1980s will occur at the political level. Some of the crucial elements of this have already been discussed; others include a developing crisis in relation to the EEC. These elements, however, will not simply accumulate individually in the quantitative manner. At some point they will combine with the deepening economic and social crisis and the potential for mass explosions in the working class to produce a qualitative shift in the alignment of British politics.
The most likely occasion for such a shift will be the introduction of an electoral system based on some form of proportional representation (PR). It might seem surprising to argue that what seems a technical question could bring about decisive political changes but in fact extremely substantial issues are involved in electoral reform. The entire present form of British bourgeois politics is historically based on the premise that two stable parties, both defending the fundamental interests of the ruling class, can assume office and form firm governments. All the details of the political system — the 'non-political' head of state, civil service and state bureaucracy; the avoidance of coalitions outside wartime; the unitary state structure; the survival of the House of Lords; the absence of a strong dominant military/police caste — are based on this one premise.
In the period prior to the twentieth century, stability was ensured through an alternation in government between two parties of the bourgeoisie. In this century, the British ruling class has found itself in the fortunate position of having a labour bureaucracy so tame and under control that it could be permitted to govern alone; in most other major countries, the bourgeoisie have considered their labour bureaucrats insufficiently reliable and firm in their grip on the working class to assume office except in coalition with a capitalist party.
The various Labour governments from 1923 to 1979 served the capitalists well; and when problems arose or other considerations came to the fore, Labour could be alternated with the Tories. In either case strong and stable administrations governed with little need of coalitions, national governments outside wartime, Popular Fronts, the development of strong forces to the right of the Tory Party or similar dangerous experiments.
The trouble with the present situation is that both potential governing parties, for different reasons, are showing strong tendencies to instability; the Tory base threatens to become socially too narrow to face a major working class upsurge while Labour might create dangerously high and potentially uncontrollable expectations among its supporters if allowed into office by itself. The old party alternation is becoming increasingly difficult, even dangerous, for the ruling class. They need to mobilise broader and more powerful bourgeois alliances than those offered by the leaderships of single parties.
The answer is not, as some people including Tom Nairn have suggested, a national government. In the first place this would only be a temporary solution — no bourgeoisie in history has ever created a semi-permanent coalition of all major parties. Secondly, the probable effect of forming a national government with an undefeated working class would be a dangerous radicalisation within the Labour Party and a general politicisation in the working class tending towards a break with all the established parties. The only peacetime national government which has existed, in 1929-31, could only be risked because the working class had suffered a crushing defeat five years previously (and this was, in any case, less of a real national government than a Conservative one with a rump Labour leadership split).
Very different, however, is a change in the electoral system to introduce proportional representation — which means in reality a move to a system of permanent, but shifting, coalition governments. This, in the medium term, offers considerable points of leverage for the ruling class.
Firstly, it would provide the best chance, within a bourgeois democratic framework, of preventing the Labour Party governing alone. The proportion of working class votes cast for a party of the working class in Britain is one of the lowest in any major European country. The Labour Party has never in its history received 50 per cent of the vote in an election. Unless there was a gigantic bourgeois crisis or the Labour Party adopted a clear socialist perspective and managed to mobilise the mass of the working class around it with the prospect of real gains, PR would offer the bourgeoisie a virtual guarantee that Labour could enter office only in coalition.
It also offers the best means, following a split, to recreate a clear and strong right wing inside the Labour Party. PR would force Labour to choose one of only two possible strategies. Either to orient openly to the left attempting to win a majority and govern in opposition to all bourgeois forces — a policy full of risks for the bureaucracy because it would unleash major struggles and one which they will therefore attempt to avoid at all possible costs. Or to seek an alliance with a party of the bourgeoisie — which, of course, means adopting as the price a pro-capitalist orientation. Around the 'need' for coalitions of this kind, imposed by PR, the capitalist class can exert huge pressure to crystalise a new right wing in the Labour Party and shift the centre of gravity of the bureaucracy as a whole rightwards.
Finally, a system of PR is an absolute necessity if the effects of splits in the Labour Party are to be maintained. The present 'first past the post' electoral system is not merely biased against third parties in general but would, in particular, electorally annihilate a 'Social Democratic' party with no base in the unions once the initial interest dies out.
There are, of course, considerable problems for the ruling class in the introduction of PR. In the first place, it would splinter the Tory bloc far more than Labour's; the Liberals, SNP, Welsh nationalists, and Social Democrats would gain. It will be violently opposed by the old party apparatus of the Conservative Party. Secondly, the whole system of permanent coalitions would far more directly and clearly implicate the monarchy in politics and create quite new strains in the state apparatus. In short, the introduction of proportional representation is not something which the ruling class will embark on lightly; it is, rather, something into which it is being forced by the decline and crisis of British imperialism and the party system it created.
The Tasks of Revolutionaries
The developments we have discussed above pose big opportunities and a big challenge to revolutionaries. It would be nice if one could say that inevitably the working class will thwart all plans of the ruling class and scatter its offensive like chaff in the wind. Reality, however, is very different. To defeat all the bourgeois attacks, the working class would require a revolutionary leadership, organisation and consciousness and, indeed, a mass revolutionary party.
The major crises and struggles which lie ahead will undoubtedly create opportunities to build a revolutionary organisation and implant it in the working class; there is no objective reason why some tens of thousands of workers, with influence in action over hundreds of thousands of others, can not be won to such an organisation in the course of the next decade. But these figures, very large as they are compared to present-day revolutionary groups, do not represent a situation in which revolutionaries will lead the mass of the working class. To take power in a country like Britain would require a party of hundreds of thousands leading perhaps some twenty million people. It is infantile to imagine that this kind of party can be built during the 1980s. And without these kind of forces, revolutionaries will not determine in its most basic aspects the course of national politics.
We must assume, therefore, that under continued reformist leadership, the working class will despite massive struggles suffer defeats and that the ruling class will succeed in important aspects of its strategies. The task of revolutionaries will be to intervene and build a powerful organisation in a reality in which they are a growing force but not at all the dominant one. What, then are the changes for which they must prepare?
The underlying trend will be for the strongest and most decisive sections of both classes to come to the fore. Already in Thatcher, and even in the Callaghan Government, the scale of attacks mounted by the bourgeoisie would have seemed impossible ten or fifteen years ago. If someone had said in 1966 that there would today be three million unemployed in Britain, that governments would attempt to lower living standards by ten per cent in a year — as the last Labour Government did — that the National Health Service would be faced with reduction to a charity level, that the whole post-war social expenditure would be under threat, that we would be in the midst of an arms drive hugely exceeding that of the frostiest years of the Cold War, that brutal military dictatorship and mass torture would cover virtually the entire continent in Latin America, and most of the colonial world, with the increasingly open support of the 'democratic' imperialist government of the United States of America, all this would have sounded like a bad dream. Indeed, even sections of the ruling class would have been honestly indignant.
But this is the reality of the present attacks mounted by the capitalist class and it is going to get far worse during the 1980s. By the end of the decade there will probably be a minimum of five million unemployed — with important effects on trade union membership and strength, a twenty per cent drop in living standards, drastic declines in health care and democratic rights, and unprecedented regimes of dictatorship possibly again spreading into certain parts of Europe. These are not fantasies but the realistic prospects of the class struggle in the 1980s of which the bourgeoisie is quite conscious and for which it is preparing. More and more decisive, forceful and right wing sections of the ruling class will come to the fore. This will be a decade of their hard liners rather than their 'wets'.
This has important consequences for the working class. Politics is not a question of numbers of passive votes but of strength. It is regrettable but true that in a capitalist society the millions of pensioners are far less powerful and decisive in the class struggle than the quarter of a million coal miners. The entire weight of all the teachers, social workers, university lecturers and students combined does not amount to anything like that of any single significant industrial union. What is more, intermediate layers will be increasingly confronted and disorientated as the easiest victims of ruling class attacks.
Inside the working class the leading role will, therefore, also increasingly pass into the hands of the strongest and most decisive sections. This means, above all, workers in industry and in the industrial unions. These are the layers in which revolutionaries must be decisively implanted and have the majority of their members if they are to be involved in the key struggles of the 1980s which will decide both the class relation of forces and the outcome of the struggle in the Labour Party.
In particular it will be among young workers that revolutionaries will find the most receptive audience for their ideas. It is often forgotten just how young are the people who make revolutions. The average age of the Bolshevik Party was around 23, of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua 24, and of the mass German Communist Party also in the early 20s.
A turn to building a party among industrial workers is, however, not nearly sufficient on its own. The 1980s will, as we have noted, be a decade of increasing social dislocation and political crisis; it will see increasing struggles against attempts to reinforce every kind of oppression and this defines the type of party which has to be built: one rooted and with the majority of its members inside the industrial working class and simultaneously capable of taking up every issue of the class struggle.
It is important to note that this is not simply a question of programme and demands but also one of organisation. The oppressed cannot struggle unless they are organised and the labour movement too will have to extend and transform its organisations to take up the new political issues it needs to confront in the 1980s. Organisations like the women's movement, black and asian groups, and united front campaigns can not be relegated to a back seat in relation to wage demands, the fight against unemployment and propaganda for the nationalisation of industry.
The relative importance of any one particular issue in the class struggle, of course, changes at different times. The movement against racism and fascism relaunched struggle under the Callaghan Government, to be followed by the 'winter of discontent' on wage questions. Today it is the fight against unemployment and militarism which has come to the fore. In the future, the dominant issues might be new wars, new attacks on women's rights, a massive wage explosion, or a new upturn in the fight against racism or in the Irish struggle. We can not tell from first principles, but only by looking at concrete situations, which will be most significant. But what is definitively not the case is that struggle against all the different forms of oppression will disappear to be replaced by simple 'bash the Tories' economic and trade union issues.
The forms of organisation of the oppressed and of struggle on international questions will, of course, change. These issues have increasingly penetrated the unions and the Labour Party and have led to the formation of specific organisations there; this trend will increase enormously. Building movements and struggles of the oppressed, building specific united front campaigns, increasingly building these inside the labour movement; this is not a secondary but a fundamental element of any revolutionary strategy in Britain. They are part of the key goal of creating a class-struggle left wing in the labour movement.
Just as the power of British imperialism shaped the features of every class in society and its political parties, so too it shaped the Marxist tradition in Britain. Whereas under the impact of the Russian revolution mass Communist Parties were built in France, Italy, Germany and elsewhere, in Britain only a tiny revolutionary organisation of a few thousands was created. No mass revolutionary tradition or organisation has existed in Britain since the decline of Chartism.
Furthermore the small Marxist movement which has existed in Britain since that time has been dogged by two contradictory but mutually reinforcing traditions. The majority tradition has coupled a right wing opportunism and economism in politics with sectarianism in organisation, the former has stemmed from accommodation to imperialism and its labour bureaucracy, the latter from the dialectic noted by Marx whereby a low level of class struggle always produces a high level of sectarianism. The minority tradition has consisted of a revolutionary political current which is socially marginal and incapable of building a serious revolutionary organisation. These mutually negatively reinforcing traditions have only been even partially overcome at times of heightened struggle: in 1889 with Eleanor Marx and the upsurge in unionisation; in Ireland — then part of the British state — with James Connolly in the decade and a half to 1916; with John Maclean in Scotland; in a more distorted form with Sylvia Pankhurst. For all their particular individual limitations, each began to unite serious revolutionary internationalist politics with a real base in the working class.
The early British Communist Party, arising out of the deep international crisis of the First World War, represented the most advanced development of this process. This development occurred at a time of deep crisis in Britain. The politics of the early Communist Party represented a major advance on anything that had previously existed in Britain. The most important of its policies including: the struggle for Soviet power, participation in elections, a fight for affiliation to the Labour Party, anti-imperialist foreign policy, and a systematic united front orientation inside the unions like the Minority Movement and the National Left Wing Movement.
It learnt many of these crucial political ideas from its involvement in the international communist movement, and the lessons of the most advanced experiences of the class struggle internationally. The American Trotskyist, James P Cannon quoted in one of his books a famous bandit, Willie Sutton, who was once asked by a reporter why he specialised exclusively in robbing banks. His reply was 'because that is where the money is'.
The point is obvious. For nearly a century and a half, Britain has had the lowest level of political class struggle of any major European country. To believe that out of this experience will come the most adequate and advanced revolutionary ideas is to turn historical materialism on its head — although the number of people 'reconstructing' the world workers' movement from London unfortunately shows that this elementary point is not yet fully appreciated. Revolutionaries have to start with international experiences and above all the experiences of working classes which have actually made revolutions.
In Britain more perhaps than anywhere else, the creation of a national revolutionary organisation cannot be separated from the building of an international organisation. It is not revolutionary-internationalist Marxism but British exceptionalism and [illegible] as it has existed for over a century which is foredoomed by what will develop in the 1980s.
Conclusion
What, in sum, do the political processes we have outlined amount to? They add up to the most radical change in British politics since the rise of British imperialism and the extinction of the mass revolutionary tradition in the working class. After 130 years British politics will once again take up the political traditions its bourgeoisie and labour bureaucracy thought had disappeared forever. This will be no rapid overnight development although there will be particular points when things change quickly. Nonetheless, the whole process is as inevitably built into the decline of British imperialism as the present political situation is a result of its rise.
But these transformations will create a crisis of every single institution and tradition rooted in Britain's imperialist past — the Tory Party, the British state, the Labour Party, and the dominant tradition of Marxism. This crisis will present enormous objective opportunities but it will have no automatic positive outcome. On the contrary the disaster of the forces attempting to be revolutionary in a country such as Italy, or Portugal in 1975, shows that simply left to its own impact a deep crisis produces disorientation and not solutions. The labour movement in Britain in the 1980s will be faced with problems it has not experienced for decades. How far it succeeds in meeting the types of challenges we have outlined will determine not only the nature of British politics in the 1980s but more important the final outcome of the political crisis these years will inaugurate.
A second article analysing the historical development and traditions of Marxism in Britain will appear in a future issue of this journal.