No aspect of the current political crisis has received more attention than the crisis in the Labour Party. The victories of the Labour left in the internal struggle and the subsequent formation of the Council for Social Democracy have forced all currents on the left of the workers' movement to re-examine their attitude to the Labour Party. Below ALAN FREEMAN polemicises against the view of the Socialist Workers Party that the struggle in the Labour Party is diversionary.
Ever since the Labour Party was a glint in the TUC's eye British socialists have split over what to do about it. A year after the Labour Representation Committee was formed in 1906, the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) walked out because the new body 'did not adopt a class struggle programme' while the Independent Labour Party (ILP) — which seven years before had voted to fuse with the SDF — took over its leadership.
Twenty years later Lenin had to bang together the heads of four jarring sects to form a united Communist Party, when three years of wrangling about parliament and the Labour Party had kept them disastrously apart. History repeated itself as farce a generation later when the British Trotskyists split over entry into the Labour Party — even though every modern group can trace its origin to someone, somewhere, who was in the Labour Party in the 1950s.
In the 1960s the Labour Party's falling membership and isolation from new movements opened old wounds and the left split once more on the issue. It is as if for eighty years the Labour Party's most secret weapon has been its ability to fragment the far left.
Today the largest revolutionary organisation to stay apart from the Labour Party is the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which has in the past months published two major statements on the Labour Party. The first, by Chris Harman, in the February Socialist Review, discusses the Wembley conference. The second is by Paul Foot in Socialist Worker on 7 February.
Both articles register a new recognition that what is happening is important. Foot writes that socialists cannot 'dismiss the changes in the Labour Party with the sectarian sneering to which we were accustomed ten years ago.' But both say that the struggle in the Labour Party is diversionary: that socialists should not get mixed up in it. Foot says that the party can be pushed into actions that benefit working people, but from the outside, by an 'SWP-type organisation'. He sums up his case with some homespun philosophy: 'If you want to push a wheelbarrow, don't sit on it.' Not such good advice if the barrow is on a steep hill.
Comrade Harman puts a similar but more detailed case. He talks of 'another Scarborough', referring to the 1960 conference decision for unilateral disarmament. This was reversed after Gaitskell's furious 'fight, fight and fight again' campaign, and forgotten in a blaze of unity when Wilson took the reins. The next conference, he says, will see the end of all the fuss. It is true, he says, that the constituency ranks are swelling again, with young and radical people. But the new footsoldiers (or Bennsoldiers as the case may be) are middle class, university educated, and have no organic links with workers.
The internal fight in the Labour Party, Foot says, won't solve our real problem — the fact that there is no fightback against the Tories: 'In 1970-74 ... the political leftward movement was matched by a huge groundswell of strikes and sit-ins, and of every other form of rank and file industrial action, which changed the Tory monetarist policies in midstream and then pushed the Tories out altogether. Today the leftward movement has no such industrial balance. Indeed it is accompanied by a lack of confidence and a passivity in the workforce such as hasn't been seen for forty years and more.'
It is welcome to see the SWP discussing the Labour Party in a different light. But its wrong positions still weaken both the working class and the cause of socialism. A discussion of them is overdue. The SWP make three points on which every revolutionary can agree. First, any fight in Britain today will be settled not by the resolutions passed but by the actions taken. Second, the Labour Party's leaders — even the left wing — have no intention of launching or organising a serious fight against the establishment, in or out of government, if they can avoid it. Third, the best guarantee of success for the working class in everything it does is to build a strong independent combat organisation dedicated to a fight without compromise for workers' power.
But our agreement ends here. It is perfectly possible, as both Lenin and Trotsky always argued, both to build a strong independent organisation and to fight tooth and nail inside the Labour Party.
Indeed the Third International proposed precisely this to the British Communists and voted by 58 to 24 to declare itself:
'In favour of the Communist Party, and the groups and organisations sympathising with Communism in England, joining the Labour Party, although this party is a member of the Second International. The reason for this is that so long as this party will allow all constituent organisations their present freedom of criticism and freedom of propaganda, and organisational activity in favour of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the power of soviets, so long as this party preserves its character as an alliance of all the trade union organisations of the working class, the Communists ought to take all measures, and even consent to certain compromises, in order to be able to exercise an influence over the wider circles of workers and the masses, to denounce their opportunist leaders from a higher platform visible to the masses, to accelerate the transfer of political power from the direct representatives of the bourgeoisie to the "labour lieutenants of capital" so that the masses may be more rapidly cured of all illusions on this subject.'
All the conditions outlined in this resolution hold true today, and it is not only possible but necessary to take part in the internal fight in the Labour Party. Furthermore, contrary to Harman and Foot's views, this internal struggle does affect the struggle in the unions and at the base of the working class generally.
The negative side of this is perfectly plain. How else can one explain the downturn of 1975? Workers didn't suddenly develop weak knees. They fell to a tremendous ideological assault from the Labour Party leadership, transmitted by their own union leaders to the rank and file, over the heads of the stewards.
Because no one in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) took a stand against Wilson and Callaghan, the union leaders could claim that there was no alternative except the Tories, and that blind militancy would only bring on a crisis that would defeat the government.
But the positive effects of Labour Party struggles also have to be understood. Harman's analysis of Scarborough only tells half the story. Gaitskell turned the tide on unilateralism — but he was defeated on his attempt to scrap Clause Four. Although Wilson papered over the cracks, the net result was to reinforce trade union control in the party.
Of course, as long as this was dispensed by bureaucrats without reference to their members, trade union control in the party was harmless. But a fuse had been lit under the Party, and the bomb went off with the attempt to push through the anti-union 'In Place of Strife' proposals.
The Communist Party and the Cousins-Scanlon-Jones wing of the TUC, given their head by the left in the Parliamentary Labour Party, built a mass rank and file movement which wrecked the Bill and the government. The Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions was a child of Scarborough — but as far as Harman is concerned it might as well have come with the stork. He can explain it no better than the downturn of 1975.
The same blindness is shown by Harman and Foot in relation to today's struggles. A furious fight is going on in the Labour Party. Does this fight have no impact on workers' struggles? Within two weeks of Paul Foot's declaration that there is no industrial movement that 'can change Tory policies in midstream and then push the Tories out altogether', John Biffen came on television to explain that the miners had forced a complete policy reversal on the government, and that 'the only beneficiaries of a strike would have been the far left'. Who was overestimating whom?
It is not even true that the Labour left has no orientation to the mass struggle. They don't like it but they do it. The Labour Party has led, and partly organised, massive demonstrations against unemployment. On these marches have been considerable numbers, not just of trade unionists mobilised through their factories, but of Labour Party contingents mobilised through the party. At Glasgow probably a quarter of the march was made up of organised Labour Party contingents. A strategy of partial mobilisations to pressure for change is well within the scope of left social democracy. Benn and his followers both advocate it and practise it. Left wingers like Hain advocate changing the Labour Party into a 'mass campaigning party'. They don't do enough of it, and they do it for the wrong ends — but they do it.
Indeed, because the SWP concentrates all its fire on the Labour lefts' lack of action, paradoxically it finds itself unable to offer effective criticism of left social democrats who do engage in action from time to time — or of their co-thinkers, the Communist Party.
However, even if the Labour left were completely passive — and we would be the last to claim they have a shining record — their fight in the Labour Party would still affect the shop floor struggle. The root of the SWP's failure to grapple with this becomes clear in Paul Foot's discussion of what motivates workers to struggle. Real Labour voters, he says, aren't concerned with problems like what the government is doing:
'For Labour politics cannot ever be separated from the way in which real Labour voters think and feel. And the way in which they think and feel is, in turn, related to their own confidence in themselves. If they feel that they cannot be pushed around by their employer or their landlord or the council or by social security officialdom, then they will feel more radical, demand more change.'
But if the only thing affecting self-confidence is their relations with the landlord or the boss, why do they bother to vote? They don't have split personalities. They don't vote Labour at five o'clock, and then forget it and fight the landlord at six. They cling to the strange belief that if they can get a council or government that supports them, they might do better against the landlord.
They also see election results, in exactly the same way as the outcome of left-right struggles in the unions, as a barometer of other workers' feelings.
You don't take a decision to strike just on the basis of how angry you feel. You weigh up the odds, you judge the support you think you can get, and one of the ways you judge it is to look at the quality of leaders your fellow workers have thrown up. The same applies to the internal struggles of a mass workers' party.
As long as workers are still trying to get what they can out of Labour governments, it matters to them who in the Labour Party is going to form the government, what policies they have, and what chance there is of controlling them. When the miners saw Callaghan knocked off his perch they didn't think everything was solved. But they did think that if this could be done when Labour was out of office there was at least a half-chance of doing the same next time Labour is in office. And half a chance is better than none. It makes it just that little bit more worth struggling and worth striking. To deny the connection is to deny common sense.
Now Paul Foot knows, and we know, and in fact many Labour voters know, that putting Labour in office won't produce very good governments. But until we've built a mass party able to produce an alternative government, voting Labour is the only practical option open to millions of people, and the only pragmatic way they can register how they think the country should be run. It does help defeat the landlords and bosses if you can make the government support you. And one of the reasons we say vote Labour is because Labour, being based on the unions, can be forced to support and mobilise workers in limited ways and at certain times.
The point is that you have to do it by means of mass action instead of resolution-passing. And you have to make sure that when you have pushed up against the limits of what can be wrung from the Labour Party, you have built an organisation that can take over the leadership from it. But workers come to understand these limits only by exploring them, by pushing Labour as far as it will go. We should be pushing with them.
What Paul Foot has failed to register is the fact that working class self-confidence is collective. The deeper the crisis, the more this confidence comes to depend on national and international factors. What is happening now is that the ruling class keeps making a national issue out of every local struggle. The stakes are so high that to enter a national struggle, capable of wrecking the economy, without doing everything you can to get the next government on your side, doesn't make sense to the 'real Labour voters'.
The fight in the Labour Party affects local struggle precisely because workers don't just think about their landlords. They are in fact a lot more political than Foot is prepared to admit in what is a rather patronising article.
Are we saying that British politics is now back to 1972, and we can confidently wait for the final big push against the Tories? Not at all. On the contrary, the face of British politics has changed utterly. The SWP's problem is that it hasn't caught up with the changes. It has forgotten one of the first rules of Marxism — that if you want to know what's going on in society, you have to look at what is happening in all classes and all parts of it.
It is true that the level of working class struggle has gone down. But this doesn't mean the ruling class has things sewn up, and it doesn't mean we're in for a prolonged period of working class passivity. John Biffen's speech, and the subsequent turmoil among the Tories, shows that the ruling class is very threatened.
Its weaknesses are not just the result of British workers' struggles, but also the lack of international competitiveness, and the depth of the world economic crisis. The result is a game for very high stakes. The lack of motion is not because the vital nerves of workers' resistance have been eaten away, but because the two great classes are locked in an Indian wrestle, neither side wanting to move an inch for fear of giving the advantage to the other, each manoeuvring for position to ensure the other side can't bring new muscles into play.
This is why it is so important to understand what Bennism is really about. Superficially, it looks very like Bevanism, which Harman deflates very effectively in his piece.
Benn's policies are very much a souped-up version of Labour's old 1945 programme. They are based on Keynesian demand management of a mixed economy, restoring the welfare state, with the added extra of some feeble government attempts to control investment and a useless and reactionary commitment to import controls. Rather than fighting for workers' control, they propose to use the old state machine to control the economy and seek a power-sharing compromise with the owners and management.
But there's a crucial difference between Bennism and Bevanism — the time and place. Indeed, this was already obvious by 1974. It showed in the incredible and vitriolic hostility of the establishment to Benn and his policies. That was why throughout 1974, until Benn was removed from the Department of Trade and Industry, the Confederation of British Industry, the Treasury and whole sections of the Civil Service waged a furious campaign against 'Bennery'.
Adrian Ham, Healey's secretary, confirms that there was a 'Whitehall-wide conspiracy to stop Benn doing anything', including permanent secretaries, government ministers, and whole Civil Service departments. Benn generates unmitigated hysteria among the press and establishments alike. The New Statesman of 21 February reliably reports that before his death, Airey Neave seriously plotted with security forces the possibility of eliminating Benn using physical force if Labour won the election.
[illegible] the sterling crisis of 1976 a secret International Monetary Fund (IMF) delegation booked into Brookes hotel under assumed names to negotiate terms with the Labour cabinet, and Healey even cancelled his holiday in the Bahamas to return to the battle against trade union sabotage of the pound. Two years later a senior American negotiator wrote of this period:
'We all had the feeling it would come apart in a serious way. As I saw it, it was a choice between Britain remaining in the liberal financial system of the West as opposed to a radical change of course, because we were concerned about Tony Benn precipitating a policy decision by Britain to turn its back on the IMF. I think that if that had happened the whole system would have begun to come apart. God knows what Italy might have done; then France might have taken a radical change in the same direction. It would not only have had consequences for the economic recovery, it would have had great political consequences. So we tended to see it in cosmic terms.' (Sunday Times 21 May 1978, quoted in A. Glyn and J. Harrison, The British Economic Disaster, Pluto Press 1980.)
Why does Benn excite so much more violent reactions than Bevan ever did? Bevanism was at its strongest when the British economy was still warming itself on the embers of the dying Empire, and when the world economy was still expanding. Bevan's demands could be fought for by asking for concessions from the state — by electoral means. We are in the worst depression since the Thirties. The Empire has gone. Britain's relative competitiveness is so bad that the depression has affected it worse than any other country in the industrialised world.
In this situation even a mild programme of reform like Benn's is quite unacceptable to the ruling class, and he has been forced to break from the consensus that has governed British politics since 1945. Quite apart from what his policies would do to ruling class profits, they could arouse expectations in a still-undefeated working class that cannot be satisfied — and this whatever Benn's personal intentions.
If in 1976 government expenditure had gone on up, in the middle of a recession, there would have been a tremendous inflationary crisis and a collapse of confidence in sterling. Capital would have flooded out of the country, which workers would correctly have seen as open sabotage. Parliamentary methods could not possibly have controlled the flow, and indeed the Civil Service — which manipulated and planned the sterling crisis of 1976 — would have refused point-blank to co-operate in government policies.
The ruling class faced the risk that workers would forget any niceties about tripartite representation and partnership, and simply take over the factories en masse — just as they did in Chile. A similar crisis would be provoked by the foreign policy measures of the left's programme. Breaking the EEC connection and breaking with NATO's nuclear policy would mean breaking off the whole pattern of trading and state relations on which British overseas investment is now based. This would provoke a crisis of sterling and a collapse of investment confidence.
Worse still it would mean a complete break with the American 'special relationship' and open a period of intense economic and political hostility towards Britain in world markets. In either case the special role of the City, and of British multinationals and overseas investors, would be turned upside down. A tremendous political and economic crisis would ensue.
In no way does this imply that the Labour Party could produce a solution to the crisis it provoked. On the contrary, Benn steadfastly rejects the only reliable solution to this crisis — a working class takeover. As a matter of fact this is in many ways a much more serious problem about Labour than its lack of activity although the two are related. But the important consequence is that the ruling class is prepared to use any means necessary to stop a government coming to office on Benn's programme.
[illegible] parliamentary democracy are being ripped away. British democracy is actually one of the least democratic parliamentary regimes in the world. It is the only one with an unelected second chamber; the Prime Minister is chosen by the monarch and in turn chooses the entire cabinet, many members of which come from outside the Commons altogether; the Prime Minister has the right to sack parliament when it disagrees with her/him; and the two-party system excludes minorities from parliament and forces them to line up with one of the major party blocs.
Of course, all the more common frauds of parliamentary democracy are also perpetrated on the electorate. Real power lies in an unelected Civil Service; the electorate has no right of recall; the parliamentary parties function with complete autonomy as 'parties within a party'; the parties can resort to indefinite coalitions to avoid facing elections, and so on.
It is not unimportant for British socialism when this is challenged by Benn! The fact that his own project is a utopian reconstruction of early nineteenth century parliamentary democracy doesn't change the fact that millions of workers are finding out just who really runs their lives through the revelations of this struggle. Will it really have zero effect on their ideas of 'real Labour voters' about how to fight for socialism when they discover that Labour governments are not chosen by them at all but by tiny cliques of conspirators at the head of their party, the Civil Service, and business? Won't it encourage them to believe that perhaps the only way their aims can be met is through struggle, rather than trust in MPs? Isn't this struggle doing a propaganda job for revolutionary socialism just as effectively as Paul Foot's most inspired journalism?
It is because they don't understand the new situation that both Harman and Foot fail to grasp the political potential for socialists of the relation between the Labour Party and the unions. Harman's reference to 1960 is doubly wrong. First, for the reasons he himself gives — the constituencies are now under the majority control of a youthful left while at Scarborough in 1960 they were controlled by the right.
This is no accident, nor is it the result of a mass influx of workers. It has happened because everyone in society with an interest in preserving state expenditure has found that they cannot do so by polite lobbying. The ground is therefore far more fertile for the growth of radical and struggle-oriented currents in the constituencies than in the 1960s, when new movements — both middle class and working class — tended to bypass constituency structures.
Of course, the electoral structure of the constituencies makes them very ill-suited to house these new currents, which is why there is such a ferment of discussion at the base of the party. The result, however, has not so far been a stifling of radical ideas in constituency and parliamentary politics, but on the contrary the beginnings of a serious questioning of the role and nature of the constituencies, with currents round figures like Peter Hain arguing for the party to change its function altogether into a mass campaigning party.
Such currents, far from cutting themselves off from the unions, can easily take the next logical step of understanding that the battle in the Labour Party must be taken into the unions.
But the second and equally important point is that in the unions themselves the situation has changed since 1960. Paul Foot writes: 'The issue at Blackpool and at Wembley, we have been told, is democracy. It is about the sharing of power. Yet the trade union leaders who have voted for all this power sharing are, when it comes to their own organisations, the most ruthless enemies of power sharing. Do Moss Evans or David Basnett or Clive Jenkins or Alan Fisher have to face an electoral college every year to confirm them as leaders? Is there a single official in any of these unions, save the general secretary once in his life, who is ever reselected, as they all propose Labour MPs should be?'
This is absolutely right — but the point is that these facts have not been lost on ordinary rank and file trades unionists! Frank Chapple's declaration for the Council for Social Democracy has provoked just as much of an outcry as his internal record. Clive Jenkins faced a roasting for his role in the council of inquiry. Do we make an issue of this or ignore it as a diversion? The struggle for democracy in the Labour Party is deepening not curtailing the left-right struggle in the unions, as well as the whole debate about accountability. It is breaking down the traditional division between trade unions and electoral politics. It is politicising the unions. And it is doing so because of the unions' connections with the party.
If we can explain to shop floor workers that Duffy and Chapple sell out struggles, back the Labour Party right wing or even the splitters, and act as Labour's Cold War Warriors for the same reason, then we can pursue the fight against them on two fronts instead of one. We can link up with workers who don't want Cruise Missiles but aren't sure about launching militant struggles in the middle of a recession, and explain the connection between the two by pointing to Duffy's dual role in the party and the unions.
Indeed, the ultimate argument against Harman and Foot is that we have no choice in the matter. The SWP might be able to absent itself from the Labour Party but millions of workers in the unions cannot. They built it. It is their party. Everyone who is affiliated to the party through a union confronts the discussion in the union about what positions to take in the Labour Party debates. Even in the non-affiliated unions there is now a growing debate on whether to affiliate.
If you don't have answers on these questions, if you don't take up the fight inside the Labour Party then you leave the field free not just to the Boyds, Chapples and Duffys of this world but also to the Evanses and Jenkinses. And this is basically what the SWP is doing.
The conditions are ripe for doing just what the Third International proposed: to combine building a strong organisation with taking vigorous part in the Labour Party, and indeed fighting to build, unite with, and lead its growing left wing. The way is open to link up the radical movement in the constituencies with the left in the unions in a combined movement against the Tories and the right wing leaders of both wings of the labour movement.
To socialists in the Labour Party we should say: 'We are with you in your fight against the Labour right wing. We are with you in your fight for a government that will scrap the missiles, get us out of the EEC, implement the thirty-five hour week and bump up public spending. We are with you in your fight to control your MPs, who will try to sell you out when in office, just as they always do. There is no contradiction between being in the Labour Party and joining with us except the barriers created by your own leaders with their witch-hunts, bans and proscriptions. In fact, our type of organisation will help you in all these struggles, because we can link up the fight in the party and in the unions, and because we will keep up the fight when your present leaders give in.
'But we also say that you won't get results by passing pious resolutions. You'll have to mobilise the combined strength of the Labour Party and the unions in mass action — both now and under a future Labour government — to get what you want. Therefore, don't leave the Labour Party — but don't accept it as it is. Use it as your leaders shrink from using it — to serve you by organising action against the bosses and landlords. Use the unions to control the party instead of treating it as an excuse for inaction.
'You'll find the most bitter opposition. You'll find that the whole tradition, structure and leadership of the Labour Party stands in your way. You'll find that the bureaucrats are ready to smash up this party rather than let it fall into your hands intact. But you'll win the support and unity of millions of voters and trades unionists who still follow the party. That, and not a handful of careerist MPs, is your real weapon in struggle.'
In this way, hundreds of thousands of trade union and constituency activists will not only win real advances and acquire the self-confidence to take on the bosses and win, but they will also find out what is wrong with the Labour Party. They will discover for themselves why a different kind of organisation is needed, why we want to group together committed revolutionaries to create the basis of such a new organisation now, and they will take the first steps towards building a real mass alternative to the present Labour Party.
But they will do so not in the interest of a sterile discussion with the SWP on whether or not to leave the Labour Party but in the context of the most important debates in Britain today: how can we all unite to get rid of the Tories, and how can that unity be used to fight for a government that will launch a genuinely radical attack on the bosses, and how can the growing number of revolutionaries ensure that the upshot of this struggle is a genuine workers' takeover?