Labour Weekly last month carried an open letter to Tony Benn from longstanding Labour left-winger Janey Buchan. She explained that she would not be supporting Benn for the deputy leadership of the party because 'Yours is not a campaign about [illegible]... Your campaign is about personalities.' Is this the case? Alan Freeman argues that in fact there is a real difference between the politics of Benn and those of the old Tribunite school.
What are Benn's politics? More than anyone else on the left, except possibly Stuart Holland, he is identified with the policies now known as the 'Alternative Economic Strategy'. But the AES is supported, in one form or another, by everyone from the TUC to Denis Healey. What's so special about Benn? The most telling difference is the importance he attaches to political democracy.
His leftward evolution began in 1968. He reacted to the French May events, to the Prague Spring, and to the failure of the Wilson government of the day — in which he was serving as Minister of Technology — with the argument that modern parliamentary democracy was inadequate. The danger, he said, 'is that it retains the arrogance of the benevolent despot and seeks to cloak the elected MP with something of the Divine Right once reserved for royal personages. At its worst, it still keeps the citizen at arm's length from the business of decision-making and bullies him into believing that the ballot box is the last word in participation. However attractive this idea may be, it won't do because it won't work any more. The game is up and we have to think the whole thing out again.'
He saw two root causes for alienation from parliament. The first was the breakdown in the post-war consensus of welfare state policies designed to bring about full employment, rising living standards and rising social benefits, which were accepted by both Labour and Tory politicians.
'The election of May 1979 marked a real watershed... forty years of experience of trying to pretend that welfare capitalism was possible, successful and permanent, and could melt away the conflict between Labour and Capital have proved it cannot be done.... as the consensus of earlier years, which obscured these issues from our eyes, has broken down, we can see that the class system is still there with most of its privileges unchanged — and in some sense reinforced.'
Tory governments were driven to make direct attacks on basic trade union rights, and Labour governments bowed to business interests and refrained from carrying out reforms. Thus working people and their families — the vast majority of voters — had no means of getting a government that carried out their wishes, and were consciously denied the right to control their 'elected rulers'.
The second problem was the rise of 'unaccountable centres of unacceptable power'. Not only were bodies such as the civil service, the House of Lords and other government institutions unelected and outside popular control; the economy was in practice controlled by faceless multinational corporations and bankers who used 'economic necessity' as an excuse for foisting anti-working class policies on elected governments. By 1980 Benn was openly proclaiming one of the best-kept secrets of government by consent: real power does not lie with the House of Commons. It lies with Whitehall, with a Prime Minister and cabinet who control the Commons and party, instead of being controlled by them, with the security and intelligence forces, with the 'new priesthood' in the media, and with the multinational barons.
He looked for a political strategy which would allow parliament to join hands with the people against these usurpers by responding to popular pressure from below. He sought ways in which he could bring political change without violent revolution:
'We shall never change society unless we start to do it ourselves by directly challenging the unaccountable power now exercised over us, exactly as our forefathers did by demanding the vote in the nineteenth century... This is not an appeal for violent revolution or even systematic and sustained civil disobedience. In Britain we don't need them, It is an appeal for a strategy of change from below to make the parliamentary system serve the people instead of serving the vanity of parliamentarians; an appeal for popular democracy.'
This had immediate consequences for his strategy for socialism. He argued that the power of the big corporations had to be met by the unions, which had to take on a new political role by fighting for power in the workplace:
'If we are going to talk about industrial policy let us start with the people. Let's forget about legislation for a moment and start talking about industrial democracy... democracy means that the people ultimately control their managers. Just that, no more and no less... this is not a particularly revolutionary doctrine in all conscience. No-one is suggesting — at least I am not — that you do it by throwing petrol bombs or starting a guerilla movement in Morecambe. You could just as easily do it by removing the obstacles to it by legislation.'
This led him to the ideas in Labour's famous 1973 Green Paper on Industrial Strategy. This called for a state holding company — the National Enterprise Board — which would also be the agency for tripartite planning agreements, which would make private industry accountable to the public and to social needs by using carrot and stick to force them into discussions and agreement, about their corporate strategy, with unions and government.
This fell well short of full nationalisation, and many have argued that this puts him to the right of the Tribunites, with their traditional policy of full state nationalisation. But it has to be realised, first of all that nationalisation for the Tribunites was used in a way that was far from socialist, and secondly that Benn sees these agreements as a way of gradually transferring power to workers by democratising industry from below. It is part of his strategy for socialism.
In order to deal with the fundamental problem of the economy — investment — Benn advocated that government, management and unions should exercise joint control over what had been the shareholder's sole prerogative: where to put capital and how to use it.
'Investors there will always be, but there is no valid reason why the investors' money should give them first claim to control, before those who invest their lives. Political democracy wrested the control of parliament from those who owned the lands and the factories, and industrial democracy is a logical and necessary development of it.'
Unions should not just bargain over wages, but over their right to a say in such matters, In other words, for Benn the AES is a strategy for transition to socialism by the gradual and peaceful conquest of control of industry by the unions, as part and parcel of the struggle for democracy in society at large.
An immediate practical consequence of this approach was seen in 1970-74. Unlike nearly all other Labour politicians, Benn championed and gave legitimacy to the wave of working class struggles which broke out against Heath. He was widely criticised in the Labour Party for backing the illegal UCS work-in, where he marched arm-in-arm with communist shop stewards on the Glasgow support demonstration. He wrote in the Daily Mirror in support of the five dockers who were sent to jail for their defiance of Heath's Industrial Relations Legislation in 1972, saying that:
'According to the Prime Minister, Britain has been taken to the brink of anarchy because five dockers disobeyed the law. If that was true the situation would be serious. But it is not true. No five men could undermine our country. What has really frightened the cabinet is that millions of people who did not break the law expressed their sympathy and support for the dockers. One of them was me.'
Where others kept a worried distance from the upsurge of industrial discontent that swept the country, he welcomed it:
'A great new movement for reform is building up — peaceful but determined and coming from below ... and the leaders of it are tough and self-confident and irreverent. Top people despise the public. No wonder the public despise them ... The so-called credibility problem is not that people don't trust individual politicians. It means they are learning from the shipworkers and the students and the miners and the women, the railwaymen and dockers that if you want to get things changed you've got to do something about it yourself. This is a rebirth of our national self-confidence.'
These actions made him a very new kind of figure in the Labour Party's post-war history: a parliamentarian with an active relation to the unions. This should be compared, for example, with Bevan's run-in with the dockers in the late 1940s when, as a government minister, he confronted angry dockers protesting against the government's attempts to use wartime legislation to break their strike. He responded to violent heckling from a particularly angry docker with the memorable words, 'I will not... reimpose charges for National Health prescriptions'. The heckles turned to cheers, but Bevan had neatly turned his back on the problem that Benn confronted squarely in 1972: what attitude should a Labour parliamentarian take to trade union action — above all action that brings the unions into conflict with state and government?
Benn came out in favour of trade union and popular action, even to the point of a clash with the law and state; he developed around this a strategy aiming to involve the unions in a permanent, new, political role in the running of the country.
Yet he sought to limit popular action in decisive ways. He argued for the 'sovereignty of the people over parliament', but never satisfactorily showed how this could be asserted. Workers whose rights were trampled on by governments who behaved like 'elected despots' could only change things by elections or moral pressure. They could not dictate, coerce, or overthrow an elected government because it would subvert parliamentary democracy — in spite of the fact that the establishment did not hesitate to bend parliament to their will by every extraparliamentary device available. His vision of change relied on changing the way MPs themselves worked so they would respond to pressure:
'Historically, when democratic pressures from below were strong enough, the system worked just because the people on top accepted them .... Democratic change starts with a struggle at the bottom and ends with a peaceful parliamentary victory at the top. That is what I want to call popular democracy.'
But what should be done when parliament refused to accept popular pressure, and took its line from the civil service, the security forces, or the CBI and IMF? What if parliament was a tool of the state and not the people? Benn confronted this possibility under Heath. He argued that Heath was using the Law and Order issue to 'get us to accept the idea that all laws made by the State must be blindly obeyed'. But here also he wanted to resist without going too far. He argued for passive resistance to unjust laws, aimed at raising enough moral pressure to prevent them being imposed. 'In our democracy no man should tell another man to break the law, nor should any man break the law to bypass parliament', he said in a Shadow Cabinet paper on Law and Order, 'But a person who is punished for breaking an unjust law may, if he is sincere and his cause wins public sympathy, create a public demand to have that unjust law changed through parliament.'
But in spite of these self-imposed limitations, Benn was still the main, if not the only figure of the seventies who argued that the people themselves must challenge, in some way, the unaccountable power of the state.
In what tradition is this philosophy? Benn himself claims descent from a unique, British school of socialism: 'This (democratic socialism) is very much a home-grown British product which has been slowly fashioned over the centuries. Its roots are deep in our history and have been nourished by the Bible, the teachings of Christ, the Peasants Revolt, the Levellers, Tom Paine, the Chartists, Robert Owen, the Webbs, and Bernard Shaw who were Fabians, Liberals, and radicals, and occasionally by Marxists.'
This is an impressive policy committee. But there are some notable absences: for example, James Connolly, John Maclean, Eleanor Marx, Sylvia Pankhurst, and the revolutionary syndicalist Tom Mann — all of whom spanned one of the most turbulent half-centuries of the struggle for democracy at the very birth agony of the modern political movement of the working class in the British Isles. Benn here expresses three of his basic assumptions about the tradition he is reclaiming: that it is uniquely and peculiarly British (in fact English); that it is uniquely peaceful and constitutional; and that it is an unbroken and continuous tradition stretching from 1381 to 1981.
None of these assumptions stands up to examination. In fact, in the act of associating himself with early British working class traditions, he breaks with a hundred years of working class history, in which its early socialist legacy was almost excommunicated by the official bodies of the labour movement, and by the Labour Party above all. This legacy was transmitted either by tiny English sects, by rank and file syndicalists, by the Scots, Irish or women. It was those in society who were most oppressed who kept alive socialism's democratic traditions, and nearly all were revolutionary socialists.
Nor is the tradition to which Benn refers — of radical working class or plebian democracy — uniquely British. On the contrary, it dates from a period in which the oppressed classes of all Europe and the New World saw themselves engaged in a common struggle for liberation against all the old tyrannies. Benn harks back to a time when Tom Paine was equally at home in Britain, France and America, and in which his fortunes and writings were followed with the same concern by the poor and dispossessed of each one of those lands.
Finally, these traditions were not in the least peaceful and constitutional, for democracy could only be won by revolutionary means. Both rulers and ruled treated a call for democracy and a call to arms as synonymous. The great liberators of the age were all revolutionaries, from Lilburne to Paine to Marx. The Americans even wrote the right of insurrection into their constitution.
The logical extension of this tradition was Marx's support for the methods of the Paris Commune, and Lenin's espousal of soviet democracy, which argued that it was necessary to guarantee the accountability of all organs of government, including the state, by involving workers directly in the administration of society and the economy, and by ensuring that officials were drawn from the workers movement, were elected, subject to recall, and paid only average wages.
The 'official tradition' of the Labour Party dates from the 1870s with the adoption, by much of the labour movement, of Liberal strategies which used the existing capitalist state to win material concessions, available because of Britain's imperial supremacy. In return, they suppressed the tradition of struggle against the state, both at home and abroad.
Above all the idea grew up that parliament and local councils were the only channel to the state. The idea of popular action to win political demands is absent from the Labour Party's vocabulary and only now is it starting to reappear, with the orientation to community action and trade union links being pushed by Benn and people like Peter Hain. Alone amongst European Socialist Parties, the Labour Party began life as a parliamentary party. It has been a laboratory pure specimen of parliamentary cretinism. It saw the gains and losses of the workers' movement almost entirely as acts of law, and never as victories won in struggle.
By way of illustration, consider the following account from Merrie England, by Robert Blatchford, which is said to have won a million converts to socialism:
'It always amuses me to hear the intensely practical person demand, how are you going to do it? When will you make a start? Where do you begin?'
My dear Mr Smith, it is too late to ask when we are going to begin. We have begun. We, or rather they, began long ago. Nearly all law is more or less socialistic, for nearly all law implies the right of the state to control individuals for the benefit of the nation. But of late years the law has been steadily becoming more and more socialistic. I will give you a few examples ... The Truck Acts are socialistic, for they deny the employer the power to swindle his own workmen. The Factory Acts are socialistic, for they deny the employer the power to work women and children to death. The compulsory and Free Education Acts are socialistic, the Acts which compel the inspection of mines and factories, the inspection of boilers, the placing of loadlines on ships, the granting of relief [illegible] are all socialist acts, for they all interfere with the 'freedom of contract' and the establishment of corporate gas and water works are socialistic measures, for they all recognise the principle of common ownership, protection, and combination.
You will see, then, that socialism has begun so that the question of where to begin is quite superfluous.'
The logical climax of this approach was the Labour government of 1945, which implemented a programme worked out in detailed discussion with the Tories and proposed by the Liberal Beveridge, during the coalition wartime government. It involved a huge expansion of the state sector, Keynesian policies of state intervention to avoid the worst effects of the trade cycle, and dovetailed neatly with the 'official' ideal of a slow transition to socialism carried out through the state.
The Bevanites simply became the left wing of this tradition. They simply argued for faster nationalisation, more nationalisation, more state benefits, and cheaper state benefits. They wanted to build socialism by buying the economy from the capitalists a bit at a time.
This tradition has seeped into the bones of the movement. Even organisations like the current around the Militant, who claim to be revolutionary Marxists, have developed a kind of litmus test for socialists — the more you want to nationalise, the more left-wing you are. They have a strategy according to which the government must pass a parliamentary act making it legal to nationalise everything they want. The bourgeoisie will then try to depose the incumbent government and workers will rise to defend it, thus bringing a revolutionary government into being.
This ignores the fact that, as the CBI showed in 1974, there are much more effective ways of thwarting a government that relies on the state than armed subversion. If the state and business community merely withdraw co-operation, the resulting economic chaos renders the government powerless to act. It can break out of this only if it changes the agency through which it implements its policies: if it legalises direct action by workers themselves, empowering them to take over factories, open books, organise production under their control, and establish local, regional and national planning under the direct supervision of their elected representatives.
A socialist strategy must also be ready for the fact that, faced with the threat of economic chaos, a Labour government would either refuse to take such measures or split, losing its parliamentary majority. A socialist strategy would have to prepare the unions to take steps to prevent economic sabotage and take over the economy in any case, and to demand that a new government should base itself on the new democracy which the people had built, not on a gerrymandered House of Commons majority. Of course, if a parliamentary majority for this course was preserved it would be excellent; but it is utter utopianism to base one's entire strategy on it. The point is that such thinking has never played any role in any part of the Labour Party's approach, left or right. Workers' control, in the vocabulary of the labour movement in Britain, has become a kind of appendage to nationalisation, an added extra slogan.
Even though what Benn proposes is not, in fact, real workers' control, he has made a fundamental break from the old tradition by re-introducing, however partially, the idea of fighting in the workplace to win political ends.
Why has the Bevanite tradition begun to break down? Why did Bevan himself desert the Bevanite camp? Why has Foot been selected as the next compromiser? The reason is that the material basis for financing long-term state concessions has been eroded with the collapse of post-war prosperity, and above all — for Britain — with the collapse of imperial income.
It is not generally realised to what extent Labour's 1945 reforms were paid for from the profits of Empire. The Commonwealth, although wrapped up in moralistic claptrap, was merely a disguise for the new lease of imperial life in which the dominions, the colonies, and Britain were wrapped up together in a protective trade association that provided cheap food and raw materials, and was forced to buy British manufactures. As a study of this process notes:
'Despite the widespread and apparently authoritative assumption to the contrary, Britain did not emerge from the Second World War having liquidated all her long-term foreign assets. As we said earlier, Keynes estimated that Britain in fact sold about £1 billion of her total assets of just under £3 billion by 1945, and made further sales of £500 million in the immediate postwar period ... Net indebtedness ... was soon made up by further foreign investment at a level unprecedented in absolute terms in British history. By the end of 1967 British long-term foreign assets amounted to £12.6 billion of which £11.6 billion were private assets.' (our emphasis)
This is what gave rise to Britain's enormous banking sector (employing 1.2 million people!) and world military and financial role. The threat of a collapse of sterling's world role (i.e. Britain's imperial profits) is always what the IMF has held over Labour governments.
But with the fiasco of Suez in 1956, the writing was on the wall. The idea behind Britain's world nuclear role was to deal with this problem by tying itself more closely to America's apron strings. Bevan's sudden break with unilateralism had a very simple cause: he understood absolutely clearly that without a big-power role for Britain, his social programme could no longer be financed. Foot has already made clear that he wants unilateralism out of the manifesto — in other words, he wants to ditch it.
His first public act when he became party leader, crossing the magic threshold which means he may some day run a government, if the ruling class let him, was to express nauseating and fulsome support for Tory policy in Ireland. He is the last of a long line of Labour leaders who have been taught that the price of power is support for the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence. The problem is that the bargain isn't such a good one nowadays.
The rebirth of a radical democratic tradition in the British working class reflects the discovery, at a higher and higher level in British politics, that a strategy of financing material concessions via the state, out of the proceeds of Empire, is not on any more.
Benn's reaction to this, as Minister of Technology in 1966, was to search out a different model for the financing of material concessions, in which the strength of the domestic economy would pay for progress, and in which the workers movement would contribute by being much more closely drawn into the process of production, responding with much higher productivity and creativity. The German and Japanese models were obviously in his mind.
But because the British ruling class, rooted abroad, is not willing to take such a course without first destroying working class strength, Benn has encountered tremendous resistance — to which he has reacted by championing the cause of the workers who are thus deprived, and by attempting to mobilise them in a force that can break down this resistance by extra-parliamentary action.
He associates with the revolutionary tradition in three ways: in bringing socialism's democratic heritage out front where it belongs; in arguing for a socialist strategy based on a fight for the control and administration of the economy by workers in industry; and in his endorsement of direct popular action for political ends, But he shrinks from the conclusions of his own argument, because he cannot accept that democracy, workers' control, and popular power can only be achieved by socialist revolution.
The fact that Benn's emergence has deep material roots is made plain by the nature of his following. A layer of new Labour leaders is arising who put forward the same ideas of democracy, popular action, and a fight for control. They do it in the same half-hearted way — as we write, Lothian council is backing away from a fight with the government over cuts. But during the early stages the Lothian Labour councillors tried to visit every union branch in the region to ask for strike action if the government tried to jail them.
The attempts by council leaders like Ted Knight and Ken Livingstone to look for ways of confronting the government, and seeking strike action to back them up, reflects the growing impossibility of using the local state machine by capturing elected majorities as a strategy for winning concessions. Their attempt to deal with the cuts by raising rates is an attempt to stave off confrontation and preserve some independence for councils — but it obviously isn't working. They are being driven to very different tactics from the genteel Brains Trust of the Bevanites.
More significant still is the very broad support that Benn is finding in the unions. When he first stood for deputy leader his campaign was almost dismissed as a symbolic gesture. Now the media anxiously discuss whether he will succeed even without Silkin's vote. What this shows is that a layer of trade unionists are also drawn to question traditional labour politics, and that they turn to Benn as the nearest expression of their conclusions they can find. Benn is proving to be a focus for workers moving towards revolutionary ideas. Revolutionary socialists have two tasks: to fight alongside these workers on every issue which takes their struggle forward, and to develop a clear and incisive critique of Benn's ideas.
But what should this critique centre on? Is Benn in fact putting forward policies which can lead to socialism?
At the outset we must note that he looks for an alternative foreign policy which will still be acceptable to capital. He proposes a non-nuclear defence policy within NATO. He argues for British troops to be withdrawn from Ireland and replaced by UN troops. Israeli troops, perhaps? He proposes withdrawal from the EEC but seeks to win the capitalist's consent for a national reconstruction of an economy in which the market, and competition, would still play a role, as would capital itself.
This idea is utopian. But it is based, quite consciously on the Italian, German and Japanese model.
Benn holds that because he is proposing eminently sensible reforms which could be to the benefit of all, the capitalists can be led to comply peaceably if they meet a determined enough government.
What he ignores is the fact that Germany, Japan and Italy started with two bonuses which our own ruling class does not possess as yet. They passed through a period of fascism which destroyed working class resistance to technical change and high rates of exploitation; they lost a war, which destroyed the overseas ambitions of their capitalists.
Trying to apply the same policies with an undefeated working class and a ruling class which is hooked on overseas investment would have a very different effect. It would make it impossible for private capital to recoup profits over any but the very long term from domestic investment. It would raise working class expectations which could not be satisfied without an onslaught which capital cannot accept. It would terrify the capitalists into panic flight, leading to a tremendous and inflationary balance of payments crisis.
This is why such extraordinarily fierce opposition greeted Benn's policies in 1974. The ruling class were afraid not of what Benn would do, but of what would be done by workers following his idea when they encountered the resistance of private industry to Labour's reform programme.
It is here that the central weakness of his strategy becomes clear. He regards all the reforms that he puts forward as something which the capitalists will eventually agree to — after a bit of a struggle, perhaps, but eventually they will see sense. The very phrases which he uses to describe his aims — a 'new constitutional settlement' or a 'new consensus' — incorporate this idea. The result is a strategy which delivers into the capitalists' hands the very weapons they need to defeat him. Let us go through them one by one.
Firstly, it gives the employers the ideal weapon to bully governments into giving way — withdrawal of co-operation. The first battle line drawn in 1974 was when the CBI said it was 'not confident' in Labour, and Wilson destroyed Labour's industrial policy on the basis that it would not 'give industry confidence'. Indeed, the Labour left have now been forced to put forward the ridiculous idea of a 'compulsory planning agreement'. Is it an agreement, or is it compulsory? If it's compulsory, then the manifesto has to make absolutely clear that the government intends to go ahead with or without co-operation. It is for this reason that the government must make clear it intends to nationalise the economy, not because state control is one step nearer socialism.
By declaring at the outset that it was going to nationalise definite, named companies, the Mitterrand programme in France greatly strengthened the resolve of the workers' movement and weakened the resistance of the owners.
For the same reason, tripartite management is an abuse of democracy and a mockery because it does not incarnate the sovereignty of workers in the workplace. In this respect Benn's proposals to give the trade union movement full access to information are very important; but they do not give the workers real control. Only one third of the board is made up of workers. One third are managers and the other third will be supplied by the state. Lenin's strategy of workers' control was based on a very different proposal: the idea of majority (at least two-thirds) control, directly accountable to workers' organisations.
Furthermore, because Benn has a strategy of bargaining for control instead of taking it, he immediately opens the door for the trade union bureaucracy to interpose themselves between the owners and the workers. In the National Enterprise Board (NEB) and in the Bullock committee on industrial democracy it was the trade union leaders who were more anxious than anyone to limit the extent of real control by their members; and the support of most trade union leaders for Wilson against Benn, and now for all manner of measures designed to stop Benn, shows which side they are on. In order to ensure that the trade unions call their leaders to account, it is essential to have a policy which ensures that workers' representatives cannot pose as arbitrators between capital and labour, and use this arbitration role to justify imposing managements' demands on their members.
This became very clear under Wilson and Callaghan when the Social Contract, which Benn supported, became a means of policing the trade union movement carried out by the union leaders. Benn was — genuinely — surprised when the union leaders deserted him in 1975, but it was inevitable once the ruling class had made clear they were not prepared to negotiate with Benn. Benn wanted to negotiate, but he had no cards left to play.
Most importantly of all, Benn's approach leaves him unable to resolve the basic issue of force. He cannot say who is to carry out his policies because of his concern to avoid provoking a revolutionary confrontation. The simplest and most effective law which a Labour government could pass, to take control of industry, is a law entitling workers in each factory and branch of industry to take whatever action they see fit in order to guarantee that their industry meets the objectives of Labour's social programme. But if such a law were to be effective, it would require another law appointing, as agents of the government in all dealings with industry, only the elected representatives of the workers movement. These two laws alone involve the destruction of all the effective property rights of the owners of capital, and the disbanding of the civil service as we now know it.
Labour could begin preparing the movement for government now by drawing together representatives from all branches of industry to draw up a national plan, showing how its reforms could be met and what each industry should do to achieve them. In order to wage a serious fight around the new TUC plan to spend £25 billion rebuilding the economy, for example, the trade union and labour movement would need to draw together rank and file workers in every industry to discuss how production would have to be organised, and also how to meet the bosses' resistance to their plans.
But the best preparation for the working class to be able to act as agents of their government in this way would be for Labour to champion, organise, and develop every conceivable form of working class action in defence of their rights and in support for the social reforms proposed in Labour's programme. An active struggle now against Cruise missiles, for the 35-hour week, for a massive programme of public spending, against the Common Market, and in support of the democratic struggles of the Irish, of women, and of blacks, would create the best chance of winning these demands, would unify and prepare the working class politically, and would prepare them for the business of government. It would also limit the room for manoeuvre of Labour's right wing in any future government.
But Benn closes the door to this kind of action by refusing to endorse 'using industrial muscle to overthrow the government'. What is the point in struggling against every single measure the government takes if one must stop at a door marked 'private — parliamentary democrats only' when it comes to getting rid of the government itself? The capitalists have no such scruples. Who was allowed to vote on Benn's removal from the Department of Trade and Industry?
And it is when it comes to the role of parliament that Benn's biggest weakness is apparent. He argues for the sovereignty of the people over parliament, — but shrinks from the measure needed to achieve it — which is to set up a democratic people's state.
He abides by two symmetrical fallacies: first, that because of Britain's parliamentary tradition, the ruling class will permit the use of parliament to bring about socialism; and secondly, that because of the working class's faith in parliament and commitment to parliamentary democracy, it will not and need not engage in violent or revolutionary action.
This is neither historically true nor correct strategy. Firstly, Benn consistently confuses minority violence and force. Actions such as mass pickets and occupations are very coercive and forceful, but may be totally peaceful — because they are made up of large numbers of people who are determined to have their way, so that the police find it useless to take them on. Benn uses phrases like 'setting up guerrilla movements in Morecambe' as a synonym for revolutionary action — thereby using the same language as the ruling class when it sets out to [illegible] popular action — but ignores the fact that in all real revolutions the decisive factors have not just been the arming of the people but the weight of their numbers and their determination to accept no compromise. What makes the revolution is the fact that the [illegible] their authority instead of the government's, [illegible] they install a new government and get rid of the old one. The new constitution is brought into being by their acts, demands and decrees.
Secondly, let us look at what actually happened in the English Civil War, which was fought under the banner of defending parliament. It was fought by rival armies. It was a bitter war in which the parliamentarians demanded, not a more open king, or a more democratic or popular king, but a dead king, an end to the king. Furthermore when the parliamentary army thought that some MPs were not prepared to fight the king, they were arrested and sacked in order to ensure that parliament would carry out the will of the people.
If Benn really wanted to continue the tradition of the English revolution, including the Levellers, the next Labour manifesto would declare its intention to establish a parliamentary militia to crush resistance to its decrees from unaccountable centres of power such as Whitehall, the army and police, and CBI or the banks. Labour would have to disband these unelected bodies if they defied parliament — as they did in 1974 — and, of course, it would have to arrest, as traitors and law-breakers, any MPs refusing to recognise the constitutionality of the new government's decrees, (thereby inciting illegal and terroristic acts of violence against the people and government.) This would probably lead to the disqualification of most Tory MPs and indeed, many of them would be liable to prosecution by people's courts under Labour's new Prevention of Terrorism Act. We leave the Queen's fate to the reader's imagination. This forceful and authoritarian process involves no more violence than all present capitalist states use against workers. The issue at stake is not whether violence takes place, but under whose laws, under what constitution, by whom and for what purpose it is organised.
Such a proposal would at least be a faithful transcription of the heritage which Benn proclaims, into today's terms. But even this does not represent an adequate strategy for socialism, because it is tied to the assumption that a parliamentary majority must first be won. And indeed a new layer of 'very left wing' Labour politicians is emerging which combine quite radical proposals for mobilising the working class — which is excellent — with a strategy which, however, relies on keeping an elected majority in order to legislate. This nullifies the strategy, because it puts everything under the threat of failure if a small group of right wing MPs desert, (of course refusing to stand for re-election), if parliament or a council breaks its mandate, or if — as actually happens — the ruling class uses the control it has over the state to prevent the emergence of a majority which will do anything dangerous for it.
Ken Livingstone could well become the prisoner of his own GLC councillors, simply because a few right wingers are going to break their mandate and vote against the Labour group every time something 'illegal' or provocative is done — like overspending the budget handed down by Heseltine. The whole purpose of the present witch-hunting campaign is to force such desertions. The only way to defeat these tactics is to mobilise, now, a working class movement which will impose the right policies on the council.
The problem in Benn's ideas is that real power, as he himself points out, does not lie with parliament. Using the many 'unaccountable centres of power' at its disposal, the ruling class can not only fall back on a coup as a last resort, but it can take many effective measures to ensure that a parliamentary majority for genuinely democratic change will never emerge. In 1974 it managed to reverse Labour's manifesto, which was not revolutionary, by first ensuring — using Whitehall, the IMF and the CBI — a cabinet majority which opposed the manifesto, and then using the threat of losing a majority in the House of Commons to whip the rest of the PLP (not very reluctantly) into line. In 1984 its method may well be to split the Labour Party.
In fact on only one occasion did the working class win real concessions. This was between February and October 1974, when Wilson governed as a minority, without coalitions, and carried through a price and rents freeze, spent £3 billion on public services, abolished council house sales, abolished wage controls, and presided over 16 per cent wage rises. These concessions were won, not because of the situation in the House of Commons but because the working class had just mobilised to an extent that it had driven an elected government from office. It was the fact that the working class would have made the country ungovernable if a coalition had been formed, or if some immediate concessions had not been made, that forced Wilson's hand.
Thus the key to what can be won in parliament — even mild reforms — is what happens outside. More important still, however, is Benn's idea that because of their faith in parliament, workers will not engage in violent or revolutionary action, and will not need to:
'Since the trade union movement believes itself, correctly, to have been a major founding force in parliamentary democracy through its support for the Chartists and others, it is not likely to reject its own history by seeking the overthrow of a government freely elected.'
'The thing that makes this country — with all its imperfections — such a law-abiding place is not the fact that we've got police and courts with judges in long wigs. It is that we are basically decent, generous, compassionate, hard-working and fair-minded people. These qualities and not the statute book are our copper-bottomed guarantee against anarchy — so long as we play it fair amongst ourselves.'
But what the people confront on the streets and in the factories are not members of parliament but the police, the management, and all the repressive apparatus which acts in the name of parliament, and in reality serves the rich and privileged. When workers fought the Industrial Relations Act, occupied factories against redundancy, or organised mass pickets, it was these forces they came up against.
A socialist strategy has to begin from the principle that a struggle for democratic rights, for workers' rights, for control of the economy, and now even for small material reforms, will meet with repression by the unaccountable bodies that Benn has identified, and must organise to resist them and bring into being, in the course of this resistance, an understanding of the kind of alternative society that socialists want. Such a strategy must put forward policies which will allow workers to experience the power of their own organisations, not just as a defensive power, but as a power for positive change. This is why a struggle for workers' control, and for workers' plans, must take its proper place in the policies we put forward.
But we cannot rely on a strategy that only aims to give partial power to the people. We have to say that popular power is only possible if these unaccountable bodies are disbanded and replaced by genuinely democratic organisations of working people and their families. And we also have to say that no parliamentary strategy can succeed if it begins by supporting these unaccountable bodies against people in struggle, or trying to use them to carry out its legislation; but that on the contrary, the role of MPs is to champion the people against the state, and so bring a genuinely democratic workers' state into being.
In order to wage a consistent fight for these goals, an organisation is needed whose representatives, including MPs, are directly and immediately accountable to it; which will combine parliamentary and popular action in such a way that the needs of workers come before electoral manoeuvres; which will organise a left wing in both the unions and the Labour Party, that is prepared to fight wealth and status without compromise; and which is committed to a democratic, planned socialist economy, Such an organisation — a revolutionary socialist organisation — will be able to count in its ranks many thousands of those who, in turning to Benn, are turning their back on a Labour Party tradition which has long had its day.
References
1 See The Alternative Economic Strategy in International Volume 5, Number 2, Spring 1980
2 Speech to international conference of political consultants, 1970 reprinted in Speeches, ed Joan Bodington, Spokesman 1974
3 Guildhall Lecture 1980, Granada 1980, p45
4 Lecture to the Fabian Society, September 1971 (Speeches p275)
5 Address to the AUEW Foundry Section Annual Delegate Meeting, May 1971 (Speeches p19)
6 Arguments for Socialism, Penguin 1979, p43
7 Daily Mirror August 1973 (reprinted in Speeches p36)
8 op cit, (Speeches p38)
9 Speech to the Fabian Society, op cit
10 Shadow Cabinet Paper on Law and Order (Speeches p168)
11 Arguments for Socialism p146
12 Robert Blatchford, Merrie England, Journeyman Press
13 Phillips and Maddock, The Growth of the British Economy, McMillan, 39