Commentators have experienced great difficulties over the past months finding new metaphors to describe the state of the Labour Party. Each new crisis finds the party 'hanging by its finger nails ... over the edge of the abyss' and all the rest. Now we are suddenly told that 'peace and unity' have broken out in the party since the Bishop's Stortford summit of Labour and union leaders. Even Socialist Worker echoed the view that Bennism was in its death agonies, carefully linking this claim to its assessment that the working class had shifted in its majority to the right under the hammer blows of the Tories.
The evidence for this supposed dramatic turnabout in the party's crisis is to be found in the promises of good behaviour said to have been made by all sides at the Bishop's Stortford meeting. Tony Benn is reported to have called for an end to the witch-hunt and for full support for Labour's conference policies, in return for which he would not run as deputy leader for a second time. The union leaders on the other hand promised more funds and an active campaign in support of the party. In return they asked that the left should not challenge the present right wing leadership of the party or take the party's political debates into the ranks of the unions round another election campaign.
But peace and unity will be short-lived. The political stakes are too high for all the protagonists in the Labour crisis. The whole future evolution of the labour movement, and the outcome of the next election in particular, are linked to the current battles.
For a right wing labour bureaucracy the central question is to isolate and defeat the Bennite current in the party and the unions to pave the way for abandoning the conference's left policies in favour of the old middle of the road Callaghan/Wilson variety. They aim to steal back the SDP's clothes and to recapture the centre ground. Jim Callaghan himself has already flown the first kite about a possible coalition with the SDP if Labour cannot win the next election outright. An offensive against the left is therefore essential and inevitable.
But the question of government also informs the growing strength of the Bennite current. The idea of a new left wing Labour government committed to real social change and a break from the party's governmental past holds real attraction for a growing number of working people as the only way out of the political and economic crisis. The Bennite current thus reflects a developing polarisation between the classes and within the working class. Its base within the unions, which makes it unique among the Labour lefts since the War, is sufficiently powerful to threaten the project of the labour bureaucracy.
Rather than heralding a new era of peace within the party the Bishop's Stortford meeting marked a new stage in the growing differentiations of the left within the labour movement, divisions which centre round attitudes to the trade union bureaucracy. The Bennite leadership is based ultimately within this layer. It aims to recompose it around its bases in the miners' union, the TGWU and NUPE, as well as the regional and national leaderships of the Broad Lefts in other unions.
While Benn's deputy leadership campaign threatened some of these alliances — nevertheless the breaks that the Bennite leadership makes from the bureaucracy are partial and temporary, designed at each stage to produce a new re-alignment within the bureaucracy rather than the construction of a new class struggle leadership in the labour movement based on mass action and socialist policies.
The result of the pressure for unity from the trade union bureaucracy has been the futile search for compromise by a section of the Bennite leadership, in particular that organised around the Labour Co-ordinating Committee (LCC). They place their hopes on winning back Foot from the clutches of the right wing. Michael Meacher even went so far as to suggest a new loyalty oath to Foot as the way to go about the witch-hunt.
Sections of the Bennite base have reacted in the opposite fashion, recognising [that the] struggle against the [illegible] and the SDP has to be coupled with a fight against the trade union bureaucracy. The role of the union leaders has been almost uniformly disgraceful. From the AUEW officials scabbing on the Laurence Scott workers despite 1000 branch resolutions supporting the strikers, through to the transport union chief Ron Todd in the recent Ford dispute, they have consistently added to the demoralisation and confusion in the ranks of the workers' movement. Nine times out of ten to fight against the Tories means to also take on your own union leadership. Each defeat and each sell-out brings a Labour defeat in the next election that little bit closer.
The coalition way?
The question of how to ensure Labour wins the next election and breaks from the policies of Wilson/Callaghan will increasingly dominate working class politics. The idea that the left is somehow responsible for the present crisis in the party must be thrown back in the faces of the right wing. The left neither leads the party today, nor is it responsible for the disaster of the last two Labour administrations. It is the left whose policies are more in tune with popular demands for change, and which is increasingly the force which is building or rebuilding the party after SDP defections.
In fact the active core of support that remains for the party tends more and more to coincide with the Bennite base in the workers' movement. It is vital that the next period sees the beginnings of a serious attempt to co-ordinate and mobilise this base, both against the Tories and the SDP and the right wing labour bureaucracy. The new Labour Liaison Committee, along with the union Broad Lefts and the Labour lefts can play a crucial role in this process. Revolutionary socialists should be part of this process at every level.
There are three other crucial components of creating the conditions for a Labour victory: first, the fight for a socialist manifesto for Labour, based on genuine socialist policies. Jobs not Bombs sums up the programme Labour should fight on. And as the failure of the Labour GLC shows such a programme will need a commitment to mobilise the labour movement to defeat attempts by the courts and the state apparatuses to sabotage its implementation.
Second, Labour should reach out now to build the campaigns such as CND, a woman's right to work, and Poland, to root them in the labour movement; third, and most importantly, joint Labour Party/trade union activity should be taken up at every level, from giving support to workers fighting the Tory government through to campaigning for union democracy and establishing workplace Labour branches. None of these steps will be possible unless the witch-hunt against the left in the party and the unions is thrown back. Failure to defeat the right wing offensive could well lead to a real electoral debacle: Labour's right wing drift towards a coalition with the SDP/Liberal Alliance.
SOLIDARITY WITH SOLIDARNOSC!
There have been so many 'acid tests' for the left in recent years that socialists may have become rather blase about the term. But when the best advertisement for socialism that we have had for many years, the independent union movement Solidarnosc in Poland, comes under vicious repression, the lack of a serious left response is alarming.
At the level of world politics the Polish events are a stunning blow to the international labour movement, representing a serious setback for one of the two high points of the international workers' struggle — Poland and Central America. If the Polish rulers succeed in their aim of crushing the workers' resistance completely it will have profound implications for world politics — making increased US intervention into Central America much more probable, threatening to seriously undermine the mass anti-nuclear movements across Europe, and weakening the struggles of the workers the world over.
For over a month many on the left have kept virtually silent about the Polish events, often only breaking that silence to deplore the extent of the media coverage on the issue compared to other worthy causes. And the two biggest currents on the far left — Socialist Worker and Militant are united in assessing that the Polish 'experiment' is all over, lessons should be drawn, and then back to business as usual.
We make no apology for giving over extensive space in this issue of International to discussing the Polish events and their impact on world politics, nor for having delayed publication of this issue to do so. There is growing evidence of a serious resistance against the repression — a resistance which deserves the maximum support from the whole labour movement. The Polish workers will have the last word.