The election was a disaster for the Labour Party and the labour movement and calls for fundamental rethinking on strategy. Alan Freeman argues that this demands changes in particular from the left, which has to adopt extraparliamentary action both as the way to resist Thatcher's attacks and to replace the Tories with a Labour government. In doing so it must come to grips with the basic weakness of Labourism's heritage.
Some time in the future an idle historian with little better to do will weigh up the great political disasters of the past, ranking them in order of the stupidity of those responsible. We are convinced that Labour's 1983 election performance will merit a special award in a category all of its own.
Just consider a couple of facts. In 1931 Ramsay MacDonald, who is recorded as the Labour traitor of all time, brought Labour's poll share down to a paltry 30.6 per cent. In 1983 Healey and Callaghan outstripped him by a full two per cent. Maggie Thatcher has secured the lowest popular vote of any Tory Prime Minister this century, and the only reason for her 140 seat landslide is Labour's defeat.
This was not just a setback. It was a disaster. When the Titanic — with which Labourism has much in common — went down, there was a widespread and natural tendency to blame the iceberg. Yet the task of any serious inquest was to expose the greed, cynicism and folly which floated an allegedly unsinkable ship, with half the lifeboats it needed, where it had no business to be, not the iceberg.
Marxism has a similar obligation to the Labour Party. It has to get to the root of what was, in essence, the shipwreck of Labourism on the flotsam of the British Empire, and answer the question, can the Labour Party be saved from Labourism?
Let's start with a small incident: the Healey/Kinnock attacks on the Belgrano affair. This incident is noteworthy because it was clearly not tied to any of the current scapegoats for Labour's defeat — the manifesto, the bickering, the extremists, or even right wing treachery. Yet, more than anything else, it symbolised Labour's loss of direction.
The attack probably did not lose votes. Most phone calls to Walworth Road were sympathetic. But Healey lacked all credibility because he waited twelve full months to make his attack. What kind of leader waits until the middle of an election to denounce even one incident in a war which he fully backed at the time. This episode finally proved that Labour lost all sense of direction on the day the fleet set sail for the South Atlantic.
And this clarifies a deep failing which voters unconsciously sensed: Labour's lack of contact with today's world. Everyone knows that capitalism is in crisis. Labour should be debating Thatcher on whether capitalism ought to exist, not on how to defend it. Workers are completely unconvinced by half-baked measures that correspond only to a dream world which the Labour Party is vainly trying to recreate. Labour did not even put across the minimal socialist message that the crisis could be solved by taking wealth from the rich. Trying to package such answers in socialist wrapping only drives workers further from socialism. We would not claim that if Labour had gone on the nation's television sets on the slogan 'sod the empire, soak the rich and smash the state' that it would have achieved overnight success: but at least voters would have understood what it was trying to say.
But Labour's failure to grasp Thatcher's world led it to conspire in its own defeat. It failed to grasp that no amount of Keynesian borrowing would patch up the mess, and it therefore did not understand just how desperate the capitalist class was to keep it from office. It failed to understand that the post war consensus was over, and with it the gentlemen's agreement which let it run the country every five years to clean up the mess left by the Tories.
The sad fact is that the Labour Party was destroyed not by its present but by its past. For sixty years it had educated its voters in a spirit of insular, smug worship of Britain's greatness and freedoms, with the simple result that Thatcher triumphed as the defender of both. Labour projected a vision of socialism that never went beyond the confines of the third worst national health service in Europe, and promptly handed the package over to the Social Democratic Party, the natural inheritors of this bankrupt traditions. Labour prepared its voters perfectly for a mass desertion, and compounded the error by clinging desperately to the spoils of a two party system which held together the rotting hulks of Toryism and Labourism long after neither could ever hope to aspire to a [illegible] again.
The ruling class cashed in. It built a second bourgeois party with a simple purpose, fulfilled brilliantly: to remove the Labour Party from politics as a serious governmental contender. And this is the critical point. In the last analysis, Labour was not defeated by its manifesto or leadership, but by a sea change in British politics: by the fact that the ruling class could not afford to let it form a government again under any circumstances.
That is why a proper reconstruction of the Labour Party cannot just begin with a critique of the right. It calls above all for a self-examination by the left, whose failure is the most striking of all because they failed to defeat the right.
True, Callaghan and Healey betrayed, just as we warned they would. What did anyone expect? They spoke out against party policy because they didn't agree with it! They were prepared to lose the election rather than let Labour win committed to left positions. They were in office before, and they knew the price to be paid if Labour came to office again on its current policies. They knew that the British ruling classes — the most heavily committed abroad next to Switzerland — would be brought to the brink of isolation and ruin by three policies alone: quitting the EEC, scrapping the bomb, and inflating the economy without a guaranteed incomes policy. They had no intention of defying the British ruling class and they said so. Their real dishonesty lay, not in speaking out against policies they didn't support, but in holding on to the party leadership when the party overwhelmingly rejected their views.
This treachery was entirely predictable. The real question is, therefore, why didn't the left prepare to defeat it? Why did Tony Benn accept the non-existent 'truce of Bishops Stortford' and refuse to stand for the party leadership? Why did he call, even as John Golding's team of Kremlinoid neanderthals seized the national executive (NEC), for 'unity around existing policies, membership and leadership' when it was crystal clear that the leadership was out for the membership and policies with a stone axe? With the exception of the small forces around Socialists for a Labour Victory, the left did not even follow its own strategy of defending conference decisions as sovereign — fooling no-one that the party was united, and throwing away the entire political capital saved up during five years of the democracy battle.
The fundamental reason is that they saw no other way to win the election. When the chips were down, they could not take the final step of standing up for the party against the leadership because they were convinced that it would lead to certain defeat. For suppose the left had pushed ahead full-bloodedly with the party's radical policies in defence of the right wing? Suppose it had rejected compromise under Foot? Surely the party would have been more divided, less supported, and therefore even less likely to win at the polls? Wasn't Benn's line the only option, and isn't Kinnock's leadership now the only possible way to hold together the remaining shreds of a tiny Labour vote?
This puts the left in an impossible dilemma, on which Kinnockism feeds rapaciously. The manifesto was a completely implausible piece of fudging. It did not even come over as a policy to transfer wealth and power to working people and their families, which was the proud rallying call for which the Bennites had secured Labour Party endorsement. Labour cannot mobilise or enthuse its supporters without policies which convey this message, even if only through such minimal steps as nationalising the banks. Yet, clearly, if the left deepens Labour's policy commitments, Labour will be still more divided and its vote apparently still more threatened. The seeds of capitulation from an important section of the left are being sown, because it cannot explain how to win elections without trimming its sails to the ruling class's demands.
What then is the solution? It is the strategy most consistently vilified, attacked and hounded during the election, the one strategy which has actually succeeded in getting a Labour government elected against frantic ruling class opposition: good old extra-parliamentary political action. The most disastrous feature of Labour's heritage, the sickness against which it must immunise itself, is its pathological rejection of any form of independent mass action for political ends, which remotely threatens the authority of the British parliamentary state and constitution. Labour began its self-destruction with a virulent witch-hunt against Peter Tatchell for the crime of endorsing extra-parliamentary action. It dismally fluffed every conceivable chance for mass campaigning action. It left it to the Tories to organise the only youth rally of the election. The People's March for Jobs and the 24 May women's day of action on disarmament passed unnoticed by Labour's dedicated footsoldiers. A careful conspiracy of silence between Labour's leaders and the CND/Jobs March leadership ensured that neither drew attention to the other.
And it thereby rejected the only measures which could actually have won the election. When consensus politics ended — in 1969 — a new political era opened, during which Labour could, in fact, only arrive in office on the back of a wave of mass action which seriously challenged the authority of the government.
Labour's analysts, of left and right, persistently ignore the real cause of Labour's February 1974 victory. Why was Wilson, holding only a minority of parliamentary seats, able to form his fatal cabinet and why didn't Edward Heath sweep to a second term of office as Maggie Thatcher has done? Not because of Labour's 1974 programme; not because of the Social Contract; not because of Labour's dynamic leader. No, Labour won the February 1974 election in the wake of the most dramatic four years of struggle witnessed since 1926, at the end of which the miners' extra-parliamentary action finally made it plain that Heath simply could not govern the country.
This action splintered and shattered the Tory vote and drove it back into the shires where it came from. It so terrified the Liberals that, even though they were the main beneficiaries of Tory losses, they refused point blank to enter a coalition with Heath. The action even drove sections of the bourgeoisie into outright support for Wilson, on the (ultimately incorrect) belief that, armed with the Social Contract, he might pacify the unions for good where Heath had failed.
Viewed in this light, the tragedy of Labour's defeat is most pathetically expressed in the latter sent from Michael Foot asking Brian Stanley of the Post Office Engineers' Union (POEU), on the eve of the election, asking the engineers to call off their actions as there was an election going on. Unfortunately, however, the Labour Party's rejection of extra-parliamentary action is not just a minor question of leadership. It is part of its whole purpose and being. Foot's letter is the crux of the matter. The principle that he is outlining is the foundation of British social democracy: as the highest organ of British democracy, parliament must be sovereign, not merely over its officers and government, but also over the people who elected it. Our right to take decisions on how our lives should be run begins and ends when we cast our vote; all attempts to interfere with parliament's right to make its own sovereign decisions outside of that act is fundamentally undemocratic and impermissible in the British Labour Party. Six hundred and twenty-six white men, one Tory Asian and twenty-three women in Westminster, in Michael Foot's eyes, now have the sovereign right to do what the hell they like to us, on our behalf, and claiming our mandate, for the next five years.
We may, of course, petition our representatives. And we may even undertake certain, precisely defined, legal extra-parliamentary actions such as holding protest demonstrations or even strikes, provided these actions do not in any way seek to challenge, defy or overrule parliament's sovereign right to make and execute laws. It would be laughable if it were not so tragic. The full irony of Labour's failure to get into parliament is that it was first and foremost the consequence of its parliamentarism.
We, the 'impractical and utopian revolutionaries' with our 'failure to understand the fundamentally parliamentary preoccupations of the British people' propose the only strategy which could actually get Labour a majority in parliament — to have it rejected in the name of parliamentary principle! In a nutshell, Labour's dilemma now consists in the fact that it may only seriously aspire to become a governmental parliamentary party by abandoning parliamentarism.
But this drives right to the heart of the dispute between Marxism and left social democracy. The critical weakness of social democracy is not that it relies on the conquest of parliament, but that it ignores the conquest of the state. Its parliamentarism is a symptom, not a cause. Under the conditions of a crisis in the state, however, parliamentarism betrays its own promise, to the extent that even its supporters can see its weaknesses. They begin to discover the Marxist truth: real power does not lie in parliament. It lies in the hands of a non-elected, non-accountable, hierarchical, class-ridden and repressive state apparatus, trained and paid by the wealthy to defend their interests no matter who is elected.
The hold of Foot's strategy on the Labour Party is a product of its failure to come to grips with the problem of the state. Now, at one level, this is all that can be expected of a social democratic party. However, it is in the British Labour Party above all others that parliamentarianism is concentrated to such an extraordinary degree. It was formed, not as a socialist or democratic party, but precisely as a Labour Party to represent Labour in parliament. It was not formed out of the Marxist, democratic tradition of its European counterparts. It has consistently refused to take up even minimal democratic questions. It has never seriously attacked the Lords, the Monarchy, or the Church; it is traditionally blind on all questions of oppression — black people, women, national self-determination. Its strategy for socialism is based on gradual parliamentary nationalisation rather than the fight for control.
And this heritage is simply inadequate to Britain's present crisis. It is a product of Labourism's classical deal with imperialism. In return for support for Britain's 'Great Power role' — that is, its foreign investments — the labour bureaucracy was allowed to implement social reforms via the British state machine. There was a second element to this deal: the labour bureaucracy must on no account challenge the state, which was backward even from the point of view of thoroughgoing bourgeois democracy precisely because of the decisive weight within it of all elements which shored up its imperialist-colonial orientation.
Now, with the chronic decline of British imperialism Labour is doubly caught. It must try to implement pro-working class social reform through a hidebound, snobbish, anti-working class civil service hierarchy. It must rely for its legislation on a parliamentary system with an unelected second chamber, a totally undemocratic voting system, and a monarch. And then it must defend all this garbage in the name of democracy! Thatcher, presiding over a completely unfree parliamentary system, accuses the Labour Party of authoritarian attacks on freedom: and the Labour Party responds by defending Thatcher's state, one of the most undemocratic in Europe, as a model of the freedom it stands for!
And this is precisely the origin, importance and motor force of Bennism. Its roots lie in the triple process comprising the weakening of the empire and the inability of foreign income to pay for social reform; the erosion of democratic rights via the strengthening and centralising of an already antiquated and reactionary state; and the consequent steady weakening of a trade union bureaucracy which bases itself on the defence of what has now become indefensible.
The strengthening of the state and the steady attack on living conditions creates a movement at the base of the unions and Labour Party that is fundamentally concerned with the defence of democracy: defence of the oppressed, defence of trade union rights, defence of human rights, a growing expression of the burning desire of working and oppressed people to control their own lives without bureaucrats, without cops, without 'experts', without bosses. Such movements conflict with the state, and are the motor force of Bennism. What classically distinguishes Bennism from all previous lefts in the Labour Party is precisely its overriding concern with democracy.
But the limitation which Benn places on Bennism is this: instead of seeking to give the movement full reign in its conflict with the state, he insists that it must be directed towards the strengthening of parliament against the state. He thus rejects calling for industrial action to defeat elected governments, and instead limits himself to cheering on the unions when and if they organise such action. Consequently he falls at the last hurdle to propose a strategy which would allow his movement to proceed independent of the trade union bureaucracy. He falls back into the sterile trap of a united leadership at all costs because he renounces the only strategy which could unite the rank and file, for fear it threatens parliament.
Here, he fails to grasp the second great lesson which Marxism alone has to offer the labour movement, that parliament is in the last analysis the prisoner of the state. Precisely because real power does not lie in parliament, the entire parliamentary system weeds out, selects and promotes only those MPs who will be 'reasonable' and 'moderate' and abide by the constitution: that is, who will obey the state.
It was consequently the easiest task in the world for the British ruling class to use parliament against Tony Benn and his movement: all they did is point out that if the Labour Party got in the result would be total anarchy, which was perfectly true. And after the anarchy, they said, exactly the same thing will happen as in 1975 and is now happening to Mitterrand: the right wing will win out in the Labour Party and you'll go back to doing what we said you should do all along. So why not cut out the two years' anarchy and make sure Labour doesn't get anywhere near the driving seat?
Translated, this simply means 'parliament is ours, and don't you forget it.' It was a not very subtle warning that the ruling class does not intend to surrender [illegible] to the working class: and it was a convincing demonstration that the extra-parliamentary power of the ruling class (the state banks, and so on) have placed an iron chain round parliament itself. Those who reject this chain — like Tony Benn — are expelled by the organism.
That's why 9 June saw the death of an entire range of semi-parliamentary strategies, of which Tony Benn was one which must now be re-examined. In particular it exposed a very tempting, very popular, and very wrong approach to [illegible] strategy on the left through which almost every Labour Party socialist tries to explain their policies on the doorstep: which is to talk about socialist advance through the Labour Party in terms of what will happen when a left Labour government gets into office. There are thus two distinct phases: one, peaceful, routine doorknocking entry into parliament by standard electoral method. Two: Labour Party pulls off dirty mac, unveils socialist programme and defeats multinationals by summoning masses.
Thus the whole Labour left is committed to working for socialism in the guise of an historically bizarre and fantastic event which will probably never happen. Militant, with its 'enabling act'; London Labour Briefing, with 'Labour take the power'; not to mention many varieties of the call for a 'workers' government' which boil down to promoting any perspective at all for propelling the result into office. All such strategies amount, in essence, to a sneak attack on bourgeois democracy. All call for a series of historically unparalleled accidents; the accidental capture of the Labour Party by the left; the accidental victory of the new left party at the polls; and finally, the accidental discovery of revolutionary methods of self-defence by the left social democrats.
What is wrong with this, as 9 June shows, is that short of a catastrophic bourgeois crisis Labour cannot conceivably arrive in office, particularly committed to any radical measures, without first having mobilised very large scale mass action to the point where the credibility of the bourgeois state and government are seriously being questioned by the mass of voters. The prospect of a left Labour government coming to office by peaceful electoral means is as remote as the prospect of Maggie Thatcher abolishing the monarchy. Never yet — including Chile — has a left social democratic party been promoted to office under any other conditions than mass upsurge and relative collapse of ruling class authority.
Can we begin to map out an alternative? To do so we must settle accounts with a second version of revolutionary strategy in Britain which even further confuses and befogs the issue of how the working class should deal with parliament: the notion of an anti-parliamentary revolution. This notion understands the need to organise mass action, understands that the working class can only progress if it is prepared to challenge the authority of the state and the government of the day, and then draws the utterly false conclusion that a revolution can only happen if the working class blithely ignores parliament and prepares a revolution against parliament.
This view is advanced by the Socialist Workers' Party. No-one since Bordiga has so effectively and consistently defended anti-parliamentarism as the SWP; few have so skillfully exposed its weaknesses as Tony Benn. His fundamental point is devastating: since the working class itself struggled to create parliament, since parliament, the suffrage, and all the extensions of democracy that go with them are working class gains, it is inconceivable that the working class should blindly embark on its destruction. The socialist who seeks to unite the working class against parliament faces a critical problem: while there is no higher form of democracy in existence there is no vantage point from which workers can launch the assault on parliament, because there is nothing to replace it with.
The critical point to be understood which neither the SWP nor Tony Benn grasp is that the working class is perfectly capable of embarking on revolutionary actions without breaking from its illusions in parliamentary democracy, and indeed under the belief that it is defending parliamentary democracy! This is simply because support for parliament as an institution is entirely separate from support for any particular parliamentary government, and even more remote from obedience to the state which acts in parliament's name. One who does not grasp this cannot understand the true significance of the miners' action of 1974, to which British socialism must return time and again if it is to find its bearings in the 1980s and beyond.
Heath, the last Tory Prime Minister to take the unions on frontally, taught the ruling class a lesson that the working class has not yet absorbed. He proved that even a working class which is completely besotted and enraptured with bourgeois parliamentary democracy will take action that can bring down an elected government, if on the horizon stands the prospect of electing an alternative government which it believes can be made to represent its interests.
The miners consciously relied on elected [illegible] to the point of forcing [illegible] departure without moving an inch from their illusions in parliamentary democracy. If they had been hostile to or even mistrustful of parliament, they would have denounced the election as a fraud and stepped up their strike to pre-empt the result. Indeed, they would have picketed polling booths or even stopped people voting. For in a revolt against parliament — such as the recent farcical election in El Salvador — the act of voting is one of capitulation and abstention is the hallmark of resistance. But this stage of revolution is reached only when workers have already embarked on building a higher democracy in the shape of an alternative state. It is a feature of the last, not the first days of the revolution. The essential point is that working people will break with the state that lies behind parliament long, long before they break with parliament itself, precisely because their experiences of an alternative national democracy have been confined to brief and brilliant flashes rapidly extinguished by war, Stalinism, or both.
The British working class can therefore be fully expected to launch assault after assault on British governments and indeed on the British state, in ever more frenzied attempts to create an elected parliament which will answer to them instead of to the state. They will break not with parliament but with the chain that shackles it to the state, and only when that chain has tightened to the point that it throttles parliament itself will they take the final step to an alternative, higher democracy.
It is out of this understanding that some sense can be breathed into the present situation, and some hope offered to working people against Maggie Thatcher. For the ruling class's fear of the Labour Party is not born of strength but of desperation.
The ruling class wants to destroy Labour as a potential party of government because of what it has to do to the working class. British capitalism, bottom of the imperialist ladder in an extended period of heightened inter-imperialist competition, is falling off the ladder. It faces a cataclysmic economic future. Only North Sea Oil stands between the Treasury and economic collapse. The world upturn which, for the more advanced countries like Germany and Japan, is the opportunity to conquer yet more markets from their weakened competitors, is proving bad enough news for British exporters whose productive capacity has been slimmed to extinction. For the Treasury it is a nightmare because it spells a balance of payments out of all control. And beyond the upturn looms the 1986-7 slump. Consequently, only two real remedies are to hand: further giant cuts in social spending and real, serious wage cuts. Both measures are politically destabilising. Thatcher's support among some sections of the working class is undoubtedly due to the rise in real wages of those who still have work which went side by side with her dole strategy. Now this is to be reversed. Attacking the welfare state is even more politically difficult: something like 80 per cent of the population believe that the limit of acceptable cuts has already been reached.
Hence, to go with the attacks on material conditions, Thatcher needs to go on the offensive on democratic rights. Union powers need to be whittled down; the police and repressive apparatus strengthened; most of all, the state has to be centralised. The alarm bells are already ringing with Scottish MPs threatening to convene a Scottish Assembly. Her promise to abolish the GLC is a sure sign of political weakness — a real confession of doubt that she can inflict a political defeat by simply recapturing the GLC at the polls. There is no question but that this will call forth resistance. The problem for Thatcher is: can it be crushed or thwarted? And the condition of the Labour Party is critical to solving this problem.
For the great and fundamental difference between the Labour Party and any other parliamentary party, no matter how radical, lies in its connections with the trade unions. And the leadership of the Labour Party understands this connection in precisely the opposite way to the ruling class. For the Labour Party leaders, the union connection means that it is the only party able to pacify the unions. For the ruling class, it is the only party able to mobilise the unions: and that is why it must be prevented from coming to office in the midst of a crisis which cannot, as the winter of discontent proved, but provoke workers to action.
The danger for Thatcher is not that Roy Hattersley or even Neil Kinnock might arrive in office in 1988 and jettison Britain's nuclear weapons in a fit of inspired generosity; it is that British workers might place him there so that they can get rid of them. It is therefore critical to Thatcher's strategy — and David Owen's — to dissolve, as thoroughly and efficiently as possible, the connection between the Labour Party and the unions: the connection between Labour and any spirit of resistance.
It is fundamental to Thatcher's prospect of success that she is able to insist, and continue to insist, and be believed, when she says 'there is no alternative': because if there is an alternative, no matter how pathetic or half-baked, in the form of a government which working people feel is theirs, then working people will feel inspired to take resistance to Thatcher to the point where she falls. If there is no alternative, or if the alternative is utterly discredited in the eyes of the majority of workers, then she will be able to drag union leader after union leader into capitulation, isolate strike after strike, grind down the working class always with the same, insistent argument: whatever you say about me, there is nothing else.
Anyone who now discusses strategy for the Labour Party must understand that a political vacuum has been created by this election. Thatcher has not won a popular mandate, despite her landslide in seats. She will confront all who resist her with the demand that they say who is to replace her, or stand accused of anarchy and subversion. All political forces will be driven to answer this question in one way or another. Kinnock's answer is no answer: more of the same, under a younger leader. It is for this reason that all issues of policy, leadership and strategy will now begin to fall within the framework of a new issue in British politics: the political independence of the Labour Party.
There is only one other serious non-socialist alternative for the Labour Party, and it has been clearly spelt out by Frank Chapple: Coalition. Lib-Labism, reborn just in time for Thatcher's return to Queen Victoria, stalks the corridors of Walworth Road. EP Thompson has breathed it into vibrant life in a forthright article in the New Statesman; one half of the Communist Party is energetically pursuing it. It is only a question of time before a serious figure in the Labour leadership raises it, and if they do not, we can be sure that someone in the Alliance will do it for them.
Coalition has a unique virtue: it is acceptable to the ruling class as a second best to Thatcherism. Under a coalition, every dangerous policy can be safely dropped under the wonderful new excuse that although we, of course, desperately want to do it, our partners unfortunately don't ... Coalitionism has a unique vice: it rules out the Labour Party becoming a serious focus for movements of resistance to Thatcher. If the party of the working class intends to enter office alone, every movement of resistance has a clear and practical strategy: win over the trade unions to take joint action to stop Thatcher; and win over the trade unions to impose alternative policies on the Labour Party for when Thatcher has gone. The two go together neatly and efficiently.
But if Labour does not intend to govern, half the effort is dissipated and so the entire enterprise fails. And so comes the insistent, siren voice of EP Thompson and his friends: don't just work on the Labour Party, work on the Liberals as well. But if you're going to work your way through the Liberals, why link up with the unions? Indeed, it becomes positively dangerous to become too identified with sectional, discredited forces such as the dwindling band of Britain's remaining militant trade unionists. And of course, extreme policies will alienate our Liberal friends. The road to coalition is thus the road to capitulation.
The alternative to this capitulation cannot be simply to stand still; simply to try and hold together the old, rotten Labourist politics. This is why Kinnockism is in the long run doomed. The task for the left is to understand that it faces a long-term, strategic battle to defend the political independence of the Labour Party by transforming its relation to the unions and mass movements; by transforming it into a party of action instead of a party of discussion and legislation.
The signs that such a task can be attacked in a serious way are extremely healthy. The Labour Party, far from losing members through the election, has recruited in a big way — and to join the Labour Party in the present climate is an act of extremism. The very fact that the ruling class is unlikely to succeed in imposing Hattersley as leader, much less Healey, is a sign of its weakness whatever Kinnock's future role will be. The left victories in the POEU and NUR and the establishment of Broad Lefts in union after union show that the political debate in the Labour Party is penetrating and intertwining with the battle in the unions on a much larger scale. A growing mass campaigning wing in the YS is taking shape.
Discussion is in train in the now 30-strong Campaign Group of MPs to approach the Broad Lefts Organising Committee for a joint conference. If this happens it will be the first time since 'In Place of Strife' that a parliamentary and trade union left have linked up for battle. Ken Livingstone and Arthur Scargill both came out clearly for extra-parliamentary action and for deepening labour's policies straight after the election. Labour Briefing is attempting to set up a national journal. This left has three tasks, which can be summed up by the proposal to create a mass, campaigning Labour Party to fight the Tories.
First, to construct an organised minority across the labour movement — in the unions and workplaces, constituencies and party leadership — committed to subordinate everything else to the paramount need to organise and link up with action to defend working and oppressed people against Thatcher's onslaught. Second, to draw policy conclusions from this battle: to defend and promote policies within the Labour Party which can serve as a genuine inspiration for the mass struggle by demonstrating Labour's intention to take hold of capitalist wealth and use it for working people; to confront the capitalist war machine and halt its bloodthirsty adventures overseas; and to struggle for the maximum possible extension of democracy and democratic rights against the strengthening and centralisation of the state.
Third, to prepare for a long term battle to place leaderships committed to these objectives at the head of both the Labour Party and the unions, without any fudging and compromising with the Hattersleys and Shores.
In short, to rebuild the Labour Party, bury Labourism!
ALAN FREEMAN is the author of The Benn Heresy, and a member of Labour Against the Witch Hunt steering committee