Letters
Why vote Labour?
Richard Brenner, a leading member of Workers Power (Weekly Worker May 16), asserts that the lack of socialist illusions when workers vote for the Labour Party is not the point. But it is the point! If workers do not expect socialism from Labour, how can the lack of it from a Blair government take them through the experience of betrayal? The tactic of ‘vote Labour’ was used by communists in a situation where huge numbers of militant workers were placing their hopes in Labour to be elected for a genuine workers’ government to transform capitalism.
This was in the 1920s before a number of Labour governments administered capitalism, attacked workers jobs and conditions and undermined social democracy or Labourism. Brenner wants to vote Labour to put the new Labour leaders to the test of government, once again, to expose their unwillingness to do what workers expect of them. The hollowness of this opinion is obvious. Workers have been told by Labour to expect very little. Blair has informed the trade unions the anti-union laws will not be repealed. Unemployed workers await workfare. Students have been promised not grants but loans.
Those on state benefit anticipate the phasing out of cradle-to-grave welfare. Left Labour leaders who have promised the workers something, however small, have been publicly rebuked and humiliated. Blair has taught the union leaders not to place false hope in the paltry minimum wage of £4.15 - the level will be set by whatever is acceptable to the bosses. All this is betrayal at the outset. There is no process of government betrayal to go through. Clause four, the old socialist symbol to fool workers who had illusions in the parliamentary road to socialism, is no longer necessary and has been ditched.
As Mark Harrison, Richard’s comrade on the Workers Power central committee, writes in Trotskyist International (January/February), Blair’s reputation is based on hammering the workers, and facing down the unions. New Labour has made its position clear to workers’: read our lips, no socialism! There is no promise of a special relationship with the workers’ organisations. Harrison correctly observes: “The aim of the new Labour leadership is to obliterate all traces of social democratic reformism”.
So where does that leave the lifeless schema of Workers Power’s thesis on reformism in Permanent Revolution 1 - that “the tactic of ‘vote Labour’ is to put to the test of government the central claim of reformist leaders to satisfy the needs of workers”? The answer is nowhere. This kind of unthinking dogmatism is a substitute for analysing the current specific political circumstances. It should be stored away in a museum for historical empty phrases, such as ‘The Labour Party always moves to the left in opposition’.
But Richard Brenner knows the huge political and historical changes since Lenin’s advice to communists in 1920 to support Labour leaders like a rope supports a hanged man - by voting Labour. Shortly before 1920, arguably, class struggle in Britain came closer to revolution than at any point this century. In 1918 Ramsay MacDonald was compelled to support calls for workers’ councils. Certainly, the Russian revolution inspired workers to believe they could create a socialist society. Even in 1920 Labour leaders were compelled to support calls for direct mass action. This was before the first Labour government.
Richard is unable to free himself from the dogma of ‘vote Labour’. This means he is forced to resort to obscurantism. He writes: “Of course Blair and Henderson [a Labour leader in 1920] articulate the reformist programme in different ways.” What is that again? So different, his comrade Mark Harrison describes new Labour as “a radical break from Labourism, both in its left (Tribunite/Bennite) forms and in its right (Crosland) form”. He correctly anticipates a Labour parliament achieved at the price of diluting everything distinctly Labourite: “New Labour is almost indistinguishable from the pro-European, one-nation Tory Party.”
Mark lets the cat out of the bag when he writes: “At the moment workers believe Blair is their only means of getting rid of the Tories”. In other words, workers are voting Labour as a lesser evil. Workers Power is adapting to the present mentality of the workers by advocating critical support for the Labour Party. This method has nothing in common with the historic communist tactic of voting Labour which was used to develop consciousness.
But Workers Power takes refuge behind the historical Marxist label for the Labour Party as a bourgeois workers’ party. As long as the Labour Party has a link with the trade unions then it still deserves critical support. Despite the profound historical change, in the blinkered Workers Power view nothing changed in the character of the Labour Party.
Mark Harrison looks towards workers fighting back in the future, when a Labour government attacks the class, by applying pressure through the trade union link. The ‘vote Labour’ tactic will unite Workers Power with these workers. Mark’s slogan is: “Preserve the union link! This will be a working class fight against an attempt to create an openly liberal party.” All this is predicated on the assumption that the reformist link with Labour is progressive in itself. That in the first instance workers will fight through the Labour Party. In other words, there is an inevitable reformist stage through which workers’ consciousness has to pass.
But why will workers inevitably see the trade union link with the Labour Party as the only channel to fight the pro-capitalist policies of a Blair government? The experience of Labour governments shows that workers do not turn to the Labour Party when a Labour government attacks workers’ living standards. Why rule out the possibility of workers beginning to accept the leadership of revolutionaries or the SLP? Why does Workers Power stick to those workers who remain loyal to the Labour Party and not support those workers who are breaking with the rotten Labourite tradition?
Workers Power falls in behind the Labour left in acting to ensure or expecting the prospect of a resurgence of the Labour Party as a traditional reformist party via workers applying pressure through the union link. Richard Brenner is keen to avoid charges of fatalism, but his comment that “social democratic illusions are an expression of trade union politics” comes dangerously close to the British communist at the 1920 Second Congress of the Communist International who was criticised by Lenin for saying the Labour Party is the political expression of the trade unions.
For Richard Brenner the danger for revolutionaries is hide-bound sectarianism towards the mass organisation. But the main danger, particularly in the history of Trotskyist groups in Britain, is adaptation to reformism via the social weight of the Labour Party. The Workers Power tactic of a vote for the Labour Party represents a profound adaptation to Labourism.
Dave Hulme
South London
Clarification required
There are two historical views on the left concerning Stalin. One is that he betrayed and led a counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union; the other is that Stalin defended and consolidated the revolution.
In short, ‘the revolution betrayed’ or ‘the revolution defended’. That section of the left which claims Lenin’s heritage has been polarised along these lines since about 1924.
It is obvious that this polarisation represents a fundamental demarcation on the left. Open Polemic argues that those who hold the two opposing views should come together in the same party.
In order to achieve their dream of a multanimous, historically non-specific party, differences can be aired but can never be resolved. In the OP party truth in regard to history will depend on a majority vote. So if a majority believes that, for instance, Stalin defended the revolution, that will be the party line. If they lose their majority, perhaps even by one vote, then the new party line will mean that Stalin betrayed the revolution. This would mean that Marxism could no longer be regarded as a science.
We have put it to the PCC of the Communist Party that it should clarify whether or not it goes along with the Trotskyist argument that Stalin led a counterrevolution in the Soviet Union.
In rushes Bob Smith, the chief architect of the multanimous party theory, in an attempt (Weekly Worker April 18) to criminalise Partisan for trying to find out which of the above views the PCC supports. This reaction seems to turn the whole theory of the multanimous party on its head.
Everyone knows where partisan stands on this issue, and what the position of the TUG is. Bob Smith hides his position behind the theory of the historically non-specific party. Are we now to witness the PCC hiding behind the theory of the non-ideological party? We hope not.
Tony Clark
Partisan
Misunderstanding
A number of recent comments about the Trotskyist Unity Group in recent issues of the Weekly Worker have revealed a misunderstanding of what the TUG is about.
The TUG’s critique of the CPGB programme (Weekly Worker April 11) does not apply only to the CPGB, but is a general critique by the TUG of a certain kind of historical materialism (HM). So the point we are making to, for example, both the CPGB and Workers Power is the need to reflect on HM, and to critique mechanical and dogmatic HM views which fail to develop a more explanatory view of relations between base and superstructure.
Also, the forthcoming TUG critique of the LRCI Trotskyist Manifesto applies just as much to the LRCI opposition as it does to the LRCI majority. It is not philosophical reflection which is idealist, but the real idealism is not to reflect on one’s HM approach.
Phil Walden
TUG
Make your protest
In a letter to your organisation (Weekly Worker April 25) I informed you of a violent attack on members of the exile organisation of the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), Sri Lankan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
I must now inform you of another violent assault on our members. Three Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter members, distributing leaflets with the RCL, were attacked by LTTE stewards at a demonstration in Düsseldorf. They tore away the leaflets and newspapers, verbally abused them and stopped Tamils from reading the leaflet. Approximately 50 LTTE thugs chased the BSA members. They attacked the party stand and used karate techniques to assault BSA members. The LTTE thugs were particularly violent towards our Tamil members. One RCL member was assaulted by four goons who beat him on the ground. Members of IG Medien, the printers union, helped to push back the attackers and protected two RCL members on their way home.
I therefore urge you once again to:
- send a letter of protest to the LTTE, stating your opposition to these attacks and death threats
- publicise this attack and your opposition to it to other associated organisations and in your press and journals.
Dave Hyland
International Communist Party