26.09.1996

Blairism creates its opposition

Labour's shift to the right opens up tremendous possibilities for the SLP

Throughout the TUC and in its aftermath the Labour Party did a professional job of grabbing the headlines. It skilfully used the occasion to forcefully remind the electorate that it is now a safe party of capitalism.

The bosses’ second eleven is rapidly transforming itself into a wholly acceptable party of government, rather than a useful tool for diverting working class militancy into the safer arena of bourgeois parliamentarianism. The likelihood of a Labour victory in the spring is not born out of a class in struggle beating the bosses back and demanding reforms: after all, Labour is promising none. It has much more to do with a completely discredited and, after 17 years in power, ideologically tattered Tory Party.

This does not mean it is all plain sailing for the capitalists. With an economy in long-term decline the system can ill afford to promise any improvements in the living standards and rights for the vast mass of the population. Though militancy is at a low ebb, anger is not. More and more sections of the population experience not only relative pauperisation, as evidenced by the widening gap between top directors and their employees, but also absolute pauperisation, as actual living standards decline.

Anger at declining living standards and attacks on working conditions has bubbled to the surface in a number of disputes, most notably on the railways, in the public sector and the Liverpool dockers dispute. However, the anger has mostly been directed at employers and the Tories with the pressure mostly corked by hope of some sort of change being delivered by a Labour government.

The more the Labour Party has opened its mouth, the less people have expected from it. With the lack of any sense of independent working class strength, it has been accepted as the lesser of two evils. In a period of defeat the class is still on the retreat. But this situation does not have to be permanent; neither does the struggle to reverse the trend have to wait for a Labour government.

The cracks in Labourism are already beginning to open up, as exemplified earlier this year with the formation of the Socialist Labour Party and this month at the TUC. Blairism has created its opposition in the SLP form of Scargillism.

Though the Labour Party team did a brilliant job of distancing itself from the unions at the TUC, it also carried out a not insignificant recruiting job for the SLP. It is reported that the SLP received scores of applications for membership during TUC week, particularly from the delegates.

Blair’s team can be expected to do more of this work for the SLP the closer the election comes. Despite what some leftwing papers say, the Labour Party realises that its election chances rest on proving that capitalism will be safe in their hands. In the absence of any working class opposition Labour is taking this opportunity to return to its Liberal roots. It is carrying out the bourgeoisie’s long sought after aim of declassing society, of wiping any notion of the working class off the map.

Last week’s talk of breaking the trade union link was followed up with a debate kicked off by Kim Howells on dropping the term ‘socialism’. Though the debate in the bourgeois press has been largely vacuous, the potential effect of these moves should not be underestimated, especially in the light of tentative steps towards working class reorganisation, which have been taking place throughout the left, but most dynamically in the form of the SLP.

The pretence towards socialism has always been, to lesser or greater degrees, a necessary one for the Labour Party and indeed for capitalism itself. Labour has now quite successfully marginalised its left wing, at present not necessary for it. Tony Benn last week urged the left not to “upset the modernisers” and Gordon Brown’s attack on child benefit went largely uncontested. Labour’s ability to become a fully-fledged bourgeois party and drop any notion of the working class would be a victory for the bourgeoisie, but it can also be our opportunity to forge independent working class organisation. We should not lose sight of the fact that Labour is quite capable of reinventing its left wing if working class militancy demands it. That has been its historical usefulness for the capitalist system.

The Labour Party’s very formation was born out of capitalist crisis and a crisis in Liberalism. Capitalism could not afford the reforms the class demanded. This was the period of sharp struggles over Ireland, votes for women and the attack on trade unions' right to strike with the Taff Vale judgement in 1901. Capitalism in Britain had to turn to imperialism in order to compete with the rising powers of Germany and the US.

Across Europe workers had turned towards Marxism, yet in Britain the working class was a paradox, moving from Chartism to Liberalism. The Labour Representation Committee formed in 1900 was not a break with Liberalism. The trade union representatives that came together were Liberals ideologically. The Independent Labour Party was prepared to subordinate any socialist programme it had to the task of representation in parliament. Yet something new was being born - Labourism. Built upon the ideology of Liberalism, the Labour Party nevertheless became something else. It represented bourgeois consciousness, but of the trade unions, and in a period of class struggle and class consciousness throughout Europe the working class demanded more than Lloyd George’s ‘New Liberalism’ could accommodate itself to.

Though built on Liberalism, the formation of the Labour Party was nevertheless an important break from it. It was potentially a stepping stone to independent working class political organisation, which is why Lenin described it in 1908 as “the parliamentary representation of the trade unions ... But ... in practice the Labour Party is not a party really independent of the Liberals and does not pursue a fully independent class policy”. He nevertheless argued for its affiliation to the Second International, “because it represented the first step on the part of the really proletarian organisations of Britain towards a conscious class policy and towards a socialist workers’ party” (VI Lenin Collected works Vol 15, London 1973, p234-5).

It was not until 1918 of course that the Labour Party adopted clause four, in order to stave off the threat of a 1917 in Britain. The clause, as we know, has never been implemented, but the fact that it could be dropped at last year’s conference, the fact that Labour can now contemplate the dropping of the term 'socialism' and breaking the union link is more than cosmetic. It represents a general shift to the right in society that Labour is able to key into to carry out the bourgeois crusade.

However, the bourgeoisie will not have it all its own way. The triumphalism at the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European states did not last long. It happened in the context of capitalism’s long decline. The very fact that the Labour Party looks set to become elected next year points to the contradiction. The Tories as the preferred party of capitalism have been unable to weather the storm and the establishment is looking leftwards at the Labour Party as a way out. The Labour Party is moving to the right to meet it with its promises of smashing working class resistance and austerity government.

Yet opposition is already forming in the SLP. Even before an election a significant section of the class, representing a movement of the class, has broken with the Labour Party. In doing this Scargill and elements of the SLP leadership are trying to re-invent old Labour, looking back to the ‘golden years’ of 1945 and seeking to create a party that can remake those reforms and take us forward peacefully to ‘socialism’ in Britain. This is an attractive prospect to thousands who, as the TUC conference showed, are more and more disillusioned with the Labour Party and less and less willing to accept its frontal attacks on the working class for the sake of ‘getting the Tories out’.

The SLP has made modest beginnings in this period of defeat for the working class, but it could sweep up many thousands more. The other parties on the left simply do not have the authority that Scargill and the SLP carry. We can be sure that a Blair government is setting itself up for vicious attacks on the working class. Such attacks could win the SLP not just individual trade unionists, general secretaries and militants, but whole unions.

The problem that faces the working class is that the very ideology of ‘old Labour’ that is winning many to the ranks of the SLP does not have the programme behind it to re-equip the working class. This is no longer 1900 with the ideology of Liberalism being absorbed into that of Labourism. Labourism - as a project to reform capitalism in the interests of the working class - has recently been seen to fail most dramatically in the aftermath of the long post-war boom. Ramsay MacDonald was new; he could be believed. In 1945 through to the 1960s capitalism could afford reforms and, with a push by the working class, ‘socialism’ in Britain could seem possible. In the context of impending capitalist crisis and the failure of the Labourism project, its reinvention cannot convince in the longer term.

However, this is not by any means to write the SLP off. It is without doubt the most significant move of our class in a generation. It has attracted not only those seeking old Labour but Marxists seeking socialist revolution - international working class power as the basis for the liberation of humanity. This poses a vital task for revolutionaries - both those have joined the SLP and those who as yet remain outside - to equip this movement with the scientific programme that can take us to that liberation.

That demands not looking back to Britain’s past periods of temporary prosperity, but harnessing the technological and economic progress of global capitalism today for humanity as a whole. Forging an international working class into a conscious internationalist class that can lay hold of the developments in capitalism that under its system seek to enslave our class further.

This task is as urgent now as it will be in the future, if workers start to move in significant numbers to the SLP. The left must establish itself and gain the right for all to debate the programme of the SLP. There is much room to do that now, but many fear the left and would rather make the SLP a safe house for the trade unions and the ideology of old Labour. If this succeeds, we could be creating a bunker for the class to bury itself in. In a period of defeat this is obviously a danger. But defeat can be turned around if a movement of the class can forge the scientific programme that gives it positive direction.

Marxist science, in order to transform the world, demands democracy. It demands openness, testing out ideas in theoretical and practical struggle. It demands organisation. Revolutionaries should not be afraid of their ideas being unpopular: organised theoretical clarification is at the centre of our struggle today. If we bury the fight for the revolutionary Party we are useless to the class.

Lee-Anne Bates