17.10.1996

Horribly wrong

Around the left

After what seems a long absence, Workers News, publication of the Workers International League,has hit the streets again. This is only to be welcomed, as the liquidation of yet another leftwing publication/group would clearly be retrogressive - though not unexpected given the nature of the times. What is not to be welcomed, however, is the routinist, ‘join-the-dots’ political analysis we have encountered so many times before in the pages of Workers News.

At a quick glance, it may seem that the WIL is more or less on the ball. The front page article, headlined ‘Blair’s bosses’ charter’, impatiently brushes aside the idle speculation of the Socialist Workers Party that a Blair government will have a two-year ‘honeymoon’. Quite correctly, Workers News states:

“But the point is not just to sit back and wait for developments to unfold. Socialists should be putting forward concrete fighting demands now and preparing for the battles ahead” (October-November).

Unfortunately, it all goes horribly wrong from here on. After pointing out the obvious - which is that millions of workers will be voting Labour “not with the expectation that a Labour government will lead to enormous change, but that it will reverse the worst aspects of Tory rule” - Workers News puts its intellectual/ideological head in the sand and proclaims: “Socialists won’t win an audience by simply rubbishing these illusions and refusing to vote Labour”.

Naturally, there is a relative truth there. If leftwing groups “simply” dismissed Labour without providing any sort of ‘electoral’ alternative, by sinking into abstentionism/boycottism, then of course they will not find an audience. But that only re-emphasises the supreme importance of challenging Labour, not of throwing our energies into “building a socialist campaign for a Labour victory”.

Fight racism! Fight imperialism! is up to its old tricks again too. After stupidly calling New Labour’s manifesto “the road to social fascism” in the last issue, it decides to makes itself look even sillier. It now tells us that New Labour is a “ruthless, totalitarian party” and that Blairism is a “form of populist totalitarianism” (October/November).

It also makes an elementary blunder when it states that New Labour “has a free hand to establish the sort of dictatorship of capital that is a precondition to salvaging British imperialism’s fortunes”. Surely we live under the “dictatorship of capital” right now, comrades from the Revolutionary Communist Group? Workers’ Liberty comes out with a howling ‘blunder’ as well in an appalling article on the New Labour, talking about how a “range of possible ‘workers’ governments’ are possible - from 1945 Labour to the Russian Soviet government of October 1917” (October).

Sadly, these groups appear to be imprisoned in their respective political ghettos, becoming less and less useful for the working class movement.

Don Preston