15.05.1997

New government, new perspectives

Phil Hearse, a member of the Socialist Party’s national committee, replies to Jack Conrad in last week’s paper

In outlining his view of the perspectives which underpin the CPGB’s ‘Summer Offensive’ (Weekly Worker May 8), Jack Conrad makes a series of one-sided and tendentious comments.

At the centre of this assessment is the question of whether the election of a Labour government opens up new opportunities for the working class and the political left. Jack Conrad says:

“The only section of society that fancies we are on the threshold of great trade union or workplace explosion are groups such as the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party and Workers Power ... Needless to say, as proved by any number of recent elections - in Australia, Europe and the Americas - there is no mechanical or automatic relationship between the class struggle and the coloration of a bourgeois government. Workers in Clinton’s USA remain painfully weak. Labourite Australia under Bob Hawke saw a big downturn in strike action. Yet in ‘conservative’ France and Germany the opposite happened.

“A crisis of expectations occurs when the masses are convinced that life can and must be better, that the constitution is obsolete, that in some way power should be theirs” (Weekly Worker May 8).

Comrade Conrad then goes on to explain the 1936 general strike and factory occupations in France. The strong implication of everything he argues - like other Weekly Worker writers - is that it is, at best, a matter of indifference to socialists that a Labour government has been elected. Thatcherite neo-liberalism remains in place, the swing to the right remains in place, trade union activity is at a low ebb and the left is very weak.

This is a one-dimensional, non-dialectical perspective. The issue of whether expectations exist among the working class for change cannot be reduced to whether we are on the verge of a “great trade union or workplace explosion” of 1936 proportions - which no one sensible thinks is likely. The question of the effect on working class consciousness of the election of a Labour government is a more complex question than that. Millions of workers who voted Labour expect some kind of change - not millennial, not earth-shattering, not socialism - but at least some improvement in the NHS, education, unemployment, a reasonable minimum wage, etc. Even if Gordon Brown pours some windfall tax and lottery money into the NHS and the schools, over time these expectations will be dashed. In the material conditions of British and world capitalism today, that can be the only possible outcome. Eventually there will be a crisis of expectations, of unfulfilled expectations.

Second, does the election of a Labour government create better morale among the working class, better preconditions for struggle? Let’s pose the question the other way round: suppose the Tories had won again? Suppose they had won by a large margin? What would have been the effect on workers’ morale and combativity then? Only a sectarian lunatic could believe that it would not have had profoundly negative consequences. A moment’s thought will reveal that in fact it would have deepened the feeling of gloom and doom, reinforced the idea that things can’t change, that the most reactionary forces in society always win, and so on.

Outside of world-historic events, the morale and combativity of the working class won’t go from the defensive and heavy defeats to spectacular and generalised offensive struggles in one fell swoop. When the working class has suffered the kind of defeats which occurred in Britain in the 1980s, combativity can only be recreated gradually, through new experiences of struggle, through often small, but accumulating victories, through a renewal - including a generational renewal - of the working class and its militant sectors. That obviously won’t occur overnight. The preconditions for this process to begin have only been improved by the ousting of the hated Tories. A huge psychological barrier to the working class moving forward has been sloughed off.

Jack Conrad poses the issue of the rebuilding of workers’ combativity, and the question of disappointed expectations, at an absurdly high level. His ‘preconditions’ for a crisis of expectations (which include no confidence in the constitution and the feeling among the workers that “power should be theirs”) sounds like a popular rewrite of Lenin’s famous account of the conditions for a pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situation. Of course we are way off that; but we are not way off the gradual unravelling of the optimism among many workers surrounding the Blair project.

Disillusionment with a rightwing social democrat government can go left or right of course. A lot depends on whether the class struggle and the Marxist left can establish a viable, coherent, combative and sufficiently united pole of attraction capable of outdistancing challengers from the right and far right.

Comrade Conrad is right at the most abstract level. There is no automatic correlation between workers’ combativity and the complexion of particular bourgeois governments. You cannot generate a chart like a table of logarithms which show you ‘rightwing social democratic government = workers’ disillusionment, plus outflanking of the government to the left’. But we are not talking at the most abstract level; we are talking about Britain now, with the whole history of the Tories since 1979, the monumental struggles against their attacks and the historic defeats on workers’ organisation, consciousness and combativity that they inflicted. Millions of workers now think (or at least hope) that, despite scepticism about Blair, that it is the end of a very dark age. Reality will prove more complicated than that; and this disillusionment will help create the preconditions for the construction of an alternative. This is not an original or particularly profound point; it’s just that comrade Conrad doesn’t seem to have grasped it.

For Marxists of course, what attitude to take in elections is entirely a matter of tactics. In the general election the most important thing for socialists to do was raise the banner of socialism through their own candidates, in a situation where the overall result was always likely to be a heavy Labour victory. But thousands of workers who agreed with the socialist critique of Blair voted Labour. This was shown in Folkestone, where the Socialist Party’s Eric Segal got just 280 votes, but where the Socialist Party council election candidates got over 500! In other words, in this constituency alone some hundreds who were prepared to agree politically with the left nonetheless prioritised sticking another nail in the Tories’ coffin in the parliamentary elections. This of course was understandable. Ditching the Tories opens up the situation and creates new perspectives for the working class.

Thus the votes for the Socialist Party and the SLP were not an accurate guide to political support for socialist ideas; the vote was squeezed downwards by the desire to defeat the Tories. By contrast, the vote for the British National Party and far right organisations was localised to a few areas. For the moment at least its support and influence is much more marginal that that of the socialist left. That shouldn’t lead to complacency. One of the key conditions for establishing a viable socialist alternative to New Labour is a dynamic of unity, towards the establishment of a new broad socialist workers’ party.

Finally, as someone expelled from the Young Communist League in 1963 for raising awkward questions about the Soviet Union (“actions harmful to the League”), I am again perplexed about how comrade Conrad poses the ‘reforging’ of the Communist Party of Great Britain - one of the first of the Comintern parties to be Stalinised, always mired by the propagandism and syndicalism of its predecessor parties, a party with a dreadful and discredited history. Jack Conrad says he doesn’t want the CPGB of 1920, 1926, 1945 or 1977. To be logical, it means he means that he doesn’t want the CPGB at all, reforged or otherwise. If you must make use of the heritage and tradition of the British workers’ movement, why make reference to a party which bitterly fought against those determined to defend revolutionary Marxism?