22.05.1997

Crisis? What crisis...?

Party notes

Phil Hearse of the Socialist Party has opened an important debate with his piece in last week’s paper replying to Jack Conrad’s contribution on Communist Party perspectives post-general election (Weekly Worker May 8).

Will the election of the Labour government bring a crisis of expectations among wide sections of the population and the working class in particular? Unlike others on the left, Phil at least concedes that a spectacular social explosion of some sort is not “likely”. Nevertheless, he writes that the “ditching [of] the Tories opens up the situation and creates new perspectives for the working class” (all quotes from Weekly Worker May 15, unless indicated otherwise).

After the defeats of the 1980s, he writes, “combativity can only be recreated gradually” and thus the ousting of the Tories removes a “huge psychological barrier” and opens possibilities for the workers. Jack Conrad projects a crisis of expectation at an “absurdly high level” in order to rubbish the notion, apparently. More prosaically, Phil suggests that “millions of workers ... expect some kind of change - not millennial, not earth-shattering, not socialism – but at least some improvement ...” These expectations will be inevitably “dashed” - “eventually”, we are assured, “there will be a crisis of expectations, of unfulfilled expectations”.

Used in this way by the left, the category of a ‘crisis of expectations’ loses any scientific value. A bourgeois parliamentary system relies for its viability on illusions being created in the party of opposition. Workers and other sections of society vote for such an alternative because they have expectations that things will get better with the new government - there would be very little point in voting for things to get worse. Within such parameters, the “dashing” of the expectations of the masses does not normally lead to a crisis or anything like it. Instead, voters go through the charade of electing a new government, again in the expectation that it will improve life.

Isn’t this precisely what has happened with the Tories? The expectations of millions of working people who voted Conservative have been cruelly betrayed. They have elected Labour. Where is the crisis? Has the system been paralysed by the demands of the workers?

Hardly. The whole process has all been comfortably contained within the boundaries of ‘normal’ bourgeois politics. It is quite feasible that disenchantment with Labour will prove to be just as ephemeral.

Phil’s position is a strange one. He argues that a Tory victory would have had “profoundly negative” effects on working class morale and combativity. Indeed, all of his contribution underlines the idea that the victory of Labour is an important blow for the working class. Yet he - and his organisation, the Socialist Party - could not actually bring themselves to call for a vote for Blair’s party (which it now describes simply as a bourgeois party), despite the fact that its victory now “opens up the situation and creates new perspectives for the working class”. Why not, I wonder? Surely this would have been the consistent thing to do?

Similarly, Phil is a little off the mark when he accuses us of having a “one-dimensional and non-dialectical approach” to this question. After mechanically telling us that working class combativity can only be rebuilt gradually, “through often small, but accumulating victories” (and the election of Labour marks a seemingly unavoidable stage in that process), he assures us with the authority of someone who knows for a fact that the election of the Tories would have deepened gloom and depressed struggle.

In fact the election of Labour has certainly quieted the mass movement around the national question in Scotland (a process of diffusion that Scottish Militant Labour is actively aiding). The election of the Tories could have brought the movement back onto the streets against the ‘English’ government in Westminster- who knows? Similarly, the Tories’ seemingly intractable problems over Europe would not have been solved by an election victory, no matter how large the margin. Splits in the political establishments may perhaps have provided the masses with space for their own intervention.

None of which lead us to call for a vote for the Tories of course. Our intervention around the general election was premised on the need to split advanced workers away from the central illusion that Phil expresses - that the election of Tony Blair is somehow an unavoidable stage in the recomposition of a fighting workers’ movement. Despite the welcome fluidity on the left and the relatively large electoral intervention of non-Labour left candidates, Phil illustrates despite himself that this core weakness of perspective retains a perniciously strong hold.

Mark Fischer
national organiser