22.05.1997

What sort of crisis?

Lee-Anne Bates challenges Phil Hearse over the content of the left’s ‘crisis of expectations’

Whilst supposedly dispelling the idea that those on the left eagerly awaiting a crisis of expectations really expect that much to happen at all, Phil Hearse, member of the Socialist Party’s national committee, still ends up staking an awful lot on the power of bourgeois democracy to influence mass psychology (Weekly Worker May 15).

Phil’s contribution is most welcome, as he brings the issue of a much touted ‘crisis of expectations’, and what exactly the effect of this election will have on the political environment, into sharp focus. Nevertheless we have to establish exactly what he’s arguing for and against.

At the beginning he attacks Jack Conrad and Weekly Worker journalists for apparently implying that “... it is, at best, a matter of indifference to socialists that a Labour government has been elected”.

It is certainly true to say that most Weekly Worker journalists do not expect the election of the bosses’ second eleven on a bourgeois parliamentary ‘landslide’ - ie, 44% of votes cast on a 71.3% turnout - to act in an automatic way as a kind of therapy, or electoral healing (gradual or otherwise), on atomised and passive workers, to bring them round from a long sleep.

The working class in Britain has not been on the offensive demanding its rights and forcing the bosses to make concessions, even through parliament. So unless you are the Socialist Workers Party (which has been trying to convince itself that working class struggle has been on the upturn since 1992), it is this kind of dramatic and artificial transformation that you are talking about if you confidently predict that the election of a Labour government will produce an immediate effect on working class self-activity.

Personally I cannot predict whether the working class in Britain as a whole will start to organise itself for socialism, around what issues or why, whether it will be so fed up with Labour that sections will be drawn in a chauvinist or viciously right wing direction, whether British capitalism will be able to ride out the storm of European integration and the working class will accept further attacks, unable to defend its own interests or build a political alternative to Labour (‘After all it is a Labour government - at least it isn’t the Tories hitting us with a big stick’).

Is the election of a Labour government then a matter of indifference to socialists? Clearly not. But what we must do is to look at what sort of government has been elected, in what sort of political conditions, and centrally in what context this places the struggle for socialism.

Though Phil Hearse calls our response to the election a “one-dimensional, non-dialectical perspective”, we have been clear that the direction of the Labour Party and its effect both on the revolutionary and reformist left, as well as on the bourgeoisie, has opened up new political terrain with a potential fluidity already evidenced.

As Phil will have read in the Weekly Worker over the last year or so, we have constantly focussed on Labour’s increasing and dramatic shift to the right which accompanied the crisis in social democracy, and the breakdown of the social democratic consensus which was part and parcel of the long post-war boom. Most importantly we pointed to the effect this has had on the left - this is where a certain fluidity has begun to be seen.

A section of our class has broken with Labour to form the Socialist Labour Party. Militant Labour has cleaved into two separate organisations as a result of the movement in Scotland. In England and Wales it has changed its name to the Socialist Party, hoping to transform itself into a ‘small mass party’. The Socialist Workers Party has been wrong-footed by the formation of the SLP and appears disorientated, though still intact, with its passive and fence-sitting ‘Vote Labour or socialist’ line for the general election. The Alliance for Workers Liberty, anticipating the de-Labourisation of Labour in government, poses the formation of a new Labour Representation Committee. Much of the Trotskyist left has been jumping through ever decreasing and contorted hoops to justify keeping its umbilical cord firmly tied to the Labour Party - a visibly painful process.

In addition we have seen contradictory phenomena: on the one hand society has moved to the right, with the Labour Party able to transform itself and stand on its most right wing manifesto ever, with an overtly Thatcherite agenda, in the absence of any opposition from the left or any threat of working class anger exploding. On the other hand we have seen sections of the bourgeoisie actually moving to the left and welcoming a Labour government. As the Tory Party’s 18 years of rule over an increasingly ailing economy unravelled to display the worst kind of hypocrisy, short-termism, sleaze and corruption, the new right wing, clean-cut face of Labour beamed out by Blair has seemed a positive improvement.

So Phil is right to point out that in a certain sense this has been an extraordinary election. I can assure him that our comrades do not live their lives guided by carefully prepared dogma, or limited, though sometimes effective slogans, such as ‘Labour, Tory both the same’. Even I enjoyed the spectacle, throughout the night of May 1, of watching Tory after Tory fall. Yes, the political map had changed on May 2 and people were reeling at the thought of a new government after 18 years.

But on the other hand, what a bore this election was. Who rushed out to get their newspapers and switched on the radio every morning to discover the daily issues during the long drawn out election campaign? Who waited with baited breath on May 2 to hear how Labour was going to overturn 18 years of unrelenting misery?

Phil says in his article that he is not expecting a workplace explosion - just the dashing of people’s very minimal expectations of change. It was notable that the press for a week after the election was full of the joys of a new government. But what did this amount to? The cabinet calling each other by their first names; the Blair children helping to move furniture; what would happen to Humphrey the cat? - and on the day of the queen’s speech, the moment that was supposed to have us all gasping in awe ... the Blairs walking to the house. Yes, a genuine sense of excitement or would curiosity be better? - but the sheer banality of it all should tell us something about the expectations that society as a whole, let alone the working class, has in New Labour.

So what is Phil talking about? I can agree that the working class has some very minimal and very cynical expectations of a Labour government - this is hardly worth arguing about. What is worth arguing about, because it effects our activity in this period, is whether this at the moment seems likely to produce a crisis. Though Phil says he is not expecting the kind of pre-revolutionary movement of proportions that would normally be understood as a crisis, he is expecting a crisis of some sort.

Socialism Today appears to have little doubt about the impending crisis. Though it says in rather Aesopian manner, “Later, the depth of their disillusionment will be proportionate to the heights of their present illusions”, the point is made in the context of the Labour ‘landslide’ “itself raising expectations”. It goes on:

“But the ramparts of Blair’s electoral victory, while appearing to make the government impregnable in parliamentary terms, will not prevent a rising tide of opposition, social movements and workers’ struggles ... Without a shadow of doubt, the Blair government will come into collision with workers, young people, and the dispossessed of the inner cities” (Socialism Today May 1997).

Perhaps we need to define ‘crisis’, or perhaps Phil is just trying to have it both ways - the working class does not expect anything much of Labour, it is not on the offensive, but surely to god it must get angry and fight back now its ‘own’ party is attacking it. But this is precisely what the Weekly Worker is attempting to refute. Yes, we have noticed something has changed in the political landscape. No, we do not think that the election of a Labour government, under these conditions, will “without a shadow of doubt” lead to a clash of workers with the government. The preconditions for such a clash are nowhere to be seen at present, which is not to suggest that under different circumstances they could not arise.

The Socialist Partyis not alone in this view, as we quoted last week in ‘Left expectant after Labour victory’. The Socialist Workers Party and the Workers Power group perhaps go even further - whether from naivety, blinding optimism or simply patronising their readers - arguing respectively: “Many working class people now believe that their time has come”; and “Blair’s victory is our victory! a victory for millions of working class people” (Socialist Review May 1997 and Workers Power May 1997).

This is in fact the second strand to Phil’s argument. That the election of a Labour government somehow in and of its very limited self will create better “preconditions” for struggle because morale has been lifted.

Yet this is a very mechanical and almost psychological view of history. Phil worries that another Tory victory would have increased the feeling of “doom and gloom” in the class and “reinforced the idea that things can’t change, that the most reactionary forces in society always win”.

Is the psychological barrier of the Tory government supposed to be a peculiarly British phenomenon? Phil chastises Jack Conrad for citing the working class in France and Germany fighting against conservative governments, while under Labour in Australia there was no such upturn. Perhaps 1926 is going back too far to look at the contradictory circumstances that lead to workers’ struggle, but what about the miners’ Great Strike - under a Tory government - in 1984, or even the anti-pit closure campaign in 1992, a bitter and desperate battle against an already weak and discredited government? Surely the lack of working class confidence owed little to the strength and credibility of the “most reactionary forces in society”.

Incidentally why do you suppose, Phil, that any working class recovery must happen gradually, step by step, strike by strike, piecemeal reform by piecemeal reform? What was to say that 1926, 1972 or 1974, Paris 1968, or Britain 1984 were futile and doomed to fail because the working class had not built up its confidence and organisation piece by piece over years of struggle? No doubt the lack of strong revolutionary organisation was a central factor in their limitations, but sections of the class were moved spontaneously, almost from nowhere in some instances, to take on and even bring down the government.

Personally I do not think that the working class even as individuals are as stupid or as suggestible as you imply. The tide of working class struggle is much more complicated and, as you say, does not move like a graph in reaction to the whims of the bourgeoisie and its rule.

I find it a little incredible to suggest that the election of this New Labour government will give the working class any more sense of the power of its own self-activity to make real change in society than the election of another Tory one would. ‘Thank god the idiots didn’t vote the Tories in again’ may be a common feeling, but do we really believe that a working class whose only hope of change is through bourgeois parliamentary elections is a class imbued with a sense of its own power? This to me rather suggests a profound sense of the “doom and gloom” that you talk about. Then you have to redefine the ‘crisis of expectations’ away so that it merely means that people will be pissed off and may or may not go on strike, may or may not join fascistic parties, in order to reject any meaningful definition, which the left quite clearly has in mind to one degree or another, of a feeling amongst an organised working class that “power should be theirs”.

Any genuine crisis of expectations would be a potentially pre-revolutionary situation, if the government and the constitution was challenged. If the working class genuinely expected fundamental change from the mechanisms of bourgeois rule, then surely it must look to other means if these fail. This is indeed a real possibility in Scotland, the only place where you can genuinely talk about the possibility of a crisis of expectation arising out of Labour’s sop parliament.

Of course any potentially revolutionary situation can only be made real if it is made conscious - that is what the name, the Communist Party of Great Britain, expresses: the class organised at the highest possible level in order to smash the state which oppresses it and take society as a whole towards communism.

What else would you have us call the Partyof the working class?