12.06.1997

Truth and invention

Blair’s government has created a crisis of invention on the left but not a crisis of expectations amongst the masses, argues Jack Conrad

It is understandable why those left groups committed to ‘vote labour ... but’ invent a crisis of expectations. A passive and atomised electorate is not allowed to merely choose the ‘lesser evil’. In the comrades’ schema voting Labour must be a class act, joined organically to the socialist future. Otherwise the mechanical programmes of the pro-Labour left would lose all validity, would stand exposed as nothing more than they are. Miserable recipes for the opportunist art of the possible.

So rather than face the truth about themselves and society at large a fantasy world is conjured up. There was an “unconscious class vote”. Society is “decisively” shifting to the left. There are “massive hopes and dreams”. More, the parliamentary majority for New Labour means the “sense” that socialists are “in a minority has gone”. That despite Blair’s big business friends, proclamations and appointments and a blatantly pro-capitalist manifesto.

From the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain to the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, and from the Socialist Workers Party to the New Communist Party they wax lyrical about the new, almost revolutionary, mood brought about by Tony Blair’s election triumph on May 1. Parallels are even drawn between France 1936 and the situation today in Britain. Supposedly, many working people “now believe their time has come”.

The latest edition of the SWPs Socialist Review speaks for the lot. According to the editorial “though the post-election euphoria has calmed down, the expectations vested in Tony Blair’s government remain very high.” So “high” that its “activists” report “increased” attendance at union meetings. Heavens. The bosses must be atremble with fear. Tony Cliff reckons we are on the threshold of a huge clash between the new Labour government and the working class. For him there exists an “ideological crisis in Britain” which is rooted in “the fact that millions of workers want big changes and Tony Blair refuses to fight for a change”.

This heady stuff serves to excuse both the perennial ‘vote Labour’ call and current SWP dogma. There has been, the SWP insists, a “decisive shift to the left in British society, in particular since 1992, which helped Labour sweep to power” (Socialist Review June 1997).

Remember, this is the very same organisation which in 1984 - at the height of the miners’ Great Strike - pessimistically described that historic clash of class against class as “an extreme example of what we call the downturn”! As the Tories deployed all the might of the state, as miners fought with serried ranks of riot police, as hit squads targeted scabs, as support committees organised advanced workers throughout the country the SWP treacherously dismissed demands for a general strike out of hand. Yet in 1992 the SWP discovered and resurrected the hoary old WRP slogan: ‘TUC off your knees - call the general strike!’. Since then we have been living though an upturn in the class struggle. Awkward government statistics which show record lows in strike activity are argued into thin air by the SWP’s ingenious intellectuals in service of the line.

Reality and SWP dogma clearly only have an episodic relationship. Optimism and pessimism are merely two sides of SWP sectarianism. The SWP flips from one to the other the instant Cliff decides a propaganda change will help build his ‘small mass party’. The general interests of the working class movement and its need for the unvarnished truth never enter his peasant-like mind. For Cliff only his little patch counts.

Let me restate my case against the pro-Labour left’s thesis of an imminent crisis of expectations.

The most tenuous evidence is marshalled to support the thesis that Blair has, in spite of himself, created a “wild upsurge of hope and expectation”. Take the modest scenes in and around Downing Street on May 2. They were surely no different from those we have witnessed after any normal general election since the dawn of mass parliamentary politics in Britain. Joyous party workers were there along with a bunch of the curious, the tourist and the loyalist. Naught compared with the nationwide celebrations of 1945 - themselves hardly an augury of revolution or even a big upsurge in class struggle.

The editorial commentary of Workers Liberty - journal of the AWL - is not alone in citing the crowd that gathered to witness Blair’s presidential entry into No10 as being “representative of feeling throughout the country”; feelings, let it not be forgot, that are supposed to herald a social explosion (Workers Liberty May-June 1997).

Those in Downing Street itself were, of course, the carefully selected, ticket-holding cadre of New Labour. There was nothing spontaneous about them. As planned by the Mill bank choreographers they patriotically waved their little Union Jacks and cheered, “Tony, Tony, Tony” right on cue. That is not to say they were not genuine in their enthusiasm. Man and woman they look forward to swift personal advancement. Getting snout into trough. Not least thanks to Thatcher, prime minister Blair has within his gift quango posts and government sinecures by the tens of thousands. The middle ranking Blairites certainly believe their day has come.

What of those who by their own volition gathered on the day? What was their mood? Did it hold the promise of a coming social explosion?

Funnily enough, Workers Liberty describes them - those they spoke to - as “benign and complacent and happily expectant”. These people expect “Blair to be better than his promise”. Surely this is not saying much comrades. After all, Blair under-promised at every opportunity. The unemployed, the pensioners, the disabled were offered pain not plenty. Blair did as much as he could to reassure and court the ruling class. No tax increases for the rich. On Gordon Brown’s spending projections the welfare state will be left to slowly wither. Tory anti-trade union laws will effectively remain in place. The changes “we propose”, Blair told The Times,“would leave British law the most restrictive on trade unions in the western world” (March 31 1997).

The market is Blair’s totem. To assuage Mammon he pledges to make Britain and its people competitive. Hence “education, education, education” - ie, more soulless homework, more arbitrary league tables, more lifeless technical facts drummed into the living heads of our children. Hence the introduction of compulsory ‘training’ for our youth. Blair has a programme to create a pliable, flexible and easily exploitable workforce.

Labour’s enormous parliamentary majority has had The Guardian’s Hugo Young, and other similar liberal bourgeois pundits, claiming that “the millions who produced a result that a new generation will look back on rather as their parents did on 1945” (The Guardian May 3 1997). Cliff too links 1945 and 1997. “Both in 1945 and 1997 Labour voters voted for radical change” he gushes, seemingly oblivious to the facts of today (Socialist Review June 1997).

One thing is for sure. In 1945 Labour could promise and deliver. Now it does not promise and cannot deliver. Capitalism, British capitalism included, is in a pre-general crisis period. The future is slump, inter-state antagonism and social dislocation. There can be no re-run of the post-1945 great boom which ameliorated class contradictions and laid the material base for the social democratic state. Whatever the subjective intentions of Blair. Whatever the mood of the masses.

In the general election of 1945 the politics of the home front were given an electoral mandate and made into a social settlement. British imperialism was exhausted but victorious. There was a strong sense of national pride. In 1940 Britain stood alone against the Axis powers. Now Germany was defeated. Hitler dead. The surrender of Japan a matter of time. There was also a radical mood. World War II was fought in the name of democracy and under the ideological guise of anti-fascism. The entry of the USSR into the war provided a definite socialistic colouration. There was widespread admiration for the self-sacrifice and fighting capacity of the Red Army and the way the USSR organised its economy. Britain’s other big ally was the New Deal USA of Franklin Roosevelt. America’s message was “freedom” not “free enterprise” (R Miliband Parliamentary socialism London 1973, p273).

Britain’s war effort owed little or nothing to the promotion of price competition and the labour market. The operation of the law of value was temporarily suspended in the long term interests of capital. There was unprecedented state intervention and control. Every available person was mobilised either into the armed forces or the workplace. Unemployment was abolished at a stroke.

The Conservative Party was closely identified in the popular mind with the appeasers and the privileged. Churchill the great warmonger “was easily distinguished from the Conservative politician” (ibid p272). Labour benefited from and articulated popular radicalism. It promised to maintain the state capitalist planning, cooperation and solidarity of the wartime years. Labour’s defining slogan was ‘no return to the 1930s’. Prime minister Clement Attlee won his landslide parliamentary majority on the basis of a programmatic undertaking to really make a land fit for heroes. Full employment would be guaranteed. There would be housing for all, a comprehensive national health service and a top-down extension of nationalisation. For those millions inspired by the economic-military achievements of 1939-45, Labour’s clause four and Stalin’s five-year plans, Attlee promised socialism.

Attlee’s social democratic socialism was anti-socialism. The reforms he introduced were designed to pacify a radicalised working class, to prevent a rerun of the industrial militancy that rocked the established order in the wake of World War I. In other words, change to prevent change. Nevertheless when put in place the post-World War II social democratic settlement did in certain ways anticipate socialism - albeit bureaucratically, pervertedly and negatively.

There was no return to the unrest of 1918-26 because there was no return to the 1930s. In the years 1945-51 unemployment was ‘frictional’. It never passed a quarter of a million. There was a huge construction programme: 200,000 council houses were built. The NHS was established as a free at the point of use service. Real wages and living standards increased year on year.

These achievements were possible almost entirely due to the fact that the genuine victor in World War II was US imperialism - which had the biggest and most dynamic accumulations of capital. The system could afford to give concessions. Unlike the aftermath of World War I, instead of being added to, the protectionist colonial empires were carefully dismantled (with the partial exception of the French empire). Apart from Stalin’s ‘evil empire’ capital could freely roam, dominate and exploit the planet. Herein lay the objective conditions for the post-World War II long boom and the ability of the system to meet and at least partially satisfy the expectations and aspirations of the masses.

Capital develops through an endless cycle of booms and slumps. Inexorably one phase gives way to another. The post-World War II boom had to come to an end. It did. Despite the anti-crisis economics of Keynesianism the long boom finally petered out in the late 1960s. The ignominious collapse of bureaucratic socialism will not save it from the inevitable. No one - not even the Chicago school - seriously believes that world capitalism is about to enter a new golden age. Indeed our analysis leads us to conclude that the long post-1970 stagnation, albeit with the occasional and fleeting upward oscillations, is but the prelude to an unprecedented general crisis.

Hence we are neither in, nor are we heading towards conditions whereby the system can readily make concessions. On the contrary, capital accumulation necessitates a continuation and intensification of the Thatcherite counterreformation against the tattered remnants of the social democratic settlement. Effectively that is Blair’s master plan. That is why Sir David Simon, formerly of BP, is Minister of Trade and Competitiveness. That is why Frank Field has been put into the Department of Social Security to “think the unthinkable”. No wonder New Labour is supported by The Sun, Financial Times and Lord Rothermere. No wonder Blair receives discreet plaudits from Baroness Thatcher.

What of Blair’s landslide and the daft notion pushed by the SWP that socialists are somehow no longer in a “minority”. As with Thatcher’s crushing majorities in the 1980s, Blair’s is a parliamentary not a popular phenomenon. It is the result of the United Kingdom’s undemocratic first-past-the-post system. Labour’s share of those who voted on May 1 was 44% compared with the Tories 31% and the Liberal Democrats 17%. That minority resulted in an enormous army of 419 MPs-the Tories only have l65 and the Liberal Democrats 46.

The sad fact of the matter is that ordinary people have extremely low expectations; expectations no different from any bog-standard Tweedle-dee, Tweedle-dum election. If expectations were soaring to extreme heights we surely would be seeing real evidence of it in mass demonstrations, big offensive strikes and the rapid growth of the organisations of the revolutionary left. If Labour’s expected parliamentary majority had produced that outcome - which every Marxist would dearly love to see - then our tactic of not voting Labour but supporting left alternatives would have been very wrong. I would today be demanding a thorough rethink in the ranks of the CPGB. But I am not.

The only section of society that imagines we are on the threshold or in the midst of a great trade union or workplace explosion is the pro-Labour left. Within the sects embattled leaders try to keep-up the activist’s commitment and morale by directly correlating the election of a social democratic government with an upturn in the class struggle.

Social life is far more complex. Needless to say, as proved by any number of recent elections - in Australia, Europe and the USA - there is no mechanical or automatic relationship between the class struggle and the colouration of a bourgeois government. Workers in Clinton’s USA remain painfully weak. Labourite Australia under Bob Hawke saw a steep downturn in strike action. Yet in ‘conservative’ Germany the opposite happened.

A crisis of expectations occurs when the masses are convinced that life can and must be made better - that the regime is obsolete, that in some way power should be theirs. Under such conditions of optimism and self-confidence the election of a left reformist government can act as a trigger.

Let us take the example of France 1936 quoted by various pro-Labour left comrades. In April-May 1936 France voted in a popular front government. Even before the new socialist prime minister Leon Blum formally took up his duties the country was swept by strikes and sit-ins. The workers, said Trotsky from his Norwegian place of exile, sought to “assist” the government using their own methods (L Trotsky Whither France? New York 1968, p153). Managers and their staff were kicked out or on occasion locked-up in their offices. At its height there were some 2 million workers on strike. This was done with neither initiative nor encouragement from the top. “In vain the leaders of the socialist and communist parties and the Confederation of Labour pleaded with the strikers to resume work” (W Shirer The collapse of the Third Republic London 1969, p317).

Revolution was possible but there was no Bolshevik Party. So after the trade unions were given legal recognition, and terrified employers agreed two weeks annual paid leave, a 40-hour week and a 33% increase in wages, the workers reluctantly ended their occupations and returned to their jobs.

The bourgeoisie had lost a battle but survived to put iron into its soul. Counterrevolution is the punishment for those who fail to carry through revolution. Marshall Petain successfully carried out his ‘purge’ of French society in collaboration with the invading Nazis in 1940 - shades of 1871.

Everything we know about British society - the general election included - tells us that as a whole things still show a right shift. There is no working class political independence and little militant trade union activity. The period of reaction continues unabated.

Nevertheless within the bleak picture there exists a striking paradox. The bourgeoisie - or sections of it - has shifted to the left. Richard Branson personifies the zeitgeist. So quiet is the working class that liberal England is in danger of being reborn. Blair’s party is hardly distinguishable from Gladstone’s in the late 19th century and today’s Democratic Party in the USA. New Labour might retain the trade union link but it serves as the left wing of the bourgeoisie. After the wilderness years of Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock there has been a restoration of two-party politics in an almost pure bourgeois form.

As I have said before, the bourgeois workers’ party is for Marxists a category that is transient and thus imbued with movement and contradiction. Only for the ‘vote Labour but ...’ sects is it fixed, immutable, metaphysical. In the early years of the 20th century the Labour Party undoubtedly represented a welcome and highly significant break by organised workers from the Liberal Party. The giant British working class stirred from its catatonic sleep. That is why Lenin and Kautsky sponsored Labour’s affiliation to the Second International. Though the leadership consisted of nauseating opportunists, though they practiced and preached class collaboration, its base was to be encouraged to move further in a progressive direction - ie, in the direction of establishing a genuine workers’ party.

What might have developed organically though the structures of the Labour Party long ceased to be a viable strategy or a realistic prospect. Since World War I when the Labour Party fatefully rallied to support British imperialism’s war effort - in l916 its leaders accepted seats in Lloyd George’s war cabinet - the bourgeois pole of the contradictory equation has been increasingly dominant to the point of being over-arching. Every Labour government has added to the trend. With Blair and his expected internal Labour Party constitutional changes in October, what has been quantitative looks set to become qualitative.

We should not expect the trade union bureaucracy to be cast aside, Blair is not so foolish. Nevertheless state funding of parties, a much reduced bloc vote and enhanced powers for the leader could well transform the situation. Fetishising the link as a thing in itself is to ignore or downplay the crucial role of politics. After all, no one would seriously claim that because the presidents and general secretaries of various Christian Democratic trade unions have seats on the executives of various Christian Democratic parties, that makes the latter bourgeois workers’ parties. The same can be said about fascist parties and trade unions. Le Pen has his own trade unions, for example in the police force. Does that mean the Front National is a workers’ party?

Our task is not to invent illusions in the Labour government and the Labour Party. The task of Marxists, of revolutionaries is to build the alternative. This can only be done if we face reality and begin to organise ourselves at the highest level possible.