03.07.1997

A single step forward

The report of the CPGB-organised discussion around the idea of a ‘crisis of expectations’ (see ‘Road to nowhere’ Weekly Worker June 19) has provoked two responses

Bob Pitt, writing below, is on the editorial board of the journal What next?

The Weekly Worker’s recent meeting on the Labour government and the ‘crisis of expectations’ resulted in a wide-ranging discussion that lasted about three and a half hours. So it is not surprising that your report in the issue of June 19 could not cover everything that was said. All the same, you rather distort the arguments I put forward at the meeting.

I do not hold the opinion, which you attribute to me, that there will be no crisis of expectations under a Labour government. What I reject is the view that the euphoria which followed the Tories’ defeat on May 1 generated expectations among Labour-voting workers that there will be radical changes under Labour, with the result that there will be a crisis when these expectations remain unfulfilled. The fact that there has been so little opposition to the Blair government’s essentially rightwing course, and that most Labour supporters are satisfied with the very minor reforms that have been implemented, demonstrates the falsity of this over-optimistic version of the ‘crisis of expectations’ argument.

But this does not mean that Labour supporters have no expectations of improvement under a Labour government. They hope and believe that they will be spared the attacks on their living conditions and basic rights that they suffered during 18 years of Tory rule. It is this expectation which will almost certainly be dashed.

If the Labour leadership sticks to its intentions to keep public spending within the limits set by the outgoing Tory administration, the National Health Service will quickly be driven into a major financial crisis. Over the next three years, either the NHS will suffer the biggest cuts in its history, or the principle of free healthcare will be severely undermined (hence Frank Dobson’s refusal to rule out charging people to see their GP). Public sector pay is another explosive issue, as we can expect to see the government imposing pay ‘restraint’ on a scale unrivalled by the Tories themselves. An eventual confrontation between the Blair administration and sections of the working class who voted it into office therefore seems inevitable.

In fact, when you cut through the verbiage about ‘huge expectations’ and an ‘enormous yearning for change’ in Peter Taaffe’s article in the June issue of Socialism Today, he is not really arguing anything very much different from what I am. But he obviously feels the need to deck out his argument with a bit of ‘onward and upward’ rhetoric.

Presumably this is intended to raise the spirits of his members, the more realistic of whom must be feeling a bit demoralised after the generally abysmal showing of their candidates in the general election and the wreckage of their leadership’s predictions that the ‘Blairisation’ of the Labour Party had opened up favourable conditions for building a new socialist party with significant working class support.

Your report was also mistaken in claiming that I said it was “incorrect to fight for the complete scrapping of all the Tories’ anti-union laws”. What I in fact argued was that it is tactically mistaken to agitate now for the complete abolition of the anti-union laws. There is surely a difference.

For example, as communists, supporters of the Weekly Worker are presumably committed to fighting for the smashing of the bourgeois state apparatus and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But I hardly imagine that they turn up at their trade union meetings and agitate for an immediate armed insurrection. (Mind you, on second thoughts, I would not put it past some of them!)

During the election campaign Tony Blair observed with apparent approval that Britain has the harshest anti-union laws in the western world, and his government evidently intends to keep it that way. Indeed, if they are faced with a clash with the public sector unions over pay, it seems more than possible that they will bring in additional laws of their own, perhaps restricting strikes in essential services.

Support for this position with the labour movement is virtually non-existent outside the top circles of the Labour Party. Most people, even rightwing trade union bureaucrats, believe that there should be changes in the existing legislation, which makes the most basic industrial action extremely difficult within the law and repeatedly threatens the unions with the loss of their funds. It is therefore possible to construct a majority bloc within the movement against the Labour leadership around the question of reforming the anti-union laws. (The relevant slogan, I think, is for ‘the restoration of trade union rights’ or some similar formulation.)

The demand for the complete abolition of the anti-union laws is, by contrast, a minority view within the labour movement. To agitate against Blair’s anti-union policy around this demand is therefore tactically inept, as it automatically hands him a majority in the movement when he rejects it.

The same reasoning applies in the case of the minimum wage. When the government eventually comes up with a figure next year it will probably be around £3.50 an hour. The vast majority of trade unionists support the demand for a minimum wage of half median male earnings - which works out at £4.22 or thereabouts.

Here is the basis for waging an effective struggle, with the backing of the mass of the movement. If you start agitating for £7 an hour, as the Weekly Worker does, you immediately reduce yourself to an ineffective minority which can have no impact on the real struggle that is coming up over the minimum wage.

Militant Labour (aka the Socialist Party) puts forward the demand for £6 an hour, no doubt in order to impress potential recruits with the organisation’s radicalism. But when Roger Bannister of ML stood for the position of Unison general secretary he campaigned on the half-median-male-earnings figure. When he was asked why, he replied that this was the figure around which you could maximise support!

I think he was right. But the obvious question is - what point is there to ML agitating for a demand in their newspaper, if they are forced to abandon it when they actually intervene in the labour movement?

The proposal to build broad alliances around basic demands, which you find so hopelessly minimalist and pessimistic, is in fact the only way to take the class forward in the present circumstances. And a single step forward for the class is, after all, worth a thousand programmes. Sectarian groups like the CPGB/Weekly Worker who reject this approach find themselves paralysed and reduced to sterile propagandism.

Helplessly declaring that nothing much can be done in the real world (where, in Jack Conrad’s words, the working class can be dismissed as existing only “in a limbo state as passive atomised voting fodder for the bourgeoisie”), the comrades around the Weekly Worker seem to believe that we should devote ourselves primarily to the task of keeping alive, in the minds of a very narrowly-defined vanguard, the idea of a Communist Party - a Party which will be built some time in the indefinite future, by forces that do not yet exist. It is the outlook of a quietist millenarian sect, and I cannot think of anything much more pessimistic than that!

Class knuckle-duster

Dave Osler of the Socialist Labour Party

Your account of my remarks at a recent CPGB seminar are factually inaccurate on two points. Please allow me to set the record straight.

I did not argue that a security guard on £3.50 an hour would see a £3.50 minimum wage as a reform. What I did say was that a security guard on £2.40 an hour - along with one million or so other workers on similarly low pay in Britain today - would see £3.50 as a reform. That is surely beyond dispute.

Nor did I argue that a crisis of expectations would be “potentially a weapon for the organised left”. I did say that a legal right to trade union recognition was potentially a weapon for the organised left. This is, you will concede, entirely a different matter.

If the union bureaucracy provides proper resources - if only out of self-interest - and activists have the force of law behind them, the far left can significantly extend its industrial base during the lifetime of the Blair administration by leading a drive to restore union representation. That is a realisable concrete political perspective.           

Lastly, is a call for a British party of recomposition really “unintentionally courting a Chile scenario”? Absolutely not. I have elsewhere (specifically in an extended article on the Socialist Labour Party in What next? earlier this year) explicitly discounted the idea that the SLP will eventually replace Labour as a mass membership party capable of winning a parliamentary majority in bourgeois elections.

I argued instead that

“within two or three years, the SLP is likely to find itself a party of perhaps 5,000-10,000 individual members and a wide ranging periphery at least as large again, grouping together the most advanced workers as the knuckle-duster of the class” (see What next?).

Industrial organisation is the key to the future of the SLP. This will be measured through the strike ballot box, not the general election ballot box.

The only real rider I would add five months on is the fear that the internal situation in the party will deteriorate to the point where the whole project goes belly up.

This is not to discount electoral activity. A socialist slate - hopefully led by the SLP - is capable of winning the same level of five to ten percent support enjoyed by similar parties of recomposition on mainland Europe or the red-green convergence groupings in Scandinavia. But that is not a Chile scenario either.