08.07.1999
Auto-Labourism in crisis
Almost without exception the left enthusiastically called for a Labour vote on May 1 1997 - the SWP being a stock example. The habitual reasoning was eminently simple. But profoundly wrong. After nearly two decades of Tory government the election of New Labour would trigger a crisis of expectations.
Nothing of the kind materialised. Three main factors explain the predictable outcome.
Firstly, at this historic juncture, the working class no longer asserts itself politically. The class that found an expression in Labourism for 80 years at present exists sociologically, as wage slaves and voting fodder. But in no sense as a subject - ie, maker - of history. On a world scale both ‘official communism’ and social democracy have suffered devastating ideological defeats at the hands of neo-liberal capitalism.
Secondly, in Britain Margaret Thatcher shifted the balance of class forces to a degree never witnessed before in this century. Over the last 10 years strike days have been ratcheted down to an all-time low.
Thirdly, in opposition Tony Blair did everything to reduce expectations to zero. Hence the mass of voters rightly believed that little of significance separated the two main parties vis-à-vis working class rights and living conditions.
Only the sects invested high hopes. Not surprisingly then it is not New Labour which is in the midst of a crisis of expectations. It is the left. In point of fact the old left stares extinction in the face. Whatever the particular antique shibboleth - the USSR as workers’ state, as state capitalist, as bureaucratic collectivist, etc - the old left has been defined by one, underlying, characteristic. Auto-Labourism. Far from representing independent working class politics - albeit in embryonic form - historically the left acts as a Labourite tail.
The crisis of auto-Labourism is manifested in moralism, organisational decay and programmatic nullity. Take the June 10 EU elections. The sects proved to be more part of the problem than part of the solution. Here was the first general - ie, all-UK - elections since 1997. Moreover, in what should have been a window of opportunity, they were conducted for the first time under the auspices of proportional representation.
Despite concerted and persistent attempts by the CPGB the left failed to unite and field a national slate of candidates. The SWP was the first to break ranks after its divided leadership narrowly decided to retreat from its electoral turn - agreed only at the end of 1998. Naturally the rank and file were kept in total ignorance - policy-making is the monopoly of a closed circle centred around comrade Tony Cliff.
Either way, having caused mayhem in the Socialist Alliances, the SWP eventually confined itself to a vote for Scargill’s red-brown Socialist Labour Party in London (half his candidates were Stalin Society members), Dave Nellist’s Socialist Alliance list in West Midlands and Tommy Sheridan’s Scottish Socialist Party. When it came to the bulk of the country, SWP members were left guessing. No guidance. No leadership. No support, even critical, for the ‘Weekly Worker’ lists (ie, what remained from the Socialist Alliance election blocs in London and the North West).
The Socialist Party in England and Wales mirrored the SWP’s bankruptcy. Workers Power - a sect which since its foundation as an SWP split has religiously preached auto-Labourism - recoiled from the prospect of voting for bomber Blair. As if Nato’s air war against rump Yugoslavia was not a continuation of the New Labour politics of May 1 1997 which they voted for. But likewise, instead of backing the ‘Weekly Worker’ lists, Workers Power anarchistically preferred moralistic boycottism.
Not surprisingly the auto-Labourite left is in an advanced stage of organisational decay. The fragments of Stalinism and Trotskyism continue to shed limbs and overall weight. The Morning Star’s so-called Communist Party of Britain, cleaved by the Hicks-Rosser rebellion, now limps on as a support group for Serbia, China and North Korea. The tiny New Communist Party is equally prostituted and politically deranged. To all intents and purposes the Democratic Left is a fetid corpse. Like a maggot Nina Temple crawls away.
As for Trotskyism, SPEW is not untypical. Having lost its jewels - Scotland and Liverpool - further schisms are in the offing. The fate of the Workers Revolutionary Party beckons. Organisationally the SWP appears to be an exception. However, politically the crisis is only too evident ... and politics decides.
Auto-Labourism was always a variety of economism (ie, the strikeist or trade union politics of the working class). Hence the left sects - not least the SWP - neither understand nor prioritise democratic demands. That is why, though repelled by Blairism’s open pro-capitalism, the old left still clings to New Labour.
Blair might not be meticulously working towards some fully articulated ‘third way’ blueprint. Nevertheless he cannot be dismissed as simply a pragmatist and a philistine in the traditional British mould. Amitai Etzioni inspires. Perry Anderson theorises. Rupert Murdoch sympathises. Anthony Giddens evangelises. From the beginning all the portents and signs indicated a far-reaching resolve. Blair was not content with tinkering. He is remaking the constitution and, if he can, the popular sense of Britishness.
What does it mean? Certainly not the beginning of the end of Britain’s supposedly incomplete bourgeois revolution. Blair’s remaking of the UK constitution is in fact both the continuation and the complement of the Thatcherite counter-reformation. Blair has no intention whatsoever of resurrecting or re-creating the 1945-1979 social democratic settlement. His communitarianism is a reinvention of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism. The ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ is to be ensured by the market and the endless drive for profit.
There is, of course, a complex and dynamic interrelationship between reform from above and discontent below. What is particularly striking about Blair’s constitutional revolution, however, is the absence of any working class input or alternative. Indeed it is the atomisation, the (temporary) disappearance of the working class from the political stage, that creates the conditions whereby Blair can propose and carry through his programme. There is neither pressure nor threat from those below. Nevertheless the main factor behind Blair’s programme has been the fact that popular identification with the UK state has been gradually slipping away since at least the late 1960s. During the long Thatcher years slippage became a slide.
The Iron Lady unleashed a neo-liberal tornado against the post-World War II social settlement. Millions were thoroughly alienated. Militant trade unionists and non-conformist youth. Migrants and homosexuals. The long-term unemployed and semi-employed. Scots and poll tax refuseniks. And not merely from the Tory government, but to a considerable extent from the monarchical state itself. New identities were sought and often found. That explains why Blair does not simply want to change the way we are ruled. Blair is determined to rewin popular identification with and acceptance of the state.
The UK is therefore being rebranded. In the name of democracy and in the absence of a democratic movement from below Blair seeks a new consensus. That is what his programme is designed to achieve. The political foundations, and thus the political architecture of the UK, are being transformed. The liberalisation of Labour, devolution for Scotland and Wales, peace for Northern Ireland, elected mayors in London and other big cities, reform of the House of Lords, a slim-line monarchy, European integration, PR elections - all are component parts of an overarching constitutional revolution.
The auto-Labourite left responds piecemeal rather than comprehensively to the whole. Using the defeatist logic that something must be better than nothing, virtually the whole spectrum lined up behind New Labour and urged a ‘yes’ in Blair’s referendums in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. It is essentially the same story when it comes to the London mayor, the House of Lords and the monarchy.
The inability of the left to challenge Blairism in the sphere of high politics - how we are ruled - stems from a programmatic nullity epitomised by the SWP.
The Cliffites have steadfastly refused to present their main politics and overall strategy in the form of a testable and democratically sanctioned programme (as we all know, such a stance is contrary to the spirit and example of the Bolsheviks, whom they claim to emulate). Socialist Worker’s thumbnail ‘What we stand for’ column is all very well for introductory purposes. But its pinched abstractions bear little relationship to daily practice or any discernible vision of how the working class is to make itself into a ruling class. That, when it comes to the SWP, is a mystery.
Indeed comrade Cliff and other SWP intellectuals have made a virtue of anti-programmism. They have written on countless occasions about the advantages of not being tied down. True, without a programme the rank and file cannot hold them to account. As a trend the SWP’s history has therefore been one of sudden opportunist zigzags. Any turn can be adopted as long as it is perceived to serve short-term interests, usually judged arithmetically in terms of crude membership figures.
The SWP’s ‘Action programme’ would seem then to represent a break with the past. Since it was launched last September, it has not only been reproduced as a glossy brochure, but there has been a drive to get labour movement bodies to adopt it as their own and finance propaganda around it. Sad to say, what we actually have is another zigzag, not a conversion to Bolshevism.
Theoretically the SWP’s ‘Action programme’ is backed up with reference to Trotsky’s 1934 ‘Action programme for France’ (see Alex Callinicos International Socialism No81, and John Rees Socialist Review January 1999). But the boldest claim is that it is premised on broadly the same conditions which prompted Trotsky’s ‘Transitional programme’. In our opinion Trotsky was badly mistaken in 1938. He maintained that capitalism could no longer develop the productive forces or grant meaningful reforms. Therefore, he declared, defence of economic gains would spontaneously produce a final and apocalyptic collision with capitalism. No matter how we excuse Trotsky and his tiny band of followers in terms of how things appeared on the eve of World War II, there is no escaping that he was wrong in fact and method.
Comrade Cliff wrote - only six years ago - that Trotsky’s ‘Transitional programme’ was only relevant when there was “a situation of general crisis, of capitalism in deep slump”, and that many of the programme’s proposals - eg, workers’ defence squads - “did not fit a non-revolutionary situation” (T Cliff Trotsky: The darker the night, the brighter the star London 1993, pp299-300).
Yet now, with workers’ confidence at a nadir and revolutionary consciousness almost non-existent, the SWP has decided that pursuit of even the most minimal demands is all that is required to fell a supposedly tottering capitalism. In his most recent work comrade Cliff insists that we live not in a period of reaction (albeit of a special type), but of imminent revolution: “Capitalism in the advanced countries,” he claims, “is no longer expanding and so the words of the 1938 ‘Transitional programme’ that ‘there can be no discussion of systematic social reforms and raising the masses’ living standards’ fits reality again” (T Cliff Trotskyism after Trotsky London 1999, pp81-2).
Herein lies the root of the SWP’s crisis. It is not simply that Cliffism cannot grasp the period - the overall productive forces continue to expand and in Britain the average full-time wage has just passed £20,000. No, for all the revolutionary verbiage employed to sell it, the SWP’s ‘Action programme’ amounts to nothing more than conventional economism. Instead of a fully rounded alternative to Blair’s constitutional revolution from above - eg, a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales from below - the SWP leadership concentrates entirely on minimal questions of pay, hours and union recognition. The workers are to be left as an economic class of slaves, not elevated to a political class of self-activating revolutionaries.
Jack Conrad