27.06.2001

Unions fire warning shot

Last week?s conference of the public services union, Unison, fired a significant shot across the bows of Tony Blair?s newly re-elected government when it voted to ?review? its financial support for the Labour Party, and whether it should fund other candidates more in tune with the interests of trade union members. Coming on top of the Fire Brigades Union recent vote, on the eve of Blair?s re-election, to support working class candidates other than those of Labour, and the narrow defeat of a similar motion by the Communication Workers Union, this is illustrative of a significant development among a layer of trade union activists.

The blatantly privateering, Thatcherite agenda of Blair?s government is producing major strains on their loyalty to Labour. While at the moment there is little evidence of any class-conscious evolution among masses of ordinary trade union members, nevertheless the layer of activists who kept the trade unions going through a period of defeat and reaction are in considerable ferment and open to influence by the revolutionary socialist left.

Indeed, a major crisis of disintegration of old-fashioned social democracy is brewing in Britain, as the bitter consequences of two decades of capitulation to the anti-union counterrevolution of Thatcher and her successors are becoming clear to the thickest of Labourite skulls.

When even Roy Hattersley, the standard-bearer of old Labour?s witch-hunting right wing in the 1980s, is driven to declare in the face of Blair?s reaffirmed commitment to a privatised ?meritocracy? that ?Labour is no longer my party?, then things are getting pretty desperate for those who continue to believe (or in many cases pretend to believe) that the Labour Party can be an instrument of working class advance.

Hattersley?s cry of despair is a declaration of bankruptcy of the entire social democratic project. Any intelligent observer of the conduct of such deeply opportunist labour traitors over the past decades could only conclude that they brought their current predicament upon themselves. In their desperation to achieve the ?respectability? and ?moderation? necessary to get elected in a period of bourgeois offensive against the entire gamut of social democracy?s reformist achievements, these people fought tooth and nail to expunge any and all expressions of class politics or impulse towards working class emancipation from the Labour and trade union movement.

Workers? struggles, most notably the miners? strike of 1984-5, were mercilessly stabbed in the back in pursuit of this project. In the face of their offensive, the old Labour left withered to the point of impotence. And now the likes of Hattersley are whining that Blair has converted the Labour Party into a party of the right.

Communists shed no tears for Hattersley?s humiliation by Blair, which is really only testimony to the bankruptcy of the reformism which Hattersley represents par excellence. In reality, it is the working class that has paid the price for the impotence and betrayals of all varieties of reformism, of the left as well as the old Labour right, with mass unemployment, damaged and crippled trade unions and the growth of despair and social reaction.

Despite the massive dominance of overtly neo-liberal, Thatcherite politics in the Labour Party, which has achieved an unprecedented level of bourgeois political and financial support by moving to occupy much of the political space that used to be occupied by the Tories under Heath and Thatcher, the trade unions are the sharp end of the class contradiction in Labour as a bourgeois workers? party. They cannot embrace the largesse of Lords Sainsbury and Simon as a substitute for their own membership. Even their bureaucratic caste cannot envisage, as can the Labour Party?s yuppie political elite, swapping the funds of their millions of members for the bribes of billionaires.

The disenfranchisement and atomisation of the working class is at the core of the Blair project, which is indeed a key aspect of its continuity with Thatcherism. Millions of trade unionists, and indeed millions more unorganised workers who would take their place inside a trade union movement that fought for their interests as a class, have the power to strike a blow against that. What we need is a conscious struggle for independent working class politics.

There is an enormous potential in the current situation for the Socialist Alliance to play the role of catalyst for the emergence of a new working class party, to intersect the current ferment among trade unionists and win them to such a project. We can best do this by taking full advantage of this crisis and bankruptcy of reformism, by a two-pronged approach of programmatic/political intransigence and tactical flexibility regarding oppositional currents within the Labour Party.

If anything, the method of the main ?revolutionary? components of the Socialist Alliance, adopting a variant of old Labour left reformism in the mistaken belief that such a consciousness is an inevitable stage in the evolution of those breaking from Labour, can only blunt our criticism and ability to exploit fully the crisis of disintegration of reformism we are witnessing. We need to drive our criticisms of the entire reformist project home with vigour in order to break off whole chunks of the disintegrating old Labour milieu to a consciously Marxist understanding and programme. Indeed our aim must be to win a clear majority.

Yet at the same time, we must be tactically flexible in dealing with oppositional currents in the Labour Party and the Labour-affiliated trade unions. Matt Wrack is absolutely correct - our tactic should be to call for the democratisation of the political fund (see his report to the Socialist Alliance, reproduced right). Furthermore, we should not simply demand that individuals (or even whole trade unions) ?leave? the Labour Party. Rather, we should advocate that they stay in and fight, openly declaring their allegiance to the Socialist Alliance project. If that means the Blairites expel them, so be it. They would take many more with them. A large exit wound is much more damaging than a pin-prick here and there, even though the dominant direction of any opposition within Labour in this period is going to be to the outside, sooner rather than later.

The Socialist Alliance also needs to unite the trade union-based militants of its component organisations, as well as independent SA supporters in the unions, in union caucuses and fractions, and to do systematic work to bring conscious Marxist politics and tactics to bear. In particular, to set the agenda in situations where the vanguard activists in the trade unions are questioning their support for the Blairised Labour Party, and to force the Blairites to break with whole trade unions, would be one hell of a blow for the rearmament of the workers? movement.

Ian Donovan