05.06.2002

Finding an audience

Times change. The differences that divided the practice, and consequently much of the theory, of communists in Britain - whether of Stalinist or Trotskyist hue - in relation to the Labour Party may seem of little importance today at a time when New Labour has discarded socialist rhetoric and stopped even pretending to have anything to do with notions of the working class as a political entity. However, the type of party Labour was and is remains something of a thorny issue and still retains the power to cause disunity in our ranks. The question of the political fund and the Labour-trade union link have recently been the subject of debate in the Socialist Alliance, with a large majority feeling that Labour cannot simply be dismissed as just another bourgeois party and that some kind of tactical approach is still needed. Whilst Labour's working class pole has been greatly reduced over the last 20 years, it exists nonetheless. Its electoral constituency remains largely the working class, although that force exerts much less influence in the local parties, following successive moves to quell potential dissent through a series of undemocratic manoeuvres and rule changes. Clearly the lack of independent action from the workers' movement is also a factor. However, in my view it is incorrect to ignore the differences between the Thatcherite approach of previous Tory administrations and those of New Labour. Labour in power, in the absence of working class combativity, has taken the edge off the harsher blows capitalism rains down on many of its victims. A minimum wage, millions of pounds thrown at various task zones (directed at 'problem estates', etc) and other elements of public/voluntary sector funding have meant real, if meagre improvements for a section of the population. This is neither permanent nor sufficient, nor does it affect every exploited section, and our task is to highlight the sham, expose the robbery effected on our class and raise horizons - kept low by the self-limitations of the union leaders and in part by the lack of imagination of the supposed vanguard organisations of our class. All this demonstrates the necessity of looking at the communist approach to Labour and how we apply ourselves to one of our key tasks in Britain - breaking workers from Labour-ism - of the left or right, new or old, varieties. Lenin's remark about communists supporting Labour like the rope supports a hanging man has long been the starting point. This formed part of a package of tactics that was debated out in the early years of the CPGB. Throughout this period the CPGB organised in the Labour Party, whilst at the same time maintaining that its aim was a genuine workers' party. Tactically in 1922, for example, the party withdrew its general election candidates due to oppose Labour at the ballot box (although several Labour candidates where in fact CPGB members). Its outlook was explained thus: "The Communist Party cannot oppose the Labour Party in so far as it is the party of the workers any more than it can oppose the trade unions as such; but it can, as it does with the trade unions, fight the reactionary junta and seek to transform Labour Party into an instrument of revolutionary progress. The faith of the workers in the present leaders of the Labour Party must be tried and outlived by experience. This experience the communists will assist them to obtain by their action" (CPGB, The Communist Party, the Labour Party and the united front London 1922). The CPGB recognised that Labour could not simply be wished away. However, work within the party was not carried out on the basis of an attempt to persuade the Labour leadership of the wisdom of communist philosophy: while the Labour Party had a largely working class membership and was based on the trade unions, its leadership was unequivocally pro-capitalist - as hostile to revolution as the class enemy. The key question was winning over that working class base. CPGB work was assisted by the Labour Party's federal nature. In many areas communist influence was strong. in Battersea North the MP, Shapurji Saklatvala, was a communist and the party was able to sink deep roots there. However, with the subsiding of the revolutionary wave following 1917 and the defeat of the British working class in the 1926 General Strike, the Labour leaders were able to diminish the influence of the communists, aided by a raft of bans and proscriptions. The sectarian zigzags of third period Stalinism significantly reduced the prospect of a communist breakthrough in the British workers' movement. The mistakes of the CPGB in this period were added to those of the Independent Labour Party. The 16,000-strong ILP, as an affiliate of the Labour Party, had 32 MPs and was the driving force behind the Labour left. But it used the revulsion with the 1929-1931 Labour government to split from Labour, in Trotsky's words, "at the wrong time, over the wrong issue". Nevertheless, communist influence on the Labour Party continued right up to the 1980s. Apart from the cases of dual membership - accidental or clandestine - a constant stream of ex-CPGBers or fellow-travellers carried on the party's method. More importantly, communists were able to win positions at all levels within the unions, which inevitably impacted upon the Labour Party. In the post-World War II period the Trotskyist left entered the Labour Party on a largely untheorised and ad-hoc basis. Some still inhabit the swamp, expecting to become the nucleus of Labour's newly radicalised mass left wing, which will reclaim the party for the working class. All of the major players of British Trotskyism to one extent or another engaged in entry work inside the Labour Party. For the purposes of this short article I will concentrate on the organisation that did it the most successfully: the Militant Tendency, forerunners of today's Socialist Party, at the time one of the smaller fragments. "The Marxists", as they referred to themselves, employed an adaptation of the entry tactic which went beyond that advocated by Trotsky in the 1930s. Led by Ted Grant, Militant became a household name in the 1980s, gaining MPs, trade union general secretaries, a network of councillors and thousands of adherents. Grant established a rigid perspective of achieving socialism via the long-term work of building a faction in the traditional social democratic workers' parties. What emerged would be the 'revolutionary party' that would introduce an "enabling bill" through parliament, which would "nationalise the top 200 monopolies" - et voilà : socialism. Needless to say, Militant's vision of revolution and party were an abortion. However, Militant cadre did become quite skilled at dealing in a hostile political terrain and developed a degree of political sophistication. The Militant Tendency had by the 1980s built itself into a well organised grouping of over 1,000 members - 80% of its work was in the Labour Party and 80% of that was in the Labour Party Young Socialists, which it had controlled since the mid-1970s. In many respects Militant was unlike many of the other tendencies on the Labour left. It had a healthy disdain for the many exotic species of middle class radicalism that inhabited Labour at the time. The organisation chugged along, doing its own work, picking up recruits to the 'party within a party'. Militant, despite tactical errors (which I do not intend going into here) did go down the road of setting illegal budgets in Liverpool, of making concrete improvements for the people who had voted for it, but understanding that the gains would be temporary and would have to be defended and action generalised as part of the class struggle. Such an approach was advocated by the CPGB but voted down at a recent national council meeting of the Socialist Alliance. However, a class struggle approach is insufficient without a revolutionary programme - there was plenty of class struggle in the 20th century, but this alone was not enough to beat the enemy. Militant's programme, contained in the What we stand for pamphlet and aimed at a large Labour and trade union audience, criminally, given Militant's key position, miseducated a whole generation of workers who passed through its ranks: far from challenging the rottenness of Labour's historical role, it glorified it and gave it a leftist makeover. Did Militant supporters believe that socialism could be achieved through an "enabling bill" in parliament? Most took it at face value and for them it presented a real strategy for changing society, when in reality it was a warmed up version of the 1970s Communist Party's 'Alternative economic strategy' (the AES called for the nationalisation of the top 25 monopolies, as opposed to Militant's top 200). Could communist work in the Labour Party be done in a different way? Certainly there can be no argument that such work has to be conducted in a semi-clandestine manner. However, the lack of an organised and open pole that could have attracted and developed Marxism, conducting work in the Labour Party in much the same manner as the early CPGB, was sadly lacking in Militant's case. Moreover, I would argue that Militant's vision of what socialism would look like was increasingly coloured by its Labourite environment - a package of minimal demands and talk of nationalisation, with mention of workers' councils and workers' control becoming ever more cursory. The language of self-emancipation has not been a feature of the development of that political tendency. In terms of its orientation to other struggles in the 1970s, especially within the trade unions, Militant missed the boat somewhat, whereas the pre-Socialist Workers Party International Socialists were able to pick up a layer of working class militants in industry and run numerous rank and file papers (only to lose most of them in later sectarian purges) and begin to challenge the rotten approach of the 'official' CPGB. Militant remained inside the committee rooms of the Labour Party. Today Militant's heirs in the Socialist Party have flipped from a position of stating that a working class party could come only from the bowels of Labour - whose allegedly Marxist roots Militant wanted to 'reclaim' - to one of declaring New Labour to be a bourgeois party pure and simple, just like the Tories. Clearly this is a case of making the theory fit the changed practice. Thus the SP no longer sees any reason to consider how to address Labour's base. Without a second thought it stands candidates against left Labour MPs, instead of challenging them to support a raft of pro-working class measures and offering to back them on that basis. In the 2001 general election the SP drew no distinction between out-and-out Blairites, who do not even claim to defend working class interests, and candidates like John McDonnell, who was opposed by the SP's Wally Kennedy in Hayes and Harlington. In the trade unions the SP's approach to the political fund is likewise equally wooden and thankfully there appears to be a more flexible consensus in our Socialist Alliance on this issue. Defeating the reactionary political ideology of Labourism is the key task of British communists. The Labour Party never has been and never could be a vehicle for the transformation of society in the interests of the working class. However, ignoring its class character, walking away from its working class base and the struggle of its working class pole has been a mistake that we can certainly do without repeating today. This struggle requires tactical acumen and, most importantly, a refusal to compromise on our political principles. In this regard Marxists have suffered in equal measure from sectarianism and adaptation to Labourism. Lawrie Coombs