Sunday, April 28, 2019

New Pamphlet Out Soon (1968)

Party News from the April 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labour Government or Socialism (1s. 3d (post free) Details below)

Labour fails again
Why are so many Labour voters disappointed? Why is there a swing to the other parties at by-elections? Why do more and more people not trouble to vote?

Why do so many people become cynical about politics and say that nothing makes any difference? Why have some trade unions that are affiliated to the Labour Party threatened to withhold contributions and to form an independent ‘trade union party'?

This new 36-page Socialist Party pamphlet, out soon, answers these questions and exposes the uselessness of this and previous Labour governments. It shows too how Labour’s avowed aim of ‘making capitalism work' leads them to support wage restraint, unemployment and profit-making.

"Experience proves beyond question", says the pamphlet, “that the position of wage and salary earners is the same whether capitalism is administered by a Conservative or by a Labour government. Some workers believe that this need not have happened if the Labour government had chosen to follow a different course. The Socialist Party of Great Britain does not take that view. What we have experienced has been the inevitable consequence of perpetuating capitalism. Within capitalism there is no escape from its economic laws".

You can order copies of this topical pamphlet by writing to the Socialist Party (Dept. SLG), 52 Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4.

1 comment:

ajohnstone said...

This was the pamphlet that John Crump complained about taking too long to get out.

"The Party had not even taken what should have been the elementary step of producing an up-to-date pamphlet...I moved the floor resolution “That this Conference calls on the Executive Committee to urgently look into the question of producing a short, moderately priced pamphlet on the Labour Government” at the Party Conference in April 1966... but what happened then? A specially produced pamphlet on Labour Government or Socialism? Was laboriously written and was finally issued… two years later, in February 1968! Surely there was something a trifle pathetic about a publication which in 1968 took 28 out of its total 30 pages “to expose the uselessness of Labour Government” (Labour Government or Socialism? p29) at a time when it had already become painfully obvious to those workers likely to read it just how useless that government was. By then any thoughtful worker could see that the Wilson government was pursuing anti-working class policies and the last thing he needed was for the SPGB to point out to him that his wages had been frozen in the second half of 1967 (Labour Government or Socialism? pp 19-20). If he bothered even to read such a pamphlet his most likely conclusion must have been that the SPGB was simply out of touch..."

It took even a lot longer for this pamphlet to be printed by the Party

"...It was against this background that in 1968 some of us suggested that the SPGB should take steps to have Julius Martov’s The State and Socialist Revolution republished, on principal grounds that it does a brilliant job on Lenin’s State and Revolution and that the amount of work which this would have entailed for the Party would have been small since an acceptable translation already existed..."

But it was eventually and very belatedly by almost five decades published