It used to be an axiom of Party speakers that if the Labour Party did not exist the capitalist class would have to invent it. The same is true of the so-called Communist Party, though in a different historical context.
The Labour Party throughout its vile and bloody history has stood ever ready to serve British capitalism, as government, loyal opposition, and in coalition with Tories and Liberals. Bloody history? Yes. Did they not support and help organize the slaughter of millions of workers in two world wars? Did they not endorse the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Were they not the government when the Korean war started in 1950? Did they not support and aid the American butchery in Vietnam? All this is viciously anti-working class. Yet these are only some major crimes that spring to mind. The catalogue is a long one.
While their cloth-capped pacifist Keir Hardie was playing recruiting-sergeant during World War I, the SPGB was opposing the war and propounding Socialism. While one-time conscientious-objector Herbert Morrison was in the Churchill War Cabinet during World War II, the SPGB was arguing the common interest of the world’s workers.
The post-war Labour government started Harwell and the development of nuclear weapons in this country. They fostered the lunatic justification: “They’ve got them — so we must have them”. It was Aneurin Bevan, the darling of the mutton-headed left, who did not want to go “naked” to the world’s conference chambers. “Negotiation from strength” meant being “clad” in nuclear armoury. They hold the distinction of being the first government in this country to carry on conscription in peacetime.
They used troops to break strikes. Their Attorney-General (now Lord Shawcross) prosecuted dockers in April 1951. Seven dockers had been charged under the Conditions of Employment and National Arbitration Order. Shawcross is recorded in Keesing’s Contemporary Archives (May-June 1951) giving a warning to strikers generally that, if there were no trade dispute involved, a strike which was calculated to cause a breach of contract, or so interfere with the course of justice, or affect the policy or interests of the state, “might constitute a grave criminal offence”. Bevan then had the job Foot now holds as Minister of Labour (members of NALGO please note).
At every election since the war, including 1945, the Communist Party has worked for the return of Labour governments, supported Labour candidates and urged workers to vote Labour. They are equally guilty. It is manifestly absurd to work for the return of Labour governments and then disclaim responsibility for what those governments do.
The guilt of the “Communist” Party goes deeper than supporting the Labour Party. As mouth-piece of Soviet state capitalism they too support wars. They supported the atom-bombing of Japan. They applauded the development of the atomic bomb in Russia because it broke the American monopoly, saying it “will encourage peace-loving people everywhere” (Daily Worker, 24 September 1949). Two years later when the British bomb was announced they called it: “A cowards’ weapon, designed for the unrestrained massacre of the civilian population” (Daily Worker 18 February 1952).
After Russia was attacked in 1941, nobody was more in favour of fighting for capitalism in World War II. They even supported the return of Tory candidates in by-elections to better prosecute the war. For more than 50 years they have slavishly followed Russian foreign policy; even stooping to support Stalin’s pact with Hitler, calling it a “victory for peace and socialism” (Daily Worker 23 August 1939).
They also supported the wars in Korea and Vietnam though, being motivated by the interests of Russian capitalism, they were on the other side to their Labour buddies in these two bloodbaths.
Flash back
How did all this come to be? How can it happen that these two parties which use Socialist-sounding phrases and (in the case of the Labour Party with the support of millions of workers) come to be buried in the dirty business of maintaining capitalism? The answers are to be found in fundamentally wrong assumptions right from their beginnings. It is a long story and from the standpoint of working-class interests and Socialism a sad and futile story.
The Labour Party in 1906 and the “Communist” Party in 1920 embarked upon the day-to-day struggle to do “something now”. The former being a native product of British capitalism in the quest for reforms, the latter taking its cue from their masters in the Kremlin. They are both the heirs to the fallacy of the old Social Democrats that Socialism can be an ultimate objective, while “in the meantime” they build a movement to seek votes on the basis of a list of reforms.
The false assumption behind this idea is that the working class cannot understand Socialism; they have to be baited by reforms. Above all, workers cannot consciously organize and free themselves, they must have leaders. So the trap is set. The trap is capitalism and the quarry is reformist.
Starting out on the wrong foot and facing the wrong way all subsequent developments were inevitable. Instead of being stepping-stones, reforms became the only attainable ends. Their spurious socialism is reforms and nationalization. As if to rub salt into the wounds of mockery, they used to say they were in a hurry and could not wait for the SPGB and workers’ understanding.
Given a working class who are overwhelmingly non-socialist, the Labourites and Communists have to appeal to the same politically ignorant electorate as the avowedly capitalist parties. If you play their game, “you” must have a policy for everything they have a policy for. To get votes you must do what they do. No use talking about the abolition of the wages system, common ownership and production solely for use. Talk about pensions and housing. Make promises. Outbid the Tories and Liberals. Sound plausible. Promote leaders. Be British. Be concerned about the nation and British interests. Their game is running capitalism. To sound plausible means you must convince millions of workers that you can run capitalism better than they can. Though all your policies pre-suppose the continuation of capitalism, you must foster the illusion of attacking the system and being indignant.
How many times during the seventy years of the Socialist Party of Great Britain have we been asked : “Where have you got? What have you achieved?” While the clamour for popular demands has become a way of life the voice of Socialism has remained small. In fact, the two things go together. The massive proportions of the one presuppose the relative smallness of the other. The point is that for all their mass appeal the Labour Party and the CP have solved not a single problem.
Despite many years of Labour government, capitalism is still here. They are a living demonstration of the futility of reformism. There has been continuous legislation of reforms concerning every aspect of capitalism. The only argument advanced has been that the reforms were necessary to solve problems. History is littered with the wreckage of their useless enactments.
Look where you will, there have been no solutions. Health and welfare, Act piled upon Act while the chaos gets worse. The wages struggles of doctors, nurses and welfare workers run parallel with the continuing poverty of the workers who need health and welfare services. Instead of ending poverty, the chief function is to administer it.
Pensions? Despite all the reforms, wretchedness and misery continue to the accompaniment of sentimental slush from the hypocrites in government getting £16,000 per year who think £10 per week is enough for one and £16 enough for two old workers.
Education. Another sorry story. While newspapers carry headlines about “class-room jungles” the reform-mongers reach for their bottomless bucket to start another round of bailing-out operations.
Rents and mortgages make the bitterest mockery of all. Nothing screams more loudly the irrelevance of reformism. From the first Housing Act in 1851, every government has been going to solve the housing problem.
The post-war Labour government was finally going to banish it in five years. In 1948 Aneurin Bevan promised : “When the next election occurs there will be no housing problem in Great Britain for the British working class”. (Hansard 14 July 1948). They were going to clear away the slums. Now, nearly thirty years later, the present Labour government blandly informs us the slums are here to stay. A report by the National Economic Development Office calling for the clearance of 380,000 slums was rejected as being against the policy of both this government and the last one. The Daily Mirror (11 April 1974) which supported the return of the Labour government quotes a spokesman for the Department of the Environment as saying: “Demolition is a dirty word now. Renovation is the best thing for slum areas”. By their own criterion of “something now” they are abysmal failures.
They were going to abolish the House of Lords and tax the rich out of existence. The rich and the Lords are still on our backs and the party which in 1945 used the catch-phrase “Fair shares for all” is still talking nonsense about “fairness” in a society that rests upon legal robbery.
Nationalization was to be the way to run industry and transport as public services not for profits. Millions of workers were kidded to regard nationalization as the answer to social problems in general and to maldistribution in particular. This was how the Labour Party was able to exploit the misguided loyalties of the workers. The economics of capitalism made short work of their silly schemes.
The bitterness and disillusionment that followed did more than give the Tories thirteen years in power. It caused many workers to regard Socialism as a failure and to become suspicious of politics generally. The fact is that the policies of the Labour Party are conceived for the running of capitalism, not its abolition. They are ignorant of or indifferent to what Socialism means. When this is coupled with the cynical quest for power by the shabby upstarts who lead this blind mass it is easy to understand how damaging to the cause of Socialism the whole futile exercise has been.
The Tories have been able to poke fun at the founderings of the Labour Party and, by misrepresentation, to discredit Socialism. In the same way they are able to point to the tyranny of capitalist Russia. Socialism suffers on the one hand because of the distortion of those who control the mass-media, and on the other hand because the great majority of the working class have so far accepted those falsehoods.
Our main indictment of the Bolsheviks is not that from 1917 they have built up capitalism in Russia. Given the historical conditions of the time — industrial backwardness, a largely illiterate peasant population and a working class outside Russia not yet ready for Socialism — capitalism was the only possible outcome. This is what the SPGB said at the time. The fact that they have passed off a million outrages as Socialism — this is our indictment. They have twisted Marxism into its opposite for more than half a century. Marxism demands the abolition of the wages-system, so the political frauds in the Kremlin invent “socialist wages”. Marx saw the state as a product and instrument of class society, so the Leninists invented a contradiction in terms called the “workers’ state”. Marx wanted a conscious majority of the working class (see The Communist Manifesto) to gain control of political power for the purpose of ending class society, so the Bolsheviks called their minority seizure of power “the dictatorship of the proletariat”.
Their brutal hierarchy is worthy of comparison with the medieval Papacy. Their terrorist secret police. The purge trials and slaughters of their own comrades. Their deals with Hitler and later with Churchill. Their vast military machine. The use of military might to crush workers’ risings in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Their stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Their commodity production and rivalry with western capitalists for world markets and investments, all carried on to the accompaniment of propaganda calling it Socialism.
These are just headings under which their deeds may be listed. The reality in human suffering is incalculable. Can there be any wonder that the progress of Socialist understanding has been slow?
For a generation they worshipped Stalin and his “greatness” while millions lived in fear of his secret police. All criticism was brutally crushed. New crimes were invented to cover any rivals for power. To be denounced as a Trotskyist or a Titoist meant that you were an enemy of the state. (Those who were shot were spared years of degradation as political prisoners.) During this period meetings of the Socialist Party of Great Britain were disrupted by members of the Communist Party who would tolerate no criticism of their Soviet Fatherland. Three years after Stalin’s death some of those who had served him denounced him, and the faithful were thrown into confusion.
It is impossible to estimate the harm all this has done to the spread of Socialist ideas. At every meeting someone asks “What about Russia?” We have to waste time debunking myths before we can expound the positive Socialist case of the SPGB.
Understanding as we do the realities of capitalism, we know that our fellow-workers in this country, as in Russia and throughout the world, are confronting similar problems. We are as confident as ever that the world’s workers will come to reject the spurious palliatives of Labourites and “Communists” and will achieve their own emancipation by establishing Socialism. Working to this end has always been the sole commitment of the SPGB. There could be no task more worthwhile.
Harry Baldwin
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