An accomplished variation of the three-card trick was performed by Mr. Paul Foot — the International Socialist — in The Times of 14th August. After quoting the words of a dispirited shop steward at Norton Villiers Triumph where the Labour government has failed to provide further financial backing, Foot draws the following conclusion:
“These are dreadful times for socialists who put their trust in Labour Governments.”
This is coy stuff of course, one of the very last places a Socialist would put his trust is in the Labour Party. But there is method in the madness. He attacks the government in its attempts to run capitalism at a time, as he puts it, of “unprecedented capitalist collapse” for the following reasons:
“Labour’s elected representatives become isolated from their power base, impotent to resist the demands of the system which they try to manage. They mouth the mumbo jumbo of capitalism.”
All unsparing language of course, but we fail to recollect when this “power base” ie, the Labour Party supporters, expected or desired other than the continuance of capitalism. In thus discrediting the leaders specifically, the illusion could be created that they alone are deliberately perverting the desires of their supporters. He accuses the “helpless puppet” (the Labour Government) of recently being forced by economic conditions to “tear up two manifestos” but fails to note that each one of those manifestos was filled from cover to cover with “the mumbo jumbo of capitalism.”
Having pointed out that such an unlikely vehicle as the Labour Party has failed to introduce Socialism, he uses some loose logic to reject the whole parliamentary method:
“The parliamentary road to socialism has turned into another blind alley. The revolutionary road is beginning to open up.”
The “revolutionary” road to Worker’s Control is what he refers to. However we recall that Foot’s paper, the Socialist Worker, had little doubt, on 16th February 1974 when advising before the oncoming election that “The working class has to respond with a massive anti-Tory vote. And that means a Labour vote…” exactly which “helpless puppet” they favoured.
[From the So They Say column, Socialist Standard, September 1975.]
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