Crisis of the Left (1983)

From the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whatever happened to the Labour Party? Remember how they used to tell us that Labour was “the mass party of the working class” — the party that workers would instinctively turn to, like Mullahs to Mecca. If you wanted to be “in with the workers”, said the Left, the Labour Party was the place to be. On 9 June the workers made it clear to their patronising would-be leaders that the party was over — that they could not be relied on to flock to the support of Labour Party capitalism, like cattle voting for “compassionate” slaughterers. The workers of Britain gave the party which tried to con them that it stood for their interests the biggest kick in the teeth for fifty years. These are the facts:

• In 1979, 11,506,661 electors voted Labour — just under 37 per cent of those who voted. In 1983, 8,460,860 electors voted Labour — less than 28 per cent of the total national poll, which was itself 3.3 per cent lower than the total national poll in 1979.
• In 1983 the Labour Party lost its deposit in 125 of the constituencies contested: well over one in five of the deposits it paid. This was a larger number of losses than the Labour party sustained in all four general elections in the 1970s added together.
• Not since 1931, when Labour polled just under seven million votes, have so few electors voted Labour; not since 1918, when Labour’s percentage of the total votes cast was 24 per cent, has Labour received such a low poll.
• More than one in four electors did not vote on 9 June; a quarter of the electorate regarded the differences between the main parties as too insignificant to go out and vote about.

The Labour Party has all but had its death certificate written for it by the workers of Britain. Frantic efforts are now being made to revive its fortunes; a leader of the Wilson-Callaghan calibre is being anxiously sought; the Right is blaming the Left and the Left is blaming the Right. Fraternal purges are on the agenda.

Why did the Labour Party fail to defeat a government presiding over capitalism in the midst of a recession which is hitting the workers hard? The answer is that workers preferred the openly capitalist policies of the Tories — whose disgusting prejudices appealed to the mass of the pro-capitalist workers — rather than the vaguely idealistic capitalist utopianism on offer from the Labour reformists. Margaret Thatcher offered “more hard times ahead”, to be followed, if the wage slaves behaved well, by a higher standard of poverty; the Labour Party offered a relative capitalist paradise, where unemployment would be brought down to “acceptable levels”, nuclear weapons would be removed to foreign soils and the exploited would be legally robbed with humanitarian administration. The workers have tried the utopian recipe before and concluded that if the governments of Attlee, Wilson and Callaghan — not to mention Mitterrand, Andropov and other Leftists — is what the reformers have to offer, then they would stick with the more accomplished thieves of the Tory Party. The fact is that the Labour Party has no alternative; it never did have a remedy for the ills of the profit system, and it never will, because capitalism is an inherently anti-social system which continuously throws up more problems and contradictions than the reformists can solve.

The Labour Party, which was formed after the Socialist Party of Great Britain, has always claimed that it is impossible to persuade a majority of workers to understand and want socialism. The advocates of reform politics have persistently argued that workers must be drawn to “radical politics” by the carrot of reform and then led to the new system without them knowing it. Socialists have heard this elitist, patronising drivel from Labour politicians for a long time: “leaders” like Tony Benn who saw himself as a man who would win the masses to Labour by making promises to change capitalism which could not possibly be fulfilled; like Joan Lestor who argued that it was only in the Labour Party that real social change could begin; like Ossie O'Brien who, in a debate against the Socialist Party, admitted that the socialists may be right, but the Labour Party would get more votes come the elections. These deposed leaders, and the others who received the message from workers they had expected to follow them, can contemplate where their opportunism got them on 9 June. Our candidate was defeated because the workers rejected the revolutionary socialist ideas which were clearly stated in our manifesto, and which we urged workers not to vote for unless they agreed with them — the "populists" of the Labour Party lost despite their opportunist grovelling for votes.

As usual, the vast majority of sects and factions on the non-Labour Left abandoned their opposition to both the Labour Party and elections in order to work like horses for the election of a Labour government of British capitalism. As usual, they all had plenty of small-print qualifications, lumps in their throats, "no illusions”, “conditional” backing and the rest of it, but when the campaign opened and sides had to be taken, the Left chose the side of capitalism with a red rosette.

The Socialist Workers’ Party is as good an example as any of the absurd twisting of these 'reformist hypocrites. Consider the words of Paul Foot in Socialist Worker on 5 December 1981:

Again and again, since the war the hopes and ideals of hundreds of thousands of people who have worked for Labour governments have been frustrated. . .

A good enough reason for not voting Labour. Alex Callinicos. in the same paper on 28 May 1983, gave an even better one:

Labour’s is a programme aimed at harnessing and controlling capital, not destroying it . . . Labour in office would attack the living standards of its own supporters in an effort to restore profits.

Quite correct. So did the SWP urge workers to reject this party which frustrates the hopes of those who support it, exists to defend capital and would attack workers’ interests in order to restore profits? On the front cover of Socialist Worker of June 4 the headline said it all: “STOP THE TORIES — VOTE LABOUR". Such hypocrisy is not something to be ignored; to urge workers to waste the power of the vote on a party which they know to be anti-working class shows just what contempt the SWP’s leaders have for their dwindling flock of followers.

The Workers' Revolutionary Party manages to carry out the Oppose Labour — Vote Labour political somersault within the course of the four pages of its turgidly written manifesto:

They (the Labour Party) have capitulated to every attack by the Thatcher government on the working class. Labour’s leaders unconditionally support capitalism and its state machine.

Therefore it follows, does it not, that:

In constituencies where we are not standing we call for a massive turn-out by the Labour and trade union movement to vote against the Tories by casting a critical vote for Labour.

Why did they not be more clear and tell workers to “critically" vote for the party which “unconditionally support(s) capitalism and its state machine"?

The Communist Party, as usual, advised workers to vote Labour where its candidates were not standing. The Militant Tendency, like guests who are thrown out of the party and run around the houses telling everyone what a great time they had, strained every muscle for the election to state power of the party which devoted a day of its last conference to passing overwhelmingly a resolution to kick them out.

At the end of the day, the leaders looked behind them to see that the sheep were flocking in their thousands to follow other shepherds — or to follow none. The Trotskyist logic of electing your enemies to power was swallowed by the gullible fools who think they are a vanguard; but the rearguard, once again, was not there. The Labour Party is one step nearer to the political grave which its record of broken promises has dug for it. Of course, the working class followers of the politically bankrupt Labour Party opted not for socialism, but to abandon their futures as sacrifices to Thatcher’s god of Profit. In the days to come socialists will be working with all the force at our command to show the workers that there is an alternative to the corpse of Left reformism and the viciousness of naked capitalism. The election is over, but the struggle goes on.

Steve Coleman