The advent of capitalist production in sixteenth- to nineteenth-century Britain was marked by the transformation of the peasantry into wage-workers. Peasants had been isolated, and concerned with increasing their individual land holdings. But as workers, forced off the land into the workshops, survival necessitated some kind of association. The revolt of workers against the conditions they were forced into went through certain phases. At first machinery was destroyed. Riots and arson were, however, easily crushed since they were isolated and unorganised. Destruction proved counter-productive. Then trade unions were formed to ease the downward pressure on wages which resulted from competition between workers. The unions aimed to establish uniform wage scales, to regulate apprenticeships and also, often, to oppose the introduction of machinery. Their role was of necessity contradictory' and sectional. The kind of political association which could potentially overcome this problem of division appeared for the first time on a large scale in the form of Chartism. This was the first attempt by workers to gain direct access to the state through extending the franchise.
The response of the ruling class to previous waves to discontent among their workers had consisted mainly of vicious and brutal oppression to outlaw trade unions and democratic association. The Combination Acts, the Tolpuddle martyrs and Peterloo are the British equivalent of the killings in recent times in Gdansk and other parts of Poland. In the late nineteenth century they began to fear how workers might react to this once they could vote. This fear had a very long history. Two hundred and fifty years earlier, at the time of the English Revolution, the aptly named Colonel Rich had said:
You have five to one in this kingdom that have no permanent interest . . if the master and servant shall be equal electors, then clearly those that have no interest in the kingdom will make it their interest to choose those that have no interest. . . there may be a law enacted, that there shall be an equality of goods and estate. (Quoted in The Century of Revolution, Christopher Hill. p. 120.)
In addition, employers faced the problem, after the Education Act of 1870, of increasing literacy among their workers which posed the threat of growing knowledge and understanding. So in place of violent suppression, there evolved the idea of social reform. According to many liberal capitalists of the late nineteenth century, the discontent of workers could be placated without revolutionary change, provided their employers were prepared to make minor concessions. This idea was sold to the capitalist class over a period of time by politicians like Joseph Chamberlain, with his question: “1 ask what ransom will property pay for the security it enjoys” (at an 1885 Liberal Party meeting discussing the financing of social services — Life, J. L. Garvin, 1932, Vol. I. p. 549).
The experiences of workers continued to show that the fetters of capitalism prevented their needs from being met. The question of getting rid of capitalism arose, but was drowned by the clamour for piecemeal reform of the system. The formation of employers’ federations in the 1890s and the anti-trade union court rulings around the turn of the century led to the formation of the Labour Party, which then grew from a trade union pressure group to an alternative capitalist government to the Liberal Party, out of which it had in part grown. The lip-service paid by the Labour Party after 1918 to nationalisation is now frowned on by many workers, particularly those who have worked in state-capitalist industries and found it no better than working in the private sector. The Tory statesman. Peel, had already proposed the nationalisation of the railways half a century earlier as a threat against private monopolies, so the idea had a long, respectable history within capitalism.
From the start, the Labour Party was not united on any principle and attempted to catch votes by empty promises which had nothing to do with the self-emancipation of workers. Labour governments have smashed strikes, supported wars, passed racist immigration legislation, presided over soaring unemployment, cut medical and social services, wages and housing programmes. In fact they have done everything the Tories do, and anything which has been demanded of them by the present, capitalist system which they say we “have to work within”. The last Labour government, for example, imposed a five per cent limit on wage rises through the “social contract”, and at the 1975 Labour Party conference called for wage restraint with the exercise of the "socialist imagination” — in other words, take less but imagine you're getting more. Jack Jones of the TGWU justified his support for these measures with the assertion that "Socialism means being able to take part now and not just dream dreams”.
Alternative Economic Strategy
At the moment the Labour Party, the Communist Party, the Liberal Party and the SDP are all proposing to deal with the 14 per cent rate of unemployment by the Keynesian policy of increasing public expenditure. Keynes saw himself as the saviour of capitalism; he hoped to prove Marx wrong by showing that the profit system could work in the interests of all. He hoped for 5 per cent unemployment as a "natural” stable level. But the policies of all the governments since World War Two have followed Keynes without success. For example, during the seventies, annual government spending was increased about four times over, and unemployment shot up from under half a million to over two million. This was simply the outcome of one of the periodic trade slumps of capitalism.
But according to the Labour Party we should not yet reject the whole system, for they have a few more policies for us to try. Have we tried them all before? Well, yes, they say. but why not try again, after all. Labour MPs might join the dole queue otherwise. The rest of the "Alternative Economic Strategy” consists of import controls, and controls on wages and other prices. That these measures cannot serve the interests of the majority has been amply illustrated by our own experience.
If you are a shareholder in one of the companies which was nationalised on 11 February 1982, your shares will be exchanged freely for guaranteed state bonds, with variable rates of interest, on 13 April 1982.
The ideals of "industrial democracy” and "workers control" within the capitalist system are simply modern replacements of the older. Tory defence of property as based on freedom and enterprise. They lead to exploitation supervised by the exploited themselves, masking the fundamental class division of capitalism.
Why, then, do the so-called revolutionaries of the Left still involve themselves in the Labour Party? It used to be because it was the "mass Party of the working class”, even though numerically you might just as well describe the Nazi Party in Germany in the thirties in that way. But recently the Labour Party has been in decline, with its individual membership falling by hundreds of thousands. The reason for the Left’s continuing involvement is their sticking to the old-fashioned idea of secret infiltration rather than open persuasion. Leninist groups such as Militant Tendency and the SWP think workers are incapable of understanding socialism — even though their own conception of it is at best vague and often oppressively anti-working class and dictatorial. Because of this arrogant belief that they have understood something which others cannot, the attitude of these groups has been somewhat contradictory. For example, in the February 1974 election the manifesto of the International Marxist Group said "VOTE LABOUR — but rely on your own struggles". Then in their Red Weekly (now Socialist Challenge) of February 22 they said:
Labour's attitude to the working class involves outright lying . . . the (Labour) programme is a big con. designed to trap the working class movement into accepting further cutbacks in its standard of living while prices soar.
On 23 February, 1974. the SWP’s Socialist Worker advised that "every socialist, every worker must spend all the days before polling day shouting two simple slogans at work, in the home and whenever anyone will listen: DEFEND UNIONS — VOTE LABOUR”. A few months later, on 6 July 1974, the same journal slated:
Wilson’s wage cuts will have to be fought with stronger organisation and stronger industrial action — stronger even than the action that booted out Heath and the Tories.
Leninism
These U-turns are made because these parties blindly accept as a dogma the statement made by Lenin in a pamphlet at the turn of the century, that "The working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness”. (What is to be Done?) Poles who know the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto have recently been saying that a spectre is haunting Leninism — the spectre of trade-union consciousness. The irony really is complete, because Leninist groups insist on the need for a leadership to take workers beyond the trade-union struggle, and yet spend much of their time talking about the trade-union struggle, even when the workers they are "organising" find that reformist campaigns which fail to touch the root of the problem cannot be in our interests as the majority class in society. As the “vanguard" repeat their circular slogans and arrogant dogmas and the rest of us find more and more evidence that we must get rid of the system they say we must work within, it is not hard to see why Marx spoke of the need to educate the educators. In the early days of the Russian Revolution, Lenin declared that to establish state capitalism would be a victory (The Chief Task of our Times), and he has been quoted:
If socialism can only be realised when the intellectual development of all the people permitted it. then we shall not see socialism for at least five hundred years. (Ten Days That Shook the World, John Reed. p. 263)
There is in fact no reason at all why the majority of workers could not easily understand that the present system of production for profit must be replaced by production for use, and private and state property replaced by democratic control and common ownership. The abolition of the world market system does require the full development of socialist political consciousness on the part of a majority of workers. We are quite adequately equipped, biologically and socially, for this task of taking political action on the basis of understanding, in order to transform society.
The organisation of the Leninist left epitomises the hierarchy, the bureaucracy, and the deadening nature of capitalist hypocrisy. Much genuine and potentially revolutionary discontent is absorbed and channelled into the kind of rebellion against fragments and details of the system which proves ultimately innocuous. These basic assumptions lead to the state capitalist regimes such as Russia — however much the Trotskyists may try to deny this by dating the beginning of oppression in modern Russia from the time when Lenin died and Stalin took over. And Russia, with its concentration of most industry in the hands of the state and the suppression of trade union activity, is basically a capitalist state:
During the first year of transition to the new system industrial enterprises obtained 3500 million roubles extra profit. The level of profitability rose from 13 per cent in 1965 (in industry as a whole) to 22.5 per cent in 1969 (for enterprises transferred to the new system). (Labour Remuneration, Labour Incentive Funds and Soviet Trade Unions, Novosii Press Agency, Moscow, 1972.)
No Socialism without Socialists
Militant is now in a state of panic over the dreaded Labour Party "Register”. In the end. they will either be kicked out or accommodated. Their history of a reformist leadership holding back the rank and file is an unfounded myth. To support the principle of leadership signifies lack of socialist consciousness. Leaders like Wilson and Foot were regarded as being on the Left at one time. The successive movements of politicians across the wings of the Labour Party merely reflects their stagnating acceptance of capitalism. Society will change through conscious desire, not the eighteenth-century Jacobin tactics of secret conspiracy and infiltration, or through the manipulations of self-styled vanguards. The limited way in which both the Left and Right wings of capitalism define what is “possible” and what is not crushes any real dissent from the prevailing form of society. They are ideological harnesses, holding back uncertain workers from developing the confidence necessary for self-emancipation, as advocated by Marx. The capitalist system has produced four tons of nuclear explosives (TNT-equivalent) for every man and woman on earth, but still leaves an average of one person to starve to death each second. Only a conscious majority of workers, organised democratically, can take the political action necessary to end this tragedy, by sending delegates to take over and dismantle the state machine. Before this can happen we must rid ourselves of any illusions about the outdated and destructive system we live in at the moment.
Clifford Slapper
