Greasy Pole: It’s A Date, Then? Or Not? (2007)

The Greasy Pole column from the November 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

That was the month that was. In September Gordon Brown celebrated his first speech to a Labour Party conference as Prime Minister by dragging out a procession of exhausted platitudes about the glories of being British and having a Labour government to stop you forgetting it. Soon afterwards a majority of the people who can be bothered to answer the questions of opinion pollsters said that, if given the chance tomorrow, they would vote for another spell of Labour government provided it could be under Gordon Brown. Understandably encouraged by this, Labour’s propaganda machine planted a rumour that Brown would call a general election for 1 November. This was startling news; don’t these people who start rumours know that 1 November comes immediately after Halloween, so that election canvassers were in danger of being confused with kids dressed up as skeletal witches frightening old ladies on their doorsteps with demands for trick-or-treat under threat of having their front gardens vandalised?

Luckily the Tory conference, following hard on the heels of Labour’s event, went some way to putting things to rights because George Osborne, who threatens to be the next Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, did a trick-or-treat on Brown by declaring that when he was in charge at the Treasury only millionaires would be liable for inheritance tax. The dullards who are bothered to be so loyal to the Conservative Party that they turn up at their conferences were ecstatic about this promised financial tinkering to the extent that they failed to notice that Osborne had also put down a marker to be the next Tory leader if the party ever gets fed up with Cameron’s touchy-feely, hoodie-hugging, I-luv-u-babe style of deception. Cameron pitched in with a speech even heavier laden with platitudes than Brown had managed, on the excuse that his speech “may be muddled but it is me” – which, it must be hoped, will not pioneer endless hours of drivel by any leader who confesses to being me. A lot of easily impressed people who had once bothered to tell the pollsters that they would vote Labour changed their mind so that Brown decided it would be wise to abandon the idea of a post-Halloween election, leaving him free to take his kids out trick-or-treating. The Tories were incensed that a party leader could change the polling date to improve their chances of winning, spluttering that this was a diabolical plot, not only to disrupt the winter festivities but also to subvert the democratic process.

Eden

Even by the lax standards of political parties the assumed Tory indignation at the possibility that Brown would fix an election date to suit his party’s interests is suffocatingly audacious. Both parties have adopted the same stratagem; indeed it is rare for a government to run its full course of five years. For the  Conservatives, Anthony Eden succeeded Churchill as Prime Minister, after a long, frustrating wait which did nothing to soothe his naturally impetuous temperament, in April 1955. In fact, although the succession had been widely assumed, it was not as smooth or as predictable; Lord Swinton, one of the grander of Tory grandees, told Churchill that Eden “would make the worst Prime Minister since Lord North” and Churchill morosely agreed that he thought it had been “a great mistake” to announce his successor so long ago. The Labour Party, exhausted and shattered by the stress of their participation in the wartime coalition and split by the controversy surrounding Aneurin Bevan, were a long way from offering a realistic option as a government while the Conservative benches were thick with young, thrusting, ambitious newcomers to the Westminster jungle. Political strategy demanded that Eden call a quick election, to exploit the contrast between the ailing, often absent, Churchill and himself as a dashing, handsome, charming ex-Guards officer. After some dithering, notable for the display of the most lurid of his tantrums, Eden decided for an election in May, a year before he had to. Against the Labour Party as it was then, it could hardly be called a gamble; the voters, perhaps in gratitude at having this scion of innate ruling class superiority ordering them about, returned Eden’s government with its unsafe majority of 16 increased to a relatively secure one of 58.

Suez

In fact Eden’s government was notable, not for its chivalry but for the chaos and deceptions of the Suez invasion. This episode in cynicism, although typical of capitalism’s politics, did not seem to inflict any long term damage on the Tory Party for Eden’s successor Macmillan constructed an increased majority for them at the 1959 election. It was an uncomfortable fact that, among their confusion, the working class showed no reluctance to pursue an outdated dream of the glory days of British imperialism during which deranged and treacherous foreigners like Colonel Nasser were unwaveringly taught to keep their place. These unhelpful, insupportable prejudices blossomed again in 1982, when the Thatcher government blanketed a number of inconvenient historical facts to justify their intention to eject the Argentinian forces from the Falklands. Satisfactory as this was at the time to the Iron Lady its full value was not revealed until she had to settle on the date of the next general election – the first test of her record since she came to power in 1979.

Had Thatcher’s government served its full term they would have gone to the polls in May 1984. But the prospects for that date were unpromising. The early 1980s were not favourable to the Tories, marked by economic problems – at one stage there were 3 million registered unemployed – showing up in a series of bad by-election results in constituencies like Croydon North West and Crosby, where the former Labour front bencher Shirley Williams won with nearly 50 per cent of the vote for the SDP. In some cases the Tories were left struggling in third place. Things did not look good if they waited for a 1984 election, in the hope that something would turn up. And something did turn up – apart, that is, from the Labour Party electing Michael Foot as their leader. But the crucial event was the Falklands; when, in June 1982 the British forces sailed triumphantly home, leaving behind their dead and their sunken ships, Thatcher was quick to put the war in the most favourable light for the Tories:

“We have ceased to be a nation in retreat. We have instead a newfound confidence – born in the economic battles at home and tested and found true 8000 miles away…we rejoice that Britain has rekindled that spirit which has fired her for generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before.”

Vote

And after that it seemed absolutely unavoidable that she would apply the heat of that newfound spirit to roast the Labour Party in a general election. In June 1983, a year before the government’s full term was up, the Tories romped home with a record majority of 144. Michael Foot’s Labour Party hit its lowest point since the defeats of the 1930s. All things considered, for Thatcher and her party an example of skilful timing, helped by a bit of luck and some hundreds of dead people, who had not been so lucky.

A governing party is absorbed in the timing of an election on the assumption that if they get it right their vote will be significantly higher. But what does this say about the people who vote? Are they content to use their power to bring about the trivial, short-lived changes which concern parties like Labour and the Tories rather than to erect a fundamental, enduring social revolution to consign capitalism to its unhappy history? Are they happy to so misuse their power that they oppose the Tories when unemployment is high but support them after a victorious war? Are they satisfied to use their vote to repress themselves rather than for their freedom?

Ivan

Editorial: Did you waste your vote? (1983)

Editorial from the October 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

The stunned aftermath of the Tory election victory was a time for the defeated parties to be composing their excuses. The Labour Party are not yet sure who, or what, they should blame for their collapse but the Liberal/SDP Alliance are quite clear on the matter. They were, they protest, robbed; the electoral system in this country is such that it allowed a party to win power on a minority of votes while a smaller party has only a handful of seats in Parliament to show for the millions of people who supported it. This anomaly, says the Alliance, calls into question the very nature of parliamentary democracy in Britain — it is. they hope to persuade us, time for a change.

In fact this is a long-established argument, which we have been hearing from the Liberal Party ever since they were swept from the position of being the alternative government. It has now been taken up by the SDP. although none of the prominent ex-Labour ministers in the SDP complained about the electoral system when it was working to their advantage. It does not need a mathematical genius to work out, or to understand, the statistics of it. Over the country millions of votes go to unsuccessful candidates, so that when the votes cast for each party are divided by the number of their MPs it emerges that vastly fewer votes are needed overall to elect a Tory or a Labour MP than for one from the Alliance. Put another way, this means that millions of votes are virtually unrepresented in Parliament, which causes much anguish among the self-styled democrats of the Alliance.

This was the argument used by the Liberal Party to support their persistent campaign for proportional representation which, by one method or another, was supposed to produce a Parliament more in line with the votes as they are cast in the election. The Labour and Tory parties always evaded the issue of democracy and attacked the Liberal proposals on the grounds that proportional representation made for a fragmented, and therefore unstable. government. There is no evidence (except to the contrary) that working class interests are bound up with the stability or otherwise of the government, which has the role of protecting the interests of the exploiting class in society. It is important to observe that both sides in this debate are motivated, not by any objective concern for democratic representation but by a concern for their own political advantage. For example the extent of the Liberal concern for democracy can be gauged by the fact that they grant dictatorial powers to their leader on the composition of their election manifesto.

None of this should obscure the fact that democracy is important to the working class. It enables them to organise more freely in trade unions and thereby better protect themselves in the struggles of the industrial field. It makes the existence of a socialist party easier, which means that the case for a new society can be stated more effectively. And there is also the fact that life for workers under capitalism is less stressful in the absence of the type of repression associated with a dictatorship such as Nazi Germany. What is unimportant is which party holds power in a capitalist society; apart from a reshuffling of their programmes and their personalities, they are at core identical. None of them can lay claim to be able to solve the problems typical of this social system, including that of political repression. Votes for all of them — Labour, Conservative, Alliance and the rest — are votes for impotence and those millions of workers who opted for them at the election were wasting their votes.

Democracy matters to the working class because it is not impotent; it is strength. It is more than a five-yearly chance to choose between the competing political clones of capitalism; democracy is a matter of knowledge, consciousness and participation. It is, in other words, an essential part of the case for a socialist society and it is as a means to establish and organise that society that democracy achieves the true measure of its importance.

Socialism will come into existence when the world’s working class, in a conscious political act, have overthrown the class ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution and replaced it with communal ownership. It will be a classless, moneyless society in which human beings will co-operate to produce wealth which will be freely available to all to satisfy their needs. It will be a system which makes all information openly available to enable a full participation in decision-taking. Just as the socialist movement today is made up of conscious socialists, so will socialism be populated by people who are aware of the basic nature of their society and of how it must be operated to the common benefit.

Socialists have good cause to be aware of the defects of the present system of parliamentary elections. We also know that to attempt to change it, while leaving capitalism to continue, will have little effect — certainly not enough to justify a diversion of working class efforts from the struggle for socialism. The capitalist parties are concerned with the issue through an expedient preoccupation with their own fortunes; the paramount issue is not whether there should be fewer Tory MPs. or more Alliance MPs, to run capitalism perhaps slightly differently, but whether the world will continue to suffer a social system which cannot answer to its people’s needs or whether we shall have socialism.

Whatever its faults, the limited democracy in force in places like Britain at present allows a socialist movement to exist and to propagate its ideas. What hampers our progress is a persisting lack of working class consciousness and understanding. When that is remedied — and socialists everywhere work to that end — we shall have the new society of co-operation, abundance and security — the society of true democracy.

Labour in pain (1983)

From the October 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Judging from his article in Tribune (19 August 1983) Conrad Jameson of the Kensington and Chelsea Labour Party is a very frustrated man. The article cries out with utter despair against a party which has betrayed thousands who placed their faith in it.

Conrad Jameson is staggered by the cynical policy somersaults which the Labour Party has performed since its overwhelming defeat in the election:

It’s hardly seven weeks since the election. Yet Neil Kinnock has already put us back into the Common Market, E. P. Thompson has already confessed that Denis Healey was right after all — stop Trident and Cruise for now but bargain about Polaris later on. Even the sweet-natured Michael Foot has already discovered that it is only the discount that makes the Tory policy of council house sales so wicked as the principle has always been good.

These are changes, mind, coming from Labour's Centre Left — and before the October Conference. When the strains of The Red Flag have died away will we not get still more? And if that is the case why should I bother my head about turning Right or Left?

The choice in the Labour leadership battle, according to Jameson, is between Hypocrisy and Opportunism:

There are two ways of moving Labour back to the middle. One is to move Rightwards but say you haven’t. For this tactic we need a first-class hypocrite, a leader who can march backwards even while claiming to make a forward change — and for that, no doubt about it, Kinnock fits the bill . . . Another way of moving Right is simply to move Right — and shut up and be quick about it. For this tactic we need a first-class opportunist . . . For that kind of swordsmanship we need Roy Hattersley.

It can be far from satisfying to be stuck in a political party which changes its policies because the voters don't like them and which picks its leaders on the basis of their hypocritical and opportunist credentials. But that is the party which Conrad Jameson says he belongs to, and who are we to disagree with him? Of course, he is not alone. Apart from the thousands who have abandoned the Labour Party in recent weeks, months and years, there are many who, like Conrad Jameson, carry on giving loyalty to the party which is as unprincipled when it loses as when it wins. One can sympathise with their attachment to the Labour Party: it is never easy to break away from one's traditional affiliations and make a new start. Hard though it may be, there are urgent reasons why Conrad Jameson and others who feel and think like him should start questioning the basic position of the Labour Party.

Facing facts, it has to be conceded by Jameson and others that the problems of the Labour Party are not simply problems of leadership. Even if Kinnock was anything but a hypocrite and Hattersley was transparently honest Labour would still be a party which aims to work within the capitalist system. It is Labour's refusal to examine the system rather than its symptoms which makes it a party of reformism, destined as long as it survives to play the futile game of trying to run the system of exploitation in the interest of the wage slaves who are exploited.

Consider the so-called Left wing policies which Labour is now in the process of throwing overboard in a desperate attempt to keep the sinking ship afloat. Membership of the Common Market; the Left want out, the Right wants to stay in. But what interest is it of the working class whether the British capitalists — our exploiters — join the European Big Business Club or stay out of it? The pretence that workers would be much better off one way or the other is one which sustains the myth that, given a few modifications, capitalism can be turned into the kind of society where all the manifestations of poverty can be eradicated. Yet any serious analysis of capitalism would show that poverty is not a consequence of one trading alliance rather than another, but is an inevitable effect of a system based on class division.

Under the capitalist system one class owns and controls the means of wealth production. but does not produce any wealth; the wealth producers are alienated from social power. The law of the market which is the fundamental principle of capitalism, is that needs can only be satisfied if it is profitable to the capitalists. The Labour Party advocates import controls, but these are economic policies belonging to a nationalistic outlook based on a confused analysis about “what's best for Britain” rather than what socialists should be advocating: what's best for the working class. The argument over nuclear missiles is, again, seen by the Labour Party in completely reformist terms. Instead of beginning by asking why wars take place in the modern world and concluding that war is unavoidable when there is constant competition over markets, raw materials and trade routes, the Labour Party has become involved in the business of advising the British capitalists — and those of the other NATO countries — as to the most humane way to fight a future war — using conventional rather than nuclear weapons

The capitalists are not interested in fighting humanely, but in killing cheaply and with the most efficient weaponry of destruction. If E.P. Thompson now agrees with Healey’s sordid compromise that is no doubt because he has realised that if Labour is ever to provide a credible government of capitalism it will have to defend and expand British capital without any moral scruples about nuclear weapons.

To the sincere Labour Party member, who joined up in order to make society more humane, affluent and secure, the “realities” which their leaders are forced to accept must be very hard to swallow. It is easier to shout names at Kinnock and Hattersley than to accept that the “realities” which these politicians are adapting to are inevitable if Labour is to bow to the needs of capitalism. This leaves Conrad Jameson and other frustrated Labourites with a choice: either they also adapt to the needs of the profit system and drop the stuff about nuclear disarmament and standing on the side of the poor — or they stop playing the capitalist game and move beyond the barriers of the Broad Church. Of course, you can try to have it both ways and accept the role of political martyrdom, as some Leftists like to do. by staying in the Labour Party and spending a lifetime crying out against the betrayals, urging Labour governments to pretend that they are running socialism when they are running capitalism, and waiting to be dealt with in one of the periodic party purges. The self-deceit of the Militant Tendency is a one way deception: they believe that they are playing a crucial role in radicalising the Labour Party, but the Labour leaders know that they are about as dangerous as a crowd of feminists infiltrating the Girl Guides.

Suppose that you choose to leave. The mass exodus of recent years shows that you will not be the first to have thought of the idea. Where to next? Obviously, nobody leaving the Labour Party because it is a pro-capitalist party is going to be attracted to the Tories or the Alliance. At one time the Communist Party seemed to be an alternative. If there is one useful lesson which workers in Britain do seem to have learned over the last few years it is that Russian state capitalism offers no preferable alternative to private capitalism. The Communist Party of 1983 is a shadow of its old self; a blundering, old hanger-on to the coat-tails of the Labour Party. What about the other Leftist groups? Essentially, they are simply advocating old Labour policies, usually formulated in the language of Lenin. The idea that nationalisation is a socialist measure is another that workers are increasingly less taken in by and Militant's demand for the nationalisation of the top two hundred companies is hardly likely to inspire more than a yawn from any worker who understands how the capitalist system operates.

Most ex-Labourites retire into a kind of cynical apathy. Ask them which party they support and they tell you how they used to support Labour — and would probably vote for them rather than the Tories — but basically the parties are all the same. It is surprising how many workers told us that when we were campaigning for the Socialist Party of Great Britain in the recent general election. Conrad Jameson could be in grave danger of falling into the pit of apathy. Given the state of his party, and the inevitable compromises which he will have to witness from his new leader, we can hardly blame him — and many like him — for looking towards the exit door of the Broad Church.

There is always, of course, the Socialist Party of Great Britain. We appreciate that Conrad Jameson may never have heard of us and we are doing all that is within our power to ensure that our existence is more widely known. If he has heard of us he may, like many other people, have all sorts of strange misunderstandings about what we stand for. We stand for one aim and one only: socialism. Of course, socialism means many things to many people, so let us define it clearly: “The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community". That object is printed on every piece of literature produced by the Socialist Party. No leader or caucus could divert us from our socialist aim because the Socialist Party has no leaders and allows no followers: admission to membership is on the basis that you know what you want and you know how to get it. The Socialist Party has a clear analysis of capitalism based largely, but not dogmatically, on the theories of Marx. It is our contention that socialism can only be established when a majority of workers, not just in Britain but throughout the world, understand and want a society of production for use and free access to wealth.

Talk to many people on the Left and in the Labour Party and they will admit to having a certain respect for the Socialist Party. Of course, they realise that a party without leaders is never going to get any followers and that a party which is not in the business of trying to make capitalism work will never make capitalism work. They stay where they are — some for power, others in hope, and others out of mental indolence. We urge members of the Labour Party like Conrad Jameson — men and women who are struggling to find a way out of the mess of reformist politics — to think hard about the case of the SPGB. Of course, there may be many disagreements to be discussed and it may be that ex-Labourites will find the unbending principles of the Socialist Party just as unacceptable as the lack of principles of the Labour Party. Unlike other political parties, membership of the SPGB involves more than filling in a form and paying a few quid. A party of principles can only retain its unity by only allowing in those who are fully with us. To the disillusioned, of whatever party they may be, the socialist message is clear: Take the trouble to consider the Socialist Party and its clear case for socialism; if you reject it, tell us why and perhaps we will be persuaded to reject it; if you agree, then the next move must be yours.

Steve Coleman

Labour's past (1983)

From the September 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every sensible delegate to this year's Labour Party conference will include in their luggage some long, sharp knives so that they can participate in a not-very-fraternal bout of blood-letting known as Taking Stock. In fact, stock is something the Labour Party need to take all too often for their own comfort but in 1983 they are under unusual pressure. No delegate can be in any doubt about the gravity of their situation and just in case there are any lingering optimists making their way to Brighton next month the leaders of the party are writing warnings like this, from Roy Hattersley:

For the Labour Party to succeed (perhaps even to survive as a major party of government) the long hard climb back to popularity and power has to begin at once . . . . Unless we swiftly demonstrate both our will and power to win in 1988, the Liberal-Social Democrat Alliance will successfully pose as the real alternative to Thatcherite Conservatism (Guardian 8 August 1983).

Everyone knows that people like Hattersley are gloomy about Labour’s crushing defeat in June, which diminished his ambition from Prime Minister to a columnist in Punch. Groggily, his party now contemplate the fact that they have not lost so conclusively since 1931, when MacDonald’s National government was returned with a majority of over 7 million votes, sweeping almost every former Labour minister out of Parliament. Since those (for them) calamitous days the Labour Party have worked hard to convince themselves that it could not happen again.

Michael Foot has paid the penalty for losing the election, hustled into retirement and likely to disappear almost without trace. If he had won it would have been very different; he would have been Labour’s hero and apart from anything else would have had a number of desirable jobs to distribute among faithful friends and followers. Now, his role in Labour’s future seems to be to make appearances at those empty emotional rallies of the faithful where the reality of both past and present is so distorted that eventually the same misguided view can be taken of the future. At such events, almost anything is possible; Foot may well become, like many a Labour politician since 1931, an aged conscience of the party to help them both forget what has happened and to believe that it will not happen again. Much hope is being invested in Foot’s successor as leader, whoever he may be, and in the prospect of a “dream ticket" — a leader and a deputy whose reputations and talents are such that between them they are able to assuage the prejudices and frustrations of all sections of the party. So that if one can’t pull off a particular deception, the other can.

It will be quite unprecedented, if Labour’s stock-taking is anything other than the familiar exercise in evasion and reassurance. There may be some criticism of their election manifesto, either on the grounds that it was not attractive enough or that it was too antagonistic. The party leadership might have expected a battering except that Foot and Healey have prudently taken their leave. A lot of hard things will be spoken about Labour’s organisation and their election machine, much of it in the conviction that it was nothing more than a matter of bad communication which left the voters in ignorance of the delights of living under another Labour government. Saatchi and Saatchi may prick up their ears at resolutions like this, from Oldham: "The Labour Party is sadly lacking in the modern techniques of organisation, administration, communication, advertising and public relations and even within a very limited budget much more effective action could be taken in the business of winning votes”.

It will not, then, be an enquiry into Labour’s basic nature as a party of capitalism, its appalling history and its dismal prospects but into why they lost the election — why didn’t they get their turn at trying to run the affairs of the British capitalist class? Some of the brainier delegates may agree with New Society (26 May 1983) which thought that the “skilled" workers who are buying council houses and installing central heating and video machines have decided that a Labour government could not be trusted to defend what they think of as their affluence. It is, of course, not only “skilled” workers who get it wrong about their class position under capitalism; sometimes they are compelled to get it rather nearer correct, when they take part in unpopular strikes which get some scathing publicity. If Labour’s enquiry comes up with some sort of an answer their next step will be to fashion a programme to attract the disaffected voters back. It won’t particularly matter what is in the programme: in any case it can all be forgotten soon after the election. The important question is — will it help in that “business of winning votes"?

We shall have to endure again the spectacle of those boring irrelevancies — the left wing and the right — parading their differences as if these are matters fundamental to working class interests. The left are already blaming the defeat on defective leadership. "The only hope", shrieked Tribune “is that in the autumn elections for the National Executive Committee and the Shadow Cabinet, the tired, ideologically impoverished, obsessive men and women who have led the Labour Party to the brink of ruin will be swept away for ever”. The right are less optimistic; they don’t think in terms of Labour’s problems being solved "for ever”, nor that they need ideologically wealthy people in the leadership. What they are sure about is that the party have lately been showing suicidal tendencies, like conference opting for unilateralism, like the confusion over Militant, like the hungrily-publicised blunders of Ken Livingstone.

But left and right are agreed on one thing; there is nothing fundamentally at fault with the Labour Party. Both wings think that it is possible to control capitalism and to make the system work in the interests of the majority and that Labour is the party best fitted to do this, even if they call it socialism. They both think that capitalism produces war, famine, poverty, by accident; it could be a benign, peaceful, abundant society provided there are one or two adjustments to the personalities and the programmes of the Labour Party. So at the election, when the working class might have voted for socialism. Labour’s left and right wings were hard at work inviting them to vote as if they were brainless, forgetting Labour’s wretched history, ignoring those ideologically impoverished leaders. In this cause Neil Kinnock nearly lost his famous Welsh voice and Denis Healey cheerfully allowed his equally famous, luxuriant eyebrows to be experimentally tugged at by children whose parents, he hoped, would thereby be persuaded to vote for the party of Ken Livingstone.

These unsavoury antics are what is actually meant by “the business of winning votes” and the Labour Party know all about it because they have been at it for a very long time. At their 1930 conference — the year when unemployment averaged 16 per cent of the total employees, almost 2 million people — Prime Minister MacDonald assured the delegates that they were ". . . moving, as it were, in a great eternal ocean of surge towards righteousness, towards fair play, towards honesty . . ." A year later MacDonald’s own personal surge had carried him into leadership of a coalition government with the Liberals and the hated Tories. This government moved promptly in the direction of fair play by protecting the interests of the British ruling class by cutting unemployment benefit below its already miserly level. The Liberal leader, Herbert Samuel, particularly wanted MacDonald to be Prime Minister; the workers, he thought, could more easily be persuaded to accept unpalatable measures from a Labour government. There was little difficulty in getting MacDonald to agree that he was the man for the job: "Tomorrow." he cheerfully assured the Tebbit-like Philip Snowden. “Every duchess in London will be wanting to kiss me".

These were the events which led to the Labour Party being annihilated at the 1931 election and to them taking stock at their conference the following year. They quickly decided that there was nothing basically amiss with their party: “The events of last year,” said Charles Trevelyan, who had been MacDonald's Minister of Education, "Were a great shock to this party in its confidence in men. but there is no shock to its confidence in itself . . .’’ The problem was that too much power had been given to too few men — in particular to one man. the hated (although not by duchesses) MacDonald. The delegates were properly impressed and passed a resolution moved by Trevelyan that a future Labour government should immediately promulgate “. . . definite socialist legislation . . .” and should “. . . stand or fall in the House of Commons on the principles in which it has faith”.

At the 1933 conference another critic of MacDonald emerged into prominence, in the diminutive and reticent figure of J.R. Clynes, who had been Home Secretary and who again was quite clear on the reasons for the 1929/31 Labour government’s dismal collapse: "Never again should any one leader of the party be empowered singly to use his personal authority, and himself alone choose his cabinet or appoint his ministers”. Clynes was recommending a proposal by Labour’s NEC that a future Labour Prime Minister should select ministers only after consulting and acting in conjunction with the other party leaders. The delegates were predictably in favour of this; they seemed to be unaware that this was in fact the method used by MacDonald and Clynes did not tell them, although he himself had come to be Home Secretary in this way. Under the impression that they were making some triumphant, significant change, the conference left things as they were. The next time Labour came to office. in 1945, Attlee simply ignored the whole thing and chose the ministers he wanted.

There is no reason to believe, in 1983, that Labour Party members are any likelier to grasp reality than were those who were so readily deceived by Trevelyan and Clynes. The plain fact is that, such is Labour’s recent record and present condition. the working class are unlikely to consider them a possible administration of British capitalism. It is not permissible for the Labour Party to avoid all responsibility for this. They cannot blame it all onto poor, bookish, bumbling Foot or the reptiles of Fleet Street or the diabolical smoothies Saatchi and Saatchi. They have persistently argued, in opposition to the case for socialism, that there is no need to campaign for workers to understand and consciously oppose capitalism; for them the important thing has been to win votes by whatever method. This has left untouched — indeed it has usually stimulated — the support which the working class give to the capitalist social system; the Labour Party have overlooked the fact that workers who are so ignorant of their class interests that they will vote for capitalism under a Labour government will at other times opt for capitalism under the Tories, unemployment and the Falklands notwithstanding.

A useful enquiry into the Labour Party would expose its ideological poverty. It would denounce Labour's theory, held to so stubbornly through all the evidence of history, that by a policy of opportunism and duplicity capitalism can be reformed out of its essential character. The facts speak for themselves, through the fog of self-delusion which will be the Labour Party conference. After decades of compromise and deceit, of cynical grubbing in the business of winning votes, the Labour Party has made such progress that the Tories are back stronger than ever and Labour are back at 1931.

Ivan

Running Commentary: Barbara’s response (1983)

The Running Commentary column from the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Barbara’s response

In their widely used double whole-page advertisement the Conservative Party claimed that “putting a cross in the Labour box is the same as signing this piece of paper” and one of the items on the imaginary piece of paper was: “I waive my right to choose any form of private medicine for my family”.

This was of course completely untrue but, on the basis that if you are going to tell a lie you might as well tell a big one — in letters half an inch high — it might have frightened some readers into voting Conservative if they had not already decided to do so.

One response was an article in The Times (26 May 1983) by Barbara Castle who was at pains to point out that "What Labour’s manifesto actually says is: ‘We shall remove private practice from the NHS’.” In other words. Labour has no objection to people queue jumping (her expression) provided they do it in Harley Street but not under the noses of the workers who build and run the hospitals and who might feel that they are entitled to as good a health service as anyone else.

But then, it has always been Labour’s policy to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds in the scramble for votes. Those workers who yet again voted for the Labour Party were voting for second class NHS treatment when they could receive of the best in a socialist society.

Exit with dignity

Len Murray, General Secretary of the TUC, is like a lot of other people. He is keen that everyone should have a job because, he thinks, anyone who is unemployed is not just penniless and hopeless: “These marchers,” he cried at a People’s March for Jobs demonstration in June, “have been cheated of their dignity by not being given a job".

Christopher Smith, devoted husband and father, was dignified alright. He had had the same job since he left school fifteen years ago and had been raised to assistant manager at the supermarket where he worked. One drawback to being assistant manager was that, as the company cut back on the staff forcing a lot of people into the indignity of the dole queue, Christopher was left to run the shop on his own.

In what the company probably thought of as his leisure time Christopher took the paperwork home to wrestle with. The responsibility and pressures became so great that a judge later described them as an “overwhelming terror”.

One day Christopher left the shop early, went home and stabbed his wife and daughter to death. He tried five times to kill himself and then told the police what he had done. At the Old Bailey the judge, probably reasoning that even for capitalism this man had been punished enough, put Christopher on probation with a condition that he accept medical treatment.

Employment, which is the process of being exploited for the benefit of a class of social parasites, is an outrageous indignity. One measure of this is the fact that, if it is not profitable to employ workers, they are brusquely thrust away onto the scrap heap. Those who arc kept on have to cope with the pressures of a fiercer exploitation.

Some can manage this without too much damage to themselves. Others fall ill, sprout ulcers, suffer heart attacks and strokes. A few. like Christopher Smith, in one way or another destroy their lives. For them, there is often a final indignity — to be told that it is they, and not this wretched social system, who are sick.

Ah, yes: which firm was it, to do this to this man? They call themselves Your Sharing, Caring Co-op.

Target practice

Like someone at a fairground shooting gallery, Margaret Thatcher has now picked off two Labour leaders and is probably at present squinting along the barrel waiting for the next target to come into view.

The Labour and Conservative parties continually tell us that political processes are something of a shoot-out between two intellectual Titans. For example the 1983 election was reduced at times to a personal battle between Foot and Thatcher, which implied that they are two specially capable people and that there was some reason to make a choice between them.

This theory of the need for leadership is essentially exclusive. Running modern society is so difficult and complicated a matter that it can be understood by only a small minority of specially gifted men and women. The rest of us must leave it up to them and be satisfied with an occasional opportunity to express our gratitude and admiration at the polls.

Well there may well be a rare technique in running a social system in which millions of people are idle in spite of the fact that there is an urgent need for wealth to be produced and distributed. A system in which every week human beings die on the scale of Hiroshima but not from a nuclear assault — from starvation in spite of the fact that huge amounts of food arc stockpiled and destroyed. A system which gives priority, not to the production of useful and constructive things but to weapons of mass destruction.

But to understand this society is not a difficult or an exclusive business. The knowledge is easily available for the Marxian analysis of capitalism, exposing its foundations, its development and its workings, is as vital and relevant now as it was when it was first set down over a century ago.

There is every reason for workers to understand that capitalism cannot satisfy its people's needs and that it must exploit and debase the majority who do all its useful work. They can easily grasp the fact, because the evidence is all around them, that none of the political parties who appeal for their support to continue capitalism can effectively deal with the problems of the system.

From that understanding it is a simple, logical step to the conclusion that only a democratic revolution to establish a society with a different basis, and different social relationships, will be effective. And this revolution cannot come about through leaders; it must be the act of a conscious, participating majority of the world’s working class.

For most workers — which means for most of the world’s people — this is suspiciously simple. They prefer submission, keeping their place in society as surely and predictably as the targets moving across the fairground booth.

Keeping a promise

It took rather a long time but at last, it seemed, something happened as a politician had promised. When he was the minister responsible for housing in the 1945 Labour government, Aneurin Bevan one day pronounced that housing would not be an issue at a future election. And in 1983, sure enough, it was hardly mentioned.

Of course Bevan meant that his government would have been so successful in dealing with housing that there would no longer be any reason to discuss it. What happened in the election was that it was overlaid by other matters of current interest to the voters — would Thatcher or Foot be the more futile leader, how should British capitalism deploy its nuclear weapons, which party would most effectively get those three million unemployed back into active, full time exploitation? Such developments in political debate are sometimes known as the onward and upward march of the working class.

It was in the background, then, that Shelter announced its opinion that one of the urgent matters awaiting the new government is a “shortage" of 800,000 homes, which is another way of saying that millions of people are without a decent place to live.

Now this is not really a shortage. For a long time bricks and other building materials have been stockpiled and among the three million on the dole are many skilled building workers. This situation exists because, for one reason or another, it is not profitable to use the materials or to employ the workers. However desperate people’s needs may be, capitalism does not produce unless there is the prospect of profit.

Then there arc those people whose housing problem consists of difficult decisions about which one of their homes they should live in at any one time. These are the people in whose interests production is carried out, the people who accumulate the profits without which there is no production, the people who live parasitically on the workers who suffer in the housing problem.

Much water has flowed under Westminster Bridge since Bevan made that claim all those years ago, and much suffering has been endured by the homeless, the slum dwellers and by those who exist in the social deserts of the high rise and the council estates or in the pressured neurosis of suburbia. And the problem is still there, as troublesome as ever. It may have been ignored in the election but as long as capitalism lasts it will not go away.

Down the drain

Speaking in Bolton during his election campaign, Michael Foot was reported as promising that Labour would create 500,000 jobs during its first year in office. 

We are not setting impossible targets. When we reduce unemployment to the level we left it in 1979, it will save the government enough money to pay for the whole of Labour’s emergency programme (The Times, 28 May).

In other words, during a Labour Government’s first year half a million workers would be paid with money later to be saved by an imaginary reduction in unemployment of more than two millions.

Leaving aside the “spend now, pay later” aspect of this form of book-keeping, one is left wondering why, with this remedy for unemployment available, there was anybody at all out of work during the period of the last Labour government.

It is of course a fallacy to suggest that jobs can be created just by taking workers off the dole and paying them with the money saved in benefits.

The kind of work Labour politicians had in mind (such as new sewers) shows no financial return on expenditure. One might almost say it is “money down the drain” which will have to be found by increased taxation. But this proposal would not have attracted many votes.

Election nasties (1983)

From the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

When it got to the point of the politicians telling us that 1983 was to be one of the most important elections ever, we knew we were in for a campaign of stupefying bathos and irrelevance.

While there was much sympathy for the apparently doomed Labour Party (the Daily Telegraph, in a leader a couple of days before the poll, said "For a party that is supposed to be terrifying us . . . Labour looks oddly loveable”) it was really the Tories who began with the more testing task. As the outgoing government, they had to convince millions of people that several unpalatable things were actually good for them and that they should volunteer for another five years of the same. As indeed they did.

Things like class society with the profit motive rampant. Things like unemployment forcing workers out of their customary poverty and into deep hardship. Things like the sexual and personal repression which are often thought of, through a misreading of history, as Victorian moral values. Things like patriotism which is used to inspire ordinary, peaceable people to attack other ordinary, peaceable people they don’t know and have no quarrel with.

In order to get some advantage from persuading people that such things are good for them, the Conservatives needed also to claim that they came about through their deliberate policies. Unemployment, for example, had to be represented as something which could easily be abolished or diminished through high state spending but which is kept in being as the price of something else which is good for us called Beating Inflation. As everyone should know by now, because politicians of all parties have been telling us for many years, inflation is one of the few things a government does not claim to be able easily to control. It is, they say, an enemy which can be kept in check only through great skill (theirs) and hardship (ours). But what everyone should, but does not, know by now is that inflation is actually in the government’s control; it is a contrived policy which they choose not to reverse and actually has no overall significant effect on our living standards.

Perhaps it was the exertion of pretending that the Tory government had planned all these things for our especial benefit and had them under control, rather than having them foisted on them, which caused Margaret Thatcher to go mad during the campaign. The famous image of the Resolute Approach is not really an initiative but a cobbled up response to events. Ignoring this piece of reality had its effect on Thatcher and television watchers throughout the country, although not qualified in psychiatry, became worried at her obvious mania.

Foot’s problem was to paper over the wide and deep cracks in his party by relating almost every question and argument to the issue of unemployment, presumably because he thought that this was a vote winner for the Labour Party. There was small chance of his succeeding and it must also have been rather exhausting for him as it required him to forget that under the last Labour government, in which he served so fanatically, unemployment doubled and was on the upward path when they lost power. In this Foot showed he has the amnesic talents required by many a mental patient and by all serious politicians. Throughout the campaign Labour’s inconsistencies — on nuclear weapons, on what they call defence, on how they relate to the wilder fringes of loony reformism called the left wing — kept catching up with Foot. Under close questioning he tried to be nimble but was exposed as evasive, cynical and politically bankrupt.

The press — even so normally sympathetic a paper as the Observer — were notably cruel to him. Yet Foot could still pull in the crowds, large affectionate gatherings of devotees of the idea that he is a man of unswerving principle who, provided he does not disappear altogether through the personality change, will one day deliver us all to the Promised Land. As polling day drew nearer he seemed to lose heart. Perhaps he was reading the Sporting Life; the bookmakers, with a properly hard-nosed assessment of reality, began to discourage bets on the election result and started offering odds on who would replace Foot when the Labour Party lost.

Perhaps the SDP/Liberal Alliance claim to be the mould-breakers of British politics who will cast out the Old Gang would have appealed to someone in a natural despair at the alternating futility of the two parties which have shared power over British capitalism. But the SDP leaders themselves sprang from the Old Gang and were responsible, when they were ministers, for many of the policies they now so heartily denounce. Of course the other part of the Alliance, the Liberals, have a trump card; they can claim not to have recently had the chance to fail which is just as well for them in view of their record when, all those years ago, they were in power. In any case their policies now are no more than a variation on the same reformist hash as offered by the Labour and Conservative parties. It was when they were faced with an unexceptional political crisis that the mould breakers showed how similar they are to the despised Old Gang.

Worried at first by their poor showing at the opinion polls, they moved quickly to make Jenkins their scapegoat. A nasty, but revealing, clash was narrowly avoided when in the nick of time the Alliance poll ratings went up which allowed all SDP/ Liberals to go back to saying how much they admired and supported Jenkins.

This disreputable incident illustrated the ability of the opinion polls to inspire panic or complacency, according to their findings. It was poll ratings which caused the initial assumption that the Labour Party would lose the election, hardening into the certainty that Thatcher would have a majority comparable to Attlee's in 1945. Labour’s depression at their years of schism and confusion, their weak showing at by-elections, their failure to profit from the Thatcher government’s problems and to win some of the nauseous flag-waving glory from the Falklands war, seemed to blind them to the fact that the polls have a history of fallibility. In 1970 the Wilson government, at first confident of victory, lost the election although at one point the polls had them leading by over 12 per cent. In February 1974 the Tories, fighting among the black-outs of the Three Day Week on the theme of Who Governs the Country, were at one time ahead in the polls by 6.5 per cent but in the end they narrowly lost. In October 1974 and again in May 1979 the polls gave the winners a much larger percentage of support than they eventually notched up.

Perhaps more important for them, the Labour Party’s reliance on unemployment as a vote winner was also not supported by history. The only comparable period, in terms of numbers out of work and general elections on a popular franchise, was the twenties and thirties. Labour were in office, as a minority government, in 1929 partly on a pledge to cure unemployment and when their brief, wretched span was ended in 1931 they suffered the most crushing defeat in their history. The monthly average of unemployment during 1931 was 2,717,000 or 21.3 per cent of total employees. At the election the National government won a majority of 497 — a result caused, not by concern at unemployment but through patriotism and fear at the crass failure of the MacDonald government to control capitalism. When the next election came in 1935 unemployment had fallen to 2,027,000 but at 15.5 per cent it was still a serious problem: ". . after four years (of National government) unemployment, depression, misery still overshadowed the land” (Britain Between The Wars, Charles Loch Mowat). But the voters were still mainly satisfied with Conservative government; the best the Labour Party could do was to increase their MPs from the freak number of 51 to 158, leaving Baldwin with a majority of 247 over all other parties.

Whatever success might have attended Foot’s desperate efforts to conceal his party’s miserable disarray on other issues was effectively nuked by Jim Callaghan's headline-catching declaration in favour of British capitalism keeping its own nuclear armoury. Foot might well have been deeply hurt by this act of ingratitude for when Foot was one of Callaghan's ministers his standing as Labour's left-wing conscience was useful in reconciling the party's doubters to the policies of strikebreaking. holding down wages, cutting public spending, racist immigration laws and so on for which that government will always be remembered. After Callaghan’s intervention Labour spokespeople grew increasingly despondent while Thatcher, seeing an unexpectedly emphatic victory looming over the horizon, became ever more manic. At times she went too far even for seasoned media hacks, addressing the galactically great Robin Day without his title and upsetting the faithful Daily Telegraph, which may have been responsible for an element of objectivity creeping into their reporting, the crux of which was their giving some space to a reasonably accurate piece on the Socialist candidate in Islington South.

So yes, it was an election of familiar bathos. Labour supporters were excitedly convinced that at all costs the Tories must be thrown out without knowing why since Labour is fundamentally no different. The Conservatives treated it as a crusade against the threat of revolution although they could not explain why something they called a revolution was designed to keep the same capitalist social system in being.

For the unwary it might have been very confusing because in one sense all sides could take heart from the result. The election spelled out again that, whatever stress and degradation capitalism subjects them to. the working class have a large and enduring appetite for the system. The people in the advertising agencies could be excused for believing in a diabolical power to convince the workers that facts and experience go for nothing and that what counts is an ability to present those facts and that experience in a distorted and deceptive way. So yet there is hope for the Labour Party and the Alliance.

Amid all despair, only the Socialist candidate in Islington stood apart. There was no bathos in that campaign, only a rational, conclusive case for the new society. It was a small effort compared to that of the big parties, and solitary, but as significant as the oyster's grain of sand.

Ivan

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

Voices in the wilderness (1983)

From the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

More than half of the workers we canvassed in last month’s election campaign were cynical about the promises of all the main parties standing. For three weeks every five years, the British ruling class expects us to think about “politics”, that is, about which band of professional liars will administer our poverty for the next period. We attended all of the main parties’ meetings in order to sell socialist literature, as part of our campaign in Islington, and at each meeting we saw the same few faces, sadly devoted to the empty rhetoric of their indistinguishable leaders.

In Islington South and Finsbury, where the only genuinely socialist candidate was standing, the Tories kept quite a low profile. Thatcher’s talk of Victorian Values had been dropped for the duration of the campaign, since for most workers, the only way in which hard work and thrift prove profitable is when our bosses profit from our hard work and thrift. The Tory leaflet spoke of “the quality of our armed forces”, “controlling secondary picketing” and “larger export markets”; all matters only of interest to those who own and control the wealth of Britain, not the millions who produce it.

The two favourites in the race for power in Islington South were the Labour and SDP candidates. The Labour Party relied almost entirely on the “lesser evil" myth. Realising that capitalism under the Labour varnish is quite unsavoury to many of the workers it exploits, they told us that we had to vote Labour, to avoid the greater horror of capitalism tarnished by the leadership of Thatcher. The idea that to get rid of Thatcher’s capitalism the only possibility is to support Foot’s capitalism is as stupidly dogmatic as the Tory claim that there is no alternative to their policies. Tactical voting is based on the assumption that sheep must follow one another on to a limited number of bandwagons, then shuffle around until the least obnoxious compromise can be found. It denies any kind of clear principle or aim, and any possibility of real social change through democratic persuasion.

The election was taken over, especially in Islington, by the most cynical slander and manipulation on all sides. The social system represented by all the major parties has become bankrupt of ideas. They have almost run out of ways to secure workers’ loyalty to the system which exploits us. Consequently, more time was spent attacking their opponents than claiming any positive merits for their own policies. Many people we canvassed said they agreed with the revolutionary alternative we were standing for, but would vote Labour through an almost religious, irrational attachment to traditional loyalties. When they start to act more in accordance with their real disgust at the Labour Party’s cynical running of the profit system, what is regarded as possible and impossible will rapidly change. Perhaps the most ludicrous example of this contradictory attitude came from the misnamed Socialist Workers Party. Some of their members passionately attacked the Labour candidate at a public rally, shouting out that Labour had always inevitably betrayed the workers because it was running the capitalist system. Finally, they were told from the platform, “No, no. You should be campaigning for a Labour victory”. They replied, to the audience’s bewilderment, “We are" and, sure enough, their paper told people to Vote Labour, even though the Socialist Party of Great Britain was posing the revolutionary socialist alternative.

We were faced with three well-oiled machines, prepared to stop at nothing in their desperate vote-catching. The Labour candidate even referred at a public meeting to the SPGB campaign slogan, "Vote for Yourself for a Change”, and claimed that the Labour Party embodied this no-leaders democracy! Their confidential instructions (from above, of course) tell a different story:

DO NOT ASK: "Will you be voting Labour?" That is bad canvassing. Voters say yes to get rid of you/make you happy/ deliberately confuse you . . . If person says "I never vote”, mark on card. We do not wish to antagonise by calling again. Sometimes people tell the truth!

One of the most infamous careerists in the constituency was the sitting MP, George Cunningham. He was elected through the Labour Party in 1979 and then transferred to their Old Boys’ Club, the SDP. In some circles he is known as George Conning’em, since that’s what he’s been doing for the past five years. Most people wouldn’t mind a pound for every baby he’s kissed. When we challenged him to a public debate, he arrogantly replied that we would have to find someone to give us publicity elsewhere, he was too busy proclaiming his commitment to democracy and free speech to mess about with petty things like public debates. Now that he has lost his job at Westminster, we plan to offer him the publicity he once denied us, by repeating our challenge to debate.

One leaflet contained compliments about Cunningham from the Daily Mail, The Times, Observer, Guardian, BBC and Punch. In other words, he is a model capitalist politician, expert at persuading people to leave control in the hands of a minority. Another shows a cartoon of him with a big, tightly-clenched fist, and another with a foot stamping on the neck of an alligator marked Creeping Extremism. The local SDP campaign was based on the "left extremist" scare, traditionally popular with the fascists. SDP Agent Chris Pryce was quoted in the Islington Gazette as saying:

Make no mistake, Chris Smith is one of the most extreme Labour candidates in the country. His constant harping on gay rights, his open support for punks and squatters and other fringe groups is now common knowledge.

Of course, at the time Pryce was not aware that the SDP were soon to join the fringe groups in Islington; on the other hand. Smith is now at Westminster, and there has been no revolution in the conditions of the workers in Islington or anywhere else.

One day, while leafletting in Chapel Market alongside the SDP, one of their members explained to us that they only had short leaflets there, since the people wouldn't understand a more detailed manifesto. It was claimed that Labour posters were displayed in the windows of empty flats by the Labour Council because there was so little genuine support for them on many of the estates. Some Labour canvassers were reported to have resorted to telling people that Cunningham was ill or not standing, and that it was illegal to display his posters. All of this vicious in-fighting among politicians standing for the profit system took the place of real debate over policies. It was not just Cunningham who refused to debate with us; we had also been refused by the Labour candidate Smith, and by both the SDP and Labour candidates in the Islington North constituency.

Islington CND planned and advertised a public debate between the candidates on the question of nuclear weapons, but this had to be abandoned since they refused to comply with the regulations which demand that all candidates be invited to such meetings; they did not want to give a platform to the candidates from the National Front and the British National Party. They even tried to use a legal loophole by asking if we would formally put the costs of running the meeting on our election expenses, which would have allowed them to leave out the fascists. We refused, pointing out the illogicality of opposing somebody because they are against free speech, and then denying them the chance to air their ideas. If the NF and BNP had to explain themselves on a public platform, most workers would be quite capable of rejecting their vicious and divisive racism, without having CND to censor it for them. Moreover, the NF, like CND. is against the American nuclear bases and missiles because they are nationalists. Indeed, the manifesto of the NF, with its support for import controls and getting out of the Common Market, shares with much of the Left the nationalist, anti-working-class policy of British state capitalism.

The real local issues were hardly dealt with at all by the six parties who stood against the SPGB and world socialism. One in five workers in Islington are unemployed. Over ten thousand are on the housing waiting list, despite there being many empty homes. An increasing number of young people there are turning to heroin, despite having friends who have died on it. On certain housing estates, violent racist attacks constantly threaten thousands of people. Since 1975, under Labour and Tory governments, the number of hospitals in Islington has been reduced from five to two. The Labour Party has failed again and again to live up to the expectations of its supporters, because it operates within the confines of the anti-human system which lies at the root of all these problems. When challenged about the possibility of a genuine socialist alternative, the Labour candidate told us, as would any Tory, about the need for “realism”. In other words, keep a system of war, poverty and institutionalised misery, rather than end the sacred rights of property.

The contradictions of the present social system cannot be reformed away by the rhetoric of individual politicians. In health, housing and so on. profit comes before need, accumulation before consumption. In the week of the election, houses in Islington (Barnsbury and Canonbury Square) were advertised costing £130,000, £154,950, £197,500 . . . The people buying these properties do not suffer the housing problems for which the area is notorious. As long as this class division remains, the majority will be in an inferior, insecure position. The Labour Party’s Plan for Jobs was just a policy to retain profits for a minority and wage-slavery for the rest. As the local community paper, the Islington Gutter Press explained:

None of these (Labour) objectives will be possible without the co-operation of the trade unions . . . Yes. the trade unions will have to show restraint and they will have to abide by the National Economic Assessment. But we believe in them and we believe in the future of this country.

As long as capitalism has lasted, not a single day has gone by without discontent and dissent burning on somewhere. But the enormous potential for revolutionary change has, for the past century, been channelled into fruitless reformism. Workers won the vote in the late nineteenth century but instead of using it to end the profit system, they have used it to give capitalism a longer lease, sometimes through Labour governments which have understandings with the unions. The Socialist Party of Great Britain stood in the election on a uniquely different basis, of working-class unity and democratic revolution. The solution to the chaos of the market system is. like the problem it solves, world-wide despite the nonsense spoken about the Socialist Republic of Islington and despite the fact that one of the local candidates was the Islington and Finsbury Party.

85 more nails . . .

In our manifesto, we asked people not to vote for us unless they were fully in agreement with what we stand for. After all, socialism could only be established if a majority were prepared to take the necessary action democratically, and with responsibility. True democracy cannot be enforced or introduced by methods of secret infiltration. The little media coverage we received during the campaign thought this was quite a joke, since to them democratic elections must involve not open persuasion and consistency but slander, vote-catching and opportunism. The electorate of Islington South and Finsbury were happy to oblige with our request not to vote for us if they were still suffering from capitalist conditioning and prejudice: we polled 85 votes, against 13,460 for the Labour Party, 13,097 for the SDP, 9,894 for the Tories, 341 for the National Front, 94 for the British National Party and 102 for the Islington and Finsbury Party. But as many as two in five voters in Islington abstained, sick of the failed promises of these political leaders.

Abstention, however, is in its effect little different from acceptance of the status quo. We are gradually building a separate political force which will be able to use the vote in a revolutionary way. The local Socialist Party branch in Islington has multiplied its membership more than five times over since its formation about five years ago, without admitting to membership anyone who is not a socialist, fully aware of the nature of the change we propose. Unlike the politicians who have been elected to run the system of class division, we will not vanish from the scene or suspend canvassing for five years. The debate between production for the profit of a few and production for the use of all is now more pressing than ever. We will be stepping up our activities of street-selling, canvassing and running meetings in Islington in the months ahead. Each worker declaring a practical commitment to a classless, world society of democratic control and common ownership represents another nail in the coffin of capitalism.

Clifford Slapper

Letter: Blind faith in the broad church (1984)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Comrades,

I am writing to you with regard to your opinions of the bankruptcy of the Labour Party as an organisation for radical change, and in particular of the articles "Crisis of the Left" (July) and “Labour in Pain” (August).

The choice before Labour is three-fold: Wilsonian pragmatism, with frontal attacks on working people, the welfare state and unions, all to retain power; revisionist radicalism, primarily attempting to reconcile Labour voters with socialism, not impose it on them; and fundamentalism, not diluting or changing our policies one bit. We have to be realistic in listening to voters' hopes, radical in articulating an alternative system to capitalism’s horrors, and resolute in meaning what we say and making people realise that we will not be blown off by capital, as in 1931, 1948. 1967 and 1976. A little bit of socialism time and time again is better than nothing, and is surely worthwhile in helping radical politics.

May I remind you that in the 1983 general election. Labour on a left reformist programme got 8½ million votes, the SPGB 85 votes, a slight difference. If the dirigisme socialism of Labour, blunted and mellowed by internal contradictions and compromises, is too extreme for voters, they aren't going to vote for a revolutionary Marxist party. Are they? Why not pause and think here; what makes you so sure that eventually the workers will turn to full-blooded socialism?

Ken Coates, in his excellent Socialists and the Labour Party (1973) asks many important questions to revolutionaries which have not been answered by you or theorists such as Miliband, Panitch and David Coates. In Coates' pamphlet, he states the obvious truism that any revolutionary mass party must duplicate “the best features of the old Labour Party . . ." This is for the reason that such a party must draw heavily on former Labour activists, who are at the moment consciously influencing Labour in a socialist direction. The revolutionary left misses the fact that Labour is a living, changing organism, not a monolithic block, and is very susceptible to rank and file activism.

Coates also commented:

Since the collapse of the Independent Labour Party, there has been no group of socialists capable of maintaining a full-scale political presence outside the Labour Party . . . (by which) . . . I mean the ability to secure the election of at least a handful of members of Parliament. . .

So far the history of modern British socialism has involved any group existing outside or independently of Labour and, thus the trade union movement, withering away; no matter whether it was a new revolutionary group as with the Socialist League, SPGB, CPGB. IMG or SWP. or a breakaway from the party—the SDF, ILP. National Labour (the MacDonaldites). Democratic Labour (the Tavernites) and the Scottish Labour Party. Labour, despite the disaster of the last election and its recent record of government, is the only credible representative of the progressive working class. The lessons of the 1880s, 1930s and 1960s, periods of radicalism, must be that the only feasible road to socialism in this country is through the Labour Party.

In “Labour in Pain” (August), you hit on a number of important points about the internal contradictions of the party and hypocrisies of the “Broad Church". Nationalisation of the top 25 companies as the IWC and Labour Conference want, or top 200 as Militant wants, is, as you say, irrelevant. Labour’s paranoid pursuit of public ownership has more to do with Gaitskell’s and Wilson’s opposition to it, than its merits. We have to realise that state control of industries does not alter the plight of workers. They remain wage slaves, no matter their income or material affluence, with no power over the factors of production which decide their lives. State control merely replaces the entrepreneur with the bureaucrat, the capitalist system for the servile state. Workers self-management, or to extend it beyond a narrow industrial front into all walks of life— citizens power, can alter the present undemocratic situation. Citizens power must be built on the ideas of guild socialism and the analysis of human nature and the stale provided by group theory. This must involve seeing the state as an obstacle to radical change, no matter how enlightened those in charge, and limiting its functions and roles. However, it has to be noted, sadly, that guild socialism has been neglected and forgotten about, seen as a throwback to the Medieval age with no pertinence to the industrial age.

The SPGB constitution says it stands for "the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth . . Does this glib phrase “common ownership" mean central planning and state control or "Stalinism plus parliamentary democracy or decentralisation and citizens power over capital? We have a right to know.

The SPGB does, on the other hand, say regularly, and in "Why we are hostile” (November), that all working-class people are "enslaved" and must be "emancipated", not by enlightened Fabian elitists, but the workers themselves. This is fundamentally true. R. H. Tawney in The Acquisitive Society (1921) said:

The workers cannot have it both ways. They must choose whether to assume the responsibility for industrial discipline and become free, or to repudiate it and continue to be serfs.

Workers initiatives, take-overs and local plans, rather than centrally decided blueprints, is the only sure way of avoiding the servile state.

You say that only people who are fully in agreement with the SPGB can join. Your inability to lower the SPGB from its high, puritanical and principled pedestal of fundamental, sacrosanct ideas is sad. Socialist parties desperately need a coherent. dynamic ideological anchor to prevent policies appearing as just a "shopping list" with no underlying philosophy, and to resist the claims of capital. Principles are only of use in relation to short-term policies. You seem to miss this.

The SPGB is a valuable part of the British socialist movement. Labour, for all its faults, is socialist, though as you say in November, most Labourites "belong to a party which they imagine will one day exist . . ." However, if we keep trying, we socialists in and out of Labour can discard the stale heritage of labourism and state socialism. While Marx is still invaluable to analyse modern capitalism, particularly in the surplus theory of value and class critique of production, he cannot be dogmatically interpreted.

Dogmatism is not the answer for socialists. The SPGB should engage in an active, open and free debate with other socialists in the Labour, CPGB and other parties about the failure so far, future and road to British socialism, possibly in the Socialist Society. Any debate must be two-way, with no closed minds. We can learn from one another, sharing our experiences of capitalism and socialist action. You can give us some of your critiques and theories of capitalism, if we can give some, dare I suggest it, flexibility. Remember, together the left has enormous potential to win electoral support and change society. Divided, it has nothing. Despite our numerous differences, which are sincere and cannot be glossed over, we are on the same side—the mosaic of the socialist movement, facing a common enemy, not Thatcher or the Conservatives. but capitalism.

Gerry Hassan 

Dundee

Reply:

The Socialist Party is most willing to engage in "active, open and free debate" with those who call themselves socialists. Repeated efforts have been made to encourage the defenders of Left reformism to take the public platform and debate but, contrary to the impression given in the last paragraph of Mr. Hassan's letter, it is the dogmatism of the traditional left which has prevented them from accepting open debate with the Socialist Party. For example, the leader of Lambeth Council, Ted Knight, was asked recently to debate with us in his own borough and replied that there would be no point in such as event as the Labour Party is bigger than the Socialist Party; our Islington branch has written two lengthy letters to The Militant Tendency, challenging them to debate, but they replied in writing that public disagreement “between socialists” would be embarrassing. So, we would advise our correspondent to write to the Leftist parties and groups urging them to make contact with the Socialist Party; they will meet no dogmatic resistance to discuss ideas from us.

We are reminded that the Labour Party won 8½ million votes in the 1983 general election on the basis of a "reformist programme". What is a reformist programme, be it “left” or "right", but a plan to make capitalism run more efficiently from the point of view of the majority of people in society? That 8½ million workers were conned into believing that a Labour government could do this indicates two things: firstly, there are still plenty of deluded workers around: secondly, there are less workers being taken in by the Labour Party now than has been the case in electoral terms for half a century. The validity of Labour’s ideas is not to be judged by the number of votes they received (on that basis, we would be forced to conclude that the Tories and the Alliance are, between them, substantially more “correct" than Labour), but the extent to which they can be realistically applied as a means of solving social problems. Eight and a half million people voted for Labour’s commitment to the NATO military gang, to the continuation of the wages system, to the acceptance that there must still be poor people for whom the state will have to care. They were voting for capitalism. Our correspondent points to the 85 votes received by the socialist candidate and draws the conclusion that if most voters found Labour's programme "too extreme, they aren’t going to vote for a revolutionary Marxist party". The reason workers did not vote Labour is that they have tried it before and it is no more than another way of voting Tory. Workers did not vote for socialism because they have yet to be convinced that it is in their interests: if there had been no Labour confusion-mongers in Islington South during the last election, making promises to workers which could not be kept, there would have been more votes for socialism. The "workers will turn to full-blooded socialism” when they have had enough of capitalism and are ready to opt for a different way of organising society.

The labour illusion is well summed up by Mr. Hassan when he writes that "A little bit of socialism, time and time again is better than nothing . . .”. Socialism — a system based upon common ownership, democratic control and production solely for use — is the direct opposite of the capitalist system. It is no more possible to have "a little bit of socialism" within a world based on minority class monopoly of the means of wealth production and distribution than it would be to be a little bit pregnant. What the Labour Party’s "little bit” amounts to is a programme to reform capitalism and, as our correspondent rightly points out, these efforts have repeatedly been “blown off by capital". We are told that it is necessary to make people realise that capital will not interfere with Labour’s aims in future, but the Marxist critique of reformism is precisely that such hopes are illusory: if Labour is elected to run capitalism, as it sets out to be, it cannot but bow to the needs of profitability.

Calling in expert witness Coates damages rather than helps the case of our correspondent. What are "the best features of the old Labour Party"? Does he mean their support for two world wars or their racist immigration legislation or their strikebreaking record? Or does he mean their record of reformist promises, such as the promise of full employment made in Labour and the New Social Order or Bevan’s promise that there would be no housing problem in Britain after the Attlee government had served its term? If. by "the best features", they mean Keir Hardie’s statement in the Manifesto of the English Socialists that socialism will entail the abolition of the wages system, then we in the Socialist Party are duplicating the best features, whereas Coates and the rest of the Labourites have ignored the socialist tradition.

After the evidence from the star witness. it is a shame that our correspondent once again returns to the old dogmatic chant that history must go on repeating itself. Evidence points the other way: Labour’s traditional support is crumbling (maybe temporarily, hopefully for good) and workers are looking at alternatives. If “the only feasible road to socialism in this country is through the Labour Party", and if, after seven Labour governments, capitalism is still here, where is the evidence that the road is anything but a dead-end?

We are pleased to note that Mr. Hassan accepts the criticisms made by socialists of Labour and Militant's nationalisation (state capitalist) policies. Indeed, we do "have to realise that state control of industries does not alter the plight of workers” — as the miners will testify. It is a pity that our correspondent's clear recognition that state capitalism is not socialism is not applied to the equally non-socialist theory of "guild socialism", as advocated by reformists like G D H Cole in the distant past. The fallacy of “workers’ control” is based on the failure to recognise that where there is a working class — where wage labour exists as a social relationship to capital — the only result can be exploitative. "Guild socialism" presented a naive plan to decentralise and democratise capitalist exploitation. If it has been "neglected and forgotten about”, as our correspondent states, working-class knowledge will be none the poorer.

We are asked whether our Object implies central planning, Stalinism, or decentralised power over capital. It means none of those things. It would be ludicrous to envisage world socialism as a society run by a bureaucracy on a central plan: clearly, common ownership will require a democracy organised by the majority. We do not advocate Stalinism, and socialism means more than parliamentary democracy: our Object commits us to working for democratic control, that is, the making of decisions about society by its citizens on the basis of full information, as for control over capital, we can only reiterate that there will be no wage labour-capital relationship in socialist society and therefore citizens will no more have power over capital than they will over the banks, the police force or the torture chambers: these social features will not exist.

We are not proposing, then, any "centrally decided blueprints", but will leave it to the workers who establish socialism (who we hope will include us) to make the plans. We agree that most plans can be made locally but, under capitalism, "workers’ initiatives, take-overs and local plans" are constantly inhibited by the fetters of the profit system.

Mr. Hassan's comments about principles invite the Socialist Party to fall into the political pit which the Labour Party is stuck in. We are told that only allowing workers to join who agree with us is "puritanical" and "sad”. We say that letting racists, nationalists, religious cranks. Leninists, pro-NATO supporters, careerists and "Wilsonian pragmatists” into the Broad Church is not just sad. but pathetic; not principled, but disgustingly opportunist.

We are told that “principles are only of use in relation to short-term policies". We have a policy (which is neither short nor long-term, but as long as it takes us to achieve) which is to abolish capitalism and establish a world free of class division, exploitation, property relationships, poverty, war and wage slavery. Those aims are urgent and we are not going to be deterred in struggling resolutely for them by those who tell us to unite with the crumb-collectors of the Left.

How nice to be told that "The SPGB is a valuable part of the British socialist movement". We have been waiting eighty years to meet the other part, but have no illusions that we will find it in the Labour Party or any of the other organisations which seek to re-arrange capitalism. Indeed. “Dogmatism is not the answer for socialists" and that is why those who still hold on to the pathetic belief that Neil Kinnock and his fellow reformists will eradicate the nasty bits of capitalism ought to abandon the Labour Party and join a party which defines socialism with clarity, fights for the new system with enthusiasm and remains uncompromisingly hostile to the apologists for capitalist politics.

Editors