Issue 194 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published February 1996 Copyright © Socialist Review
John Rees
The question is, can Labour bring change? The fundamental
contention of the Labour Party is that change can come within the confines of the system, within the established institutions of the system, through the operation of the economy as we experience it today.
Within those confines, there have been conditions when change has been possible. If we look at the 1945 Labour government, it is true that important changes did come through the NHS, nationalisation, expansion of education. But when we ask to what extent the Labour Party is capable of delivering change now, it is important to understand under what conditions these changes came about in the past and which of those conditions exist today. The 1945 Labour government was at the beginning of the postwar boom, at the outset of the most sustained growth that the capitalist system has ever seen. It was a time when many of the gains that the Labour Party institutionalised were already part of the wartime economy, such as nationalisation. It was also a time when labour was far from alone in understanding that if the system was to survive it had to make concessions. That there had to be a welfare state and a National Health Service, was common ground among the main parties. We got a slightly better variation under Labour, but the plans for the welfare state were actually drawn up by a Liberal, and the Tories would have been prepared to introduce some, if not all, of the reforms, had they been in office.
Another important condition that prevailed at the time, and it still pertains today, is that reforms were given under pressure from below. The future Lord Hailsham said, 'Give them social reform or they will give you social revolution.' Even under those conditions--the most favourable that Labour ever had--it still used troops to break strikes.
You don't need to he a historian to realise that conditions are very different today. After 20 or more years of stagnation, recession, of long slumps followed by short booms, the system does not have the same room for manoeuvre that it had in the postwar years. Recent government figures showed the single biggest fall in average living standards for 14 years. Every government acknowledges that it no longer has room for manoeuvre. This is what makes Tony Blair so right wing. It's not simply an unpleasant thing about his personality, or an unfortunate fact that he comes from a horrendous middle class background. He has less room for manoeuvre because the system has less room for reform. The road to reform and the possibility of reform is being closed off by 20 years of the employing class demanding more and more to retain the profitability of its industries. This is why the market is absolutely central as far as the leadership of the Labour Party is concerned.
And it's not just Blair. Look at Mitterrand in France who was elected in the 1980s on a radical programme, yet eventually followed an austerity programme every bit as nasty as Thatcher did in Britain; you can say the same thing about Gonzalez, the Socialist president of Spain. The system is forcing those who want to stay within its limits to say not only that they can't grant reforms but that the reforms they have granted in the past are to be taken away. Today we face not just reformists without reforms, but reformists who take away reforms year on year.
It's not just that they can't deliver reform but that their failure prepares the ground for the right--Mitterrand gives way to Chirac who then gives ground to Le Pen. The Socialists in Italy give way to right winger Berlusconi but also to Fini, the fascist waiting in the wings. We are in the situation where it is not just a question of the fate of this or that government. We are in a crisis where, if people can't find a solution within the working class movement, they begin to look to something nastier, more barbarous, beyond the realms of the working class movement.
But there is another possibility as well. In December 1995 the French working class--despite the attacks on them, despite the election of Chirac last May--went on strike and took to the streets. The strikes took on their own momentum. There you see the seed of a completely different sort of alternative within the system--there is a possibility of socialism from below, of workers taking their lives into their own hands because they have been compelled to fight more powerfully than they could have imagined only a few weeks before. The trouble is, unless you have a political organisation that relates to those disputes, to those on strike, to that alternative that exists in the workers' struggles, then the movement can go back to the established parties, to the right wing, if defeated and demoralised.
This is why we need a different sort of party--one whose sole concentration is on the power that working people have at the base of society, through their own organisations, their own struggle, and which relates to their own alternative vision of what is to be produced and by whom. This is the kind of party that we need and that we are trying to build. This is what we were doing when we defeated Beackon on the Isle of Dogs along with thousands of other people in the working class movement, and also when, with thousands of others, we were involved in fighting the Criminal Justice Act. This is what we did also when the Labour and trade union leadership, with virtually no exception, turned its back on the anti poll tax movement--a movement which broke the back of Tory policy and ended Margaret Thatcher's time as prime minister.
The important things take place outside the parliamentary arena, when working people do things for themselves under their own power. This is why we need an organisation where every flicker of struggle is fanned, an organisation that says, for example, that if you are a Liverpool docker on strike then you are not to be left to fight alone. We need an organisation that carries the tradition of one struggle to the next--from the poll tax to the anti-Nazi struggle, from the anti-Nazi struggle to the struggle against the Criminal Justice Act, from supporting one strike to the next battle that we have. So over time we have the confidence and build a movement that begins to challenge the fundamentals of the system, begins to transform the society.
For that, you cannot have a party that, like the Labour Party, is divided against itself--not just that it has a right wing leadership, but that it is split down the middle. In the SWP we want a party where to be a member you have to fight for women's liberation, against racism, instinctively to deliver solidarity for any group of workers in struggle. We don't want one in which you have to look over your shoulder because you might be disciplined or even expelled for being critical of the leadership. You cannot build a socialist party if all the time you are fearful that you will be expelled by the leadership simply for standing by groups of workers when they begin to fight back. To deliver solidarity a unified party is absolutely necessary.
Some people say that when you talk about this kind of party what you want is a vanguard party, a democratic centralist party. But I fail to see how you can have a democratic party without also having a democratic centralist party. Lenin described democratic centralism as 'absolute freedom of discussion' followed by absolute unity in action. We discuss things in our branches, our conference, our publications, then we do something to make sure that every member does their best in the struggle. What sort of a party is it that does not do that?
The Labour Party is one where anyone can discuss whatever he or she likes and then the leadership goes away and does what it likes no matter what policy is passed at conference. There is absolute freedom of discussion followed by a leadership that does what it likes. This is not democracy. It's chaos. Democracy is where people hammer things out, discuss things, come to a conclusion and then the members all fight together. I'm not saying that these sorts of parties don't make mistakes. But you can't even tell if you've made a mistake if you don't all do it together.
If you want to deliver the maximum amount of solidarity for the dockers it's no use some people saying, 'I'm not sure if we can support them.' We must have an organisation that wants to improve the lives of ordinary people and that means standing by workers when they struggle and using the whole apparatus of the organisation to deliver the solidarity that will allow the dockers to win. This is the real difference between the Labour Party tradition and the revolutionary tradition. The same issue runs through every strike and every protest right through to the day of the revolution.
The SWP believes that workers have the capacity to take control of society and run it for themselves. We believe in centralism from below, from the bottom up. Therefore in every strike the strike committee should be elected. In every campaign it should be built from the grass roots. Whereas Tony Blair and those in the Labour Party believe in something different. They believe that the system can be changed from above by the MPs, through parliament and the trade union bureaucracy. Therefore when it comes to any struggle, whether it's a small struggle today or the fight for socialism tomorrow, they will impose this strategy on the movement. We need an organisation genuinely built from the bottom up that gives people the power to change their world now and transform their world in the future.
Mark Seddon
I joined the Labour Party when I was 15, and I suppose if I were 15 again I wouldn't join now. But I am a socialist, and most of my friends in the Labour Party and trade union movement are socialists too, and I feel that my party has been taken away from me in a very undemocratic way. It does have something to do with democratic centralism. I'm going to have to take issue with John over this, as I am a democrat. I do believe in sitting down and discussing things and coming to a majority verdict, and then going out and being united. But the problem is that within any organisation there are people who are stronger and well organised, and with a lot more money, like some of the business people around the Labour Party at the moment. And we watched that anodyne Labour Party conference last year where there was no real debate and it was organised and controlled and centralised, yet undemocratic.
One of my arguments about New Labour is that it is profoundly the same as the old Communist Party except it has not got any politics. This is a terrible thing to be saying. It is the first time that we can set a radical agenda and win in the Labour Party. Yet what we have is the two parties going for the centre ground, without realising that the centre ground does not exist any more. The mass of opinion has shifted far to the left. If you look at all surveys of public opinion, when people are asked they say, 'We want to tax the rich,' or, 'We want to spend more on public services,' and, 'We want to take the water industry back under public ownership.' This is without Tony Blair saying these things.
The trade union leaders too have become enfeebled by these 16 years in opposition and I think they have failed to give a lead. But--and this is the reason why I am going to stay in the Labour Party--these people who have come in are intellectually vacuous. They have not a scintilla of understanding about what socialism is all about and what Labour was formed to do or represent. I don't think these people will last the course, for a number of simple but fundamental reasons.
There is not space for two major political parties representing capital. The labour movement is what it says it is--to represent labour. I do not think that if there is a Labour government after the next election people will have voted for it to continue with the same sort of monetarist economics of the past 16 years. You cannot come in without asking some basic questions about the institutions that control our lives and control capital. To be going in and saying--as Gordon Brown is now--we will cut taxes and not borrow any money, and rely on economic growth and a windfall tax to get poeple back to work, is complete mythology. This is why it is important for people in the labour movement to keep the pressure up. THe movement belongs to a huge number of people and it will be a tragedy if the trust of people who desperately want change is thrown away.
John mentioned institutional change, and that the Labour Party works for change within the system, but there are plenty of people within the Labour Party who know that institutions have to be changed as well. I believe we on the left have to challenge the institutions that are ruling our lives and over which we have no control.
We live in a global economy, and we are told we cannot do anything about it--well, Nick Leeson did something about it and I don't think he was a socialist. We can do something about it, and I can't understand why all the left has become so defeatist. Why do we not ask the basic questions like, who elects the leader of the IMF? Who decides that all developing countries should have policies of structural adjustment--the posh word for cutting welfare and cheap labour--who decides these things? Who elects the commissioners of the European Union, and what will the single currency do? It will create mass unemployment on a scale not even known in the 1980s.
But that is why there are plenty of socialists in the Labour Party, and we have some confidence because--and this is not being arrogant--there is not a lot to New Labour. When it runs into crisis it has two choices: it can either run to the right or it can come to the left. And if it comes to the left it has to resist monetary union, it has to spend more on public services, to tax the rich, and to take those things that belong to us--water, electricity, gas and the railways--back into public ownership, and preferably into workers' ownership.
I don't want to sound too depressed as I'm an optimist. It is a difficult time--but why should it be? This is the extraordinary thing. We have had 16 years of Thatcherism. But this is where I differ from John as I believe not only do you have to have the support of working people, but you must also have the support of a significant number of middle class people as well.
When change has been achieved in this country it has been because both middle class and working class people have stood together. I do believe this is essential to achieve change in Britain. At the moment New Labour is appealing to what is worst in the middle classes--their greed and avarice--and if you win on that basis you have to deliver to them on that basis when you get to power. This whole myth about middle England and how they have suffered more than anybody else is untrue.
So I do think there is all sorts of potential for change, and I can see how all sorts of people can say that the Labour Party does not stand for what I believe, and it doesn't stand for what I believe either. But the modernisers have not changed it all that much. For a lot of people who have seen local authority power stripped away, have seen all sorts of constraints against the trade unions, you can see why they say we must keep quiet and hope for a Labour government. This explains at least partly why there has been so little opposition to some of the changes that have been shunted through. I don't think that the Labour Party is perfect, or that it ever has been. But I think it has the potential for change.
There is another interesting debate going on, launched by Arthur Scargill. I believe he has been given a rough time by the Labour establishment--he is not credited with a basic truth that he told 20 years ago that the Tories would close down the coal industry. Arthur is talking about setting up a new socialist party. I think this is a very interesting development, and it is absolutely right for him to be talking about it. But I don't happen to think that now is the time.
I think in all of this you have to watch the record of Labour in power and if the left is not able to change the direction of Labour, and if the Labour Party moves further to the right, and if Labour distances itself further from the trade unions, and if there is a total victory for the new right in the Labour Party, I believe this sort of development will happen whether Scargill does it or not. It may well come through electoral reform.
In New Zealand the Labour Party went down the road of privatisation and deregulation. As a result the New Zealand Labour Party split in two and a new Socialist Alliance Party was set up, and that now has 26 percent in the polls and the Labour Party is languishing at 16 percent and going under. This is something you would have thought Mr Blair and his friends would take very seriously indeed.
You simply cannot defy political gravity in the way that they are doing. At Tribune we have a lot of loyal supporters out there who think the same as they always have done. The first battle after we get the election of a Labour government is to get that government back on course following left wing socialist policies.