One year into a Labour government we face a much more complex situation than under the Tories still a degree of expectation from many Labour voters, coupled with growing disillusionment among a substantial minority at Blair's conservative policies. Recent opinion polls show that this disillusionment amounts to around a quarter of Labour voters between 2 and 3 million people a good number of whom are looking for a left alternative to Blairism. In another poll around three quarters of Londoners support Ken Livingstone's plans to stand as mayor of London.
However, there is a major paradox in the gap between the radical left wing mood which caused Labour's landslide and has certainly not diminished since then, and the very low level of class struggle which is a frustrating feature of the present period. This means that the anger is constantly mediated by lack of confidence and a feeling that workers do not have the power to take things into their own hands in order to bring about change.
This political situation has led the Socialist Workers Party to consider the question of standing in elections, something we have not done since the 1970s. During the Thatcher/Major years most workers were looking to a Labour government, so we called for a critical Labour vote (as of course we will still do in many cases). Often in recent years supporters have called on us to stand and we have always resisted such calls. Why should we change now?
Socialists have always faced a contradictory situation over elections. On the one hand, revolutionary socialists have always argued the impotence of parliament and the need for workers to develop their own institutions of power if they are to bring about real change. On the other hand, it is undeniable that elections form a fairly important part of political life in capitalist society. Most people, including many quite militant workers, define 'politics' in terms of what happens in parliament and elections, rather than as activity in which they themselves take part. It has therefore frequently been necessary for socialists to stand in parliamentary or local elections in order to advance a form of socialism which relies on neither and which believes that the parliamentary structures are a sham. To not participate in these elections would be to leave socialist organisation on the sidelines, having nothing to say while many workers are looking to the parliamentary arena.
This was the argument put by Lenin and Trotsky in the years after the First World War. They started from a question of principle that winning left positions in parliament cannot effect real change. This is because real power inside capitalist society lies elsewhere, through control of the workplaces where wealth is produced and through control of the armed power of the state. The task of socialists is therefore to struggle to win power in the workplace and to smash the power of the capitalist state. There can be no compromise on this principle.
However, there is also a question of tactics can socialists, while maintaining their principles, also in certain circumstances use elections to parliament or local councils in order to further their politics? This was the basis of a major discussion among socialists in the years after the First World War. Revolution in Russia had triumphed in 1917 but elsewhere, despite a revolutionary surge in 1918-19, the capitalist class had at least temporarily stabilised itself. There was still a massive social crisis, but it became increasingly clear that revolution was going to take more than one quick push. Yet the ideological flux among socialists caused by the war and the revolution led many of the most militant to reject any parliamentary arena, while at the same time millions of less experienced workers around Europe were moving to the left and looking, at least initially, to parliamentary socialist politics.
In such circumstances there were two dangers facing socialists, as Lenin and Trotsky pointed out. At the 2nd Congress of the Communist International in 1920 the dangers of parliamentary opportunism (capitulating to the idea that parliament could change things) and ultra-leftism (turning their backs on parliament) were both criticised. Opportunism affected various parties such as the French Socialists or the German Independent Socialists which had broken to the left of outright reformism under the pressure of the revolutionary wave, but where too many 'remnants of parliamentarism can be seen, which we must literally root out', as the Russian socialist Bukharin put it introducing the conference report. He went on,
'We come now to another question, namely, that of anti-parliamentarism on principle. Such anti-parliamentarism is the legitimate child of the opportunism just described and the former political activity with all its sins. They gave birth to it as a kind of counterweight. We much prefer this anti-parliamentarism on principle to opportunist parliamentarism.'
In the same discussion, Lenin argued, 'We are obliged to carry on a struggle within parliament for the destruction of parliament.' Criticising the Italian ultra-left Bordiga he said,
'You must know how parliament can be smashed. If you can do it by an armed uprising in all countries, well and good. You are aware that we in Russia proved our determination to destroy the bourgeois parliament, not only in theory but in practice as well...you forget that to destroy the bourgeois parliament in Russia we were first obliged to convene the Constituent Assembly, even after our victory... When the working class had already succeeded in seizing power, the peasants still believed in the necessity of a bourgeois parliament. Taking account of these backward elements, we had to proclaim the elections and show the masses...that the Constituent Assembly...did not express the aspirations and demands of the exploited classes. In this way the conflict between soviet and bourgeois power became quite clear, not only to us, the vanguard of the working class, but also to the vast majority of the peasantry, to the petty office employees, the petty bourgeoisie... In all capitalist countries there are backward elements in the working class who are convinced that parliament is the true representative of the people and do not see the unscrupulous methods employed there.'
Lenin wrote his book Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder precisely to criticise those like the English socialist Sylvia Pankhurst and the Dutch Anton Pannekoek who wanted to reject all thought of participating in parliament and who had no conception of winning over the mass of workers. Instead they tended to raise their banner expecting workers to immediately flock to it. Instead, Lenin argued, socialists should use parliament and parliamentary elections as a platform to expose parliamentary socialism and the wider inability of the system to be transformed without a revolutionary struggle.
If this was the position adopted by the Bolsheviks in a period when they had made a workers' revolution in Russia and when revolution was much more immediately on the cards in Europe than it is today, then its application today makes even more sense, in certain circumstances and under certain conditions. There are times when to ignore elections would appear as abstaining from the questions concerning workers. The SWP is a sizeable organisation. All sorts of people look to us to give a lead. It would be a mistake to refuse point blank to extend our intervention to elections when there is an ideological crisis of Labourism.
The most important electoral contest in the near future is for the Scottish parliament elected next year. This election is going to dominate Scottish politics for the foreseeable future, as Labour's inability to deliver is increasingly under criticism and the SNP is gaining ground. The SNP's success is much less to do with overt nationalism and much more to do with the generalised discontent at the Blair government's failure to deliver; SNP policies on issues such as public spending, the minimum wage and union recognition are all to the left of Labour's official position. It is a mistake to see the only alternatives facing Scottish workers as right wing Labourism or nationalism. There is a space here for a revolutionary alternative which argues class politics. There may also be a case for standing in other elections. Of course to socialists a big political strike or a general strike has 100 times more impact than a parliamentary election. But not all strikes have that impact and to simply concentrate on such struggles rather than on the bigger picture can give a highly distorted view of political consciousness inside the working class.
While it is important not to abstain from such contests, parliamentary activity is never going to be our most important form of political intervention; rather it is a tactic that we can employ to gather round us a bigger periphery for the class struggles ahead. If we want to know how and how not to behave in deploying this tactic there are plenty of examples to avoid. Many socialists have lost sight of the tactical side of standing in elections and have elevated them into a principle, and victory in elections as a major advance for the class struggle.
The biggest single danger facing small groups of revolutionaries who stand is that they prioritise elections above all else and see them as central to growth. So the French organisation Lutte Ouvrière, which polled nearly 800,000 votes in the recent regional elections, has a politics which is evenly divided between a form of syndicalism (obsession with factory bulletins and small strikes) and an electoralism which itself takes an ultra-left form. It takes a dismissive line to the struggle against Le Pen's Nazis and concentrates its fire on the Socialists and Communists rather than trying to engage in a united front with them. Its election results therefore become self justifying rather than being used to build wider struggles. A recent edition of the party's magazine was entirely devoted to the election results. In Britain we have seen a similar obsession with elections from the Socialist Party, formerly Militant, which has used a handful of relatively small successes to prioritise its electoral work.
The political practice of many socialists can therefore become determined by elections. This has been the downfall of socialist organisations in Europe. Since the downturn in class struggle from the mid-1970s, some of the biggest groups have retreated into electoral politics as their major orientation. This has not only led them into alliances with non-socialists such as the Greens, it has also led them to judge their success inside the working class movement by the number of votes they receive, rather than by their underlying strength in the factories and workplaces. This has led in turn to their elevating individuals who achieve electoral success above anyone else. Yet this only builds up the notion of MPs or councillors as the most important people in the movement. Lenin and the Bolsheviks referred to their representatives inside the Tsarist Duma (parliament) before the First World War as the 'trumpeters', the people who put socialist ideas across inside parliament but whose position was in reality much less important than that of workers' representatives inside the factories.
The move towards electoralism by many revolutionary socialists dovetails with the more common position of left reformists in believing that electoral gains are the way forward the GLC experiment under Ken Livingstone or the 'socialist republic of South Yorkshire' under David Blunkett in the early 1980s. Today the Labour left is weak electorally, but we can see the same sort of politics in, for example, the strongly electoral orientation of Arthur Scargill's SLP (with constituency SLP groups etc.)
We want to avoid both these positions. We should also enter any electoral fight with extremely realistic expectations. Even if we get a good vote we will look small compared with Labour. That is, however, realistic when you look at our level of support inside the working class movement as a whole, and consider how shallow our roots are and how many areas there are where we have little or no influence. This tactic should be seen as part of beginning to sink roots in new areas, widening our influence in the working class locally and using elections so that they give us publicity and a platform for other activities.