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From International Socialism, No.48, June/July 1971, p.1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
If a general election were held now the Labour Party would win it. The opinion polls and the local election results show this clearly enough.
A year after its defeat, the ‘discredited’ Wilson leadership has toe wind in its sails again. Fluctuations of opinion will occur of course. The fact remains that the Labour Party is the alternative to the Tories in the minds of practically the whole working class, notwithstanding a practically unchanged policy and leadership. For the vast majority of those working people who have reached a basic level of class consciousness there is still nowhere else to go.
At the same time there are probably fewer illusions in the Party than at any previous period. The record of the Wilson government as the pioneer of Heath’s policies is still fairly fresh in most people’s minds. In economic policies which combined stagnation and growing unemployment with an accelerating inflation, in cuts in the social services, the Common Market, the attacks on the unions, Heath has followed where Wilson led. It is not surprising that a recent poll showed that an unprecedented number of people believe that there is no essential difference between the parties. And yet these same people are voting Labour in larger numbers than before.
This revival in electoral support is not connected with any influx into the ward and constituency organisations. 172 constituency and borough parties failed to send a delegate to the 1970 Annual Conference, the paper membership is down to 680,000 and there is little subsequent sign of organisational growth. The youth organisation (LPYS) is small – its recent conference mustered some 200 delegates most of whom represented very little. Both adult and youth organisations, outside a few centres, are largely white collar in composition with a strong middle class element.
Thus we have a party which practically monopolises that two-thirds of the working class vote that has been won away from the bourgeois parties and which at the same time has fewer industrial workers active in it than it has had at any time since 1918. This lack of involvement by working-class militants explains the extreme feebleness of the party’s left wing.
Those left wing tendencies that have been significant in the party in the past had four components: largish numbers of constituency workers, a radicalised youth organisation of at least some thousands, minority trade union machine support that rested largely on the Communist Party’s, activists, and a group of leftist MPs. The last two components are still present though in modified form. Compared even to their Bevanite predecessors the present crop of parliamentary lefts is remarkably unimpressive; on the other hand the trade union lefts are both relatively and absolutely much stronger than they have been since the middle nineteen-twenties. Since the first two components are absent the political left has no independent base and operates on the sufferance of the leadership. The industrial left, the Scanlon-Jones axis, which does have a substantial base lacks a political arm and, even if it had the will, lacks the means to create one in the absence of activists in the constituencies.
For revolutionaries the key change is this: the Labour Party is no longer a reformist party in the sense that it still was in the fifties and even the early sixties. It is committed to the ‘modernisation’ of British capitalism in conditions which effectively exclude the possibility of serious reforms and which demand the curbing both of real wages and of social expenditure. A future Labour government will be a new – and worse – version of 1964-70.
This is the basic reason why it is objectively possible to build a revolutionary socialist party in the years ahead. There is a secondary but still very important reason: the ideological decline of Stalinism. The same two reasons ensure that the strategy of the Communist Party, a left reformist alliance on a ‘political’ programme, will fail. There was never a parliamentary road to socialism. There was a parliamentary road to real and significant reforms given real extra-parliamentary pressure. There is no such road today.
The creation of a revolutionary party, an organisation of thousands of workers and intellectuals with the policies, discipline and cohesion to intervene effectively in the class struggle and, ultimately, to gain mass working class support, can only occur outside the Labour Party. But equally, it can only occur if revolutionaries develop a realistic strategy for connecting their ideas with those of those militants - the vast majority - who at present see no real possibility of a movement outside the Labour Party.
The basis for such a strategy is the inability of reformist politics to deliver reforms under present conditions. It involves an active intervention in struggles alongside those who still turn to the Labour Party, not in most cases through the constituency shells, but through the unions. The demands to be fought for are reformist in form, but transitional in content. The central demand is to throw out the Tories and replace them by a government (and in practice at present this means a Labour government) committed to:
- Unconditional repeal of the Industrial Relations Law and all anti-union laws.
- No incomes policy under capitalism.
- Restoration of all welfare cuts. No welfare charges, no selectivity.
- An end to unemployment; work or full maintenance at trade union rates.
- Repeal of all racist legislation including the present Aliens Bill if it becomes law.
- Renationalisation, without compensation, of all sectors of industry returned to private hands.
These extremely limited demands cannot in fact be realised by a government committed to capitalism. A serious fight to commit unions, and through them the Labour Party, to such a programme as the basic minimum in no way precludes other demands. Indeed it facilitates them.
The independent development of the revolutionary organisation is our central task. A concrete answer to the Labour Party orientated workers is an essential part of achieving it.
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