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From International Socialism, No. 60, July 1973, p. 3.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg, with thanks to Paul Blackledge.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
‘To the horror of the Tories and their kept press, the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party has taken what the Times called “a giant strike backwards into old-style socialism.” It voted ... for public ownership of 25 of Britain’s top companies.’ So we read in the journal of a group of self-styled ‘marxists in the Labour Party’. Noting that Harold Wilson had ‘sharply rejected this proposal’ our ‘marxist’ writer leads on to his ‘revolutionary’ conclusion: ‘The NEC should be inundated with resolutions of support, to strengthen its hand in defending Party democracy.’
The particular journal we have quoted is of no importance, but the idea it expresses is significant. It is the traditional illusion of Labour Party left wingers, ‘faith in the efficacy of conference resolutions’.
As everybody knows – except perhaps the ‘resolutionary left’ in the Labour Party – it is not merely what is said that matters but above all who says it. The grotesque notion that the way forward lies in inundating the Labour Party NEC with resolutions of support could only be entertained by people who are under the delusion that somehow, someday, all experience notwithstanding, the Labour Party is going to relieve the working class of the necessity of struggling for power by introducing socialism from above.
No such thing is going to happen. The emancipation of the working class, as Marx said, must be the act of the working class itself. Certainly the working class needs an instrument, a party. But what sort of party? The Labour Party is and always has been an electoral machine, all its activities are directed to the return of Labour councillors and Labour MPs. It takes for granted the existing political structure and limits the political activities of the workers it influences to voting and persuading others to vote. ‘Vote for us, and we will do things for you’ is its invariable approach. Once in office, locally or nationally, it works within the system and inevitably comes to operate the priorities and values of the system, of capitalism.
The party that is needed is not an electoral machine. It is a fighting organisation that seeks to give leadership in the day to day struggles of working people and through those struggles to prepare for the eventual seizure of power and the destruction of the existing political and economic system. In so far as it engages in electoral activity, it does so for agitational and propaganda reasons and an important element in its propaganda is stress on the absurdity of what Lenin called ‘the prejudice that the fundamental problems of the class struggle can be solved by voting.’ All those who spread illusions to the contrary are, whatever their private good intentions, helping to preserve the credibility of the parliamentary fakers.
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Last updated on 23.9.2013