Roger Silverman writes:-
I am writing to make a belated contribution towards the discussion on the nature of the Labour Party.
It is true that ultra-left sectarians have always impressionistically dismissed the Labour Party as a capitalist party, and that Militant in its day was right to insist that as the political arm of the trade unions, it was the workers’ traditional party, to which they would turn first in their search for a political solution.
It is also true that empirical data about current membership figures, or outrage at successive Labour governments’ foreign policies, are inconsequential in establishing criteria to determine the party’s class character. The degree of popular disillusion reflected in low membership figures at the base of the party, or of corruption, treachery or criminality by the parasites at its head, are not in the end decisive arguments.
On the other hand, it is not enough for Marxists to repeat old formulae which worked decades previously, without looking afresh at living processes. We need to examine whether or not there have been any fundamental qualitative changes which might require a modification of our approach. What fundamental changes have taken place in the Labour Party?
1) The removal from the constitution of the party’s commitment to socialism: Clause 4. It is true that, on its own, such a change need not be decisive in defining a party’s class base. The Bad Godesburg conference in 1959, which carried through a similar change, did not in itself alter the working-class nature of the SPD. And yet the removal of Clause Four represented a historic shift. For decades such a retreat had been resisted tooth and nail. At the very same time as Bad Godesburg, the Labour Party rank and file had forced Hugh Gaitskell to abandon his attempt to take the same route. Gaitskell, a blatant forerunner of Blair, nevertheless had to fight the 1959 election on a programme of wholesale nationalisation. Right up to the 1980s, the party conference was committed to “a fundamental shift in the balance of power and wealth” in society. It was that relentless underlying impulse towards social change that we always based ourselves on. Unlike the sects, we never measured the class nature of the party by the scale of treachery by the leadership. For us, that was predictable. Our assertion of the proletarian nature of the party was based on the socialist aspirations of the membership. The fact that in 1994 Clause Four was dropped with hardly a murmur of protest was a significant fact to be taken into serious consideration. Since then, the “curious behaviour of the dog in the night”, as Sherlock Holmes might have put it – the absence of any significant audible rank-and-file protest against the Blair/Brown government’s policies – itself represents damning evidence of a significant change in the character of the party.
2) The drastic – or rather, the almost total – reduction in the specific weight of the trade unions in the party structure. The weight of trade union block votes at Party conference, trade union representation on the national executive, and above all the very powers of party conference and the national executive, have been reduced virtually to zero. The party leadership in the past owed their authority to the mandate they enjoyed from the trade unions. Today the Labour leadership and Labour MPs are a self-perpetuating clique accountable to no one. So feeble has the rank and file become that it could not even find a means to put up an alternative candidate for the party leadership. It is true that, in the past, whatever trade-union support for reactionary policies was enjoyed by previous party leaders had been prostituted without democratic accountability by corrupt bureaucrats. But today, at least formally speaking and in terms of party structure, the Labour Party is no longer in any sense the political voice of the trade unions. The only relationship which survives is the trade unions’ continued donation of cash, and to that extent the comparison with the US Democratic Party is not inappropriate. The loss of political influence by the trade unions represents another significant change.
3) The attitude towards the Labour Party of big business. In the past, Labour governments were tolerated only at times when capitalism was suffering a severe crisis of authority, and only then under protest and with gritted teeth, for brief periods, and under relentless pressure. Having been swept to power on the crest of a mass wave, which gave them the scope to make genuine reforms, the Attlee government was removed after one and a bit terms of office, and it was thirteen years before Labour regained office. The first Wilson government explicitly objected that it had been dictated to by the “gnomes of Zurich”; it was blackmailed into reversing its policies by a “strike of capital”; and already there was idle talk of a coup led by Cecil King and Lord Mountbatten. The second Wilson government found itself back in power when Britain was paralysed by the miners’ strike and the three-day week, and Heath had called an election on the issue of “who runs Britain: the government or the trade unions?” That government was rocked by economic crisis, runaway inflation, waves of strikes, and terrorist bombings. During its period of office, contingency plans were being openly discussed for the possibility of a Chilean-style military coup, and military manoeuvres were even staged as an overt warning. Big business has a very different attitude towards Blair and Brown. For a decade they quite explicitly patronised New Labour as their preferred instrument of government. They showered donations on New Labour, having until very recently completely abandoned their traditional party the Tories. It is true that recently they seem to have opted tactically for a return to their traditional party of government, but they cheerfully supported a nominally Labour government for an unprecedented three successive terms of office. This indicates another drastic change in the nature of the Labour Party.
4) The political constraints on the party leaders. Yes, in the past the Labour leaders always pursued reactionary and treacherous policies. In the past, however, they always had to be careful to justify themselves in terms of the need for “realism”, “gradualism”, “priorities”, etc. They dared not question the overall goal of a social transformation. When Ramsay MacDonald swung towards direct frontal attacks on the working class, he had no option but to break with the Labour Party and rely on the capitalist parties in a National Government, to pursue policies that New Labour nowadays carries out with relative quiescence from the party rank and file. New Labour politicians show open contempt for even the mildest of the old Fabian aspirations for even the most gradual social change.
None of the factors listed above would categorically rule out the possibility of a return by sections of the working class to the Labour Party at a time of future crisis. What we are obliged to take into account, however, are the following factors:
1) That this might well turn out to be only a part of a wider and more general upsurge, that would also manifest itself outside of the party. As things stand at the moment, the generation under 35, say, to whom the class traditions of past decades are a closed book, would be as likely to think of turning to their local Labour Party branch for a solution to their problems as to their local branch of Tesco’s. This might change, but it is a fact that for the moment memories even of the miners’ strike, which ended less than 25 years ago, let alone the General Strike, have been blotted out of social consciousness.
2) Any influx into the Labour Party would precipitate, not the kind of slicing off of a corrupt bureaucratic crust from a healthy revived organism that we had envisaged in the past, but a very different kind of confrontation between the trade unions and a highly professional machine of smooth pro-business politicians, owing no loyalty and sharing no traditions with the working class. The idea of a mass breakaway by the trade unions to form a party of labour, maybe alongside single-issue anti-capitalist campaigning lobbies, is by no means far-fetched in this scenario.
As I tried to suggest in my piece on how globalisation has affected the working class, the times have changed fundamentally. We have even wider issues to consider than even just the nature of the Labour Party and other such parties. We cannot be too categorical in asserting whether or not the way forward to a revival of workers’ political action will be through a movement to reclaim the Labour Party, or a movement to replace it. What we need to ask ourselves is why so far there have been no noticeable movements through either one of these routes.
We can all be proud of the work that Militant did in the Labour Party, which was exemplary. It turned Trotskyism for the first time for decades into a formidable force to be reckoned with, bringing masses of working-class people into direct confrontation with capitalism; it was explicitly feared by the Labour leaders and by the capitalist state itself; it even brought down a prime minister. Militant pushed entrism to its very limits and achieved spectacular results. The crisis and split in Militant came when it was necessary to decide where to go next.
Today we are in uncharted waters. It is unprecedented for a party to change its class character without a split. It was also unprecedented, however, for a state to change its class character without a civil war… and yet that is what seems to have happened in Russia.
In the UK, trade unionism survives for the moment mostly within a rapidly shrinking public sector. The days when giant industrial factories were run by shop stewards’ committees are long gone. The relocation of the industrial proletariat to new territories has fundamentally changed the international outlook, and, in the long run, by no means for the worse. We are moving now into the era of a truly international working class for the first time in history. As I have suggested elsewhere, it may be to the new industrial territories that we have to look for the birthplace of new workers’ parties and a new international.
Roger Silverman
