Date: Sat, 01 Mar 1997 01:09:05 +0000
Subject: M-G: Re: M-I: Re: Labour means business


Jason A Schulman wrote:
> 

Hi Jason.

I'm afraid your views on the Labour Party sound like they've been put together from the bourgeois press.

> 
> I don't buy it.
> 
> When the Labour Party moved more to the left in the early 1980s, its
> membership declined from over 660,000 to under 280,000.
> 
> A 58% drop. Within five years.

The membership dropped after the democracy campaigns had *lost*, not because of a leftward shift in the Labour 
Party. There had been a move back into the Labour Party after 1979, with people saying, "We will never again 
allow a Labour government to betray us like the last one did."

There was a massive upsurge of demands for democratic reform of the Labour Party, the right of constituencies 
to select their own candidates, the right of members to elect their own leaders, etc. These were fundamental 
attacks on the priveleges of the right-wing leadership, who fought them tooth-and-nail.

Tony Benn, left-wing MP, challenged for the deputy leadership, and lost, by less than 1% of the vote (if only 
Adam and his SWP colleagues had been LP members...), and from then on, the right-wing couter-offensive gained 
pace. Kinnock played a central role in selling out Benn (he'd claimed to be a left-winger up until this 
election, when he called on people to support the right-wing sitting candidate), and went on to split the 
Labour Party by attack Militant instead of the Tories when he was party leader.

The Labour Party lost many excellent comrades after this battle for democracy had been lost, and also lost a 
huge bagful of scabs who went off to form the SDP. That is the basis for the drop in membership, not the 
so-called left-wing policies which made up the 1983 election manifesto.

In fact, one of the contributory factors to declining membership was the spectacle of the Labour leaders going 
round the country disowning the policies in the manifesto.

> Now, really, how do you think Labour would respond to that kind of
> massive decline after what the public perceived as a move to the left?

But this assumes that 'Labour' would respond in only one way, i.e. that the Party is homogeneous. But it 
patently is not. The leadership responded by saying, "that was close - we'll never let the members get so much 
of the upper hand again", the ideology which spawned Blairism. The left responded (the best bits of it, at 
least) by saying, "we have to win people to the Labour Party in order to win the battle inside the Party".

> After the crushing defeat in 1983 the main question was not so much
> whether Labour's policies were "too centrist" or "too left", but whether
> the party itself would continue to exist.

The "main" question for whom? Not for Marxists, certainly, who do not believe in prolonging the life of 
something beyond it's 'natural span' or beyond its usefulness. The main question was, and is, can the Labour 
Party be used by the working class to secure political change?

If it couldn't, then the LP would not continue to exist, even if some formation with that name continued to 
contest elections. And out of the rubble of the Labour Party would have arisen some other working class-based 
party, because of the very nature of the Capitalist political system.

But the reality is that even now, this question is still undecided. That's why the Labour Party still exists. 
It's policies will be decided by the process of class struggle going on inside it, between the ideologies of 
reformism and surrender, and the ideology of the working class, namely Marxism.

> 
> Then the party began "modernisation" under Kinnock, began to recover from
> the decline by 1990, and has grown since the implementation of OMOV (one
> member, one vote) in 1993, which (I'm told) is the most democratic
> internal system of any social democratic party in Europe (and an amazing
> feat for Labour).

Told by whom? The OMOV system is democratic in a formal, bourgeois, sense - every member gets a vote. But it's 
a postal vote, where the leadership get all the Party's resources to campaign with, and the opponents none. 
Where the 'approved' candidates of the state get access to the media to propagandise, while the left-wing 
candidates for things such as the National Executive Committee are prevented from even circulating a leaflet 
about their views to the membership.

OMOV was a method for gutting the 'collective democracy' of the Labour Party, and replacing it by armchair 
democracy. That is, it reduced the working class culture in the Labour Party, of meetings, debate and 
collective decisions, and imposed a bourgeois culture of individual postal ballots.

'Democracy' is a dangerous concept. In the wrong hands it is even more dangerous than it's opposites. Marxists 
are not in favour of democracy for its own sake, but for workers' democracy, no?

> But alas, OMOV (i.e.- more democracy) has not brought support for more
> left-wing policies, because the politically inclined people who are
> freely joining or returning to Labour are not revolutionary leftists or
> the unemployed, but members of a new "upwardly mobile" working class.
> It's important to note that the traditional manual working class are not
> leaving Labour, but their voice is being affected by the transformation
> of the workforce.

The reality is that OMOV has hidden support for left-wing policies, because the leadership have decided at 
every stage what questions would be asked. But ask Labour Party members what policies they want carried out by 
a Labour government, or read the resolutions for conference each year, and you find: renationalisation, a 
minimum wage, rebuilding of the welfare state, trade union rights, etc., etc. That is why the Blairites are now 
targetting annual conference for their next round of "democratisation" - they want to remove the right of CLPs 
to submit resolutions.

> It's not pleasant for us ideologues, but it's down to sheer numbers, and
> the writing is boldly on the wall. In order to end 17 years of horrendous
> Tory rule, Labour has to win the middle class, particularly in the
> affluent south of England where 1/3 of the seats in Parliament are
> returned. Labour also has to at last win the women's vote, which is
> historically more attuned to middle
> class concerns and has not voted for Labour in the past.

Bollocks. To end 17 years of Tory rule, Labour has to win a majority. They could do this more easily by 
appealing to the millions of working class people who feel unrepresented by the political system. Being 
left-wing and radical did not stop Labour getting elected in 1945 - their 'revolutionary' (so it was called, 
then) vision of a welfare state, jobs and homes for all, and public ownership led to the biggest landslide in 
modern British political history.

You've given in, Jason, and accepted the bourgeois version of the Labour Party's history. It is completely 
inverted from the reality. Working class people are now far more left-wing than the Labour Party. They'll be 
voting Labour to get rid of the Tories, despite, not because of, Blair's pro-business, one-nation bollocks.

> More to the point, Labour has to win the middle class by winning on
> middle class issues, or Labour (and any other socialist formation for
> that matter) will never see political "power" again.

Who the fuck is the "middle class"?

Come one, Jason. Have some faith in your class.


Nick



     --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---