Date: Thu, 06 Mar 1997 20:01:50 +0000
Subject: M-G: Re: M-I: Re: Labour means business


Jason A Schulman wrote:
> 
> Hi, Nick.  Thanks for your thoughtful response.
> 

Why, thank you. I'd have replied to this one sooner, too, only I was worried about the 
limit (I flunked it anyway). Sorry if my previous message was a touch aggressive - I'd 
been having a hard week.

> >I'm afraid your views on the Labour Party sound like they've been put
> >together from the bourgeois press.
> >
> They've been put together by a member of the Socialist Party USA who has
> dual US/British citizenship.  He's a Christian Socialist, not a Marxist,
> but I don't think he'd have any reason to lie about these matters.

Perhaps not, but as a Christian Socialist (which, incidentally, is how Tony Blair 
describes himself) and a non-Marxist, he does not evaluate things from a class 
perspective. Hence the confusion over the nature of the Labour Party and the 'middle 
class' thing we seem to have restarted debate over.

I would suggest you need to be a touch more critical in your handling of information 
supplied through that route ;-)

> The idea that a leftward shift would lead to a drop in membership made
> sense to me only in that I figure the media would demonize Labour as ever
> more eager to bureaucratically collectivise British industry ("See,
> they're Communists after all"); at least that's what would happen in the
> States.  I really don't know what the average Brit thinks of when they
> hear the word "socialism," or what the political tilt of the mainstream
> media is.

While a 'drop in membership' might have made sense, it didn't actually happen, or at 
least not in the way you originally described. This is primarily because, although your 
estimation of the British press is essentially correct, the working class at that time 
did not do what the press wanted them to. They saw the nightmare of the right-wing 
Labour government of the 1970s, and said, "we have to prevent that happening again". 
They recognised, in my view correctly, that to prevent a Labour government selling them 
out again, they needed to control it; they needed their wing of the Labour Party (the 
unions and the rank and file) to dominate the bureaucratic wing. They set out to 
acheive this, and joined the Labour Party as part of the process.

Sadly they didn't succeed.

 
> What was the response by the Labour rank & file to the expulsion of
> Militant? And how sectarian was that group, really?

In the main, the rank and file would probably have joined a broad "Defend Militant" 
campaign. The evidence for this is that when the LP banned the Trotskyist newspaper, 
'Socialist Organiser', and the paper responded with an "End the Ban" campaign, many LP 
lefties, who were not readers or supporters of the paper, joined it, and campaigned 
against the ban. They weren't successful, however, and selling or writing for SO became 
an offense punishable by expulsion.

The Militant, however, responded to the threat, not by setting up a broad campaign, but 
by alternately denying that 'Militant' even existed as an organisation, and then 
launching screaming attacks on the Labour Party for being so hostile to them. They 
tacked from one approach to another in a centrist fashion, and ultimately alienated 
most of those who might otherwise have supported them. Rather than challenge the LP 
leadership by continuing to operate inside it (which they claimed to still believe was 
the right place to be) they tried to make a virtue out of a necessity by "splitting" 
with the Labour Party, and pulling comrades out of the Labour Party rather than have 
them stay in and get expelled. This led to the split between the Militant and the 
Socialist Appeal group (led by Ted Grant) who stayed behind.

> Wasn't public reaction to Labour's nuclear-disarmament views fairly
> hostile?

Not until after the Labour leadership had publicly said they would not carry it out. 
This made it a laughing stock. Remember that this was the era of Greenham, and massive 
public support for CND.

> >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?
> 
> Good point.  "Main question" being "would there be a mass working-class
> party in Britain," then.

Yeah. Although we need to be a little careful in catergorising the Labour Party as a 
"mass working class party", if this is what you are saying. It is, kind of, but it one 
with a very definite bourgeois edge to it - a bourgeois workers' party, in classic 
terminology. It is a formation with a struggle going on inside of it for ideological 
leadership, between the ideology of the bourgeoisie (represented by Blair), and the 
ideology of the working class (represented, I hope, by the Marxists).

> By this same fellow I mentioned.  I realize one shouldn't rely on only
> one source but he's the only source I've encountered, and he's not a avid
> Blair supporter, so I figured him trustworthy.

Trust him, by all means, but expect him to understand the world in a non-Marxist 
fashion. The facts he may give you; their interpretation you may need to add for 
yourself.

The 'reforms' in the Labour Party's structures may be 'democratic' to a bourgeois 
observer, but anti-democratic to a proletarian one. It's all a question of perspective.

> >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.
> >
> I was referring to the fact that in Britain, as in other developed
> countries, the composition of the workforce has shifted away from manual
> labourers to skilled non-manual (white collar) and service workers. (The
> "fragmentation" argument.) Since the manual working class was and is the
> core constituency of the Labour/Social Democratic parties in these
> nations, the political effect of the decline of the traditional
> industrial sector on labour/social democratic parties has been both
> consistent and dramatic.

First thing we have to sort out is the question of "Labour/Social Democratic". 
Currently, the Labour Party in Britain is not Social Democratic in the sense that these 
parties operate in most other countries. Labour is still, to an extent, the political 
expression of the organised working class. Most Social Democratic parties have no 
formal links with trade unions, and no mechanism for the working class to direct them. 
Therefore they are not worth our time or involvement.

The Labour Party is different, albeit slightly, and albeit that this difference is now 
under attack. But it is a crucial difference, because the issue for Marxists should 
never be about who is the least bad representative of the bourgeoisie, but about 
furthering the interests of the workers. This means that while it is probably true that 
Labour could get into power by ditching all its links to the working class, and 
becoming a 'national unity' party along Blair's lines, getting Labour into power at any 
cost is not what the Marxists are in the Labour Party for.

We want Labour into government to serve the political interests of the working class. 
Therefore we want a strategy for getting Labour into government that strengthens its 
ties to the union movement, and takes the working class electorate forwards, not 
backwards. 

It is my contention that such a strategy is not only possible, it is also likely to be 
more effective than Blair's alternative at (a) winning the election, and (b) doing 
something useful afterwards.


> The crisis of Social Democracy, therefore, is in many ways the ironic
> result of its success; the majority of the manual working class (in
> Europe) has become for the most part (and if not undoubtedly identifies
> with) the "middle class," and as such they don't care so much about who
> owns the means of production as they do about how much control they have
> over their own lives, homes, and communities. No social democratic
> political formation in the industrialised nations has escaped this
> development.

True, but where has this led them (the workers, I mean)? Nice houses, shit lives, no?

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but in Britain, polling data shows that the one
> constant political position increasingly favoured by Labour voters is
> workers having a greater say in their workplaces; but the one position
> most in decline is the support for more nationalization.  As the working
> "middle" class seems to have individualistic viewpoints, any successful
> current left politics has to appeal to individualist (as well as
> collectivist) motives.

You are right and wrong, in that order. Support for nationalisation, despite no 
political party offering it for any sector of the economy is still surprisingly high. 
People want the utilities (water, electricity, etc) renationalised, and don't think the 
'windfall tax' proposed by Labour goes far enough.

It is true that Labour voters say that workers should have a greater say in their 
working conditions, but then wasn't that one of the reasons for the construction of the 
Trade Unions?

> Hence Blair's "stakeholder society" rhetoric, which appears to
> democratize corporate relations without nationalization.  No, it's not my
> idea of socialism either.  (Though neither is the bureaucratic
> nationalization Social Democracy has implemented in the past.)

I'm with you here, on both points. But the stakeholder rhetoric has been all but 
dropped now, because it wasn't engaging with people. Working class voters quite 
reasonably asked how they could be equal stakeholders with a water company that cut 
them off if they didn't pay their bill, but over which they had no control.

> A related question for you, Nick:  When a labor movement helps elect a
> labor party into government, in a polity where the majority of people are
> not in the labor movement, what is
> the responsibility of each to the other (union and party) in order to
> move the whole project along under difficult circumstances?

The both have a responsibility to the class as a whole to represent their class 
interests. Most importantly, and the point missed by the way you phrase the question, 
is that a Labour government is not the same thing as the Labour Party, and that the 
government has a responsibility to be accountable to the movement.

> After all, wasn't Harold Wilson's (ergo Labour's) inability to "control
> the unions" a recurring factor in the British public's unwillingness to
> vote Labour, and hasn't this contributed to Blair's
> current stance on such things?

Well, kind of. The media certainly made a lot of that, but at the time most workers 
were pissed off by Wilson's refusal to give them a decent pay rise. The unions were 
only being stroppy because their members demanded action. At the time, the union 
leaders wanted a cosy deal with Wilson, but the membership wouldn't have it.

As for Blair, he has certainly learned a lesson from the 70s: that a Labour government, 
even more than a Tory one, needs to break the union movement if it is to stay in power 
longer than five minutes.

But to the working class, this is not the right lesson. The question is not, how can 
Labour stay in government, but how can the workers win power?


Nick




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