Date: Fri, 16 May 1997 20:13:12 +0100
From: Nick Holden & Kate Ahrens <glengate-AT-foobar.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-I: New Labour and Trade Unions


Chris Burford wrote, being surprisingly soft on 'new' Labour,:
> 
> The unions have been so pleased to think of the possibility
> of Labour winning an election, that they have not
> insisted on the government pledging to undo the
> substantial anti-solidarity legislation of the last 18
> conservative years. So much so that Blair can say that
> the best trade unions are talking to their employers.
> 
> New Labour is trying to emphasise that it will not have a
> special relationship with the trade unions against other
> sections of society such as employers/capitalists.
> 

And thus far the union leaderships are happy with that. They don't particularly want free trade unions any 
more than Blair does. They want access for themselves to the corridors of power (which a Labour victory gives 
them) without giving their members any greater ability to hold them accountable.

So if we are to get free trade unions, it will only be by trade union members fighting for them.

> This therefore is the end of the Labour Representation Committee
> project. Logically it leads to a left-of-centre party funded
> by neutral state resources. How the government handles this aspect of
> constitutional reform will be interesting.

True, but we don't have to be passive about it. We can (as Marxists) seek to influence events. This is where 
your view of the Labour Party is important. Those who say the Labour Party is already bourgeois find nothing 
of significance in Blair's plans to ditch the unions, because for them the Labour Party had no potential 
anyway. For others, who see the Labour Party as the culmination, to date, of the British working class 
intervention into politics, the threat to the Labour Party is significant. An end to the Labour Representation 
Committee project, if it happens, will mean an end to participation in British politics by the working class 
in any mass, organised sense.

We would then have to refound some kind of LRC, based on the unions and drawing in ordinary working class 
people. The Marxists would fight for their programme to be the programme of the party, but would not make it a 
principle of involvement that that happened. Given this, why wait for the death of the Labour Party and the 
creation of the next mass party? Why not fight for your politics in the one we've got?

> If New Labour gets to a more socially conscious society
> it will not be through using the trade unions as conveyor
> belts to socialism.

And if a Labour government is not accountable to the working class through the unions, then it will not get us 
to a more socially conscious society, will it?

Nick




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