Date: Tue, 27 May 1997 21:26:10 -0700
From: knightrose <knightrose-AT-geocities.com>
Subject: M-I: re: Labour and Politics - let's consider class.


At 07:18 PM 5/27/97 +0100, you wrote:
>Karl Carlile wrote:
>> 
>> The British Labour Party is a bourgeois party. To susggest that it is
>> some kind of working class party is poppycock. Incidentally did you
>> get elected as an MP Nick?
>> 
>
>It must be nice to live in a world where everything is so clear: the LP is a bourgeois party, 
>and any other possiblity is 'poppycock'. How can you be so confident about the purely 
>bourgeois nature of the Labour Party when it has millions of working class people paying 
>subscriptions (through the unions), voting on policy and participating in the structures of 
>it. 

Have you ever tried to opt out of paying the political levy?  The unions
don't make it exactly easy, do they?  That's why millions of workers
keep on paying it!

>Are the unions also bourgeois institutions? If not, what happens to the unions to make 
>them bourgeois when they are participating in the thoroughly bourgeois Labour Party, but 
>proletarian when they conduct industrial activities?

Can you remember the last time a union in Britain actually did anything
serious about the wages and conditions of its members?  I reckon it's
easier to remember all the times they forced their members back to work
or did their level best to prevent militant action.  Most union bosses
want to be a part of the management structure of capital.  Most of them
have succeeded in a junior way. They function as cops in the workplace -
just ask the Liverpool Dockers!

>I always thought that Marxism was about studying the transformations, the contradictions, the 
>movement in things: hence understanding the shifting nature of the Labour Party. Obviously it 
>is easier if you can just label things and then throw them away. If only the British working 
>class had your insight.
>
>Incidentally, no.
>
>Nick

Marxism is about understanding the world so that we can change it.  What
you are talking about is using it as an ideology to justify constant
shifts in policy.  You end up finding factions of capital to support,
just like all the other Trots and Stalinists in the world today.

For Proletarian Revolution!
Smash the Labour Party!

Harry Roberts
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