Date: Mon,  7 Apr 97 22:41:18   =20
From: Workers Struggle <global-AT-uk.pi.net>
Subject: M-NEWS: BRITAIN: REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISTS AND THE GENERAL ELECTION


WORKERS STRUGGLE

REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISTS AND
THE GENERAL ELECTION.
=09The forthcoming General Election in Britain on International
Workers' Day is a political event that workers and socialists should
welcome. This is because, although parliamentary elections alone cannot
bring about  a revolutionary transformation of society, at least this
election will provide the chance to boot out a hated Tory government that
has spent the last 18 years attacking working class jobs and living
standards on behalf of the greedy City of London profiteers and assorted
international financiers.
Clearly, there are not a few socialist minded individuals and would-be
revolutionary organisations who say that voting for the Labour Party is no
longer permissable now that Tony Blair and his 'New Labour' cronies have
ditched any real commitment to even minimal reforms and become
programmatically indistinguishable from the Tories. Whilst it is true that
New Labour has moved to the right and is seeking to cut the links with its
traditional base-the organised trade union movement-when can it be said that
the Labour Party ever represented real socialism?
We say that it cannot be a serious analysis that simply judges a political
party (in this case the Labour Party) purely on the basis of its pretty
rotten programme. From a CLASS point of view, despite the fact that Blair,
Mandelson, Brown and company are looking to turn the Labour Party into a
British version of the US' Democratic Party, the trade unions are still
ORGANICALLY linked to Labour and, from looking at the results of a number of
recent by-elections; the working class, in its vast majority, has not broken
with Labour.
This is why calling on workers and oppressed peoples to vote Labour on May
1st is not, as some ultra-leftists (Spartacists, Socialist Equality Party
etc.) insist, an impermissable or opportunist act, but on the contrary; a
mass class based vote to mobilise to kick the Tories out and force Labour
into office.
However, this is only the beginning, and a vote for Labour in every
constituency is not a foregone conclusion or habitual act, as many
revolutionary imposters (Socialist Outlook, Alliance for Workers' Liberty,
Workers Power etc.) believe. This organisations, for
example, will ask the workers in Newport not to vote for
Scargill, the left-reformist leader of the miners strike, and to back a Tory bourgeois politician who is running as the official Labour candidate despite supporting all Thatcher's anti-workers attacks and her offensive
against the strikes. The battle is now on to put socialism firmly back at
the top of the agenda.
Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party (SLP), as a left-social democratic
organisation that nominally bases itself on rather more class struggle
politics than New Labour, can be critically supported by revolutionaries and workers, provided the respective SLP candidate can be regarded as having
some influence among militant workers.
Similarly, the newly formed Socialist Party (SP-the former Militant Labour
group) and the Scottish Socialist Alliance will field candidates in working
class areas such as Coventry, Glasgow and Liverpool. Judging by Militant
Labour's levels of support when it has fielded candidates in these areas in
previous elections, a significant layer of fighting workers has been
prepared to vote for them.
As, by and large, the SLP, the SSA and the SP are not likely to field
candidates in the same constituencies, critical support can be offered to
both parties and against Labour where the SLP, SSA and SP have respectively
sown illusions in militant workers.
A key issue in the forthcoming election is NOT to form a radical
popular front alliance by voting for any candidate likely to defeat the
sitting Tory-such tactics only serve to tie the working class to openly
bourgeois parties like the Greens and the Liberal Democrats. The proposed
"anti-sleaze" vote in Tatton, Cheshire; where the Labour Party has withdrawn its candidate is one such example of how some politicians will happily
abandon  political issues and capitulate to petty  intrigue and
feeble-minded  gossip. Whilst we are happy to denounce the shabby,
hypocritical double-standards of the Tory Party, such desperate tactics must
be decisively rejected as CLASS INDEPENDENCE is the key.
Genuine revolutionaries do not believe that either the SLP or the SP can
deliver real socialism as neither has any sort of programme to bring
socialism about. But if workers have illusion in them in any numbers, the
best way to break such illusions is with respective "socialists" in elected
positions of power. This also applies to New Labour as, however much it
parades itself as the bosses friend; at its root base, it is still, as Lenin
termed it, a 'bourgeois workers' party.=93 This means that its politics are
unashamedly pro-capitalist, whilst its main base remains in the working
class.
This is why it is necessary to mobilise workers to fight for their needs and
against all job cuts, hospital closures, attacks on much needed public
services, and against the pathetic, nationalistic small-talk of import and
immigration controls in the here and now. The best way to expose Labour in
the eyes of a majority of its working class supporters (who still number
millions) is to launch a full scale programme of  struggle that will: (a)put
class demands on Labour that will make it a lot more difficult for a
Blair-led government to simply ride roughshod over working class interests;
(b) shake out the trendy middle class New Labour members and send them
retreating back to the Shires and; (c) significantly increase the chance of
splitting the base of the Labour Party away from its rotten hierarchy and
open up the way for the forging of a genuinely revolutionary socialist party
that can do down and overthrow this decrepid, bankrupt capitalist system
that blights so many of our lives, once and for all.