Labourism & the British Left

1 Blair’s Bogus Bolsheviks Labourism & the British Left Buoyed by favorable opinion polls and salivating at the terrevolutionary war against North Korea in the 1950s. prospect of electoral victory after more than fifteen years in Under Harold Wilson in the 1960s, it dutifully backed the wilderness, in April 1995 the British Labour Party voted American imperialism’s failed attempt to crush the Viet- to abolish the famous Clause IV of its constitution, which namese revolution. committed it, at least on paper, to fighting for ‘‘social own- ership’’ of the major means of production and exchange. Labour Party: Pillar of Capitalist Rule With this obsequious bow before the ‘‘free market,’’ Labour at long last joined its social-democratic counterparts on the The Labour Party, like social-democratic parties every- continent in abandoning any pretense of standing for so- where, serves as an essential pillar of ‘‘democratic’’ capital- cialism. ist rule. While the impulse for its existence comes from the The vote was also a milestone in the career of Tony Blair, working class, the Labour Party acts as a mechanism for who had risen to the post of party leader the previous year promoting bourgeois ideology among working people. In vowing to make Labour a respectable ‘‘party of govern- times of political crisis, when bourgeois paries and politi- ment,’’ i.e., one that would be acceptable to a capitalist class cians are discredited in the eyes of the masses, the capitalists on the attack. Dumping Clause IV was the culmination of are glad to have some experienced operators with enough Labour’s long retreat in the face of the Thatcherite offensive. political authority within the workers’ movement to control The Labour Party betrayed the miners’ strike of 1984-85 and outbreaks of class struggle. then purged itself of leftists----all with the ‘‘pragmatic’’ ob- Labour leaders, including the so-called trade-union lefts, jective of getting back into 10 Downing Street. Now Tony played a key role in the defeat of the 1926 General Strike. In Blair has taken the next logical step on the road of political 1931, Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald defected ‘‘realism’’: assuring the country’s capitalist rulers that, once to a Tory ‘‘National Government’’ in order to carry out in government, his party will do nothing very different massive austerity attacks, including cuts in already near- from the Tories he aims to replace. starvation-level unemployment benefits. During the past Although the scuttling of Clause IV is a new low, it fifteen years of Tory reaction, the latter-day MacDonalds represents no fundamental change in the character of the have once again been stabbing the working-class move- Labour Party. From its inception, Labour has always been ment in the back. a classical example of what Lenin called a ‘‘bourgeois work- From its inception, the Labour Party has been formally ers’ party.’’ Founded on a recognition of the necessity for committed to achieving, by parliamentary means, the working-class political independence, and based upon the piecemeal nationalization of parts of the British economy, organizations of the working class, it has always neverthe- and to ameliorating the worst ravages of capitalism. In less been dominated by bourgeois ideology, and run by order to head off the growth of communism after the Rus- people whose fundamental loyalty to the existing social sian Revolution, the party brass thought it prudent to bur- order was never in doubt. Labour has always acted as a nish its ‘‘radical’’ image. Labour became a party with indi- prop for capitalism, and an obstacle to the development of vidual membership (open initially to workers of all political revolutionary consciousness in the proletariat. The aboli- stripes, though Communists were soon excluded), and a tion of Clause IV thus only makes explicit what was implicit formal commitment to ‘‘socialism,’’ as embodied in Clause in the Labour Party from its formation. IV. The constituency parties provided a playground for the The Labour Party arose in response to a deep working- left, but the real balance of power lay always with the class radicalization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, party’s two more substantial components: the trade-union as British capitalism faced serious competition from pow- bureaucracy (with a guaranteed bloc of votes), and the erful German and U.S. imperialist rivals. The resulting parliamentary caucus. economic insecurity was sufficient to detach the more ad- Even the gains Labour achieved----e.g., the free National vanced sections of the proletariat from the bourgeois Lib- Health Service, introduced after the Second World War by eral Party as recognition spread that the workers needed Clement Atlee’s government----were conceived by Labour their own party separate from, and counterposed to, the chiefs as a way to ‘‘protect’’ British workers from commu- parties of the bosses in order to defend their interests. nist influence. In fact, the National Health Service was the Yet this organizational step forward was not matched by brainchild not of the Labour Party, but of a Liberal aristo- an equivalent political advance. Even while separating crat, Viscount Beveridge. from the organizations of the bourgeoisie, Labour remained In recent years we have seen a concerted drive by the firmly within the political tradition of British liberalism. It ruling classes in the imperialist countries to raise profit has always remained slavishly loyal to the parliamentary margins through the wholesale destruction of social gains system, that ‘‘democratic’’ mask for the rule of capital. won by the workers. Margaret Thatcher’s attacks on trade- While formally calling for socialism, the party insisted that union rights and on the ‘‘welfare state’’ went hand in hand this goal would have to be attained by parliamentary, rather with a military buildup aimed at the Soviet bloc. The Labour than revolutionary, methods. Labour’s leaders invariably leadership’s support for these measures led to a long string grovelled before the monarchy and supported the British of electoral defeats, and ensured the ascendancy of ruling class in all its imperialist adventures----from world Thatcher and her colorless successor, John Major. Capitalist wars to colonialist interventions in Ireland, India, Africa triumphalism over the collapse of the USSR, coming after a and elsewhere. Labour eagerly supported the UN’s coun- decade of domestic defeats (most notably the 1984-85 min- 33 ers’ strike) drove the Labourite bureaucracy to despair, and connection to the unions, which made Labour, even in opened the door for the far right of the party under Tony government, vulnerable to pressure from the working class, Blair. The Blairites wholeheartedly embrace the Thatcherite as a distinct liability. When Labour lost the 1979 general ‘‘free market,’’ and regard Labour’s historic link with the election, this tension exploded into a right/left conflict unions as a source of embarrassment. within the party. But Thatcherism and Blairism did not arise in a vacuum. Attempts to break the power of the trade unions can be Revolt of the Labour Lefts traced to the 1964-70 Labour government of Harold Wilson, which imposed compulsory wage controls and attempted The revolt by the Labour lefts headed by Tony Benn in to introduce anti-union legislation outlined in a 1969 White the early 1980s was a fight in which Marxists had a side. It Paper entitled ‘‘In Place of Strife.’’ The British workers’ pitted the lefts (with a probable majority of working-class movement was then at the peak of its post-war strength, Labour supporters behind them) against the most venal and a storm of protest from the BLP and the unions soon sections of the bureaucracy, those who regarded Labour’s led Wilson to abandon the idea. But British capital contin- working-class roots as an obstacle to their political careers. ued to lose ground to its competitors throughout this pe- The domestic questions that split the bureaucracy were riod, and the Tory government of Edward Heath, which exacerbated by the renewal of the Cold War in the 1980s. succeeded Wilson’s, re-introduced a package of anti-union The rightists predictably took a hard pro-NATO line, legislation known as the Industrial Relations Act. This im- whereas the Bennite left opposed the U.S./NATO war posed compulsory cooling-off periods and ballots before drive, if only from the standpoint of ‘‘Little England’’ paci- strikes, outlawed effective picketing, and set up a special fism. court empowered to fine or imprison trade unionists. The The anti-union right actually split the party: the ‘‘Gang Heath government’s attempts to crush the unions fueled a of Four’’ (Williams, Jenkins, Owen and Rogers) broke from working-class radicalization. Faced with a powerful min- the workers’ movement altogether to form the bourgeois ers’ strike, in January 1974 Heath called a general election Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981, and went on to fuse on the issue, ‘‘Who rules the country, the government or the with the Liberal Party after the 1987 election. In 1981 Tony unions?’’ The government lost. Benn, representing Labour’s left wing, ran for deputy The BLP bureaucracy responded to the radicalization at leader. He lost by a margin of less than one percent. Had he its base by shifting markedly to the left. It adopted a paper won, there would undoubtedly have been much larger program of widespread nationalization, and advocated a defections by members of the openly anti-working-class National Enterprise Board with the power to buy govern- right. This was reason enough for Marxists to have given ment shares in profitable industries. Originally proposed critical support to Tony Benn against the pro-NATO right by the muddle-headed parliamentary lefts, this scheme winger, Denis Healey.

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