Labour and the Struggle for Socialism

Labour and the Struggle for Socialism An ON THE BRINK Publication WIN Publications Summer 2020 On the Brink Editor: Roger Silverman, [email protected] Published by Workers International Network (WIN), contact: [email protected] Front cover photo: Phil Maxwell Labour and the Struggle for Socialism By Roger Silverman From THE RED FLAG (still the Labour Party’s official anthem) The people’s flag is deepest red, It shrouded oft our martyred dead, And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold, Their hearts’ blood dyed its every fold. CHORUS: Then raise the scarlet standard high. Beneath its shade we’ll live and die, Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, We’ll keep the red flag flying here. With heads uncovered swear we all To bear it onward till we fall. Come dungeons dark or gallows grim, This song shall be our parting hymn. A Turning Point The recently leaked report of the antics of a clique of unaccountable bureaucrats ensconced in Labour headquarters has sent shock waves throughout the movement. Shock – but little surprise, because these creatures had always been in effect “hiding in plain sight”: ostensibly running the party machine, but actually hardly bothering to conceal their sabotage. All that was new was the revelation of the depths of their venom; their treachery; their racist bigotry; the vulgarity with which they bragged about their disloyalty; their contempt for the aspirations of the hundreds of thousands who had surged into the party behind its most popular leader ever, Jeremy Corbyn. They had betrayed the party that employed them and wilfully sabotaged the election prospects of a Labour government. This is not a question of a few “bad apples” or stray mavericks. These officials were simply carrying out the explicit policy of the former leadership which had hired them. The report has exposed the truly vile nature of the party machine put in place by New Labour. After all, it was former prime minister Tony Blair himself who sneered that anyone voting for Corbyn “needed a brain transplant”; his closest sidekick Alastair Campbell who openly boasted that he would be voting against Labour; his mentor Peter Mandelson who bragged that “not a minute goes by when I am not working against Corbyn… Every day I try to do something to save the Labour Party from [his] leadership”. Another Labour MP announced that he was “doing everything I can to stop Corbyn becoming prime minister”, and Labour’s designated “Head of Political Strategy” called Corbyn “a lying little toe rag”. A wave of disgust is sweeping the ranks of the Labour Party at these revelations. But what is needed most of all is a clear understanding of how this situation has come about. Such visceral hatred goes well beyond the commonplace factional rivalries that characterise every political party. It is the aim of this pamphlet to place this story in its necessary historical context. While the left has always behaved with magnanimity and chivalry, the right has always shown the utmost malice and ruthlessness. The key to understanding the outcome of the conflict that has raged within the Labour Party, especially in the last five years, is perfectly encapsulated in the following two quotations from the left and right of Tony Benn, Photo: I, Isujosh 1 the party respectively: First, from the most revered champion of the socialist left, Tony Benn: “The Labour Party is a very broad party, reflecting a wide variety of opinions from left to right. This diversity of view is a great source of strength and we must vigorously resist any attempt that is made to drive the left or the right out of the party… We must be very clear that we are not interested in a narrow, sectarian, purist party all taking one view…We must be a broad church.” The second, from former Labour MP Tom Harris, who as one of the leaders of the Scottish Labour Party shares responsibility for what is still the most shattering political reverse in modern British history: the total annihilation of Labour’s once rock-solid base in Scotland. He writes: “The conclusion to be drawn is not that the Labour Party is, as it has always claimed, a broad church of diverse opinions and priorities, but that it is an uneasy alliance of two separate parties, each with separate, diverging and even opposing aims and principles. And each side sees the defeat of the other as a necessary prerequisite to its own success.” In other words, it is a one-sided and undeclared civil war, fought tooth and nail by one side while the other vainly seeks an unattainable peace. A recent book on the history of the Labour Party is circulating among party members. Its author is so taken with one casual throwaway comment by Tony Benn that he even borrows it to serve as the title for his book: “The Labour Party has never been a socialist party, although there have always been socialists in it”. With all due respect to Tony Benn, one of the most honest and courageous champions of the socialist cause in Labour’s history, on this point he is historically wrong. Much to the distaste of its leaders, the Labour Party was at its base an unrelentingly socialist party for more than three quarters of a century – i.e. for most of its lifetime: from 1918, when under the impact of the Russian revolution it adopted Clause Four, through 1959 when it implacably resisted Hugh Gaitskell's proposal to remove it, to 1994 when it finally succumbed to the seizure of the party by a hostile crypto-capitalist clique masquerading under the label New Labour. Up to that time, the Labour Party had undoubtedly always been weighed down by a conservative right-wing millstone; but until 1994 the leadership had always had to justify its hesitations, its retreats and even its betrayals on the pretext of prudence, caution and “gradualism”, gratefully seizing on Aneurin Bevan’s ambiguous formula: “The language of priorities is the religion of Socialism”. The arrival of New Labour represented something very different: a capture of the party by alien forces. It was the election of Corbyn in 2015 that marked the beginning of a reclamation of the party – a liberation from captivity. The explanation for the ferocity of the conflict is, as Harris has so conveniently spelled out for us, that there are two hostile forces fighting for occupation of this territory. The election of Corbyn represented an attempt by hundreds of thousands of newly awakened activists to wrest control of the party back from 2 Police attack a demonstration of women matchmakers. One of a series of movements that strengthened the call for working class political organisation in the late 19th century the clutches of the now discarded political tools of the capitalist class. The Birth Of Labour Implicit in the very name of the Labour Party is an understanding that workers have their own distinct interests, and need their own party to fight for them. Unlike all those other parties that claim to stand for the “people” or the “nation”, its name proclaims itself the party of the working class. In the words of the Labour anthem The Red Flag, mumbled at party conferences with embarrassingly obvious distaste by a succession of Labour leaders: “Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, We’ll keep the red flag flying here.” Never have hymns contained such appropriate words. There is a myth, carefully fostered by the ruling class, and eagerly embraced by these “cowards and traitors”, that – unlike the rude uncouth French and Russians – Britain has a tradition of moderation, reason and compromise. The truth is that England (and still more so, Scotland, Wales and England’s oldest colony Ireland) has a long and militant history of revolution. In the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the king was besieged by an angry mob and barely escaped with his life. In 1649, England was the first country in the world to chop the head off a king (144 years before the French), and to wage a bloody civil war to overthrow the then ruling class. As far back as then it brought forth the forerunners of socialism, the Levellers and Diggers. As Britain became the birthplace of industrial production, trade unions were formed and grew in the teeth of draconic repression, as exemplified by the case of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Following the Napoleonic war, throughout the first half of the 3 nineteenth century Britain was constantly ablaze and teetering on the verge of revolution, from the brutally crushed protest demonstration that has gone down in history as the Peterloo massacre to the Cato Street conspiracy and countless more manifestations. A formidable industrial working class took root, soon emerging as an independent and militant political force in its own right in the form of the Chartists, who mobilised literally millions of workers. Later, it was under the direct and active influence of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who were by then based in Britain, that the London Trades Council formed the bedrock of the world’s first workers’ International, the International Working Men’s Association (a name that still reflected the prejudices of the time). So much for the myth of the British way of “compromise”. One important milestone on the road to the mass organisation of low-skilled workers, extending beyond the exclusive craft unions, was the famous strike at Bryant and May in 1888, in which thousands of mostly Irish women went on strike in protest at their fourteen-hour working day, a regime of summary fines and sackings, and horrific working conditions, which put them at risk of phosphorus poisoning and the disease known as “phossy jaw”.

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