Dayschools: Marxists, the Labour Party and the labour movement ALLIANCE FOR WORKERS' 1974: Labour returns to office on back of miners' strike forcing Tories to an early election. At first 1.L IBBasicER ideasTY from our tradition: united front and repeals many Tory measures. From late 1975, amidst workers' government (texts at end of collection) economic crisis, Labour government turns sharp right DAY SCHOOLS ON MARXISTS AND (wage controls, IMF "rescue plan" involving big social 2. The history of the Labour Party cuts). Labour left in disarray following the defeat of 3.THE New Labour:LABOUR where P itAR cameTY from and what it did the nationalise cause it has attached itself to in the 4.29 The Septemb Corbyner surge2007 and 6the Octob perspectiveser 2007 it opens up 1975 referendum on British withdrawal from the European Union. Please read the articles in this bundle, and also the pamphlet "The Trade Union Movement, New Labour, 1979: Tories return, with hard-line programme and Working-Class Representation". carried through consistently (Thatcher). Rank and file revolt explodes in Labour Party, demanding "never again" a Labour government subservient to capital CONTENTS like the 1974-9 one. Radical measures pushed through to democratise Labour Party. Union leaders, Chronology to 1997 dissatisfied with Labour leadership after the government policies of 1976-9, and still fairly 1966: from "What We Are And What We Must confident of their own power, go along with the left. Become" 1970: Revolutionaries and the general election 1981: A chunk of Labour right wing splits away to form SDP (will later merge with old Liberal Party to 1980: "The last Labour government was a bosses' form Liberal Democrats). government. We need a workers' government" 1982: At a meeting with Labour leadership at Bishops 1996: "The Labour Party in perspective" Stortford, the major union leaders agree to fight to 1997: "The crisis of New Labour" push back the left. 1998: "Should socialists stand against Labour?" 1983: In the wake of the Falklands war, Labour loses heavily in the general election. Ex-leftist Neil Kinnock 2001: "The unions, Labour, and socialist politics" and old Labour right-winger Roy Hattersley elected as Summary of Corbyn surge/ Radek on workers' government/ new Labour leadership. Many, including on the left, Trotsky on united front hail this as a "dream ticket". But Kinnock works CHRONOLOGY steadily to reassert leadership control in the Labour Party and dump left policies. 1945: Labour gains a large and solid majority of working-class electorate and forms a government 1985: Year-long miners' strike defeated. After this (1945-51) which carries through radical reforms (as epochal defeat, employers smash union organisation well as using troops against strikers, secretly in other previously strong areas (national developing British nuclear weapons, joining NATO, newspapers, docks) and union leaders proclaim etc.) retreat "("new realism"). Early 1950s: Big leftish movement in the constituency 1992: After a further election defeat, Kinnock is Labour Parties ("Bevanism"), though solid right-wing replaced as Labour leader by the old-style right- control of the big unions enables the leadership to winger John Smith. Smith pushes through limited defeat all challenges at Labour Party conferences. measures to reduce union influence in the Labour 1960-1: Crisis over unilateral nuclear disarmament Party (one member, one vote, rather than decisions policy. The right-wing leadership emerges triumphant by committees of delegates, to select parliamentary but shaken. Labour Party Young Socialists (launched candidates). in 1959) grows and radicalises (almost all the 1994: Smith dies. A labour movement by now heavily revolutionaries active at the time are in it). demoralised elects right-winger Tony Blair as his 1963: Former "Bevanite" Harold Wilson succeeds the successor. Blair moves quickly and symbolically to hard-line right-winger Hugh Gaitskell as Labour Party ditch Labour's Clause Four (notional commitment "to leader. Labour's profile tilts a bit more leftish. secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry... upon the basis of the 1964-70: Labour government. At first enjoys wide common ownership of the means of production", working-class support, despite only scanty reforms. previously printed on all Labour Party membership Later becomes discredited (support for US in cards). Vietnam, attempt to push through anti-union laws, etc.). Meanwhile there is sizeable extra-Labour 1997: Blair wins election with a promise to retain the radicalisation - industrial militancy, students - and Tories' anti-union laws. He does that and alos follows many Labour party activists drop out or cease largely Thatcherite policies on other fronts. Blair attending Labour meetings. declares: "I want a situation more like the Democrats and Republicans in the US. People don’t even 1970-74: Returned Tory government, at first with question for a single moment that the Democrats are proto-Thatcherite hard line. Big industrial battles. a pro-business party. They should not be asking that Unions shift towards the left in the politics inside the question about New Labour." (Financial Times, 16 Labour Party. Some revival of local Labour Parties. January 1997). Blairite Stephen Byers floats the idea 1 of an open and complete break of Labour from the Revolutionary Communist Party after that. The unions. leadership may occasionally still be heard to say something similar. But side by side with this they do Instead, at the 1997 conference Labour adopts new (and fail to do) things, and adopt positions which rules called "Partnership in Power". The union say at place this view in question. conference remains (at 50%, rather than nearly 90% before), and unions can still put some motions (only They talk about the 'socialist' consciousness of the four), but conference heavily downgraded in favour of British labour movement; they talk about the future an impermeable "National Policy Forum". in terms of a 'stages theory' of development, with the mass revolutionary Bolshevik party emerging, if at all, at the end of the long, long tunnel ahead; they 1966: FROM "WHAT WE ARE AND WHAT WE MUST completely exaggerate the weakness of the BECOME" bourgeoisie and its state in such a way that clearly it would not need the organisation of a proletarian 'counter-state', the combat party, to defeat them. (All well and good... if true.) And finally, as we think the "CRISIS OF LEADERSHIP" last section shows, they have abandoned all talk of seeing ourselves as an independent grouping, striving to function in the living processes as a conscious, The experience of the working class in Russia, active force; they settle down to wait passively in the Germany and Spain led the Trotskyist movement (as Labour Party. From this flows their glorification of the earlier the Communist International) to declare that Labour Party and the existing labour movement. We only the construction of democratic centralist parties, must consider these things in detail. fully grounded on the theory and practice of Marxism/Leninism, could lead the class to power. It denounced those who said there could be an absolute THE LABOUR PARTY AND SOCIALISM maturity of the working class which could lead to an automatic transition to power. The most magnificent ILLUSIONS IN THE LABOUR PARTY risings in Germany, Spain (and to some extent Britain) had been led to frustration and defeat by their own conservative apparatus. The fight therefore The document issued March 1966 begins by stating was to overcome the 'crisis of leadership' in the that 18 months of Wilson's government has confirmed working class - to create parties that would embody the analysis made by... "The Marxist Tendency of the the historical interests of the working class. role which would be played by the Labour government This is our task: this task will be completed or the in a period of difficulties for British capitalism..." working class in the future will go down to defeat in Later, on page 8, it adds: "One thing has been Britain as in Europe. There must be no equivocation demonstrated beyond possibility of refutation. The here, no easy, false optimism here. The issues must illusions in certain so-called Marxist circles that this be stated clearly. The outcome of the future battles was a left Labour government, in the early will only be victory, if the advanced layers can intoxication of Labour victory, have been dissolved by organise themselves into a class-conscious Marxist the realities of events." party. Yes, well, who were those people who fostered The Labour Party, Clause IV and all [Clause IV, illusions in a left Labour government? A document adopted in 1918 and scrapped in 1995, committed issued early in 1964 by the RSL, and written (we the Labour Party - on paper - to common ownership believe) by the then General Secretary (Jimmy of the means of production], is an abortion from the Deane) says [The Labour Party in Perspective, p 3]: point of view of the needs of the working class. "It is clear that there is the possibility of a Labour History will view the Labour Party as an organism government being elected in the next election. This through which a détente was established for a government would come to power in conditions of an number of decades between the partially roused upswing in the economy which until the early part of proletariat and the bourgeoisie in the centre of the 1963 had been more or less stagnant and which, in British Empire, in the period before the world relation to the other European countries had fallen pressures of capitalism upset the balance. It will behind. This is true even though this upswing is record one of two outcomes from this. Either a threatened by a balance of payment crisis and beating down of the working class, or a inflationary tendencies.