Proletarian Tenacity

After 35 years of experience in the Labour Party I've had plenty of time to observe its members, their ideas, their behaviour and so on. As a young revolutionary it was all too easy to see the Right-wing leaders, not only the national leaders, but also the ones who controlled the local Branches as nothing more than agents of the enemy class. Objectively, of course, they were and are. At a national level the top leaders were usually careerists, who like the top Union bureaurats had acquired a standard of living, and palce in society that necessarily separated them from the workers they were supposed to represent,and gave them more than adequate reason to make their peace with the existing system, only challenging it enough to ensure that they could maintain the support of their working class base without which their position itself would disappear. At a local level too three were no shortage of such carerists. Either they too were able to carve out a sufficient niche that paid them handsomely for their many official positions - often not huge sums, but adequate to top up a pension or other income - not to mention their connections to "polite" society that flowed from them, or else they were individuals who would have been unlikely to have made much of themselves in life outside such activity, and for whom the title of "Councillor", "Chairman", "Alderman", or better still "Mayor", was suffient for them to sell their soul let alone their pricniples to the devil. As one old Lefty once described such people to me, "They look at politics like catching a bus. They don't mind whether its a red bus or a blue bus, so long as it gets them to where they want to be."

Yet, at the same time even amongst some of these people it was possible still to detect why they had originally joined the Labour Party. For the most part it was because they had some sense of feeling that they wanted to make life better for their own class, for the people amongst whom they had grown up as simple ordianry working people themselves. By, and large they were not particularly well educated people, and looking back a great deal of the disdain for them on the part of "revolutionaries" was a snobbish attitude to that as much as to their actual politics, and a failure to understand that to some extent the lack of a clear political outlook itself flowed from their lack of education. But, I remember, for example, during the great Miners Strike of 1984-5, I proposed at my Branch a levy of all members. The vote was carried unanimously, and the most right-wing members were as assiduous as anyone else - and mostly they were pensioners who didn't have much money - in making sure they paid up each week.

Amongst, most of the other workers in the party who held a more left-wing position - often again they were not particularly well-educated, and their leftishness was often hardly more thought-out than the politics of the Right - there was frustration at the lack of progress of "their" party, and a clear frustration against those on the Right they saw as being responsible for it. They would express it in voting against the Right where possible, and even voting for "revolutionaries" to occupy positions, would bloc with the revolutionaries, buy their papers - though often I suspect never actually read them - even turn up to their meetings on occasion. Time and again that frustration would be expressed as - "if they do this, that's the end for me." But, whatever, "this" ws would happen, and at worst a few would lapse into inactivity for a while, or perhaps even completely.

What never happened was that any of them said, "That's it for me," and they then joined some revolutionary group. Partly, the reason for that is given above, all of the revolutionary groups were effectively groups of petit-bouregois intellectuals or students, or ex-students. The ones least like that - the Militant and the SWP - were the only ones who did make any headway, but it was tiny. They were never able to reach out to any significant number of workers because the workers recognised that they were only interested in building their own organisation, and often this came above building what the workers saw as their Movement, their organisations, the Trade Unions and the Labour Party. The same is true throughout the world in respect of workers and their relations to what they see as the real Workers Parties.

The following quote from James P. Cannon leader of the American Socialist Workers Party explains in better words than I can muster why it is that workers do not abandon their organisations in favour of these tiny groups, and why it is that the petit-bouregois intellectuals are attracted to and then repelled from such organisations like moths to a flame.

"A lightminded attitude towards party organisation, towards splits and unifications—one of the most characteristic expressions of intellectualism and dilettantism—is a fatal thing. Socialism is inevitable but the struggle for socialism by means of the proletarian revolution must be organised. The sole means of organising the proletarian revolution is the revolutionary party. A petty-bourgeois intellectual or dilettante, who has not assimilated the ideas of Marxism into his blood, is capable of rushing into unifications one day when there is only a seeming agreement and of splits the next day at the first sign of serious disagreement. Not so the workers. The worker joins a party for struggle. He puts his life into it. He takes his time before joining in order to see what a party is doing as well as what it is saying. When such a worker joins a party he takes it very seriously. He gives it his full devotion and recoils fiercely against anyone who takes the party lightly and disregards its discipline.

An intellectual dilettante is capable of joining a party without attaching any great significance to such an action, and of leaving it at the first disagreement, or—more often—the first time someone steps on his toes. The worker, on the other hand, who as a rule will not join a party unless he means business, will not leave it at the first disappointment or when the first doubt enters his mind. No, the worker clings to his party and supports it until all his confidence and hopes in it are exhausted. This is the great factor which underlies the extraordinary tenacity with which thousands of militant workers stick to the Communist Party. Superficial intellectuals are inclined to regard these workers as incurable idiots. Not so. The workers cling to the CP in spite of disappointments and doubts and misgivings only because they do not see any other party. This sentiment of seriousness, devotion, sacrifice, tenacity—horribly abused and betrayed by the Stalinist fakers—is a sentiment that in its essence is profoundly revolutionary. Don’t be hasty to leave your party. That is a sign of petty-bourgeois impatience and instability, not of proletarian revolutionary responsibility."

See: James P. Cannon - The Struggle for a Proletarian Party"