Why The Sectarian Left Really Hate The Labour Party

“As the experiences of the Russian Revolution teach us – remember this in England and America! – the most important thing of all is to stay in the midst of the masses of workers. You will often go wrong with them, but never leave the mass organisations of the working class, however reactionary they may be at any given moment” (emphasis added).

(Zinoviev’s closing speech at the 15th Session of the Second Congress of the Comintern)

Mixed Emotions

I had very mixed emotions on that night in 1997 when Labour was re-elected. On the one hand, it was obviously fantastic, that 18 years of Thatcherite rule had come to an end, on the other, the New Labour Tendency, that had gained dominance, stood for a set of ideas, that most people, even on the reformist Left, in the LP, had opposed, let alone those of us who came from a revolutionary background. From my own personal standpoint, it was elating, because, on the same day, I was elected to the County Council with a vote that was so big that, as one of the people at the count said, it needed to be weighed rather than counted, almost three times the vote of the second place candidate. But, that didn’t outweigh the unease I felt, in the Workingmen’s Club, that night, where the celebrations were taking place. Old adversaries from within the right-wing of the LP, were consumed in an orgy of triumphalism as the results poured in, and I could see that it was as much a triumphalism they felt over the Left, as much as over the Tories.

In the coming weeks, as Labour hit the ground running, with a series of initiatives, I remember talking to my friend, the late John Lockett, who was Deputy Leader of the Borough Council, an old NUM militant, and Labour Leftist, who during the 1970’s and 80’s was perpetually canvassed by the SWP, Militant, and myself, in order to recruit him to one of our organisations, all without success, though he did once tell me, he’d nearly joined the SWP, rather than the LP, in the late 60’s. He complained that, everyday, they were getting faxes, and e-mails, from Labour HQ, telling them what they should be doing, briefing notes on how and where to attack the Tories and so on. My first reaction, because I felt uneasy about this right-wing, superficial, media driven elite, now running the party, was to share his sense that there was something wrong with this. But, after a while I reconsidered it, and thought, what exactly is the complaint all about?

Imagine, during the Miners Strike, if Labour HQ had acted as such an organising centre, sending out information, provided by its staff of researchers, that LP Councillors and activists could have used in their propaganda. Imagine if it had co-ordinated Labour Councillors, in their actions, to oppose the Tories, not just in supporting the Miners, but in co-ordinating those Councils to oppose the Tories’ cuts, and so on. What an amazingly powerful tool that would have been! No, the problem was not that the LP had stopped acting as some ramshackle, amateur outfit, and had begun to operate as a professional political party. After all, that was precisely what Lenin argued the Workers Party had to be – a professional party – in “What Is To Be Done?”

But, it illustrates, I think, part of the reason that the Left, and in particular the sectarian Left, really hate the LP, and its because starting from a feeling of revulsion, every act is viewed with hostility, an hostility that, in some ways, is heightened when New Labour shamed the Left by doing things – like putting the Party on a more professional footing – that the Left should have been fighting for itself, and implementing for years before, themselves. But, that is only a minor part of the real reason for the hostility of the sectarian Left to Labour.

Genetic

That hostility was a part of the whole genetic make-up of the sectarian Left. After the war, various Trotskyists groups infiltrated the LP. Two had particular success. The Socialist Labour League in the 1950’s and 60’s built up considerable support in the Young Socialists, which it won control of. Its history is illuminating. In its early activities the SLL’s predecessor, known as “The Club” had its journal “Socialist Outlook” banned by the Labour Leadership in 1954. It responded, by, instead distributing Tribune. During this period “The Club” made considerable headway both in organising the Left within the LP, and in the trade unions. Compare that with the situation later in 1963, when the LP leadership responded to the SLL’s growing support by closing down the YS. At almost the same time that this was happening the SLL, came to the conclusion that there was a revolutionary situation in Britain, and the most important thing to do was to “Build the Party”. So began the sectarian nightmare that was to become Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party.

But, this scenario should be familiar to younger comrades who did not experience the events of the 1950’s and 60’s, because an almost identical course of events can be found in the responses of the Left during the late 1980’s and 90’s! Few of the sectarian Left would actually argue that there was a revolutionary situation, but that has simply been replaced with the argument that “The LP is Dead”, as the motivation for abstaining from the struggle within it. Of course, the sectarian Left point to the expulsions of some members of Militant, the second organisation to gain considerable support through entrism, during the 1980’s, to bolster this argument with the claim that, “even if we didn’t think the LP was dead, we are not allowed to join”. The argument is fatuous.

As “The Club” demonstrated there is no point of principle that says that revolutionaries have to identify themselves as being members of some separate revolutionary party working inside the LP. Indeed, Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, argued the exact opposite. They wrote,

“The Communists do not form a separate party to the other Workers Parties”!

And, in explaining his and Marx’s position when they joined the German Democrat Party, which was an openly bourgeois party, Engels stresses that, although they formed the Left-Wing of that Party, that is precisely what they were – a wing of the Party, not a separate party working inside it. He says, that their experience was that it was possible to argue for their politics openly, and even to organise openly. And, indeed even in today’s LP, leftish groups like Tribune, continue to organise openly. Many Marxists like myself continued to argue our politics. The main problem that the sectarian Left has faced has been not that it is not allowed to argue its politics, or even to organise, but that it set itself up in the first place as parties in their own right, whose function was to act like parasites within the body of the Workers’ Party, completely in contradiction to Marx and Engels dictum. Worse, in doing so, they have seen it as their prerogative to do what no Workers’ organisation can allow individuals or groups of members to do – and which these organisations most certainly would not allow within their own ranks – and that is to simply flout democratically arrived at decisions, in order to plough their own furrow.

The Left was rightly outraged when the Right who went on to form the SDP flouted LP decisions, and demanded their expulsion. Yet, the sectarian Left believes it should be able to simply ignore the decisions of the Party, and then respond with righteous indignation when the Party calls it to account!

But, even were it the case – and I am in no doubt that the right-wing of the LP would resort to expulsions or a split if it thought that the Party was going to become a Party that truly challenged the power of Capital – that it was impossible to organise and argue your politics openly, this does not justify simply packing your bags and leaving, which is what all of those groups effectively did during the 1980’s and 90’s – despite the history presented by the Socialist Party, only a few of its members were expelled, the rest left as the result of a decision by the organisation itself. Engels’ statement, about their experience, of finding no problem operating openly, does not preclude the option of operating covertly if that proves not to be the case! The “Club”, had no great problem, and suffered no lack of ability to recruit within the LP and Trade Unions by distributing “Tribune” rather than “Socialist Outlook”. In the 1930’s, Trotsky made clear that there was no point of principle that sections of the FI had to declare that that was what they were, or had to produce a paper, or any other such fetish. The point was to stick with the workers. Today, given the ability to produce and distribute such a newspaper electronically, and thereby anonymously there is even less point of principle at stake.

But, the reality is that these organisations, that came out of the post-war Trotskyist movement, never saw that as their main function. In part, that stems from their genetic make-up. 1914, saw the existing division of the Labour Movement, between its reformist and revolutionary wings, heighten into a physical split, with the creation of the Third International. The effective collapse of the Second International, together with the rapid recruitment of forces to the banner of the Third, combined with the view that the War was simply the prelude to inevitable revolution on a global scale, justified the revolutionaries in driving forward that split. The analysis that Capitalism was in its death agony – leading to a choice only between Socialism or Barbarism – together with the continued existence of huge revolutionary forces – if we count those of the ordinary rank and file members of the various CP’s – led Trotsky and his comrades to wrongly conclude that, armed with the correct programme and tactics, the Fourth International could be born out of the ashes of the Third, as a mass Party of World Revolution. The idea then, of seeing yourself as such a revolutionary party, flowed from the world the revolutionaries thought they were living in. They had an excuse, for being mistaken about where they were in history. Today we have no such excuse.

Historical Materialism

Marxists should use the tools of historical materialism to analyse the world in which they live, and develop their programme and tactics accordingly. Capitalism was not in its death agony at the beginning of the twentieth century, nor in the 1930’s, and its massive expansion after WWII, and today, show that it is not now either. The decision, with the benefit of hindsight, to divide the workers’ movement after WWI, was a huge mistake, from which we are still trying to recover today. It is, in part, what creates the weakness of the Marxist Left, within the Labour Movement, and which, because of the failure to accept the nature of that mistake, leads to the adventurism of that Left, and its continued daydreaming and occupation of a fantastic world, in which it still believes that it is the embryo of some new revolutionary party, that will suddenly become a mass party if only the correct conditions arise, if only it finds the right set of demands to raise, the right milieu in which to work, and so on.

This is what determines the mindset of that Left, and explains its otherwise inexplicable actions. The starting point for a Marxist is to ask what are those material conditions, what is the point in history with which we have to deal? The answers seem not too difficult to uncover, if not too welcome for a Left that has spent the last 100 years convincing itself that the revolution is at hand. The conclusions from it not too difficult to comprehend, if again, not too exciting for a Left that has framed its actions and programme around the idea that all it has to do is uncover the right set of demands, ensure its doctrinal purity, and a grateful class will flock to its door sweeping it to power!

It is a refusal to deal with this reality that explains, not just the tendency of that Left to continually see some catastrophe on the horizon – which began with the SLL back in the early 1960’s – whether it be an economic collapse, or an environmental catastrophe but also explains the attitude of the sectarian Left to the LP. It is the politics of Mr. Micawber, always anticipating something to turn up, which would save the situation.

The reality we face is that of Capitalism as Imperialism, but an Imperialism, which does not signify as Lenin believed, Capitalism in decay, but represents the most dynamic phase of Capitalism, a phase in which it has created for the first time a truly global market for all commodities including Labour Power, and through which it has raised the International Division of Labour to new heights, a phase in which it has forged a dynamic link between science and production in a way previously unheard of, and through which technology itself feeds into the process of further development of the productive forces via the medium of IT. It is a phase, which is driving forward production and growth at faster rates than Man has previously thought possible, and which will before too long see the industrialisation of the last Continent to be modernised – Africa – as well as the application of science to resolve some of the remaining problems facing mankind, in particular in providing sufficient energy and clean water, and dealing with some of the issues of health and the environment. It is setting the true conditions in place required for the establishment of socialism as a global co-operative system. But, the transition to such a system is no more automatic today than it was in the past. The possibility remains that if Mankind does not actively transform social relations, then Imperialism will reach a point where decay sets in, or Mankind might destroy itself.

The reality we face is that the human material forged in the great furnace of class struggle during the latter part of the 19th century, and early 20th century has been frittered away. The divisions in the workers movement created by the establishment of the Third International turned the fire of class struggle away from the bosses and their agents, and into internecine conflict, the most grotesque example of which, was the Stalinist Third Period, that allowed Hitler into power. The huge potential for creating a mass revolutionary workers party that existed even into the 1930’s, has not existed now for decades. A truly dialectical process has been at work. The failure of Marxists to provide the working class with practical working solutions to their immediate problems, outside a limited Economism of Trade Union struggle, has led to those Marxists being seen as increasingly irrelevant to the working class. It is notable that even where “Marxists” were able to create something approaching sizeable movements of workers in the industrial sphere, where they have been able to get their members elected to positions of authority within the Trade Unions this has never translated into any kind of meaningful electoral success. In fact, even the success of those revolutionaries that have won positions in the Trade Unions has largely been a sham, a case of appearance rather than reality. No serious person believes that the majority of Civil Servants, for example, share the “revolutionary” politics of those organisations whose members won control of their union’s leading body. That is why when that body backtracked over the pensions fight there was no mass revolt by the rank and file!

The example of Militant and Liverpool City Council could be cited, but the reality is that pretty much the same argument applies. The working class of Liverpool did not vote for “Militant” Councillors, they certainly did not vote for revolutionary politics. They voted for Labour Councillors, who happened to actually be members of Militant, who had won positions within the Liverpool LP, by similar means to those used by revolutionaries to win positions within the Trade Unions! It was the fact that these positions were built on sand – along with some pretty poor tactics employed by Militant, for example its failure to link up their struggle with the Miners Strike – that enabled both the Tory Government to defeat them, and allowed Kinnock to remove them. In reality, the working class of Liverpool voted not for anything revolutionary, but only for the kind of reforms that previous reformists have advocated, reforms that seek to simply ease the workers condition, temporarily, until such time as the bosses or their state, are able to undermine them.

In short it was the Economism of industrial struggle simply transposed onto the political arena. As such, the comments made by Marx in relation to such struggles apply. He wrote,

“At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!"

…Thirdly. Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system.”

Value, Price and Profit

Economism

However admirable, from the point of view of trying to ameliorate the condition of workers housing, in Liverpool, the politics of Militant amounted to nothing more. They neither represented a shift in class power, nor provided workers with any protection from the renewal of attacks by Capital at some future time of its choosing. Had the City Council, however, supported the establishment of Housing Co-ops by workers to take over the estates, to build new housing and so on, then not only would that have represented a significant shift of economic and social power away from the bosses and their State at national and local level, but by placing the ownership of the housing directly in the hands of workers it would have protected workers from the future attacks of Capital, through privatisation of the housing stock, rent increases and so on.

As, Marx puts it,

“If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one. Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?”

Both Trade Unionism and Municipal Socialism – and indeed state socialism in general – are examples of this “Vulgar Socialism”, because they all rely on changes in DISTRIBUTION, rather than understanding as Marx set out that this distribution is a function of production, and the ownership of the means of production. Raise taxes, and increase benefits, or provide workers with some other improvements through the Social Wage for example, but fail to transfer ownership of the Means of production into the hands of workers, and Capital will respond by all those methods Marx outlines, to reverse that redistribution. Establish workers ownership of the means of production, however, and those top-down, redistributive, reformist policies become unnecessary, because distribution is permanently changed in the workers interests!

A similar situation can be seen now in relation to the Royal Mail dispute. Of course, as Marxists we give our full support to the Royal Mail workers, but precisely because we are Marxists it is our duty to do more than that. The headlines, of the Tory Press, in speaking about the dispute spelling the death knell of the Royal Mail, are sickening, but it has to be admitted not without foundation. Were Royal Mail a private Capitalist firm, then the strike would fall immediately on the profits of the firm. It would have an immediate incentive to bring the dispute to a close. But, it is not. It is a state capitalist enterprise, which Capital has sought to transfer into the private sector. A strike, which destroys the Royal Mail, simply accomplishes that task for Capital, and does so whilst transferring the blame for it, directly on to the workers!

Even were that not the case the position of the workers is constrained. As Marx puts it,

“Take, for example, the rise in England of agricultural wages from 1849 to 1859. What was its consequence? The farmers could not, as our friend Weston would have advised them, raise the value of wheat, nor even its market prices. They had, on the contrary, to submit to their fall. But during these eleven years they introduced machinery of all sorts, adopted more scientific methods, converted part of arable land into pasture, increased the size of farms, and with this the scale of production, and by these and other processes diminishing the demand for labour by increasing its productive power, made the agricultural population again relatively redundant. This is the general method in which a reaction, quicker or slower, of capital against a rise of wages takes place in old, settled countries. Ricardo has justly remarked that machinery is in constant competition with labour, and can often be only introduced when the price of labour has reached a certain height, but the appliance of machinery is but one of the many methods for increasing the productive powers of labour. The very same development which makes common labour relatively redundant simplifies, on the other hand, skilled labour, and thus depreciates it.”

This is, in fact, the situation that Royal mail workers face, not in relation to a struggle for higher wages, but in relation to a struggle to prevent their real wages being cut, to prevent a speed-up, and so on. Why? Because the global market now means that Capital will flow to where it sees the opportunity to access what have been Monopoly profits, some of which have been absorbed in higher wages than the global market would set, because the advance of technology means that Capital is presented with many alternatives to the use of Labour Power in the transmission of communications! As Marxists we have to offer workers more in terms of a practical solution than just the same old dead-end of industrial struggle that ultimately is doomed to failure either immediately or some ways down the road.

“ limiting (ourselves) to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it,”

Independent Working Class Political Solutions

And how are we to simultaneously try to change it? Not, with calls for a Labour Government to act, not with calls for some non-existent Workers Government to come to power and act, but by the same means that Marx and Engels proposed. What Post Office Workers need now is the establishment of their own Communications Co-operative, owned and controlled by them. As Marx said,

“ the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society”.

Such a Co-operative could recombine the postal and telecommunications operations, providing workers with some protection against the continued development of electronic communication in place of paper. It could combine with the Co-op Bank, to offer the kind of Post Office and Banking operations that workers require, and so on. Yet the Left does not advocate such solutions, because it is stuck in a form of political trench warfare.

This might seem a diversion from the topic of this blog, but it is not. It is precisely this shortsighted view of political trench warfare, where the whole battle is about winning this or that skirmish – usually tied to the idea that out of such disputes a few more recruits for “building the Party” can be won – and about exposing the LP and TU leaderships, that characterises the sectarian stance of the Left. Everything is seen in these terms, because the whole strategy is based around nothing more than the idea of “building the Party”, and winning the leadership. It places the cart some distance in front of the horse.

But, to complete that dialectal process, the increasing separation of the Marxists from the working class, the failure to provide it with any kind of strategy which could deal with its immediate problems has led to an increasing depoliticisation of the class, a significant fall in its level of class consciousness compared to previous generations. Whereas the period from the late 19th century saw a steady rise in workers organisation, and in class consciousness as workers parties won ever larger votes in elections, and organised ever larger numbers within their organisations, the period from the 1930’s onwards has seen a reversal of that process. The election success of Labour in 1997, marked a sharp break with what had been a persistent decline in its support from 1945 onwards, a decline that certainly was not matched by any increase in support for a left alternative.

In a discussion on this topic on Phil’s Blog at AVPS, one comrade commented,

“The left hate Labour because of the politics they represent.”

In part, that is true, but only in part, because as I will demonstrate there is no qualitative difference between Labour’s politics now, and Labour’s politics in the past. But, the comment is significant to the extent that it is true, for what it actually means. What it means is that the sectarian Left not only hate Labour for those politics, but hate those millions of workers who at best share those politics!!!! It means that sectarian Left has to hate even more those millions of workers whose politics stand even further to the Right than New Labour, those who vote Tory, or Liberal, or UKIP, or BNP!!! It means that the only people that the left DO NOT hate, is that less than 1% of the working class, and petit-bourgeois intelligentsia – i.e. mostly the current, and past memberships of the various sects – that agrees with it.

Third Period

That is who its propaganda and activity is directed towards, that is who it speaks to, that is why it continues to decline even when Labourism is in decline, and when the BNP and other fascists are the ones who benefit. In fact, the left’s sectarian position is similar to, but worse than the sectarianism of the Stalinist Third Period. In the 1930’s, the German Stalinists, had millions of workers as members and supporters. They were able to continue to relate to, and organise those workers. Their sectarianism, damnable as it was, was a sectarianism directed at only Social-Democratic workers. But, today’s Left has virtually no membership or support within the working class, its Third Period lunacy is effectively directed at the working class as a whole!!! Its no wonder the BNP are breeding like vermin.

The decline in class consciousness has been reflected not just in working class support for the Tories, but even for more right-wing parties such as the BNP and UKIP. Without seeing things in too mechanical and deterministic a way, it has to be recognised that a condition for building a mass workers party has to be that working class consciousness is rising not falling, as much as that a condition for raising working class consciousness, is the interaction with that class of the Workers Party, and the Marxists within it. And that decline has been mirrored in the performance of workers parties elsewhere.

In a sense the root cause of the sectarianism of the Left, and its attitude to Labour resides not just in its genes, in what it has inherited from Leninism, but resides also in its own failure to attract support to itself, even as support has drained away from the traditional workers parties. It is what leads now to repeated attempts to recreate those old reformist parties, by the revolutionaries pretending to be something they are not, whether it be attempts to create a Labour Party Mark II, or even the example of Die Linke, which is winning support not by moving the class Left, but simply by occupying the Centre-Left ground abandoned by the Social Democrats.

In Britain even this argument is strained by the Left’s arguments about why it has abandoned the LP, and why it insists it must create some LP Mark II. The argument generally rests on three legs. The first leg is that the LP as a bourgeois Workers Party – that is a Party based on the working class, but having a bourgeois programme and outlook – is continually pulled to either of these two poles, and the transformation of recent years has pulled it irretrievably towards the bourgeois pole. The second argument is that the membership of the LP has collapsed, and the remaining membership are made up of middle class elements and careerists, thereby undermining its claim to be a Workers Party based on a working class membership. The third argument is that although the link with the Trade Unions can act to counteract this second argument, the organisational changes brought in by the leadership have meant that the normal channels for exerting working class influence over policy making by the Trade Unions through the CLP’s and Conference have been closed down.

Labour Then And Now

Let us look at how valid any of these arguments actually are. The first argument is about the political stance of the Party. In reality the Left has told itself a story here, and convinced itself of it. There are a number of events, which play into this story. What is odd, is that in reality in order to convince itself of the story it has told the sectarian Left has had to abandon some of what it has argued in the past! Take one of the main battle lines, one of the events that play into this story – the scrapping of Clause IV. Clause IV, which vaguely committed the party to securing, through Public Ownership, the full fruits of their labour, for the working class, was seen as to some extent embodying the socialist goal of the party. By setting out to scrap it, so the story goes, New Labour made clear its intention to abandon any such goal, and to make the LP into a purely bourgeois party.

Nice story. But, hold on, for years the revolutionary Left had argued that, in reality Clause IV was meaningless. Not only is the phrase about “full fruits of their labour” economically illiterate, for the reasons Marx set out as against Proudhon, but “Public Ownership” by the Capitalist State, has never been about securing anything for workers, and even if it were, the commitment is so vague as to leave room for a coach and horses to be driven through. Which indeed, had been the case, because no Labour Government has ever paid a blind bit of notice to Clause IV when it got into office. Even Attlee’s Government had to be pushed hard from below to nationalise the Capitalist lame ducks it took over.

Yet, the battle over this meaningless totem has been turned into a significant turning point! If anything is significant in it, it is that the Left chose to waste so many resources over fighting it, and took its defeat over it so badly! Its true that, combined with the abandonment of the idea of advocating state capitalist nationalisation, as a means of resolving the problems of British Capitalism, New Labour, introduced other ideas such as PFI, which provided the financial resources for the necessary investment in schools, hospitals and other pieces of infrastructure, at the cost of paying out huge amounts in rental and interest payments to the private firms involved. Yet, how is this different in principle to the huge rip-off of the NHS, and other state-capitalist enterprises, that has been the feature of all of them from their inception?

We can argue that such a policy is not in the workers interests – though personally I do not see it as a Marxist’s job to advise the Capitalist State on what is the best method of managing the problems of the Capitalist economy, and its need for infrastructure investment, anymore than I would see it as our job to advise a Capitalist to raise Capital by a Share Offer rather than issuing a Bond! – but, it is no less in the workers interests than has been state capitalist nationalisation. So, in that sense it does not represent a more right-wing position, it does not signify a shift to the Right by the Party, only the adoption of one bourgeois solution as opposed to another.

What is more, the apparent reluctance of many firms now, to engage in PFI schemes, reflects the fact that many of these deals have not turned out as lucrative for private capital as they anticipated, and given the vast number of new hospitals, schools and other facilities that have been built, it is not at all clear that, on balance, such a strategy has not benefited the workers who rely upon these facilities. In any case, as a strategy, it is precisely that pursued by Lenin in the 1920’s, who faced with a shortage of Capital, and expertise, turned to western private Capital to invest in Russia in similar PFI type ventures. If it was good enough as a strategy for Lenin, it seems strange that a revolutionary Left that prides itself on being his heirs should criticise Labour for adopting it!

And Labour has renationalised industries such as Network Rail. Moreover, it has done so in a far more subtle way than nationalisations in the past. It took Network Rail back effectively at no cost. The same has been true of the re-nationalisation of the National Express East Coast franchise. By contrast, the nationalisations of Coal and Rail and so on, by the Atlee Government, involved paying out such generous compensation, to the former owners, that those industries were crippled for decades after their nationalisation.

A similar story appears to apply to the Banks. Northern Rock was nationalised at virtually no cost. Last year when the Government took majority stakes in the other high street banks, the banks and others present at the meetings declared that they were presented with a fait accompli, which they have described as being a “mugging”.

The same is true of other areas of policy. The 1945 Attlee Government maintained food rationing for the working class long after it should have been scrapped. It did so, in order to bolster Britain’s Balance of Payments, which was crucified as a result of the War, and the policies of the US, but also because of Attlee’s decision to develop a nuclear deterrent, and to involve Britain in the Korean War. It has now been admitted that in 1976 there was no real need for Britain to go to the IMF for a loan, and no chance that the IMF would turn it down, if it refused to accept the terms that the IMF sought to impose. They did so, because it gave them political cover to undertake the Public Expenditure cuts they were politically committed to.

By contrast, if we are to measure Labour governments by such actions we would have to say that New Labour moved considerably to the Left of either Attlee or Wilson/Callaghan, because far from Public Spending cuts it has instituted a massive increase in Public Spending, tripling expenditure on that other fetish of the Left, the NHS.

For years, the Left cried out, like a wolf in the night, calling for a Minimum Wage, and the nationalisation of the Banks. There was absolutely no chance of any of these Labour Governments carrying out either policy. Yet Blair carried out the first, and Brown the second. Again, if we judge by actions not words, we would have to place New Labour to the Left of these previous Labour Governments.

Its true, that Labour has not abolished all of the Tories anti-union laws. That should certainly be criticised, but does this fact mark out Labour now as qualitatively different from previous Labour Governments? Attlee’s Government, for example, even without such laws, sent the troops out to confront striking workers. Wilson’s Government attempted to introduce the first anti-union laws with “In Place of Strife”, and Callaghan’s Government did not need anti-union laws, when instead it could rely on the TUC, and compliant union leaders to police the workers in return for being invited to Number 10 for beer and sandwiches! Indeed, during this period the main fear was of a Corporatist State, in which the unions became just a transmission belt for the policies of the Capitalist State.

The most notable policy criticised has been the decision to invade Iraq. Again it is certainly a policy to be criticised, but does it mark out any qualitative change over past Labour Governments? Clearly not. The earliest Labour governments not only took responsibility for maintaining the Empire and the enslavement of millions of people around the globe, but Labour leaders actively recruited workers’ battalions to fight in the intervention against the Bolsheviks in Russia! Attlee’s Government maintained the Empire, and presided over the slaughter of millions in the Indian sub-continent on independence, as well as sending troops to fight in Korea and so on.

Wilson’s Government stayed out of Vietnam, though there were reports of covert operations, but turned the North of Ireland into an armed encampment, and introduced internment i.e. concentration camps. Callaghan’s Government continued that policy as well as Labour backing Thatcher’s adventure in the Falklands.

If we deal with actions rather than words it is difficult to see that any of the actions carried out by Labour since 1997 are in any way qualitatively different from those of previous Labour Governments that failed to provoke the Left into declaring that Labour had become beyond the pale.

Let us turn to the second argument then about the LP’s actual membership. Again most of this argument is based on myth. The first thing to say is that the LP has rarely been a mass working class party of the type of the German SPD at the beginning of the twentieth century. Moreover, even when it has gone through periods of increased membership, it has always been the case that much of this membership was purely on paper. Indeed, during the 1980’s part of the Left’s mistaken arguments over One member One Vote, was that it allowed these many paper members to vote!

Basing, the argument on the level of membership and activity during the 1980’s is fraudulent, precisely because that period was untypical! There are many studies of LP membership, which show this to be the case. Some of them were done by the International Socialists in years gone by, precisely in order to make the argument about the LP, that the rest of the sectarian Left now try to make. I know from my own experience that for most of the decade prior to the upsurge of the 1980’s the LP was largely moribund in terms of its membership base.

See: Pits, Pongs and Politics

In fact, all the evidence is that initially membership increased markedly under New Labour. Certainly Blair’s own CLP – which also can hardly be described as being typically middle class – seems to have been very successful in recruiting large numbers, and stimulating involvement, and some of that seems to be directly due to the more professional attitude that New Labour brought with it. Having said that, it is also equally clear that current membership has declined dramatically.

But, has this dramatic decline had any qualitative effect compared to similar conditions in the past? Not that I can see. In some ways it is similar to the period under Gaitskell when having once been the case that the unions acted as a bulwark of the Right, with the CLP’s providing the Left influence, the situation was reversed with the CLP’s standing to the Right of the Trade Unions. Moreover, it is necessary to understand the natural hunting grounds of different sections of the class within the Party itself – a fact, which is important for understanding why the sectarian Left really hate the Labour Party. The reality is that the LP has always been made up of essentially two classes of activist. On the one hand there is the ordinary working-class member who joins because they have some concern for what is going on in their own neighbourhood. Often their concerns do not stretch much beyond that horizon. Very limiting from the point of a Marxist that is true, but nevertheless a fact of life.

On the other hand, there are those, be they union militants who have reached a certain level of class consciousness, or others who have joined because of some wider political concern, whose main interest is in debating these wider issues, and for whom the hum drum routine of the Branch meeting, dealing with community issues, is a distraction. One group sees the Branch as its main area of operation, the other sees the CLP, the DLP or higher bodies as the main area of operation, and in that regard the passing of resolutions on these matters of concern is the main focus of political activity. For fairly obvious reasons it is with this latter group, and, therefore, with this latter arena of politics that the Left has traditionally attached its wagon. The Left has seen a focus on the Branch work as “routinism”, as it believes would be a correct Leninist description. Yet, in fact, it is through that Branch work that real work inside the working class occurs.

My experience is that although there has been a general reduction in LP membership and activity, the make-up of the Party at that basic grass roots level of the Branch remained virtually unchanged, and overwhelmingly proletarian. Even at the level of elected Councillors, the majority that I know are solidly working class. When I was a County Councillor – and County Councillors tend to be less proletarian than District Councillors – the vast majority of Labour Councillors were working class, with only a handful of lecturers, and even white collar workers. The leader was a former GEC production line worker, and his successor a comrade from my own Branch was an ex-fireman, who lives in a Council house. I am fairly confident that a sociological survey would demonstrate that the LP remains far more proletarian in its make-up than the average Left sect.

Where the difference does lie is at the level of the CLP, DLP etc. Here, the very fact that those members of the Left, for whom this was the centre of activity, have vacated the space, has necessarily changed its political composition. Now politicos with a different agenda, careerists who see these forums as means of advancing themselves have been able to dominate, and rather like during the 1960’s a layer of shop stewards and convenors was incorporated into the union bureaucracy, so today layers of these activists are incorporated into the LP bureaucracy.

The Politics of The Student Debating Club

In other words it is not that the composition of the LP has dramatically changed, but merely that the sectarian Left see it that way, because there eyes have always been fixed on that one narrow aspect of LP, which for them was all important. It was all important, because what characterised their existence in the LP was nothing constructive, no attempt to build the Party as the Workers Party, but was a continuation inside that Party of their raison d’etre outside it, continual sterile debate. What characterised it was simply such debate in order to launch attacks on the Party Leadership. The real reason the sectarian Left hate the LP, is that the Party has acted like a parent with a spoiled child – it has taken away the toys.

And this finally leads into the third leg of the argument, that the Party has closed down all avenues of debate, and decision making. The obvious reply to this argument is that the decisions about Conference etc. were all decisions taken by the Party and its members, including the Trade Unions. No one forced these decisions on the Party. Moreover, these decisions can be overturned by the party if it so chooses. Again, what frustrates the sectarian Left is that it failed to get its own way in these decisions. To use Marx’s phrase it failed to “Win The Battle of Democracy”. But, because this sectarian left comes from an essentially undemocratic tradition, rather than responding by trying harder to persuade workers of its correctness, it prefers bureaucratic measures that attempt to determine how votes should be held so as to best favourite it (hence opposition to OMOV), or relies on Leninist organisational prowess to pack meetings with delegates, or simply ignores democratic decisions and chooses to support anti-Labour candidates as did the RMT, and others.

The sectarian Left really hates Labour because it put an end to all these undemocratic games. Certainly, the Blairites were not slow to use similar methods themselves, but once again that explains the fury of the sectarian Left, which fumes at being beaten at its own game. 25 years ago I wrote then as a member of one of these organisations about what I saw as the dead-end of this kind of politics and outlook.

See: Being A Revolutionary Means Getting Your Hands Dirty

That document could have been written today as a description of the attitude of most of the Left, and its debilitating Third Periodist sectarianism.

Even in terms of the other criticisms that go with this leg of the argument its possible to see how thin and hypocritical are the arguments. Take the arguments over LP Conference. Clearly a Party Conference, should be able to debate true emergency motions, but the argument that the Party had fundamentally changed because discussion on Policy had been moved to the Policy Forums, is not just misplaced, but thoroughly hypocritical! During the 1980’s most organisations realised that trying to actually get anything positive done via Conference Plenary sessions was impossible. Nearly all organisations including the revolutionary Left itself began to break up such events into a range of workshops to discuss particular areas of policy, which were then fed back into plenary sessions for more rational debate and the possibility of reaching decisions that could be acted upon.

No sensible person can believe that a real democratic debate that deals thoroughly with complex issues can be had in the space of a couple of hours at most during a Conference. Revolutionary groups themselves long ago established Commissions whose role is precisely that of the LP’s Policy Forums, for that reason. By all means debate how the membership of such forums should be formed, and how the rank and file at all levels could be involved in such discussions, but do not give us hypocritical nonsense about such forums themselves being undemocratic, when in your own organisations you do exactly the same thing!

But, of course, as I stated above it is not the principle which is the real issue, it is the fact that in moving discussion into such forums the toys were taken away. The left had to give up the idea of some studentist debate at Conference – and similar arguments apply at the other lower policy making bodies such as the CLP and DLP – which produce more heat than light, but which fulfil the function the sectarian left assigns to it – salving its conscience by proclaiming its purity, and “exposing” the politics of the leadership, and instead was faced with having to spend some time actually being constructive!

As I said in that old document, the irony is that the sectarian Left having run around like headless chickens for decades in an attempt to “Build The party”, or each sects microscopic version of it, have singularly failed. Yet, had a fraction of the effort been put into constructive work day in day out alongside the ordinary working class members of the Party, its likely that just as Marx and Engels were able to win support for their ideas as a by-product of such activity, so would the Marxist Left. What is more, in undertaking such work in the context of a real Workers Party, faced with having to “win the battle of democracy” every day to persuade those workers of its ideas in struggle, many of the sectarian divisions that have sprung up between the various Left sects would have disappeared. Each sects ideas would have been tested in the fire of class struggle, and the workers would decide, which to discard. Its only because the ideas of that Left remain at the level of debate that no such test can be applied, no conclusion achieved, and so each sect is able to continue to argue that it is right.

Still Time To Correct The Mistakes

All of this is depressing, but as yet not crucial. At the moment the bosses do not need the fascists because the left is weak, and bourgeois democracy is strong. Not only do the bosses not need the fascists, but for now the bosses need to keep the fascists in their cage. The fascists only threaten to bring destabilisation and social unrest, which is not in the bosses interests for Capital accumulation. That is probably one reason for the emergence of the EDL, partly a reflection of the fact that the attempt to present an image of suits not boots by the BNP, will be pissing off part of its membership, partly the fact that the Spooks, and agent provocateurs of the State will be having a bit of fun, stirring up dissent within fascist ranks. But, that may no always be the case. IN the 1920’s the German bosses did not need Hitler, and the Nazis were unable to mobilise large forces as a result of lacking the backing of the big bourgeoisie. By the 1930’s with the German Stalinists, and German Social Democrats winning majorities of votes between them, and increasing votes for the Stalinists, German big business turned to Hitler, and the situation changed in a matter of just a few years.

Given our knowledge of what happened then, and what is happening now, it would be an even worse crime than that committed by the Stalinists, if the sectarian Left continued its own Third Period madness, in its attitude to the LP, and the millions of workers it represents.