But, when it came to the referendum, it turned out that the working-class, itself, was more advanced than the Communist Party/Bennite Left/SWP/Militant and so on, and their adherence to the ideas of petty-bourgeois nationalism. The referendum produced a 2:1 majority in favour of remaining in the EEC, and the progression to the EU. The third of the electorate that voted against, pretty much replicated the 25% of the population, at that time, which comprised the petty-bourgeoisie, plus its attendant layers of backward workers. The two-thirds that voted for, similarly mapped the core, working-class vote, which, at that time, backed Labour. At that time, it was a Labour Party that was dominated by the likes of Wilson, Callaghan, Healey, and Roy Jenkins, Williams and so on.
That in itself confused and confuses the issue, because, on the one hand, at the time when more intense industrial and political battles were taking place, in the 1970's, there stands, on one side of the battlefield, the likes of Wilson, taking on the unions, and, on the other, the likes of Benn, and various “Left” union leaders, engaging in industrial struggles for wages, against austerity, fighting closures, and calling for nationalisation, and so on. That the former, along with the CBI, and big business, line up in favour of the EEC, whilst the latter line up on the other side, meant that, for many militants, the one simply blended into the other. Indeed, Wilson also saw it that way, from the other side. Although formally, he took a neutral stance, on the question, in reality, he made it be known that a vote to stay in the EEC/EU was vital, because of what a win for Benn and the Left opponents of the EEC would have meant, politically, i.e. in terms of the balance of forces within the LP itself.
But, the fact that this situation is seen as confusing simply reflects the confused nature of the “Left”, itself, which, in fact, continually boycotts its own politics, by defining itself by what it is against, rather than what it is for. It proceeds on the same basis of “lesser-evilism”, as that discussed by Trotsky, above, repeatedly seeing its role being to ally with some other class force to that end. It meant simply putting a minus sign, where some immediate opponent placed a plus sign. And, that same idiotic means of reasoning, continues, today. For example, look at what Dave Douglass says, in this recent letter to the Weekly Worker.
“Traditional left leaders of unions and the Labour left were very public ‘leavers’, while at the same time the whole of the establishment - from the Confederation of British Industry to the leaders of all three political parties, the heads of the armed forces, the police, the EU, the International Monetary Fund - all wanted Britain to stay, as did Nato, the US president, etc.”
I'll return to some of the other fallacies in Comrade Douglass's letter later. But, it can be seen, how this lazy form of thought pervades it, in which we are supposed to believe that the matter is resolved for us simply by looking at who was standing on either side, the bosses and “the establishment” over, here, “traditional left leaders” over there. Of course, he fails to mention that, in the “over there” camp, with those “traditional left leaders”, i.e. Stalinoid elements, are, also, the likes of the BNP, Farage, Rees-Mogg et al, not to mention Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Marine Le Pen, just as in 1975, there was Powell and the NF standing beside Benn, the SWP, and various Left union leaders.
Marxists have had to deal with this kind of idiotic thinking going back to Marx himself. In the 19th century, the workers had to deal with the iniquities caused by capitalist development. On the one hand, there was the likes of the Luddites who sought to respond to that by breaking the machines that were seen as throwing the workers out of jobs. Marx notes,
“They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.”
In fact, in many ways, these individualistic, anarchistic forms of response, reflect the fact that this proletariat was, itself, still marked by its previous existence, as peasants and petty-bourgeois commodity producers. The peasant and the petty-bourgeois, are always marked by their atomised, and individualistic nature, which produces these kinds of acts of individual terrorism and destruction, but offers no positive way forward. It is typical of peasant revolts, and student protests.
On the other hand, there was the likes of Sismondi, representing the interests of that petty-bourgeoisie, and seeking to hold back capitalist development in its name. Its modern equivalents are the “anti-capitalists” and “anti-imperialists”. That trend was reactionary in Marx's day, and even more reactionary, today. Marx noted,
“... this form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.”
(ibid)
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