The Challenge of the Socialist Labour League

[p003] The Challenge of the Socialist Labour League ABOUR REVIEW welcomes the decision to set L-. in the shape of the Socialist Labour League, an organization of Marxists within the Labour Party and trade unions. For over two years this journal has striven to defend and develop the revolutionary theory without which no revolutionary movement is possible. In a very real sense, all our work has been a preparation for this new ‘step forward of the real movement’, a step forward which in present-day circumstances in Britain is indeed worth ‘a dozen pro- grammes’. Not that there is any programmatic ambiguity about the new revolutionary organization. Together with the more immediate reporting of and commentary upon the class struggle carried out with increasing assurance by The Newsletter, the efforts of Lasour REviIEW to secure theoretical: clarity have helped to lay quite substantial foundations for the emergent League. Now comes the task of erecting a firm and balanced structure on these foundations. Our journal has an indispensable part to play. Our allotted share of the task is enormous: no less than the education of a generation of working-class fighters and leaders, to whom it will be given to seize and hold State power, to accomplish the British Revolution. Henceforward LaBouR REVIEW will appear as the theoretical organ of the Socialist Labour League. This implies no change whatever in our policy of admitting non-Marxist and even anti-Marxist contributors to our columns, in the belief that the clash of ideas is the best way to educate people, the best way to demonstrate the validity of Marxism and the falsity of the ideas which in one way or another are engendered by obsolete social relations. It does imply, however, that Lasour REVIEW itself will speak as the voice of a movement, unequivocally and firmly; that it exists to serve that movement and there- by serve the working class. The closer our review gets to the living movement; the more it is seen by militant workers as one of their best weapons; the more it can at once stimulate and satisfy their taste for that theory which is linked with practice and illuminates practice— the more adequately shall we be fulfilling our function. * * * To readers who are unaware of the difficulties which of late have beset the print-shop where this journal is produced we owe a word of explanation for the non- appearance of an issue in January. For several months work in the print-shop has been hampered by building operations whose object has been the expansion, re- equipment and reorganization of the press on the most up-to-date lines, so that it can adequately serve the needs of the Socialist Labour League in the fields of propaganda, agitation and education for many years to come. At times it has been only just possible, in the midst of this work, to set up and print The Newsletter. The present issue of LABOUR REVIEW is now so late that we thought it better to redate it and aim to give readers another four issues in the course of 1959. We would add that ours are the difficulties of a workers’ Press, deprived by its very nature of the resources enjoyed by millionaire press-owners. Our problems have been ones of growth and development. Such problems are vexatious, but exciting. : I. Who Shall Have the Whip Hand? ; HAT is the situation in which the Socialist WW ston: League is born, to inherit and carry forward the best traditions of four international associations of working men? If we were to choose one word to sum up the salient features of this period, on a world scale, that word would be ‘crisis’. Either actually or potentially, the profoundest crisis faces the three main actors on the world stage: the bourgeoisie and the two bureaucracies, reformist and Stalinist, that have substituted manoeuvres for battles, accommoda- tions for leadership. Informing all the work of the League is the conviction that only when a fourth actor, the working class, steps once again on to the stage of history will these crises be resolved in a lasting—though for some, perhaps, painful—way. Even as the self-satisfied prophets of a new capitalist millennium, of doubled living standards, of expansion, full employment and the disappearance of the trade Tt

[p004] LABOUR REVIEW cycle, were waiting for the ink- to-dry on their lucubrations—lo! the bubble labelled ‘expansion’ burst in their faces. In the USA—unemployment passes the 4 million mark again. In. Britain—over 550,000 un- employed according to official figures, but in reality a million out of work, according to reputable economists. Do Labour Party electioneers tell their audiences that this is the fault of the wicked Tories? Their own lack of any adequate policy for restoring full employment gives the game away: the tendency to slump and ‘unemployment is inherent in the capitalist system. It expresses that system’s crisis. That the Tories encourage, within certain limits, the growth of the dole queue in British cities, serves merely to indicate the ‘depth of this crisis, as do all other measures they have taken to put the workers” backs instead of their own under the economic lash. Their offensive is a far more ~ conscious and co-ordinated attempt than many suppose to impose a ruling-class ‘solution’. In Moscow and in Cyprus the British bourgeoisie has been engaged in freeing ifs hands, or trying to. Why? Is it disinterested love of peace? Is Christian practice measuring up to Christian precept for the first time’ in 2,000 years? Or does Macmillan just want to sell books to the Russians? We do not think so. But we do not believe, either, that the approaching General Election is the prime consideration. To be sure, the white fur hat and the rest of the ballyhoo are part of the Tory party’s election effort. But the fundamental _reason for disengagement abroad is to be seen at Ford’s ‘and Morris’s. The bourgeoisie has to be free to intensify ‘its offensive at home. The experiences of the past two years have hammered home to the Tories this lesson: that-the British workers are in no mood to accept with- out a fight cuts in their living standards or attacks on their organization. UA cartoon appeared recently in i the Daily Mail show- April-May 1959 ing the shop steward as a grinning lion, a whip in. its paw, making its tamer (labelled “TUC) perform circus tricks, while a crowd of Daily Mail readers—at least one supposes that the maiden aunts, stockbrokers’ clerks and retired colonels would readily identify them- selves with those vacant faces—gape through the bars in consternation. An ideal caption would have been: ‘This. animal is wicked: when you attack it, it defends itself.” _The cartoonist drew better than he knew. For reasons set forth in our last issue, the struggle in industry is indeed a struggle about who shall have the whip hand. Who is to dictate to whom in the factories? Are workers to lose their livelihood, or are bosses to be compelled to share the work and maintain in ‘hard times’ those who have for years by their labour been making fat dividends for the shareholders? In this struggle, the employers mean business. Read the engineering employers’ frank avowal that they wish they had had a show-down with the engineering workers in 1957. Read the Economist reiterating almost weekly its belief that from the employers’ point of view strikes are better than shop stewards’ organization. Throughout industry a testing-time is coming such as has not been seen in this country for a generation. The crisis of capitalism is focusing on an assault against the workers’ elected representatives at workshop level. No slander will be too vile, no trick too mean, no mass dis- missal too costly, if ‘discipline’—i.e., the annihilation of workshop organization—is likely to be achieved thereby. And the crisis of working-class leadership is expressed most sharply in this fact: that the present leaders, ‘communists’ and ‘Lefts’ included, are not preparing or mobilizing their members for the fight. What is more, these would-be lion-tamers are doing their utmost to witch-hunt into silence all those who are trying, as best they can, to carry out this task of preparation and mobilization. il. Central Africa and the Hypocrisy of Centrism UT before discussing the Labour leaders’ ultimate B confession of bankruptcy in face of their members’ demands for a fighting socialist policy, let us glance at yet another expression of both the crisis of the capita- list system and the crisis of working-class leadership: the events in central Africa. No sooner is a phoney ‘settle- - ment’ arrived at in-Cyprus than the colonial revolution ‘bursts forth at another point. The leader-writers- reach ‘wearily for their pens and their clichés about ‘respon- sibility’, ‘order’, ‘partnership’, ‘constructive efforts’ and ‘constitutional settlements’. Lennox-Boyd comes to their aid. in. the House of Commons with a tale, un-- “supported by. a shred of evidence, about a plot to ‘massacre’. Europeans. Then the real. massacre—of forty Africans at the hands of ‘security’ police whose ‘burning down Africans’. huts. pastimes are shooting black prisoners in the knee and And when areas do rise in revolt, not a single white person is killed. The real plot, against which the victims had been demon- strating, was a plan to impose apartheid on millions more Africans, to consolidate the rule of a handful of ‘white landowners (it is romantic and misleading to call them ‘settlers’), to exploit still more brutally the labour of copper-miners and labourers whose Jand has been stolen from them, to turn Nyasaland into a second ‘Kenya in order to fulfil these aims. When will the imperialists learn? Bastion after bastion of their empire has crumbled; government spokesman after government spokesman has threatened and blustered, only to eat his words in some subsequent statement, much to the

[p005] SOCIALIST LABOUR LEAGUE confusion of the die-hards and would-be book-burners of Bournemouth. And still the tide of colonial liberation rolls on. It will not cease to roll till ‘labour in a black skin’ has finally cast off its chains and the flowers of spurious ‘self-government’ that decorate them. Yet, recalling the massacre at Enugu under a Labour government, the exploits of John ‘Strachey in the Malayan jungle, and other episodes between 1945 and 1951, we are entitled to ask whether the Labour leaders, however fierce their cries of ‘Resign!’, would in fact act very differently from the Tories in this matter if they were in power. Certain aspects of Mr John Stone- house’s behaviour add point to this question. He was called ‘white Kaffir’ and otherwise insulted by a crowd of racialists; yet a correspondent of the Manchester Guardian described his deportation from the Central African Federation in these terms: For about fifteen yards he struggled and kicked while Press . photographers took pictures. He then ceased and turned to the Pressmen with the question: ‘Have you got all you want?’ He then walked quietly to the aircraft, chatted with immigration and police officials, offered them cigarettes, and shook hands with them before the plane took off. ... - Mr Stonehouse said: ‘I put up a token resistance.’ -Token resistance! . And that very same day. thirty. Africans were murdered. Neither the British Labour movement nor the oppressed peoples of Africa are helped by this peculiarly repulsive combination of cynicism, play-acting and weakness. Stonehouse fol- lowed his ‘token resistance’ by demanding that the British government should fly in British troops.. Where from? From Cyprus, perhaps, where a coroner not long ago indicted them for their brutality at Fama- gusta? Stonehouse’s politics show Centrism at its most hypocritical. There are no anti-imperialist heroes among Labour MPs. Not one of them would give open and unqualified support to the colonial revolution. Not one of them would tell the Africans the truth: that only organization and a resolute struggle will win them independence. Not one of them would tell the British workers the truth: that independence is not a gift to be bestowed. on colonial peoples, but a goal for which these peoples will fight—and that it is in the interests of the British workers to fight alongside them against a common enemy. - . The colonial revolution is the acid test for the Labour Party leaders, and for Labour MPs. They fail, because they give the African workers platitudes and counterfeit tokens, while betraying them in deeds. Il. The Emperor Is Naked —and a Witch-hunter N the colonial question, as on other questions, the QC) iersiss in the Labour Party are in the position of the boy who blurted out: ‘But the Emperor has no clothes on.’ They are saying what everyone knows to be true, but by common consent is not to be spoken of until after the General Election: that the glossy programme The Future Labour Offers YOU is not a socialist programme; that the Labour leaders are abandoning socialist principles in the hope of attracting middle-class voters; that they have no effective policy for ending unemployment; that if there is to be any hope of mobilizing the workers to meet and beat back the employers’ offensive, a fight must be waged against these leaders. To mention the unmen- tionable is a crime in the eyes of the bureaucrats who lead the Labour Party. It is a crime that merits expulsion, under a kangaroo closure procedure quite contrary to normal democratic practice. The way in which Councillors Finch and Taylor were expelled fixes on a microscope slide the leaders’ fear of putting the real political issues before their members. These two Birmingham councillors were given twenty-four hours’ notice of the meeting at which they . were to be expelled. They had to answer there and then charges made verbally. They were refused a month’s adjournment to enable them to prepare their case. They were refused the charges in writing to enable them to prepare their appeal. Much of the ‘evidence’ seems to have been provided by a man who on his own admission had a disordered mind at the time he made allegations against Finch and Taylor. The meeting was packed with Right-wingers, some of whom are rarely seen at meetings. And Morgan Phillips, commenting on the expelled members’ right of appeal, made it clear that he for one had already judged the issue. . . . There is only one word for this crooked procedure: it is a witch-hunt. The picture is completed by Bir- mingham Labour Party’s proscription of a small, ad hoc industrial movement, an informal group of shop stewards, to which Finch and Taylor belong. Hence- forth it is a crime in the Labour Party to advocate, as they did, that local parties support workers in dispute or campaign on their behalf. (No criticism of Lady Attlee’s fawning on a bus conductress who scabbed in the London bus strike, though a picture of this charm- ing scene was displayed in the Daily Mail.) In such a situation it behoves the Marxists in the Labour Party to say quite openly that the party is in the hands of middle-class people and of trade union bureaucrats with middle-class ideology; that the only hope for the Labour Party is for the industrial struggle to become the motive force of any Leftward develop- 3

[p006] LABOUR REVIEW ment; that it is idle to wait for Tribune or Victory for Socialism to begin such a development, so tight are the election shackles they have tied on themselves. The Marxists must intensify the struggle for socialist prin- ciples. They must answer the witch-hunt by showing their fellow- members what are the real political issues at stake. They must bring the working-class struggle April-May 1959 into the heart of the Labour Party and mobilize the rank and file of the trade unions to participate actively in the local Labour Parties for this purpose. To do ‘ all this an organization of active fighters for socialist policies is needed, an organization that will lead the opposition within the Labour and trade union move- ment to the present policies of class betrayal. IV. A Living Vindication of Marxism League comes into being, as a living vindication of Marxism, as a decisive challenge to all open defenders of capitalism and to all purveyors of quack remedies inside the Labour movement. Events are moving swiftly, and they are moving in the Marxists’ favour.. Our journal’s warning, over the past two years, has been essentially.a simple one: mistrust all who put forward any alternative to the class struggle as a way of fighting capitalism and war. On all sides the cry of “To the. summit! has resounded. Mikoyan has been to the USA. The Daily Worker’s ‘“MacMoscow’ has been to Russia. Khrushchev has been to Leipzig, where. he proposed a.toast to. the health of Alfred Krupp the war criminal, saying: ‘Please convey my best wishes to Herr Krupp.’ Despite these movements of statesmen, despite this all-but-a-summit-meeting, the arms race continues, the H-bomb tests go on, the botu- linus toxin and God knows what other horrors are still manufactured at Porton. Pacifism and summitolatry are bankrupt. On all sides the ‘peaceful’ road to socialism has been extolled. At South Bank police by the hundred tore a gap through the picket-lineforthe scabs and Brian Behan was sent to jail for defending his fellow-workers against police brutality. Fabianism and Stalinism are T HIS is the situation in which the Socialist Labour V. Postscript ND now, just as this issue of Labour REVIEW A is printed, comes the proscription of the Socialist Labour League and The Newsletter for advocat- ing socialist policies—on the same day, be it noted, that the leadsrs of the hosiery workers’ union accept without a murmur a second savage wage cut for their members. Two decisions: two precedents. If the attack on wages is not resisted, and if sectional differences prevent any concerted fight on this year’s claims, the employing class will redouble its attack. If the ‘Lefts’ on the Labour Party national executive vote for the proscription of the Marxists today—as they did—then tomorrow. they themselves will be correspondingly the weaker under the blows of the Right wing. Both the industrial struggle and the witch-hunt have their own implacable logic. Once let a position go by default, once fail to- resist reaction, and you are baring a further victim’s neck, perhaps your own, for the knife. Let the union leaders be warned. The defeat of. the hosiery workers without so much as a shot being fired 4 bankrupt. Only the method of the class struggle, fought right through to the end, can advance the cause of the working class. And only the Marxists tell the workers to place confidence, not in remote and well- paid leaders, but in their own strength. And the workers are listening and are judging for themselves. It moves. -Hardly a- week goes by now without some newspaper or journal referring with ill- concealed irritation to the mysterious phenomenon of the recrudescence of ‘Trotskyism’ in Britain. Our native Philistines fancy that ideas, like men, can be killed with the hired assassin’s pickaxe. So much the worse for the Philistines. Next year, which sees the twentieth anniversary of the murder of the greatest upholder of Marxism against the crimes and theoretical decay of Stalinism, will see that anniversary com- memorated in the most fitting way of all: by the growth in power and influence of a movement that is the living embodiment of the ideas for which he lived and died; a movement that is destined to lead the class struggle of the British workers to victory; a movement that will seek to aid the theoretical clarification of Marxists in other countries and their assembly into an international organization. only postpones the eventual reckoning, and ensures that it will be all the more bitter when it comes. And let those ‘Left’ heroes Silverman and Mikardo be warned. They can protect themselves for a time by joining in the witch-hunt. But they should watch out; Watson and Matthews have old scores to pay off. No matter how much they posture, or how many doors they knock on in the General Election, their complicity in these latest proscriptions cannot shield them for long. ' All these gentlemen—hosiery employers and union leaders, witch-hunters of ‘Left’ and Right, and those who, themselves politically paralysed, write in Tribune about ‘mindless militancy’—all of them have left out ‘of account the decisive factor: the class struggle. 1959 is not 1954, when Socialist Outlook could be strangled. The tempo of the class struggle is quickening. The tide is turning. This is why the challenge of the Socialist Labour League is a formidable one.