The ‘New Left’ Must Look to the Working Class

[p009] The ‘New Left Must Look to the Working Class The summer number of the New Reasoner (No. 9) carries an article by one of its editors, E. P. Thompson, on the ‘new left’. The author, as is his right, sharply criticizes a number of tendencies inside the Labour movement and in particular the Socialist Labour League. Let us say at the outset that we have no quarrel with the tone of this article. By all means let comrade Thompson be as sharp and as critical as he likes; such criticism is part of a method and it is this which we are concerned with, rather than its tone as. such. We say this because we have become a little tired of the attacks levelled by such people as E. P. Thompson about the ‘sharpness’ and ‘uncomradeliness’ of the Marxists. We consider that such characteriz- ations do not serve any useful purpose, and should be dispensed with in serious debate. What strikes one immediately on reading E. P. Thompson’s article is that he entirely omits the working class; consequently there is no attempt to analyse the actual relationship between the left of today and the working class. One would imagine that the ‘new left” had just arrived and existed in a world of its own. The opposite, of course, is the case. The ‘new left’ is not just a grouping of people around a number of new ideas that they have developed independently. This nev’ developnient on the left reflects a particular phase of the development of the crisis of capitalism, which for socialists is the crisis of the working-class move- ment. Like movements among intellectuals and students in the past, the recent emergence of the ‘new left”? is the advance warning of a resurgence of the working class as an active political force in Britain. The crisis which is the basis of such action finds its first reflection in the battle of ideas. THE LEGACY OF STALINISM Thompson’s omission is understandable. He obtained his political training in the school of Stalinism, and that is a bad school. Now E. P. Thompson is, of course, no longer a Stalinist. But the mere fact that he has broken politically from this school does not mean that he has abandoned all the things that he learnt there. Stalinism is not just a system of mass brutality, such as we have seen in Hungary and during the long reign of Stalin himself. Stalin did not start off as a tyrant. His particular ideas, personality and political position fitted him to be the instrument of new social forces. Under the impact of the difficulties that developed internationally and in the Soviet Union following the First World War, there took place a rapid bureaucratic degeneration. Following Lenin’s death in 1924 Stalin prepared the way for his dictatorship by developing a whole system of political ideas which revised Marxism and Bolshevism. In essence these ideas were reformist. In practice they defended the rule of the bureaucracy and not that of the working class. Bureaucracy be- came the all-powerful, infallible guide for the Soviet Union; the working class and peasantry were relegated to a position of unquestioning obedience and loyalty to this bureaucracy. Henze, instead of genuine workers’ 70 Gerry Healy control there developed a system based on bureaucratic commands. All the vices of capitalism and viciousness of capitalist dictatorial methods reflected themselves in this way inside the Soviet Union. Hence the mass purges, the trumped-up trials, the destruction of nationalities and the return of official anti-Semitism: all - these were necessary to preserve the omnipotence of the bureaucracy and in the last instance of the chief bureaucrat, Stalin. In a nutshell the method of Stalinism boils down to the relegation of the Soviet and internati- onal working class to the background and the emer- gence of the power of the bureaucrat. That is the basic difference with Marxism, which fights for the establish- ment of working-class power. The struggle to establish this power is carried out by the development of a Marxist leadership striving to raise the level of the working class so that it will understand the necessity for conscious control of its own destiny. The first task in this connection is to wrest power from the hands of the capitalists. Under the leadership of the Marxist Party in the struggle to conquer and consolidate this power, the working class achieves the status of the leading class in society, the preparation for the abolition of all classes. Opponents of Marxism are constantly attacking the Marxists on the grounds that we stand for party dic- tatorship. This is a falsehood from beginning to end. In the struggle against capitalism the working class faces a highly organized, oppressive machine, guided by a conscious general staff of monopolists. In their hands is a state apparatus which plots and plans day in, day out to preserve the privileges of the men of wealth through the systematic exploitation and repression of the working class. To combat this reactionary force it is necessary to develop a leadership inside the working- class movement, a party based upon the widest possible democracy in the creation of its policy and the utmost discipline in action. Such a party was the Bolshevik party in the Soviet Union before Stalinist degeneration. Its heir in Britain is the Socialist Labour League. After the conquest of power the role of this party will change: from being the lealership of the working class before the revolution, it will strive to educate and prepare the working class as a whole to supersede the party’s leadership and become conscious planners and leaders in a communist society. Nobody doubts the difficulties of this transition and those who seek to . confuse Stalinism with Marxism are at rock bottom serving the capitalists and deliberately falsifying history. The social forces responsible for the degeneration in the young Soviet state must be constantly studied, so that the difficulties of bureaucratic deformation and growth can be combated by the Marxists in the future. An essential part of this, however, is to understand the historic role of the working class, and the fact that - Thompson never: even bothers to examine this role shows that he still essentially retains the method of Stalinism.

[p010] NEW LEFT & WORKING CLASS LEFT BOOK CLUB LEGEND In the course of his polemic, Thompson refers nostal- gically to the days of the Left Book Club. In this he fosters a false legend which has been carefully preserved in the Stalinist mythology. It is perfectly true that the Left Book Club provided a considerable body of literature for the intellectuals who came to the Labour movement before the war, but it is also true, if one exainines many of the books produced by Victor Gollancz, that this organization was the chief propaganda weapon whereby the Stalinists falsely indoctrinated these intellectuals against Bolshevism. - Khrushchev’s 20th Congress speech and subsequent revelations have begun to reveal the full extent of the systematic falsification which characterized this period; only a small number of Marxists fought against this with the barest material resources. It is a pity that E. P. Thompson does not speak a little more about how some of the main sponsors and main defendants of the Left Book Club, including its publisher Mr Gollancz and his lieutenant, Mr Strachey, emerged in their true coiours as soon as the war began, and published “The Betrayal of the Left’, which was nothing more than their way of making peace with the capitalist enemy. Those whose ideas were formed by the Left Book Club came into politics during a period of working- class defeat following the general strike of 1926. When Thompson speaks of the ‘old left’, he carefully avoids analysing this left. Once again we have this slipshod method of posing the old against the new, erecting Aunt Sallies and knocking them down. The old left emerged in an entirely different period from that which cradles the new left today. The fact that the working class was defeated in 1926 meant that a considerable period had of necessity to elapse before this class could renew its strength and again inspire the intellectuals towards the socialist goal. The period of the thirties was the period of demoralization and of unemployment for the miners, engineers and workers in_ basic industries. That is why the theory of the Popular Front drew such support from young intellectuals coming into politics for the first time. Many of these were looking, naturally enough, for a short cut to settle accounts with the capitalists; this prepared them for a tactic which was advocated by the Stalinist bureaucracy in order to strengthen its class collabora- tion on the international field. The idea was that it was possible, through a government composed of parties representing different classes, to achieve power and take the working class towards socialism. Such an idea was attractive because it appeared to offer a way out of the struggle through class collaboration and inter party manoeuvres. History, however, shows that this form of class collaboration, as all forms of class collaboration before it, could lead to nothing but defeat, and in fact that is what happened, with the Spanish revolution as the outstanding example. The working class in France today, which had for a period a Popular Front government, is once again padlocked in the strait-jacket of dictatorship. Yet Stalinism will repeat the mistakes of the thirties. Thorez reaffirms his ‘Parliamentary Road to Socialism’ and the party regards any slogan farther to the left than ‘restore the democracy of the Fourth Republic’ as a ‘provocation’. By ignoring all these facts when speaking of the old left, E. P. Thompson shows a certain contempt for the youth of today: what this youth requires above all is an objective study of these events, and not a subjective counterposing of old against new, with snatches of Tommy Steele thrown in. This is the gimmick method of argument and teaches nobody anything. NO ESCAPE FROM HISTORY There is, however, a more basic reason why E. P. Thompson does this. The significance of Khrushchev’s speech was that it stopped at the point where it should have begun and that it failed to analyze the social causes of Stalinism. It refused to explain how Stalinism arose. One would imagine from Khrushchev’s speech that its history began in the middle thirties and not in the important formative years of the young Soviet Republic after Lenin’s death. The great struggle of the Left Opposition, its plans for the industrialization of the Soviet Union and the struggles with Stalinism which led to the physical and political annihilation of that Opposition, are completely ignored by Khrushchev. He mentions Lenin’s Testament, but fails to explain why Lenin found it necessary to write ii. E. P. Thompson follows a similar method in that we have yet to hear ' from him or his friends an explanation for the historical origins of Stalinism. We have had, of course, many articles from this quarter about the moral outrages of Stalinism and the human indignities which it inflicted on the Labour movement, but this is only a part of the truth. The course of those who support E. P. Thompson and the New Reasoner flows directly from the fact that they have been unable to give a historical explanation of the rise of Stalinism or of their own abandonment of it after Khrushchev’s speech. It is admirable to talk about the need for theory in the Labour movement as E. P. Thompson does, but the first requirement of a person who seriously believes in theory is to put himself right with the historical reasons for his own development. Emotional hostility to Stalinism can in fact in certain circumstances lead one right back along the path to Stalinism, or into the camp of capitalism. The new left of today cannot separate itself by an effort of will from the history of the working-class movement, and E. P. Thompson and others will continue to flounder until they outline their attitude towards this history and declare where they really stand. There is a direct relationship between the new left of today and the old left. It is important also to realize that both these trends were cradled in an English Labour movement which has a traditional backward- ness in matters of theory. The great difference between the left today and its predecessor lies in the fact that the working-class movement is no longer suffering from demoralization and unemployment and has fully recovered from the defeat of 1926. In Britain we have the most powerful Labour movement in Western Europe, and the effect of its strength is to constantly interrupt the plans of the British capitalists. The new left reflects this basic strength, and many of its members will be impelled to join the growing number of intellec- tuals who have made the leap to a historical analysis of Stalinism as the prerequisite of restoring true Marxism in Britain. Those who do not take this course, and prefer to set themselves up as revisers of Marxism, find themselves gripped by pessimism. They are inflicted with British 7

[p011] LABOUR REVIEW ‘exceptionalism’, Working by rule of thumb and on the basis of superficial impressions they conclude from the slowness of events in England that things will re- main as they are and that the battle of words with the old gang of Tory and Labour leaders will go on in the ~ same old way. Here and there they visualize some changes in the régime, and they work for the most paltry returns, all the time directing bitter criticism at the left, at the Marxists. This outlook derives from a failure to understand anything about the political history of the British working class. The new wave of struggles in Britain provoked by the current employers’ offensive against the Labour and trade union movement will inevitably, and in the very early stages, revive the heroic episodes of the General Strike, the miners’ struggle in the 1920s and the powerful solidarity actions in defence of the young Soviet Republic. When the working class moves into action they have their history strapped across their backs and willy-nilly they will be unable to get away from this. This history, with its positive and negative aspects, remains the storehouse of knowledge which ‘affects the working class first in an unconscious sense; the task of the Marxist movement is to transform politically this unconscious relationship into a conscious guide to action for the future. Intellectuals are moving in a Marxist direction today because they are being affected by the same powerful combination of historical forces which affects the work- ing class. If there is a new field for the development of Marxist theory it is precisely because the working class of this country is being forced to gather the resources of experience and strength in preparation for big ‘actions It is this historical fact which makes nonsense of ‘Thompson’s reference to the old and new lefts. The new left can only advance today if it understands why the old left failed; hence the importance of under- standing Stalinism and its historical development. The old left did the dirty work for the Stalinists and for the reformists. The new left must thoroughly educate itself in the nature of the political forces which hold back the working class THE NEW GENERATION The problem of youth today can likewise only be ‘understood in its historical context. To flatter the youth of today by referring in sneering tones to the limitations of the older generation is a method of work ‘which can only be described as shabby. Young workers today are in many ways much more confident . than the unemployed youth of the 1930s. They have reason to be. The full employment of the war period and the post-war boom has provided them with a standard of life far above that of the pre-war ‘generation. But this is only one side of the question. Just as the youth of today enjoy these standards so also will they fight more strenuously to maintain and im- prove them. They are determined, and rightly so, not to go back to the thirties. If the capitalist politicians were to come out and declare for a return to the standard of living of the youth of the thirties, can any- one doubt the revolutionary consequences? Yet here is precisely the policy of the capitalists. Youth unem- ployment is higher now than at any time since the thirties—a foretaste of things to come. We can expect 72 October-November 1959 in consequence an enormous transformation in the out- look of young people. Their feelings of uncertainty and bitterness, which today give rise to all sorts of frustrations, will become transformed into a political powerhouse directed against the forces of the old society. To speak of the intellectual youth who marched to Aldermaston as something which is separate from these events is again to ignore the relationship between the old and the new. Far from making a completely fresh start, the youth must be part of a movement which understands scientifically the fail- ‘ure of the generation of the 1930s to defeat unemploy- ment and war and the relationship between those struggles and the defeat of 1926, for the memory of these events is built into the working class, and cannot be ignored. It is significant that in the forefront of all the strikes over the recent period, demonstrations against rent increases and against the manufacture of the H-bomb, it is the youth who predominate. But youth cannot by itself elaborate the strategy for victory: for this it needs the assistance of the older generation and its experience. Without this it will not be able to halt the capitalists in their offensive. Marxists today estimate the youth in the light of their relationship to the older generation. Whilst Marxism fights against conservatism in the older generation it nevertheless does not, as Thompson does, go to the other extreme and set up the youth as some self-contained social entity. Here he ignores the potentialities of today’s youth which will be fulfilled only when they are blended with an under- standing of youth’s role in the social struggles of yesterday. The educational work to achieve this under- standing is a formidable task, but there is no easy way around it. With all due respects to skiffle, Tommy Steele, the pops, and E. P. Thompson, we must start from fundamentals in finding a road to the youth, and an understanding of Britain’s social crisis will prove a much more powerful factor than that of being tuned in to the saxophone. An attitude to history is the basic difference between the Marxist movement and E. P. Thompson. Marxists will insist that an understanding of today proceeds from an understanding of yesterday. History cannot be by- passed; the development of the working class and of the youth within its midst remains first and foremost a product of the class struggle. Thompson’s omission of any examination of the working class thus derives from a rejection of the Marxist theory of the class struggle as the dominant factor in society. On such a basis he can talk about problems of today as if they had no relation- ship with the problems of yesterday. E. P. THOMPSON AND FACTIONS This characterizes also his attack on the Socialist Labour League, which he discusses in terms of faction- alism. Now it was fundamental to Stalinism to abolish all factions, first in the Bolshevik Party and then in the international communist movement. The Communist Party in Britain to this very day carries the tradition forward, factions are prohibited inside the party by rule. Similarly the Labour Party bureaucracy justifies its drive against the Socialist Labour League on the grounds that the League constitutes a faction in the Labour Party. Thus E. P. Thompson in his crusade

[p012] NEW LEFT & WORKING CLASS against factions finds himself with some strange bed- fellows. A footnote to his article (New Reasoner, Summer 1959, p. 14) states that he is sharply in dis- agreement with the ‘administrative proscription’ of the Socialist Labour League; but he avoids mentioning that the Socialist Labour League is proscribed exactly because according to Transport House it is a faction. Thompson arrives at his contradictory position because once again he tries to approach the question without any knowledge (at least there is no evidence of it) of the history of factions in the Marxist movement. These have arisen, and will continue to arise, when a group or tendency sees the necessity to organize itself in a disciplined way, as a party within a party, because it thinks that the policy of the leadership or a section of it can lead to serious mistakes for the working class. A faction has its own political platform and arises when all other means of persuasion have failed. It is a tight political formation and from the moment it arises the danger of a split is always present. Marxists have to work as an organized faction within Social Democracy and within Stalinism because there is an absolutely unbridgeable gulf between themselves and the leaderships of these movements. Those who attack the Marxist movement for fighting for political clarity within these movements have in effect accepted that the fate of the workers is to fall victim to the false policies of these leaders. When Marxists fight on be- half of these workers for political ideas, they are of course aware that the retaliation of the Right-wing may sometimes mean splits and expulsicns. FACTIONS, TENDENCIES AND CLIQUES Generally speaking the formation of a faction is the last stage in the development of a struggle, although this stage can continue for a ccnsiderable period, depending upon the objective conditions in a given country. Oftentimes comrades get together in a move- ment without any factional ties, but with some political agreement on the problems of the movement and how they should be attended to. Groups of this description with no hard and fast organizational discipline can be described as tendencies. Yet at other times groups of people get together in the movement and resolve to remain together at all costs despite their political dis- agreements. They consider that the personal relation- ship between them should override their political differences. Inside such groups there is naturally contempt for Marxism, which seeks precisely to probe the differences and their relationship to the class struggle in society. This type of group is not a faction but a clique and is very common in the British Labour movement. Opportunist groupings are invariably cliques: their leaders subordinate discussions on policy to the objective of attaining certain positions in the movement. Occasionally the various cliques in the Labour Party and the trade unions go to war with one another. One feature of the New Reasoner and the Universities and Left Review is that those of their spokesmen who howl loudest against Marxism have always carefully avoided politically clarifying the differences that exist within their own camp. Anyone who examines the pages of the New Reasoner can see these differences for himself. But those who agree to differ have unity in at least one thing, they hate the Marxist movement and are determined to fight it at all costs. Thompson’s denunciation of factions is an attempt to characterize principled politics as ‘dirty’ politics. All those who, like the Marxist, fight for a principled line are regarded as dogmatists and doctrinaires, while all those who avoid the fight for a political line behind the pages of some magazine or other are regarded as highly practical people. Oi course, objective circumstances at the moment help Thompson in his attack. The inertia and mis- ‘ education which hold back the working class are powerful barriers in the development of a movement. In the present period, the prelude to a real break- through of the class struggle, the Thompsons seem to find a ready audience in denouncing the Marxists move ment as sectarian. In this, he only has the temporary advantage enjoyed by similar opportunists in the past. The Marxist movement remains small at this time not because of the failure of its ideas, but because only now is there maturing the favourable objective situation which will vindicate these ideas. Marxist principles reflect the objective requirements of the working class. These objective requirements can only be translated into class consciousness in the course of class struggles. Consequently, Marxism, whilst’ it reflects the historic requirements of the working class, nevertheless in a period of slow tempo of development can appear to be temporarily isolated from the class. E. P. Thompson flourishes in the last years of this slow process, but his advantage will be short-lived. The attack on factions is thus an attack on principled politics and an implied defence of clique politics; it is because such clique politics dominate relationships inside the New Reasoner, Transport House and King Street, that Mr Thompson finds hiniself in such strange company in attacking the Marxists of the Socialist Labour League. The Socialist Labour League has. openly proclaimed in its founding Conference resolution the principles for which it fights. It has openly pro- claimed that it is a disciplined organization following in the steps of the Bolshevik movement. Internal democracy is not a means of glossing over differences of principle, but is an instrument for understanding these differences, drawing conclusions from them and educating the movement for action. Common discipline and internal democracy are the necessary weapons of the working class in action. While a number of people on the left show a tendency to retreat to Stalinism or reformism, the balance sheet remains positive. Intellectuals are learning to serve the working class and learn from the working class. The method of Marxism is not to foist ideas and impressions on to the working class, but to begin with that class, study it, understand it and draw practical conclusions from the course of its development. THE FUTURE OF THE ‘NEW LEFT’ Tt is when we come to the final part of Thompson’s article that we see the real fallacies in his thinking. ‘The new left,’ he says, ‘does not propose itself as an alternative organization.’ Such a statement is under- standable, but it is not true. The ‘new left? is an organization by virtue of its own production of magazines, discussions on editorial policy and educa- tional work. What E. P. Thompson wants to say is 73

[p013] LABOUR REVIEW that he does not want the new left to be a Marxist organization, but an organization of a ‘centrist’ variety which, while declaring itself against all organization, is at the same time itself the tightest form or organization. Thompson denounces Marxist factionalism and organization, but at the same time carefully ignores the fact that only very recently, after considerable pressure, was the normal method of elections by voting applied to such concerns as the Universities and Left Review. We have not heard of any elected editorial board for the New Reasoner, though no doubt an editorial board does exist. In point of fact Thompson’s New Reasoner is very tightly and narrowly controlled. The Socialist Labour League’s conference on the other hand was open to visitors, it had a public session and people who were not members participated in the discussion. All its leading committees were elected. We haven’t heard of this happening inside Thompson’s new left as yet, although we have no doubt that some progress may be made in the next period. Thompson’s organizational outlook is again related to his lack of understanding of history. Political move- ments similar to the one proposed by Thompson have existed in the past. The whole history of the Independent Labour Party in its centrist forms through- out Western Europe before the war reveals that the . all-inclusiveness of these movements served only to hide the machinations of ‘leaders’ who were undecided whether to go back to reformism or turn to Stalinism. That is why the ILP has been reduced to an insignificant hulk of aging people, the majority of its leaders having October-November 1959 either deserted to the camp of reformism or simply disappeared from the scene. Thompson’s new left is related to these experiences. It represents the mood of people who cannot make up their minds where to go. It is a sort of crossroads where various people are meeting, some downright opportunists, others inclined towards Stalinism, still others who want to find a road to revolutionary socialism. It is essentially a movement in which there is necessarily a permanent crisis of indecision. Such movements are normal in pre-revolutionary develop- ments, as well as in periods of reaction and defeat. They are a halfway house for people who are pausing in the search for a revolutionary way forward, trying to decide whether to go forward or back. The most dangerous trend in the new left will be to attack the Marxists in the hope of accommodating more easily to all sorts of pseudo-left-wingers thrown up by the oncoming crisis in the Labour movement. Thompson and his friends cannot remain at the cross- roads indefinitely, but must soon make up their minds politically on the basis of the class struggle. The Uni- versities and Left Review and the New Reasoner are transitional phenomena; the many sincere supporters of these journals have a primary duty to direct their attentions to the struggles of the working class. This does not mean only Ieft speech-making by trade union leaders. What is important is the turn towards the basic movement which lies behind this speech- making. If this is done then the new left will steadily evolve in a Marxist direction.