Constant Reader A Workers’ Party

DISCUSSING with a friend the other day the reasons why the Socialist Labour League does not set itself up as a party in opposition to the Labour Party, but on the contrary supports the latter’s candidates in elections and seeks affiliation to it, I was confronted by the argument that the Labour Party is no more a workers’ party than was the Liberal Party which enjoyed the support of most politically-minded British workers until the rise of the Labour Party in the first ‘decade of this century.

The argument is a familiar one. In the 1950 general election, when the Communist Party put up a hundred candidates (and was responsible for the loss of a number of seats by Labour), 1 canvassed for the Communist candidate in Harrow East, and with other canvassers was given a slip of paper with the official answer to the charge that we were splitting the vote. This amounted to saying that the Communist Party in 1950 stood in the same relation to Labour as Labour had stood in 1900 in relation to the Liberals. I don’t think it helped the Communist candidate much; workers who were critical of the Labour Party’s leadership and policy seemed, nevertheless, to be convinced that it was somehow qualitatively different from any Liberal Party, past or present, and that people who tried to equate the two were out of touch with reality.

To old-timers, moreover, and those with some knowledge of Communist Party history, the 1950 ‘hint for canvassers’ echoed some old, unhappy, far-off things in the Party’s record —the alleged Left turn in 1929 which opened a period of extreme sectarian isolation when the Party came near not merely to physical extinction but also to complete political bankruptcy.

The ‘Third Period’

There was, of course, a theory of sorts attached to the fantastic things that were said and done in those days, though the real causes were to be found ouside the realm of theory. Following the First World War, it was said, there had been a ‘first period’ of revolutionary upsurge which ended with the failure of the German revolution in 1923. To this there had succeeded a ‘second period’ of capitalist stabilization. Now a ‘third period’ was opening in which a renewed upsurge of revolution would dominate the scene. (What actually happened instead was the victory of Fascism in Germany, with the crushing of the strongest Communist Party outside Russia. The ‘third period’ was never officially wound up, but the Communist International passed over, on tip-toe, so to speak, into a ‘fourth period’, never openly described as such, in which the slogans of 1929 were stood on their heads.)

Those were days when a Leftist logic of lunatic lucidity prevailed among British Communists. The Labour Party is ‘a third bourgeois party’, is it? Right, then, says R. P. Dutt (Communist Review, January, 1929), we must oppose payment of the political levy by the trade unions to the Labour Party: ‘Advocating the payment of the political levy means in its result, whether we like it or not, recruiting for the Labour Party, which we are engaged in fighting with all our force.’ And Pollitt brought back from a meeting in Berlin with the Comintern representative, just after the Labour Party’s election victory, the instruction that the British Communist must ‘emphasize’ that it is a crime equivalent to blacklegging for any worker to belong te the Labour Party.’

The real difference’

» When we claim that history has shown the Labour Party to be a workers’ party and that the tactics of Marxists in relation to it must be determined by this fact, what do we mean? In this connection, I make a free gift to our ‘Left’ critics of the following quotation from Lenin: ‘Of course, for the most part the Labour Party consists of workers, but it does not logically follow from this that every workers’ party which consists of workers is at ihe same time a “political workers’ party”; that depends on who leads it, upon the content of its activities and of its political tactics’ (speech on the Labour Party at the Second Congress of the Comintern, 1920).

But look more closely, friends, and notice the separate mention of three concepts: first, a workers’ party; second, a party which consists of workers; and, third, a party which is a political workers’ party, i.e., a party which fights politically for the workers’ interests. To have a lot of worker supporters does not make a party thereby a workers’ party. The Liberal Party was formed by capitalist politicians for capitalist purposes and has always remained a party directly dominated by capitalist ideas and interests, even in the days when it enjoyed a great deal of working-class support. The Labour Party came out of the working class and is organically bound up with that class through its distinctive structure and its fundamental ideas. Its strong and weak points are those of the working class.

Marxists face in relation to the Labour Party a proposition of a kind different in many essential respects from that which confronted Eleanor Marx when she carried on her work among the Radical Clubs of London’s East End, financed by Liberal businessmen. The work today has different prospects, for it is based upon, and therefore cannot mechanically repeat, the building of that party which represented, in Lenin’s words of 1908, ‘the first step on the part of the really proletarian organizations of Britain towards a conscious class policy and towards a socialist Labour Party’.