Constant Reader What is the Labour Party?

WE are definitely living in 1960 and not in 1950. Of this fact I am now doubly sure after reading R. P. Dutt’s tribute to Harry Pollitt in the August Labour Monthly. Mentioning with scorn the capitalist press obituaries which remarked on Pollitt’s sense of humour as though this were something not to be. expected in such a man, Dutt demands: ‘Have-they never realised the Olympian laughter of Marx, the lightning play of the smiling wit of Lenin, or the boisterous gale of a Khrushchev?’

What has become here of genial Joe Stalin? It does seem ungrateful of Dutt not to list him—as he certainly would have done ten years ago—among the great laughers of working-class history. After all, didn’t Stalin in 1929 engineer the ascent of Dutt, in close alliance with Pollitt, to domination of the British Communist Party, as a sideshow in his fight against Bukharin?

But proof that Dutt still holds his old master’s ideas in respect, even if he is too discreet to name their source, is given in his report to the executive committee of the Communist Party, printed in the weekly World News for July 23.

‘The Labour Party,’ Dutt tells us, ‘has been described in Marxist terms as a two-class party, based on an alliance of the petty bourgeoisie and the economic mass organizations of the working class, with the petty bourgeoisie in the dominant leadership and the trade. unions providing the mass basis. It is obvious that there has been throughout a latent contradiction in this structure, expressing itself in continuous battles between Left-wing and Rightwing policy, that is, between working-class and capitalist policy. The understanding of this contradiction has been a key to Communist Party strategy and tactics.’

A bloc of two classes Now some of my readers who fancy themselves wellread in the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin may wonder just what Dutt has in mind in that first sentence of his from which the rest follows. The answer will be found in Stalin’s Works, Volume 9, on pages 253 and 254. In May, 1927, Stalin was desperately striving to justify his policy of making the Communist Party of China stay in the Kuomintang, the party headed by the Chinese bourgeoisie, a policy which had just come most bloodily unstuck. It’s not what the Kuomintang is that matters, he explains, it’s what it can become. And here he resorts to a truly fanciful analogy with the British Labour Party. ‘Can it be said that it is actually the party of one class, the working class, and not a party of two classes? No, it cannot. Actually, the Labour Party in Britain is the party of a bloc of the workers and the urban petty bourgeoisie. And... it must be said that the influence of the petty bourgeoisie predominates in this party.’ But people insist, and rightly, in regarding the Labour Party in the light of its potentialities, as a ‘workers’ party’, Stalin points out. (Not long after, of course, this became frightful heresy; the Labour Party was ‘social-fascist’, and Dutt knew how to rap the knuckles of anyone tactless enough to quote Stalin’s May, 1927, formulation!)

Surely this bit of . . . pragmatism could have been left to rot with its author? If ever a description was thought up to fit a preconceived purpose, this was it. How can anybody with knowledge of the reality talk of the Labour Party being a bloc of the working class with ‘the petty bourgeoisie’? The Labour Party has been singularly -unsuccessful throughout its history in winning substantial support among the lower middle class. The 1945 general election is the only exception I can think of, and that proved a flash in the pan. How does it help anyone in working out strategy and tactics to repeat such rubbish? (Zinoviev shot it down when it was first uttered.)

The real struggle That there are some petty-bourgeois elements in the Labour Party is well-known. But these have at times shown themselves, through the constituency parties, more to the Left than the trade unions, as represented by their officials, as Dutt cannot but remember—in the days of the fight against non-intervention in Spain, for instance. That there are elements of petty-bourgeois origin in the leadership of the Labour Party is also well-known. (This is true, I should say, of every other political organization in the country, except perhaps the Tory Party.) These are, of couse, in general very definitely non-Left—and everyone knows that they hold their positions by grace and favour of the trade union bureaucracy. The latter constitute the main channel through which Right-wing ideas become powerful in the Labour Party. And they rely mainly on confused and backward sections of the working class.

It will be when the Labour Party starts to fight the monopolists on the basis of a socialist progamme, and draws the whole working class into the fight through its ~ trade union links, that we shall see for the first time a winning of the lower middle class, on a large-scale and stable basis, as allies of the working class—certainly not before!

The Turnover Tax But my old associate Sam Russell, now foreign editor of the Daily Worker—he doesn’t know it’s 1960. With magnificent tactlessness he rushed into print in the Daily Worker on July 27. The paper had published a Reuter message about Khrushchev’s song-and-dance regarding the. ‘abolition of taxation’. Reuter had pointed out in a note at the end, quite accurately, that the chief tax falling on the mass of the population in Russia is the turnover tax, comparable to our own purchase tax; and that isn’t being abolished. It used to be the rule for the Daily Worker to follow the official Soviet line in denying that the turnover tax is a tax falling on the consumer at all, so publication of this Reuter message in full was an interesting departure.

Russell solemnly ‘corrected’ Reuter, asserting that the turnover tax is not comparable to purchase tax; in other words he insists on the old line on this question being maintained. Well, let him sort it out with his comrade Maurice Dobb, who wrote in his book ‘Soviet Economic Development Since 1917’ (second edition, 1951, pages 360361) about the turnover tax as being ‘analogous to the British purchase tax’; and added that ‘the rates of this tax are high, and the extent to which they have the effect of stepping up selling prices to retail prices is accordingly high.” When Dobb wrote this it was regarded as rather daring and naughty in Stalinist circles, and only permissible because in a book not likely to be read by ‘the masses’.