Socialists and the Labour government

WORKERS in Britain are faced with pressing and urgent problems of wages and living standards. Trade union leaders, by collaborating with the employers, are exposing the working class to a serious weakening of their organised strength. The Labour government of Harold Wilson is the political initiator of the proposed new laws to outlaw 'unofficial' action on wages.

Legislation against the trade unlons provokes a political struggle by the workers which will enable a new, Marxist, revolutionary leadership to be built.

This political struggle is necessary, and its necessity becomes evident and urgent for more and more workers, because British capitalism can no longer afford, through concessions and reforms, to limit the class struggle to the trade union field. So long as such reforms were possible, then politics in the labour movement could remain under the dominance of the middle-class and bureaucratic elements who inhabit the trade union apparatus and the 'labour left', parțicularly the Parliamentary Party.

But when the capitalists are forced to press the attack, restricting even trade union rights, and the workies class exerts its strength independently of the bureaucratic 'leaders', then the röle of the 'Labour lefts' is reversed.

The Bevanite movement, from which emerged the H-bomb 'shadow' Foreign Minister Bevan and the later Prime Minister Harold Wilson, was the limit to be reached by the 'Labour left'. Having run its course, and now in a situation where an independent class line, possible only through Marxism, is the only basis for opposition to Wilson, this 'old left' has become the most conscious apologist for Wilson and the right.

The international role of this 'old left' is also important. They are the only potential 'allies' of the 'unity' calls and 'popular fronts' of the local agents of the Stalinist bureaucracy, in open crisis since 1956.

They are the chief advocates and defenders, through special agents like Fenner Brockway, of the treacherous 'national' leaders of the colonial and ex-colonial peoples.

We have stressed that the building of a Marxist leadership is the essential question for the working class. This can only come from an organisation built upon the theoretical foundations of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, summed up in the resolutions of the first four Congresses of the Third (Communist) International and the founding document (Transitional Programme) of the Fourth International (1938).

It is significant that the finall process of degeneration of the 'Labour left' has coincided with a struggle inside the Fourth International.

The Socialist Labour League and its comrades in the International Committee have emerged strengthened from a fight against revisionism, usually called 'Pabloism' after its most conscious advocate, Michel Pablo.

One of the leading theories of the followers of this trend, including those who have now split with Pablo himself, is the idea, cultivated in the capitalist countries for nearly 15 years, that a powerful left-centrist trend would be forced to emerge from social-democratic parties like the British Labour Party.

Adapted

Deep entry" into such parties was justified by these expectations. The revisionists are incapable of drawing the painful negative conclusions about their theories, because they have become adapted to the left opportunists themselves.

These so-called Trotskyists (they produce the paper "The MiliBevanite movement was limit reached by left' tant, and find great comfort from the left paper "The Week') have condemned as 'adventurist' the struggles inside the Labour Party of the Socialist Labour League and its supporters in the Young Socialists.

They are now the most sophisticated opponents of the political campaign against trade union legislation, in which the Socialist Labour League and Young Socialists are prominent.

In order to justify this, the revisionists quote not only Lenin's 'Left-Wing Communism', • but also the repeated reference in the document of the Communist International and the Transitional Programme to what was called a 'Workers' Government' 'Workers' Farmers' Government'.

The Pabloites welcomed the election of the Wilson government as a 'left-centrist' or simply 'lefit' government, refusing to characterise it as a capitalist government.

We have seen that Lenin never in fact proposed support for the election of a Labour government as something 'better' than the Tories.

He was interested only in getting the reformists in, in order to defeat them. • What about the 'workers' governments'? Here, too, we shall see that Lenin and Trotsky had completely different starting points and different directions from those who misuse their writings.

Funther, Marxists should draw some conclusions from the experience of the working class and the Labour government.

Even in the middle 1920's, when Trotsky expected a MacDonald Labour government, if elected, to be able to bring in certain reforms, including some nationalization, he still wrote:

It is necessary from day to day to struggle against compromising illusions, in other words, to declare a life and death fight against MacDonaldism.' Trotsky also understood very ell the role of the lefts' in lation to MacDonald:

It would be a monstrous illusion to think that these left elements of the old school are capable of heading the revolutionary movement of the British proletariat and its struggle for power. In themselves, they represent a completed formation. They have only a very limited elasticity, their leftism is opportunist throughout.' ('Where is Britain Going?' page 130.)

At that time too, Trotsky pointed out that whereas a leftward swing in the working class pushed a Labour government in parliament, it brought at the same time a swing to the right among the lefts of the Independent Labour Party.

Contradiction

But of course, following Lenin, Trotsky saw in the election of a Labour government, a contradictory reality. On the one hand it represented the capitalist class, but on the other hand it brought to a head the struggle of the workers.

But this contradictory character could be used as a basis for revolutionary politics only by those who understood the class character of the Labour government and the irreconcilable struggle of the working class for power.

Conclusions

Trotsky did not prattle about the 'progressive" charactér of a Labour, as against a Tory government, but drew conclusions for revolutionary, struggle:

It is the very Party of MacDonald that is strengthening the confidence of/the bourgeoisie and at the same time stretched the endurance of the proletariat to its last limits.' (Ibid. page 133.)

When the Communist International in 1922 put forward the idea of Communists supporting, and even participating in, 'workers' governments', this was part and parcel of the tactic of the working-class united front.

Bukharin expressed very sharply the purpose of this tactic:

'For us the united-front tactics are primarily a great strategic manoeuvre designed to destroy the influence of socialdemocracy' Within this perspective, the ımmunist International decided at:

"The slogan of a workers' government is therefore suitable for concentrating the proletariat and unleashing revolutionary struggles.' Communists should declare readiness to participate in such governments 'only if there are guarantees that the workers' government will really conduct a struggle against the bourgeoisie'.

Definition

We are of course still a long way from considering a British Labour government. In the same 'theses', , the Communist International insisted:

•.. the communist parties must bear in mind that while every bourgeois government is a capitalist government, not every workers' government is really a proletarian government, a revolutionary instrument of power. The Communist International must consider the follawing possibilities:

1. Liberal workers' government, such as there was in Australia, also possible in England in the near future.

- 2. Social-democratic workers"

governments (Germany).

3. A government of workers and poorer peasants. This is possible in the Balkans, Czechoslovakia, Poland, etc.

4. Workers' governments in which communists participate.

5. Genuine proletarian workers' governments, which in their pure form can be created only by the Communist party.

"The first two types are not revolutionary workers' governments, but in fact coalition governments of the bourgeoisie and anti-revolutionary Labour leaders. Such governments are tolerated by the enfeebled bourgeoisie in critical times as a means of deceiving the proletariat about the real class character of the State, or to ward off, with the help of the corrupt workers' leaders, the revolutionary offensive of the proletariat and to gain time.

Communists cannot take part in such governments. On the contrary, they must vigorously expose to the masses the real character of these pseudoworkers' governments. But in the present period of capitalist decline, when the most important task is to win the majority of the proletariat for the revolution, even such governments may objectively help to accelerate the process of disintegration of bourgeois power.' (The Communist International, Vol. I, 1919-22, Documents.)

It was only Trotskyism which took up this revolutionary thread in the struggle against reformism. The Transitional Programme, carried at the Founding Conference of the Fourth International in 1938, posed as the centrail question before the working class, indeed before the whole of mankind and its future, the resolving of the crisis of working-class leadership, the defeat of the reformist and Stalinist leaders by a new Marxist leadership in the Founth International.

In drawing attention to the possibility of 'workers' and farmers' governments' this programme insisted that where they did occur, and even where representatives of the petty bourgeoisie were forced to go farther than they intended against the imperialists, such governments would be but short steps along the road to genuine workers' power, for which an independent Trotskyist leadership was the indispensable prerequisite.

The present situation in Britain enables us to grasp more decisively the character of the struggle against the reformists, of both 'right" and 'left' variety. If we summarise the present class position of the Labour government, as our conclusion, it will be apparent that the revolutionary approach of Lenin and Trotsky, far from having been outdated, is the essential starting point for the working class today.

A vital part of the Transitional Programme is the fight for the independence of trade unions from the state, and the accompanying fight for democracy inside the trade unions against the bureaucracy.

Britain today, and the other advanced capitalist countries, are the arena of struggles on this question at a much higher and more intensive level even than they were when the Transitional Programme was written. The basic demands of the workers on wages and conditions have now merged inseparably with the political question of the relation of the trade unions to the state. cession, relayed through a more or less privileged layer of better-paid workers, the labour aristocracy' , is rendered impossible by the decline of British capitalism.

Thus it becomes necessary to replace concessions with 'discipline', and very quickly, as Mr. Gunter never tires of pointing out. It is the ex-Bevanite Wilson who is chosen to do the job. The working-class movement must also draw its conclusions quickly.

The social strata of labour aristocrats and bureaucrats, with the petty bourgeois intellectuals' who have always merged with them in the Labour Party, have found it just as natural to produce the personnel for the present phase of repressions and direat state service to the monopolies, as they did to play the role of a reformist cushion between the working class and the capitalists.

2. new about the class role of There is nothing essentially the Labourites: it is the specially advanced stage of British capitalism's economic and political crisis which forces this role into the open.

Betrayals

At earlier times, particularly in the General Strike of 1926, the 1931 crisis, and the Second World War, the British social-democrats carried out open betrayals, condemning the working class to receive the direct blows of the capitalists.

talking of In other countries, and particularly in Germany, the social democrats, even where they had officially embraced Marxism, in contrast to their 'untheoretical' and 'commonsense' blood-brothers in the British Labour Party, long since came out as the executioners of their working-class followers.

The British Labour Party summarize class position of the Labour government is to show that revolutionary Lenin and Trotsky, from being outdated / is relevant to the MacDonald (top) and Wilson (bottom)

governments, and is essential starting point for working class (a) In the first place the state becomes more and more, ever since 1914, the instrument for mobilising the nation's capacity for total war and for the imperialist oppression of subject nations. Militarism, diplomatic secrecy and bureaucratisation are accentuated, the role of 'democratic' institutions like parliament becomes less 'and less important in the actual process of government.

(b) The state now plays a vital role in the economy itself, through subsidies, taxation policies, investment control, nationalization, military budgets, etc.

(c) International finance-capital demands a certain relation with the governments of the various nations. This international responsibility to the capitalist class seems to contradict our first point, the use of the state to mobilise for national wars. Indeed this contradiction is real, and goes through various phases of mounting intensity. The present 'liquidity' crisis is typical.

(d) The special relation between imperialism as a whole, under the leadership of the US, to the degenerated and deformed workers' states, ties the governments of countries like Britain ever more closely to the overall military and strategic needs of imperialism.

(e) Imperialism is still dependent on the control of the colonial and semi-colonial countries, though the methods of oppression have changed. The crisis of the capitalist system necessitates ever more malignant and intensive 'discipline' replacing forms of exploitation oppressed peoples.

Any government of an imperialist nation is drawn into the military, political and economic machinery of exploitation developed in line with these processes. In Britain this is especially critical because the capitalist structure of this old colonial