Weekly Worker 401 Thursday September 27 2001

Alliance’s futile sectarianism

Labour Party member Bob Pitt, editor of What Next?, dismissed the Socialist Alliance in his address to last month’s Communist University as ‘serving no purpose’. This is an edited version of his remarks

Socialists need a general strategic conception of their relationship with the mass movement. Specifically we need an understanding of the relationship between Marxists and mass workers’ parties which have rightwing leaders and pro-capitalist programmes. New Labour is hardly unique in that sense, nor is this something simply restricted to Britain. The history of the labour movement in western Europe has basically been one of parties with a mass working class base but a rightwing leadership and a pro-capitalist programme.

The key text here is that section of the Communist Manifesto - ‘Proletarians and communists’ - which contains the line that communists do not form a party opposed to other working class parties. Now in Britain, the way I would read that is that Marxists do not form parties opposed to the Labour Party. In the history of the labour movement in Britain there have really only been two workers’ parties: the Chartists and the Labour Party. Other parties have claimed to represent the interests of the working class, but the working class in Britain has remained resolutely unconvinced by them.

So how we relate to this particular mass workers’ party is a crucial question for Marxists. There are some general lessons from history about this. It is not that Marxists are dogmatically opposed to developing alternative parties to the existing mass-based workers’ parties; it is a question of how such new parties can arise. They cannot be built by establishing a small, ‘pure’ socialist organisation outside of and opposed to that mass-based party, condemning the treacherous actions of the leadership and appealing to people to rally to the new organisation. That has been tried in Britain from the time of the Social Democratic Federation up to the time of the Socialist Alliance today and it has repeatedly failed.

Mass-based communist parties in western Europe arose on the basis of crises, conflicts and splits within existing mass-based reformist parties. In Britain, by contrast, the Communist Party was built by means of a fusion of various far left groups, in opposition to the existing mass-based reformist party. Consequently the CPGB remained entirely marginal to mass politics. In the entire 70 years of its existence it only had two MPs elected.

In a bourgeois democracy, mass politics involving millions of people is, like it or not, essentially parliamentary politics. From that standpoint the CPGB was marginal to mass politics, despite its undoubted influence within the trade unions and such organisations as the Unemployed Workers Movement. That seems to me a relatively uncontentious statement.

And yet we read in the recently published pamphlet by Jack Conrad: “For the first time since 1920-21 there is the distinct possibility of uniting all serious revolutionaries in Britain in a single organisation and thereby starting the historically necessary process of building a viable mass working class party” (J Conrad Towards a Socialist Alliance party London 2001). If one thing can be learned from the period 1920-21, it is that you do not build “a viable mass working class party” by those means. It was not done then; it will not be done today.

While I would say that new political organisations can only be built by splits, I do not think it is the role of Marxists to go around advocating splitting the labour movement. When splits do take place, the onus has to be put on the right wing. At last year’s Communist University I was speaking on the Labour Party after Livingstone, and I explained why I thought Livingstone was correct in not forming a new political party out of his independent mayoral candidacy. Someone said then, “Bob thinks the time is never right for a split.”

Looking back at the Labour Party over the last century, it would be difficult to see the circumstances in which the time was right. The only significant split that took place from the left was the breakaway by the Independent Labour Party in 1932: it had 15,000 members, a handful of MPs and fizzled out after a few years.

So I am not in favour of working towards a split. I am in favour of working within the movement as it actually exists to counter the onslaught of the hard right - at the moment an essentially defensive struggle. I hope that we will defeat them and drive them out of the Labour Party. On balance, this is somewhat unlikely, in anything but the long term. And a number of groups that were once committed to this sort of perspective have given up on it.

I see formations like the Socialist Alliance, and the Socialist Labour Party before it, as a bit like the Angry Brigade without the guns - representing a narrow layer of militants who become frustrated and impatient at the conservative character of the mass workers’ movement and its failure to adopt a militant anti-capitalist programme. It is not so much that they seek to substitute themselves for the mass movement; it is rather that they seek to trigger the development of a new mass movement by means of exemplary actions. This is a totally futile exercise. Whether it is standing 90-odd candidates in a general election and getting an average of 1.69% of the vote, or sending letter bombs to Robert Carr, I do not think either of these things really are effective means of promoting the development of a new mass movement. The role of Marxists is to work within the existing movement.

By the way, some people have suggested that I might have voted Green on June 7. I did not - although I did vote Green in the Greater London Assembly election: Livingstone for mayor, Labour in the constituency section and Green in the top-up list. In the general election I mainly worked outside of my own constituency, for a leftwing candidate. I live in a safe Labour seat. I knew that there would be large-scale abstentions by Labour voters in the general election and thought that was quite a good thing, because that was one way of giving a message to Blair. If it had been a marginal constituency, I would certainly have gone out and campaigned more effectively locally. I did do some leafleting for our Labour candidate, because it would have damaged my credibility with fellow party members if I hadn’t done anything - you have to find a way of relating to the consciousness of Labour Party members.

This is important. Having come from an ultra-left background, when I first joined Labour I found it very difficult relating to party members. I tended to be excessively strident and denunciatory, which had the effect of driving the centre ground into the arms of the right. I learned that you have to pose things in a way that can add to the consciousness of the people you are addressing. On the other hand, I do not keep my politics private. There are plenty of opportunities for making socialist propaganda in the Labour Party. I do not pretend to be anything other than a Marxist.

There are a number of explanations as to the origins of New Labour. One of them is to see it as a kind of inevitable product of globalisation. I find this somewhat unconvincing. There was nothing particularly inevitable about Blairism. There was something accidental about it in terms of John Smith’s death in 1994. Had this not happened, things would have turned out rather differently. Smith was a civilised, old-fashioned, rightwing social democrat. Had he remained leader, Labour would undoubtedly have won the 1997 election, albeit with a somewhat smaller majority.

The policies it would have implemented would have been far more in line with an old Labour programme: no student tuition fees, no abolition of single-parent benefit. There would have been substantial reforms of the anti-union laws. This would not have ushered in a socialist millennium. Yes, it would have been a rightwing Labour government, but a rightwing old Labour government.

The globalisation thesis is also unconvincing. The idea of transnational corporations dominating the world is highly dubious. In general there are multinational companies based in a particular nation-state and repatriating their profits there. There are very few genuine transnational corporations, and I am not convinced that the nation-state has now been superseded and that national-based governments are now completely impotent in the face of international capital.

The argument that New Labour is to be seen as an automatic development resulting from economic changes is a kind of crude determinism, which ignores the whole question of human agency and is a caricature of what Marxism is supposed to be. There is no kind of general process which arises automatically out of globalisation and which impacts on every country. It is a question of the level and development of the class struggle.

This ‘inevitability’ argument disarms the working class, because it is basically what the Blairites themselves say: ‘We live in a new, globalised world. There are limits to what we can do. Therefore you can’t buck the market: you have to capitulate to big business. There’s no alternative.’

Rather than finding an explanation for the rise of New Labour in terms of international economic developments, it makes more sense to see it in terms of domestic political factors. There is a sense in which New Labour is very much a continuation of the project that was begun under Kinnock in the aftermath of the 1983 defeat: to shift the Labour Party’s programme to the right in order to make it more electable. It is certainly true that Blair has shifted the party’s programme far further to the right than Kinnock could even have conceived of. Now the party has a poisonous Thatcherite programme that goes well beyond anything the ‘new realists’ of the 1980s would have imagined.

So the rise of New Labour was founded on an attempt to make the party electable. From that standpoint we have to say that it has been a brilliant success - a second landslide victory, barely a dent in Blair’s 1997 huge majority, and the Tories thrown into crisis. This has been achieved by shifting the programme so far to the right that Labour now occupies the territory formerly occupied by the hard-right, free-marketising, social authoritarian wing of the Tory Party itself. That is the political territory which New Labour now occupies programmatically.

In the aftermath of the general election, there was an interesting article in The Times entitled ‘Hurrah for the New Tory government’ by William Rees Mogg. Rees Mogg talks of the “splendidly Tory Education Bill at the heart of the queen’s speech. Given the potential resistance of the teaching trade unions, could William Hague have done more? Could he have done as much?” Rees Mogg goes on to welcome a Welfare Reform Bill: “Hurrah for Ann Widdecombe as the new government’s inspiration on welfare reform ... Tony Blair has the courage to use the second largest majority in Labour history to force through a radical Tory programme of privatising the social services ... he is putting the roof on the building [Thatcher] designed.”

Of course, this puts the Tories in a very difficult position. They can hardly say, ‘If we were in government we’d be implementing much the same programme.’ In which case why vote for them when they pose no alternative? The Tories have to differentiate themselves from Labour’s programme in some way. On this or that issue, they can position themselves to the left of labour. For example, on tube privatisation, for totally opportunistic reasons the Tories actually support Livingstone.

But generally this is not something they can do. You only have to look at the backlash against Portillo moving the party a bit nearer to the centre on issues like section 28, the legalisation of soft drugs, all-women short lists and so on. Given the party’s base and the nature of its activists, it is not really possible for the Tories to position themselves to the left of Labour. So in order to differentiate itself the Conservative Party really has to shift further to the right and, given how rightwing New Labour’s programme is, this puts the Tories in the position of being perceived as a bunch of extremist nutters - alienating the centre ground and playing into Blair’s hands. All of this ultimately stems from New Labour’s electoral strategy.

The question then is, how has New Labour been able to get away with this within the labour movement? Ten or 15 years ago, if you were told that the Labour Party would implement this kind of programme, you really would have found it difficult to credit it. You have to bear in mind the general background: during the last decade there has been a very low level of class struggle, and industrial conflict has been at a historically low ebb. The trade unions may have picked up a bit during the last couple of years, but membership is now down to seven million, compared with 13 million when the Tories came to office in 1979.

On top of all this, there was the experience of 18 years of Tory government - particularly the defeat of 1992. Many people thought that Labour would probably win in 1992; it was ahead in the opinion polls and yet it went down to another devastating defeat by the Tories. There was a mood of desperation in a labour movement that wanted so much to see an end to Tory rule.

Four days before the 1997 general election I moved a resolution at the Usdaw conference opposing Blair’s ‘partnership in power’ proposals as an attack on internal party democracy. People were not exactly threatening to take a rope and string me up, but it was verging on that. There was considerable hostility in the ranks of Usdaw members. People were saying, ‘You can’t do this. If we pass a resolution like this, the Tory press will get hold of it, use it to attack the Labour leadership and say the trade unions are fighting against it. This could destroy the possibility of a Labour victory.’ It was on the basis of this general mood that Blair was able to force through changes in internal party democracy and the party’s programme with relatively little opposition.

Back in 1997 some sections of the left argued that people would expect radical changes from the Blair government and that in the short to medium term, when it became clear that these changes were not going to happen, there would be a revolt against the government based on a ‘crisis of expectations’. I always thought that this was a bit over-optimistic and that the breakdown of support for the Blair government would be a protracted process. But even I would never have thought that Blair could get away with four years of such a rightwing government, with no serious rebellion from the trade unions, for example. It was not until last year’s party conference - with the revolt over the pensions issue - that the trade unions took a stand against Blair at all.

It has to be said that things have been very bad. Within the constituency-based membership of the party there was certainly a lot of resentment, a lot of suspicion of Blair. Whenever party members were allowed to express their views in internal party elections, they tended to elect opponents of Blair. You remember that in the 1997 national executive elections the constituency section voted for Ken Livingstone and kept Peter Mandelson off the NEC. Repeatedly since then, the Grassroots Alliance candidates have had good votes when standing for the NEC. The problem has been that for the last four years the representatives of the trade unions have essentially blocked with the Blairites against the constituency-based opposition at every level within the structures of the Labour Party. It has to be said that this has had a hugely demoralising effect.

The interesting feature of last year’s conference, when the unions pushed through the vote on pensions, was that constituency representatives actually voted by a large majority against that. This does not represent the views of Labour Party members or activists; it represents the fact that the people who go to conference these days are people who are basically supportive of the Blair project, or are politically inexperienced first-time delegates who are vulnerable to appeals for loyalty to the leadership. Those within the ranks of the party who are opposed to Blair just ask, ‘What is the point of going to these things any more?’

How can this log-jam be broken? It seems to me that there are signs now that it is being broken. The reason for that is essentially the success of the Blair electoral strategy - the fact that the Tories are so completely marginalised. Over the last four years, the argument the Blairites have always trotted out is, ‘Look, the alternative to a New Labour government is not an old Labour government, but a Tory government.’ That has had some impact, securing a certain amount of compliance. But now a Tory government is not a viable prospect, because the Tories represent no kind of effective opposition at all.

In so far as there is an opposition to Blair, it is actually emerging within the labour movement. Even the Parliamentary Labour Party rebelled over the question of removing Gwyneth Dunwoody and Donald Anderson as chairs of parliamentary select committees. The idea of the PLP publicly rebelling against Blair in this way is unprecedented over the last four years. Another example is the GMB deciding to withdraw £1 million of funding from the Labour Party and putting that money into organising a campaign against Blair’s proposals to introduce the private sector into the NHS and education.

There is certainly a mood developing within the party at all levels in opposition to Blair and I think that the next four years are going to be far less depressing and demoralising. The question is, what should socialists do about this? What socialists should not do is turn their backs on actual developments within the labour movement. What socialists should not do is go off and form initiatives like the Socialist Alliance and stand candidates against Labour. It seems to me to serve no purpose whatsoever.

What socialists should not do is seek to disaffiliate the unions from Labour. Nor should they seek to get the unions to adopt policies which would free up the unions’ funds to support candidates which enjoy the support of some tiny minority of their membership. Quite how the existence of the Socialist Alliance helps the struggle in the Labour Party I just do not see. If anything, the fact that its impact is so limited is disadvantageous to the struggle against the Labour right wing, as the Blairites can point to the alliance’s derisory electoral results and say this proves that leftwing politics have no popular support.

What socialists should do in relation to the trade unions and the Labour Party is seek to ensure that their representatives within the structures of the party actually stand up for their own union’s policy. Socialists should act to articulate, to focus and to organise the opposition which is emerging within the ranks of the labour movement, not to seek to lever away fragments into sectarian electoral stunts.

I have been asked whether I think the comrades from the Weekly Worker should liquidate themselves and dissolve themselves into the broad labour movement. I think that would be a very good idea, but I hardly feel this proposal would be received in a positive spirit. The essence of sectarianism and sects is simply that they exist for the purpose of their own existence. It’s like that song soldiers used to sing in World War I: “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here.”

The role of Marxists is to work within the organisations which the working class has built, however inadequate those organisations may be, however rotten their leadership may be, however limited the consciousness of the working class involved in those organisations may be. Certainly I would be far from promising major achievements in the direction of socialism in the next few years, but I do think that, if we are going to proceed and advance towards the objective of a socialist society, we will have to conduct some serious struggles within the existing structures of the Labour Party over the next few years.