A New Workers' Party or an Old Labour Party?

A long-time correspondent recently wrote to us asking us if we intended to send any delegates to a meeting in London at the end of June organised by the "Campaign for a New Workers Party". We had received no invitation to the meeting but we have been aware for some time of this initiative. One of the great needs of our time is for workers to create a political instrument which can give organisational form to an anti-capitalist consciousness. As an affiliate to the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party the CWO is obviously duty-bound to comment on such an initiative.

Love Labour's Lost

However, it does not take much of a glance to see that this so-called "New Workers' Party" already has an ancient and sorry history. In the first place it is the initiative of the Socialist Party. Older readers will know that this was the label the old Trotskyist Militant Tendency took when it was expelled from the Labour Party in Neil Kinnock's spell as leader. They may also remember how Kinnock had a field day at a Labour Party Conference exposing the entryist tactics of their corrupt and careerist leader Derek Hatton, who at that time headed Liverpool City Council. Once expelled from the Labour Party the Militant Tendency took on the name of the Socialist Party but then had a number of splits and defections and made little political headway in the capitalist mainstream.

Now, after more than ten years of New Labour in power, these old-style Labourites smell an opportunity to re-establish themselves in the position Labour once occupied inside the working class. Their thinking is not hard to follow. New Labour has been a very useful instrument for the British ruling class in managing the consequences of Thatcherism. New Labour was forged by Blair and Brown, and their allies, on the assumption that the working class would always vote for them because they had no alternative, since for workers the Conservatives were even worse. Instead New Labour actively courted "middle England" and took on all the policies of Thatcher that appealed to the petty bourgeoisie (the "aspirational middle class" in their jargon). The welfare state would be cut and benefit fraudsters would be hunted, but child benefit would not be cut (since that is oh soooo useful for paying the childminder a pittance whilst both parents are earning decent salaries). In education, selection was brought back except that it wasn't by ability but by postcode. All the schools in middle class areas topped the league tables and thus had big waiting lists. Schools which took on the most difficult kids, expelled from everywhere else (some headed by Labour stalwarts like Chris Searle in Sheffield) were told they had failed and were shut down (some to be reopened as "academies" with private money from rich Christians dictating the curriculum). Similarly, pensioners (who are an increasing proportion of society and, most importantly, vote) got their non-means tested winter fuel allowances. With the economy floating on a wave of credit everyone in "middle England" as well as a large number of workers thought that they had never had it so good.

But once the sub-prime bubble burst in the US, once the exposure of the British banking system to this dodgy operation was revealed, then the bottom dropped out of the credit market and suddenly the future does not look quite so rosy. Actually, for most of the working class with below-inflation wage "rises" the future wasn't that rosy anyway. With fuel and food bills rising faster than flood water, money is very tight. The final straw was the abolition of the 10p income tax band which Brown had brought in only 2 years before. Announced twelve months ago, no-one seemed to notice that 5.3 million of the poorest households would suffer from this cut until just before the local elections this year. Suddenly £2.7 billions was found to be lying around in a jam jar on Alistair Darling's mantelpiece and all was well. Or was it? In fact, Brown has borrowed so heavily over the last few years that next year new attacks are inevitable. They might even print money and stoke up inflation thus devaluing the budget deficit (and thus our wages) but one thing is clear the working class will be under even more attack.

The Sorry Past of Social Democracy and Labour

And this is where our Trotskyists hope to come in. Already, as the Crewe and Nantwich by-election underlined, the Labour Party is already being deserted by its traditional working class support. At the moment these voters have nowhere to go except to parties which are equally as bad as Labour. The last attempt to form an electoral party on the left of the capitalist system was based on the rainbow coalition against the Iraq War. Galloway's ego and SWP manoeuvres were never going to be happy bedfellows and predictably it has now split. Step up the project for the "New Workers' Party".

To look at the proposed New Workers' Party is to see a re-run of history. As Marx said, if the first time was tragedy the second time is farce. The proposal for a New Workers' Party is to create a party based on the trades unions (some Trotskyist, or are they ex-Trotskyist?) union leaders like Mark Serwotka have given it their support. Its programme will look remarkably similar to the one written for the Labour Party in 1918 by Sydney and Beatrice Webb (who later went on to applaud Stalin's Russia as "A New Civilisation"). It won't (yet) have a Clause 4 calling for the nationalisation of the means of production, but the proposal is that it will call for the commanding heights of the economy to be put under public ownership. This is what the organisers understand as "socialism". The final assumption is that this "socialism" can be achieved by voting it in through a capitalist parliament. This is pure old Labour nostalgia. The sorry course of Labour in the twentieth century was no accident. It began badly as a trades union party and therefore was always more interested in doing a deal with the capitalists to give them a place at the rich man's table. It was never revolutionary, a fact underlined by the support of the majority of the Labour Party and the trades unions for British imperialism in two world wars. When the Russian Revolution came along to put an end to the First World War Labour sided with the Second International. Not content with siding with the nationalist butchery of the war, they now put themselves alongside the saviours of capitalism in Germany, Hungary and elsewhere. First amongst these was the German Social Democratic Party which had murdered the Spartakist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Keep this in mind because the other inspiration of our Socialist Party promoters of the "New Workers Party" is Trotsky who along with the decaying Third International was to call for a "united front" with these self-same butchers only three years later.

Trotsky's "French Turn"

Trotsky was a great revolutionary who made an enormous contribution to the victory of the Russian working class in 1917. However, after this he, like his Bolshevik comrades, was faced with an insoluble contradiction. If the international revolution did not come to the aid of the Russian working class what would happen to attempts to build socialism? History gave its answer - the very people who were the leaders of the revolutionary attempt of 1917 would end up managing a new form of capitalism. Trotsky was not too embarrassed by this and became the ultimate man of the state in ruthlessly leading the Red Army to victory in a civil war which cost 8 million lives. At the end of it he even advocated at one point the building of socialism through the militarisation of the labour force. But if Trotsky became a man of the state, Stalin was already the man of the Party. With his control of the party apparatus, which had now become the state, Trotsky was levered aside. Trotsky failed to link up with other oppositions or a wider working class base (and indeed frustrated his allies by conducting a fight almost solely within the corridors of power, i.e. playing Stalin's game). Eventually (in 1929), he was expelled from the Soviet Union but thousands of workers still looked to him. However, once again, when it came to making a choice between principled proletarian militants, such as our political ancestors in the International communist left, and immediate success, Trotsky took the latter road.1

The international communist left were trying to come to terms with the defeat of the Russian Revolution and the fact that the Third International had, after 1921, become no more than an agent of Soviet foreign policy within the imperialist set up. Trotsky, however, preferred to look immediately for a mass party, even though in the conditions of the 1930s this meant he would have to look towards the very Social Democrats who had strangled the international revolution at the end of the First World War. In 1934-5, Trotsky encouraged his followers to take the so-called "French turn" and enter the parties of the Second International. Marx in the Communist Manifesto in 1848 had memorably written that "the communists disdain to conceal their aims". Ninety years later this is precisely what Trotskyism rejected. This is not just a tactical question but a fundamental break with revolutionary Marxism. Socialism cannot come about except through the conscious activity of millions. It certainly cannot be achieved by manoeuvres and deceptions. But this is what "entryism" meant and the British Labour Party after the Second World War was full of Trotskyist entryist groups like The Socialist Labour League (later the Workers' Revolutionary Party), Militant, Workers' Liberty, Socialist Organiser, etc.). After the Socialist Labour League captured the Labour Party's Young Socialists and then departed in the 1960s the Militant Tendency was left as the largest entryist group inside Labour until it was expelled in the famous incident referred to above.

A Real Workers' Party Can Only Be International and Revolutionary

Now the successors to Militant in the Socialist Party are trying to re-form the old Labour Party from outside. In true Trotskyist fashion they put down the failure of Labour to represent working class interests as a failure of leadership. What they do not recognise is that any party which attempts to come to terms with capitalism (which means accepting the rules of the electoral game) will inevitably be drawn into a compromise with it. The historic lesson of the last century is that reformism is dead. We cannot abolish capitalism by piecemeal changes. There is no point, for example, nationalising the commanding heights of the British economy if the capitalist state remains intact. Nor can socialism be introduced piecemeal since the international capitalist class will have already withdrawn its capital. Today a globalised capitalism has to be faced with a world working class united in fighting to abolish the very laws by which capitalism governs our lives. We not only have to go beyond national frontiers but we must also abolish money as the medium of exchange. This is something that the trades unionist mentality of these old Labourites has not even thought of. They think that getting "a fair day's wage" is socialism (or at least a step towards it) when in fact to abolish exploitation we have to abolish the wages system itself. There is enough food to decently feed (i.e. over 2200 calories per person) the entire world today yet close to 1 in 6 of its population are starving. This can only be reversed by preventing the speculators, who are today pushing up the price of food, from using their financial muscle to distort the real economy. However, we cannot do this in a single country. The lesson of working class history is that the revolution, wherever it breaks out, has to spread to more than one country. It also has to take place in a context in which imperialist powers have enough internal problems of their own so that they cannot crush it by force. Ultimately, the revolution has to be world-wide and has to paralyse the mechanisms by which wealth is extorted from those that produce it. This is why we are part of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party. Although we are not yet the world party of the working class, we do intend to be part of the process of its formation. But such a party has to be genuinely revolutionary and has to have taken on all the lessons of the world's working class history so far. The perspective is a long one but it will be shortened if workers and revolutionaries ignore the sorry attempts to relive those mistakes as contained in the appeal of the likes of the "new workers' party".

Jock

(1) For more on this sad odyssey see our pamphlet Trotsky, Trotskyism, Trotskyists (£3 including postage from our London address) .

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