The question of standing parliamentary candidates has posed itself to the revolutionary Left in Britain in the last six months. The sectarian drive of the International Socialists and the confused support for ‘class struggle’ candidates by the IMG makes it vital that revolutionaries are clear on the question.
The IS see the standing of Socialist Worker candidates in the by-elections and the General Election as central to their perspective of building the Socialist Workers’ Party. Jimmy McCallum, their Walsall candidate, made it quite plain that they see standing candidates as a method of building their own organisation. As a result the IS have a deplorable record of sectarianism towards the rest of the left. On a minimal militant platform they have refused to even discuss joint candidates with those on the left, such as the IMG, who would be prepared to campaign for minimal militant candidates. With no consideration as to their actual base in the class they refused pig-headedly to drop their claims to be the only alternative. With a minimum programme they pose as the nucleus of the revolutionary party.
The IMG has given uncritical support to the IS candidates. In Walsall they produced a leaflet supporting McCallum in the name of real socialist policies. The required policies they outlined (which did not include Labour Movement support for black self-defense, or Troops out of Ireland and Now) were not the policies of McCallum, but the IMG did not even point this out. Such support, and the attempt to stand a united candidate in the Stechford by-election, is given in the guise of supporting ‘class struggle’ candidates. The IMG will give their support to ‘class struggle candidates’ where they stand in opposition to the policies of the Labour Government.
The problem is not simply a British one, nor is it purely a problem of election tactics. In Italy, revolutionaries have participated in the Democrazia Proletaria election campaign with a united but centrist programme. In Portugal the left attempted such a unity within the F.U.R.. The question of standing candidates also poses then the question of the political basis for unity and co-operation on the left.
Parliamentary elections are an important forum for revolutionaries to make propaganda. Obviously the most direct, clear way to do so is via a revolutionary candidate standing on a manifesto directly reflecting the programme of the party as applied to a particular time and situation. The question of ‘doing well’ or getting a ‘respectable’ vote is not the decisive factor in determining whether a group stands a candidate or not, but whether a parliamentary candidacy is the best means of putting over revolutionary politics. Those who think that a tactic of critical support for the mass reformist party rules this out until a revolutionary party exists on a mass scale, are wretched opportunists.
However, communists always argue their full programme i.e. point out through the actual immediate and partial needs and struggles the road to working class political power. Obviously, this necessitates focussing on the key problems facing the class, but it does not mean diluting the programme to what workers will accept at any given moment.
As long as revolutionary communists remain a tiny minority compared to the mass reformist parties, they are obliged to use a tactic which is a variant of the united front. Though the social democratic and stalinist parties are in essence bourgeois in programme and policy, their mass working class base and their ‘socialist’ political disguise make it possible and necessary, generally speaking, for revolutionaries to give them critical support during elections against the open bourgeois parties. The criticism of the reformists is not simply an ‘exposure’ of their crimes and betrayals, but contains the programme of immediate and transitional demands communists argue are objectively necessary to meet the needs of the class. These are focussed as demands on the reformist party, not passively, but as the simultaneous objects of mass direct action, struggles.
Thus, such a programme is not disguised as a ‘reasonable’ series of measures to be carried through by normal parliamentary means – so-called ‘socialist policies’ – in the belief that when this strategy fails, the reformists and the nature of the capitalist state will be exposed. That then the disabused and indignant masses will turn sharp left onto the road of revolution, picking up the waiting revolutionary leadership en route.
The positions of the ‘Anti-Pabloite’ groups, the WRP and the WSL fall into this error. ‘Labour to Power on a Socialist Programme’ sows more illusions that it exposes. It strengthens parliamentary illusions by disguising the revolutionary programme as a series of normal governmental measures, as an alternative set of policies which a Labour Government might carry out. The question of direct mass struggle for these goals is obscured or postponed until after the Labour Government refuses to adopt or fails to carry out these measures. The term ‘socialist policies’ also opportunistically blurs revolutionary measures and reformist ones being inevitably ‘understood’ in a reformist sense by workers under reformist leadership.
Critical support means making absolutely clear the communist appraisal of the treacherous role of not only the right, but even more importantly, the left reformists, challenging them to make good their rhetorical promises certainly, but not painting them in socialist colours to encourage them to go a little further. In their different ways, the policies of both the WSL, (‘Force Healey/Callaghan to resign’) and the IMG (class-struggle Labour candidates) fall into precisely this trap.
Critical support is a tactic for fighting not accommodating to reformism. It remains in Lenin’s dramatic phrase: ‘a rope for hanging’.
However, revolutionary communists cannot tie themselves passively to the tail of the mass reformist parties until the day the ‘great exposure’ dawns. They must intervene to actively intervene in the process. When sections of workers break with the major reformist party it is not our task, as the Militant Tendency, the Chartists and, increasingly, the I-CL, see it, to plead with these workers to return to the fold to ‘fight the right wing’ or ‘fight reformism’.
In certain circumstances revolutionaries ought to critically support non-revolutionary candidates (left centrist, left reformist organisations or non-party militants from particular struggles, e.g. black self-defence) against the candidates of the mass reformist parties. In none of these cases do we support the programme put forward. We criticise its every inadequacy, whether of inclusion or exclusion. What determines our support is not rightness of the programme, but the opposition to the pro-bourgeois policies of the Social Democrats and the support that this will attract from workers breaking away from allegiance to the reformist party. Our criticism is, as before, an exposition of our programme and a criticism of their’s. The tactic of critical support is, therefore, a method of fighting left-centrism and left-reformism. It is applicable only when such candidates are at least potentially related to important sections of workers and other strata and is a matter of concrete assessment.
A trial of Labour
As a result of such a concrete assessment, Workers Power took the position that it was correct to support the Socialist Worker candidates in Walsall and Newcastle. Why was this.
The by-elections were a national focus and trial of the Labour Government anti-working class policies at a particularly sharp period of economic/political crisis, and coming at the end of a summer of mounting racist hysteria.
The militant TU/militant, anti-racist elements of the IS programme was likely to draw the support, both as active campaigners, election audiences and voters, of black workers and rank and file militants disillusioned with Labour’s racist and anti-working class policies.
Within this milieu it was vital to fight the centrist rubbish of IS’ policies and programme, which are reformist in essence and no operative alternative to the LP. This supporting the SW candidates militancy and anti-racism and mercilessly criticising inadequacies both on these issues and on their lack of a real strategy capable of challenging reformism.
The Left’s attitude to candidates
Our position was in sharp contrast to that of the IMG who dubbed McCallum the Socialist Worker candidate a ‘class struggle candidate’ and made no criticism of him. It was also different from that of the I-CL who remained oblivious to the possibility of sections of militants looking towards candidates like McCallum. We oppose the IMG’s “projection” of ‘class struggle tendencies’, particularly confusing left reformist politician s and trade union bureaucrats with workers in struggle and attempting to stitch together left reformist or centrist programmes for them. Equally we oppose the total fixation of the I-CL with the tactic of critical support for the Labour Party.
A separate question is that of joint candidates from revolutionary groups. In our view such candidacies are possible and desirable only as part of the process of re-groupment around programmatic agreement. However, agreement to stand candidates on the basis of solely immediate or minimal demands obscures the main aim of communists at all times. We reject the notion of revolutionaries standing as ‘class struggle candidates’ i.e. revolutionaries constructing a programme that supposedly expresses the immediate needs of the class struggle as distinct from the plans and programmes of the reformists and collaborators. In practice this means revolutionaries posing as centrists. The IMG have made it clear that they have no preconception of a programme for a joint candidate in Stechford, they certainly will not insist on the candidate standing on their programme. The ‘Revolutionaries’ of the IMG see their aim as being to help articulate centrist currents being expressed in the working class movement in response to the capitalist crisis and the Labour Government’s attacks.
Workers Power’s position may be summed up as follows. We give critical support to Labour, putting demands on it in normal circumstances i.e. when the Labour Party is ruling for the bourgeoisie by persuading the workers it is ruling in their interests. Revolutionaries cannot support Labour ‘in all circumstances’, however electoral opposition to them would be necessary where a Labour Government called an election to carry on anti-working class measure against mass action by organised workers. Support for a centrist or left reformist candidate against Labour is also possible at certain critical conjunctures. This is necessary where such a candidacy acts as a rallying point for opposing anti-working class Labour Government policies. But it is principled only on the condition of the sharpest and most honest criticism of the candidate’s inadequacies.
Workers Power is prepared to discuss the question of joint revolutionary candidates within the context of the programmatic agreement – i.e. within the context of the unification of revolutionary forces around programmatic agreement.
