By Phil Brown
THE EMERGENCE of yet another grouping on the British left is more likely to be greeted with despair by workers and militants drawn towards revolutionary politics than by rejoicing. The last year or so has seen a further splintering of the Trotskyist groupings. Some comrades may be forgiven for exclaiming, ‘Oh no—not another!’ Why have all these splits occurred in this particular period?
In the metropolitan capitalist states, the last few years have seen the definitive passing of the long period of stabilisation which characterised the third quarter of the century. A series of dramatic events have signalled the ending of a whole period, and heralded the onset of a new phase marked by serious and prolonged capitalist crisis. (The triumph of the Vietnamese national liberation movement has heralded the decline of American imperialism and toppled the US from its position of unchallengeable supremacy).
As the gendarme of imperialist order, US money and military aid had everywhere installed or propped up reactionary regimes. In Spain and Portugal, Greece and throughout Latin America, military and semi-fascist regimes lent on the working class and the rural masses. In South Africa, the southern quarter of the continent seemed an impregnable barrier for racialist barbarism. In the Middle East, the forces of expansionist Zionism had defeated all but the heroic guerilla fighters of the Palestinian people. Within a few years, all of these pillars of reaction have suffered severe shocks from the anti-imperialist movement and from the re-emergence of the basic internal contradictions of world capitalism.
For the first time in decades, the anti-imperialist struggle and the working class struggle have come together in the crisis of Portuguese colonialism. This holds profound consequences for both southern Africa and for Europe.
British capitalism, senile and bearing the accumulated weight of 50 years of decline, acted after 1945 as a servant to US imperialism. With the crisis of its master and the increasingly violent competitive war for world markets, the British ruling class is forced into ever-sharper attacks on the conditions and organisation build up by the trade union movement since the last war. The miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, the latter unseating the Tory government, heralded a period of acute class struggle not witnessed since the 1920s. The Irish national movement, dormant since that period, has broken into armed conflict that has reached the proportions of open war.
In these circumstances, revolutionaries, their politics and their tactics, are put to the test with increasing sharpness—a test which is showing the fundamental weaknesses of all the major tendencies of British Trotskyism. What are these weaknesses?
Firstly, Economism—the under-estimation of the conscious ideological struggle and the consequent belief that the working class will spontaneously evolve the strategy necessary to take power. This tendency develops a basically social democratic split between propaganda (socialism) and agitation (trade union and economic struggles). It, of course, sincerely believes that the bread and butter issues will evolve into the struggle for socialism. All these ‘revolutionaries’ have to do is to give a bit of organisational encouragement to this trend and generalise it.
This tendency rejects the Leninist and Trotskyist conception of the Party as built around a strategic transitional programme which means an active fight to transform the ‘actual struggles’—the day to day trade union routine—into a conscious and coherent offensive against capitalism.
Such a programme does this, not on the basis of voluntarism, nor because it would be nice for revolutionaries. The transitional programme depends on the objective need for transitional struggles as the only answer to a capitalism greedy to restore itself on the crushed back of a prostrate working class. The choice is increasingly stark: either the goals and methods of the trade union struggle as we have known them for 30 years are consciously transformed, or the gains of that period—wages, conditions, social services—will be lost.
Either new organs of struggle are forged—a national rank and file movement, combine committees, councils of action—and old ones transformed—the union branch, shop steward committees, trades councils—or the trade unions will suffer decline and perhaps destruction. Since 1969, the British ruling class has set as its task the drastic weakening of the trade unions and particularly the shop stewards’ organisation.
But the very size and strength of the trade unions breeds a certain complacency and inertia. This affects trade union militants as well as revolutionaries.
The IS group and Tony Cliff probably encapsulate the economist tendency in its purest form. But many ‘orthodox’ Trotskyists have turned the transitional programme into a barren and inoperative totem—they act in practice no differently to the Cliffites.
A further danger running parallel to the accommodation to pure trade union consciousness, is accommodation to parliamentary reformism. Though the latter is very much a junior partner to trade unionism, it may prove more attractive to Trotskyists who (mistakenly) recoil from the apolitical nature of trade union routinism. The logistics of accommodating to parliamentary reformism are far more manageable. Trotskyists have always been able to take over its youth movements and hold their own alongside the Tribunite left reformists and assorted CP fellow-travellers.
The danger is that the Labour Party is seen as the battle ground for the soul of the British working class, and that in this battle, revolutionaries simply amalgamate with the left against the right. From this, all kinds of follies arise: ‘Make the left MPs fight’, ‘Kick out Wilson’, ‘Labour to power on a socialist programme’. Talk of a ‘class struggle, proletarian tendency’ being forged in unity with Tribune is sometimes heard.
All these slogans and positions sow criminal illusions in the left fakers, Tribunites and Benn-type mavericks. Of course, their authors think they will expose the left of the Labour Party and thus social democracy. But the great exposure never seems to come off. Meanwhile, any honest Labour Party worker who is not in on the secret takes these slogans seriously.
All these positions, whether whispered in the Labour Party by entryists, or shrieked from outside by hysterical sectarians, point in the wrong direction—away from transforming direct industrial action into direct political action. Of course, it is necessary to challenge the Labour Party—to expose it—and to put demands on it. But these demands must be put by real forces, forces capable of doing the job themselves when the reformist politicians, left as well as right, slink into the background, failing to live up to their promises or openly betray the class.
Tailoring one’s politics either to the spontaneous issues of the factory floor, or to the left/right battles of a reformist party, are both forms of adaptation.
Two further possible reactions are abstract propagandist sectarianism—sorting out theory in small colonies of intellectuals—or total absorption in a broad movement such as the women’s movement or the narrower circles of Irish or anti-fascist work. These reactions are possible because of the philistinism and concessions to national and male chauvinism of the large groups.
How does Workers Power—a very small grouping—intend to avoid these pitfalls and offer a positive alternative?
The task we see as central is the raising of transitional politics in every major workers’ struggle. This implies a fight to maintain a central orientation towards the fighting organs of the class—the trade unions. We will raise in the trade unions a transitional programme which outlines a workers’ answer to he crisis. To avoid fetishising this programme, we realise that particular demands have to be raised agitationally and translated or explained in the clearest possible terms.
This is not to underestimate the importance of the programme as a whole, though here we must observe that the 1938 document, its demands and its basic method, need to be reapplied to the new imperialist crisis of the late 1970s.
This is not a national task alone. That would be to turn Trotsky’s international programme into the property of a national sect. The re-elaboration of the Transitional Programme is a central part of the struggle to recreate a new International based on the method of Lenin’s Comintern and Trotsky’s Fourth International.
We recognise that on the Trotskyist left today there is a multiplicity of tendencies. We do not believe that any group can have a monopoly of theoretical correctness and orientation. We believe the task facing us is one of regroupment around a clear programme—a clear strategy and precise tactics.
We are not in favour, however, of an amorphous political swamp where a thousand schools of thought vie with each other. We see as crucial to revolutionary regroupment a number of basic positions:
Internationalism
As Ireland and racialism are the acid test for British revolutionaries, Portugal tests the strategy of all national and international Trotskyist groupings in the sharpest way. It lays the basis for international regroupment and the fight to recreate a democratic centralist International on a redeveloped programme.
The trade unions
The Labour Party
The Labour Party is a capitalist party with mass support from workers. It is not a two class party, nor are its left reformists a proletarian tendency. It can neither be ignored syndicalist fashion, nor transformed into a revolutionary party. Entry work must be a tactic. It must not become a strategy or central orientation as it can never end with the Labour Party seizing power for the workers. An entry tactic is a matter for concrete assessment which takes into account, firstly, the Labour Party’s current relationship to the class and mass struggles, and, secondly, the size and influence of revolutionary groupings. No programmatic concessions can be made to this tactic. The central task of the coming period is the building of an independent revolutionary party.
The united front
In the women’s movement for example, active support for all equal rights demands and against legal disabilities and restrictions (equal pay and abortion).
But we recognise that the social enslavement of women can be tackled at root only by the struggle against capitalism. Nevertheless, women’s struggles to overcome oppression must not wait until the revolution. They must become an integrated part of the struggle for socialism. Emancipation of women will be won only when women fight and lead this fight.
Resolute criticism and struggle must be carried out against petty bourgeois feminism, radical or socialist. There must be a central orientation towards working class women who suffer both oppression as women and often super-exploitation as women workers.
The nucleus of the British revolutionary party does not exist in any of the large revolutionary organisations. Our experience has convinced us that IS, the largest group, cannot build that party. Those who have broken, or are breaking with, the dead ends represented by the leaderships of the major tendencies (compromised as they are by economism, sectarianism and opportunism) must make a serious attempt to develop an alternative strategy capable of building the party on firm foundations.
To such a task, we dedicate our small resources. We welcome into our ranks comrades with a similar perspective. We shall fuse our organisation with any grouping sharing the same fundamental political principles.
