What should be the position of revolutionary communists in the coming general election? The Labour Government since 1974 has performed an inestimable service for the bosses. From 1974 to 1975 under a smokescreen of left rhetoric, with promises to bring about ‘a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families’, it demobilised the movement which had freed the Pentonville Five and won the miners claim. In its first year of office Labour handed out a number of half-hearted reforms, plus the unavoidable repeal of the detested Industrial Relations Act, vociferously proclaiming an end to incomes policy, and preparing the enormous diversion of the ‘Great Debate’ on EEC withdrawal.
The strike movement of 1971–1974, though reaching levels of militancy unseen since 1926, remained under the leadership of the militants of the left-wing of the LP and CP at a rank and file level and nationally — though putting enormous pressure on them — under the leadership of the TU ‘lefts’. This leadership was unable to see beyond the limited reforms, the wages rises (both to prove totally transitory gains) to the real crisis of British capitalism and the inevitable return to the attack on the part of the bosses that this would necessitate. Worse, they led working class activists into the chauvinist campaign around EEC withdrawal, including a sense of defeat on the more class conscious elements after involving them in one side of a battle between sectors of the ruling class.
When after ’75, rampant inflation, mounting unemployment, the crash of giant firms in the car industry, and the propaganda machine of the bosses media drove home to every working class home the imminence of the most serious capitalist crisis since the 30s, the militants had neither leadership nor perspective to resist the Government’s sharp turn to wage freeze, unchecked unemployment, drastic cuts in social services. The fair-weather reform programmes of the TUC, the Labour lefts, and the CP were dropped by the Government like hot potatoes. The TUC, with taunts from the Labour Government to put up or shut up, dropped its own proposals one by one. So too after a decent interval did the lefts in the TUs. Deserted by the Scanlons and Jones, the Heffers and Mikardos fell silent in their turn.
The lefts were unable to suggest a programme to deal with real capitalist crisis — when capitalism could not afford reforms and demanded sacrifices to ‘save the national economy’ — because any such programme would have to be based on (1) solving the crisis at the expense of the bosses by expropriating the big monopolies without compensation, and (2) mobilising the direct action of the millions of trade unionists against the inevitable ‘direct action’ of the bosses, whose army and bureaucracy would take to smash such a solution.
Neither the trade union bureaucrat nor the parliamentary cretin dared envisage such a prospect. However the exigencies of a period of crises did not allow these gentlemen to remain silent for long. They were forced to speak out and act on the side of the Government’s attacks on the working class. Foot stomped the union conferences pleading for wage restraint. Benn engineered in a particularly treacherous way the defeat of the miners and Bidwell appears as the architect of the racist Select Committee Report on Immigration.
In 1976 and 1977 spontaneous movements of resistance to the cuts in real wages erupted but the almost complete opposition of the bureaucracy at all levels isolated and fragmented the struggles. In the wake of the defeats at Grunwick, the Miners, the Firemen and in Leyland, a definite retreat is born witness to by the low strike figures for the first three months of 1978 and the debacle for the Broad Left in the AUEW elections.
The CP, dependent on the Labour and TU lefts for its strategy of a peaceful parliamentary road to socialism, has to fall in one step to the left of the Government–TUC–Labour and TU left bloc. Its leading industrial figures like Derek Robinson prove themselves adept agents in class collaboration and betrayal as the Speke events show. It cannot mobilise the rank and file (as it helped to do in 1971–72) via the LCDTU in a situation which would bring the whole wrath of the bureaucrats on its head.
The SWP(IS)
The SWP is incapable of appreciating the depth of British capitalism’s crisis or the effects this has on the class struggle. High profit levels mean for them that there is money in the kitty to be won by militant trade unionism — outside of this framework they fall into tearful protest and moralising about the evil nature of capitalism. Faced with the continued adhesion of the class to Labourism they search desperately for one stunt after another to make themselves a ‘credible alternative’ to Labour. They are incapable of going beyond the average militant’s loathing of the union bureaucrats, petty privileges and constant betrayals. Above all they can offer no programme for tackling the political issues which are inextricably linked up with the economic struggle and which, if not consciously addressed by a fighting strategy, will trip up and confuse the most ‘militant’ shop steward.
This kind of centrism is strong on left rhetoric and on occasional courageous acts of militancy, but faced with a serious situation it falls into the farcical slogan ‘A vote for Bogues means Rees Must Go!’ It is no accident that the SWP falls into electoral cretinism at the same time as taking fright at the isolation its street fighting tactics brought it; it imitates the CP strategy on dealing with fascism (the ANL).
The IMG and Socialist Unity
The IMG/Socialist Challenge/Socialist Unity hopelessly muddles up the method of fighting for a united front with reformist workers and their leaders — a united front that would, if achieved in the present period, be limited to a few immediate issues, with the presentation of a focussed transitional programme as a strategic alternative to reformism. As a result it achieves neither objective. The IMG’s position on elections hovers uneasily between the consistent reformism of the CPs — a left government with Communist MPs to start the slow business of legislating towards socialism — and the communist position of using the election forum for presenting the essentials of a revolutionary programme addressed to the burning issues facing the working class. Instead a programme which will be acceptable to workers, blacks, women, squatters, ecologists etc. is floated, in order to bring into being a ‘class struggle left wing’. A third element causing further confusion is that ‘Socialist Unity’ is a central element in founding a ‘united revolutionary organisation’. Thus its platform is too diffuse for a united front, and is devised not for common action with reformists but for common propaganda. It is totally inadequate as a revolutionary action programme to meet the needs of the crisis and it is totally inadequate as a ‘step’, let alone a basis for a revolutionary organisation.
Thus while Socialist Unity calls itself a coalition of ‘far left’ or ‘marxist’ organisations, its mass electoral propaganda limits itself to immediate demands. Hilda Kean, the most ‘successful’ candidate so far, can put out a leaflet for the October 20th by-election in Spitalfields which limited itself to opposing Healey’s 10% limit on wages, making wages ‘inflation-proof’, more homes, schools and hospitals, nationalisation of firms declaring redundancies and reduce the working week, freeze all prices and rents, ‘full rights and liberation for women’, ‘no platform for the National Front’ and full support for black self-defence, withdrawal of British troops from Ireland, down with racist regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia and an end to all Britain’s military alliances — and lastly a clause that deserves to be quoted at length:
‘Make the resources available for this programme by ending all compensation payments to the old owners of the nationalised industries. Stop all interest payments to the banks and money lenders, as the first step towards the nationalisation of the finance houses.’
This programme is referred to as a ‘socialist solution’ to be gained by ‘mass action’. An Islington Socialist Unity leaflet for the 4th May local elections again limits itself to calling for nationalising firms that declare redundancies and nationalising the banks and finance houses. In Waltham Forest we find that Socialist Unity does not ‘have any great faith in Parliament’ (sic) and ‘believes in changing the system’ — the problem is that ‘the wealth is in the wrong hands!’
Let us be clear. These platforms are not the basic planks of a revolutionary programme; they are reforms and are presented in a reformist manner. Nowhere are the direct action tactics necessary to fight for these reforms — the solidarity strike, mass picket, workers defence squads, factory occupations — even mentioned. Indeed this is not even a radical reformist platform in that the scope of expropriation is expressly limited to failed capitalist enterprises and the banks — both of which measures would leave capitalism intact. What is more, these measures are posed within the rubric ‘The Resources are there to meet our needs’, ie the cash will thus be released to pay for the above reforms. Disguised ‘transitional demands’ such as the ‘inflation proofing’ of wages, benefits and pensions are robbed of the vital element of working class direct action and workers inspection and control (the working class cost of living index and the committees of trade unionists and housewives).
In the last analysis what makes this a reformist programme is that nowhere is the question of the nature of the capitalist state’s resistance to these demands even hinted at. Nowhere is it even posed that a mass working class movement would have to create a workers government, backed up by a workers militia and workers councils. Instead a further ‘Labour Government’ is presented as ‘the alternative’. No demands are put on this Government to break with the bosses. Instead it is simply stated that the struggle must go on. That this reformist hodge podge should be the first serious electoral project of the ‘British Section of the Fourth International’ should convince any doubters that the IMG stands on the terrain of the left centrist opponents of the founder of the FI. This programme has as little to do with Trotskyism as it has to do with being an action programme capable of meeting the urgent needs of the working class.
The anti-Pabloites and the Lib-Lab government
The ‘anti-Pabloites’ focus their attention centrally on the pact with the Liberals, putting the breaking of this as the first task facing workers. Here they start from a false premise. The Lib-Lab pact is not the main axis of the Labourites’ class collaboration in the present period. This lies in the TUC–Govt Social Contract with the CBI/Tories on wage controls, cuts in public spending, repression in Ireland, building up the apparatus of repression at home, etc. The Lib-Lab pact is only one of a series of parliamentary blocs (with the Northern Ireland Unionists, with the Welsh and Scots Nationalists). It has not involved major concessions by the LP — it has not even used the Liberals as an excuse for dropping important reforms. Its major excuse — one abetted by the whole TUC — is the seriousness of the ‘national crisis’. The bloc is not a coalition with the Liberals: it has no governmental aspects beyond ‘consultations’, there is no common legislative programme, no intention of standing on a common electoral programme or of supporting one another’s candidates.
This explains the almost complete indifference to the Pact in the ranks of the LP. We are of course in favour of breaking it, but we are also in favour of the LP breaking from the whole gamut of its anti-working class policies — and to single out in isolation the Lib-Lab Pact is to suggest that breaking it is the key step in ‘breaking with the bourgeoisie’. The hopeless insubstantiality of this position is testified to negatively by the positions of the WRP, WSL and Sparticists. In the WRP’s case the Pact is turned (by the alchemy of Healyite ‘dialectics’) into the Lib-Lab Government and singled out for being brought down by a General Strike or ‘forced to resign’ by some other means, and replaced by a Labour Govt. pledged to socialist policies. Apart from the reformist implications carried by the suggestion that a Labour Govt could carry out ‘socialist policies’ or a ‘socialist programme’, this position relates neither to the objective situation nor to the tasks facing the working class. It downgrades the struggle against Labourite class collaborations on wages, cuts, unemployment, state repression in Britain and Ireland, racist immigration laws, etc — before and after a general election, with a Labour overall majority in parliament or without it. It identifies the Liberals as the source of Labour’s betrayals rather than the liberalism of the Labour and TU leaders.
Nor does it relate to the existing identification of the working class both electorally and through the TUs with the Labour Govt. All the WRP’s journalistic hot air about the ‘seething hatred of the masses for the Lib-Lab Govt’ notwithstanding, the great bulk of workers (when not directly in strike against the Govt) see it as a lesser evil than the Tories, as a protection against the attacks they experienced under Heath and which they can expect under Thatcher. Revolutionaries have to explain that the Labour Govt is not merely a weak protection against the Tories but an active aider and abetter of them; that its, and the TUC’s attacks on wages, conditions and jobs demoralise and weaken the unity and fighting strength of the class, driving the least class conscious into voting Tory or NF, destroying the faith of the great bulk of organised workers in the effectiveness of trade unions or direct action, and isolating and victimising the militants.
Revolutionaries need to state the full truth to the class — every struggle against these policies of the Lab/TU leaders ‘threatens the Labour Govt’ because the Labour Govt pledges its existence to attacking the working class. To place as a condition on any serious struggle that it should not threaten the Labour Govt is to announce in advance that you are not serious about winning, that you will give in to Govt blackmail. The only correct position is to say ‘no holding back to preserve the anti-working class Labour Govt’, and ‘if the Govt chooses to fall in defence of the bosses then that is its responsibility not ours’. Equally incorrect is WRP’s ‘bring down the Labour Govt’ and the IMG’s ‘the best way to preserve the Labour Govt is to struggle against it’. Both fail to challenge the crippling hold the ‘preserve labour’ argument exerts in every serious struggle.
The WSL falls into the same trap of calling the Pact a government and seeing this ‘reactionary alliance’ as the source of all the ills suffered by the working class at its hands. (It is a reactionary alliance, but it is also an alliance between reactionaries — and in no way would Rees, Callaghan, Foot and Benn be one whit the less reactionary if they stopped meeting Steel and Pardoe once a month.) The WSL talk vaguely about breaking the coalition by ‘working class action’. This slogan is closely allied with an older piece of Healyite ‘orthodoxy’ — the demand to make the ‘Left MP’s fight’ (or lefts as the WSL put it). Here the ‘left’ MPs are singled out by the WSL for having demands put on them; i.e. the Labour Govt or Party as a whole is not the principal object of these demands. The implication is that the masses have and can have no illusions in the Callaghan–Healy leadership, but that the ‘lefts’ — Wise and Skinner, Heffer and Mikado — represent the focus of their illusions.
The WSL argue that the exposure of the ‘lefts’ is a crucial stage in achieving a breakthrough to revolutionary politics and that this is the present stage that must be addressed. Now whilst it is true that revolutionaries must constantly expose these ‘lefts’ and that in periods of mass struggle they become particularly dangerous, the above position suggests that these ‘lefts’ must be first installed as leaders of the LP and form a government where they will expose themselves in action — and then the masses will turn to the revolutionary alternative. In effect this becomes not a challenge to but an endorsement of the belief that the crucial dividing line in the Labour movement is between left and right wing reformists. The method of demanding that reformist leaders fight to defend workers’ vital needs must be applied concretely to those ‘misleaders’ who are standing at the head of the forces of struggle in any given situation, and it must be specific about what demands and what methods of struggle should be employed. Above all it must include the element of mobilising independently those forces that can resist a betrayal by the leaders. In the present period, when the left MPs have identified themselves almost totally with Callaghan & Co., the blanket demand for them to fight falls into all these traps.
The Spartacists see the crucial feature of the present situation as the Lib-Lab pact. They term it a ‘Popular Front’ and identify the crucial weapon for breaking it as ‘conditional abstention’ from a Labour vote. Anything less than this they identify as endorsing the popular front. This argument adds nothing to the WRP position and is wrong for the same reasons. The Labour Govt now and the LP that will stand in the coming general election stand on a pro-bourgeois programme. In no sense can ‘critical support for Labour’ be interpreted as support for this programme; what is central about this support is that the LP is based on the organised working class, i.e. it is a bourgeois workers party. If such a party forms an electoral alliance involving a common programme, support for each other’s candidates, a voting bloc in parliament and possibly a joint government (sharing of ministries) then it can be legitimately described as a Popular Front.
We specifically condemn a Popular Front because it is from the beginning limited to pro-bourgeois policies — i.e. it has formed an alliance against the demands and pressure of its own supporters and involved them in supporting an open government of the bourgeoisie. The first demand we make of a ‘workers party’ or parties in this situation is that it breaks with its bourgeois partner and attempts to carry out specified pro-working class demands. In essentials this position is the same as that of a minority Labour Govt which restricts itself to carrying out measures that bourgeois parties will agree to (anti-working class measures and reforms that do not challenge capitalism). This was the Comintern’s position with regard to the MacDonald Govt of 1924 and Trotsky’s position with regard to the Popular Front of 1936. In the latter case Trotsky opposed the slogan ‘Down with the Popular Front’.
The question of voting is another matter. The Spartacists maintain that it is a principle to abstain from voting for a worker’s party in alliance with a bourgeois party. This is clearly nonsense. It is a principle not to vote for a bourgeois party and therefore a principle not to vote for bourgeois candidates on a Popular Front slate. Therefore whatever alliance was struck between Labour and the Liberals — no vote for a Liberal; in France — no vote for a Radical, etc. Since a critical vote for a ‘workers party’ cannot be interpreted as support for its policies, no more can support for a workers party in a popular front be interpreted as support for the policy of a popular front. In fact the Spartacist position is a sectarian yearning for a boycott. Lenin made it clear time and time again that a boycott is defensible only in a period when the working class is directly faced with the possibility of seizing power, i.e. by the task of the armed insurrection.
That this is the drift of Spartacist politics is underlined by their fallback position that the Social Contract itself makes the Labour Govt a popular front. Their whole method — sectarian in form — contains a right wing revisionist kernel: that critical support is predicated on a Labour Govt not carrying out pro-bourgeois policies, i.e. that critical support is in some sense support for certain policies of a Labour Govt. We might ask the Spartacists what these policies would be? Are they simply Labour’s programme minus the Social Contract and the Lib-Lab Pact? This is powerfully implied by the fact that they are prepared to relax ‘conditional non-support’ in favour of Labourite opponents of the Lib-Lab Pact who take their opposition as far as a refusal to vote for the Govt until the Pact is broken. Or would Labour have to positively adopt the programme of a Workers Government? But there the Spartacists run full tilt into another of their sectarian opportunist revisions of the transitional programme: that the workers government is merely a ‘popular expression’ for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
How could they demand of a Social-Democratic Govt that it institute the latter? At the end of this road stands the hideous spectre of the ‘Militant’ (GB) with their Enabling Act.
Thus the anti-Pabloites come full circle to a position of posing as an alternative leadership to the right-wing Labourites — the ‘lefts’.
This farrago of confusion from the ‘anti-Pabloites’ can on reflection be seen for what it is: opportunism with a sectarian face. Under the fearful grimaces and contortions of sectarian tactics — ‘Bring down the Lib-Lab Govt’, ‘conditional non-support for Labour’ — and under the pugnacious cries for general strikes and boycotts, the left Labourites (either the hypothetical ones who have been made to fight in the case of the WRP/WSL, or the totally imaginary ones who vote against the Popular Front in the case of the Spartacists) are advanced as the next ‘alternative leadership’ for exposure. This fossilised schema-mongering bears as much relationship to a concrete analysis of a concrete situation and the deployment of tactics as the USFI’s projections based on ‘new mass vanguards’ and ‘class struggle tendencies’. It has the added disadvantage that its permanent refutation by reality drives its exponents wild with rage.
Workers Action and the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory
Workers Power has broad agreement with the project of the supporters of the paper Workers Action (WA) on the necessity to mount a campaign against the anti-working class record of the Labour Government and for a Labour victory over the Tories. We consider the draft programme carried in WA No 105 represents a principled alternative to the reformist mish mash of Socialist Unity and the SWP. The overwhelming number of working class militants will vote Labour to ‘Keep out the Tories’ and defend the class against the ferocious attacks the latter will launch on the unions, on immigrants, on democratic rights etc. They will not vote Labour as an endorsement of its reactionary policies on wages, cuts, Ireland, immigration etc. Therefore it is correct for revolutionaries to raise a fighting programme around which active opposition to these policies can be built in the event of a Labour victory, and to minimise the demoralisation which a Labour defeat will bring.
However we have serious criticisms of both the programme carried in WA and the rationale the paper puts forward for the campaign. In our view the programme lacks sharpness on the question of what action working class organisations should take against the treacherous policies of the Labour Government. It states ‘no more wage curbs’ but it does not call for an end to the TUC/Govt wage ceilings and for full support for all workers like the firemen who go for claims which break these norms. This will be central in the coming months as the Government and the bankers try to force the unions into a real wage cutting 6% limit. The direct action element is missing from the demand that ‘wage increases should at the very least keep up with price increases’. Presumably the WA comrades believe that the only way this can be fought for as a class-wide unifying element is around the struggle for a rising scale of wages linked to a working class cost of living index calculated and fought for by shop stewards committees drawing in working class women, trade unionists and housewives. This vital element of mobilisation for struggle, of direct action, is thus missing.
Likewise, to concentrate on the 35-hour week on unemployment (as the Socialist Challenge Industrial Conference also does) is extremely dangerous at the moment when the TU leaders are offering to trade reductions in the working day for a wage ceiling. Again the ‘direct action’ element involved in a shop steward controlled sliding scale of hours is missing. The section relating to cuts, correct as far as it goes, does not raise the demand to force Labour Councils to refuse to implement the cuts, and for Labour MPs to vote against them in parliament.
The question of the maintenance of a Labour Government is not faced squarely. Whilst we should defend the Labour Government against Tory attacks we should be clear that time and time again it has chosen to stand or fall on carrying through its anti-working class measures. In these instances we are neither in favour of unions holding back on wage claims to preserve it, nor are we in favour of Labour councillors or MPs voting for these measures. We are in favour of them voting against even where Callaghan and Co. choose to make these issues of confidence.
WA rightly points to the failure of the Tribunite left in the Labour Party and the TU lefts to lead a fight. But the crux of their failure is not just the bankruptcy of measures which take the economic and political integrity of capitalism as sacrosanct, but their insistence on sinking their differences to keep Labour in at all costs. No campaign of resistance can duck this issue.
Lastly, if the programme lacks this sharpness as a basis for mobilising the grass roots of the LP and the TUs against the Labour Government and the TU bureaucrats, it also fails to pose the question of building a movement capable of either forming an alternative leadership which can launch the offensive to ‘raze the capitalist system down to its foundations’ and establish a socialist planned economy. The latter is posed as a distant maximum programme. The WA comrades are obviously confused about whether they are attempting to build a united front with reformist workers who wish to fight over limited immediate issues, or whether they are trying to build a revolutionary current in the Labour Party around a fighting action programme for working class power as the only solution to the present period of capitalist crisis. For these reasons Workers Power supports the call for a conference to plan a campaign whilst putting forward a series of amendments to the inadequate draft programme.
Workers Power theses on elections
- ‘The bourgeois parliaments, which constitute one of the most important parts of the state machinery, cannot be won over by the proletariat any more than can the bourgeois order in general… Communism repudiates parliamentarianism as the form of the class dictatorship of the proletariat; it repudiates the possibility of winning over parliaments; its aim is to destroy parliamentarianism. Therefore it is only possible to speak of utilising the bourgeois state organisations with the object of destroying them. The question can only and exclusively be discussed on this plane.’ (Comintern Theses on Elections)
This fundamental position regarding the bourgeois state and its parliaments governs communist election tactics. We view electoral campaigns not in order to obtain the maximum votes in order to legislate socialism via the bourgeois state machine, but above all as a means of revolutionary mobilisation of the masses against the state around the programme and slogans of a revolutionary communist party and the deepening of the influence of the party in the working class. Communists elected to parliament must be ‘tribunes of the people’ in constant touch with the moods and concerns of the masses. The communist fraction in parliament is the party’s ‘scouting party’ in the bourgeois institution, working under strict subordination to the party.
2. Voting for the reformists
Why then do we vote for a mass reformist party in circumstances where communists remain a tiny minority in the class? Not in any way because of its programme, or tactics which are bourgeois — ie they embody the politics of the class enemy. Our first duty is to say what is to the class and so we can in no way hide the communist criticism of these treacherous policies or the fact that the Reformist Bureaucrats are (consciously or unconsciously) agents of the bourgeoisie in the working class. Against them we pose the historic necessity of the working class to seize state power, expropriate the expropriators and suppress their revolts by force. However, the masses do not yet accept this view and if all we could do was to baldly state these necessary truths we would be barren sectarians converting this truth into an abstract utopia.
We not only have these fundamental criticisms of the reformists, but we wish the masses to prove to themselves in practice the correctness of it. The reformists are bourgeois agents indeed, but agents in the working class — holding the leadership of their workers organisations. Their deal with the bourgeoisie puts them at odds not only with the historic goal of the working class (its emancipation) but also with the immediate needs of workers. In times of capitalist stability the reformist bureaucrats, resting upon the better off sections of the class — skilled workers etc, whose conditions of life are those of a comfortable petit-bourgeois — and taking advantage of the splits and divisions in the working class, are able to sell out or sell short the workers section by section without provoking a general rejection and revolt. The onset of severe capitalist crisis puts these brokers between labour and capital in a cleft stick; more and more it reveals them as agents of the bosses in the most immediate questions — unofficial revolts of the rank and file break out against them.
Yet without these revolts becoming fully conscious of the reasons for reformist betrayal they will be unable to finally replace them — at best replacing them with left or militant talkers. This spontaneous tendency is however the starting point for revolutionaries who are not hopeless sectarians. We have to give the spontaneous criticism of the angered masses consciousness of a sure goal; we have to give our valid ‘criticism’ and ‘alternative programme’ mass force. As long as the masses wish to keep ‘their’ parties in government rather than allow the open bourgeois parties to rule, we support this elementary act of class consciousness. Following the method of the united front even in the field of the ballot box we strike together — ie we vote with them for the Reformist Workers Party. But we march separately, under our own banner (ie our programme), which we raise against the reformist leaders as a series of demands on them (see the last section of our Action Programme). In sum this method is that outlined by the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in its theses on Tactics dealing with the fight for a Workers Government and reiterated by Trotsky in the Transitional Programme:
‘Of all parties and organisations which base themselves on the workers and peasants and speak in their name we demand that they break politically from the bourgeoisie and enter upon the road of struggle for the workers and farmers government. On this road we promise them full support against capitalist reaction. At the same time we indefatigably develop agitation around those transitional demands which should in our opinion form the programme of the “workers and farmers government”.’ (Transitional Programme)
3. Left reformists and centrists
As well as mass reformist parties (the Social Democratic and Labour parties in Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, Australia, Canada etc, and the Stalinist parties in Italy and both in countries like Spain, Portugal and France etc) there often exist small sect-like reformist parties like the British CP, and centrist groups originating in Maoism/Guevarism (PRP in Portugal, AO and Lotta Continua in Italy) and also the left-centrists emerging from the wreckage of Trotsky’s FI. As stated above, our reasons for ‘supporting’ a reformist workers party lie in the hold it has on the masses. Left reformist sects like the British CP or centrist sects like the SWP, let alone centrist propaganda blocs like Socialist Unity, are not in any sense mass formations and therefore the tactic of critical support outlined above does not apply.
We do not vote for a candidate because his/her policies are ‘a little better than’, or a ‘step forward from’, those of the main mass party. Thus we do not argue a vote for left Labourites as against the right within the LP electoral lists, nor a vote for the CP because its policies are better (as the SWP is now proposing and as Socialist Unity ought to do if its ‘class struggle’ line is consistent). The working class needs neither a left reformist nor a centrist programme and leaders to mislead and confuse it. A ‘critical support position’ for these groups says in essence ‘it is very important to support this programme, so much so that we are not going to vote with you for the mass workers party, but of course we have some criticisms of it’. The whole weight of this position is to endorse a left reformist/centrist platform and the sect which created it as a necessary step from, as a real (albeit incomplete) break with reformism.
4. Exceptions
The ‘critical support’ for the mass reformist party position outlined above is however a tactic — an important and very general one, but a tactic nonetheless. Therefore there are situations to which it is inapplicable. Obviously where there is a mass revolutionary party, it openly confronts the reformists on the ballot papers as well as in all other fields. Also wherever a revolutionary group has the strength to do so it puts up a candidate against the reformist — and when it does this, it does not adopt the cowardly ‘we don’t want to win’ or ‘only in a safe Labour seat’ or ‘only against a right winger’ positions of Socialist Challenge. A split in the working class vote whereby a Tory is elected is an evil more than compensated for by an effective winning of important sections of workers to a revolutionary programme of struggle.
A different situation exists where sections of the masses, angered by the actions of the Labour traitors, break loose from their hold and enter into the ranks of existing left reformist/centrist organisations. Here it may be correct to give critical support to this mass break with the established reformists in order to fight for a transition to revolutionary politics. A position of ‘critical support’ is not a recommendation for the centrist programme but an endorsement of the break. No such situation has yet presented itself in Britain. In Ireland situations that could be so evaluated have occurred in 1969 around B. Devlin’s candidacy at the right of the civil rights agitation and then the resistance to British repression, and also in the case of the recent split in the Irish Labour Party. In each case a concrete analysis is necessary.
A further possibility exists — that of a crucial event like the imminent outbreak of a war where a significant non-revolutionary group takes a ‘correct’ position (its reasons and the rest of its politics may be wrong), eg the ILP in the first world war or the American CP in 1940. Here critical support (ie posing the communist programme as demands) may help rally the vanguard from the social traitors and expose the muddle, inconsistency etc of the centrists.
- In two elections in the past we abandoned our position of critical support for Labour. In the Walsall by-election we argued inside the I-CL for a vote for the SWP candidate. We argued for this on two grounds: given that the election came at the height of a campaign of racist hysteria (Summer ’76), the SWP standing on an anti-racist platform would stand as a rallying point for the black community and anti-racists both locally and nationally; and secondly the SWP stood clearly against the ‘social contract’ at a time when it appeared that opposition was beginning to mount to the trade union bureaucracy/Labour Government alliance. We took a similar position on the Stetchford by-election, calling for a vote for the IMG candidate. By the Ladywood by-election (Autumn ’77) we had reverted to a position of critical support for Labour.
In retrospect the positions we took on the elections at Walsall and Stetchford — to abandon a position of critical support for Labour — were wrong. We overestimated the likelihood of substantial sections of immigrant and white workers breaking with Labour over its policies on race and wage curbs. On this question, a matter of dispute between Workers Power and the I-CL, the latter were undoubtedly right as against us.
Resolution on electoral tactics adopted at the April 1978 National Committee of Workers Power
