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Labour after Brighton
COMING ONLY a few months after the worst electoral defeat in the Party's recent history, the 1983 conference at Brighton has been generally seen as a watershed in the development of the Labour Party.
On the face of it, the conference marked a relative set-back for the left, with the defeat of Meacher for the deputy leadership, the consolidation of the "soft" left-right bloc on the NEC, and the ratification of the expulsion of five members of the Militant Editorial Board.
Yet for anyone with the most elementary grasp of the Marxist method, it would be a mistake to allow oneself to be unduly influenced by this or that episodic turn in the mood of the labour movement, as reflected in this conference. What is first of all necessary is a thorough understanding of the underlying processes at work in society, in the working class and in the organisations of the labour movement, without which an entirely misleading impression can be created about the real significance of Brighton.
for socialist
policies
For millions of workers, unemployed, housewives and trade unionists, the victory of Thatcher at the general election came as a terrible shock. The prospect of a further five years of attacks on living standards, mass unemployment, the undermining of hard-won trade union rights and the dismantling of the welfare state has filled them with horror.
It is perfectly understandable that the first gut reaction of the Labour workers is the need to rally round to defeat Thatcher, to close ranks and unite the Labour Party at all costs in the fight against the common class enemy. And, at bottom, this striving for the unity of our class—unity in
struggle against the Tories and the employers- is something which the Marxist wing of the Labour Party, represented by the Militant, both support and actively strive for.
It was not the Marxists who disrupted the unity of the Labour Party, but the right wing majority of the NEC, who senselessly unleashed a destructive witch-hunt which poisoned the atmosphere at all levels of the Party in the crucial lead-up to the general election.
It was not the members of Militant's Editorial Board who undermined Labour's electoral chances of speaking out publicly against the Party's election manifesto, but the prominent leaders of the right wing, such as Callaghan, Healey and Hattersley. Militant supporters worked for the election of Labour candidates, irrespective of whether we agreed with their views or not. Frank Chapple saw fit to publicly support the SDP candidate in Islington against the official Labour candidate. Yet no action has been taken against Chapple by the NEC, which has also remained stubbornly silent about the sabotaging role of the right during the election campaign, reserving all their energies for the expulsion of five long-standing Marxist members of the Labour Party.
But if "unity" is to mean anything at all, it must surely mean unity of all members of the Labour Party who are prepared to stand by socialist ideas and the policy decisions democratically agreed upon by Party conference, not those who, like the right, consider themselves to have a "divine right" to ignore the opinions of the rank-and-file whenever it suits them, and who regard the Labour Party purely as a means to personal advancement, and not as an instrument for changing society.
The leaders of the big unions have been frightened by the Tory victory and taken in by the deafening campaign of the millionaire press which, conveniently ignoring the sabotage of the Labour right, try to pretend that Labour's defeat was due to the adoption of "extreme policies"
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Undemocratically over-riding the decisions of their own union conferences in many cases, these general secretaries threw their weight—and the votes of their members-behind the so-called 'dream ticket" of Kinnock and Hattersley, in a misguided attempt to woo back those same right wingers who did enormous damage to the Labour Party in the previous period, and must be held responsible in some measure for Labour's electoral catastrophe. And this manoeuvre was carried out in the name of 'fighting for a Labour victory"!
We saw the same bending to the pressure of the capitalist press when the same general secretaries-despite the overwhelming opposition of the CLPs and a large section of the union rank-and-file cast their block votes in favour of ratifying the expulsions of the Militant Five. A classic case of "tail wags dog", if ever there was one!
o going
Yet, in spite of everything, the Brighton conference can by no stretch of the imagination be described as a turn to the right. Many of the delegates who gave Neil Kinnock a standing ovation on the Sunday, were the very same who gave the Militant Five a standing ovation on Monday-precisely the reason why the NEC, for the first time since 1978, ordered a closed session to deal with the expulsions, to deny the Five the possibility of putting their case to the visitors and the TV as well as the delegates. While the expulsions were steamrollered through by the simple expedient of the union block vote (80% of constituency Labour Parties voting against), the overwhelming sympathy shown by the majority of delegates-including a significant number in the trade union section— represented a moral victory for the ideas of Marxism and a stinging rebuff for the organisers of the witchhunt.
Even many of those who voted for expulsions did so more in sorrow than anger. in a mistaken attempt to "get unity" and improve the image of the Part!' . under the pressure of the leadership. while at the same time making it absolutely clear that they wanted no more expulsions and no more witch-hunts.
The fact that the
No aoina back
right could take
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precious little comfort from the proceedings was shown by the rough reception Callaghan got in the defence debate. When Healey, in his summing-up decided that "discretion was the better part of valour" and resorted to the fudging tactic of "two of sand, and one of cement"
The incident on the Sunday night, when despite the efforts of Neil Kinnock to get it withdrawn, the TGWU delegation—to its credit-persisted in presenting a unilateralist resolution which was subsequently passed by conference, is an indication that the goodwill which is being extended to the new leader does not give him the right to reverse previous conference decisions.
What all this demonstrates is that Labour's rank-and-file, while wanting Party unity and being prepared to extend a large degree of credit to the new leader, who is at present seen as a left, is not prepared to go back, or to retreat on the political conquests which have been made in the past few years. Any attempt on the part of the right to launch an attack on any fundamental issue—such as the mandatory re-selection of MPs will rapidly run into trouble from the rankand-file activists, and produce a fur ther swing to the left.
The right is finished
In reality, Labour's old right wing is shattered. The "victory" of Hattersley as deputy-leader—a product of the overriding desire for "unity" and the total lack of organisation and backbone of the Tribune Left— cannot conceal the fact that, in the leadership stakes, he came nowhere, while right-winger Peter Shore got nil votes.
On policy issues, the defeat of the right was still more humiliating. Despite the noisy campaign waged for months by Hattersley and friends, the motion to introduce the 'oneman-one-vote" system to elect the Party leaders, a system which they hoped would give them more room to manoeuvre in the constituencies, attempting to play off the more inert layers against the Party activists, received the grand total of six votes!
Even in the trade union section, the TGWU delegation's stand on defence, and the splits and arguments
which took place in all the union
delegations over the expulsion of the
Five and the election of the deputy
leader, indicated that the general
secretaries can no longer count on
having things all their own way. In
the "good old days", when the right
ruled the roost, the likes of Carron,
Lawther and Deakon would have had
no trouble in "delivering the goods" in any vote at conference. But those days have gone beyond recall. Far from strengthening their grip on the union membership, the trade union leaders will find themselves under enormous pressure, as the Tory government and the employers tighten the screw and the rank-andfile demand action. The movement of the miners in Yorkshire and Scotland, the movement that is just beginning against cuts in the NHS, the POEU dispute over privatisation-these are just a little foretaste of what could take place even this coming winter. Big battles are inevitable on the industrial front, and that will have a profoundly radicalising effect, first on the unions and, later on, on the Labour Party.
The old Labour right is finished because, in a historical sense, their role is played out. In the fifties and early sixties, reformism could give certain reforms to the working class because, in conditions of world economic upswing, capitalism could still afford to grant concessions. But now that period is gone forever. Under conditions of capitalist crisis the ruling class cannot give serious and long-lasting reforms. On the contrary, it must try to take back the concessions it gave in the past, cutting living standards and wrecking social services in a desperate attempt to "solve" the crisis at the expense of the workers, the unemployed, the old and the sick. It is not Thatcher's "callousness" (though she is certainly very callous which makes her attack the welfare state, as both the Labour right and the Tribune left imagine, but the blind alley of British capitalism, of which Thatcher is merely the most convulsive expression.
Everywhere in the world, whether under right-wing governments in Britain, the USA, Germany, Denmark and Israel, or under "socialist" (in reality right-wing socialist) govern-
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ments such as France, Greece. Spain. or the last Labour government in Britain, we see the same phenomenon. with differences only in degree: austerity programmes, wage cuts. the slashing of social services, and rising unemployment. And this is inevitably the case, where a Labour or socialist government attempts to operate within the confines of the capitalist system. Where the decisive, most modern and profitable sector of the economy is in private hands, that sector will dictate policy to the government, and not vice-versa. That is why a complete transformation of society is necessary in order to stave off the catastrophe of mass unemployment, and to meet the most elementary needs of the working class, the old, the sick and the rising generation.
The representatives of Labour's right-wing like Healey and Hattersley have abandoned the idea of socialism a long time ago.
They completely accept the domination of the bankers and capitalists as "the realities of life" and have no other perspective than the continuance of capitalism for ever. Their "realistic" policies have been discredited in the eyes of wide layers of the working class and middle class as a result of the experience of the last two Labour governments. Reformism without reforms-or reformism with counter reforms, to be more accurate-is a formula which has no appeal for anyone. There is no fundamental difference between the ideas and policies put forward by the Labour right and the policies advanced by the traitors of the SDP, with whom many of them have been linked in the past by close ties of friendship. They are out of step with the labour movement and out of step with the times we live in. Just like the Gunters, the Prentices the Browns, the Owens and the Williams', who could not reconcile themselves to the changed position in the Labour Party, and stabbed the movement in the back when it suited them.
To lean over backwards to appease this group for the sake of an artificial and purely ephemeral "unity" is to fly in the face of reality, as the present Kinnock leadership will discover to its cost in the future.
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