The struggle for a new party after 1997

Bill Hunter

The Blair victory expressed profound hatred for the Tory government and deep desires for an end to the uncertainties of employment and general life. The fatal contradiction of the New Labour government was that while it was a government elected on a rising wave of discontent with the policies of Thatcherism, it accepted completely the ideological base of the Tories and their basic policies. That is what led to increasing collisions between a Labour government and the wishes of large sections of the population. In his book, Hidden Agendas, John Pilger rightly said about the New Labour government:

“Theirs is a ruthlessness known only to the ideologically born again—as their attacks on even disabled people make clear. The Blairites have become the political wing of the City of London and the British multi-national corporations and, in natural order, the trusted servitors of European ‘central bankism’ and American economic and military hegemony. They are indeed more trustworthy and more ‘modern’ than the Tories, many of whom are still smitten by English nationalism, some even by paternalism.”

A new party

A new party has to be an instrument in the enfranchisement of the working class who had fought bitter struggles through their Chartist movement in 1840s and afterwards.  For those who fought for a Labour Party at the turn of the century it was to be a class party.

What are the traditions of the Labour party and in what way have they been repudiated? Arthur Scargill argued that a new party was needed because, with the removal of Clause Four the Labour party has ceased to be the socialist party that was founded at the beginning of the century. The Labour party in fact was not founded as an expressed socialist party. It is not a matter of an academic discussion on its history, but the a completely accurate understanding of the birth of the Labour party and its nature evolution is essential for pointers to what is important today.

There was an instructive debate in the bureau of the Second International in 1907 about the request of the Labour party for affiliation. Two of the organisations which were affiliated to the Second International and were part of the Labour party supported its affiliation. Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation opposed. Lenin supported its affiliation as a party which came out of the class struggle although its leaders were not socialists. He later described it as a party which by programme and activity of its leaders was bourgeois.

Two questions around the new party, among those seriously concerned with building a revolutionary leadership in Britain. The first has to do with the need of a revolutionary party or Communist Party—using the term ‘communist’ with the meaning it had for Marx and Lenin.

Workers feel the need for a new party

The second has to do with the desire of political workers and trade unionists who feel the need of a new mass workers’ party because New Labour has disenfranchised and betrayed the trade unionists, the exploited and deprived in society, in the interests of increasing the wealth and power of the rich and powerful. Their feelings are much the same as the mass of struggling workers at the end of the nineteenth century who brought the Labour Party as a broad organisation giving a political expression to their unions and their class. It is necessary to underline that we are talking here about their feelings. There is, of course, not yet the widespread and deep mass ferment which 100 years ago raised the Eight Hour Day and the need for independent class political expression as the central demands in the class.

Between then and now there are one hundred years of great advances of the working class and great setbacks such as the conquests of fascism, which brought a pessimism and demoralisation among similar layers of middles class intellectuals, politicians and trade union leaders who today exchange Marxism or reformist socialism for reactionary capitalist ideology and cynicism toward the working class. There has been the experience of Stalinism, the collapse of the Second and Third International. There was the ‘Golden Age’ of capitalist boom in the 1950s and 1960s, and the accelerating, overwhelming signs of the decay of this capitalist system where groups of immensely powerful manufacturing multi-national companies, financiers and gamblers who take the ruling decisions in pursuit of their wealth and power. Blinded by anything other than profit and greed they play with the future of the earth itself as well as with the future of humanity. Karl Marx and Friederich Engles showed in their Communist Manifesto, 150 years ago, that motive for profit in capitalism drove it to reduce every social relation to a cash relationship. Today, even the basics of life itself are patented, and genes declared to be solely for the profit of certain drug companies.

The rising desire for drastic change, was shown in Britain with the accelerating hostility against the Tory government. There was a popular movement against the Tory government and polls constantly showed an opposition to privatisation and support for nationalisation of railways and energy services. There was a growing bitterness at health and education cuts, and at the treatment of the sick, the disabled and the deprived; at the increase of wealth at one end of society and poverty at the other. There is also an overriding scepticism, particularly among the youth, about prospects in capitalist society and about its institutions.

The nepotism, hypocrisy and self-seeking among political leaders and state and capitalist organisations had its effect in a hostile reaction to “politics”. The slashing attacks on the Welfare State is a world-wide phenomenon and comes from a fundamental cause—the decay of the world capitalist system.

Trotsky in 1938 put it that the revolutionaries in the Fourth International would make a leap by “turning to the questions of the mass movement”. Together with that went his advice that the revolutionary had to win leadership. Thus, Lenin underlines the unavoidable task of the revolutionary party as winning the devotion of the mass by the correctness of its tactics and strategy—in the class struggle.

This is Marxism, scientific and dialectical. The leadership gives assistance to understand the inner processes at work in the situation and making its agitation, but seeing the actual class movement in all its contradictions and the living organisation of the working class.