Inside or outside the Labour Party and Marxism-Leninism today
I was invited to attend the Yeovil Trades Council meeting yesterday. I was pleased to see the discussion was very open and it sparked a debate about being in or out of the Labour Party, one I've had with myself prior to joining for many years.
I wasn't able to get all of my thoughts out at the meeting on this, so here they are.
A couple of comrades brought up the point that because the Labour government was carrying out a neo-liberal agenda, which is perfectly true, such as moving the postal service in the direction of privitisation etc, they shouldn't have our support and we should attempt to form a new party.
Lenin said the Labour Party was a bourgeois-workers party, so we shouldn't be surprised that the leadership is carrying out a bourgeois program, with some concessions that is after all what they have been doing since it was founded.
It is a valid point to say that New Labour is far worse, and that Brown is even more right-wing than Blair. So we should look for an explanation why, I believe one possible candidate would be the state of socialists within the party. I believe thanks to all the people saying work outside the party, or attempting splits it has allowed the leadership to get away with far too much.
The state of the Labour Party is the way it is firstly because of the purges during the 1980s which weakened the left, largely thanks to the help of the media, Thatcher and the Labour leaders and their "longest suicide note in history" crap, and later because of so many people calling on their comrades to abandon the party.
If we lose the Labour Party, we lose the political wing of the working class. Instead of having the couple of dozen socialists in parliament we have nobody, 2.5 business parties sitting opposite each other. In effect handing the bourgeoisie total control of the parliament.
The fight for Labour isn't over, the next few years I think will be crucial, as a few comrades mentioned the possibility of losing the next election is something we need to be aware of, the polls are grim reading. But will an election defeat strengthen New Labour? Of course not it probably destroy it, it will end the one thing they've had going for them with all the moderates inside the party "we can win elections" doesn't amount to much when you lose an election.
Marxism-Leninism also cropped up, and how that the USSR and China are bad, oppressive and so on and so forth, Dave (Bridgewater TUC). How that has any relevance is beyond me, if anything it seemed more like an ad hominem against Ken (sorry I forgot your last name) from the Communist Party of Britain.
By the same logic one would attack democracy because George Bush declares he is for democracy - or any number of things. Marxists should not hand over our words just because Stalinist and Maoist revisionists like to use them.
Marxism-Leninism, or Bolshevism is important for the working class, the Labour Party is not capable of revolution, its a mass party of the working class, but still bourgeois which we should use to win progressive advancements for the working class. However when the time comes and the labour leadership are brought off on the edge of revolution, we need a revolutionary party to finish the job.
20th December 2007 13:43:54, 572 words, 746 views
4 comments »
4 comments
The problem lies with invisible forces, such as the free market. We don't live in an age where we can justifiably rise up and savagely overthrow something which is the very embodiment of our oppression. They could in imperial Russia, we can't in the United Kingdom.
We have had revolutions in the past, in the 17th century, which didn't work to plan. Alas, the monarchy returned. Apart from that incident the British revolution has been a gradual yet persistent one and that is in all likelihood how it will continue to progress.
In its true form i don't think the labour party is any kind of bougeoise party. In its true form it is a workers party. The true cause of this party has been subverted and its power weakened in recent years as the leadership has found itself in the control of more right-wing elements. The way forward is to strengthen labour party democracy and to make it accountable to those at the very grassroots.
We should also note that we haven't been making any progress over the last 30 years, the working class has suffered setback after setback. Ours is one of the first generations in modern history that are worse off than the previous generation.
The Labour Party is bourgeois because it has never committed itself to abolishing the bourgeoisie, and historically it has always been controlled by people further right than the workers themselves. It has only gotten more bourgeois since the 1920s.
A workers' party wouldn't be getting Royal Mail ready for privatisation, it would be expanding the public sector, pulling more and more areas of the economy into public ownership and public accountability and control. This is the party that we need the Labour Party to be, we also are well aware of what the capitalists would be doing to the economy with a workers' party in power, they would be sabotaging it - ready for the return of the Tories. At that point we need a party to end private ownership of the means of production and utterly destroy the power base of capital - I don't think Labour could ever go that far, which is why we need a revolutionary party.
Otherwise no long-term progress is made. It's just yo-yoing back and forth between concessions from capital and all out class war from capital when they want to save a few pennies. The cycle needs to be broken, and it can only be done by the workers' taking over control of society.
On Labour, I'd agree it is still a bourgeois workers party, but workers are very thin on the ground when it comes to individual membership. The majority of trade unionists are either political independents, with a minority in the various revolutionary groups. The problem is the Labour party cannot be reclaimed in any meaningful sense. The acquiescence of the TU bureaucracy to the gutting of conference this year has made it constitutionally impossible to hold the Nu Lab leadership accountable. In my opinion, comrades in Labour should either throw their efforts into building the LRC, or perhaps consider life outside in one of the revolutionary groups (I would say join the SP, but then I'm biased ;))
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