Labour Parties

["Steve Painter and Rose McCann" <spainter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mass labour parties in the English-speaking world, empirically described.
Their organisational and structural relationship to the trade unions and the
working class, in the context of the debate about the early Comintern and
the united front

Bob Gould

In a recent post Richard Fidler said: "well put" (relating to Nick Fredman's
post). "This really is the central point of this very interesting discussion
on labour parties. While the ALP is 'bourgeois', the revolutionary left must
adopt a united front stance toward it, engage its militants in debate as
well as common activity where possible. This we would not think of doing in
regard to a 'classic' bourgeois party such as the Liberals (Australia) or
National Party (New Zealand). That is because the
ALP is a bourgeois party of a peculiar type: it operates specifically within
the workers movement (as well as in Parliament), through its special links
with the trade unions and the broader labour movement. Our overriding
objective in all of this is to build the Marxist current, just as in the
unions we work to build the class-struggle current."

Richard Fidler, in this paragraph, manages to express a number of complex
issues easily and clearly. I agree with his formulation of the question in
this classical framework. It is useful when attempting to use this classical
framework in current strategic discussions to actually do a concrete
overview of the labour party organisations in the English-speaking world, as
they exist now.

What follows here is my description of the organisational aspect of this
current reality. My broad analysis of the sociology of these organisations
is still stewing in the teapot and will be finally brewed soon.

This week's events in the UK have demonstrated that the rather substantial
shift to the left in trade union elections in Britain has almost immediately
led to a shift to the left in the British Labour Party, expresses in the
unusual circumstance historically that a large part of the union bloc vote,
which for the most of the British Labour Party's history has been the
bastion of the right, was a left-wing force at this Labour Party conference,
defeating Blair in a careful way over privatisation and delivering about
half the trade union bloc vote to a resolution opposing the immediate plans
for war in Iraq by British and US imperialism.

When considering the immediate relationship of forces and set-up in
trade-union-based labour parties, it's convenient to break them into three
groups: England and Wales together, Scotland and Ireland together,
Australia, New Zealand and Canada separately. My information about Canada is
very sketchy so I will not comment on Canada, hoping that someone like
Richard Fidler who knows more about the Canadian set-up, will contribute a
description of the Canadian labour party, the New Democratic Party.

Phil Ferguson's and Juriaan Bendien's description of the current state of
the New Zealand Labour Party is probably reasonably accurate. The
reactionary laboratory for right-wing policies made of NZ, by the Roger
Douglas right-wing Labour government produced a massive split in the Labour
Party in which almost all the active members left to form the New Labour
Party, and then the Alliance, and most unions disaffiliated, which coincided
with a dramatic drop in trade union density and power under the new,
reactionary labour laws.

A new electoral system with a proportional representation element, MMP, gave
scope for new political formations on the left to blossom electorally, and
the Alliance at its height got more than 10 seats and the Greens also got a
large vote, and a significant number of seats.

At the organisational level, the NZ Labour Party is clearly the
conservative, middle-class rump that Bendien and Ferguson describe, with few
members and no left at all. Nevertheless, in the recent elections the NZ
Labour Party recaptured the traditional Labour vote almost to the old
levels, at 41 per cent, and the Alliance and the Greens got between them
about 10 per cent.

Phil Ferguson's sociology of the Labour vote, implying that it had
essentially a non-working-class character is open to serious dispute. It's
quite clear that the Labour vote was much higher in the Maori seats, in the
urban seats where Maoris, Pacific Islanders and the industrial working class
live, etc.

It appears from the distance of Australia that the Greens tended to get
their votes more from tertiary educated new social layer people, and the
Alliance vote had a similar character.

On the other extreme, the Nationals and other conservative parties got their
vote mainly in rural areas, or more wealthy urban areas. Phil Ferguson can
flood out as much squid-like ink as he likes about the sociology of the
LABOUR PARTY in New Zealand. He's generally right about the sociology of the
Labour Party in NZ, but the sociology of the LABOUR VOTE is a different
story.

If he continues to assert that the Labour vote doesn't have a generally
working class, Maori, Island and oppressed character. I challenge him to do
the kind of limited, empirical explanation that I've done for NSW,
attempting to correlate the pattern of the vote in the last election with
available New Zealand statistical office information about income,
occupation, ethnicity and even religion in each electorate.

It shouldn't be too difficult to do that, at least in an approximate way,
and it's only possible to make sweeping statements about the class character
of voting patterns if you do that kind of exercise.

SCOTLAND and IRELAND

Scotland and Ireland are both a bit different to England and Wales. The
electoral system in Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Irish republic all
have a powerful proportional representation element. In fact, in the Irish
republic and in the Regional Assembly in Northern Ireland, there is only
proportional representation.

In the Irish republic, the Labour Party is historically a weak formation
electorally although it has considerable involvement with the trade unions,
and there is also a strong republican tradition. The main bourgeois
republican party, Fianna Fail, competes with Labour for an electorate with a
similar class social composition, and there's also a certain tradition of
Sinn Fein and Stalinist Workers' Party candidates doing well in elections.

The electoral system provides for multiple TDs from electorates. So a Labour
candidate or even a Sinn Fein or left candidate has some chance of election.
This is the electoral and social context in which the Militant group,
through diligent mass work, has elected a TD in Dublin.

In Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein is an almost total electoral obstacle to any
socialists who run against it independently, and it gets about 20 per cent
of the vote, and the slightly more conservative SDLP gets about 20 per
cent - the other half of the Catholic nationalist vote in the province.

Scotland is a different situation again, with some features in common with
Ireland, but some different features. It has a very old independent
socialist electoral tradition. The red Clydeside for many years was
represented by a significant number of Independent Labour Party (ILP)
members in the British parliament, sometimes in the British Labour Party and
sometimes outside it, and one of the only two Communist members of
parliament in Britain, Willie Gallagher, was elected and re-elected several
times, in the mining district of Fife.

When devolution took place recently in Scotland, the new Scottish assembly
was constituted on the basis of proportional representation, and the
aggressive and effective agitation of the Scottish Socialist Party, led by
the charismatic Tommy Sheridan, was both located in an old Scottish
electoral tradition and facilitated by the proportional representation
arrangements in the new Scottish assembly.

It's worth saying about the situation in Scotland that electorally speaking
it is the most radical part of the UK. No Tories were elected in the British
election in which Blair came to power, and in the last British election only
one Tory was elected. Despite the breakaway of the Scottish Socialist Party
from Labour and the Socialist Party's relatively rapid growth in the
electorate, Labour is still very strong in Scotland and several Labour MPs
in the British parliament are solidly on the left of British politics,
particularly George Galloway and Tom Dalyell, who are in the forefront of
the battle against the Blair-Bush war drive.

Despite the necessity of competing with the Labourites electorally, the
Scottish Socialist Party would be wise to conduct a united front strategy
towards the Labourites in the way that the old ILP in Scotland sometimes
though not always conducted such a united front.

ENGLAND AND WALES

In England and Wales, there was a period of leftist upsurge in the BLP in
the late 1970s and early 1980s, which was followed by Labour electoral
defeats, which produced the long-lived reactionary Thatcher Tory government.

>From the late 1980s onward there was a dramatic shift to the right,
culminating in Blair's coup, and the right-wing policies of the Blair
government elected in the 1990s, which were taken over wholesale from the
Thatcher government. These policies were not resisted by the trade union
leaderships, and there was a mass exodus of leftists from the British Labour
Party.

Blair's Bonapartist style and political methods recruited masses of
conservative, middle-class members to the Labour Party, with a lower
standard of membership than in the past. The constituency parties, which had
been mainly on the left for the previous 30 or 40 years (although not
always - they weren't in the immediate post-war years) shifted back to the
right, to the point that at this week's British Labour Party conference only
30 per cent of delegates from the constituency parties voted for the left
motions.

The long years of privatisation and attacks on working-class interests,
however, have produced their first expression in a dramatic swing to the
left in British trade union, and the election of the so-called Awkward Squad
in recent years has been a bit of an earthquake in British politics. In
particular, the defeat of Sir Kenneth Jackson in the Amalgamated Engineers
and Electricians Union (which has a leftist tradition that had been
obliterated in the last 40 years of right-wing leadership, but has now come
back with a vengeance). The union bloc vote, although reduced and modified
by Blair, still exists, and it is still the biggest voting force in the
British Labour Party structure.

In these conditions, despite the propaganda of some leftists in favour of
the unions pulling out of the Labour Party, there is a stronger
gravitational pull on the unions in their new, leftist mood to exert their
political power in the traditional way through the Labour Party. The
critical votes at the current Labour Party conference are a bit of a
defining moment in this process.

The British Labour left is now clearly back in the political field, backed -
as it was to some extent in the early 1980s - by the massive power of the
big unions, and their votes at Labour Party conferences.

While it's always a bit delusory to have too much confidence in how far even
leftist trade union bureaucracies will go in colliding with Labour
governments, nevertheless the conditions now exist for a political and
social collision of a very substantial sort.

It will be very difficult to prevent the rapid rise of a new left in the
British Labour Party in current conditions, despite the temporary dominance
of Blairite go-getters in two-thirds of the constituency parties. Marxists
and socialist of various stripes, including some former Labour Party members
have made a creditable effort to construct an independent electoral
formation, the Socialist Alliance, but it has been quite unsuccessful
electorally and it's only likely to go down in the future, not up.

No doubt the people and groups in it, will persist for a while in this
independent electoral activity, and good luck to them, but even for those
who choose to conduct their electoral activities outside the Labour Party,
it's important to point out that the militants in the Socialist Alliance
ought to conduct a serious united front tactic towards the left in the
British Labour Party, which will now re-emerge as a significant political
force.

This is made particularly concrete by the mass movement emerging in Britain
against Blair's war. The massive opposition at the TUC and Labour Party
conferences is clearly a major obstacle to Blair and the presence of many
leftist Labour trade union leaders and 50 or 60 Labour politicians as major
figures in the antiwar agitation makes such a united front vital if the war
plans of British imperialism are to be defeated.

LENIN IN 1920
The documents of the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920 are an
extraordinary goldmine of material on labour parties in the English-speaking
countries. Following  is an extract from one of Lenin speeches to the
congress, on July 23, which is available at
http://www.marx2mao.org/Lenin/SCCI20.html The full speech should be read to
put this extract in context.
"I will now deal with some of Comrade McLaine's arguments concerning the
question of the British Labour Party. We must say frankly that the Party of
Communists can join the Labour Party only on condition that it preserves
full freedom of criticism and is able to conduct its own policy. This is of
supreme importance. When, in this connection Comrade Serrati speaks of class
collaboration, I affirm that this will not be class collaboration. When the
Italian comrades tolerate, in their party, opportunists like Turati and Co.,
i.e., bourgeois elements, that is indeed class collaboration. In this
instance, however, with regard to the British Labour Party, it is simply a
matter of collaboration between the advanced minority of the British workers
and their vast majority. Members of the Labour Party are all members of
trade unions. It has a very unusual structure, to be found in no other
country. It is an organisation that embraces four million workers out of the
six or seven million organised in trade unions. They are not asked to state
what their political opinions are. Let Comrade Serrati prove to me that
anyone there will prevent us from exercising our right of criticism. Only by
proving that, will you prove Comrade McLaine wrong. The British Socialist
Party can quite freely call Henderson a traitor and yet remain in the Labour
Party. Here we have collaboration between the vanguard of the working class
and the rearguard, the backward workers. This collaboration is so important
to the entire movement that we categorically insist on the British
Communists serving as a link between the Party, that is, the minority of the
working class, and the rest of the workers. If the minority is unable to
lead the masses and establish close links with them, then it is not a party,
and is worthless in general, even if it calls itself a party or the National
Shop Stewards' Committee ."
The important thing is that the basic structural features that Lenin
describes here and considers of great importance when considering tactics
are still the structural features of the British Labour Party today.
AUSTRALIA

The structure of the Australian Labor Party and the internal set-up in it
are different again from Britain, Ireland or Scotland.

Australia is a federation of six states and two territories. It has the only
compulsory voting system in the English-speaking world, combined with a
continuous program by the Australian Electoral Office to enrol all citizens
by regular visits to all known residential addresses, which electoral
structure generally ensures a 95 per cent vote in elections.

Practically, state and territory government are as important as the federal
government because of the great distances between states and capital cities.
The state electoral systems combine individual electorates in the lower
house with preferential voting, with a proportional representation voting
system in most state upper houses.

In the federal arena there is a lower house of individual electorates and
preferential voting, and a senate elected on a state basis, with a
proportional representation voting system statewide.

The Australian Labor Party structure reflects Australia geographically, with
elements that are quite favourable from a socialist point of view. The long
years of the right-wing Labor government produced a demobilisation of the
Labor Party rather than a mass exodus of the left. The majority of
individual Labor Party members are still loosely on the left, although
extremely quiescent after many years of misleadership by the opportunist
leaders of the ALP left.

The structure of the Labor Party is still favourable to progressive
interests. After a series of complex factional struggles 30 years ago, the
structures in each state and the federal structure, were established as 60
per cent unions, 40 per cent branches combined with an entrenched internal
ALP electoral system of proportional representation between party factions
in inner-party elections. This is a structure very advantageous to political
agitation, if it has any kind of trade union base, and there is some kind of
upsurge in society going on.

The "Blairisation" of the ALP structurally has so far not taken place. Only
now is there a serious move to even marginally weaken trade union structural
influence in the ALP, although there is constant pressure from the ruling
class to drive unions out of the ALP.

The federal ALP rules revision conference this weekend in Canberra will see
a powerful move by the parliamentary leadership, supported by a bloc of the
most opportunist section of the left and some of the right to reduce trade
union influence from 60 per cent to 50 per cent.  This move will be
strenuously opposed by an opposing bloc of right and left unions defending
the existing 60 per cent trade union influence. The outcome is by no means
certain, but even if parliamentary leader Simon Crean and left
parliamentarians Anthony Albanese and Kim Carr succeed in reducing the union
influence from 60 to 50 per cent, this is still very far from the complete
removal of trade union influence advocated by the Australian bourgeoisie.

LABOR FOR REFUGEES

The spearhead for the revival of a serious left in the ALP has been the
rapid emergence of a vocal and energetic Labor for Refugees movement in all
states, with thousands of supporters. (I have been personally involved in
this movement since its inception last December.)

It has been able to pass motions through five state and territory ALP
conferences demanding the end of mandatory detention of refugees. A striking
feature of this movement has been its cross-factional character, straddling
the traditional left and right factional structures in the ALP. In each
state there has been substantial participation by the lower ranks of many
trade unions, right and left, with the tacit support of many major leaders
of these unions.

The push to have the refugee policy discussed at the rules conference has
been given vigorous support by John Robertson the new secretary of the Labor
Council of NSW, (who is emerging as a figure a bit like Sweeney in the US
AFL-CIO). The leadership of the Labor Council, the peak trade union body in
the state, is traditionally part of the right-wing machine in the ALP. The
paradoxical situation in NSW is that on both the question of refugees and
the 60:40 structural question, the new Labor Council leadership - the body
with most clout in the traditional right faction - is significantly to the
left of the leadership of the left faction, a rather confusing situation.

THE ALP AND BUSH'S WAR

Crean and the federal ALP leadership have equivocated on the war plans of
Bush, Blair and Howard. They have stated a position that they are opposed to
any war without UN approval, and they have said if there is UN approval they
will consider the situation at that time.

A number of Labor MPs and a number of unions have asserted their opposition
to this war in any circumstances, and a number of these unionists and Labor
MPs have lent their support to the mobilising coalition against the war.

In particular, Meredith Burgman, the president of the Upper House in NSW, a
fairly forthright member of the left faction, has been very vocal in
opposition to the war, and has stepped forward as one of the main figures
willing to participate in organising the necessary broad coalition against
the war.

It follows from the above summary outline of the structural features of
Laborism in Australia and the current situation, that a strategic united
front towards all the forces in the ALP, both trade union and parliamentary,
willing to take a stand on the important matters of refugees and the
impending imperialist war, is just basic common sense from a Marxist point
of view.

Bob Gould


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