Labour Parties

[David Walters <dwalters@xxxxxxx>]

I wanted to thank Bob for that wonderful analysis of various Labor Parties
and the electoral parameters they exist under. I'm saving that one for
reference, it's that good.

There is no doubt that Labour Militant/Militant Labour (I never get that
right), played a pivotal role in the 80s. This was not just some small sect
that made proclamations but a grouping that defined, in large part, the
Labour Party left during this period. It grew to be over 8,000 members,
probably the second largest Trotskyist group in the world after the MAS in
Argentina during a similar period.

My friend Brian Cahill gives a defense of the action of Militant after
departing the BLP. He argues that the party turned into a thoroughly
"bourgeois" one due to the drift to the right (what it was BEFORE this is
left unexplained). I suppose he classified it, or Militant did, as a
"workers Party' or a "bourgeois workers party"....others here have made a
case, successfully, I think, about why this view of Militant is flawed.

My view of their split from Labour is that Militant deduced from a
combination of increasing victories of Blair's right-wing and their own
expulsion that the BLP was now thoroughly bourgeois.

Militant made this decision based solely, in my view only, on the
relationship between them and the BLP, not the relationship of the class to
the BLP which fundamentally did not change since since Ted Grant's
Revolutionary Socialist League entered the BLP decades before.

I believe this is one of the fundamental flaws in the method of the
Socialist Party, as Militant calls itself now. Obviously we do not want to
get into here the ins and outs of Militants tactics in the LP, it's a
completely other kind of debate. I say that because I'm not polemically
trying to say "Ted Grant was right" or any other socialist current that
remains in the BLP to this day, it is simply another type of discussion.

BTW...Ted Grant's writings are available at www.tedgrant.org. It seems to be
unannounced by Socialist Appeal but I found it doing a search for him.

David Walters



~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.