Forwarded from Fred Fuentes

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

La lucha continua
Fred Fuentes

Notes on John Rees' article,
International Socialist Journal,
Winter 2002

contributed by James White

These thoughts are not intended as a full response
to John Rees' article entitled

The broad party, the revolutionary party and the united front,
but are presented here to hopefully stimulate debate.

There are many aspects of the Rees article one could take issue with, such
as the history of the SWP and the nature of the United Front, but where
Rees's article is particularly interesting is in that it begins to address
the questions of the class nature of the Labour Party and the perspective
of building a Socialist Party as being the key political objective for
socialists in the present period. Rees concedes that:

"If Labour is finished then the whole political territory that it
previously occupied is, potentially at least, open to a new socialist party."

He goes on to say that this is not however the position we are in, and
argues that the Labour Party is fundamentally the same organisation that it
has always been - a bourgeios workers party - that is composed of workers,
but has a leadership which has a pro-capitalist outlook. This is the
generally accepted view taken by Marxists since the time of Lenin on how to
characterise the mass parties of the Left. As Phil Hearse correctly pointed
out over 6 years ago (Socialism Today, June 1996) this analysis did not
simply depend on a formal headcount of how many working class members the
party has, or of how many votes the unions have at conference, but on the
political manifestation of that class base within the Party - ie that the
working class looked to the Party to effect social change to the benefit of
workers and act in their interests. Rees does not mention this.

The core of Rees's argument on why the Labour Party has not undergone
fundamental change is contained in the following passage:

"Labour remains working class in the following crucial senses: its
individual members are overwhelmingly working class, even though the
apparatus is more dominated by middle class elements than it was before;
its voting base is overwhelmingly working class; the majority of its
election funds still come from the unions. The unions, as this year's
Labour Party conference demonstrated beyond doubt, are still organically
connected to the Labour Party in a manner that makes a mockery of the idea
that Labour is a second Tory party."

The point about the election funding is simply wrong - in 1992 66% of the
Party's expenditure came from the unions, in 1997 it was 40%, and in 2001
it was 33%. (See article by Julian Glover, Guardian July 2002). Even if
Rees were correct, the fact that the unions are continuing to waste members
money by giving it to the Labour Party does not make Labour a workers party
- in the 2000 US presidential elections the AFL/CIO pledged $48m to the
Democrats, despite their overwhelmingly pro-corporate agenda. Are the
Democrats a workers party?

On the question of individual membership, the position is less clear. A
1997 survey of Labour Party members found that 64% of the membership were
in the "white collar, salaried" bracket, with only 15% in the "manual,
working class" bracket. Marxists would argue that these categories tell us
very little about class, and that many of the white collar category are in
fact working class. The major survey done by Patrick Seyd at the end of the
1980s found that the average labour party member was a male college
lecturer in his late '40s. In 1994, 38% of LP members were TU members, by
1997 this was down to 29%. Certainly the apparatus is overwhelmingly middle
class, and this seems to be the case at a local as well as a national level
- councillors and local officials are increasingly drawn from middle class
backgrounds, and such positions are largely seen as stepping stones to a
career. Perhaps the key point here is the fact that local parties are
increasingly empty shells - there is a crisis of active involvement in the
Party from anyone, regardless of their class background.

This crisis of activism is reflected in the national membership figures -
down from 400,000 in 1996 to less than 260,000 today. Around a third of
constituencies didn't bother to send delegates to the 2000 party conference
- when I was in the Labour Party, in the late 1980s, some people used to
spend all year trying to get nominated as delegate to conference! The
reason they didn't bother is because nothing of any importance gets decided
at conference any more - Rees's example of the leaderships defeat on PFI at
this years conference is really clutching at straws - this was only the
second time that the leadership were defeated on anything, despite 5 years
of privatisation and warmongering, and neither defeat has made the
slightest difference to either Labour Party policy or the actions of the
Labour Government. 2/3rds of constituency parties supported the Government
position (only 3 opposed the dropping of Clause 4). The block vote of the
unions has been cut from 90% to 50%. Whatever elements of a working class,
reformist outlook remain within the Labour Party, they are unable to gain
an expression in the Party's policy and decision - making arenas - the
party is now effectively deaf to the voice of the oppressed.

Rees's argument that the Labour Party is still reliant on working class
votes is odd - my immediate reaction is "so what?". The list of bourgeois
parties that are reliant on working class votes is as long as my arm -
Fianna Fail in Ireland, Democrats in US, Peronists in Argentina etc. The
vote of the working class is crucial in any election, because they are the
majority of the population, at least in the advanced capitalist countries.
The fact that a bourgeois political party has adopted a strategy (or is
continuing with an old one) of attempting to gain support from the working
class does not alter its class basis. What we have seen over the last 10
-15 years is a fracturing of the traditional patterns of party support on
an international scale - the collapse of the Italian Socialist Party, the
rise in support for the far Right amongst a section of working class voters
across Europe, increase in support for the Greens, cities such as Liverpool
and Sheffield coming under the control of the Liberals, and - Yes, John -
the rise of the SSP. It is precisely this process that is creating
opportunities for the Socialist Alliance. What we are also seeing, which
Rees makes no reference to, is increased levels of rejection of all the
mainstream political parties, as working class people conclude, with a
better grasp of what is going on than the SWPs theoreticians, that all the
parties are much the same and none are worth a vote. The last General
Election had the lowest turnout since 1918, with 17m people (and 62% of
young people) not voting.

All the evidence, in Britain and internationally, points to a process of
embourgeoisment of the traditional social democratic parties. The key
question for socialists, therefore, is the creation of a new party which
can use socialist ideas to bridge the gap between the radicalising layers
of the official labour movement and the radical new social movements. One
could debate how far advanced the process of embourgeoisment is, but to
ignore it completely, as the SWP seem to be doing, is to give rise to the
suspicion that they are putting their own sectarian interests ahead of the
movement. Rees takes a snapshot of the LP as it is now (the elements of
which are themselves incorrect or debatable), but makes no effort to
examine if this is how it has always been, whether it is getting better or
worse, etc. This analysis is crucial if socialists are to work out a
perspective and strategy for the period ahead.

Suporters of a socialist party project in England need to take on this
debate, in the run-up to SA conference in March and beyond.


22 December 2002

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