Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No.107, June/July 1992
Reviewing the general election in the New Statesman recently, Jeremy Seabrook wrote that ‘the small frightened freedoms that we enjoy are underpinned by a global system that requires that they be paid for by rigorous and intensifying dispossession of the poor of the earth’, and argued that ‘Labour’s promises of a better life depended absolutely and solely on the further success of the global economy further to enrich the people of Britain by means of the same flow of wealth from the poor to the rich of the world.’ ROBERT CLOUGH examines the issues.
A divided world – a divided working class
Seabrook has seized on something of vital importance to communists, even if he deals with it as a non-Marxist. He has recognised the imperialist structure of world capitalism in general, and of British capitalism in particular, and exposed its essentially parasitic character. But more: he links the ideological bankruptcy of Labour to its acceptance of the imperialist order, and thereby makes a direct connection between the parasitism of British imperialism and the corruption of its political life. By corruption, we mean indifference to destitution and oppression, to the destruction of the planet and the lives of the vast majority who live on it. That indifference is the prerogative of those who have benefited from the parasitism – not just the ruling class, but wide sections of the middle class, and an upper stratum of the working class as well.
The general election campaign epitomised such corruption as it became no more than a dispute on how the proceeds of British parasitism would be divided amongst the more affluent sections of the British population. It excluded not just the mass of the working class throughout the world, but the majority of the working class in Britain as well. Politics became a televised circus, a succession of sound bites and photo opportunities. There was no pretence at actively involving the electorate, let alone the working class: that basic feature of elections in the past, public political hustings, has long since disappeared.
The corrupting influence of British imperialism on left wing politics is not restricted to Labour alone: the decadence extends to its apologists and defenders both inside and outside the Party. The SWP, for instance, has a long history of denying the connection between parasitism and corruption. Back in 1979, it argued that:
‘In fact neither the export of capital nor the “superprofits” of imperialism play the role they once did… It is arguable that there has been no net capital export at all [to the Third World] for long periods in the recent past… Export of capital plays a vital role in modern capitalism, but it is overwhelmingly exported from one developed country to another. Its economic significance is entirely different… It cannot account for the “corruption” of “labour aristocracies”… by the crumbs of superprofits.’ (Socialist Worker 28 April 1979)
This was written several years after the explosion of bank lending to the Third World had started, and a mere two years before the resulting debt crisis. They repeated the view recently:
‘If the Third World’s debt service during the 1980’s had “benefited white workers”, it would have provided £1,318 for every man, woman and child in the West. They received not a penny – instead it went to help bank profits and the revenues of governments.’
In fact, sections did receive rather more than a penny. The boom in house prices in the 1980s cannot be explained in terms of some fundamental change in the domestic economy. The superprofits of the banks were used as a base for the rapid expansion of credit in the domestic economy. Sections of the working class who has bought their houses in the early-to-mid-1980s – and these were often council houses – found that they were for a period of time ‘earning’ more through the increase in the value of their houses than through their real wages. This reality is one which the SWP chooses to ignore – but it rips their ‘theories’ on imperialism and the labour aristocracy to shreds.
Why Labour lost the election
These strata, having defected to the Tories in 1979, then supported them throughout the 1980s for very material reasons, one of which we have just explained: the aim of Labour’s campaign was to win them back. Hence it had become a ‘fair tax party’, supporting only prudent public expenditure – a coded rejection of any significant steps to alleviate the poverty that is one of the legacies of Thatcherism. Apart from the minor concessions on pensions and child benefit, it offered the working class nothing except when ‘resources allow’.
For some on the left, even these concessions to the better-off were inadequate. Militant thought that ‘starting tax rises at £21,000 a year could give the Tories ammunition. The tax issue could still make the difference with better-paid skilled and white-collar workers – vital votes Labour has to win back,’ (Militant 20 March 1992) whilst according to its post-mortem, ‘white-collar workers, middle ranking teachers and middle class voters who could be won to Labour were not, because they ‘got the impression Labour would tax them harder’, and referred editorially to the ‘tax disaster’.
The ‘tax disaster’ was a very mild, not to mention equitable, proposal that those earning £21,000 and more should pay the same marginal National Insurance rate as those earning less. It only goes to show how many principles need to be ditched to re-elect Labour. But Militant knew that the votes of these better-off strata, particularly in London and the South East, would be crucial to Labour, a perceptiveness not shared by others such as the SWP, who believed that Labour could offer some defence of the working class. Hence its view that ‘Labour’s defeat was a disaster’, a ‘disaster for everyone who wants a better society’, a ‘disaster for working people’ (Socialist Worker 18 April 1992). And why did Labour lose? Because it looked little different from the Tories, and because it ‘turned its back on working class struggles’, facts well known before the election which did not stop the SWP from urging a Labour vote. Neither can be given as an explanation: a more radical standpoint would have been unacceptable to those whose support it needed to win.
A third reason is apparently working class ‘confidence’: ‘The big Labour victories of 1945 and 1966 were won when the unions were strong, when nobody was out of work and when the workers were full of confidence and hope.’ (Paul Foot, Socialist Worker, May 1992). But the size of the 1945 victory in fact depended on the two million middle class voters who supported Labour for the first time, and who ensured that the largest swings to Labour were in the more affluent constituencies of London and the South East. And Foot forgets (or possibly never knew) that many more workers voted Labour in 1951 when it lost the election than in 1945; the difference was that the middle class had returned to the Tories in sufficient numbers to let them in again.
A similar process took place in 1966: the scale of Labour’s victory was determined in large part by the votes of the more affluent, whether they were skilled workers or middle class. Ken Livingstone recognises this when he writes that ‘the bases of Labour’s greatest successes – led by Attlee in 1945 and Wilson in 1966 – came when we established a coalition between the highly-paid and the skilled, and the low-paid and unskilled sections of the working class electorate.’ (Morning Star 28 April 1992) What he misses out were the very particular conditions in which such a coalition could come about: in 1945, a general spread of democratic sentiment amongst the middle class from their experience in the war against fascism; in 1966, the belief that Labour could rejuvenate British industry where the Tories had patently failed.
Crucial was the position of British imperialism within the world economy. In the late 1940s, it was able to plunder the Empire to ensure that Britain’s manufacturing base was rebuilt whilst maintaining working class living standards; in the mid-1960s it was still a significant manufacturing force yet to be overtaken by its major continental rivals. In the late 1970s and 1980s, severe industrial decline was accompanied by an enormous growth of British imperialism’s most parasitic features, principally the financial services sector, with its ability to suck wealth out of the Third World through sheer usury. But Britain’s financial supremacy has now been undermined by German and Japanese competition. It cannot afford to maintain the conditions of any more than the most privileged layers of the working class: the rest are to be condemned to increasing poverty. The conditions for Livingstone’s coalition no longer exist; the discussion on ‘targeting’ benefits, as means testing is euphemistically described, merely reflects this new reality.
Illusions and fairy tales: the SWP and Labour
The SWP, however, prefers fairy tales: ‘the Labour Party was founded on the rejection of the Lib-Lab alliances, and on the support for working class political representation’ (Open Letter to the Left, Socialist Worker 25 April 1992); ‘[Labour] grew out of the effort to elect working class MPs who were independent of the Liberals and Tories.’ (2 May 1992).What is the truth? Until 1918, Labour MPs could only be elected through secret ‘Lib-Lab alliances’ whilst the first two Labour governments depended on Liberal support. Labour was not founded on the need for ‘independent working class representation’, but on the need of a narrow section of the trade unions for parliamentary representation at a time when they excluded 90 per cent of the working class. These facts are no secret, but the SWP has to forget them to sustain its position, which is that the skilled workers are the true working class.
This explains its concern to scotch ‘the myth that it was the C2s, the better-paid skilled workers, especially in the South East, who cost Labour the election.’ Unfortunately it fails. Labour got 43 per cent of the C2 vote, which is far better than the 36 per cent it got in 1987. But in 1974 it got 49 per cent, and then only just scraped home. In both 1979 and 1983, the largest swings against Labour – over 10 per cent on each occasion – were amongst the C2 voters. The Tories gave the better-off sections of the working class a material stake in the system, through council house sales, privatisation and tax concessions, and this bribery was sufficient to retain enough C2 votes for them to win a fourth term. In case there is any doubt about the effect that council house sales for instance have on working class voting patterns, no less than 59 per cent of 1979 Labour voters who bought their houses between then and the 1983 elections switched their vote from Labour in 1983. Not a palatable fact for the SWP.
To attempt to bolster their absurd position, they argue that the C2 layer is made up of the self-employed and foremen as well as ‘genuine’ skilled workers, and that these ‘genuine’ skilled workers always vote Labour. But the distinction the SWP draws between skilled workers as the self-employed (the collapse of manufacturing employment has made the foreman category far less significant) serves only to hide how this layer as a whole has benefitted from the Tories’ ‘people’s capitalism’. The number of self-employed rose by nearly 1.5 million during the Tory years, a fact that only emphasised how going self-employed has always been one of the ways up for the skilled worker.
The SWP shares with Militant the belief that Labour is a ‘workers’ party’, but differs in proclaiming its organisational independence. Yet this ‘independence’ is a charade. When Livingstone and Bernie Grant announced they would stand in the leadership contest, the SWP called them ‘a real choice’, declaring that only they ‘represent anything different’, and that ‘if Livingstone and Grant do succeed in winning the nomination of 55 Labour MPs, their campaign could become a focus for those activists who want to prevent the further drift to the right and to build resistance to the Tories’ attacks.’ (Socialist Worker 25 April 1992) A week later, and this ‘real choice’ had disappeared in a puff of smoke, having obtained a dozen votes, leaving the SWP without explanation.
The SWP wants to build a ‘socialist alternative’ to Labour, but only an ‘alternative’, not an opposition. An ‘alternative’ cannot be any more than a ginger group of the disaffected or disillusioned who want to be organisationally separate from Labour without breaking their political connection. It is a halfway house where they need be responsible for nothing, be it for Labour or the mass of the working class, the choice of political cowards who could bemoan Labour’s defeat as a disaster, but were either too idle or embarrassed to actively canvass for it.
We heard a lot of this ‘alternative’ after the 1979 election; it was as craven then as now. It supported Benn during his deputy leadership campaign, despite his silence on the hunger strike, and his condemnation of the uprisings of the same year. Indeed, its ‘warmth and solidarity’ for Benn (Paul Foot’s words at the time) contrasted sharply with its dismissal of black working class youth as a ‘lumpen proletariat’, a ‘vulnerable underbelly of the working class’. In 1983, it attacked Livingstone when he described electricians and engineers as privileged, dismissing the ‘trend’ that sought to create a new popular base ‘by linking up with groups which are not part of the working class. The examples most often given are those of such “minorities” as women, blacks and gays.’ At the 1988 Socialist Conference, Chris Harman for the ‘socialist alternative’ could take this a step further to reject a community-based anti-Poll Tax campaign because ‘on council estates are drug peddlars, junkies and people claiming houses under false names’, and argue that the central issue was the Benn-Heffer leadership campaign.
The ‘alternative’ was then and now the original, even if spiced with some revolutionary rhetoric. The vehicle for the politics of the SWP is the same privileged stratum of the working class that Labour represents; the SWP can no more break with Labour than it can from the stratum in which it is rooted. We have explained in the past how the SWP, along with the rest of the left, reject both the concept of imperialism and the existence of the split in the working class. The election and its aftermath shows the consequences: a flight from reality.
Robert Clough
