A debate on 100 years of Labourism, response

Another Marxism is possible
Richard Price responds to Mike McNair’s critique of Graham Bash and Andrew Fisher’s 100 Years of Labour. This article appeared in Weekly Worker 16 November 2006.


Mike McNair’s review of Graham Bash and Andrew Fisher’s 100 Years of Labour (‘100 years hard labour?’, Weekly Worker, September 28, 2006) is a thoughtful and detailed response, but one that is heavily distorted by its conclusion that the most effective way for socialists to exert influence upon Labour is through the building of ‘the unity of Marxists in a common party’ outside its structures.

A significant part of Mike’s review is devoted to a critique of the Perry Anderson/Tom Nairn thesis on the absence of a mass socialist or communist party in Britain, upon which, he argues, Graham and Andrew’s pamphlet is heavily reliant. I don’t hold any particular brief for Anderson or Nairn, but I do think it’s important to respond to what the authors have actually written, and not to infer what you think they may mean on the basis of a few footnotes.

So, for example, Mike, apparently criticising the pamphlet, argues that the aristocracy played no distinct economic or political role after the seventeenth century, and became ‘a segment of the capitalist class’. Hang on a minute! Bash and Fisher state – in opposition to crude accounts of the English Revolution of the 1640s – that it was ‘by no means a straightforward confrontation between a progressive bourgeoisie and an obsolete feudal aristocracy, but a far more indirect conflict mediated through the factional struggle of two sections of the same ruling class bloc’. And it is scarcely news that the British aristocrats, like the mining magnate, the Duke of Northumberland, were among the first in Europe to invest heavily in industry, while industrialists from the late nineteenth century onwards bought into land.

But Mike seems to veer towards an opposite error, in failing to recognise that the ‘landed interest’ was by no means always in step with the industrial capitalists. It had distinct economic interests of its own, and it occupied a leading role in politics until the turn of the twentieth century. How else are we to understand crucial clashes between different wings of the ruling class which gave rise to the large scale mobilisations that preceded the Reform Act of 1832 and the struggle between the Manchester School free traders of the Anti-Corn Law League and the landed aristocracy in the 1840s?

The New Domesday Survey of 1873 found that a quarter of England and Wales was still owned by 710 people. Between them, the Dukes of Sutherland and Buccleuch held nearly 1.5 million acres, and there were more than 40 other estates of more than 100,000 acres. The contradiction between the industrial and landowning wings of the ruling class continued through the agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century and was only resolved with the break up of many of the old landed estates – a process that gathered pace at the turn of the twentieth century and continued into the 1930s.

The 1832 Reform Act symbolised the entry of the new capitalist class into British politics, but the aristocracy continued to occupy its commanding heights for many decades. The second half of the nineteenth century may have been the era of Disraeli and Gladstone, but aristocrats occupied 10 Downing Street for more than three of these five decades.

Non-conformism and socialism
Mike argues against the view that there was a deep discontinuity in English working class politics in the four decades from the decline of Chartism at the end of the 1840s to the rise of New Unionism in the late 1880s. Far from there being a discontinuity in revolutionary ideas, he argues there was a ‘continuity of radical-Christian ideas’.

Aside from the fact that there isn’t necessarily a contradiction between these two propositions, a distinction must be drawn between ideas and the class struggle itself. To argue that the class struggle after 1848 didn’t take a long constitutionalist detour is to fly in the face of the evidence of the three preceding decades, which are studded with militant and semi-insurrectionary movements, often followed by harsh repression – the Peterloo Massacre (1819), the Cato Street Conspiracy (1820), the attempts to form general unions (1829-34), the Captain Swing agricultural disturbances (1830-31), the Merthyr Rising (1831), the campaign for the Reform Act (1831-2), the campaign against the ‘bastilles’ set up by the 1834 Poor Law, the campaign for the release of the Tolpuddle Martyrs (1834-36), the Rebecca Riots (1839-42), the Newport Rising (1839), the Plug Plot general strike of 1842, and physical force Chartism in the 1840s.

The principal reason why politics developed mostly through constitutional channels in the decades after 1848 isn’t hard to uncover. British manufacturing conquered the world, and the violent swings of the trade cycle, which had generated the most acute conflicts of previous decades, moderated. Real wages of the average manual worker rose by about 75 per cent between 1850 and 1900 – the largest percentage rise since the second half of the fourteenth century. Hours of work fell, factory conditions improved, and there were advances in public health. Affordable housing came within reach of better paid workers. Mass entertainment and spectator sports took off. The British ruling class learned to defuse class conflict by social reforms, urban improvement and judicious extensions of the franchise.

The point is not that the working class campaigns in the 1860s against slavery and in support of Polish independence, and the role of British trade unionists in the First International cited by Mike were unimportant. It is that they were an anti-climax in comparison, and didn’t lead to a mass radicalisation in political consciousness.

There were, for instance, only about 25 branches of the First International in Britain in the early 1870s, and their combined membership was numbered in hundreds rather than thousands. In 1872, a leader in The Beehive newspaper – closely associated with the International – complained that the working class’s ‘thoughts on labour questions are expressed solely by their trades, which are non-political’. Six years later, Lloyd Jones, the first secretary of the Labour Representation League, could still bemoan the fact that ‘the working men are shaping no questions for themselves, are considering no policy, are organising no party’. In 1890, Engels could write enthusiastically that the British working class was ‘newly awakened from its forty-years sleep’.

Was there a continuity of radical Christian ideas from the seventeenth century down to the rise of the Independent Labour Party in the 1890s? It has long been a commonplace that the British labour movement owes more to Methodism than it does to Marxism. There were strong echoes of Leveller demands in the People’s Charter, and at the time the ILP began to grow in the West Riding there were still old Chartists whose memories stretched back to the 1840s. Leading historians of the nineteenth century like Macaulay and Gardiner revived interest in Cromwell as a precursor of constitutional advance. A number of the non-conformist churches, like the Quakers, were founded in the 1640s. Christian socialist and radical liberal ideas certainly found their way into both the ILP and the trade unions via their common inheritance from non-conformism and Lib-Labism.

That being said, the religious revival of the later 1800s was a major obstacle to the building of a genuinely independent workers’ movement. The founders of the ILP included not only Catholics, Quakers and Methodists but also secularists and atheists. ‘The attempt to suggest that the ILP was founded by a slate of Methodist parsons and local preachers’ wrote E.P. Thompson, ‘is even more wildly inaccurate than the attempt to attribute it to the single-handed efforts of Engels and Aveling … if the socialists succeeded in sweeping whole chapel-fulls … into the movement, by their broad, unsectarian, ethical appeal, the credit is due to them, and not to the Nonconformist “Establishment” which fought the ILP every inch of the way’.

The non-conformist churches, with the honourable exception of the Primitive Methodists, were not normally on the side of the trade unions. They preached a gospel of class peace and acceptance of one’s place, and supported gradual civic ‘improvement’. Temperance movements, youth organisations with strongly religious overtones, like the Band of Hope, the Boys Brigade, and later the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, and welfare organisations like the Salvation Army all had mass memberships, often in the major industrial areas.

The message of hard work, prudence, sobriety, piety, self-reliance and self-improvement may have led a minority of non-conformists into the ILP. But many more remained loyal to the Liberals, or like my grandmother – a staunch Methodist born in humble circumstances, who signed the pledge in the early years of the last century – became loyal Tory voters. Non-conformism provided a significant part of the Birmingham power base of Joseph Chamberlain, whose name became synonymous with civic pride and urban improvement. He offered a potent mix of imperialism abroad, and social reform and protectionism at home.

Mike criticises ‘the common belief that the SDF was more middle class than the ILP’, arguing that, if anything, the reverse was true. But it’s not a belief shared by Bash and Fisher, who note that the Social Democratic Federation’s ‘rank-and-file membership was frequently active in the trade unions, playing a key role in the rise of “new unionism” after 1888’. Mike also points out that the ILP was stronger in the north, while the SDF was stronger in London.

But it isn’t true that the SDF was without any strength in the north. By 1893, the six branches of the SDF in and around Burnley claimed a combined membership of nearly 2,000, and in the 1906 general election, H.M. Hyndman, with ILP support, came within 356 votes of taking Burnley for the SDF, in a three-cornered contest. And while the ILP became a more middle class organisation in later years, its early Yorkshire strongholds were solidly working class mill towns, like Bradford and Halifax.

Socialist unity or mass party of labour?
Mike admits, somewhat grudgingly, that ‘With the benefit of hindsight, the 1901 decision of the SDF to pull out of the Labour Representation Committee can be seen to be a mistake’, though quite why – given his emphasis on the need for a united Marxist party – is not clear. Surely, the logic of his position should lead him to argue that the SDF’s project of socialist unity was correct as against the struggle to bring in the trade unions to provide a mass base.

At any rate, there were some within the SDF who thought it was wrong to leave the LRC. The Rochdale branch sent a motion to the SDF’s conference in 1905 calling for the SDF to re-enter the LRC, and in 1907, Hyndman, who had started a two year sabbatical from politics before the decision to split had been passed, began to raise the question of affiliation to what had now become the Labour Party.

Mike sets up a straw man when he claims that: ‘The Anderson-Nairn thesis, as applied by comrades Bash and Fisher, takes the case of German and Swedish social democracy, where the party created the unions, as the continental “norm” .’ In fact, the pamphlet doesn’t mention Sweden at all, simply compares the party-union relationship to Germany and Russia, and does not claim either as some kind of continental norm.

The review criticises the pamphlet’s contention that the affiliate structure has been central to Labour’s stability, instead arguing that: ‘The key is, rather, the first-past-the-post system of elections, which creates a substantial pressure towards a two-party system.’ But this is a very limited – and electoralist! – explanation of Labour’s stability.

It can’t, for a start, make much sense of the 1920s, when there was three-party politics; it ignores the role of the TUC in keeping the party together in the 1930s after the traumatic departures of Ramsay MacDonald and the ILP; it glosses over the trade unions’ role in the service of the wartime coalition, when they became the third pillar of state; and it leaves out the crucial role of the affiliate structure in more recent turning points, such as the Social Contract in 1976, and the victory of the Blairites in 1994.

Now, and only now, do we get to the main thrust of Mike’s critique – that the most effective way of influencing the Labour Party is via an avowedly revolutionary party from outside. He takes it as read that any Communist attempts at affiliation were doomed to failure in the 1920s. I’m more convinced by the idea (first put forward by Bob Pitt, so far as I’m aware), that had the British Socialist Party simply attempted to renew its affiliation, rather than do so in the name of a Communist Party bound by the 21 Conditions of the Comintern, it would have created some real problems for the Labour bureaucracy.

Instead, as the pamphlet correctly notes, ‘The CPGB’s application was couched in terms that were intended to provoke rejection’ – an error that demonstrated how little the sectarian and propagandist leaders of the CPGB understood how small groups of revolutionaries could win the confidence of broad masses of reformist workers.

Having set this precedent, it made things easier for the Labour leaders to defeat subsequent CPGB affiliation proposals. But Mike draws the conclusion that communist influence grew the more it was repelled by the bureaucracy, favourably contrasting the CPGB’s efforts with that of its affiliated predecessor, the BSP. But it’s hardly a fair comparison. The BSP’s affiliation was not accepted until 1916, by which time the party was split down the middle, for and against the war, and it had little time to develop unified and consistent tactics within the larger party. The CPGB, in contrast, held the British franchise of a successful revolution, as well as a great deal of Soviet financial backing, much of which was ploughed into sustaining CP-led front organisations and other organisations it was close to.

The Labour Party’s 1925 conference rejected CPGB affiliation for the second year running by a wide margin, banned communists from individual membership, and barred affiliated unions from sending communists as delegates to conference. One hundred constituency and borough parties, urged on by the CPGB, resisted the ban on communists, and about half of these joined the National Left Wing Movement when it was launched in December 1925. For a brief interlude it seemed that the antagonism of the right wing might assist the development of a CP-influenced left wing. The NLWM grew rapidly, and its paper, the Sunday Worker, claimed a circulation of 100,000.

But what is instructive is the comparative ease with which the bureaucracy outmanoeuvred the opposition by disaffiliating the rebel branches, and reorganising new official ones. Harry Wicks, who was a young communist member of the united Battersea Labour Party and Trades Council at the time, recalled: ‘Tragically, in the year after the General Strike, the disaffiliated party – which began with majority support – went down to defeat. Those who left it for the affiliated organisation were not necessarily right wingers. Far from it. Many of them simply could not bear disaffiliation.’

By the time of the NLWM’s second conference in September 1927, almost all of its participants were outside the official structures of the party, having been disaffiliated. Far from facilitating effective work being carried out in the Labour Party, maintaining an independent party was an obstacle. The Labour leaders could appeal to party loyalty on the one hand, and portray the NLWM as the creation of a hostile outside organisation on the other. By 1928, the CPGB had virtually no remaining influence within the Labour left, so that when it embarked upon the mad ultra-leftism of the ‘Third Period’, there were no bridges left to burn. So much for the high water mark of Mike’s preferred orientation.

Mike is correct when he points to some important omissions in the pamphlet – its ‘muted treatment’ of imperialism, and its inadequate account of local government. That being said, for long periods local government wasn’t a strong area for the left. The London County Council, for instance, was the power base of right winger Herbert Morrison during the inter-war years.

Partyism or the united front from within?
From here we fast forward to the 1970s and 1980s. Mike maintains that Militant became by far the most successful ‘entrist’ group, as a consequence of its high profile party-within-a-party approach. But while Militant was relatively successful in winning positions, notably in Liverpool, it came at a very heavy price. Its refusal to collaborate with other sections of the left and its dogmatic organisational and political style won it many enemies. While councillors like Ted Knight and John McDonnell pushed the rate-capping struggle as far as they could, Militant-led Liverpool became the city that dared to capitulate.

Like the CPGB, Militant walked away from its persecutors, with most of its members simply failing to renew their Labour Party membership, or in some cases where they were disciplined, not even bothering to appeal. Like the CPGB, Militant concluded shortly after it had broken all links, that Labour had ceased to be a workers’ party of any sort, and that it had become simply a third capitalist party. As I tried to show, in my article ‘Communists and the Labour Party 1927-29: a sense of déjà vu’, (Workers Action, No 17, Summer 2002), it’s a well-trodden road that leads to calls for trade union disaffiliation and ends in the political wilderness.

Mike, to be fair, does not hold that view, but tries to balance equally dogmatically mid-way, by upholding the need to influence the Labour Party, but only from outside – the very conditions that have failed so ignominiously and so often before.

Warming to his charge that Bash and Fisher underestimate both the positive impact of the CPGB in the 1920s and its more baleful influence in the 1970s and 1980s, Mike makes the case that the defeat of the Labour left since the 1980s is in large part the product of the collapse of British Stalinism. He points both to CPGB’s role in formulating the Alternative Economic Strategy, and to its significant industrial base.

But there are a number of objections to the causality Mike suggests. Firstly, the Labour left wasn’t completely dependent upon CPGB ideas. Many left wing MPs, like Eric Heffer from the older generation and Jeremy Corbyn from the new intake, came from strongly anti-Stalinist traditions. The GLC and other left wing councils had many left wing councillors who came out of student radicalism and Trotskyism. Andrew Glyn, who was around Militant, was a key figure in debates on the AES.

Secondly, the Labour left was at its peak of influence at the same time as the CPGB was descending into a terminal tail-spin. The Labour left, from the Benn for Deputy campaign down to the rate-capping debacle in 1985, posed a serious challenge to the right wing, and even after the defeat of the miners’ strike there were still significant numbers of left wing councillors. The CPGB surely reached its nadir when it tried to ban anti-Tory slogans from the People’s March in 1981. When the marchers reached London, they were greeted by the newly elected, Livingstone-led GLC, which proclaimed its defiance of the Tories across the river, day in, day out. Throughout the rate-capping crisis and the miners’ strike, the CPGB was consistently to the right of the Labour left. The main residual influence of the CPGB today seems to be the concentration of ex-Stalinists within the New Labour hierarchy, where their talent for suppressing internal democracy has finally found an outlet.

There was, therefore, no direct causal connection between the crisis in the CPGB and the subsequent crisis of the Labour left. Rather, both were affected by a crisis across the entire spectrum of the left, which began with the neo-liberal offensive of 1980s, and accelerated with the collapse of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989-91. The Labour Party’s membership may have halved, but the membership of groups to the left of Labour has suffered a far higher percentage loss.

A party of warring sects won’t work!
The continuing crisis of the Labour left is, Mike argues, a strategic one: without the CPGB’s ‘British Road’ strategy to lean on, it can only rely upon ‘the pieties of the old Bennite left’. The problem, I would suggest, is much broader. While the far left in the 1970s loudly proclaimed that its aim was the armed seizure of power, the aftermath of the collapse of Stalinism has seen all sorts of attempts at forming broader parties and groupings like the SLP, the SSP, the Socialist Alliance and Respect, which do not present themselves as openly revolutionary and fudge the issue of state power. Groups that would formerly have denounced Hugo Chávez as a bourgeois nationalist are booking their plane tickets to Caracas, where, despite impressive social reforms, ‘property rights and the structure of the economy remain intact’. (Guardian, November 14) Amidst the clamour on the far left for a new mass workers’ party, where is there a concise and credible perspective for the victory of socialist revolution? The far left has muffled the drums on the tricky issue of state power for the last 15 years. We are, it seems, all reformists now.

The reasons are not simply down to opportunism. While the collapse of Stalinism didn’t make the peaceful parliamentary road any more likely, it heavily discredited the idea that power – at least in the Western world – was likely to fall into the streets, that soviets would spring up, and a small revolutionary party would seize power in short order. Even those who thought it was possible often questioned whether it was desirable for small, unrepresentative ‘vanguards’ to seize power, and what implications this had for socialist democracy.

Where does this leave ‘the unity of Marxists in a common party’ that Mike sees as the precondition for any sustained socialist revival? The first problem is one of critical mass. If you gathered every last person that claimed allegiance to Marxism in the whole of Britain in a single organisation, you’d struggle to get to 10,000 members, and that would involve rubbing shoulders with quite a few, who in Alexei Sayle’s memorable phrase, think that in order to make an omelette it’s necessary to kill 20 million peasants.

But let’s just suppose you did manage to bring together all these completely incompatible sects and propaganda groups – and that itself takes a quantum leap of faith – what would be the first thing it would do? Split, of course! And that wouldn’t just be down to a higher than average demographic of misfits, movementists, cranks and dead-end sectarians, alongside a fair number of decent, honest comrades.

Such a party – just the sort of fusion of sects that Engels warned against – would almost certainly be based on a set of dogmatic programmatic ‘principles’, but it would lack a clear practical project. After all, it would include both those who are opposed to participating in mass reformist organisations full stop – and for some, that includes unions as well as parties – and the growing number of national union officials, for whom ‘Marxist’ politics is merely an add-on to their trade union activities.

And didn’t the Socialist Alliance founder for precisely these obvious reasons? It was too small to pose as a credible national alternative to Labour, and far from being a disciplined combat party, it was an umbrella of feuding sects, pulling in different directions. It is all very well to argue that the Socialist Alliance should have become a party. But that’s the whole point – building a genuine party out of such political material is excluded as a realistic possibility.

Which leaves us with the Labour Party. While you can debate new workers’ parties for years, there is a concrete struggle being fought right now to rally support for John McDonnell’s leadership campaign – one that both comrades Bash and Fisher actively support. How are the Marxists outside the Labour Party relating to that? One answer was given at the Organising for Fighting Unions conference on November 11, where delegates managed to applaud John McDonnell, and then cheer to the rafters calls to leave the Labour Party and disaffiliate the unions. When I asked an SWP member what this ‘support’ for John’s campaign amounted to in practice, he disarmingly told me, ‘Not much really’! Any united Marxist party in the foreseeable future will be united in one thing only – its sectarian attitude towards not only the Labour Party as a whole, but towards its left wing as well.

Although it is good that the Weekly Worker is supporting McDonnell, it is within the constituency parties, the trade unions and other affiliated bodies that the campaign will be fought. And while some will salve their conscience by supporting the campaign through their affiliated union, such are the vagaries of the electoral college that an individual member’s vote is worth about twenty times that of an affiliated trade unionist. If there are genuine Marxists out there, then this campaign would be a good starting point for unity in action around something of real, practical significance. We can debate the characteristics of future workers’ parties and where we’ve got to with the Marxist theory of the state while we’re walking down the road together.

If, however, you prioritise debating Marxist theory with rag, tag and bobtail Marxists over this simple, practical task then you will be repeating the mistakes Marxists have been making in relation to the Labour Party for the past century, but under conditions in which the Labour right wing can destroy what remains of a party of labour, and set the movement back a generation or more. It’s that serious.