apeing the US Democrats?
The hey-day of the "Bennite left" in the British Labour Party has long since past. Since 1979 the party has lost four elections. The response of the party leadership has been to move further and further to the right.
Many "Bennites" either moved with the leadership or left the party completely. Our correspondent examines the current state of the party, in particular the debates about the party's trade union links and the spectre
International Viewpoint #249 October 1993
### Introduction
The following selection of articles -on Britain, France, and New Zealand - examine and analyse the crisis of modern social democracy in specific countries. They are, therefore, only parts of a much wider picture.
• BRITAIN
Labour:
of "Clintonisation".
PHIL HEARSE — London, 21 September 1993 However, each of the three countries are illustrative of the different forms that the crisis has taken. • In Britain, the organic link between the trade union movement and the Labour Party is under threat. Phil Hearse explains why, and what the repercussions might be if this link were to be detrimentally altered or broken altogether. • In France, amidst scandal and an image of growing incompetence in government, the Socialist Party (PS) was almost wiped off the map in elections earlier this year. Jacques Kergoat, in returning to many of the debates of the 1970s and 1980s, examines the background to the party s failure and what its future may hold. • In New Zealand, the rightward drift of the Labour Party developed to the extent that a split occurred and the NewLabour Party (NLP) was formed. A number of trade unions have also disaffiliated from the old party and some have begun to build links with the new. Kia Kaha & Geoff Pearce and briefly cast a critical eye over the NLP itself. In a fourth, associated article, we ask what the effects of the crisis of the social democratic project have been on the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). Roland Wood suggests that the repercussions for many of the ICTUs affiliates are clear to see but that the effects on the organisation as a whole are quite negligible. This is particularly so now that it enjoys a dominant position worldwide. The
CFTU continues to dance to its own tune - and it expects the newer, more militant federations in the developing countries to dance to this tune as well. - Gerrard Macklin * 16
T
WELVE years ago the British Labour Party was in the throes of the most sustained left-wing upsurge in its history. The left's standard-bearer, Tony Benn, came within half a percentage point of winning the deputy leadership of the party, while Labour conferences routinely passed sweeping radical policies.
Today it is going through another turmoil, this time through an assault from so-called "modernisers", who want to break the party from its historic links with the trade unions and deepen the decade-long process of shifting the party to the right.
The form of the struggle now is quite different to the previous battle. For today's modernisers are not rank-andfilers conducting nationwide campaigns inside the structures of the trade unions and Labour "constituencies": they are. in the main, leading members of the party, including the leader John Smith, in alliance with some of the most rightwing union leaders. Ranged against them are some of the most powerful, and not necessarily very leftwing union leaders.
In truth, the lack of fierce debate inside the Labour constituencies is not very surprising: after four electoral defeats in a row since 1979, each of which have been met by the party leadership launching new attacks on the left, the local structures of the party have withered. Individual membership, estimated at 240 thousand (compared with 1 million in 1951) is at its lowest post-war point, probably down by 100 thousand in a decade and those who have left are disproportio nately the left wingers.
The "modernisation" process is wrapped around with mystification. Its proponents argue the necessity to create a "modern" mass-membership social democratic party on the "European" model. In reality the party is being prepared for a coalitionist alliance with the Liberal Democrats, Britain's third party. This would represent an historic development, especially given the traditional hostility to coalitions with right wing parties which existed inside the Labour party for historical reasons.?
### Viable
The drift towards coalitionism is an index of the ideological collapse of what is probably, after the German SPD, the world's strongest social democratic party. Underlying this collapse is a deep-rooted fear among the Labour and trade union bureaucracy that Labour is no longer a viable governmental party because of changes in the social structure and ideo logical outlook of broad sectors of the working class, especially in the south of England: this question is discussed below.
The central proposal of the Labour leadership and the most aggressive modernisers, around home affairs spokesperson Tony Blair and economics spokesperson Gordon Brown, is to base voting for party leader and selection of parliamentary candidates on a "one member, one vote" system among individual
1. The Labour Party is organised on the basis of geogra phical "constituencies" which correspond to electoral areas: one constituency elects one MP. Each constituency is divided into four or five branches, which in turn correspond to electoral areas for the election of local government councillors
2. In 1931 the Labour leader Ramsey MacDonald took the majority of Labour MPs into a government coalition with the Conservatives to form a "national government". The national government enacted huge reductions in unemployment benefit and other social benefits as a result of the world slump. MacDonald and the other MPs were expelled from the Labour Party: Labour was reduced to a parliamentary rump, and the Conservative party was in power unti 1945. For decades "Ramsey MacDonald" has been a swear word in Labour mythology.
International Viewpoint #249 October 1993 members. At first this proposal caused massive confusion, because apparently it was a step in the direction of greater democracy. The trade union "block vote" system at annual conferences has traditionally given the rightwing the ability to wield millions of votes "on behalf" of the huge affiliated trade union membership. The total vote of the constituency parties is 650 thousand, whereas the unions cast more than 6 million votes, with rarely any democratic accountability in how the block vote is cast.3
However, the block vote is the apex of a system which links the trade unions with the Labour Party from top to bottom: thus the local trade union branches attend Labour constituency meetings, both to participate in political debate and to cast votes on disputed matters, including the selection of parliamentary candidates. This whole system is now under threat. The left traditionally has not opposed the block vote, but argued for its democratisation, a system whereby how the block vote is cast is subject to debate and discussion within unions.
In addition to breaking the block vote, the Labour leadership has made a series of constitutional reforms which radically reduce the power of Labour's national conference to make policy. Put together with the end of the block vote, this would mean policy making being protected from the decisive say of both the union affiliated members and the individual party members.
The power and weight of British social democracy has been intimately linked with the achievements of the
1945-51 Labour government. This comprised the nationalisation of public utilities and some major industries like coal and steel, with the construction of the welfare state, including some of the most advanced social provisions anywhere in the world - the crowning point of which was the National Health Service, with its ideal of universal and free health provi-
Burdens Now, after fourteen years of Thatchente government, these gains are in the process of being destroyed. The "mixed economy" is all but gone, after the waves of 1980s privatisation. The welfare state is severely buffeted, but still much more than vestigial. And, with the high levels of unemployment and the ageing population, universal benefits (unemployment benefit, child support benefit, disability benefit, and especially the health service) impose huge burdens on British capitalism. The £50 million budget deficit is closely linked to rising welfare costs. It is not just ideological wickedness which drives the Tories to attack the welfare system, but the fiscal crisis of the state.4
Labour's ideological crisis derives from its inability and unwillingness to defend its old ideology of Keynesianism and welfarism. Although traditionally a party which shunned high theory, social democracy in Britain actually developed a substantial theorisation of "democratic socialism" being incarnated in the defence and extension of the Keynesian welfare consensus: this was the work of the late Anthony Crosland, in his famous book "The Future of Socialism' (1956). Crosland took the post-war changes in capitalism to be irreversible, and postulated the impossibility of the Conservative party acting as a party of social coun ter-revolution. In particular he took the progressive taxation system to be cast in stone. His classically reformist text represented the optimism and self-confidence of post-war social democracy at the onset of the long economic boom: its lack of historical perspective is pathetically obvious today.
Now the Labour leadership challenges both the ideology of universal welfare benefits and the mixed economy. Its economic policy is based on the soundness of markets; and it has established a "Commission on Social Justice, the function of which is to find complicated reasons why the welfare benefits system has to be severely modified.
The collapse of the basics of social democratic ideology, common to all the major social democratic parties, including now the Swedish and German parties, is however only part of the alarming charge to the right. Chief "moderniser" Tony
Blair is responsible for two innovations which are symptomatic: the championing of "family values" and attempts to outflank the Conservatives to the right on the question of "law and order". On family values Labour differs from the Conservatives in insisting that only a high-growth economy will create the social context for the "stabilisation" of the family. But the basic ideology of the pervasively progressive character of the traditional nuclear family, and its role in solving the problems of drugs and youth crime, is not challenged. This is particularly inappropriate in a society in which there are millions of single parents and only a minority living in the traditional nuclear
Tony Blair has recently taken to delivering long lectures on "individual responsibility" , going a long way to meeting the ideology of the rightwing of the Tory party, which of course insists that crime, drugs and social disorder are the result of malign individuals, lack of discipline at school, the allegedly catastrophic ideological effects of the 1960s, the collapse of organised religion, etc, etc.
Without a strong ideology to hold onto Labour is naturally bereft of a strong basis for its opposition to the Tories. Its one really distinguishing policy is the call for state investment in training and education, identifying Britain's economic decline in a "lack of skills". During the 1992 election the electorate was highly sceptical of Labour's claim that investment in training would rapidly reverse economic decline; a scepticism which was of course very realistic.
3. Trade unions affiliate members to the party on the basis of those who pay the "political levy" on their trade union subscriptions. But union members have to "opt-out" of paying this rather than "opting-in": it is certain that over the years many Liberal and Conservative voters have been "affiliated" to the Labour Party in this way
4. Especially in the light of the huge income tax reductions made by the Conservatives in the late 1980s. In 1988 and 1989 the state budget was in positive as a result of the mini-boom, and substantial sums were actually paid to the national debt!
5. The ideology of mainstream British conservatism has undergone a radical shift since the 1950s of course. The extent to which the British New Right has a worked out ideology is often underestimated; this is not just a matter of importing the theories of Milton Friedman and von Hayek, but a much deeper theorisation of the nature of society and history. For critical interpretations see: Andrew Gamble The Free Economy and the Strong State', MacMillan 1988 Edgar Wilson, 'A Very British Miracle', Pluto 1992.
6. This is because of the high numbers of both young adults and elderly people who live on their own; the high number of single parent families is a function of the rate of divorce, and different familial structures in parts of the ethnic minority population.
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International Viewpoint #249 October 1993
John Major's Conservatives have recently undergone huge electoral defeats in two parliamentary by-elections. In Newbury and Christchurch on the south coast, the Liberal Democrats achieved massive swings away from the Tories to win the seats. In both constituencies Labour received pathetic votes. There are of course special factors. Tactical voting by Labour voters to defeat the Tories in rural areas which Labour couldn't win was very marked. Both these areas are deep in the Tories southern England heartland. Nonetheless the absolute level of the Labour vote indicated a deep problem: in Christchurch the Liberal democrats won 33,000 votes, the Tories 16,000 and Labour just 1500.
Outside of London and a couple of other urban constituencies, there are no Labour MPs in the south of England, which of course is the population and economic centre of Britain. Labour MPs represent largely inner-London, the industrial north, Wales and above all Scotland (Labour has fifty-one out of seventy-two seats there). This has raised both the immediate pragmatic debate about whether Labour can ever again win a parliamentary majority on its own -especially as its own bastions are overrepresented in terms of parliamentary seats, an over-representation which will gradually disappear as a result of constituency boundary changes; and also a deeper debate about whether Labour and traditional Labourist ideology is based on social layers, workers in traditional manual industry and the public sector, both highly unionised, which are in decline.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s there was a stormy debate in the Labour Party about whether "affluent" workers would abandon Labour. This debate was settled in real life: a strong and assertive working class increased its level of trade union organisation and the level of Labour voting remained more-or-less constant until the mid-1970s. Increases in living standards in themselves did not shake class allegiances. But the social changes in Britain are now much more fundamental than thirty years ago.
Traditional industries have declined, giving way to service industries and lowemployment high-tech industries. Working class housing estates have been broken up, as local authority housing has given way to high levels of home ownership. The level of trade unionisation has declined, both as a result of unemployment and the failure of the major unions to even attempt to make inroads into new industries. The consensus in academic 18 political science is that this has led to a "de-alignment" of class allegiances in party loyalty at elections, and the emergence of a pragmatic electorate which assesses voting preferences on immediate perceived personal advantages. Labour is highly vulnerable from these pragmatic voters because it is perceived as a party of high personal taxation. And all this affects the south of England disproportionately as the area of greatest prosperity.
### Collectivist values
There is some truth in this account. It is foolish to deny major changes in the social structure of the working class, and the decline of knee-jerk automatic loyalty to Labour in important sections of the working class (although forty percent of the working class has always voted Conservative!). On the other hand, every opinion poll without fail records the alarming persistence (alarming for proponents of the Thatcherite revolution) of collectivist values and "social democratic" ideology in the overwhelming majority of the population. This includes massive loyalty to the welfare state, the health service, state-provided pensions, national investment in education, public utilities and so forth; as well, it must be noted, as substantial majorities for liberal social policies on issues like abortion and lesbian and gay rights.?
At a surface level, then, this would seem to reflect a huge audience for the (perceived) ideology of Labour, an ideo logy it is rapidly ditching.
But there is an evident contrast between ideological majorities and votes for Labour; and the reasons are not hard to find. After numerous Labour governments there is little confidence that Labour will actually provide public services and social welfare provision. Health service workers are perhaps the group most universally hostile to the Tories in the whole of society; but opinion polls during the last general election found generalised scepticism about whether anything would change under Labour. This is reinforced by the experience of people with Labour local authorities. It also has to be said that while there is much scepticism among them about privatisation, nationalised industries were often unpopular with their end-users, and Labour is seen as having no alternative to either bureaucratic nationalisation or the logic of the market.
And then there is the practical question of assessment of each individual's personal fate under Labour. Millions of people believed during the 1992 election
LIBERAL-DEMORAT
LABOUR
that nothing much would change, that they would have to pay higher taxes, and the economy would do no better and probably worse under Labour. Even so, 11 million people voted Labour. How many of them did with great expectations of a new dawn and sincere ideological conviction, rather than a gut hatred of the Tories, is open to question.
Pragmatic voting calculations cannot be separated from the generalised organisational and ideological crisis of the labour movement. Lower levels of unionisation diminish the opportunity for the unions to be a decisive factor in mobilising votes for Labour and undermine collective loyalties.
While conceding some of the social factors which undermine the Labour vote in the south of England, this has to be put in the perspective of still 8 million trade unionists and 6 million affiliated to the Labour Party. In this context, even from the narrow perspective of the self-preservation of the labour bureaucracy, the present course of the Labour leadership is disastrous. Instead of turning towards a campaign of trade unionisation, a fight to organise the unemployed, and the resurrection of even a limited Keynesian welfare state ideology, the Labour leadership takes the opposite course, demobilising its existing base, and failing to make gains in new layers, or layers which have abandoned Labour. It is the course of a collective suicide foretold
Labour's present self-destructive course is a massive victory for the British bourgeoisie. The early 1980s "Bennite"
7. The two issues on which public opinion is overwhelmingly reactionary are immigration controls and crime, with crushing majorities in favour of capital punishment.
International Viewpoint #249 October 1993 revolt in the Labour Party sent shock waves through the British "establishment". Contrary to simplistic theories that the union "block vote" is inherently rightwing, it was indeed the ability of the Bennites to make substantial gains at the base of the unions which made them such a potent force inside the Labour Party. The prospect of a radical leftwing Labour Party coming to power, backed by trade union strength, signalled potential disaster for the bourgeoisie. Again, contrary to simplistic theories, the bourgeoisie is highly interested and not at all agnostic about the political complexion of the Labour Party. The lesson of the crushing 1983 electoral defeat for Labour, in the wake of the Malvinas war, and with the most gigantic media anti-Labour mobilisation this century, was simple: the bourgeoisie sent the signal that Labour must make itself again "fit to govern". This is of course an endless game: the bourgeoisie demands Labour makes radical changes, but every shift to the right is "not quite enough" (even though the Financial Times did back Labour in 1992!).
### Deliberate
It is a conscious and deliberate policy of the most politically active sections of the bourgeoisie to break Labour from the trade unions, and not "just" to defeat its leftwing. The reasons for this, which is after all a change in the mainstream bourgeois view since the 1960s, has to be sought in the predicament of British capitalism and the potential reorganisation of the party system which is in view.
Britain will not reverse its comparative economic decline, whatever the conjunctural fluctuations (if the British economy seems to be growing faster than the rest of Europe today, this is fundamentally a result of the short-term effects of re-unification on the German economy). Thus the welfare-Keynesian postwar consensus is unsustainable, and the welfare state must be finally dismantled; and a major British party in any way committed to it is unacceptable to the bourgeoisie. Moreover, the "corporatist" mechanisms of integrating the union bosses are, after the experience of the 1970s, also unacceptable to the bourgeoisie.& All this points to an effort to smash up the Labour Party as a party based on the organised working class, which means breaking the links with the unions.
Moreover, this fits into the project of creating a viable alternative government to the Tories. After fourteen years of Tory rule, theories of Britain being a
"one-party state" abound. This is very simplistic. All the more sensible sections of bourgeois public opinion see the need for a viable alternative governmental team, if only in case of electoral accident. And the idea of a Liberal-Labour coalition is much more acceptable than that of another Labour government. Making Labour a party capable of doing coalition deals also means breaking its organised links with the unions.
Labour's turmoil has immediately raised the issue of whether it will cease to be a bourgeois workers' party and become a party like the US Democrats, a simple capitalist party. Strict analogies with the US Democrats are not very useful, given the adherence of a substantial portion of the American ruling class to the party, an unlikely fate for Labour. Labour of course is already a bourgeois party politically, and always has been, contrary to the mythology of (declining) sections of the Labour left: Tony Benn recently stated "Labour has never been a socialist party" 9 But the basic answer to the question is that it could become a simple bourgeois party, but there is still an enormous gap between what the Labour Party is today and that possible
In the first instance, a change in the form of organised links with the unions, although very significant and utterly symbolic, would not in itself be decisive. The German SPD does not have these kind of organic links, although of course the trade unions are very influential in the
The leaders of the Transport Workers and the GMB, the largest and third largest unions respectively, are locked in a bitter battle with Smith over this issue. This reflects an instinct for survival: the trade union bosses may not have the influence with government they had in the 1970s, but at least they have an important say in one of the two major parties. They fear being completely politically sidelined by Smith's proposals. And, this is vitally important, it is the trade unions which fund the Labour Party, which in the absence of a real mass membership, is decisive.
More fundamentally, despite the predominance of class-collaborationist "new realism", the British trade unions, with the exception of an important groups of rightwing unions based on the engineering union, the fourth largest, has not collapsed into business unionism of the typical US type.
Despite organisational decline and ideological chaos, the British Labour Party is still a very different kind of party to the French, Spanish and, especially, Italian Socialist Parties. Any upturn in the class struggle can rapidly send shock waves into the party. The social base of the "modernisers" is extremely weak, reflecting an extremely narrow part of the labour bureaucracy.
Over the spring and summer months this year, most of the major trade union conferences rejected, out of hand, Smith's proposals to change the organised links with Labour. At the conference of the Transport Workers, Britains' largest union, the proposals were rejected almost unanimously despite a personal appearance by Smith to put his case.
"Fixer"
John Edmonds, leader of the GMB general workers union, a staunch rightwing loyalist and "fixer" throughout the 1980s, has ben forced into extraordinary attacks on Smith, for "ditching our traditional values" and failing to put up sustained opposition to the Tory attacks on the working class. Even on this specific issue of the trade union link, there are long and bitter battles ahead.
Labour is in historic crisis because the social and economic basis of its ideology has collapsed. If the working class goes down to bigger and bigger defeats, if there is no end to economic crisis in Britain and internationally, if the welfare state is utterly crushed, if there is no sustained re-mobilisation of the workers, if no new left wing is built, if all this hap pens in the context of unending defeats for the working class internationally — then obviously Labour could collapse into being just another bourgeois party. It would be a foolish person who concluded that there are no straws in the wind, and that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. It would be an equally foolish person who mistook straws in the wind for an actual tornado. An historic defeat which is a long way from occurring is an historic defeat which can be prevented. *
8. The period of the greatest influence of the unions with the government, the 1975-79 "social contract" with the Wilson-Callaghan government, was also a period of sustained industrial militancy, culminating in the "winter of discontent" in 1978-79
9. Eric Heffer memorial lecture 1992.
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