The point however is to

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Stan Crooke reviews the Socialist Workers' Party's latest pamphlet, 'The Labour Party, myths and realities', by

IN 1899 the TUC passed a motion calling for an increasing number of Labour members in the next Parliament'. The next year, trade unionists and the socialist groups came together to set up the Labour Representation Committee. By 1906 the LRC had become known as the other ion of the trade • union movement into Parliament.

But Duncan Hallas begins his history of the Labour Party in 1918 when Clause Four and individual membership of the party were adopted.

Why does he omit the first 18 years of the history of the Labour Party? Because he wants to ignore and deny any connection between the trade unions and the Labour Party, in order to justify the SWP's practice of being active in the unions but not in the Labour Party. To do this Hallas has to slide over the creation of the Labour Party by the trade union movement itself.

And the same method runs through the pamphlet. Facts are cited to show the conservatism and treachery of Labour leaders and Labour governments: the reality that the Labour Party is the political wing of the mass labour movement, and that therefore those leaders must be fought within the movement. is slurred over.

After Post-dating the origins of the Party to 1918, Hallas simplistically portrays its creation as a cunning plot to 'head off dangerous (that is, revolutionary forces" by reformists who "rode the wave of postwar radicalism, the better to combat it" • About the masses of workers who moved towards the Labour Party after World War 1, and how Marxists could have fought with them against the reformists' misleadership, Hallas has nothing to say.

Post-dating the Party's origins has an added bonus for Hallas: he can duck the question of how Marxists should have related to it at the time of its founding.

The main Marxist organisation in Britain at the turn of the century was the Social Democratic Federation, an organisation as sectarian as the SWP is today. Engels wrote scathingly of it: "it has ossified Marxism into a dogma and, by rejecting every labour movement which is not orthodox Marxism... it renders itself incapable of ever becoming anything else but a sect"

The SDF's attitude to the Labour Party was a close parallel to the SWP's today. Having failed to get its programme accepted, the SDF pulled out of the Labour Party in 1902 and decided it was not worth Ramsey MacDonald outside bothering with since it was not a revolutionary party. That is why Lenin, in 1907, criticised the SDF for their inability "to envisage the theoretically helpless but vital, mass, powerful labour movement which is marching side by side with them"

Was the SDF right to ignore the Labour Party on the grounds of its political inadequacies? Or were Engels and Lenin right in their criticisms of the SDF?

Ever since its origins, the party has been "an essentially conservative force" Hallas tells us, "not, of course, an ordinary conservative party but a conservative workers' party" • And arhat 1c • 'roncervative workers' party"? Hallas Wlal 1s goes on to clarify this: 'a party wedded to capitalism but depending on a working class base"

Conclusion? Apparently, to ignore the contradictions in the basic nature of the Labour Party; to ignore the against the Party being 'wedded to capitalism'; to leave the leaders who are 'wedded to capitalism' a free run within the Party. But trade unions too are 'wedded to capitalism but depend on a working-class base' . Unions organise workers and fight (sometimes) to get a better deal for their members within the framework of capitalism. They are dominated by reformist bureaucracies. So why should socialists fight just in the unions and not in the Labour Party, given that both are 'wedded to capitalism...' Lenin's view Lenin (in 172D) was much harsher in his verdict on the Labour Party than Hallas ds, but argued for the British revolutionaries to join it. "The Labour Party", said Lenin, "is a thoroughly reactionary 10.10, 1924 party... led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that". • But Marxists should join it to find a road to the masses and fight those leaders.

Now was Lenin right or wrong? This is a question of no small importance. But it is another question which Hallas does not even ask, never mind attempt to answer. On page 10 the reader is told that the Communist Party was then "a real but small revolutionary party" , and on page 14 the reader finds out more or less by chance that the Communists tried to affiliate to the Labour Party in the early '20s. That's all.

The fact that Hallas does not even attempt to tackle Lenin's arguments underlines how little the pamphlet has to do with revolutionaries and the Labour Party. The omissions from the pamphlet, even more so than its contents, show it up to be a one-sided rehash of history aimed at justifying a preconceived conclusion — the syndicalist (narrowly trade-unionist) sectarianism of the SWP today.

The Having side-stepped the origins of the Party in the unions, and Lenin's call for the Communist Party to affiliate to it, Hallas zooms in on the record of the 1924 and 1929-31 Labour governments.

He reveals... that they did not overthrow capitalism.

Is this then what exposing the myths about the Labour Party amounts to? The revelation that after three years of Labour government prior to the last war, British capitalism was alive and well?

Hallas also looks at the record of Labour left-wing movements in this period. Unfortunately he is too clever for his own good.

Stan Cri roke re pamphlı et, 'Thi Duncan Hallas

"From the beginning" writes Hallas, "there had been two kinds of leftwing members in the Labour Party. They can conveniently be called the 'hard' left and the "soft' left' Trotskyists The 'hards' were those members influenced by the Communist Party. But in 1929, Hallas correctly points out, the CP went ultra-left, denounced the Labour Party as just a third capitalist party, and called on workers not to vote Labour (which is what the SWP would do as well, if they took their politics to their logical conclusion).

Because of this ultraleftist binge, the 'hards' isolated themselves and were unable to 'influence or win over the large number of Labour Party members who were undoubtedly open to the appeal of revolutionary politics after MacDonald's betrayal in 1931" [when Labour leader Ramsey MacDonald broke with the Labour Party to join the Tories in a coalition government].

As for the 'softs' - they didn't believe in a revolutionary road to socialism, they failed to put up a serious fight against the Party leadership, and they got sucked into the class-collaborationist Popular Front politics that the Communist Party turned to after 1934.

But what Hallas wants all this to prove, and what it actually does prove, are two completely different things.

In this section of the pamphlet, as in the pamphlet as a whole, Hallas is trying to prove that left-wingers in the Labour Party can make no significant impact and are wasting their time.

But the record of both the 'hards' and the 'softs' does not prove this at all. They failed not because they were in the Labour Party but because of their own political inadequacies, ultra leftist in the case of the people influenced by the CP, reformist in the case of the 'softs' Hallas says nothing about another sort of left-winger: the Trotskyists in the Labour Party in the '30s.

After their expulsion from the Communist Party, the first British Trotskyists organised as the Marxist Group in the Independent Labour Party, a tactic which soon spent itself with the decline of the ILP and the tightening up of its internal regime. One faction in the Trotskyist group, headed by Matlow, now argued for joining the Labour Party, while another faction, headed by Cooper, opposed this.

Trotsky commented: 'In my opinion, Matlow is 100% correct... I consider that the rigid, formalistic position of the Cooper paper has no relationship to Marxism at all. It shows a complete lack of comprehension of the class struggle... Tremendous possibilities unfold themselves inside the mass reformist organisations... It is absolutely essential to be within the mass organisations while there is the possibility of doing revolutionary work within them. Any such sterile, sectarian and formalistic interpretation of Marxism in the present situation [as Cooper's] would disgrace an intelligent child of ten"

The Trotskyists who joined the Labour Party and set up the Militant Labour League do not fit into Hallas's convenient division between the 'hard lefts' and I 'soft lefts'. They were revolutionaries, insigniticant in number, but fighting to root themselves in the working class.

The second half of the Duncan Hallas pamphlet follows the record of the post-war Labour governments and the failure of the "soft' lefts in the Labour Party. It does no more than state the obvious: no Labour government has ever abolished capitalism.

As with the first half, the second half of Hallas's work is more interesting for its omissions than its contents. Again, there is no discussion of what Marxists could do, or tried to do, to change the reality of pro-capitalist domination of the Labour Party.

But the SWP did not, after all, emerge from nowhere. It was previously the International Socialism' group, and before that the 'Socialist Review' group.

For nearly 20 years, from the early '50s to the late '60s, they existed as a loosely organised series of discussion groups inside the Labour Party.

Hallas cannot admit that his own organisation was a group within the Labour Party for nearly two decades without exposing the hollowness of his stance.

Hallas comes perilously close to dismissing the whole issue of leadership. 'The working class will in all probability have to renew its leadership several times before it creates a party really answering the historical situation and the tasks of the British proletariat" , wrote Trotsky in Where is Britain Going?

Hallas takes a diametrically opposed view: It "is an all too easy way out for many socialists in the Labour Party: blame the leadership. It also follows for them that the only way to change things is to get a better, more left-wing leadership"

In fact the SWP supports Benn's campaign for deputy leader — within the unions. But when the SWP refuses to join the same struggle inside the Labour Party, and justifies itself by saying that changing leaders won't really help, what does it do but help the right wing?

There is a similar inconsistency on trade union affiliation. If individual socialists are wrong to be in the Labour Party, what justification is there for us voting for unions to affiliate? Yet usually in the unions SWP members vote for affiliation - seeing that otherwise they would line up with the right wing.

If the pamphlet serves any purpose at all, it is not to expose the 'myths and reality' of the Labour Party, but to expose the fundamental political inadequacy of the SWP: a party which likes to think of itself as revolutionary, but which ignores what the greatest Marxists have had to say about the Labour Party and which abstains from the struggle within the labour movement's political wing.

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Socialist Organiser 30 July 1861 Page

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