[THE major reason for the reelection of Thatcher…]

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THE major reason for the reelection of Thatcher must lie in the terminal crisis of old Labourism. For generations • this lumbering carthorse, plodding along on its economic and political plates of meat, has refused even to contemplate taking a jump over the preliminary fence on the road to socialism.

It has neither been for a genuine working class democracy under a system of workers' councils, nor for an efficient running of capitalism. A mundane commitment to wagebased militancy, wrapped in the wafer-thin wrapper of 'socialised' state capitalism, has simply accentuated the appeal of a more charismatic individualised consumerism.

Many skilled workers want to be identified with. sectionalised, menolithic unions headed by pot-bellied gauleiters who are paraded before them by the media s the B Team for Advanced Capitalism's First Division Squad.

Perry Anderson discussed many years ago how the pathetic intellectual servility of British Labourism to the establishment was a product of the nondevelopment of a virile, organic working class intelligentsia that could fire the arrows of a withering scientific critique at the very foundations of bourgeois institutional and ideological power.

Now, for the umpteenth occasion we are treated to another Harold Wilson lookalike, Roy Blubbersby, calling for a return to traditional mediocratism. "If we repeat the essentials of the capitalist programme often enough and obsequiously enough, then we might get a look-in" he says.

As an intellectual and member of the "professions" I protest. For the social basis of this mindless pragmatism is the failure of Labour's educational policy over the last two decades.

Instead of creating a freethinking corps of criticalminded intellectuals committed to developing socialist culture, the universities and polytechnics have simply churned out layers of conformist functionaries who see their role as "keeping their heads down" and "doing as they are told" committing acts of what Sartre called ''bad faith"

Criticising their superiors behind cupped hands and locked doors, ever willing to whip themselves in self-abnegation before their employers, a subintelligentsia of bank clerks written large across the social fabric has become a real obstacle to the growth of progressive forces.

Call it the SDP, or their foetuses in the Labour Party around Neil Cynnock, these forces have been detached from the socialist project. In contrast, we, the Marxist left, must continue the struggle, bringing the fruits of Lenin, Marx and Gramsci's struggle to bear in pushing away the dead wood blocking the road to socialism.

JOE ROURKE Send letters to Socialist Organiser 28 Middle Lane, London N8. No longer than 400 words, please: longer letters are liable to be cut.