Hard labour, labouring in vain

The Labour Representation Committee was born in 1900. At its founding conference the leadership of the ILP had specifically opposed a motion from the SDF that the LRC be an organisation of “class war”. In 1905/6 the LRC was re-formed as the Labour Party. At party gatherings and conferences, the socialists as such played no part whatever; in the deliberations and councils of Labour their voices were scarcely heard. Labour Party conferences were little more than second supplementary trades union congresses. In 1918 it adopted a new constitution that included what was to become Clause 4, a commitment to nationalisation. The concept of “the nation” owning anything is meaningless, little more than a constitutional justification for control by a State bureaucracy.


Reading and listening to the Left and we are presented with a history of the Labour Party as a series of betrayals. Historians will excuse the betrayal by the Labour Governments of 1924 and 1929 on the grounds that they were minority governments dependent and hindered from carrying out Labour policies because they required the parliamentary support of the Liberals. The 1945 and 1950 Labour governments, possessed an overall Labour majority but they too failed to carry out their election promises. In power, with or without a majority, the Labour Party acts in the interest of the capitalist class. The Labour Party have become the mainstay of the capitalist class is deceiving the working class. That there would be splits and revolts within the ranks, even at the top, inside and outside Parliament is to be expected when many join for motives contrary to the Labour Party purposes. It is true that the Labour Party includes in its ranks quite a few well-intentioned though gullible people who are unfortunately taken in by its claims to be socialist. For genuine socialists, however, the task in this case is to disabuse such people of their illusions, not give them excuses for their gullibility. The sincerity of some Labour supporters does not absolve socialists from their duty to expose the Labour Party’s true class nature.

The Left fall into the trap of portraying the Labour Party as in some way less capitalist than the Tories, thus helping to lend credence to a myth which class-conscious workers have long seen through. They strengthen the misconception that the private sector alone constitutes the capitalist enemy, and that the state sector is not really capitalist at all.

The Tory Party is openly and avowedly capitalist and make a big hoo-ha about Labour Party policies such as nationalisation and so on, and call them ’socialist’, while Labour makes a big fuss about Tories and big business. Yet most Tories have tacitly accepted that these Labour measures have been necessary for capitalism even if this stance has since changed and Labour is committed to private enterprise. This essentially a double act, a political Laurel and Hardy. Those who promote the idea that the Labour Party is in any way less capitalist than the Tories are helping to foster the idea that there is a fundamental class difference between the two main capitalist parties.

The Socialist Party has not been reduced to explaining the Labour Party’s record through betrayals but has always pointed out that the Labour Party in itself, by its very nature, is a capitalist party, just as much as the Tory Party or any other bourgeois party. The Labour Party worksto keep the capitalist state intact. The fact that successive Labour governments have not introduced socialism has nothing to do with a traitorous right-wing leadership but that as a capitalist party it does not want to introduce socialism. The Labour Party has never confronted this task. The Socialist Party holds that the Labour Party is capitalist to its very core. The Trotskyist groups are always declaiming about how the working class has been “deceived” or ’let down’ by the Labour Party. The Socialist Party, however, argues that the Labour Party cannot be said to “betray” the working class, for it is not a working class or socialist party in the first place. The Labour Party was never created to establish socialism in the first place and never has been a socialist party from the day of its foundation. It, therefore, has never “betrayed” the working class. At the foundation conference of the Labour Representation Committee, the beginning of the Labour Party, proposals that it should adopt a class-war position was voted down. Clause 4 did not arise out of a revolutionary spirit but to dampen down revolutionary aspirations.

Workers are clearly outgunned in the class war. The workers’ enemies have been able to convince many people that unions are corrupt and sinister. The Labour Party has abandoned the trade unions. Unions continue to donate money, but Labour Party governments continue to disappoint them. When the unions complain, Labour Party politicians tell them to shut up and be patient. When the unions threatens to seek help elsewhere, Labour Party leaders laugh in their faces and say, “Who are you going to ask? The Tories?” Leftists offer the mistaken view that the working class is better served by the Labour Party than by the Tories and that socialism could, given a bit more determination from the Labour leadership, pressed by themselves, come about through the kind of reformist measures associated with the Labour Party. The role of the ’Left’ appears to be to keep alive the illusion about the Labour Party is moving to the left, so that support can be obtained for the return of yet another ’right wing’ Labour government which will inevitably carry out essentially the same policies as its predecessors and result in the “revolutionary” disillusionment among workers with Labourism. But there is no secret host of Labour Party rank and file members whose standpoint is socialist. A politically conscious mass working-class membership of the Labour Party does not exist. Just because many workers still vote for the Labour Party does not mean that it is a workers’ party any more than the Liberal Party was when most working-class electors voted for it nor when the “Alf Garnett’s” of the world vote Tory does it turn the Conservative Party into a workers’ party..

Although it may include many working class elements, the class expression of the Labour Party remains bourgeois. Past Labour governments have attacked workers’ living standards, imposed racist immigration legislation and enacted anti-worker and anti-union laws. The Labour Party is as much our class enemy as the Conservatives.