LABOUR'S LEFT
BRITAIN Labour's conference ended on November 29 not so much with a bang but a whimper. Despite the sighs of relief from Labour's leadership, the story is far from over. The basic coordinates of the economic, social, and political crisis in Britain have already been mapped out. (See INPRECOR No. 10, October 17.) The mass struggle of the British working class, combined with the steadily worsening economic situation, has meant that there is no stable political solution for the capitalist class outside of a major shift in the balance of class forces against the workers, first at a political level, and then at an economic and social level. The pivot of the bourgeoisie's strategy in moving toward this shift has been the drive to the strong state. At the same time, because the economic asis of offering broad reforms has been wiped a and because the mass struggle has had rodicalizing effects within the workers movement, a section of the Labour party, including paris of the leadership, have been forced to develop a "left" program within the working class. (Labour won the last election with a lower percentage of the vote than it obtained when it lost the election of 1970.) An additional pressure on the Labour party in this same direction has been the party's increasingly marginal role in the strategy of the big capitalists.
BACKS OFF by BRIAN HERON Labour's "left" and the Social Contract The left within-the Labour party arose in harness with sections of the trade-union bureaucracy, which had also been pushed to the left by rank-and-File militancy. For the first time, two programs begon to exist within the party. The left began to project the need for state fakeovers of industry, workers management, opening the books of the major capitalist companies to workers inspection, and so on. The center and the right maintained the old course of the British Labour party, hoping to inflict defeats on the working class through the trade-union bureaucracy. The weapon developed by Labour faced with the capitalist crisis was the Social Contract, an old-fashioned voluntary wage-restraint program concocted in a clever polifical manner. The Social Contract has also fulfilled an internal function for Labour, serving as a bridge between the right and the left, simultaneously offering state control and wage restraint. The very vagueness of the terms of the Social Confract were necessary to allow for the shifts and maneuvers in the policy that would be required in the struggle between the right and the left in the party and the unions. "Miraculously, " Denis Healey's budget presented in November became part of the Social Contract. This "amendment, " previously unmentioned, amounted to a dole of £1.5 thousand million to industry, the costs to be passed on to the
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BRITAIN working class in the form of price increases. As one delegate to the Labour party conference remarked, "The purpose of this budget was to give nerve back to management, but we have just spent five years unnerving them. The left at the conference What happened to the left at the Labour party conference? The conference, originally scheduled to take place in September, was postponed until after the election. From November 26 to 29 at Central Hall Westminster delegates debated economic policy, the Common Market, and many other issues. Big challenges had been expected from the left on all these points. But they did not materialize. Even on the question of elections to the National Executive Committee (the extra-Parliamentary leadership of the party), the left made no striking gains. They did not even manage to unseat Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey, the current bête noire of the Labour left because of his recent budget. The left gained one additional seat on the party executive through the election of the new representative of the Seamen's Union. This gives them a current overall majority of two. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, a leader of the left, polled the highest vote among the local constituency branches of the party, but that represents no change, since Michael Foot, currently minister of employment and one of the oldest left-wing figures within the party, normally takes that position. The Economist, leading journal of the industrial bourgeoisie, commented: "Mr. Wilson and his team will probably feel they have been let off lightly. " Even the resolution demanding a special conference on the renegotiated terms of British membership in the EEC, passed against the wishes of the Labour party leadership, meant, according to the December 1 London Times, that "nothing is fundamentally changed so far as the Market is concerned and it will be next year's conference that counts on this issue. So what happened to the left? The first point to recognize is that the issue that really dominated the conference, and certainly the lead-up to the conference, was the question of whom the Labour Members of Parliament and the party cabinet ministers will be responsible to. On this issue Richard Clements had this to say in the November 22 Tribune (joural of left Social Democracy): "Democracy reaches its proper consistency only when it is intermixed with tolerance. It is my deepest conviction that in the last five years we have come very close to getting the right ingredients." lan Mikado, left MP, platform speaker on the issue at the conference, showed in practice what this mixture means. To him fell the task of opposing on 4 behalf of the leadership a proposal to make Labour's MPs face new selection procedures in the party branches before every election. The character of the mixture was also clear on October 31, less than a month before the conference, when Minister for Industry Tony Benn and Minister of Overseas Development Judith Hart were carpeted for supporting a National Executive Committee motion deploring the fact that the government saw fit to sanction a visit by the British navy to Simenstown, South Africa. Wilson demanded wriften assurance that these ministers would defend the line of the cabinet within the NEC. This action, declared the editors of the Times on November 2, "suggests that there is more at stake than three ministers stepping out of line about a naval visit to South Africa. And indeed there is. We are witnessing preliminary moves . . . before battle commences on the issue of authority within the Labour Movement." Unions take a back seat The trade unions have traditionally been the bulwark of the right wing within the Labour party conferences. This situation changed when the old bureaucracy failed to hold back rank-and-file struggle against the incomes policy of the Wilson governments in 1964-70. That struggle was of such a pitch that it resulted in a significant shift to the left in the trade-union leaderships. In the fight over Labour party democracy the total confusion of the left inside the constituency section of the party was backed up by a series of straight pro-platform votes by the trade-union leadership. For them, the issue of the accountability of MPs and ministers is abstract at best; at worst, it is extremely damaging to their own positions. The basis for the preservation of the union bureaucracy's increased political influence lies at least in part in their direct relationship to the cabinet. Further, such accountability within their own organizations would represent a real danger in the current period of mounting struggle. Finally, accountability would lock the Labour leadership into a straitjacket, thus impeding the maneuvers the trade-union bureducracy will have to carry out in the difficult period ahead. But the real problem lies essentially in the nature of the shift to the left within the Labour party and the trade unions. Two days of the conference were taken up with discussing changes in party rules, an issue that was carefully chosen by the Wilson leadership in order to split up and defuse the left by taking advantage of the left's political weakness, which is rooted essentially in its failure to extend its very partial and limited economic program into the political arena, both within the party and within the unions. The left failed even to make an at-
tempt to forge the political instruments that would be needed to carry out their own limited program, based as it is on a break with the immediate interests of the bourgeoisie. The fight for working-class democracy within the Labour party is the necessary extension into the party-political framework of the desire to develop a left program for the govemment. The left's incapacity to wage such a fight reflects both the limits of their program and, in the final analysis (and this is one of the things that divides them from revolutionaries), their conception that they should be responsible to Parliament (that is, the bourgeois state) and not to the organizations of the working class. It was this conception that enabled Wilson to consolidate his position; he attacked the left exactly on their weakest flank. A twofold operation Dealing with the left was the first part of Wilson's project at the conference. A second part, related to the first, was more subtle. On the second day of the conference Wilson declared that the Labour party now is "the natural party of government." His small majority in Parliament has begun to look rather more secure in view of the disarray he sees in the bourgeois parties, which has emerged since the fall of the Heath government at the beginning of this year - a disarray that reflects the crisis of the whole strategy of the ruling class. But Wilson's statement relates to something else as well. It should be recognized that the Labour party came into office very early after starting to develop its "left turn. " The party's accession to the government offered a material base for an important renewal of the right wing. In that sense, left MPs put their finger on an important point when they said that Healey's budget represented a victory, of the treasury ministry over the Labour party. Sections of the Labour right have attempted to find a base outside of the working class and its organizations. They look to parts of the state apparatus and the nationalized industries for support in this. This situation was consolidated when the initially precarious-looking Labour majority turned out to be sufficient to allow the Labour government to survive without facing a united initiative in Parliament to unseat them, at least for some time. The political price for such an initiative would be very high in terms of the reaction of the working class. And the internal crisis of the bourgeois parties prevents any precipitous move in this direction by the ruling class anyway. During the summer the Labour party right held relatively open and unchallenged meetings to organize their offensive against the left. Shirley Williams, minister for prices, and Roy Jenkins, minister for the Home Office, announced their intention to resign if the renegotiated terms of Common Market membership were not supported by the cabinet. This open blackmail met with little response from the left. Labour's recent Parliamenfary victory has reinforced the right's strength. Second, despite continued rank-and-file combativity, the number of strikes has dropped in the recent period (as is normal for this time of year). The trade-union bureaucracy has been relieved of the sort of constant pressure it was under during the summer when union conferences were going on. The Trades Union Congress was able to endorse Labour's Social Contract at its autumn conference this year, and the big struggles have not yet begun. The operation, then, that Wilson mounted of the conference was aimed at attempting to win support from the ruling class by utilizing the maneuvering room created by a few months relátive industrial peace, the disarray of the Tory party, the partial and temporary containment of his own left wing, and the massive grant he has made to private industry through the budget. He confuses the internal problems of the Tory party with a process of rethinking of strategy by the ruling class as a whole. While it is true that there has been some degree of breakup within sectors of the ruling class, no section of any significance is moving in the direction of support for Labour or support for the Social Contract. Nevertheless, that is what Wilson is aiming for. He would like to play a role for the British ruling class similar to that played by Social Democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt for the West German ruling class. That was the meaning of Wilson's inviting Schmidt to the Labour conference. Wilson has created a small political space for himself because of the crisis of political perspective in both the ruling class and the working class. That situation could prevail for some time if the relationship of forces between the classes depended solely on a debate about perspectives. Reality, however, is somewhat different. Wilson has a short breathing space; but nothing more. State of the struggle Recently released figures indicate that since October 1973 wages have risen 22.8 percent, which is approximately 5 percent above the rate of inflation. Despite the dire warnings of leading capitalists, unemployment is rising only very slowly. It now stands at 650,000 and is increasing at a rate of 600 a month. It has not yet affected the core of the working class. While the bureaucracy has moved to curtail wage demands for the winter, the balance sheet shows that this operation has been far from successful. While the Engineers executive limited the resolution that was passed to a call for a "substantial increase" (defeating the left motion for a
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