[The following article is reprinted from the March 9 issue of Red Weekly, the paper of the International Marxist Group (IMG), British section of the Fourth International.]
The national press and TV focused on only one of the elections that took place last week: the general election. But socialists should not forget the other election - both for its own importance and because it helps to put the Labour party leadership's campaign in perspective. The other election was at Clay Cross.
In the general election, Wilson fought for the "national interest" and won less than 50% of the seats. In Clay Cross, the Labour councillors fought for working class interests and won more than 90% of the seats, polling the highest ever Labour vote in one of the wards.
Wilson's Feet
The Labour leadership have tried to excuse their miserable showing in the election by complaining that they have been slandered as soft on extremists and wreckers, and by bemoaning the undeniably vicious anti- Labour campaign in the Tory press. At least they cannot be accused of giving support and assistance to the councillors at Clay Cross.
Lord Denning denounced the Clay Cross councillors as common criminals. The courts slapped penal fines on them. The Whitehall bureaucracy moved their agents into the town to throw the elected councillors out of office and organise new el ctions. And to cap it off, Edward Short went to the trouble of tramping out to the White City to declare on the BBC that the Labour leadership was in no way backing the "law breaking" councillors at Clay Cross.
But the fact remains: 90% to Labour at Clay Cross; 45% to Labour in Westminster. If we are to accept the logic of the reformist politicians in Transport House [Trades Union Congress headquarters], we must imagine the working people of Clay Cross to be a bunch of thieves and con men -for how else could they vote for councillors with the worst TV image in British politics?
The answer is simple: Wilson spent three years refusing to support or launch a single mass struggle against the Tories, followed by three weeks campaigning to get working people to unite with the employers, the landlords and Lord Dennings in One Nation. That was a campaign for the Liberals and Tories. After all, if you want to unite workers and bosses, why vote Labour, when the Labour party is based on unions whose job is to struggle against the bosses?
The Clay Cross councillors had the courage to act on a simple truth: the conflict between the interests of working people and those of the capitalists. They refused to raise rents whatever was thrown against them; they refused to freeze the wages of council workers whatever the pay laws said; they refused to make the people of the town suffer from electricity cuts because the Tory Government wanted to confront the miners. Little wonder that such leaders were backed by the working class of Clay Cross.
And little wonder that working class voters are less than enthusiastie for Wilson, with his feet of clay.
Communist Party
Whichever way you look at it, 32,- 741 votes for forty-four candidates is a disaster for the Communist party. More than that, it is a decline in the CP vote since 1970 in spite of the tremendous working class struggles in which some members of the CP have played a big role. How can this be explained?
Of course, the electoral system in this country does not favour minority parties, but this does not explain the failure of the CP to substantially increase its number of votes. The last three years have seen substantial growth in the active socialist forces in the working class movement. The CP must have been standing in the main centres of its strength, and yet its vote was lower than its total membership. A party that fields candidates in forty-four constituencies and cannot do better than that against the Labour party is in trouble. Moreover, the Blyth result showed that candidates of the left can beat the official Labour candidates where the choice is a clearcut and striking one.
The CP leadership has put their bad results down to the capitalist witchhunt, and refusal to provide the CP with publicity on the mass media. But we need only note the fact that the CP has always suffered these disabilities, and indeed has suffered much less from them than, for example, the Republican movement in the north of Ireland. Yet the latter can get considerably higher votes than the CP got even in Jimmy Reid's constituency.
Most damaging of all is the fact that the Communist party results were little better, and in some cases worse, than those of the small revolutionary 334
groups like the IMG and the WRP [Workers Revolutionary party). This is a really critical problem for the party leadership. Only five CP candidates polled more than 1,000 votes. yet the WRP candidate in Wallsend polled 1,108 votes and the WRP candidate in Pontefract polled 991 votes.
We can compare the revolutionaries' votes and those of the CP in one of the strong centres of the Communist party - Sheffield. In the Brightside constituency in that city, the full resources of the party were put behind one of its national leaders, Vi Gill. She got 513 votes. Yet the IMG candidate, Tariq Ali, with much more limited resources, preventing the IMG from systematic canvassing, got within 90 votes of that figure. If we remember that the IS group was refusing to vote for the revolutionary candidates, we begin to see the scope of the decline of the CP's influence in relation to the revolutionary left.
Here we have one of the main clues to the CP's debacle: why vote for a CP candidate rather than Labour when the CP says little that is different from the words of the Labour left? Was it not true, for example, that CP local councillors in Scotland actually voted against fighting the Housing Finance Act to a finish, in marked contrast to Clay Cross?
This is only part of the answer. The other hard fact that the Communist party leadership cannot answer is its refusal to admit that the bureaucratic dictatorship in the USSR is an antisocialist regime which has nothing in common with communism; and that the USSR itself is not at all a working class democracy or a socialist society. At meeting after meeting in the election campaign, class conscious workers asked the question: do you think the USSR is socialist? The Communist party cannot give an honest answer. It cannot break from 45 years of Stalinism and repression of workers' democracy in the USSR. As more and more workers turn to socialism and Marxism, they demand an explanation of these facts. Only the revolutionary Marxists could give it.
Floating With the Stream
After an initial silence, the International Socialists' paper Socialist Worker eventually took up the question of whether to vote for the revolutionary candidates in the election. On 23
February, a carefully worded statement from the editor explained that while IS was not opposed in principle to putting up revolutionary candidates, it was opposed to putting them up in this particular election.
Unfortunately, the statement did not clearly distinguish between two quite different problems: first whether IS should itself put up candidates; second, whether IS members should vote for the Labour party, against the candidates of the revolutionary left. It was the second problem that was preoccupying socialist militants, including many members of the IS, while the Socialist Worker statement addressed itself to the first question.
But a careful reading of the statement provides an answer to the IS view on how to vote. The editor declares: "For revolutionaries to stand candidates in such an election is simply a diversion from the main issues and constitutes a tactical blunder." In other words there is something special about this election which makes it wrong to stand against the Labour party. More than that, a revolutionary candidate would be a diversion -he or she would divert people from the main issues—in this particular election, but not in others. This is the only fair rendering one can make of the extraordinary IS statement.
The mystery therefore is this: what is so special about this election that makes candidates putting forward full-blooded socialist policies, a diversionary force distracting people from the main issues?
If we look around us, there is one outstanding feature of this election which makes it peculiar in comparison with others in the last twenty-five years: the fact that the capitalist system is in an unparalleled crisis. This crisis, and its catastrophic consequences for working people, was the main issue for the working class in this election. Because of this crisis situation a reformist, class collaborationist Labour leadership is going to be unable to resolve the immediate needs of the mass of people in this country. It is scarcely capable of getting rid of the Tory government, after three years of unrelenting attacks on the working class.
Just about the only thing that is not peculiar about this election has been the miserable attempts by the Labour left to persuade militants to subordinate every struggle and issue to vote-catching for the Labour party.
A revolutionary organisation is in a sad state when it considers that the more critical the state of the capitalist system, and the more acute class struggle, the more diversionary is the presence of revolutionary candidates in an election. Such moods are understandable among Social Democratic workers. They are inexcusable amongst people who claim to be revolutionary socialist leaders.
The IS statement was far more serious than a "tactical blunder."