Click on the headline to link to a Leon Trotsky Internet Archives online copy of his Leon Trotsky’s Writings on Britain-Volume 1-The Labour Movement
1906-1924 to give a little historical perspective to this post.
Commentary
Regular readers of this space have long been aware that this writer fights his propaganda war under the banner of struggling in America for a workers party that fights for a workers government. In the course of that propaganda war I have had occasion to use the British Labor Party (today, New Labor) as the whipping boy (oops, person) for all that the slogan does not mean. Over the past few days news has filtered out that in the recent local municipal elections in Britain the Labor Party has taken something of a political beating by the Conservative Party AND, hold onto your hat, the Liberal Party. These are desperate times in Labor Party circles, especially for the party bureaucracy and their remaining toadies in the Trades Union Congress. I will, however, not wake up screaming in the night over this development. I cry no tears that ‘radical’ Ken Livingstone has fallen as Mayor of London. Nevertheless a few remarks about how militants in Britain (and elsewhere) can take advantage of the situation seem in order.
One of the great truisms of British left wing politics for the last century or so (since the split with the above-mentioned seemingly previously moribund liberals and the formation of an independent working class party) is the need to have a strategic orientation toward the Labor Party. Most famously, Lenin in his nice little polemical of 1920 against the ‘wild boys and girls’ of anarcho-communism in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder noted that, at times, militants are forced to support the Labor Party like “a rope supports a dying man”. And on occasion that little advice might be true in the future. But not today.
Every British militant, as an individual, should be a member of the Labor Party, or one of its organizations. The truth of the matter is that the bulk of the working class still owes at least formal allegiance to that party. The problem historically has been, and continues today including by militants who know better, that one needs to know as an organization how to file for divorce. That, my friends, is the fundamental problem with long term entry into a larger labor organization that I have discussed elsewhere in this space. I would argue that this is an excellent time to think about a regroupment of left forces outside the Labor Party. The particular contours of that regroupment are contingent on local conditions and particular prospects. Of course none of that makes sense unless there is programmatic agreement, to my mind that is a given. But it is something to think about.
These recent British elections, and the defeat of Mr. Livingstone as mayor, have also brought in focus a question that has been raised by the International Communist League on the question of revolutionaries running for executive offices in the bourgeois state. The ICL’s argument is that, unlike in the past, including in their own past, where revolutionaries ran with the understanding that they would not take office, it is a matter of principle not to even run for such offices and that we confine ourselves to parliamentary races. I had in the past, not without a few qualms, continued to favor the old policy. I believe that I am now ready to change my position on this question; however, I wish to write on that question separately. So, perhaps, old Ken Livingstone’s defeat serves a purpose after all.
1906-1924 to give a little historical perspective to this post.
Commentary
Regular readers of this space have long been aware that this writer fights his propaganda war under the banner of struggling in America for a workers party that fights for a workers government. In the course of that propaganda war I have had occasion to use the British Labor Party (today, New Labor) as the whipping boy (oops, person) for all that the slogan does not mean. Over the past few days news has filtered out that in the recent local municipal elections in Britain the Labor Party has taken something of a political beating by the Conservative Party AND, hold onto your hat, the Liberal Party. These are desperate times in Labor Party circles, especially for the party bureaucracy and their remaining toadies in the Trades Union Congress. I will, however, not wake up screaming in the night over this development. I cry no tears that ‘radical’ Ken Livingstone has fallen as Mayor of London. Nevertheless a few remarks about how militants in Britain (and elsewhere) can take advantage of the situation seem in order.
One of the great truisms of British left wing politics for the last century or so (since the split with the above-mentioned seemingly previously moribund liberals and the formation of an independent working class party) is the need to have a strategic orientation toward the Labor Party. Most famously, Lenin in his nice little polemical of 1920 against the ‘wild boys and girls’ of anarcho-communism in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder noted that, at times, militants are forced to support the Labor Party like “a rope supports a dying man”. And on occasion that little advice might be true in the future. But not today.
Every British militant, as an individual, should be a member of the Labor Party, or one of its organizations. The truth of the matter is that the bulk of the working class still owes at least formal allegiance to that party. The problem historically has been, and continues today including by militants who know better, that one needs to know as an organization how to file for divorce. That, my friends, is the fundamental problem with long term entry into a larger labor organization that I have discussed elsewhere in this space. I would argue that this is an excellent time to think about a regroupment of left forces outside the Labor Party. The particular contours of that regroupment are contingent on local conditions and particular prospects. Of course none of that makes sense unless there is programmatic agreement, to my mind that is a given. But it is something to think about.
These recent British elections, and the defeat of Mr. Livingstone as mayor, have also brought in focus a question that has been raised by the International Communist League on the question of revolutionaries running for executive offices in the bourgeois state. The ICL’s argument is that, unlike in the past, including in their own past, where revolutionaries ran with the understanding that they would not take office, it is a matter of principle not to even run for such offices and that we confine ourselves to parliamentary races. I had in the past, not without a few qualms, continued to favor the old policy. I believe that I am now ready to change my position on this question; however, I wish to write on that question separately. So, perhaps, old Ken Livingstone’s defeat serves a purpose after all.
