From 'left' to Rig

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National Cabinet 1931: (back) Cunliffe-Lister, Thomas, Reading, Chamberlain, Hoare, (front) Snowden, Baldwin, tarxists have always been selled to struggle against apportunist and reformist as of the working class ament. In August 1914 a ire split occured when *formists went over withpealification to 'their own' ฿ classes by supporting sist Imperialist War. fer since then, the policy of mists has been to fight to • and push aside all those is of the working class who in the way of its emancipation. ! the modern epoch of wars revolutions, the working class *o longer defend or improve sonditions without defeating * the course of its struggle leaders who hold back and →y every effort at its improveb and act thus as direct agents be employers in the workers' sment.

SCIENTI Dur struggle for a new leaderin the working class involves rious and scientific assessment de forces ranged against us. We i fight for the immediate reement of those such as Prentice Healey who openly ally with class enemy, and use Tory cies, including state pay laws, she working class.

However, we must not be deed by the left reputations aed by those who sometimes test against these policies, like n, or Bidwell, or Heffer, even if y do gain the support of militant i left-moving workers. These ple are, as Trotsky said of their tralents in the 1920's, but rieties of the same basic Fabian Their policies can do nothing *ave the interests of the working in this period, but simply d off the struggles of workers by fining them to the legalistic annels dictated by the bourgeoisie. ¡ Such a conclusion is not always rious when we hear the militant nds of Eric Heffer about the tewsbury. building workers, or * the capitalist press view of adgewood Benn as some kind of Teat to the bosses and their system wever, under pressure of any fificant conflict, where the basic terests of the working class are at ke, these people always break for ter and run.

An essential role of a revolution: • paper is to expose in advance in traitorous role of the fake lefts, ad to attack their hesitations and *illations. They should of course i supported on those rare occasas when they do take a principled mad, as Heffer did when he left * government over the Common darket, and as Scanlon did when he •ted against postal ballots in trade -dion elections.

DECEPTIVE

However, it would be wrong to • to point out that such steps. as se in the end serve only to iceive workers and head off the muggle for the revolutionary overtrow of capitalism. In demanding that the 'lefts' • the unions and the Labour Irty take a stand in defence of * interests of the working class, Te must constantly point out that, dess they fight for a programme rich brings the workers indepenatly into conflict with their apitalist masters, unless they come per unequivocally to the side of trolutionary Marxism, then they mill simply provide a cover for he openly pro-capitalist leaders of he Prentice-Jenkins variety.

We cannot talk of a 'good side' jad a 'bad side' in the policies if these lefts, selecting which parts ie worthy of support. The deands we put on them must be .. of tha font in general will be ever more treacherous, ever more liable to deceive the masses and .. hold back the struggles for their interests.

The purpose of this article and others which will follow is to show that however militant and leftsounding leaders of the working class may be, unless they take up the cause of revolutionary Marxism, they inevitably in the end become an obstacle to the interests of workers.

However much workers are deceived by the handouts to capitalie in the nostrend, their will be jobs unless they fight for factory occupations, for opening the books of their employers to committees of trade unionists, and for work sharing without loss of pay.

However much they are deceived by left rhetoric in favour of such policies as selective import controls, only by a sliding scale of wages under trade union control linked to a campaign for socialist nationalisation and workers management will they safeguard their wages and working conditions in this period. It is only the working class under revolutionary leadership who will be able to do this, and not the manoeuvring of the Benns and Heffers.

Of course much that Benn, Scanlon and others say can at times sound militant and even 'revolutionary'. Besides analysing their statements to show their treacherous essence, we can also show where such policies end, by examining the careers of others whose promises have been just as golden, and whose road has always been that of betrayal.

TRAITOR

This series must begin with a few remarks about the career of James Ramsay MacDonald, first Secretary of the Labour Party, and first Labour Prime Minister.

MacDonald is of course now remembered in the working class movement chiefly as the turncoat and traitor, who joined the Tories and Liberals to form the so-called 'National' Government of 1931.

He then presided over a government which obediently carried out policies of mass unemployment and wage cutting at the behest of the international bankers- and cooperated with the appeasement of Italian and German fascism, helping to prepare for a new imperialist war.

It should be emphasised that whatever hatred now surrounds the memory of MacDonald in the working class, he was not always seen in that way. There was a time when MacDonald commanded the fiercest loyalty in the working class movement, and when those who warned that he would betray it were treated with derision.

It is also important for workers to know that there was a long period in MacDonald's political life when he was considered a left, to be supported as an opponent of capitalism and imperialist war.

During the First World War, MacDonald resigned as leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party, spoke up on behalf of conscientious objectors in Parliament, and even attended the 1917 Leeds Conventio:

which greeted the February Revolution in Russia.

VICIOUS Furthermore, MacDonald was subject to a vigious and dirty press campaign accusing him of being a "pacifist', an lagent of Germany , and much more besides. Horatio Bottomley, the patriot and swindler who made a profit of £78,000 out of persuading young men to join the army, published in his magazine John Bull a copy of MacDonald's birth certificate, in order to prove his illegitimate origin So great was the campaign of All of this proved of considerable political benefit to MacDonald. He gained a great reputation as a man of principle falsely accused. A book was even written about him with the title The Man of Tomorrow.

ELECTION This view of him played an important part in his election to the position of Parliamentary leader in 1922, in preference to Clynes, whose support for the war had been well known and who had been a member of the wartime Coalition Government.

Nor was this by any means the end of the campaign in the capitalist press against MacDonald. During the General Election campaigns in 1923 and 1924 posters were issued by the Conservative MacDonald, Samuel, Sankey.

Party claiming that MacDonald was in some way sympathetic to the Soviet Union because he favoured recognition of the new Government and the establishment of trade links.

Press attacks were again whipped up when MacDonald decided, acting on legal advice, not to prosecute J. R. Campbell, editor of the Communist Party Workers Weekly, for an article that called on soldiers not to shoot at strikers.

This was the issue of confidence on which the first Labour Government was voted out of office by the combined votes of Tories and Liberals. In the election campaign that followed, sections of secret service, in league with the Daily Mail, used a fabricated letter from Soviet leader Zinoviev in a further attempt to smear MacDonald.

All of these charges by the press, personal attacks, etc., rebounded against their authors by building up the prestige of MacDonald within the working class movement. However, there was another important point about all the statements on MacDonald's opposition to the War and his sympathy for the Soviet Union. They were quite untrue.

The attitude of MacDonald to the War had nothing whatsoever in common with the revolutionary opposition of Karl Liebenecht who declared that 'the enemy is at home' or of Lenin who called for the imperialist war to be turned in every country into a civil war of workers against their "own" capitalist class.

MacDonald wrote to a ILI.. mantine it lairecter in the moment, settle the immediate issue of victory. He claimed that it was possible to separate the struggle for 'peace' from serious opposition to the slaughter on be half of capitalism that was taking place on the battlefield.

This was how he managed to come into alliance with the disilliasioned ex-Liberals and pacifists of the Union of Democratic Control who provided an important element in developing concepts of class compromisers in the leading ranks of the labour movement.

Nor were the rumours of MacDonald's sympathy with communism anything more than a slander on MacDonald - and on communism. He was the most consistent and continuous opponent within the Independent Labour Party of affiliation to the Communist International, which its left wing favoured.

For a time he was Secretary of the Second International, trying without success to breathe some life into that rotten corpse . He supported the proscription, and eventually the expulsion of Communists from the Labour Party, and defended the puppet regimes of Georgia and other areas set up by the imperialists and Mensheviks to challenge Soviet power during the Civil War.

Although, as one recent writer on his life has put it, 'most of the other Labour leaders of his generation shared his ideas and reinforced them', he was the only one who seriously tried to give them a "theoretical" gloss.

Some of his pamphlets and speeches have been reproduced recently with learned introductions and explanatory notes, but they do little to allay his reputation for crass philistineism and formidable obscurity.

He defended reformism on the grounds that for the working class politics should consist of 'laboratory experiment, not revolution'. He was particularly disposed to biological analogy in presenting his arguments for gradual revolution.

TROTSKY The fifth chapter of Trotsky's Where Is Britain Going? provides particularly devastating critique of this view of the world, which exposes MacDonald's hypocritical nacificism. not to mention his ignoworking class are shown in such statements as "in place of class consciousness we want to evoke the consciousness of social solidarity..

With such conceptions as these, the second Labour Government of 1929-31 under the leadership of MacDonald, had no policies at all for dealing with the devastating capitalist crisis that soon engulfed it. The relative weakness of British capitalism made her particularly vulnerable in the period between the collapse of the Wall Street stock market in 1929 and of the Austrian Credit-Anstalt Bank in 1931.

Throughout these years the only policies discussed by the 'Labour' Cabinet, including by many who later claimed to be opponents of MacDonald, were swingeing attacks on public spending, wage cuts and unemployment. MacDonald told a TUC delegation about one such series of proposals:

"There is no abandoning principles, only bowing to necessities. ' Everyone responsible for a department is a Trade Unionist or a Socialist, or both, and the meeting can trust us."

INEFFECTIVE

Even the leaders of the TUC found it impossible to wear this.

They could never defend in front of their members policies which were proposed to cut the pay of those working in the public service, and the massive increase in unemployment, which eventually was nearly 3 million, or close on 25% of those registering for jobs. However there was no hint from them, or from the left' opponents of MacDonald's policies in the labour movement, of an independent mobilisation of the working class in defence of jobs and wages, or for a socialist programme to solve the crisis.

Without such a mobilisation, the proposals from 'left' MPs for increases in taxation and programmes of public works were utterly ineffective. Although union leaders like Bevin and Citrine spoke of 'revenue tariffs' and other radical' solutions, they had no proposals for carrying out even these limited measures. Leaders of the Independ.

ent Labour Party spoke of "Socialism in Our Time" and even expelled MacDonald in anticipation of his betrayals, but they had no prog

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Troops Out Movement: summoned to action against the pay laws along with road for the ultimate betrayal by MacDonald and some of his colleagues when they joined the Tories and Liberals in a so-called "National' Government to carry out a whole range of attacks on the working class, including a large cut in the dole paid to the increasing army of of the unemployed. However, MacDonald left many behind in the labour movement such as Morrison and Dalton, who were able to carry out a similar role in later generations.

SOCIALISM

For MacDonald, as for all reformists from that day to this, the struggle for socialism had nothing whatever to do with day to day politics. One of his former supporters wrote of him soon after his death that he considered socialism to be: "that far-off Never-Never-Land born of vague aspirations and described by him in picturesque generalities. It is a Turner landscape of beautiful colours and glorious indefiniteness. He saw it, not with a telescope, but with a kaleidoscope."

MacDonald himself apparently remained unaware of the level of his hypocrisy as perhaps his equivalents do today. Thus when in 1934 a delegation of unemployed workers from Jarrow went to see him, while he was already "National' Prime Minister and responsible for much of their plight, he said to their Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson, "Ellen, why don't you go out and preach socialism, which is the only remedy for all this?"

Such a • perverted view of the world will never be dead as long as we continue to hear 'left' Cabinet ministers like Barbara Castle speak of workers who fight to improve their wages and conditions "endangering the future of socialism in Britain"

It is easy to see in retrospect the patent and sickening hypocrisy of MacDonald and where it led. Yet MacDonald's oratorical flights of fancy and his left reputation gained him the firm support of large sections of workers during the 1920's.

His unearned reputation as an opponent of the war and his alleged sympathy for the Soviet Union gave him the millions of votes in the 1929 General Election, making it possible for him to lead the ultimate betrayal in 1939.

At the time of the 1929 Elec. tion the criminal ultra-left policy of the Communist Party, in calling MacDonald a 'social fascist' , did nothing to challenge his power and reputation. Yet such a challenge had to be mounted. MacDonald had to be exposed at every turn, not simply as a liar and a hypocrite, but also as an enemy of every basic interest of the working class.

It was not a matter of separating out the "good bits" from the "bad bits" of his policies, but of building an alternative movement that could challenge and expose every step to his ultimate betrayal. From our understanding of this history, we can predict with complete confidence that whatever 'left' reputations Foot or Scanlon, the need to fight those who have been given them is as sharp and urgent as ever it was.

Without the building of an alternative revolutionary leadership in the working class, these leaders will once again only open the door to defeat and betrayal. In further articles we will say something of others who have trodden the same treacherous road.

by Joh Di TR The lead article of the latest edition of "Red Weekly", paper of the International Marxist Group, is a hysterical response to the incomes policy measures put forward by Wilson and Healey. It marks a new stage of political confusion in the IMG, and a continuation of their revisions of Trotskyism.

Wilson's imposition of state control of wages, and the preparation for it in the form of the acceptance by the TUC bureaucracy of Jack Jones' "flat rate" £6 scheme requires serious study, and analysis by Trotskyists. Contained in these moves are vital lessons for the political education of whole layers of workers who seek to defend their rights and living standards, but who still retain some faith. in "leaders" who have all played a role in this unprecedented betrayal.

The 'left' MPs, who caved in on every question to Wilson and have refused to challenge his right to lead the Labour Party share a heavy responsibility for the state pay laws, along with the left' union leaders who refused to come out and expose the reactionary essence of Jones' £6 plan.

At the centre of the betrayal was of course the so-called "Marxist" Arthur Scargill, who collapsed before the right wing even attacked at the NUM conference, and got up to move a right wing composite motion, rather than fight for a £100 pay demand for miners. But Scargill did not act alone: right alongside him providing the alibis and urging a "compromise" was leading Communist Party member Mick McGahey, and behind him were the other Stalinists also.

There can be no clarity and no soundly-based fight against Wilson's pay laws which ignores these political facts. Stalinists, centrists and reformists are among the factors relied on by Wilson and Jones as they force in their reactionary proposals.

IMG however does not attempt to analyse the crisis of political leadership in the working class, but responds in desperation, with no mention of the enormous strength of the working class movement. Instead they search round anxiously for any kind of allies with whom they can fuse in what they call a "mass action united front" of the "left" against Wilson.

The "united front" they envisage would include a motley array of forces and groupings, which the IMG refuse to differentiate politically.

Their attitude to these groups is the very opposite of that posed in a Communist united front. As Trotsky wrote:

"The party can achieve this [majority support of workers] only by remaining an absolutely indépendent organisation with a clear programme and strict internal discipline. This is the reason why the party was bound to break ideologically and organisationally with the reformists and the centrists who do not strive for the proletarian revolution, who possess neither the capacity nor the desire to prepare the masses for revolution, and who by their entire conduct thwart this work.

"Any members of the Communist Party who bemoan the split with the centrists in the name of "unity of forces" or "unity of front" thereby demonstrate that they do not understand the ABC of Communism and that they themselves happen to be in the Communist Party only by accident." [First Five Years of the Communist International, Vol. 2, p. 91] Thus the IMG call for action (what action is undefined) from the Stalinist-run Liaison Committee outset attempted to divert workers' political discontent and determination to struggle down the blind alley of Stalinist protest campaigns. Most noted recently has been their refusal to fight the TUC bureaucrac in its abandonment of the Shrewsbury Two. The LCDTU has always acted simply as a safety valve to protect the bureaucrats.

FRAUDULENT Along with the LCDTU, they ump in the reactionary and fraud Ilently-named "Institute of. Work ers Control" '. This reformist body omprising bureaucrats, radica cademics and centrists, is giver : whole page in the current Rea Veekly. In it, IWC spokesmar steve Bodington gives their defin tion of "workers control". 'It is in fact no more than the imple meaning of the words, viz. he exercise of some degree of ocial, political and economic ontrol by the workers".

He goes on to show that this eformist notion means teaching vorkers "how to use the NEB an 'lanning Agreements", • and what e terms 'social control' over "bank ng, finance, foreign exchange, mport controls, etc. " This bogus nstitute thus emerges as a mouthiece for Benn's reactionary "partcipation" schemes, as included in Vilson's NEB legislation, and for he Tribune Group's nationalist lemands for import controls. None if this matters to the IMG, tc hom any opportunist grouping › grist to the mill of their "unite ront" or including in their list the IS This can be the only reaso tont "Rank and File Muvement" 1 body which has always restricter tself to the lowest levels of non political trade union militancy eflecting the opportunism and syndicalism of IS itself.

But the IMG shopping list o: eft and radical groupings does no stop here - on Page 3 they go on tr nclude such political "Uncle Ton Cobleys" as the National Abortior Campaign, the Troops Out Move nent (Leo Abse, Catholic priest: ind all), the Medical Committer Against Private Practice, and that organisation with the task of re labilitating Stalinism after the Chil ›etrayal - the Chile Solidarity Campaign. Conspicuously absent of ourse are the traditional organis itions of the working class - the rade union branches and trade: ouncils.

So desperate are the IMG tc get this carnival of opportunists on the road that they forget to mention themselves - or do they only see IMG as a coalition of members from these groupings? Certainly the "programme" to fight against the Labour government's imposition of state control of wages, put forward on Page 3, seems to set out to provide something for everyone. It misses out the call for a sliding scale of wages (deliberately omitted to enable an alliance with the IS and the CP who oppose the demand), but includes the demand for "free abortion and contraception on demand", to provide a lure for "left" middle class women unconwhat such a circus should actually do the Red Weekly descends almost to incoherence: "The trade union leaders opposed to the measures could play an important role here by calling for organisation and action of the rankand-tile. Similarly, national organisations inside the trade unions -such as the LCDTU, the IWC and the Rank and Fie Movement -could play a powerful röle it they co-ordinated their organisation and action. But so far the trade union leaders refuse to organise the rank and file, and the national political organisations in the unions display an important role here by calling for organisation and : therefore be [!] the establishment of local conferences and action committees against the measures. If these are established in even one or two ited action against the measures sought out." [Front Page 10.7.75] The incoherence is only the outward form of political confusion and the attempt to substitute "org anisation", bogus "unity" and syndicalist "action" for political understanding and the fight for principle.

Indeed after disillusion and despair with the right wing of the bureaucracy, the IMG centrists direct attention not to! the building of revolutionary leadership, but to the 'left' wing of bureaucrats. The working class only rates one sentence in their front page article, while their hope seems to revive only at the thought that: "Some trade union leaders have opposed Healey. A few Labour MPs may vote against"

This tuin towards the bureaucratic layers rather than the workers movement is not new. Readers of Red Weekly may have noticed that for several weeks now the paper has also been angling for a cosier relationship with the lefts' of the Tribune Group. This requires that IMG cover over the capitulations and betrayals that the 'lefts' continue to carry out. Thus Red Weekly has suggested that the betrayals are not really very important: "However unless Tribune comes out clearly both for the removal of Wilson from the leadership of the Labour Party and for the open organisation of forces foI mass action against his policies... they will not be playing a role which can really have any important weight in the working class struggles which are coming". (Red Weekly, 26.6.75 emphasis added).

Thus the impact on the workers movement of the political collapse of the 'lefts' is concealed, and IMG crawls nearer the 'lefts' on its belly. This is the meaning in practice of the majority tendency position adopted at the IMG conference, with its talk of close "relationships" and "unity" are abstractions to cloak the workings of opportunism.

Such policies, subordinating the independence of the party to alien political forces are in line with the history of the IMG and its parent international organisation, the United Secretariat (US). The original forces of the US split from National Abortion Campaign Trotskyism in 1953 precisely on the question of the need to develop independent revolutionary parties in each country to lead the struggle for power. Their main spokesman, Michel Pablo, developed the alternative theory that the "objective process" of revolution would spontaneously throw forward the vanguard forces of leadership. This was perhaps clearest expressed in the passage from Pablo-supporter Harry Frankel, quoted in our previous article on the IMG (Socialist Press, по. 6,17.4.75): "We have confidence in our analysis of our epoch. That analysis and the confidence which flows from -- £-11 Mlanenlessinas right itself! (emphasis added)...

We base ourselves upon the objective forces in the world, and we feel sure that these objective forees will in the long run remedy subjective defects" (International Secretariat document: 1951-54 (SWP/ Vol 2 p81)

This passive, almost religious conception minimises the importance of the revolutionary party (the "subjective" factor), and relegates Trotskyism to merely deciding which "objective force" to sub merge into.

At first the Pabloites saw these "objective forces" arising in the Stalinist Communist Parties interHe Docar IWC: boosted by IMG nationally, and some Trotskyist parties, following Pablo's directions dissolved into their national Communist Parties.

The onset of colonial struggles then produced the concept in the US that the "epicentre" of revot ution was in the so-called "Third World" peasant and liberation more ments. Uncritical support was given to these, to the extent of terming ridel Castro, that notorious anti Trotskyist, a "natural Marxist"

Then the radicalisation of the middle class in the student and anti-war movements in the lat 1960's produced the Pablo-ite con cept of the "student vanguard" Conspicuously; into which Pat "objective forces" loites dissolved were outside the main organised working class move ment. IMG continues this line today • with calls for the united "left" and relationships with the left MPs.

This is light vears away from Trotsky's clear statement in the Transitional Programme that "The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat". (emphasis added).

Trotsky also specifically dissociates from the IMG conception that the 'smallness' of a revolution ary organisation means it must merge itself with others in order to act. He wrote: "There are epochs when the revot utionary tendency is reduced to a small minority in the labour more ment. But these epochs demand not arrangements between the small groups with mutual hiding of sins but, on the contrary [NB, IMG!] a doubly implacable struggle for a correct perspective and an education of the cadres in the spirit of genuine Marxism: Victory is possible only in this way". (emphasis added: Communism and Syndicalism, 1929 UNITY This does not mean, and neither does Socialist Press at all suggest, that there is no need to unite the working class on the widest possible basis to fight all attacks such as the state pay laws, and in the struggle for power. It goes without saying that revolutionaries, along with all class-conscious workers must and will lead the struggle to support any section of trade unionists that takes on the government and fights these But within that "solidarity" movement must develop the sharp fight for the Trotskyist programme and principle, which cannot proceed if the Trotskyist party is tied to a coalition of politically bankrupt and fraudulent front organisations and radical groups. That is not a united front but sheer opportunism, "linking up" single issues in order to duck the fight for leadership.

The internal opportunism of IMG has already been exposed in Socialist Press - with its "peacefui coexistence" of opposed tendencies - but this latest Red Weekly reaffirms that Pabloite revisionsim an‹ opportunism, and not the defence thanantinal

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SOCIALIST I

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areas they can spread to the rest of country. Every single means of un-

political relationships with "left social, democracy". For the IMG

The Way Forward for Workers' Control