Central illusions behind Benn's arguments for

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Callaghan: Benn avoids any fight for his removal No result would more clearly show the limits of public opinion polls. For the future of British capitalism, the political evolution of Tony Benn and those who support him is of the grealest Ifportance Benn's supporters include the vast majority of the left within the working class. If a challenge to capitalist rule is to develop in Britain, it is this layer which will have to develop the programme and organisation necessary to lead the class to For this reason it is vital that revolutionaries both understand and thoroughly! answer Benn's ideas, reflecting as they do both the strength and weakness of this advanced layer of workers.

Benn's latest book Arguments for Socialism must be used by revolutionaries as the beginning of a struggle to win his followers from left reformist to revolutionary politics.

It is important to realise that Benn's ideas were not static.

Under the impact of the economic crisis and his experience in government there no doubt that he has continued to move to the left.

In 1964 he was the foremost advocate of Wilson's view that British capitalism could be regenerated by a "technological Now-after eleven years of class collaborationist Labour governments have shown the bankruptcy of such a policy-he puts forward a call for a transformation of society so that labour exploits capital and not the other way round.

It is not easy to say how far this change in Benn's argument has been an unprincipled adaptation to militant workers and how much a genuine development through experience.

We can merely point out how far he still has to travel if his socialism is to go beyond rhetoric.

One of the greatest strengths of the British labour movement has been its commitment to gaining a greater democracy for all sections of society, and within its own sphere a greater control over the factories, over its local communities, over its education and health services, and over its own organisations.

It is a struggle which has time and again been frustrated and distorted by the integration of layers of working class leaders into the state. But it is a great tradition nevertheless and one which Marxists must respect.

Gradual process

But the weakness of the labour movement has been that it has in the main viewed the extension of democratic control as a gradual, process of transforming the existing institutions of society rather than destroying and replacing them.

That is why so many working class leaders end up serving the interests of capitalist govern ments or industrialists in order to "preserve their influence"

over capitalist institutions.

Tony Benn is no exception to this. Indeed he sees the struggles of the working class for democracy as a continuation of the struggle of the Levellers and the radical bourgeois thinkers of the 18th Century.

This is not incorrect in itself.

Marx himself noted the debt which the class movement had to the democratic traditions of the early bourgeoisie.

But nevertheless Marxists see the working class not in terms of its past but of its future. We see the working • class as the embodiment within capitalism of the future socialist democracyBy virtue of its position in society the working class develops some of the democratic forms which will be the foundation of socialism; for instance the creation of shop stewards who are elected from among their own group of workers and can be recalled by them.

But the working class also comes to the struggle for socialism with many ideas which must be discarded.

If the working class as exploited and oppressed class was nat dominated by bourgeois ideas, capitalism would long ago have fallen.

Tony Benn's stress on the continuity of working class and bourgeois struggles for democracy leads him to deny the need for a dictatorship of the working class over the bourgeoisie to achieve socialism.

He even tries to claim that Marx shared his viewpoint on this. He quotes the Czech reformist Svitals who stated in 1968 that:

"Marx strove for a wider humanism than that of the bourgeois democracies that he knew, and for wider civil rights not for the setting up or the dictatorship of one class and one political party".

But this is not Marxism. As Engels wrote:

"Of late the Social Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" Well and good gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat"

Engels described the organis ation of the Commune thus:

"From the very outset the Commune was compelled to recognise that the working class, once come to power, could not go on managing with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy this working class must on the one hand do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against itself, and on the other hand safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials by declaring them all without exception subject to recall at any moment.

Against the transformation of the state and the organs of the state into masters of society, an inevitable transformation in all previous states, the Commune made use of two infallible means. In the first place it filled all posts, administrative, judicial and educational, by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time by the same electors. And in the second place all officials high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers.

Instead of deciding every three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people constituted in the communes as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers of his business".

Against this description of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Benn's" proposals for democracy and open government stand only as the palest of pale shadows.

He calls for the annual election of the cabinet by MPs, the right of parliamentary select committees to interrogate officials, an end to the secrecy of cabinet papers.

But all of these proposals remain locked within the present system of bourgeois democracy -the very machinery set up by the capitalist class to defend their rule against the working class.

• The argument we have to win with Benn's supporters is that only the dictatorship of the proletariat can bring real democracy into the lives of workers other non-exploiting ailu Benn on the platform of sections of society.

ihis argument requires an understanding of Benn's alternative to the dictatorship of the proletariat: it is a theory of stages.

First, Benn tells us, we have to elect a Labour government. Then this government will bring in laws requiring large firms to draw up planning agreements and creating nationalised sections of industry with the same duty to reach long term planning agreements with their workers.

This-says Benn-will be the stage of 'equal partnership' of labour and capital. But in this partnership the workers will take a _ greater and greater control-until they reach the position of hiring capital as they choose.

This utopian scheme ignores certain unpleasant realities. The first is the proven power of capitalism to control Labour governments.

As long as Laböur leaders remain committed to achieving social reforms through regenerating industry under capitalism, they will be unable to implement socialist policies. Benn should be the last to forget this.

He knows full well that when the IMF told Wilson to drop Benn's mild industrial policies for nationalisation and planning agreements or face financial collapse, Wilson did not appeal to the working class for support, but sacked Benn double quick (and none of Benn's cabinet colleagues defended him either).

World slump

He knows that when the IMF demanded spending cuts in health and education as a price for new loans, Wilson and Healey obliged. Indeed he now claims that this was the moment he became a (silent, Cabinet position-holding) socialist.

So why does he now ignore the reactionary politics of the right wing leadership?

The second reality is the economic conditions of the present period. In the middle of a world slump of massive prothe "Debate of the Decade" portions and unforseeable end, the power of labour to bargain economically with capital is not Benn says he agrees that the working class must be mobilised outside Parliament to achieve any advances. But the question is around what programme.

On this question there are fundamental ambiguities in Benn's approach. On the one hand he appears to accept that the defence of jobs by occupations is correct: but on the other he says it is wrong to, resist the introduction of new technology!

His ideas remain a confused mixture of old "technological revolution" illusions of regenerating capitalism mingled with "Instituțe for Workers Control" ideas about self-management within capitalism on the basis of workers' needs.

No middle way But Benn has to make up his mind. In the present period, defending the living standards, jobs and conditions of workers is the same thing as holding back the necessary restructuring and modernisation of capital.

There is no middle way when overall production is stagnating or falling.

Marxists are . clear: they stand fully for the defence of working class interests-even if in the short term this makes worse the total crisis of capitalism.

We say that a Labour government in this period could only defend the interests of workers by declaring war on the interests of capitalism.

In this situation only the mobilisation of the working class could sustain it. We say that the Labour Party is incapable of. carrying through such a mobilisation: it has neither the programme or the leadership. What is Benn's answer to this situation?

Concluded

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