"Their country before ass"

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pierce the shell of the capitalist state.

"The beak of the proletariat is its party. If we look at MacDonald.

Thomas, Mr. and Mrs. Snowden, we have to confess that the work of the bourgeoisie in selecting short-billed and soft-billed has been crowned with astonishing success for these individuals are not only fit for the piercing of the capitalist skull, but indeed are not fit for anything.

(Trotsky, Where is Britain Going?

To read the published extracts from Richard Crossman's diaries is to have confirmed with inside detail, all that Trotsky wrote in this famous analysis of the Labour Party in 1925.

The Labour Government that came to office in October 1964, when these diaries start, was dominated throughout by the development of the world crisis of capitalism, revealed in Britain in a balance of payments deficit of some £800m and in the complete lack of confi dence of international bankers in the ability of British capitalism to take on the working class. No capitalist wanted sterling at any price.

The bankers wanted increased exploitation of the working class to save capitalism; the diaries show hot the Labour Government lined up with the bourgeoisie to do just that. There are very important lessons here as we see the present Labour Government imposing the wage-cutting social contract and presiding over and threatening increasing unemployment today.

The facade of democracy, which Crossman is so proud of, is exposed as a fraud,as any policies for the defence of the working class, who elected the Labour Government, an sacrificed one after the other to the dictates of the handful of financial magnates in the banks.

CYNICISM

This is carried out by the Labour leaders with the most brazen cynicism - principles are laughed aside. Crossman writes of his first cabinet meeting:

"a mere formality only concerned with the economic crisis and, honest ly, we were told as little about it as the National Executive of the Party is ever told. It really was an absolute farce to have George Brown saying "Naturally, you won't want to be told. for fear of the information leaking, how serious the situation is. You won't want to be told what methods we shall take but we shall take them." (emphasis added)

But a month later realisation of the crisis broke through to him A journalist friend tells him:

*The City, he said, have lost confidence. After all Callaghan (Chancellor of the Exchequer) threatens the City daily with corporation tax and the capital gains tax, and the City feel they don't know what to fear, they lose confidence. You are heading straight for devalation "Callaghan's budget speech really had been a flop. Confidence had not been restored, at least not in the City; and with heavy selling and speculation in Zurich, we were in the kind of classical financial crisis socialist governments must expect when they achieve power and find the till empty." (Nov. 22nd, 1964)

Pensioners are the first human sacrifices made to appease the bankers. The reformists go to the task with enthusiasm:

"George Brown got up and did magnificently, he rallied the Party, he indicated the danger and pulled the backbenchers round to drop the idea of any further concessions to the pensioners. (Nov. 24, 1964)

And social services are the next on the shopping list for those defending capitalism:

"Now so far there has been no suggestion by Harold or James that we should actually cut social services No wonder we are still faced with his complete lack of confidence n the pound abroad." (Dee. 3, 196 *I was followed by Callaghan whe said that we were going to crack up and crash unless the increase in public expenditure could be halted even a neutral budget would fail to win the confidence of the bankers" (Feb. 11, 1965)

SPINELESS But easily the shrewdest of the assessments made by Crossman when he examines the helplessness and spinelessness of his fellow reformists:

"Callaghan is really representing the MacDonaldite attitude to the bankers in 1931. Like MacDonald Crossman he is open to moral blackmail by Lord Cromer (Governor of the Bank of England) and so are most of my working class colleagues. One could see at Cabinet how, whether they belong to the Right or to the Lett of the Party, they of the City and of the Bank of England when a crisis of this kind blows up and they feel they must put their country before their class (Feb 11th 1965)

The point is clearly made: the poor 'terrorised, pliable reformists cannot measure up as a leadership for the working class against the ruling class in its boardrooms, who on their part proceed with class determination to use their immens resources for the sabotage of the most minor social reforms. Trotsk! writes:

"The resources of State destruction, and legislative and administrative sabotage in the hands of the possessing classes are immense since, no matter what their parliamentary majority, all the state apparatus from top to bottom is inseparably linked with the bourgeoisie. To it,all belongs: all the Press, the most important organs of local government... the banks and the whole system of social credit . *It is absolutely obvious that all these gigantic means will be brought into action with frantic violence in order to dam the activity of the Labour Government, to paralyse its exertions, to frighten it... and finally to cause a inancial panic, to terrorise the upper ranks of the workers* organisations and to sap the strength of the proletariat." Where is Britain Going? P.

CRISIS

has to step into line with the requirements of the whole chaos of capitalism in crisis, it is not surprising that Crossman continually makes helpless noises There is no inner Cabinet, no coherent policy on home affairs and we are drifting along. That' really the lesson of this deplorable show" (Feb. 3rd 1964)

An important item of the bourgeoisie's "legislative and administrative sabotage" is the power of the Civil Service, which Crossman continually bemoans with the desperation of abject: helplesness.

"oughtn't i to make one real effort to get some sanity and de tral strategy into our conduct o affairs? Here we are, with our momentum halted and the Civil Service taking over more every day."

Crossman describes with great and very instructive detail how "Whitehall ensures that the Cabine system is relatively harmless. The whole job is pre-cooked by offcials .. dominated by the Treasury" When once this system works for him, Crossman declares: "The Cabinet was effectively rigged".

The question is, of course, how has it come about that the leadership of the working class, the only revolutionary class in society, has passed to such spineless, opportunist and treacherous politicians2 The bourgeois parties, liberal and Tory, held undisputed sway throug out the nineteenth century when Britain was the most powerful industria country in the worid. with enormous wealth. Part of this wealth could be sacrificed for forced concessions to the growing strength of the working class, and to create in the process a privileged layer in the working class which was tied to capitalism by such concessions. But foreign competition displaced Britain from the position of world domination at the end of the century, and in Trotsky's words "Towards the beginning of the present century it produced a state of internal want of confidence, and ferment among the upper classes, and a profound molecular process of an essentially revolutionar: character among the working clas: Chief place in these processes was occupied by mighty conflicts between labour and capital." Where is Britain Going? p. 2.

It was under this decline of the power of British capital on the one hand, and the mighty revolutionary movement on the other that there developed the political awakening of the working class, applied to found and build the DEFEND UNIONS Spurred by the need to defend the unions from the Taff Vale judgement which made them fir cially liahle for striking, workers achieved a large Labour Party fraction for the first time in the General Election of 1906, with 42 MPs.

Restrained by the treacherous position of its leadership during the war, strikes continued afterwards on a grand scale till the triple alliance of miners, railwaymen's and transport leaders betrayed the general strike of 1920, and, paralysed in the economic struggle, workers directed their energy to the political plane.

The Labour Party, composed of the political reflection of this reformist, compromising, privileger aristocracy in the workers movement grew out of all expectation and finally achieved a Government in 1924.

So the Labour Party is a party of contradiction. On the one hand built during a revolutionary upheaval by the working class for its own voice in Parliament, and on the other taking leaders drawn from a privileged reformist layer which has nothing but dread of the revolution which these reforms were intended to forestall.

This petty bouregois privilege can be seen when Crossman revealingly in the country" with a farm of 500 acres which Crossman owned.

In consequence of this Trotsky defined their role: "In struggling against proletarian class-consciousness the reformists are in the last resort the instrument of the ruling class". (Where is Britain Going?

The Labour Party rules by virtue of the comparative historical weak ness of the ruling class in the face of the developed strength of the working class. But the conservatism of its upper circles means that a socialist programme for the working class is put off to the indefinite future while in the present it manages capitalism for the capitalists.

Thus Crossman repeats the usual bleat of the reformist, impotent to challenge the rule of capital: "We are now, as a Cabinet, faced with the most difficult problem we have ever had. What sanctions should provide against employers who refuse to freeze their prices ....or who insist on forcing up their wages in the period of the wage freeze? Once we have sanctions of this kind it means that conceivably a trade union or trad union leader could be punished for industrial action.

WAGE FREEZE

*I get the impression that this is one of the assurances Callagha must have given to Fowler from the American Treasury when he was in Washington. [Nov 4th 1965] This is one of Crossman's few references to the Prices and Incomes Board set up in April 1965 to effect the desired increased exploitation of the working class through freezing wages and through productivity dealing.

In the name of this Anglo-Amer ican "special relationship" Wilson had to fit in with American imperialist nlans, to support their anti-working class slaughter in Vietnam and to increase defence expenditure. But whatever happened to the left' in the Labour Party - all those MPs who make speeches about socialism and the class struggle but who almos invariably turn out into the lobbies to vote for Wilson? There is a real requirement in the Labour party now for all those members who see it as a socialist party to get up and fight for the removal of the right wing - the Wilsons, Jenkins and Prentices. Yet always the 'left' has proved unable to fight the righ wing in the Labour party. The Trit unites today refuse to fight for the release of the Shrewsbury Two and the removal of Jenkins as Home Secretary.

Nowhere does the nature of the "left' come out more clearly in Crossman's diaries than over imm igration.

Crossman's position is clear. On February 5th, 1965 he writes:

"Frank Soskice is a disaster as Home Secretary...... he has been gradually dragged out of his pure. ly liberalistic attitude to a recognition that we haveto have tight immigration controls.....Immigration can be the greatest potential vote loser for the Labour party if we are seen to be permitting a flood of immigrants to come in and blight the central areas in all our cities"(emphasis added] IMMIGRATION he Immigration white paper of gust 1965 proposed to restrict commonwealth immigrants from 208,000 to 7,500, for professional and skilled workers only.

From the Labour party Conference, Crossman reports:

"We felt we had to out-trump the Tories by doing what they would have done. (emph added)

"I think so because I am an old-fashioned Zionist who believes that anti-semitiom and racialism

Wilson

are endemic, that one has to deal with them by controlling immigration when it gets beyond a certain level" [Sept 29th, 1965] Thus, like all reformists, Crossm slames the working class for hiso. weakness, stating that racialism c se fought while refusing to fight. He describes the left response, knowing they pose no serious threat: "The talk was now about the immigration debate, and all the corridors were humming about the great sell-out of socialist prin ciples in the White Paper, and he the T&GWU were going to side with the anti-government people There was Vicky [the cartoonist looking white with anger, sitting with Michael Foot. All the left were up in arms against the betrayal." [September 28th 1965] "Then came the left attack. Once again I realised that in the Labour party the real discussion is berween practical poliey and emotional protest. Very rarely have we discussed alternative policies or even alternat ive attitudes. The left don't say the have a different policy from support for the Americans in Vietnam. The left say, 'That is the official line and we object to it'."[Sept 29th, 1965, emphasis added] TROTSKY to quote rotsky once more:

'The left wing of the Labour party represents an attempt at the resurrection of centrism within the ocial-imperialist party of MacDonid. It thus reflects the agitation of a part of the Labour burcaucracy for a connection with the leitward , masses. It would be a monstrous illusion to think that those left elements of the old school are capable of heading the revolution -ary movement of the British proletariat. (Where is Britain Going! PP 129-30)

LEFTS As centrists, the'lefts ' are incapable f an independent policy, and cannot ead the working class. They have no overall system of policy and so allow the right, who have such a system, to control the Labour party. If they were forced into power on the backs of the working class, they would immediately surrender it to the rightwing if the working class under a revolutionary leadership was not powerfully cnough organised to take it over from them.

So we demand of the left': Throw out Roy Jenkins, Reg Prentice and the right-wing in the Labour party who will not carry out the wishes of the working class, and replace the with those who will fight. Workers who have illusions in the lefts' will rapidly-see their true role exposed under conditions where the lefts are called upon to act rather than just talk.

We maintain therefore, that above all, the need is to build a principled revolutionary leadership in the wor king class, able to analyse and fight the betrayals of both the "right" and "left" wings of the Labour leadership. This is the main lesson we must draw from the Crossman diaries.