Clear Line Needed on Coalition

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There is widespread confusion on the left on the question of the Lib-Lab coalition deal. This confusion has been assiduously cultivated by defenders of the Callaghan-Healey leadership and also by those who pull back from any serious fight against them.

For this reason we have decided to publish Does this mean you supported it? be to break the pact).

If this were a coalition govern- anding a Labour government ment, then that would impose carry out a different programme certain obligations on Marxists, to the one it is - a socialist prowho stand for the complete gramme ? organisations from the bourgeois the time of the Labour Party conletter.

Dear Comrades, I would be pleased if you could clarify some questions which arise from reading your paper. You talk of the Lib-Lab pact being equivalent to transforming the Labour government into "coalition This seems to me to be obviously wrong. Where are the ministers from the capitalist parties?

The policy of the Labour government is counter-revolutionary, with or without the support of the Liberals.

Certainly, acceptance of the pact has created a dangerous precedent which the right wing will utilise, at a later date, when they want a real coalition.

However, believe your use of the term to be unscientific, theoretically confusing, and downright dangerous. This confusion is evident in the pages of your paper.

You talk for the most part of breaking the pact | or "breaking the coalition" as you prefer it), yet on other occasions other formulations appear - e.g. the September 30 Socialist Press talks of the need of the firemen to "get rid of" the "coalition Further, in your issue of January 11 you report the defeat of a WRP motion ( at the conference in support of the firemen called by Liverpool Trades Council) calling for a "campaign to bring down the conspiratorial coalition You say nothing whatsoever in nnnnsition to this motion.

Are you for kicking out this gov. ernment, yes or no ?

independence of working class state and bourgeois parties.

We would have to come out unequivocally for the overthrow of the present government.

If you believe this government is a coalition, then why do you not come out without hesitation for its being kicked out of office?

Ludicrous

The answer seems to me to lie in the fact that it would be ludicrous to demand the overthrow of this Labour government simply to call fro the return of ... a labour government Such a position would be subject to both contempt and ridicule in the labour movement. At the present time there is no other governmental alternative for for the workers' movement except a Labour government. This means we are obliged to centre our attack on breaking the Lib-Lab agreement, by both a political campaign against it, and by struggling to smash the 10% limit.

It would be the most criminal irresponsibility for Marxists to call for the overthrow of a Labnur anvernment when there was no other governmental possibility save for a Tory government.

Having made the mistake of designating this government as a "coalition government" , you appear to be caught in the horns of a If you are to be consistent, and fight to kick out the government, then you obviously could not simply demand the return of a Labour government (otherwise all that would be necessary would Consequentiy you would be pointed in the direction of demThe danger signs are there. At ference you demanded of the left PHOTO: John Sturrock (Report) MPs that they fight for the adoption of a 'socialist programme' (i.e. a Marxist programme).

This is an opportunist call for it demands of a wing of counterrevolutionary social democracy that it carry out a programme which only Marxists can carry out.

This adapts to the belief of reformist workers that socialism can be achieved through Parliament, by the Labour Party.

If you do not really mean that you are fighting for the overthrow of the present government, then it is inconsistent with the term "coalition", in which case I would find that the logic of such a position will drive you along the road travelled by the WRP.

Fraternally, John Ford (Thames Polytechnic)

Our reader manages to pack a number of confused points into one letter. We will try to answer each in turn.

We have consistently termed the Lib-Lab deal-struck last March in the wake of the Leyland toolmakers' strike-as an undeclared coalition in which the Labour leaders undertake to implement nothing more than Liberal policy will allow.

In return for sufficient parliamentary support to enable them to force through a third phase of wage control, the Labour leaders conceded to the Liberals an arrangement by which Liberal politicians are consulted more on policy questions than any body within the labour movement.

Unscientific Because of the relative balance of parliamentary forces and the necessity to head off working class resistance by retaining the fiction that a "Labour government' remains in office, the Labour leaders themselves fulfil the role of capitalist ministers.

But, as Liberal leader Steel has time and again pointed out, there is no prospect of this coalition implementing even vaguely socialist policies.

It is no longer remotely subject to pressure from the labour movement. The Liberals vet every decision, every policy, before it is even raised in parliament.

in our view, it is unscientific to describe such an arrangement as a 'Labour government' And it ic eccential to focus It is not only political bankruptcy that stares the Labour Party in the bulletin is to be believed.

Apparently work has now begun on the Party bureaucrats' dream - a new headquarters, on the Walworth Road, near the Elephant and Castle.

ine rarty 's compiere inad- ammalate insola ility to satisfy the demands or continuously on the betrayal committed by those 'lefts' who, by their Parliamentary votes actually facilitate this coalition arrangement.

Isolated error

Our policy, flowing naturally from this analysis, is that in order to fight for the socialist policies necessary to defend jobs, wages and living standards, workers must fight to break the Lib-Lab coalition, and for Labour to take the power.

The phrase "get rid" of the coalition government is clearly an error-and obviously an isolated one, since it is the only instance quoted between September 30 and January 11!

Our heavily edited report of the Liverpool Trades • Council conference originally contained two paragraphs making clear our position in opposition to both the WRP's call for a campaign to "bring down" the coalition and to the refusal of the platform to acknowledge that the Lib-Lab deal is a coalition.

Political independence We are not for "bringing down" but for breaking this coalition in order to assert the political independence of the working class from the capitalist Liberal Party, and to create the conditions to expose the Labour leaders, right and 'left' wing alike, in office.

The WRP's uitimatist demand in fact diverts from the struggle to expose the reformist leaders, and is a simple continuation of their call to 'bring down' the Labour government.

It is not necessarily true that Marxists are obliged to call for the overthrow of a coalition government embracing workers parties.

This was not the position that Trotsky took in relation to the French Popular Front in 1936, for example (see centre pages for a more detailed account).

Oust bourgeoisie

The central question is to assert the political independence of the working class.

The main thrust of our work is therefore to oust the bourgeoisie from the coalition-in order to sharpen all the political questions within the working class movement.

This is completely in line with the line of Trotsky's Transitional Programme which advocates systematically addressing the reformist leaders with the demand "Break with the bourgeoisie, take the power!"

Demands

Our reader they moves on to discuss the question of demands on the Labour government. We insist that it is necessary to place demands on a Labour government-not because we believe that such a government car ever working class supporters could, they hope, be better concealed in a grand building.

All but the front facade of a Georgian Terrace is to be demolished to provide the basis of a new office building - just as all but the facade of socialism was long ago demolished within the Party to create sufficient elbow room for Labour's crypto-Tory leaders to continue their betrayals.

Labour Party members seem to be recognising this.

Despite a fanfare of pubers in the Party's paper Labour Weekly that the building project is to cost £1.6 million the money is not exactly flooding in to Party offices.

Anguished pleas

Anguished pleas from Tribunite Party Treasurer Norman Atkinson have now been supplemented by a renewed plea from General Secretary Ron Hayward.

He has pointed out that only £60,000 has so far been collected. This is a mere 3.75% of the required total !

With work already under way clearing the site, the Labour bureaucracy could well find themselves with a big space near the Elephant -but no Castle !

London Labour Party conferenc satisfy workers' requirements, bu because we can see that widi layers of workers believe it.

Only in the struggle to forci their existing leaders to act or their behalf and seeing the refusal to do so will such worker come to recognise the need for i revolutionary leadership.

Our demand that those MP who proclaim themselves oppor ents of Callaghan-Healey fight fo socialist policies in opposition te the government's capitalist pro gramme is therefore a part of thi fight to expose the impotence c these fake 'lefts' Following the Labour Parti conference we have consistenti referred to their refusal to fige the right wing in that conference Buffeted The sharpest way of demer strating , to workers that Labocannot introduce socialism is ::

ensure that a majority Labogovernment is forced into pone in its own name, and that :

buffeted on all sides by =.

demands and problems of :working class-problems whic cannot solve, and demands vi:

as a government tied to cac :a s it cannot fulfil.

In such a situation a =.=tionary alternative bolciv c.: i=.

ward can attract := conscious layers of no-es =-.

open the road :. =...:== ST OCCI

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Background to Gallacher's ultra-leftism - crowds raise the Red Flag in Glasgow, 1919. ort two of an analysis of the struggle against sectarian revisions of Marxism which resulted in the split of 22 members of the Workers Socialist League last month. By John Lister *How many times have we met a smug centrist to reckons himself a "realist" merely because he Is out to swim without any ideological baggage latever and is tossed by every vagrant current. He unable to understand that principles are not dead Ilast but a life line for a revolutionary swimmer. *The sectarian, on the other hand, generally es not want to go swimming at all, in order not to * his principles. He sits on the shores and reads tures on morality to the flood of the class struggle. *But sometimes a desperate sectarian leaps heade into the water, seizes hold of the centrist and Ips him drown. So it was; so it will be. Gallacher korarianism-the refusal Fety the fight for the itionary programme in a way into the mass erent of the working Is not a weakness aced to middle class elete in the revolutionary e..ent, any more than is •... opportunism.

Proletarian E nett Wing Communism, Frantile Disorder, Lenin I sed against sectarian lacies among proletarian rs. new to the ComL: movement, including -iant Scottish trade Exs around Gallacher in ETA eacher had stated that a: impermissible to give surport whatever to the I s: parliamentarians of ILP. since it would simply I :: put power into the k:: the "hopelessly reacI: Henderson, Clynes, Desald and Snowden. I pointed out that cis:s letter: ... excellently expresses lemper and point of view r young Communists, or mk-and-file workers who only just coming to munism. This temper is gratifying and abs. we must learn to i :: and to support it. for ou: :::: would be hope. Trotsky Writings (1935-36) p26.

Henderson the proletarian revolution in Great Britain, or in any other country for that matter.

People who can give expression to this temper of the masses, who can rouse such a temper (which is very often dormant, unrealised and unaroused) among the masses, must be valued and every assistance must be given them.

And at the same time we must openly and frankly tell them that temper alone is not enough to lead the masses in a great revolutionary Tanin traced that anlit: is a science, and that this means objectively analysing the balance of forces and state of consciousness of:

"all the forces, groups, parties, classes and masses operating in the given country"

He insisted that:

... policy should not be determined only by the desires and views, by the degree of class consciousness and the readiness for battle of only one group or party"

Lenin went on to confront Gallacher's ultra-leftism head-on, by insisting on the need force the Labour traitors to take the power in order to expose them to the masses:

"That the Hendersons, the Clynes, the MacDonalds and the Snowdens are hopelessly reactionary is true ... But it by no means follows that to support them is treachery to the revolution, but rather that in the interests of the revolution the working class revolutionaries should give these gentlemen a certain amount of parliamentary (Left Wing Communism, pp.79-81)

Of course the only similarity batween Gallacher, a proletarian mass-fighter, and the petty bourgeois opposition that emerged within the Workers Socialist League, working in liaison with the "'international Spartacist tendency" is that both shared a similar confusion on the necessity to convince the masses of the need for revolution in the course of their experiences in the class struggle, and a common inability to distinguish between principles and tactics.

One-sided ch case the siol 'om a one-: sub The petty bourgeois t endency regurgitated many of the discredited positions of the "Left Communists" SO tellingly refuted by Lenin years ago.

Unlike the "Left Communists", however, they reflected not the strength of the most determined layers of the working class, but characteristic petty bourgeois quailing before the difficult task of constructing a revolutionary cadre within the mass workers' organisations.

Imagination

While Gallacher and other proletarian forces that adopted ultra-left positions had arrived at their views through their experience of a mass sentiment amongst advanced, militant layers of the working class, this is not the case with petty bourgeois sectarians.

They arrive at their :!... left dogmatism 35 ::a. 13e3040.8::=. and unending arsirac: discussion. And the! are reinforced in these false costice. by their very sers.

SOCIALIS -ele Trotsky For them ideas are the point of departure and the conclusion -while for the Marxist:

"dialectical materialism .. takes experience as its point of departure and always returns to it"

Again and again the sectarians' arguments against the leadership of the Workers Socialist League boiled down to no more than an attempt to substitute their own subjective wishes, feelings and frustrations for the struggle to win the mass of workers to an understanding of their bureaucratic leaders.

This led the sectarians to denounce the WSL's tactic of using critical support for fake 'left' Labour MPs and trade union leaders in order to expose them in practice. Their opposition document claimed that:

"The central strateg! of the leadership with relato io the existing lestes ine #Orking iN 0 CRES 0 o! he phrase "Make the Lefts Fight* . The slogan derives from an illiormed conception cha: the Les: Pa.:

heanesda:

seen by the [WL] leadership as in some way representing the proletariat and the bourgeoisie respectively. Hence the 'critical' support given to the 'lefts'."

(Opposition document, 'In Defence of the Revolutionary This passage contains one deliberate falsification and also epitomises the inability of the petty bourgeois sectarlans to understand the necessity to raise workers in practice to a revolutionary level of consciousness.

Tactic

'Make the Lefts Fight' is not of course a strategy. Not a single aspect of the WSL's programme presupposes or suggests that any left-talking bureaucrat, either now or in the future, will necessarily wage a fight against the right wing.

Rather it is a tactical means of mobilising workers in such a way as to enable them to learn the objective role played by their 'leftwing' leaders.

It is not the WSL leaders that believe that the Labour Party "falls into two quite distinct wings"-it is the working class.

Workers demonstrate time and again by their votes for Labour's National Executive and the completely different response that workers in struggle give to 'left' MPs that they regard the 'lefts' as, however inadequately, representing their interests against the open right wing agents of capital.

If workers are to break from these long-cherished illusions and recognise the need for a revolutionary leadership, then they will need to see the treacherous role of the lefts' revealed in practice.

Refusal

To focus workers' attention on the refusal of these 'lefts' to wage the slightest fight against the policies of the Lib-Lab coalition or against the right wing Labour leaders through the slogan 'Make the Lefts Fight' is an essential part of this educational work.

Urging workers to demand that their leaders put their and wage a fight against the open right wing, enables revolutionaries to expose every retreat and betrayal, and counterpose the necessity for a revolutionary programme and a new leadership.

But the sectarians caricatured this approach as serving only:

"to lend our authority to the 'left wing' credentials of the thoroughly rotten counter-revolutionary parliamentary cretins in the Tribune group and this serves to tie the political development of the working class to a wing of social democracy"

Such a statement shows how the sectarians completely fail to come to grips with the real problems within the workers movement.

The most pernicious force actually binding the working class to 'left' reformism at the present time is the Stalinists of the Communist Party.

Assist Stalinists The Stalinists tie workers to social democracy precisely by arguing that the 'lefts' are fighting the right wing-and by opposing any attempt to put real demands on them.

The sectarians, from their ultra-left standpoint actually assist the Stalinists in this tash of protecting the Eric Here. and Dennis Skinnersfor us to put ..... Taker ...it instead .- re through

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CALIS PRESS hednesdar March 22, 1978.

French Popular Front leaders. 1936. Tie.

Lenin insisted that the mood vere unable, throughout the 1-week discussion in the Vorkers Socialist League, to ›roduce so much as one practical instance of the WSL n any way capitulating to eft reformism. Their allegaions proved as empty as their irguments.

Equally characteristic was he fact that the sectarians lisdained to offer the WSL or he working class any alternaive means of demonstrating, n the course of living truggles, the bankruptcy of hose leaders that workers alsely believe are an 'alternaive' to Callaghan or to the fUC right wing.

The problem of tactical ›rientation is "solved" for he sectarian by avoiding any eal intervention at all, and ›y simply levelling the accusition of "opportunism" ¡gainst those forces that take he question seriously. leffer - protected by those vho oppose raising demands o expose him.

"The sectarian sees an enemy in everyone who attempts to explain to him that an active participation in the workers' movement demands a constant study of objective conditions, and not haughty bulldozing from the sectarian rostrum"

Trotsky, Writings 1935-6.

In doing so, the sectarian turns his back on the invaluable heritage of experience from Lenin and from Irotsky, who both insisted that revolutionaries must remain sensitive to divisions and shading within reformist and centrist organisations.

"The petty bourgeois democrats (including the Mensheviks) inevitably vacillate between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, retween bourgeois democracy and the Soviet system, between reformism and revolutionism, between love-forhe-workers and fear of the proletarian dictatorship, etc. The proper tactics for the Communists must be to stilise these vacillations, not o ignore them; and utilising :hem calls for concessions to hose elements which are urning towards the proletariat-whenever and to the extent that thev turn towards of an advanced group of workers fighting those who turn towards the bourgeoisie ...

This is a long process, and the hasty "decision"_ "No compromises, no manoeuvres"-can only injure the work of strengthening the influence of the revolutionary proletariat and enlarging its (Left Wing Communism, Lenin in this passage would almost seem to stand well to the right of the Workers Socialist League, which while insistently directing demands towards left' MPs and trade union leaders, has made no concessions whatever in their direction.

Guide to action

But in illustrating the content of Marx and Engels' dicium that our theory is not a dogma but a guide to action Lenin squarely confronts the method of wooden abstractions and empty denunciations peddled by today's petty bourgeois "left communists".

The inability of the sectarians to distinguish between strategy and tactics, and their refusal to involve themselves in the day to day struggles of the working class also characterised their position on electoral tactics in relation to the Lib-Lab coalition government.

«The coalition with the Liberals is equivalent to a Popular Front. Labour Party candidates in this period stand as representatives of a bourgeois political formation, the coalition, and thus to extend even the most critical support to them is a breach of principle"

The real history of Trotskyism on the question of the Popular Front consists of a merciless exposure of the class collaboration of the Popular Front combined with the development of slogans and tactics designed to drive a wedge between the masses and their reactionary leaders.

For the fake "Trotskyist" faction, willing mouthpieces for any idiotic formula dreamed up by Spartacist discussion circles, this was not enough.

New 'principle' They decided to discover a new "principle"-that any call on workers to vote for workers' parties involved in a coalition bloc is nothing less than support for Popular Frontism!

They went on to lecture the WS for its "Menshevism" for our position of calling on workers to vote Labour against the Tories while we continue our fight to oust the coalitionist leaders, to break the Lib-Lab deal, and to establish a programme of socialist policies.

They compared the WSL policy to that of the counterrevolutionary Spanish POUM, which actually signed the cout Id not substitute for mobilising gramme and participated in a bourgeois government which attacked the Spanish proletariat!

Unabashed

Not one of these ridiculous allegations was witharawn, nor were the sectarians in the least abashed when confronted at the WSL conference with proof that the French Trotskyists, working under Trotsky's close supervision, had called for votes to the Communist Party and Socialist Party in the 1930s.

[Indeed, one of the leaders of the "Trotskyist Faction" recently spoke at two meetings organised by the French Spartacists, arguing for no vote for the Communist Party or the Socialist Party in the second round of the French elections on the grounds that they were part of a Popular Front formation].

In the 1936 elections the call went out for a vote for the workers' parties, but no vote for the bourgeois Radicals with whom 1 tnese parties had blocked in a This tactic was designed to place the reformists and Stalinists in a position to take the power alone, and thus expose their refusal to break from collaboration with the bourgeoisie.

In the event, of course, the Trotskyists' call for a break from the Radicais was not heeded.

The parties of the Popular Front won 378 out of 598 seats in the Chamber of Deputies-with a marked class as a whole. advance for the workers parties, and a 'significant fall in support for their bourgeois partners, the Radicals.

Socialist Party leader Leon Blum became premier of a Popular Front government, while workers staged a massive wave of strikes, and the fascists and employers plotted a counter-attack.

Tactical approach

But under Trotsky's direction, the French Trotskyists did not call for the newly elected government to be brought down.

Instead, Trotsky concentrated the attention of the French section on the tactical approach necessary to advance the fight for working class independence and the revolutionary programme:

"We and the People's Front have common enemies. That is why we are ready to fight them alongside the regular groups of the People's Front government, without taking the least responsibility for this government, OI posing as the "protectors" of Leon Blum. (...)

"We must not conceal from the masses that the [Popular Front's] programme is unattainable in the framework of capitalism or that the attainable parts of the programme would always be sabotaged by the Radicals.

•When we say, "The moment has not yet come for a frontal attack on the Blum government'. , we do not mean that we have to protect it, but only that we must attack it from the side-its right side, the Radicals.

«We must distinguish and personalise our criticisms of the government by striking the heaviest blows at the Radical ministers and by explaining to the Socialist and Communist workers that it is Daladier, Delbos, Rucard, etc. who sabotage and cannot but sabotage everything that is progressive in the government programme. (...)

"The Radicals are the line of least resistance for the revolutionary critique. By concentrating your fire against the Radical ministers, with really concrete examples you will easily get the ear of the Communist and Socialist workers. (...)

"At any rate, our slogan cannot be "Down with the Blum i government!" but 'Drive the bourgeois Radicals out of the Blum government!" That is where the slight difference of meaning lies. It is extremely important for this period, but it does not at all mean that we "protect" the Blum government" (Crisis of the French Section, The example of France in 1936 is not put forward here as a rigid pattern to be slavishly followed.

Method

Quite clearly there were fundamental differences in the political situation then as compared to the conditions of the Lib-Lab coalition in Britain in 1978.

But by examining the real record of the Trotskyist movement we are able to learn the method of approach applied by Trotsky-the way in which the fight for revolutionary leadership is related to a tactical intervention in the living struggles of the working class.

The task is not simply to demonstrate through propaganda that revolutionaries understand the Popular Front -but rather to mobilise workers to break that class collaborationist alliance and take a crucial step towards political independence.

The WL continues to apply similar tactics today. We proudly defend the history of Trotskyism against the petty bourgeois sectarian bankrupts who would brand it as "Menshevik" and "capitulation" to class collaboration.

Evidence ignored

Throughout the discussion however, "trivial" matters like evidence, facts and the established positions of the Trotskyist movement were casually brushed aside by the disciples of the Spartacists.

They had scented the prospect of a way out of routine work, and an escape from patient attention to the day-to-day struggles ward" workers.

The most ridiculous arguments were consumed with gusto and retailed all solemnity.

Perhaps clearest the expression the of "Trotskyist" faction's contempt for the established positions of the Communist movement was their insistence that the WSL should take up and incorporate into all propaganda the demand for a "workers' government" as "a pseudonym for the dictatorship of the proletariat"

This ludicrous proposalhanded down by the Spartacists to their gullible offspring without a shred of support in the documents or the practice of the Marxist movement-was doggedly defended by them throughout the 11 weeks of the pre-conference discussion, in the face of a mountain oi evidence to prove that no leading Communist had ever attempted to use the workers government slogan simply in that way.

But the absurdity of the argument was further exposed when the sectarians combined their call for the dictatorship of the proletariat with opposition to the WSL's fight for workers committees -price committees, open the books committees and Councils of Action.

Their abstract demand for proletarian government, divorced from even a call for building the workers organisations on which such a government must be based, does not even make sense as propaganda.

Abstract or incomprehensible propaganda does no more in practice than sow confusion and strengthen illusions in the "common sense" arguments of reformist and centrist forces.

Sectarian propaganda of this kind therefore can be seen as a clear reflection of the penetration of bourgeois practice only to reinforce the grip of the bourgeoisie's bureaucratic agents in the mass organisations of the working class.

WEEK:

International questio the politics of the St tendency.

(Final

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Budapest 1956- Stalin's statue pulled down by eager hands. without bothering to study munist work (and suffered the evidence, has said that police torture for it, as (Monty Johnstone writes permanently crippled) before of men who sell their friends' and during the war. by the few weeks later imously accepted as good eticians', a specialist in

----- pull-quotes -----

suggest that if you do not "over- throw" this conception, you will

socialis Press replies

face, if the report in Labour's Press Service'

licity for a 'Pound a Brick' appeal, and constant remind.

"left' talk into practice, support workers in struggle,

ideology into the revolution- ary movement, serving in