building of a strong Marxist movement in Britain is something yet to be accomplished. No one can pretend to foresee all the steps by which this will be achieved. What we can say is that unless a working class leadership is built, the ruling class will inflict massive defeats on the British workers. It must do so if the profitability of the chronically sick British capitalism is to be restored
Here and now we can indicate some of the major political steps necessary to build a mass Marxist movement in Britain — some of the essentials of analysis, programme and strategy. without which we cannot go forward. Thatcher's offensive... Since 1979 the Thatcher government has had some success in changing the relationship of class forces in favour of the ruling class. In order to understand why, it is worth looking back at the 1970-4 Heath government and the lessons which Thatcher learned from Heath's failure.
In the early stages of the Heath government an attempt was made both to boost the profitability of manufacturing industry by allowing ailing firms to go to the wall (the famous 'lame duck" policy), and to inflict a major defeat on the trade unions through the Industrial Relations Act. The lame duck" policy floundered when the government lost its nerve and reflated the economy in 1972-3.
International, No. I, November/December 1985
But the basic reason for the failure of Heath to inflict major defeats on the working class was the huge surge of working class militancy, from the struggle to free the Pentonville 5 dockers — which effectively broke the Industrial Relations Act — to the two miners' strikes, the second of which actually brought the Heath government down. The 1970-74 Tory government failed to grasp the necessity to materially weaken the working class and its organisations through mass unemployment.
Thatcher learned this lesson well. When the Tories came to power in 1979 unemployment was already much higher than in 1974. However, between 1980-1 Thatcher deliberately engineered a massive deflation, crashing the economy and sending unemployment skyrocketing. The plan was to boost profitability and attack the working class through a coherent strategy. This combined attacks on workplace and union organisation, anti-union legislation, plus a wholesale attack on the public sector and the welfare state. Key to the whole strategy was the insecurity created by mass unemployment and the dampening effect it had on workers willingness to struggle.
Thatcher utilised government-run industries as the front line for this attack. The steel workforce was chopped in half. In British Leyland, long a symbol of working class shop floor militancy, the Edwardes "corporate plan' involved both a savage reduction in the workforce, and direct assault on shop floor organisation and union rights symbolised by the sacking of militants like Derek Robinson at Longbridge and Alan Thornett at Cowley. The whole strategy culminated, of course, with the attack on the miners, and the deliberate provocation of sending MacGregor, who had butchered the steel industry, to do the same with the pits.
At each stage these attacks were met with determined resistance, at least by a minority of the workforce, and in the case of the miners by the overwhelming majority. In the steel industry the whole workforce fought a bitter battle in 1980, although with little long-term result for jobs. And in 1982 there International, No I. November/December 1985
was a quite unprecedented mobilisation of health workers in pursuit of a living wage, a struggle which was in the end defeated. In the print industry over the NGA, and in both the rail disputes over one-person operation of trains and flexible rostering', there have been at least big minorities determined to wage a fight.
The national struggles like those of miners and ASLEF have been interspersed with hundreds of small-scale fights symbolised by events like the redundancy struggle at Laurence Scott in Manchester, the women's strike at Barking hospital and the Silentnight struggle. Still, at both national and local level the results have been the same. Struggles have occured on a wide scale: victories have been few and far between.
If Thatcher has not succeeded in doing much to boost British capitalism, this is a result of the depth of the British crisis and the huge scale of the defeat of the working class which is needed to really boost profits again. Despite all the defeats, 9% million workers remain in trade unions and the basics of working class organisation are intact. It would be foolish, nonetheless, to believe that the working class is on the offensive. It is waging defensive battles, and more often than not losing them. ...and the response of the labour movement leaders It is of course simplistic and foolish to put every working class defeat down to 'betrayal' by the leadership of the working class. Certainly, the miners were not betrayed by their leaders. On the contrary the Scargill leadership was the most militant and determined of any union since the 1920s. But neither can the chain of working class defeats simply be explained by 'objective' circumstances — the failure of the membership to fight because of the difficult economic conditions.
The Thatcher government strategy of combining frontal attacks on the working class in a situation of mass unemployment, 17
with the savage use of the courts, the police, the social security system and a sympathetic media, has upped the stakes in every major struggle to a level of confrontation which has sent the trade union bureaucracy running for cover. Where the majority has wanted to fight, defeat has been engineered. Where a minority which wanted to fight could have been turned into a majority by a firm lead from the top, the bureaucrats have played to the most backward and cautious sections of the membership. And as the government upped the stakes, it has become clear in struggle after struggle that only class-wide action led by the TUC or several unions was sufficient to win a
There is no room here to go through each major struggle, but the main examples of the TUC and leaderships conceding defeat without a serious fight are well known. The Bill Sirs leadership of the ISTC lifted not a finger to stop the butchery of the steel industry. The health workers were sold out by the TUC Health Service Committee's refusal to take any sustained longterm strike action. Unions at British Leyland actually supported the Edwardes corporate plan. ASLEF were ordered off the field of play before the match began while the NGA were stiched up by the right of the TUC General Council. And the miners were the victims of the failure of the TUC and Labour Party leaders to fight from day one of the strike for all-out solidarity action.
The explanation for all this which argues that, after all, trade union bureaucrats betray, is only part of the truth. During the Pentonville 5 struggle in 1972 the TUC actually called for a one-day general strike. Trade union bureaucrats are quite capable, in certain conditions, of putting themselves at the head of struggles. But in the current situation, for them to put themselves at the head of struggles to seck partial victories is
The whole role of the trade union bureaucracy is to mediate between the struggles of the working class and the bosses. Negotiation and compromise — not determined struggle — is their role. However, when the labour movement is faced with an intransigent government intent on inflicting massive defeats, this role is systematically undermined. Faced with a choice between attempting to mobilise their members in mass struggles to defeat the government, and simply organising defeat and surrender, the trade union leaders inevitably chose the latter course.
The miners strike was the classic illustration of this. Only the scale of struggle which would have actually brought the government down was possible to win the strike. Because for the bureaucrats this risked far too much, they opted for pure and simple defeat.
The ultimate rationalisation of this whole process is the emergence of the 'new realism' , pioneered by the likes of Eric Hammond and Gavin Laird. The essence of the 'new realism' is a simple acceptance that struggle has no role to play, and that therefore the union chiefs had better accept single-union sweetheart deals, no strike agreements and the few crumbs that the bosses are prepared to offer, in return for acting as simple policemen of their memberships.
The move to the right in the unions is both cause and effect of the defeats. But it goes well beyond the 'new realist' leaders.
The shift to the right
The long series. of struggles against the Tories produced a
significant radicalisation in the whole labour movement. Union
militancy intersected with the political struggle inside the
Labour Party, linking up with the 'Bennite" left. During the
miners' strike there was a strong mood of tying together the
the miners strike itself. Politically the crystallisation of this mood 18 was the emergence of a 'Benn-Scargill' left wing.
But throughout the period of Tory government this has been one side of a polarisation; the alleged "dominance' of the labour movement by the left has been a product of either imagination of the tabloid press or of wishful thinking. The Labour left, and its base inside the unions, has always been a minority, albeit the strongest left wing minority to emerge in Britain since the 1920s.
Clearly this left wing has not been strong enough to shift the balance of forces during the crucial struggles. The miners strike itself was, in a sense, a clash of two counterposed perspectives for the labour movement. Now the defeat of the strike is working its way through the whole movement.
As in any defeat the predominant effect is not to show up the betrayals. For the majority the outcome is always to cast doubts on the advisability of the struggle itself, to make workers more hesitant, to cast doubt on the political viability of the *Benn-Scargill' left.
It is into this situation that Kinnock and Kinnockism has stepped. Whatever its formal rhetoric, Kinnockism is the clearest statement of 'new realism' in the realm of national
Kinnock's personal support for state funded trade union ballots is merely symbolic of this. The aim of the Labour leadership is to utilise the miners defeat, and the collapse of the ratecapping struggle, to push ahead with their project of 'recentering' the Labour Party, to jettison radical policies and make Labour 'fit to govern' - in the eyes of the ruling class. In the realities of British politics today, making Labour 'fit to govern' incudes preparing, as a last resort, for the possibility of a coalition with the Liberal-SDP alliance.
No doubt the shift to the right has mass support both in the unions and the Labour Party. But it would be quite wrong to assume, as for example do some comments by the British SWP that this shows that the surge of the Labour left and union radicalism after 1979 were an illusion, with little or no strategic significance for revolutionary socialists.
Even if the polarisation today is to the right it is still a polarisation. There is still a mass left wing minority in both the unions and the Labour Party. And on it much of the immediate future of British socialism depends. Miroslav Millbojevic/Reflex
International. No. I, November/December 1985
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Carlos Augusto Guarita/Reflex Kinnock - moving rightwards accompanied by sections of the left 'Bennism' and the Labour Left Given the organic links between the Labour Party and the trade unions, and the emergence of the 'Benn-Scargill' wing of the labour movement, it is vital for Marxists to get right the precise significance of this development, both its potential and its limitations.
During the struggle against the Heath government in the early 'seventies working class radicalisation essentially took the form of militant trade union struggle, by-passing the Labour Party. More precisely, the working class struggle only produced a weak echo in the Labour Party, which culminated in the 1973 election manifesto which promised the famous 'fundamental shift in wealth and power to working people and their families. During this period it was possible for an organisation like the International Socialists (now SWP) to grow rapidy among working class militants without the least concern for what was hap pening inside the Labour Party.
This period of relative quiescence inside the Labour Party continued through the 1974-9 Labour government. While the trade union leaders engineered the "social contract', the far left concentrated its activity on struggles outside the Labour Party, FOR TRAINING IN lacob Sutton/Refl
like the Grunwick struggle, the firefighters strike, and anti-racist and anti-fascist activity including the highly successful Anti-Nazi League. Both the SWP and the IMG stood candidates against Labour in by-elections.
After Labour's defeat in 1979 however the situation inside the Labour Party exploded, and a mass left wing emerged. How is it possible to explain this development? The emergence of the post-'79 Labour left, 'Bennism' represented something very fundamental about British politics. By 1979, two Labour governments, with a total of 11 years in power since 1964, had shown the utter bankruptcy of the Labour right wing in dealing with the crisis of British capitalism. Traditional social democratic consensus politics had both failed to make any steps towards socialism, or even succeed in defending the employment and living standards of the working class. Both Labour governments had carried out incomes policy, and indeed part of the reason for the defeat of the Callaghan government in "79 was its clash with the public sector unions in the preceding winter.
Two things need to be noted here. First, given the depth of the crisis of British capitalism, and Labour's status as the only mass party of the working class, it was absolutely inevitable that a profound crisis of Labourist politics would develop sooner or later. Left wing militants in the 'sixties and 'seventies had taken surface appearances of little internal resistance to the Labour right and Labour governments as signs of the 'death' of the Labour left, or indeed, in more excited analyses, even for a 'vacuum on the left". Post-1979 developments showed however that the dominant form of the political crisis inside the working class movement would not be a rapid and sudden outflanking of social democracy, with mass left wing splits, but a bitter crisis inside social democracy and a struggle to re-fashion it to serve the interests of socialism and the working class.
Moreover, this phenomenon was an illustration of a more general feature of working class radicalisation when mass working class parties already exist. When sections of the masses, as • opposed to small vanguards, become radicalised, they first turn to their own mass orgaisations. In the first instance it may well be to the trade unions, rather than the working class political parties that they turn, but ultimately union radicalisation is certain to reproduce itself inside the mass parties themselves. Of course, the precise forms and rhythms of this process will differ 19
in countries where there is more than one mass party, and where there is a tradition of political trade unionism — of the type practised by the major union federations in France.2 But in Britain it was quite inevitable that an alternative left leadership of one sort or another should arise inside the Labour Party, which tens of thousands of workers would look to.
Such a process, far from being an 'obstacle' or "diversion" for Marxists, is an essential stage in the breaking of the logjam of right-wing domination of working class politics.
Two points must be made here. Tony Benn, or indeed Eric Heffer, Dennis Skinner or any other of the left leaders in the Labour Party, never claimed to stand for socialism. Indeed it would be quite extraordinary if a revolutionary current were the first expression of major political differentiation inside a reformist party. As always happens in such cases it is either left reformism or centrism which is the first development. Second, since the period 1979 the central leadership of the Labour left, including importantly Tony Benn himself, has evolved quite sharply to the left, as part of a process of differentiation which has seen other leaders like Livingstone go over to Kinnock.
Instead of standing pat and criticising from the sidelines, it was the absolute duty of Marxists to link up with and become part of this major development in British working class politics, and within the limited means which Marxists have at their disposal to help give organisation and leadership to this left wing. As Trotsky once put it, the job of Marxists, when faced with left developments inside the working class, was to share the struggle and not the illusions'. This involved giving critical support to the fight for Benn's programme against the right wing, and for example championing Benn's deputy leadership campaign. "After Labour's defeat in 1979 the situation inside the
Labour Party exploded, and a mass left wing emerged." The Benn-Scargill wing of the labour movement, the real Labour left, is the crystallisation at a political level of a whole cy-
cle of working class struggle, including the experience of two right wing Labour governments. If this left is defeated, its consequences will not be the establishment of a mass left outside the
Labour Party, but a defeat for the whole left and
marginalisation of socialist politics in Britain for a long period. Whether this left is defeated will not just be a by-product of a
mass trade union struggle and its outcome, but also of direct
political struggle inside the Labour Party itself. The job of
Marxists is to be part of that struggle, and not shadow box while
the contestants get on with it in the ring.
This stance must in any case be informed by a historical
understanding of how mass revolutionary currents emerge. All
the experience we have where Marxists were faced with a labour
movement already dominated by mass reformist parties - for
example the emergence of the USDP and KPD in Germany,
and the birth of the French and Italian Communist parties in
their revolutionary phase — shows that such developments can
only be the product of the political fight inside the already ex-
isting labour movement, including its political parties, and not
of the attempt to counterpose a 'pure' movement to the real, ex-
isting, workers movement.
Our conclusion must be therefore that a central task for
Marxists will be to be part of the organisation and strengthening
of the Labour left, to fully participate in left developments like
Labour Briefing and the Labour Left Co-ordination, while
fighting at all times for a Marxist understanding of the crisis of 20 British society and British politics.
Obviously, the injunction that revolutionaries must attempt to link up with and become part of the mass left wing of the labour movement, is not an argument against the organisation of revolutionaries as such. Reformism in Britain has enormous absorbative powers. Its institutions and ideology provide numerous mechanisms for turning yesterday's left wing rebel into today's aspiring young trade union bureaucrat or Kinnockite hack. The fate of dozens of militant opponents of ratecapping, including some illustrious leaders, is enough to show how this process works.
But what has happened to someone like Livingstone can be seen day-in, day-out in the ranks of the labour movement. In the last analysis only the organisation of the left, and within that the organisation of a Marxist nucleus, can prevent this from occuring. Thus building a Marxist movement is a process, yes of intervening to build and link up with the trade union and Labour Party left, but also the process of winning individual militants to Marxist politics and organisation.
It has to be said, that the existing 'far left' organisations and currents, while in general exhibiting the greatest tarianism towards the left of the labour movement, are neither particularly adept at winning and training militants in principl ed Marxist politics. All too often we see people pass through two or three years of frenetic activity in one or other Marxist group, and then leave, burned out and demoralised, having perhaps read a couple of pamphlets by Lenin and Trotsky, but hardly having become educated and trained Marxist cadres.
If a Marxist moverent is to be built in Britain, then war has to be declared against the chronic sectarianism and fly-bynight stunt politics of the self-proclaimed 'parties" of the far left. Only long-term serious work in the unions and Labour Party will begin to give results. 'Marxism Today' ideology Part of the shift to the right in the labour movement is the now widespread adherence to the popular front ideology of Marxism Today, the theoretical journal of the Eurocommunist wing of the CP. Marxists in the labour movement must pay special attention to combatting this pernicious concoction. The essence of this right wing attack on the left is a particular analysis of Thatcherism, most consistenly theorised by Stuart Hall. According to Hall Thatcherism is an 'exceptional state' bolstered by a reactionary ideological mobilisation called 'authoritarian populism' The term "exceptional state" is borrowed from Poulantzas" writings on fascism and military dictatorship. The complement to this analysis is the political strategy worked out by Eric Hobsbawm. Despite his occasional and significant references to anti-Thatcher coalitionism with the SDP, Hobsbawm's main thrust has been to argue against the 'sectarianism' of the Bennite left and for a recentering of the Labour Party, a return to the "broad church' of right wing domination.
The error of analysis here is twofold. First the idea that Thatcherism represents an 'exceptional state' — in the sense of something akin to military dictatorship or Bonapartism — is far-fetched and dangerous. Britain under Thatcher, despite the very real and growing authoritarianism which has been a development over nearly 20 years, remains a bourgeois democracy, with central working class rights and freedoms intact, despite all the attacks. Moreover, the notion "authoritarian populism' is itself a dangerous and overexaggerated one. All the statistics suggest that consistently since 1979 support for the Tories has declined, especially in the working class. While ruling class, and some middle class, opinion has polarised sharply to the right, to imagine that this is a general feature of society is not supported by the evidence.
The general thrust of Marxism Today's attack is to suggest that the struggle for socialism is not on the agenda; we have instead to prepare a 'popular front' to defeat Thatcherism.
International, No. 1, November/December: 1985
Newham 7 demonstration, 1985
This is to misunderstand something very fundamental about Thatcherism itself. Its very success is based on an understanding of the depth of the crisis, and hence the radicalism of the solutions which it proposes. It was this feature which won it ruling class support — an understanding that a return to the old, social welfare Keynesian consensus was hopeless to solve the crisis. To hark back, as does Hobsbawm, to the good old days of the '50s and '60s and seek an alternative to Thatcherism in the policies of yesteryear is to propound a fatal illusion.
It misunderstands something else. Given the depth of the crisis, even those allegedly committed to the consensus policies of the past will be incapable of carrying them out once in government. Indeed, the likes of Healey and Callaghan when in government began the first round of monetarist welfare cuts after 1976, despite their professed faith in social democratic welfare politics.
Despite its claim to "new" thinking, Marxism Today proposes in fact very old and clapped-out solutions. And this acts as an obstacle to the adoption of radical socialist solutions to the capitalist crisis which is the only effective answer which the working class has to the shift to the right in the ruling class.? A new minority movement After the 1926 General Strike the TUC lost nearly half its membership. Despite four million unemployed, nothing of the kind has happened in the 1980s. Whole new layers of workers, including women workers and white collar workers, have become unionised for the first time. But to actually win struggles new networks of solidarity and organisation are needed. The miners strike itself, with the emergence of the womens support groups and the grid of local support groups, showed the kind of thing that was needed. But it all had to be improvised on the spot. Something more permanent is needed
Trotsky spoke of the trade union bureaucracy as 'the main support pillar of British imperialism'. That characterisation is still true; the bureaucracy is the main force of reaction in the labour movement, and given the organic links between the Labour Party and the unions, plays the key role in ensuring the domination of the Labour right.
One of the main factors of the success of the Bennite left
was that, unlike the Bevanites in the 1950s, who had their
strength in the constituencies and the parliamentary caucus, it
international, No. 1. November/December 1985
Philip Gordon (Reflex) had strong roots in the unions. But the militancy in the unions needs to be organised. At trade union conference after trade union conference this year we have seen the right wing have a walkover because of lack of left-wing organisation.
To turn this situation around revolutionaries have to set themselves the objective of creating a network based on consistent class struggle, like the old Minority Movement in the 1920s. The emergence of such a movement is clearly at an embryonic stage and presupposes a higher level of class conflict than currently exists. The task here and now is to get on with the creation and building of minority curents in the trade unions based on a class struggle perspective. In some unions this will take the form of building the already existing 'Broad Lefts'; indeed where they exist this will be a normal form of trade union activity by Marxists. In union it will mean the building of variety of left-wing caucuses at local and national level. The task everywhere is to organise the left to challenge the right and the "new realists' Internationalism There can be no Marxist movement without internationalism. Building material and political solidarity, especially with the peoples of Central America and South Africa is a vital task in the construction of a movement which breaks with pro-capitalist politics.
Since the mid-1970s there has been a sharp change in the world political situation. Following the USA's defeat in Vietnam and a series of conflicts in the 'third world' where US interests were defeated (Iran, Ethiopia, Angola and Nicaragua) the United States launched a massive counter-offensive to reestablish its world position. This offensive has been a political, economic and miltary offensive, leading to the new 'cold war" With the US economic domination of the capitalist world declining, it has sought to use its military might to re-establish its domination of the capitalist world and launch an offensive against revolutionary movements world-wide. Since 1979 Thatcher has been the most loyal ally of the United States in this process.
The missiles offensive in Western Europe, the stationing of Cruise and Pershing missiles in Britain, Germany, Sicily, Belgium and Holland, plays a dual role. On the one hand it ties the ruling classes in Western Europe closer to the US global counter-revolutionary crusade, on the other it puts military and 21
Women in the FSLN militia especially economic pressure on the Soviet Union. The 'Star Wars' obscenity plays the same role.
For the first time since the Vietnam war US troops have been in combat against the workers and peasants of oppressed countries - during the invasion of Grenada and in the Lebanon. With the formation of the Rapid Deployment Force' and the new 'Central Command' the United States has announced its intention of intervening massively wherever it feels its interests threatened.
Most immediately threatened by United States imperialism are the peoples of Nicaragua and El Salvador. Both the Sandinista government and the forces of the FDR-FMLN in El Salvador are facing escalating US intervention against their revolutions.
If imperialism, led by the United States, is launching a massive counter-revolutionary offensive then it has been unable to stem the revolt of people in the semi-colonial countries. The whole of Latin America is rumbling with revolt against the austerity imposed by the debt crisis. But most crucially and symbolically, ten years after the crushing of the Soweto uprising, the black people of South Africa are in open revolt, threatening to bring down the whole ediface of the apartheid state.
"There can be no Marxist movement without internationalism." A revolutionary movement which wants to become part of an international struggle to defeat the imperialism world system has also to fight all those forces which maintain and bolster the imperialist world order. That means intransigent revolutionary opposition not only to US imperialism, but to reactionary ruling class forces in the semi-colonial world, even if those forces -like Khomeini in Iran, like the PRI government in Mexico, like the reactionary governments in Syria and Iraq - themselves come into conflict with the United States.
It also means opposition to the strongest counterrevolutionary force in the world working class movement -Stalinism. Stalinism, whether represented by a bureaucracy in power or a mass party in the capitalist countries, crushes and demobilises every mass struggle which threatens its bureaucratic privileges. The events in Poland after 1980, the role of Stalinist parties like the Italian PCI, show only too clearly that the Stalinist bureaucracies are not 'progressive' friends of the working class, they are not in 'our camp' , they are deadly enemies, organisers of repression, defeat and betrayal.
In the British labour movement, alas, Stalinism, thanks to its international links, has a disproportionate influence on interthe unions and the Labour Party have experienced this first hand. To build support in the working class Marxists must 22 always champion the struggles of the working class not only
against the United States, but also against each and every act of repression against the working class of Eastern Europe.
Despite the rightward drift of the CND leadership, the peace movement in Britain and indeed the whole of Europe, represents a tremendous force against the imperialist war plans. That's why Marxists will build CND, especially in the labour movement and among youth. But at every stage they will fight to show the connection between nuclear weapons and the imperialist war drive, fight to connect the fight for unilateral nuclear disarmament with the struggles of the working class and fight for an unequivocal commitment that a future Labour government will scrap all nuclear weapons, throw out American bases and withdraw from NATO.
The struggle to break with imperialism must put at its centre the fight against NATO. Those who say they want a 'nonnuclear' defence policy within NATO are preparing to keep the US bases, and to tie Britain to an imperialist alliance which has as its central strategy the use of nuclear weapons against Eastern Europe.
Finally, there can be no internationalist movement in Britain without a consistent struggle in defence of the freedom struggle of the Irish people. Nothing tells more clearly about the real attitude of any party, movement or current towards British imperialism than its attitude towards the demand for Irish unity and the struggle of the Republican movement. Concretely this takes the form of the demand in the labour movement for British withdrawal from Ireland, for an end to the Unionist veto, and for solidarity with the struggle - including the armed struggle - of the nationalist community in Northern Ireland Mass social movements and the working class In Britain, the struggle of women, black people and of the lesbian and gay community will play a massive role in the struggle against capitalism. The women's movement in particular, but also the lesbian and gay movement, black liberation movements and the developing movement of people with disabilities, have crystallised questions and demands which have not beforehand been an integral part of the Marxist programme. They have challenged, too, the organisation and style of functioning of the working class movement itself.
An anti-capitalist dynamic, whether implicit or explicit, is evident among those minorities (or majorities) fighting for liberation on specific fronts. It means that there is an indissoluble community of interests between their struggles and the battle for socialism. Revolutionaries, therefore, strive to build the mass social movements - to draw out this community of interests in action.
But it is not difficult for such efforts to be thrown offcourse. One common error is the economistic attempt to subsume the struggles of particular liberation movements in the struggle for socialism. This appraoch is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the Militant Tendency who are content to repeat, for example, that women's liberation will come automatically through socialism.
International. No. 1, November/December 1983
This kind of approach bases itself on a theoretical premise that socialism is both the necessary and sufficient condition for the liberation of oppressed groups. Not only is this manifestly false, it amounts to asserting that liberation movements' stuggles are a diversion from the struggle of the working class for socialism. Thus the Militant are happy to dismiss the women's movement as 'petty bourgeois'. Some elements of the same approach also inform the Socialist Workers Party.
On th other hand, there are members of the social movements who argue that the oppression they suffer is the defining criterion of their social being, denying that this social being is also crucially shaped by the fact that they are workers.
Among the Eurocommunist theoreticians Bea Campbell has moved rapidly in this direction while others, like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, now deny any connection at all between the struggle for socialism and the fight for the liberation of oppressed groups.* For Laclau and Mouffe, each movement has its own independent 'discourse'. Any attempt to ally it to the struggle for socialism is 'classism' — a heinous crime!
This later error is no doubt encouraged by the still considerable racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination which are directed by workers against workers. On many occasions these are being at least partially overcome in struggle. Nonetheless there is a long way to go and this makes it essential that members of the mass social movements are free to organise autonomously.
"Revolutionaries strive to build the mass social movements — to draw out this community of interests
Tin action."
For Marxists the overthrow of capitalism remains the precondition for oppressed groups to be able to carry through the liberation process that they have begun. But it is only the precondition. The winning of socialism, clearly, will not at a stroke result in the abolition of various oppressive attitudes and forms of behaviour which have been nourished by the capitalist system over centuries. That is why, just as the role of the oppressed in the overthrow of capitalism is indispensible, so will be their continued contribution, from their own awareness and experience, to shaping and renewing the programme for a socialist society. Role of Youth Under Thatcher's government, as indeed during any capitalist crisis, youth have been particularly badly hit. Mass youth unemployment, the driving down of youth wages through YTS and benefit changes; the attempt to turn young claimants into impoverished itinerants; the repression against black youth; and the assault on the abortion and contraception rights of young women are all facets of the generalised attack on working class youth.
Out of this attack there is a massive potential to build a socialist movement of youth, which can not only fight back against Thatcher but become an important factor in shifting the balance of the labour movement to the left. The organisation best placed to do so is evidently the Labour Party Young Socialists. Alas, the stranglehold on the LPYS exercised by the Militant has prevented that potential from being realised. Not only has the LPYS suffered from the general propaganda routinism which characterises all of the Miltiant's activity, but its leadership has failed to turn the LPYS towards a strong socialist lead in YCND and other mass campaigns of youth, has attempted to cut off the LPYS from the Labour left and generally suffocated the LPYS in a blanket of autocratic sectarianism. International. No. I: November/December 1985
DEVIEW Arthur Scargill. President of the NUM Only in the mobilisation of school students, briefly, has the LPYS gone beyond Militant's sterile routinism. And questions of international solidarity like Central America, sexual oppression and the struggle against it, and clear support for black liberation inside and outside the Labour Party — all questions capable of mobilising tens of thousands of youth - have been either downplayed or ignored altogether.
The question of building a mass socialist youth movement is an urgent one. Marxists must strike to build the LPYS, but against the line of Militant and its rotten right wing sectarianism, to bring new forces into it and attempt to wrench control from its misleaders. The way forward British politics is moving towards a new and decisive turning point. As the toll of mass unemployment rises, so the popularity of Thatcher's government sinks. There seems little likelihood now of a return of a Tory government after the general election. Of course the precise outcome cannot be predicted: but whether it is a Kinnock government or a coalition involving the SDPLiberal Alliance, it is likely to be a government which mounts new and forceful attacks on the working class. In this situation the organisation and political clarity of the hard left of the labour movement will be at a premium. And that in turn depends in large measure on the building of a Marxist nucleus at the heart.
International sets itself the task of contributing to the building of a current which combines fighting for the organisation of the Labour Party and trade union left; fighting for internationalism and opposition to British imperialism; fighting for a campaigning LPYS on a class struggle basis; full support for the self organisation of the oppressed and the building of an alliance for socialism between the mass movements and the labour movement; and the struggle to build a Marxist cadre rooted in the labour movement. We invite our readers to join us in this task. Footnotes 1 See for example the article by Chris Harman '1984 and the shape of things to come' in International Socialism Autumn 1985 2 The CFDT has develped its own particular brand of political syndicalism', linked to currents in the SP. The CCT, of course, dominated by the Communist Party's fraction. 3 On this topic see Ralph Miliband "The new revisionism in Britain' NLR 150. 4 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe 'Hegemony and Socialist 23 Strategy' Verso 1985.
THE LONG WAR is undoubtedly one of the best Marxist accounts of the history and political economy of El Salvador. It is very different in character to Nicaragua: The Sandinista People's Revolution, which anthologises the writings and speeches of the leaders of the revolution, many of them available in English for the first time. The Sandinistas explain, in a powerful language born out of struggle, why the overwhelming majority of Nicaraguans are prepared to fight and die to defend their revolution. They tell us how they achieved victory over the US-backed Somoza tyranny in 1979, and what they have tried to accomplish since then in the face of an American inspired counter-revolutionary war.
US intervention in El Salvador is the subject of detailed study in The Long War. The new edition of this now classic work (first published in 1982) includes a lengthy postscript, which brings the analysis up to date. Dunkerley gives us a perceptive analysis of the social and political forces engaged in this bitter and protracted struggle
He unravels the contradictory and inept nature of Reagan's "dual track' policy (an impossible strategy of repression with reform"), which has so far failed to establish a stable ruling class bloc, despite Washington's enthusiasm for Jose Napoleon Duarte
Despite imperialism's problems the regime has deeper roots in society than the Somoza regime in Nicaragua had. "The liberal opposition is bourgeois in its ideology and programme rather than its social base; there are no Salvadorean counterparts to Robelo and Chamorro.' The system of alliances pursued by the Sandinistas would be difficult to emulate in El Salvador. It does, however, remain the case that the revolutionary movement in El Salvador draws considerable inspiration from the Nicaraguan and Cuban revolutions.
In the book published by Pathfinder, Tomas Borge sets out the points of Sandinista strategy that are, in their essentials, also held by the Salvadorean movement: Only the workers and peasants are capable of struggling to the end against imperialism and its local political representatives. With this notion, Sandino's intuition grasped above all the class character of the revolutionary movement, the class struggle as the motor of history... Sandino also grasped the form the revolutionary movement had to take. In the economic, social and political conditions of Nicaragua, the armed struggle was the only road that could lead to the revolutionary transformation of society.'
To those who think that this is 'all too obvious a notion' today, Borge explains that in the formative years of the Sandinistas a schematic interpretation of the Cuban revolution had been propagated, one that isolated the guerilla warfare from the mass movement. From its inception the FSLN made a critical analysis of the guerilla foco. The foco had aroused great enthusiam among fighters for national liberation in Latin America, but Carlos Fonseca and all the rest of us viewed it with something more than distrust. Our critical analysis of the notion was of great value in fin-
Revolutionary strategy in