By Will McMahon ROBIN BLACKBURN'S editorial The ruins of Westminster', in the latest New Left Review (NLR), centres on three issues: constitutional reform and Charter 88, the left agenda and Europe, and a demand for PR.
Amongst these Blackburn views PR as 'the strategic imperative' - giving space for a new left party - and so calls for a liberal-Labour coalition in preference to a Labour majority government. If this sounds familiar, it is because it was the litany of the thankfully deceased Marxism Today.
That it should appear on the eve of the election in NR is evidence of the intellectual collapse of a section of the left intelsentia which pre viously had some association Blackbum's support for Charter '88 is a reflection of the lack of class interest in his position. Not only is Charter 300 Club '88 itself undemocratic, but it makes no mention of the democratic right of working people to have a voice in the running of the economy And his mistaken, and almost unconscious, conflation of Europe with the west European Community is only overshadowed by tus statesy for eastern Europe - its egration into the west Finally, there is the call for coalition government to force the issue of PR, and in turn Face for a new left project above the crucial need or รก majority Labour govern nent, creating space for clas struggle. It is cent of the ultra left politics of the RCP, but with an additional facade of 'pragmatism' and 'reason'.
So why has the layer of intellectuals represented by Blackburn gone for political necrophilia with the corpse of The answer lies partly in the obsession of the British left intelligentsia with western Europe and the supposed backwardness of the British olitical system. But the recent tively debunks the mythology of British backwardness. Rather than being peculiarly backward, it argues, it is a particularly capitalist social formation.
But for Blackburn and friends, the working class has let down the generation of '68. The defeat of the 1984-85 Miners' Strike was the signal for the intellectuals' retreat from class and the slide towards the more comfortable politics of constitutional reform.
Is this an aberration? I hope so. It is with sadness rather than nger that we see the editor of and Class Struggle tread the g ollections such as Revolutio path to the morass of eurocommunism.
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