movement activist knows in their heart that last Thursday's election defeat is going to make things more difficult -more difficult to organise working class resistance and more difficult to build a socialist alternative.
It also means the beginning of rapid political changes in the labour movement. After the 1983 and 1987 poll defeats, the union bureaucracy and Labour leaders moved sharply to the right. With the departure of Kinnock this will happen again, but in a totally different way.
Socialist Outlook has persistently argued that Kinnockism was a brittle construct, an advertising executive's creation, with no ideas other than respectability and image; we also argued that in or out of government it would politically unravel. Now its emptiness is obvious to everybody.
But the 'wide ranging enquiry being talked about in the Labour leadership will not reaffirm socialism. The rightwing agenda is now being set by those who argue that Labour on its own cannot win.
This case was set out most clearly in a kevnote article by Will Hutton in last Saturday's Guardian. Simply summed up its says that social changes make the working class too small a base for an assault on the Tories; class war is out. What is needed is a new left-of-centre realignment, which means a pact with the Liberals.
In this scenario Labour must rapidly adopt a position in favour of proportional representation. It must embrace "communitarian capitalism'. Most of all it must get rid of any policies which frighten the middle classes. Anti-Tory Britain, as ex-SDP ideologue David Marquand puts it, must hang together or hang separately.
The attractive power of such a course should not be underestimated. What it has This kind of thinking cae make huge inroads for it is that appears utterly realistic not only into the ideas of the union bureaucracy, fed up with being shunned by government, but also into important sections of the political left.
When the election results began to be declared last Friday morning the first impression the Tories the largest party. Immediately Roy Hattersley and other Labour leaders began to talk of a government of national unity and consensus - a de facto coalition with the Liberals.
The left is not going to be alone in deriding Kinnockism and old-style new realism. And a coalitionist project will have attractive power because it correctlyidentifies a major weakness of old-style new realism - its lack of a 'hegemonic vision for imposing a new order on The new coalitionists are also right in arguing there have been important social changes under Thatcher, with the creation of a larger middle class and a better-off working class, deeply endebted through high mortgages and other credit commitments. The PARTNERSHIP ous. The model of the 1960s and '70s Labour governments lacks all credibility; the failure of those governments led directly to Thatcherism. Only a vision much more radical is capable big social forces.
The new coalitionism is distinguished from Kinnockism in that it will favour radical constitutional reform proportional repre entation and Scottish devolution at least. So cialists should support constitutional reform; but on its own, in the way often presented by Charter 88, it easily fits into a project for capitalist modernisation.
What underlies the new coalitionism is a fatalistic attitude to the relationship of social forces in Britain. It takes for granted a demobilised working class and a cowed labour movement. Once these things are taken for granted, a socialist alternative is indeed off the agenda. There is no socialist way out of this crisis without a remobilisation of workers struggles, inevitably at first defensive. With the collapse of Kinnockism millions of people under attack from the Tories and the bosses will first a stark choice; either fight or go under The argument of the union leaders -wait for a Labour government- has gone down the pan. Every lightback in the new situation, no matter how small, will pay immense dividends in rebuilding confidence and combativity in the working class.
Socialists face a long and hard battle in the next period. What is crucial is that the socialist left does not bend to 'left' or 'right' versions of coalitionism. Both are a dagger pointed at the heart of radical socialism and working class independence.
The blame for the election defeat must be put where it belongs, with Kinnockism and new realism. But there is no future for socialism in replacing Kinnockism witheven a radical' pro-capitalist project.
When working class loyalties shifted from the Liberals to the new Labour Party at the beginning of this century, it represented an important advance in creating an independent labour movement. That will be put in danger by the adoption of 'anti-Tory consensus' coalitionist politics.
No. 20 April 17, 1992