TONY BLAIR winning the Labour leadership ballot was a foregone conclusion. His victory gives a snapshot of the situation in the labour movement, reflecting the continuing weakness of working class organisation at every level, and the continued dominance of the defeatist politics of 'new realism', despite new challenges with which it is faced.
But what does Blair's victory mean for the future of the Labour Party? Will Blair set it irretrievably on the track to breaking the party's links with the trade unions, to becoming an openly capitalist party like the US Democrats? Is Labour now definitively on the path of coalitionism with the Liberals?
To answer these questions we need to look at the overall trends in British politics and the historical roots of Labour's crisis.
Tony Blair does not represent a confident Labour right-wing which knows exactly what it wants to do. contrary, his apparently radical statements - for example his strong implication that the welfare state breeds a 'dependency culture' - are more soundbites than a worked-out programme.
The current Labour leadership represents the absence of a clearly-defined programme, and is thus buffeted by the nostrums of the post-Thatcherite rightwing political consensus.
Labour has lost its political bearings because their objective underpinnings have been kicked away by capitalist economic crisis. Post-war Labourism was above all defined by its adherence to the twin pillars of Keynesian orthodoxy - the mixed economy and the welfare state.
Welfare state
With privatisation the mixed economy is torpedoed; and all over Europe the welfare state is being under sharp attack and decaying. This is the basis of all "realist" political positions on both the left and right of the political spectrum. It is the reason for the crisis of social democracy continent-wide and the vast attrition of its working class support.
Tony Blair of course represents the most complete adaption to this reality: it is the meaning of "modernisation" of the Labour Party.
The trend of development is thus very clear. Historically, Labour, like all European social democratic parties, will collapse into becoming a bourgeois liberal party if working class defeats continue unabated.
In the long run, only a new economic boom, or an upsurge of working class struggles, will stop that development.
But history lasts a long time. There are huge and probably insuperable obstacles to Labour collapsing into being a US Democrat-style party, in both the short and medium term.
There are two reasons for this. Labour's links with the unions, although attenuated by the modification of the block vote, are largely intact. In 1993 John Smith failed in his project a radical Blair: not such a landslide rupture of the Labour-union link. « The second reason is that "new realism" in the unions is in crisis and unravelling. The leaderships of the two biggest general unions - the TGWU and the GMB - have more or less broken with the extreme collaboration of US-style 'business unionism'.
Faced with the rapid decline of their membership, the social role of the trade union bureaucracy is threatened. They want policies which will restore that role. Thus they have sharply reasserted the questions of full employment and defence of the welfare state.
They have in effect defended the terrain of the post-war settlement, the traditional Labourism of full employment, the mixed economy and the welfare state. It matters little that the objective basis for that settlement has disappeared. The attachment to these ideas in both the organised labour movement - and let it be said vast sections of the population -is undiminished.
It is on this terrain - defence of full employment and the welfare state - that the defence of class independence, Labour's role as a party organisationally independent of the ruling class, must unfold.
Constraints
These constraints put big limits on What the Labour right can do. In the 1950s and '6Os, the Labour right under Gaitskell, although out of power for much of that time, was utterly confident. It imagined that continuous economic growth would create the basis for an endless increase in living standards, free education at every level, the welfare state and "equality in affluence" through progressive taxation.
That dream is shot to pieces ,and the Labour right has nothing to put in its place. Blair is a total lightweight compared with Gaitskell.
But in both the Labour and Tory parties there is a political vacuum, an abIs "Clintonism" Labour's future? sence of serious programmes for restoring the fortunes of British capitalism.
For the Tories, Thatcherism simply has not worked; bigger and bigger attacks on the working class and the poor have not resulted in any turn-round in the economy. For Labour, the mixed economy and the welfare state are not realistic options, given the structural crisis of British capitalism.
There is a further complication which will have a big impact on the Tory Party: the Americans have pulled the rug away from the "special relationship" with Britain. Clinton was completely up-front about that during his visit to Germany.
This will give a further twist to the Tory crisis over Europe. "Atlanticism" is no longer a realistic alternative to Europeanism. On the other hand, partly because of Britain, the pace of European capitalist integration has slowed dramatically.
Labour, for want of any other ideas to boost the economy, hangs on to the "Europeanist" option for grim death, despite the fact that Europeanism is not going to save British capitalism.
British politics is going through an unstable transition period, waiting for the emergence of a serious programme on the scale of Thatcherism or Bennism in the 1970s and '80s. Neither Major not Blair will provide it.
None of this means that Labour can't win an election under Blair. There are strong voices in the ruling class calling for the Tories to take a spell in opposition, to regroup and re-define their programme.
But a Blair government would be confused and probably short-lived, unable to begin to solve any fundamental problems. And the Tories in opposition would be a nasty spectacle; all the constraints in the extremism of the Tories' right wing would be removed once they were in opposition.
Blair could win an election because he leads the main party which is not the Conservative party: and that is one reason why talk of a coalition with the Liberals before the next election is overdrawn.
Rightward lurch
The danger for the working class movement in the overall development of British politics is clear: it is the danger that post- hatcherite British poltics will take a further, and very dangerous, lurch to the right. And only a deepening of working class struggle and a strengthening of the left can stop it.
There are elements of this already in the actions of the current government -the limitations on the right to strike, and the Criminal Justice Act, putting in place elements of the strong state, are examples. The re-emergence of the far-right, however limited, is another sign of this.
The politics of Tony Blair are no impediment to this trend. It is a further demoralisation and demobilisation of the organised labour movement, allowing a further shift to the right in British politics, which is the immediate danger from Blair's leadership of the Labour Party -not the improbable notion that Blair can transform Labour into a British version of the US Democrats.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 67, August 1994, Page 4