E DO NOT call for a V V Labour vote because of any agreement with Labour's inevitably wretched manifesto. We do not expect to transform a Blair-led Labour government into a socialist or a workers' government.
But we do call for a Labour vote as a class vote against the Tories, and we do work in the mass organisations of the working class for socialist policies to be fought for under a future Labour governDespite Labour's total political bankruptcy, we campaign for the return of a Labour goverment as the best hope of opening up a favourable situation for working class action: If the Tory government, the iron fist of the employers' offensive, could be defeated and removed, and a goverment at least pretending to respond to workers' demands were to be elected, the doors would be opened to a new tide of militant action and demands, and a new strengthening of workplace organisation as activists recovered confidence and fighting capacity. copy of the great surge of mass action which followed the re-election of Harold Wilson when Labour last took office, twenty years ago in 1974. The heavy defeats inflicted on the shop floor organisation of the working class and the virtual disappearance of key industrial sectors which had fought the Heath govemment and remained in the vanguard under Labour- dockers, printworkers, miners and others -mean that there is little in the way of a shop stewards' movement to lead a new fight. However the election of the Wilson government also encouraged action from sections that had little record of mass struggle: nurses came to the fore, and rail workers discovered a more militant side; the Engineers' union AUEW decided to defy the Tory anti-union law and force Labourto act swiftly to avoid a national strike. Other campaigns were pushed up the agenda, but without success: victimised Shrewsbury building union pickets remained in jail, surcharged Clay Cross councillors found no reprieve, but the fight was rekindled. pendence of the unions and the When large numbers of workers begin to take action on their own demands, this creates the best conditions for learning political lessons and discussing the way forward and the kind of leadership needed in the labour movement. The 'armchair socialism' that takes root in periods of relatively low morale can be challenged by a determined agitation around demands and issues which raise the level of the fight. In 1974 this was restricted by the ultra-left, propagandist slogan politics of much of the far left; in the 1990s a much greater danger is the weakened forces of the left and the continued dominance of new realism and defeatism in the labour movement.
While the 1974 far left focused excessively on maximum demands of immediate nationalisation and 'socialist policies', the problem now is that after 15 years of Tory onslaught, much of today's Labour and trade union left would settle for almost anything COR from a Labour government that was not outright Thatcherism.
The task now, as then, is to link the day-to-day problems and struggles of the working class with the fight for socialist solutions. It was to address precisely this strategic problem that the early Comintern, and later the new Fourth International, turned to the adoption of transitional demands which contain this potential dynamic of leading from one phase of the struggle into a new, higher phase.