NEIL MURRAY takes a long hard look at the politics of the party before Blair's arrival. IT HAS BECOME common to hear people on the Left say that if the battle over Clause IV is lost, the Labour Party "will be lost to They claim Clause IV is the 'socialist heart' of the Party, representing its 'socialist roots'. The real nature of the Labour Party is somewhat different however.
The commitment in Clause IV to "securing the full fruits of their labour for the workers" stands in sharp contrast to what Labour does in government. Even the main reforms of what is generally considered the most left Labour government, that of 1945, did not get close to challenging the fundamentals of capitalism.
The introduction of the welfare state, welcome as it was, was common currency among all the parties of the day. After a second devastating war people were not prepared to put up any more with the poverty and disease of the pre-war years.
The nationalisations carried out by that government were of bankrupt industries essential to the infrastructure of capitalism. The boards set up to manage them consisted of exowners and others committed to ensuring they functioned for the benefit of capitalism as a whole. There was not a whiff of "popular administration and control".
Other Labour governments have done far less. What reforms they have implemented have been within limits acceptable to capitalism. They have been prepared to use troops against strikers, introduce pay restrictions and anti-union laws.
In their foreign policy Labour governments have even more explicitly carried out the requirements of imperialism, although sometimes keeping it secret for fear of opposition in the Party's ranks.
Capitalist policies In short, every Labour government has been a capitalist government.
Even in opposition Labour has kept its fight against Tory governments within clearly defined boundaries. While fulminating against the worst excesses of their policy, it has been careful to keep the fight against them within legal, and if possible, parliamentary channels.
From the fight of Poplar councillors in the 1920s to the battle over rate-capping in the 1980s, the Labour leadership has kept a safe distance between the Party and popular resistance.
These contradictions, between the desires of the base of the Party and what the Party actually does in practice, are not simply a product of people deluding themselves, but a contradiction built in to the very nature of the Labour Party.
Hallmarks
Formed by the unions to represent the interests of Labour in parliament, the Labour Representation Committee bore all the hallmarks of trade union politics from the start. Under capitalism, the unions exist to improve workers' conditions within the system. They don not challenge the system itself.
The Labour Party expresses this on a national scale through Parliament. While accepting and administering capitalism it attempts to obtain reforms within the system.
It represents the organisational independence of the working class from the bosses' parties. But this is a long way from the political independence represented by a socialist • programme capable of leading the working class to the seizure of power and the establishment of a socialist society.
Before the battle was won in the unions to establish an independent party of Labour many trade union leaders were happy to sit as Liberal MPs.
Although the break to form the Labour Representation Committee represented a recognition of the need for organisational independence and for some policy differences (particularly around the anti-union laws of the day) it did not signify a programmatic break with the rationale of CLAUSE FOUR capitalism.
The establishment of the Labour Party as an independent party of the working class represented (and still represents) a significant gain over such countries as the USA, where the working class has to choose between two explicitly capitalist parties.
But the Labour Party never was.a socialist party in any meaningful sense of the word.
The adoption of Clause IV by the Party in 1918 was a recognition that there was great sympathy in Britain for the Bolshevik revolution and that many workers sought such fundamental change here. But the leadership either never had any intention of introducing this change.
It is these contradictions in the nature of the Labour Party which lead revolutionary socialists to describe it as a bourgeois (i.e. capitalist) workers' party. While based on the organised working class the programme it attempts to carry out is one rooted in trade union politics -bourgeois through and through.