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The fall of the ILP
The Failure of a Dream.
The Independent Labour Party from Disaffiliation to World War II.
By Gidon Cohen, Tauris. 2007.
In 1932 the ILP, which had been founded in 1893 and had been
instrumental in setting up the Labour Party, voted at its annual
conference to disaffiliate from Labour and to set out to establish
itself as a leftwing, indeed “revolutionary socialist”, alternative to
it. Cohen (a former Socialist Party member as he acknowledges in his
introduction) recounts in this book what happened afterwards.
The first thing to happen was that the Stalinists tried to take over
the party. With some success. They got the ILP to favour Workers
Councils (soviets) as the agent of change, to regard Russia as a
“Workers State” on the way to “socialism”, and to commit itself to
eventual unity with the Communist Party. In 1935, however, Moscow
ordered its agents in the Western Labour movement to change policy and
to advocate reliance on the League of Nations (previously, the ‘League
of Bandits’) and to agitate for a “Popular Front” of all anti-fascists
including Liberals and dissident Tories instead of a “United Front” of
workers’ organisations.
The ILP stuck to the old policy and the Stalinists left to join the
Communist Party. >From then on the ILP was situated to the left not
just of the Labour Party but of the Communist Party too. This aroused
Trotsky’s interest and he ordered his followers to “enter” the ILP to
try to take it over and get it to support his call for a Fourth
International. They didn’t get very far.
The ILP survived these assaults but its membership fell, according to
Cohen’s calculations, from over 16,000 in 1932 to under 2,500 in
1939.
Trotsky described the ILP as “centrist” (whatever that meant). For us,
it was just another reformist party as it retained the programme of
reforms to capitalism it had had since the start and sought support, at
and between elections, on this basis. We also pointed out that it was
confused about the nature of socialism, seeing it (as Labour did) as
essentially nationalisation and mistakenly seeing state capitalist
Russia as some sort of pro-worker regime.
On one issue, however, we were prepared to give credit where it was
due: on the question of war. When Italy attacked Abyssinia, the ILP’s
Inner Executive (dominated by its 3 MPs, led by Jimmy Maxton) issued a
statement saying that “in our estimation the difference between the two
rival dictators and the interests behind them are not worth the loss of
a single British life”. The Socialist Standard (May 1936)
described
this as a “sound line”. However – as Cohen describes in detail – this
turned out not to be the view of most active ILPers. They wanted to
take sides and support Emperor Haile Selassie as a victim of
imperialist aggression.
Similarly, after the Second World War broke out, the Socialist Standard
(May 1940) wrote: “The ILP propaganda to-day is largely concerned with
the war. It takes a line which, in appearance, seems to be fairly sound
and in conformity with the Socialist position. It is an imperialist
war, it is argued, fought over questions of trade routes, colonies and
for political domination”.
By 1939, as Cohen shows, most of the members of the ILP were resigned
to reaffiliation to the Labour Party, which he says would probably have
occurred had the war not broken out. After the war, the matter came up
again, but Maxton opposed it. Instead, members left and joined Labour
as individuals, including prominent pre-war members such as Fenner
Brockway, Bob Edwards, Walter Padley and Jennie Lee, who all became
Labour MPs. In fact “later a Labour MP” is a phrase that occurs quite a
few times in Cohen’s book.
The ILP staggered on until 1975 when it changed its name to
“Independent Labour Publications” and became a think-tank within the
Labour Party.
ALB
Reformism, old and new
Struggling for a Social
Europe: Neoliberal Globalisation and the Birth of a European Social
Movement.
By Andy Mathers. Ashgate.
Mathers begins his book with the claim that “15 June 1997 may prove to
be a significant date in the development of the labour movement in
Europe”. What, you will be asking, happened that day? Some 50,000
people demonstrated in Amsterdam at the EU Summit that was being held
there, including a few hundred who had marched from various parts of
Europe to demand “the right to work or a guaranteed basic income”.
Nothing very new — or very significant — then. Except for Mathers who
had chosen to study these marches for this PhD thesis, but as a
“researcher-activist”, i.e. someone who sympathised with their aims but
was at the same time studying them like an ethnologist studying a
primitive tribe.
He writes as some sort of Trotskyist, so his conclusions are
predictable: there is still some mileage to be got from making reform
demands on the nation-state (as opposed to the EU), that the trade
union movement ought to have involved itself more, etc. He criticises
as “the new reformism” those theorists who have written off the working
class as an agent for social change and who look instead to some other
groups such as students, employed and unemployed graduates, and
marginalised youth who make up the bulk of those involved in the
so-called “New Social Movements” (NSMs).
This is in fact an interesting discussion since the “official” labour
movement — trade unions and Labour and Social Democratic parties — have
given up any idea of changing society, even gradually through a series
of social reform measures voted by parliaments. They have abandoned
this and now settle for getting the best they can out of the present
social system, capitalism. This is a significant development that does
need analysing.
The “Labour Movement” essentially only embraced a section of the
working class properly so-called - only those who worked in industry
and transport whereas the working class is comprised of all those who
are forced by economic necessity to sell their ability to work in order
to live, so including the so-called “middle class” too.
Mathers does in fact conclude that the non-industrial workers involved
in the NSMs are workers, even if they don’t yet recognise it. But his
criticism of the “new reformism” is not made from a revolutionary
socialist standpoint, but from that of “old reformism”, as can be seen
from his description and endorsement of the programme proposed by
leading SWP theoretician, Alex Callinicos:
“In An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto, Callinicos outlined a set of measures
which he argued combined 'immediate remedies' to the consequences of
neoliberal policies with a 'different social logic' (p. 132). These
demands included those prominent in the European Marches such as the
Tobin Tax, the universal basic income, the reduced working week, the
defence of public services, and the redistribution of wealth and
income. It also included those arising from the broader movement like
the abolition of immigration controls and third world debt, the defence
of civil liberties, and measures to ensure environmental protection
(pp. 132-9).”
Some of these are not even palliatives led alone remedies, but they are
all reforms to capitalism.
As it happens, I was myself present in Amsterdam on that 15 June (with
my trade union) and witnessed one of the incidents mentioned by
Mathers: the reception by the Dutch riot police of a group of masked
demonstrators who had travelled from Italy by train (p. 62). Both
groups were lined up outside the railway station facing each other,
with ordinary passengers walking between then. Apparently, later there
were some clashes as the police forced them back on to a train for
Italy. What the point was I don’t know.
ALB
Marx’s
Capital
Francis
Wheen: Marx’s Das Kapital. Atlantic £7.99.
Wheen wrote a well-received biography of Marx and here he turns his
attention to Marx’s greatest work.
He traces the influences on Capital, the labours Marx went through in
writing it, its main ideas, and its subsequent reception and
reputation. He gives a decent account of how surplus value comes about:
labour power creates more value than it has itself. To the capitalist,
the labour market is just another branch of the commodity market. The
effects of machinery are invariably malign: the worker is deskilled and
forced to work longer hours. Wheen is particularly good in discussing
the idea of ‘increasing misery’, and shows that this has to be
understood in relative terms. Marx did not claim that there would be an
absolute decline in wages, only a relative decline in comparison with
profits. And as another example, workers in Britain now work longer
hours than was the case in the early 1980s, so we are indeed more
degraded as time (and capitalism) goes on.
In the chapter on the ‘Afterlife’ of Capital, Wheen discusses Marx’s
fall-out with Hyndman, who had plagiarised from him with no
acknowledgement. He also demonstrates that Bolshevism bore little
relation to Marx’s ideas. Citing Lenin‘s arguments that workers should
place themselves under the leadership of professional revolutionaries,
he notes that here ‘one can see in embryonic form what eventually
became a monstrous tyranny’.
Marx’s great triumph, says Wheen, lies in revealing the nature of
capitalism, and this makes his work still valid and relevant today: he
concludes that Marx ‘could yet become the most influential thinker of
the twenty-first century’.
PB
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