Reformism fails again

Socialists have always maintained that parties, such as the Labour Party, which seek power within capitalism to try to improve the lot of the workers end up, not by reforming capitalism, but by being changed by it into simply a party of capitalist administration. A statement made by Callaghan to the Labour Party Conference at the end of September well illustrates this.

The Labour Party always used to support the idea that the way to end a slump and unemployment was to increase government expenditure so as to offset the decline in private capitalist investment, along the lines advocated by Keynes. But now listen to what Callaghan says :

“We used to think that you could just spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you, in all candour, that that option no longer exists and that in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting bigger doses of inflation into thé economy, followed by higher levels of unemployment.” (The Times, 29 September)

What a confession of failure! What a condemnation of the policy which Labour has always advocated and claimed as its own!

The experience of being in power during a slump has forced Callaghan to recognize that, in practice, a Labour government has to pursue the same sort of policy as any openly capitalist government, to try to restore business confidence and profit prospects by reducing workers’ living standards and cutting back on social reforms. In short, to accept the logic of capitalism. And it is doubtful whether even these measures will bring the slump to an end any quicker than would happen anyway due to the normal workings of capitalism which, because of its unplanned and competitive nature, goes through alternating phases of boom and slump.

Once again the miserable failure of yet another Labour government has confirmed the Socialist case that capitalism can never be reformed so as to benefit workers and that therefore workers should direct their efforts rather to abolishing capitalism and replacing it by Socialism where the means of production would be owned in common and democratically controlled to satisfy people’s needs.