Communist Party of Britain

The British Road to Socialism (1989)


Britain's Crisis


Britain's problems today reflect the general problems of world imperialism, and at the same time exhibit certain specific features arising from its parasitic colonial past. Britain, the first industrial capitalist power, was once the 'workshop of the world', dominating world trade and commerce, and controlling the largest colonial empire in history. Up to the first World War, London was the financial capital of the world and the pound was monarch of the international monetary system.

All that has changed. By the turn of the century new capitalist nations, including France and Germany but especially the US were increasingly challenging Britain for supremacy. Since 1945 the peoples of the colonies have fought for and in the main achieved political independence leading to the collapse of the British Empire. The need for a complete break with past imperialist policies was urgent, but instead, successive Tory or Labour governments continued with them.

Central to this was the effort to maintain the international role of the pound and of Britain as a major financial centre. British monopolies continued to invest huge resources abroad at the expense of investment at home. Colonial wars and repression continued after the Second World War, while neo-colonial policies thwarted the efforts of former colonies to achieve real independence, and racist and oppressive regimes were backed in Southern Africa and in other parts of the world. Britain played the role of junior partner in US imperialism's efforts to hold back national liberation and direct the cold war against socialism, which meant a gigantic waste of resources on arms and bases abroad.

In the initial post-war period these policies , though their cost was enormous, did not prevent advances in living standards from being made. The immediate postwar situation favoured sustained expansion in the world economy and this meant that Britain also enjoyed a period of growth. Although Britain's economy compared unfavourably with those of other capitalist countries, showing one of the worst records for investment, productivity, and trading performance, it nevertheless compared favourably with its performance in the pre-war period. This meant that significant concessions could be yielded to working people in terms of jobs, wages and other material and social benefits. The creation and expansion of the Welfare State in this period is important evidence of this.

This is not to say that the capitalist class in Britain voluntarily or benevolently granted concessions to working people. On the contrary, these concessions were the fruits of a hard struggle, with its roots in the pre-war period itself. Nevertheless the fact remains that in the early post-war years of relative expansion, the capitalists were favourably placed to yield concessions. The situation altered towards the end of the 1960's and early 1970's when the chronic weaknesses of the British economy, temporarily cushioned by the conditions of post-war world expansion, became sharply exposed with the change in the economic climate. The crisis in the world capitalist economy reacted with extra special force on the ailing British economy because of its long-standing and acute underlying weakness. This meant that the task of placing the burden of the crisis upon the shoulders of the working people, and clawing back previous concessions, was for the British ruling class that much more urgent and had to be executed that much more quickly.

The Heath government was the first to attempt a complete break with Keynesian style class-collaboration policies which had in the main characterised all post-war Labour and Tory governments alike. From the moment of its election in June 1970 the Heath government opted for open confrontation with the trade unions and labour movement in a swift attempt to reverse many of the post-war gains won by the working population. But judged even from its own class standpoint, the Heath government was an abject failure. It suffered defeat after defeat at the hands of the working class which in the early 1970's was too united, too strong and too confident in its own strength to be defeated in direct confrontation.

When Labour was elected to office in February 1974, many thought that the magnificent struggles of the miners, the dockers, the power workers and the whole working class might be rewarded, because Labour's election manifesto promised to 'bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families'. But this did not happen. It was thwarted by commitment to the class-collaborationist Social Contract. As a result, there was a further substantial shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of the capitalist class.

Essentially the class objectives of Labour's right wing leadership were the same as those of Heath and the Tories. The difference was that, where Heath had failed to achieve these objectives by means of open confrontation with the labour movement, Wilson and Callaghan had succeeded by enlisting the collaboration of the majority of trade union leaders. In September 1974 the TUC endorsed the Social Contract, which was presented as a means for involving the unions in a partnership with the government in the making of national economic and social policy. But its real specific purpose was to get the TUC itself to enforce and police a wage restraint policy. something that was unprecedented in the history of UK government-labour relations.

The results of the Social Contract were catastrophic for the working class. The period between 1974 and 1977 saw a larger recorded drop in real wages than during any comparable period in UK history. This was accompanied by a wide-sweeping attack on the social wage as the government. operating behind the façade of an IMF diktat, slashed government spending on industry, infrastructure and social services. The period of the Social Contract was for the working class a period of betrayal and broken promises. But as their position steadily worsened, and their initial confidence and expectation turned into disgust and disillusionment with the Labour government, the ground was inexorably prepared for the return of another Tory government under Mrs Thatcher in 1979.

Tory Strategy Today

The strategic objectives of the Tories in the current period are basically twofold: to develop and sustain a comprehensive assault on the incomes and living standards of working people so as to restore and consolidate the profit base of the

monopoly corporations and the financial sector; and at the same time to adopt every means possible to suppress democratic rights with the intention of breaking working class resistance to these belligerent wealth redistribution policies on behalf of monopoly capital. Towards these objectives, Tory legislation has facilitated the deeper and more direct penetration of monopoly capital in many areas of social life and activity, such as sport, leisure, culture, education and housing.

The Tory government has sought to hide its real class aims behind an elaborate propaganda campaign extolling the virtues of private enterprise and the market economy, and the so-called freedom of initiative and individual choice which they permit. But the harsh reality of the situation in Britain today is increasingly exposing the hollowness of these claims. Take for example the monetarist economic policies of the Tories which, they say, are designed to squeeze out inflation, restore business confidence and competitiveness, and thereby eventually secure long-term improvements in industry and jobs.

Far from this happening, their cuts in public spending and investment, their selloff of vital public assets and nationalised industries at knock-down prices to private monopolies both here and abroad, their encouragement of a continuing exodus of capital, and their volatile interest rate and exchange rate policies have all combined to accelerate the decline of Britain's economy leading to massive redundancies and worsened job conditions, continuing inflation and balance of payments crises and cuts in living standards.

Of course there is nothing accidental about all this since the same policies that have attacked living standards have also resulted in a massive accumulation and concentration of wealth in the hands of the monopoly capital sector. This same disparity is evident in regard to Britain's continuing membership of the Common Market where the extra profits enjoyed by British transnational corporations and the City of London institutions, through operating in a wider European market, stand in sharp contrast to the decline in workers' jobs and real incomes as many smaller British firms collapse in the face of increased foreign competition, or as British and foreign transnationals increasingly relocate their production units in other, more central, parts of the Market.

In actual fact, Britain's manufacturing base has been eroded to the extent that in the current period, for the first time in its two hundred year history as an industrial nation, Britain imports more manufactured goods than it exports. And so little is spent on industrial research and development that Britain has now become very much a second-rate low-tech and low-skill economy. The mass unemployment resulting from these policies has caused enormous hardship for millions of working people, disrupting whole communities particularly in Scotland, Wales and in the north of England.

Urban communities have been impoverished by cut-backs and mass unemployment and have been thrown to the mercy of capitalist market forces. New development is often carried out in the interests of the big property, leisure and retailing companies not primarily to serve the needs of the majority of local people. The same is true in rural areas where local communities often face problems of seasonal, low-paid employment, second-home ownership, exploitative tourist development, and the growth of agribusiness.

Far from having any real concern about solving the problem of unemployment, the Tories have employed it as a weapon to clamp down on working class morale and confidence, knowing that fear of the dole-queue makes many workers refrain from struggle and strike action. At the same time, unemployment has been used in a more direct way to weaken working class resistance, as policies are implemented which compel the unemployed to compete for jobs with those at work in order to force down wages, effect speed-ups and further undermine trade union power.

The attack on workers' wages and job conditions has been accompanied by a wide sweeping assault on social service provision to the extent that the Welfare State, steadily weakened through years of government underfunding, is now facing the prospect of outright abolition. The reductions in pensions, unemployment and child benefit, and in other benefits; the run down and dismemberment of the National Health Service; the cut-backs in house construction; the cut-backs in education and the so-called reforms which together pose a threat to the whole principle of a free, all-round state education for all; and the deteriorating conditions in all forms of public transport are all contributing to a severe reduction in living standards and in the general quality of life for the majority of the population of Britain.

The worst affected are inevitably those sections who are especially disadvantaged, including women, young people, pensioners, ethnic minorities, the unemployed and one-parent families. Not only do women perform the bulk of work in the home, but they also comprise a growing proportion of the paid workforce, tending to occupy part-time, low-skilled and low-paid jobs. So, as well as wide social discrimination, women face additional exploitation and discrimination at work. This social and economic position makes them particularly vulnerable to cuts in social benefits and social service provision. At the same time these cuts inevitably worsen the position of the majority of black people, particularly black women, and black youth, who are oppressed not only as members of the working class, but who face various forms of racist prejudice and discrimination because of their colour.

The savagery with which the Tories have attacked the incomes, jobs and living conditions of working people in Britain is a sign of their intention to secure a massive redistribution of wealth towards the capitalist class, and at the same time to make the process permanent and irreversible. In particular, they want to force the working class to lower its aspirations and to accept lower standards as a way of life. But to achieve this objective, it is necessary to undermine the confidence and the ability of the working class to fight back. This explains why the attack on the trade unions, the main organisations of working class solidarity and struggle, has been, and continues to remain, the central plank in the Tory anti-working class programme.

While the Tories have used unemployment to heighten the climate of insecurity, and weaken working class morale, they have at the same time passed anti-union legislation to ensure more direct, physical constraints on trade union resistance. The successive Employment and Trade Union Acts of the 1980's have removed piece by piece many of those immunities from the law, which enabled trade unions to adopt a wide range of activities to defend the interests of their members. In particular, many forms of strikes and other types of union action, such as secondary picketing, have been made illegal. The imposition of mandatory ballots on every conceivable occasion and the other forms of gross interference in the internal affairs of trade unions have further helped to debilitate trade union fightback potential. At the same time that these and other measures have weakened the bargaining position of the trade unions, the power of the employers has been strengthened as they now find it easier to dismiss workers and to sack strikers, to have shop stewards disciplined, and trade unions financially crippled in a court of law.

The attack on trade union organisation represents a serious threat to democracy in Britain today. But under the Tories the attack on democracy is comprehensive and uses every instrument of state power, including the police, the judiciary, the secret services, the civil service, as well as the media and other forms of influencing public opinion. With the passage of legislation such as the Prevention of Terrorism Act, the Official Secrets Act, and the Public Order Act, the intention is to give the police and the courts a wider range of powers to harass, intimidate and convict people, and to make it generally more difficult for people to voice their opposition in any effective way. There must be opposition to attempts to bring back the death penalty.

The Tory attacks on living standards and democratic rights have combined with a reactionary ideological offensive to create a climate of fear, insecurity and intolerance, in which personal greed and ambition is encouraged, and any sense of collective responsibility or concern for people's mutual well-being is undermined. Individual private charity cannot be a substitute for organised, collective provision.

In Tory Britain the conditions have been created in which anti-social and self-destructive behaviour has increased. The widespread portrayal of women as sex objects, for example through mass-produced pornography has led to less freedom and greater insecurity for women as well as perpetuating divisive and oppressive sexist attitudes within the working class.

While the attacks on democracy and the reinforcement of an atmosphere of intolerance and repression have affected the majority of people in Britain, they have had a more severe impact upon those sections who face extra forms of oppression. This, for example, is the case with gays and lesbians, who have met with increased prejudice and discrimination in the recent period. The position of black people in particular has worsened. Apart from confronting growing racist prejudice and violence, much of which has been aggravated by Tory economic and social policies, their legal rights have been further cut by racist immigration laws and by the discriminatory and increasingly coercive actions of the police and the law courts.

In the communities, genuine local democracy is being extinguished as it becomes increasingly subordinated to central government diktat. The policies that began with rate-capping and spending limitations, followed by the abolition of the Greater London Council and the metropolitan councils, and are leading to the replacement of the rating system by the P011 Tax, thus increasing financial burdens on the community in favour of the wealthy - these policies are all designed to strip local authorities of any significant power, and to prevent local residents from having any real say in the running of their communities. Locally raised finance should be based on local income tax.

For the peoples of Scotland and Wales the erosion of basic democratic rights is further exacerbated by the centralisation of power in London thereby effectively denying them any real means to influence or determine policies affecting their national economic, social and cultural interests. This threat to the national rights of the Scottish and Welsh people overlaps with the wider threat to the sovereign rights of all British people as the legislative powers of the nationally-elected Parliament are increasingly curtailed with the passing of responsibility for many areas of decision-making to the Common Market Commission in Brussels.

Within the comprehensive suppression of civil liberties and democratic rights in Britain today there can be little doubt that those who have suffered the most are the people of Northern Ireland. Colonised by Britain over 800 years ago, Ireland was partitioned in 1922, with a puppet state set up in the north as a means of perpetuating British imperialist domination in the face of the growing struggle for liberation. But the continuing development of that struggle, and the growth of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland, led eventually to the collapse of the Stormont regime and its replacement by direct British rule operated by Tory and Labour governments alike.

In 1969 British troops were transferred to Northern Ireland ostensibly to keep the peace, but instead the army has consistently been used to suppress the nationalist forces seeking a united independent Ireland. It has been responsible for torture, killings, mass arrests and the maintenance of a martial law presence in working class areas. Diplock courts, hunger strikes, shoot-to-kill and counter-violence have become the norms in Northern Ireland. What is also ominous is the 'guinea pig' role of Northern Ireland, as methods of repression first applied and tested there by the British state are then subsequently transferred to Britain as instanced by the militarisation of the police, their equipping with plastic bullets, CS gas, special armed vehicles and the growing attacks on the jury system.

The Anglo-Irish Agreement is the latest manoeuvre by the British state to give the impression that it genuinely wants to seek a solution to the problems in Ireland. But there can be no solution unless the British government renounces its right to occupy Northern Ireland and declares an intention to withdraw. Far from contemplating this, British imperialism is seeking instead to use the Anglo-Irish Agreement to extend its domination over the whole of Ireland, to end Ireland's traditional neutrality and involve it in the reactionary NATO military alliance. The British labour movement must be won to support the withdrawal of British troops from Ireland at the earliest possible opportunity.

The policy adopted by the Tory government towards Ireland symbolises, as it were, the identity and continuity between its reactionary domestic policies and its reactionary foreign policy. Successive Labour leaders have colluded with the Tories to ensure continued imperialist domination of Ireland. Together with the US government, the British state stands at the forefront of aggressive efforts to hold back world progress and maintain the grip of imperialism. The Tory government provides every form of assistance to reactionary regimes around the world and, despite muted criticism from time to time, continues to give full support to the apartheid regime in South Africa, using its power of veto to prevent economic and other forms of sanctions against that regime. At the same time the Tory government also continues to use every opportunity to perpetuate an atmosphere of suspicion towards the Soviet Union as the necessary backcloth to maintaining the nuclear arms build-up, to which the Tories are committed. Yet the colossal arms spending involved robs the social services of the resources which they need. Conversion to peaceful production would in fact create more stable jobs and be of real benefit to society. -

Although the Tory government is forced by changing world conditions to rely on economic, political and diplomatic measures to promote its imperialist and neo-colonial interests, it can still resort, when required, to gunboat tactics reminiscent of its Empire days, as the Falklands war showed. But the loss of its colonies, and the fact that Britain is no longer a leading world military power with bases across the globe, means that the ruling class has to rely increasingly on US military strength in order to protect the parasitical, nee-colonial interests of British transnational corporations and their subsidiaries abroad.

It is this factor, more than any other, which accounts for the Tory government's slavish support for US imperialist aggression in Central and Latin America and for US policy in the Middle East and other parts of the world, and why it has given endorsement to the US arms expansion programme since the early 1980's, including the infamous 'Star Wars' project. This is also the reason why the British government helps to reinforce US domination inside the NATO military alliance, and at the same time allows Britain to play host to over 130 US military bases, making it the main centre for 'forward-based' American strategic weapons and therefore a main target for retaliation in the event of nuclear conflict.

But Britain's relationship with the US is complex. For although one side of British imperialist interests dictate the necessity for alliance with US imperialism, another side of those interests dictates the need for closer unity with the West European imperialist powers grouped inside the Common Market. British monopoly capital was originally opposed to the formation of the EEC in the 1950's because at that time it ran contrary to Britain's global interests. However, British imperialism now plays a key role in the Market, seeing it as a necessary framework for protecting its interests, in common with those of other Western European imperialist interests, against the intensifying competitive threats posed by Japanese and US transnational corporations. At the same time, the British ruling class also sees the Common Market as a vital supra-national monopoly capitalist institution that both helps to undermine organised working class struggle, and at the same time facilitates the collective neo-colonialist exploitation and oppression of the former colonies in Africa and other parts of the world. In its historical development it has also been closely linked with NATO.

There are of course some acute contradictions and antagonisms within the Common Market, particularly between Britain and other members as the Tory government under Mrs Thatcher attempts to block certain aspects of Western European centralisation within the context of general support for progress towards a Single Market Union by 1992. This opposition to complete centralisation, however, far from reflecting any desire to protect national sovereignty and democracy on behalf of all British people, on the contrary reflects the Tory efforts to balance and reconcile its Western European involvement with its so-called 'special relationship' with the US.

Reformism

The struggles we have seen by the miners, printworkers, teachers, nurses, seafarers and others show that among many and diverse sections of the working class there is a readiness to fight ruling class policies. The key problem today is that this same readiness in the ranks of the labour movement and the working class as a whole, is not shared by the right-wing leadership of the movement. Far from seeking to help confront and defeat Tory policies, their main concern is to keep a position of general accommodation with these policies, and to limit or deflect resistance to them. As a result the anger and frustration amongst working people that could be channelled into sustained and effective struggle, is wasted as the right- wing reformist leadership seeks to dampen the struggle, and attempts to keep any opposition to Tory policies confined within Parliament.

The clearest expression of the right -wing leadership's abandonment of any class commitment to the working people of Britain, is the watering-down or outright abandonment of policies that could promote their collective interests. On a whole range of domestic economic, political and social issues, and on the issue of peace and disarmament and matters of foreign policy, the Labour leadership supports policies which, although they may afford some minor concessions to some sections of the working class, in general protect the economic and political power base of the capitalist sector as a whole.

There is of course nothing new in this. The right wing have always dominated the Labour Party leadership, and they have always promoted reformist policies aimed at preventing the struggle of the working class from developing to the point where the capitalist state could be challenged, and the capitalist system of exploitation as a whole could come under threat. It is this diversionary role of reformism which explains why the ruling class itself not only has always supported and encouraged the right wing inside the Labour Party, but has also tolerated the election of reformist Labour governments.

However, the nature and techniques of reformism can change in different phases of capitalist development, mirroring in fact changes in ruling class strategy itself. Thus, for example, in contrast to the post-war reformism of the Labour Party, which was of a more benign kind offering hopes of increasing benefits for the working class within the context of a 'managed' capitalism, reformism today is of a more restrictive type. It seeks to condition workers to acceptance of the 'new reality' of capitalist 'reorganisation', and therefore to reduced incomes and living standards.

To win acceptance for these reformist policies, we find them offered as 'new' initiatives under the banner of the 'new realism' and presented in a 'left' or 'socialist language', and even in 'Marxist' language. In this connection the role played by the Eurocommunists who dominate the leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and who control the journal Marxism Today is of some importance. For this group, having abandoned the most basic class and internationalist principles of Marxism-Leninism, and having virtually severed all links with the industrial working class, now acts as a vehicle for the promotion of reformism and class collaboration inside the labour and progressive movement as a whole, and inside the left of the movement in particular. From this position it has spearheaded the drive for 'left-realignment', which far from uniting the left, has disrupted and disunited it, taking it away from any clear broad-based commitment to the goal of socialism.

Symptomatic of its complete and unashamed abandonment of working class interests, is the call by the revisionist group in control of the CPGB for electoral pacts between Labour, SLD, SD? and other parties, against the Tory government. Such electoral pacts would lead to Labour's complete abandonment of progressive working class policies. After all, if the original SDP grouping broke away from the Labour Party because of the Labour Party's swing towards a more progressive stance on a range of issues in the early 1970's, it would hardly be likely to entertain the notion of electoral pacts unless there were strict guarantees that such a stance would be jettisoned.

Clearly, pacts with such parties can only weaken and undermine the fight for left and progressive policies, and must therefore be resolutely opposed.

Of course, Marxists are not opposed to electoral agreements in principle. At particular moments in the struggle for socialism and in specific circumstances they may be tactically necessary. But to advocate an electoral pact in present circumstances only serves to weaken the struggle, breed defeatism and undermine the confidence of the working class and the labour movement in their ability to defeat the Tories. The revisionists spread confusion by equating electoral pacts with the justifiable desire of most socialists to build a broad popular movement against monopoly-capitalism. Today, in fact, such pacts with forces opposed to the working class, would hinder the building of such a movement.

The urgent need is to step up pressure to win the Labour Party to a commitment to left policies. For though the Labour Party leadership at present opposes electoral pacts, it is nevertheless promoting policies that are virtually indistinguishable from those of these other parties, in the mistaken belief that these will help Labour's election chances.

However, successive election defeats for Labour in recent years show that such policies, which offer few real prospects for the majority of working people in Britain, can only disillusion and alienate important sections of Labour's traditional voting base. One aspect of this has been the proliferation of Trotskyist and other ultra-left groups which have had some success in making recruits, particularly among the young. Generally they play a disruptive role, and despite their revolutionary-sounding slogans, objectively impede the struggle for socialism.

The consequence of the division in Labour's base of support is that the Tories can repeatedly win elections with only a minority vote in the country. And with each successive electoral victory, the Tories are further encouraged to widen the scope of their attacks on the living standards and democratic rights of working people in Britain.

The lesson from all this should be clear. Just as the ruling class supports a strategy which protects its position, so also must the working class and its allies be mobilised in support of a strategy that can promote its interests. This can only be a strategy for socialism.