User:Andysoh

This is a trialing of an article I have been working on.

Marxism in the UK Labour Party

Trends of Marxism in the UK Labour Party have existed for most of the Labour Party’s history. Marxist groups joined, affiliated or entered the Labour Party from its inception. Some former Marxists became leading members of the Labour Party.

The Labour Party was established in 1900 as the Labour Representation Committee. Marxists and Marxist organisations were invited participants in the founding conference. Small Marxist groups moved in and out of the Labour Party until at least the mid 1980s. However the legitimacy of Socialists and Marxists in the Labour Party was a matter of dispute at various periods of the Labour Party’s history, mainly the 1920s and 1930s, the 1950s and the 1980s and thereafter. The Labour Party and trade union leadership often took issue with Socialists and Marxists in the Party, beginning in 1905, whilst socialists and Marxist groups, such as the Militant Tendency (1964 – 1997), argued that they were a legitimate part of the Labour Party.

From 1918 until 1995, clause four, part four of the Labour Party's constitution, called for the "the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange" in a clear reference to Marxist ideology, which calls for the abolition of the private ownership of bourgois property.Hugh Gaikskill attempted unsuccessfully to remove the committment to common ownership in 1959, causing a rebellion in the Labour Party ranks. Tony Blair removed it in 1995 without raising any protest.

In the 1980s the Labour Party leadership claimed that membership of the Marxist Militant tendency was incompatible with the Labour Party, it was refused affiliation, and its leading members expelled.

Socialist and Marxist groups at the founding of the Labour Party

The founding conference of the Labour Representation Committee was held in February 1900. In addition to trade unions, representing just under half of all those affiliated to the Trades Union Congress, the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), and the Fabian Society participated at the founding conference. The ILP brought a membership of 13,000, the Social Democratic Federation, 9,000 and the Fabian Society 861. The two largest unions represented at the conference were the Amalgamated Society of Engineers with 85,000 members and the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants with 54,000 members. The Cooperative Union had been invited to attend but were not present. The co-operative societies, however, soon began to play a role as affiliates over the following decades. The ILP, the SDF and the Fabian Society been invited by the TUC and had worked with the Parliamentary Committee of the TUC in drawing up the arrangements for the conference. GDH Cole writes, in his book The Second International that at first, at local level the Labour Representation Committee was,

“ no more than a committee, each of whose constituents kept the full right to manage its own affairs. Each affiliated body - Socialist Society or Trade Union - put forward and paid for its own candidates. There was no central fund for financing candidates or even for engaging in any propagandist or organising activities. ”

Many of the early trade union pioneers of the working class movement at the turn of the century had been members at one time or another of the Social Democratic Federation, which considered itself Marxist. By contrast, many of the parliamentary leaders of the newly formed Labour Party supported the ideology of Fabianism, which was “non-revolutionary and specifically abandoned such general principles as the abolition of the wage-system…but it was almost wholly a middle class body”. Ramsay MacDonald had first been a member of the SDF, and then moved towards the Fabians. MacDonald was sponsored as an MP by the ILP however.

However, another layer of MPs came from the Liberal Party, and brought with them their ideology of liberal reform. The result was a tendency for an ideological and class antagonism to arise between the radical socialist elements of the membership who were largely working class, and the largely middle class leadership of the Labour Party which found support in the ideology of the Fabian society. MPs such as Arthur Henderson, who was originally a Liberal Party agent, came from the Liberal Party with a Liberal Party, rather than a socialist, outlook. In fact, the first Labour government included MPs who were not even members of the Labour Party at all, such as one of the chief law officers, the Lord Advocate for Scotland, and the person who was given the Admiralty post.

The Social Democratic Federation, characterised by a dogmatic, inflexible attitude, disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 1901, and changed its name to the Social Democratic Party in 1907. In 1912, many ILP members left the Labour Party when many ILP branches chose to amalgamate with the Social Democratic Party in 1912 to found the British Socialist Party.

However, despite the fact that the SDF as an organisation left the Labour Party, many of its members remained in the Labour Party. In Merseyside, for instance, Charles Carrick was elected president of the Liverpool Trades Council in 1905, served for fourteen years as one of Labour's first councillors, and yet was an organiser for the Marxist Social Democratic Federation. Carrick was the grandfather of one of the founders of the Militant tendency, Jimmy Deane.

The Independent Labour Party had both a Marxist leaning left wing and a right wing within it, and split in 1912, when many branches amalgamated with the avowedly Marxist SDF. The formation of the ILP in 1893 had been welcomed by Frederick Engels, and the ILP contained from its inception, on its leading body and in its membership, groups and individuals with an outlook strongly influenced by Marx and Engels, (although often differing from them in various ways.) The Marxist Edward Averling, for instance, was on its leading committee for a while. The ILP was the largest body affiliated apart from the trade unions and supplied many of the foot soldiers for the Labour Party.

In an early instance of entrism, in 1914 the British Socialist Party returned to the Labour Party, without any change in its Marxist outlook, continuing to make severe criticisms of the leadership of the Labour Party. John Maclean, its leader in Scotland, had an entirely revolutionary outlook at this time.

In 1920 Lenin said that the

“ Labour Party has let the British Socialist Party into its ranks, permitting it to have its own press organs, in which members of the selfsame Labour Party can freely and openly declare that the party leaders are social-traitors. Comrade [William] McLaine has cited quotations from such statements by the British Socialist Party.” ”

The struggle between the central leadership and the local membership

The historian GDH Cole states that the national Labour leadership kept its radical membership at arms length in its early years:

“ Although Local Labour Representation Committees or Labour Parties existed in a number of areas, they were not admitted to affiliation to the national party or represented at its Conferences" because "local LRCs... would more easily pass under socialist control." ”

The arguments about the labour Party having an explicit socialist commitment were perennial. “They found expression in one form or another at every annual conference of the Labour Representation Committee up to the time of the 1906 General Election when the LRC transformed itself into the Labour Party.”

In 1905 the Labour Representation Committee debated a proposal to confine itself to affiliated trade unions. This would have meant the exclusion of the ILP and other organisations. The General Union of Carpenters and Joiners spokesman argued that “if the LRC were confined to unions it would attract more support.” However George Barnes of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers said “that the purpose of the proposal was to 'chuck out' the socialists. He was opposed to it.”

“ Barnes emphasised that that before the LRC was formed the socialists had everywhere been raising their voices in preparation for the formation of such a body. He particularly singled out for praise the members of the ILP. The Carpenters' resolution was overwhelmingly defeated. ”

In 1906 the Labour Representation Committee’s elected Members of parliament decided to adopt the name “the Labour Party”.

The adoption of an explicitly socialist clause

The 1905 conference of the Labour Representation Committee agreed a socialist resolution moved by the Gas Workers Union organiser Will Thorn. Thorn had been a member of the SDF in his youth.

“ “This annual conference of the LRC hereby declares that its ultimate object shall be the obtaining for the workers of the full results of their labour by the overthrow of the present competitive system of capitalism and the institution of a system of public ownership of all the means of production, distribution and exchange.” ”

This wording was very similar to the wording eventually adopted as the famous ‘’Clause four Part four’’ of the Labour Party constitution, adopted in 1918 following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and printed on every members card at least until the mid 1980s.

The famous ‘’Clause four, Part four’’ of the Labour Party constitution read:

“ To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service. ”

In 1918 the Labour Party decided to establish individual membership, but this membership was established in addition to the affiliated bodies.Thus the committees which ran the Labour Parties at constituency level (the General Management Committees or GMCs, as they were called until renamed the GCs in the 1980s) which was comprised of elected members of trade unions, affiliated groups (such as the Cooperative society) now had members elected from the local party branches. This remained the case at least until the mid 1980s.

The Communist Party’s entrism in the Labour Party

The Russian Revolution

After the First World War the Labour Party membership quickly became very radical. In March 1918, Britain, under a Conservative government, had invaded Russia, which had undergone the Russian revolution of October 1917. Forces landed at Murmansk. The Labour Party leaders invited Kerensky, the Russian provisional government leader deposed by the Russian Revolution of October 1917, to address the 1918 Labour Party, and he was introduced by Arthur Henderson. Henderson was the first member of the Labour Party to become a member of the Cabinet, in the war time coalition government of Liberal Prime Minister Asquith, the man who declared war on the German Empire on August 4, 1914.

Yet despite the address of Kerensky to party conference, sympathy towards the Russian revolution of 1917 grew amongst organised labour so that the following year’s Labour Party conference to agree to discuss affiliation to the third, Communist International, organised by the leaders of the Russian revolution, Lenin and Trotsky.

Lenin remarked that the newly formed Communist Party should enter the Labour Party:

“ This is a very original situation: a party which unites enormous masses of workers, so that it might seem a political party, is nevertheless obliged to grant its members complete latitude. Comrade McLaine has told us here that, at the Labour Party Conference, the British Scheidemanns [e.g. Arthur Henderson and Ramsey MacDonald] were obliged to openly raise the question of affiliation to the Third [Communist] International, and that all party branches and sections were obliged to discuss the matter. In such circumstances, it would be a mistake not to join this party. ”

Conflict between the leadership of the Labour Party and the membership grew during this time, and was ultimately reflected in the leaderships opposition to the Communist Party.

In 1919, the Miners Federation, whose MPs pre-dated the formation of the Labour Party, and were since 1906 a part of that body, demanded withdrawal of the troops from Russia. The vote at the 1919 Labour Party conference on the question of affiliation to the Third (Communist) International, was agreed “to the distress of its leaders” . A vote was won committing the Labour Party committee of the Trades Union Congress to arrange “direct industrial action” to “stop capitalist attacks upon the Socialist Republics of Russia and Hungary.” The threat of immediate strike action forced the Conservative government to abandon its intervention in Russia.

However the Labour Party leadership’s antagonism to the Labour Party delegates’ congress decision in 1919 is indicated by Sylvia Pankhurst, who argues that:

“ The Executive of the Trade Union Congress is openly opposed to industrial action for political purposes and cares nothing for the Soviets and the majority of the Labour Party Executives is also opposed to action. McGurk, the retiring chairman of the Labour Party, at once gave an interview to the capitalist-imperialist Evening Standard, a most virulently anti-labour paper, in which he said that nothing would come of the resolution.” ”

The antagonism between the membership and the leadership was indicated during the course of the minority Labour government elected in 1924. The membership compelled Ramsey MacDonald, Labour’s Prime Minister, to recognise the Soviet Union and institute negotiations for an Anglo-Russian treaty, but MacDonald “abated nothing in his hatred of Communism, or of his determination to disassociate his party from all taint of Communist associations.”

Communist Party affiliation

Lenin advocated that the Communist Party apply for affiliation to the Labour Party on only one condition: “Our resolution says that we favour affiliation insofar as the Labour Party permits sufficient freedom of criticism. On that point we are absolutely consistent.”

Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) influence has a long tradition within the Labour Party. The CPGB was formed in 1920 by an amalgam of groups, some of which were already legitimate parts of the Labour Party, like the British Socialist Party. It failed to gain affiliation to the Labour Party in 1920, but members and what were called fellow travellers abounded within the Labour Party, first as ordinary members, and even as MPs, before this was disallowed. .

Sylvia Pankhurst and other leaders of the Communist Party fiercely opposed affiliation to the Labour Party. Pankhurst appealed to Communists to leave the Labour Party:

“ We urge our Communist comrades to come out of the Labour Party and build up a strong opposition to it in order to secure the emancipation of Labour and the establishment of Communism in our time. Comrades, do not give your precious energies to building up the Labour Party which has already betrayed you, and which will shortly join the capitalists in forming a Government of the Noske type. ”

However many members of Pankhurst’s own ‘’Workers' Socialist Federation’’ did not leave, and local members in London’s East end Poplar district were expelled instead.

The newly formed Communist Party’s constitution, proposed by this same leadership, included the sentence “No affiliation with opportunists”. However those in favour of affiliation soon gained a majority and the CPGB applied for affiliation to the Labour Party on Lenin’s urging. Pankhurst was expelled from the Communist Party in 1921 for her continued opposition to CPGB policy of affiliation to the Labour Party.

Almost from its inception, however, the Communist Party had delegates to the General Management Committees of the Labour Party mainly through the Trade Unions. The Labour Party leadership moved to ban Communist representation on its general management committees.

Communists were trade union delegates to Labour Party constituency committees and to Labour Party conference until the Liverpool conference of 1925 banned them. Consequently three dozen Constituency Labour Parties were disaffiliated for refusing to expel Communists. They formed the National Left Wing Movement, which also embraced left-wing groups in other constituencies.

In seeking to work in the Labour Party, the Communist Party was increasingly obliged to use the entrist tactic the Labour Party, and later, in the 1930s, there was no question of a Trotskyist organisation applying for affiliation. Two Communist Party members were elected to parliament whilst standing as Labour Party candidates in 1922. Yet both the Communists Party and various Trotskyist groups carried on their different policies and battles off and on within and without the Labour Party for the next fifty years.

Right-wing organisations

The Fabian Society is considered to be on the right of the Labour Party. Its leading figures campaigned against the constitution. In 1959 they tried to remove the "Socialist clause", the original "Clause IV, part IV", from the Labour Party constitution, but were overturned by conference.

The "Socialist clause", printed on every party member's membership card from 1959 until abandoned in 1995, called for the "common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange" and was itself written by a Fabian in 1918 following the Russian revolution of 1917, though in fact it was ambiguously worded in order to gain support from the radicalised membership whilst allowing the Labour Party leadership to distance themselves from more revolutionary currents.

The Fabian society claim that "Leading Fabian Sidney Webb wrote the original clause IV in the party’s 1918 Constitution with its famous commitment to the 'shared [sic - 'common' is correct] ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange'."

The Fabian society says that "Leading Fabians Hugh Gaitskell and Tony Crosland campaigned unsuccessfully to rewrite the clause after the 1959 election".

They also claim that the "1990s rewriting of Clause IV was led by Giles Radice’s Fabian pamphlet series 'Southern Discomfort' which set out why Labour was failing with southern swing voters. Tony Blair’s Fabian pamphlet as leader first signalled his intention to rewrite clause IV."

The clause was replaced without noticeable opposition in 1995.

Allegations of CIA-backed fronts in the Labour Party such as the Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding (LCTU) were common in the decades after the Second World War. These bodies continued to attract right-wing trade union and Labour Party figures well into the 1980s. The LCTU (later to be incorporated by the Trade Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding) was formed "in order to develop a better understanding of the objectives and democratic values of the Western Alliance in the ranks of socialist and trade union movements in Europe and their counterparts in the United States"; it distributed a news service among the trade union movement and provided regular seminars and conferences for senior trade unionists and politicians. Speakers at LCTU / TUCETU conferences have included Dr John Reid MP (later to become Tony Blair's armed forces minister) Peter Mandelson MP, and George Robertson MP (Blair's defence secretary), according to bilderberg.org and Robin Ramsay's Uncle Sam's New Labour

Nick Cohen wrote:

“ In a fascinating book, Who Paid the Piper? (Granta), which deserved far more attention than it received when it was published in the summer, the historian Frances Stonor Saunders detailed the relentless efforts by the CIA to ensure that educated opinion in Britain and Europe became and stayed pro-American. ”

For the Militant tendency, this was another indication that the Labour Party had a pro-capitalist leadership, now no longer in doubt.

In the early 1980s the Militant tendency contrasted the treatment the "Gang of four" received from the press and right-wing in the Labour Party to the treatment of its own case, in particular after this group split for the Labour Party to form the Social Democratic Party, and, the Militant argued, went on to take enough votes at the 1983 general election to rob the Labour Party of victory.

The Militant Tendency

Main article, Militant tendency

Critics of the Militant tendency claimed that this group 'entered' the Labour Party contrary to its rules and regulations. 'Militant supporters' (as the members termed themselves) at the time of its foundation claimed a membership of the Labour Party stretching back to the 1930s. The Militant tendency also claimed that groups of Marxists and socialists, as well as non-socialists, had been organised as separate organisations within the Labour Party since its inception.

The Labour Party NEC inquiry which reported in June 1982, termed the Hayward-Hughes inquiry, found that the Militant was guilty of breaking Clause II, section 3 of the Labour Party constitution. Michael Crick, author of The March of Militant, shows that many other groups, left and right, also broke the same Labour Party rules, naming Labour Solidarity, the Labour Co-ordinating Commmittee and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, amongst others. The constitution, Crick writes, has always been taken "by all pressure groups, on the left and on the right, with a particularly large pinch of salt".

No questions were asked of the Militant until 1975. From its inception, the Militant tendency took a high profile, clearly demarcated position within the Labour Party, just as the affiliated socialist groups had always done. It occasionally won Labour Party conference motions, and its delegates to conference were well known. Its supporters were marked by the fact that they not only openly supported Militant’s policies, but also sold its paper. It is thus that the Labour MP Paul Rose wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph, with the following arguments against the Militant Tendency’s expulsion:

“ to regard them [Militant] as sinister and alien... one cannot criticise the ‘Militant’ group any more than the Christian Socialists, Owenites, Co-operatives, Fabians and other so-called moderates who still overwhelmingly control the heartland of the party’s territory. ”

Ken Livingstone, currently the Labour Party’s mayor of London, (and no longer considered a left-wing figure), defended the Militant Tendency in 1982 with similar arguments. In his speech to a special conference organised by the Militant Tendency to protest against what they termed a "witchhunt" against them, he argued that "The people fighting to get rid of the Militant, were previously fighting alongside those who deserted to the SDP". Before they deserted the Labour Party, the SDP had openly organised as a separate group and publicly called for a policy change. Furthermore the Militant defended their right to do so, although it objected to their threats to split the Labour Party if they did not get their way. The Militant argued that, in the light of the history of the Labour Party as outlined here, it was being expelled for its policies, not because of its entrism.

The Militant Tendency claimed that its special conference at the Wembley Conference Centre in September 1982, at which Ken Livingstone had spoken, was attendanded by 1622 delegates from constituency Labour Parties, 412 trade union delegates and 1000 visitors, showing the considerable influence the Militant Tendency had at that stage amongst ordinary members.

The Militant Tendency found itself expelled, as an organisation, when it applied to register but was omitted from the list of affiliated organisations compiled by Jim Mortimer in 1982.

There was no clear list of affiliates, so that in order to expel the Militant Tendency in the 1980s, the Labour Party had to compile a central list of affiliates. The Labour Party leadership drew up, under its chairman Jim Mortimer, a list of affiliates, and required all groups within the Labour Party to register. The Militant's affiliation was turned down. But until then, "entrist" organisations could not be treated differently to the various groups that had entered and left the Labour Party since its inception.

The Militant tendency argued that attacks on the Militant and the left in the Labour Party by the leadership were ultimately political in nature, and represented a struggle between a pro-capitalist leadership which wished to implement anti-trade union legislation in order to improve the competitiveness of British capitalism, and Labour Party members who saw such legislation as attacks on the working class who they sought to defend. Amongst these members, drawn in many cases from a trade union background, the Militant tendency saw many who to varying degrees aspired towards a socialist solution to the problems the working class faced, and who saw socialism in the Labour Party's 1964 manifesto and its apparent support for "purposive planning" against "economic free-for-all". .

The Militant tendency and others argued that resistance to expulsions by the right-wing of the party is a defence of the socialist traditions of the Labour Party. They argued that the Labour Party was the mass party of the working class, and socialists such as supporters of the Militant tendency are an integral part of the working class. Many Militant supporters were regarded as "life-long socialists".

Dominic Brady, Chair of the Education Committee in Liverpool City Council during wrote to the Guardian newspaper in 1985: "I am not a member of the Militant tendency, most people are now aware that the vast majority of the members of the Labour group are not members of Militant. But on behalf of all other non-Militant members of the Labour group, I will say this to Neil Kinnock: If he continues to use the media to attack life-long socialists, if he continues to attempt to destroy Liverpool Labour Party and its achievements, he will end any possibility of a Labour government. And if he continues to consider expulsions of our comrades in the Labour group, he will do so over our dead bodies".