Kopec is right about the party’s “bourgeois, imperialist politics.” The present Labour government is just the latest case. Since its formation in 1906, the Labour Party “in and out of government” has supported the British empire and Britain at war; doffed its collective hat to the British monarchy; exuded nationalism; and been a faithful servant of the British rulers’ assaults on workers at home.

The capitalist program, electoralist orientation and structure of the party—the party leadership has never been under the control of the ranks—doesn’t tell the whole story, however.

Fighting workers for many years viewed it as a party of labor, an echo of Labour’s origins in major working-class battles. When millions of unskilled workers swelled the ranks of the unions at the end of the nineteenth century, they forced a break with the capitalist Liberal Party, whose left-wing tail had been headed up by the labor aristocratic union leaders. But while the new party was an organizational break from the Liberal Party, it continued liberal labor politics. In 1914 the Labour party leaders rushed to support World War I. The party that emerged after the first world interimperialist slaughter was a pale reflection of even the pre-war party, let alone having anything in common with a striving for class independence. What gave Labour’s pretence to working-class credentials a new lease on life was Stalinism.

Under the impetus of the Russian Revolution of 1917 the Communist Party was founded in Britain. Prospects for building a proletarian party in the huge class battles of the 1920s were good. The Stalinist policies of those who dominated the fledgling Communist Party, however, ensured this didn’t happen. The CP prettified the reformist trade union leaders and effectively liquidated itself into left labor formations. In the nine-day general strike of 1926 they called for “all power” to the strike-breaking general council of the TUC with which Stalin maintained relations. After a flip-flop in which they exited the unions denouncing them as “reactionary” and condemning the Labour Party as “social fascist” putting further wind in Labour’s sails, the Stalinists turned to class collaborationist popular frontism: the bureaucrats in the Soviet Union kept as close as possible to “left Labour MPs” and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), as it was called for many years, acted as the foot soldiers of the reformist union and Labour leaders giving a progressive veneer to Labour’s links with the unions.

The membership of the Labour Party still included substantial numbers of workers. Periodically, Marxist currents developed in the party, including winning the leadership of the party’s youth organizations. Workers involved in struggle would often turn toward Labour, looking for solidarity.

The last major case of unions seeking to bend Labour to their will was the coal miners strike of 1984-85. The miners won applause at the Labour Party conference and some MPs campaigned in their support. But the party leadership railed against the strikers and their leaders, playing the major part—alongside the TUC General Council—in ensuring the defeat of the strike. The party leadership also launched a purge, expelling a socialist current and making the party less and less habitable by workers. The result has been a bourgeoisification of the party’s social composition. At the same time, Stalinism—the force inside the labor movement that had kept Labour’s working class credentials echoing from the grave—suffered a mortal blow. With the shattering of the Stalinist apparatuses in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the CPGB went into terminal decline.

Millions of workers celebrated Labour’s election in 1997 and the end of 18 years of Tory government marked by the Thatcher-Reagan course of the 1980s. But hopes have been dashed. Today, workers engaged in resistance to the bosses attacks on wages and working conditions are not looking to Labour. Those voting Labour at the next general election will not be casting a “class vote.” Labour today stands before workers as a social imperialist party, looking far more like the Democrats in the United States than like the social democratic party it once claimed to be.

The Communist League in the UK won’t be calling for a Labour vote at the next general election. It will run its own campaign under the watchword “it’s not who you’re against but what you are for.” The League’s program will advance the need to build and strengthen unions. It will point toward workers and farmers taking political power.

Such a course has nothing whatever to do with recent developments characterized by reader Robby Kopec as “unions disaffiliating from Labour, though not necessarily towards independent working class politics.” One union, the Rail Maritime and Transport union (RMT) has broken organizationally with the Labour Party, having been expelled after backing non-Labour election candidates in Scotland. The Fire Brigades Union (FBU), involved in a series of strikes last year, threatened to end its affiliation. But neither of these represent a shift toward independent working-class politics. They are part of the labor bureaucrats’ wars of position as they seek to compensate for the membership decline that’s a consequence of the continuing weakening of the unions.  
 
 
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