Get with the programme

Why having a good election manifesto is not good enough for the working class

Although there is no longer the immediate prospect of a socialist-led Labour government which would test the limits of a “left-reformist” strategy, the foundations of that approach have remained the same in terms of mass working-class consciousness.

This is not to say that the central focus of the left in Britain in the coming period is going to be the Labour Party in terms of membership, “changing it from within” through internal factional struggle against the right, and so on.

Although a sizeable Labour Left will remain, its activity is limited by the dominance of the Labour Right. A majority of those with at least a left-reformist consciousness have quit the party and revolutionary groups which had been able to retain membership even during the 90s and 00s have now been purged by the leadership.

Towards a workers’ government

A strike wave prompted by real-time pay cuts has led to the growth of rank-and-file networks among trade unionists in different public services to reject bad pay offers and this leadership has given hope to the broader working class. The Tory government has responded by adding further restrictions to the existing legal constraints on the ability of workers to easily win union recognition and make use of collective bargaining rights through strike action if necessary.

Constraints on effective trade unionism can be defied where workplace organisation is strong, of course. But what prevents the spread of collective workplace organisation across the economy is as much the intense effort required to overcome these constraints as it is the confidence of workers to undertake this commitment.

So a retreat from electoral strategy does not appear possible. Such a strategy – electing a left government which will implement reforms which free up and empower the organised working class – remains an essential step on the road to socialism in Britain given the balance of forces between classes.

However, just because a left-reformist strategy may be required to empower the working class, it does not mean that the left-reformists have the best ideas about organising and that we should therefore tail them politically, liquidating our organisations into theirs.

On the contrary, because left-reformists lack a coherent programme for socialism – and this approach to building power will be essential if the working class is to win political power – independent revolutionary organising is essential.

Uniting around a programme

A programme is not the same as a manifesto: Labour’s general election manifesto in 2017 was a step forward, but neither it nor the 2019 general election manifesto was a document which offered a roadmap to socialism.

What is meant by a programme in the tradition of the workers movement is a document which lists demands which, if conceded, would strengthen the ability of the organised working class to win political power. A manifesto in the contemporary electoral sense is a document which might include the minimum demands of a workers’ party but not the maximum goals contained within its programme.

We have not had the experience in Britain of parliamentary representatives being elected on the basis of a workers’ party programme in addition to a general election manifesto since the Labour government of the 1970s.

In the coming months and years, our task will be to consider if this most recent high point of the working-class industrial and political struggle in Britain could be repeated with success rather than a return to Tory assaults on rights and liberties.

“Fundamental and irreversible”

Labour’s 1973 programme and its 1974 election manifesto called for a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power towards working people and their families. 

Much of the party membership and the broader labour movement wanted to advance beyond the limits of social democracy towards socialism: monopolies were to be taken into public ownership and democratic control was to be extended into the economy through planning agreements and forms of industrial democracy, including proposed legislation to introduce workers’ participation in enterprise management and the promotion of workers’ co-operatives.

But this was not to be. The Labour government did not break with managing state-monopoly capitalism, it broke with the movement which had brought it to office. The consequence of the rise of the Labour Left in the 70s and 80s – and reforms to hold MPs to account for the policy agenda set by the broader movement via mandatory reselection – was that a number of prominent Labour Right MPs split to form the Social Democratic Party, later forming an Alliance with the Liberals to defeat Labour.

Thus with complete control of parliament for all of the 1980s and much of the 1990s, the natural party of Britain’s ruling class had an unprecedented period of time in the era of mass working-class political participation with which to reshape British society completely. They could do this in the full knowledge that the opposition was thoroughly divided – introducing both economic policies of mass unemployment and anti-union legislation to break the back of organised labour in much of the economy and increase the power of managers in the workplace.

The necessity of a new mass workers’ party

A similar process took place during the rise of the Labour Left in the 2010s with the sabotage and splits of the Labour Right. That faction of the party is now dominant and unlike the Labour government of 1974-1979, the left will be locked out of the cabinet – a new Labour government will proceed much as in the 1997-2010 ‘New Labour’ period but without the economic conditions of a booming global economy to soften the blow of popular disappointment with the extent of the reforms.

Labour’s current policy-making process does produce a document which is referred to as a  programme. But this is not a fixed document which is periodically revised by the membership at a delegate conference – as demonstrated by the ease with which the leadership has disposed of progressive policies contained within the 2017 and 2019 manifestos. It contains no programmatic commitment to achieving working-class political power as a means to liberate the whole of humanity.

Without a doubt, a new mass workers’ party will be required to offer an alternative to the Labour Right from outside the party. But for it to be effective in winning representation in parliament, the rules of the game will have to change.

An emerging new mass workers’ party will have to organise, without representation in parliament for the foreseeable future, as a multi-tendency organisation or alliance of organisations. It will grow by establishing a mass base within workplaces and neighbourhoods with which to influence Labour through its affiliated trade unions and as a coherent electoral bloc until such time as significant independent parliamentary representation is viable.