hard labour

After "New" Labour in the Independent we find we now have whats being branded as Blue Labour, "an attempt to reclaim dormant traditions within the labour movement...Crudely, this has been described as tapping into a "small c" conservatism."

The Labour Party has failed, so let’s start a new one. Why bother? The history of the Labour Party has been one long disaster for the working class.

We in the Socialist Party point out our original criticism of Labourism is confirmed beyond doubt. It was not possible either to reform capitalism into socialism by means of a series of reforms enacted by parliament or to make capitalism work in the interest of the majority class of wage and salary earners. Instead of the Labour Party gradually changing capitalism, the opposite happened. Capitalism gradually changed the Labour Party into an ordinary alternative party taking its turn to manage the affairs of British capitalism. "Old" Labour said it stood for socialism and advocated policies to run capitalism. "New" Labour says it stands for capitalism and advocates policies to run capitalism. The only difference between the "old" and the "new" versions is that the latest Labour Party leaders are more honest about its love affair with capitalism. Labour has always stood for step-by-step reform. The only difference is that in the old days they did so with a pretence of aiming at the creation of a totally different way of organising human affairs. Today's Labour is at least being straight. They can see no alternative to capitalism.

After a century of failure the working class was back where it had been nearly a century previously, faced with the choice between two openly capitalist parties, not the Tories and the Liberals as it was then, but now between the Tories and Labour. The Labour Partry increasingly judged itself by the success of the one thing it could do in government – manage capitalism; all reformist baggage being abandoned in the pursuit of Labour's desire to manage capitalism better than the other lot.The history of the Labour Party is one of deceit and opportunism that has given a bad name to socialism and induced working people to hand political power to representatives of their class enemy to administer capitalism against the working class interests that Labour has pretended to represent. What Labour has traditionally meant by "democratic socialism" is benign capitalism. This is nonsense. The function of capital is to exploit labour.

Surely we have learned the hard lesson that Labourism is a dead end. It can’t succeed. Not because its leaders are insincere or incompetent or corrupt or not resolute enough (all of which is probably true) . It fails because it sets itself the impossible mission of trying to gradually reform capitalism into socialism. This can’t be done, as experience, not just theoretical understanding, has confirmed. What is required is not a new Labour party but a party with socialism as its explicit aim and a policy of doing all it can to bring this into being. Those who want another century of reformist advance and retreat can go ahead and form a new Labour Party. Those who, learning from the failures of the past, desire the socialist alternative should join those who have rejected reformism and sought instead to make socialists and work for socialism-and-nothing-but.