From the archives: Labour’s history of strike-breaking
JVL Introduction
It is fair to say that our high hopes for the social movement that Jeremy Corbyn gave expression to was often accompanied by a suspension of disbelief.
For a brief period it really did feel that another world was possible.
What we suspended was the traditional socialist view of the Labour Party, articulated most clearly in Ralph Miliband’s 1961 book Parliamentary Socialism, that it was the most implausible vehicle for radical social transformation.
“Vote Labour without Illusions” was a common slogan over many decades.
We repost this almost 40-year-old study by Geoff Ellen as a fine analysis in its own right, and as a reminder – for those like your web editor – who knew the history well, yet somehow managed to push it to one side in the recent glory years of hope and optimism.
The 1945 welfare state was the great triumph of the Labour Party, but also a pinched and attenuated victory in which the hopes for ongoing social transformation were virtually snuffed out at birth, not simply with the connivance of the Labour Party leadership but by its active intervention.
Nowhere was this expressed more strongly than in its hostility to the self-activity of working people, shown in the repeated use of troops to break strikes in a period that is still generally regarded as Labour’s finest achievement.
Ellen’s account is a gripping read and his conclusion in 1984, as valid today as then:
“Capitalism’s greatest boom had given way to its present, protracted slump, but Labour’s commitment to managing the capitalist system is as strong as ever. So is its commitment to parliament, and its hostility to working class struggle as a means of change.”
This article was originally published by International Socialism, Summer 1984 on Sun 6 May 1984. Read the original here.
Labour and strike-breaking 1945–1951
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Seems many Left Wing socialists go into politics to change things then once they have a chance to actually do anything they’re turned and become just another Establishment tool to keep the Status Quo….
Seems Jeremy Corbyn was a once in many lifetimes the TRUE Socialist with one aim to right injustice wherever it lurks. Maybe the hunger for change in many others is blunted by the very action of arriving where they strove to be.. 45 years a Labour voter and been disappointed and disillusioned by Labour MPs and PMs so many times..
But to give up is to admit defeat..
The moral of the story is that you can’t run capitalism in the interests of the working class and oppressed. But it is a very timely article. Pity the SWP has degenerated so.
My father was a lifelong ‘Socialist’ and very active in the local Labour Party for many years. He was always opposed to strikes, which I sometimes found odd. Specific historical context is of course crucial and I sometimes wonder what his view might be now, with particular reference to the NHS, public transport, progressive education etc.
A brilliant article and a warning to those who laud Attlee’s government. And that’s apart from its wretched foreign policy – with it being little more than an agent of the US and its brutality in the Empire. See Caroline Elkins’ A History of Violence: A History Of The British Empire.
Attlee’s government expressed all too clearly what ‘Labourism’ was – purporting to represent the economic interests of the working class but only within the confines of the interests of British capitalism and representing the political interests of the working class – but only within the confines of the British constitution.
A timely warning for what lies ahead if there is a Starmer government!
Shocked by my own ignorance of this history, and it’s especially shocking to discover Cripps’s role. My mother was his secretary during the War.
This article is indeed an excellent reminder of the dangerous mythology concerning the domestic historical record of the Labour party in power. (The foreign policy record is even worse). However the fact that JVL is republishing this 40 year old article – or any similar analysis – only now, despite its clear relevance to all that has occurred in the last 8 years, also tells us something politically valuable about the drawbacks of JVL’s constitutional association, and now unrequited love affair, with the LP.
If JVL is to continue to be a leftwing campaigning group whose integrity is widely recognised and which acts as a powerful catalytic influence, it can only develop this further in future if it completely sheds any formal allegiance to the LP. The more honest historical appraisals and debates which are now beginning to reappear in leftist media, about the possibility of a purely parliamentary road to democratic socialism, and the equally serious question as to whether, as a first stage, a necessary revolutionary overthrow of oligarchic capital can be achieved in an isolated economy the size of that of the UK, are long overdue; but paradoxically they are only taking place because of Corbyn’s failure and Starmer’s brutality.
Such fundamental questions – and many others- were submerged and repressed on the labour left during the Corbyn years, and this self-censorship of honest debate resulted in many serious errors, not least of which was the failure to appreciate at the earliest stage the viciously reactionary and xenophobic nature of the Brexit project. Owing to its allegiance to the LP during the Corbyn years JVL itself has not been immune to such political self-censorship even on matters closest to its core interests, as a certain reticence concerning the Corbyn leadership’s failure to denounce false accusations of antismitism continues to demonstrate.
The virtual expulsion of JVL and all that it stands for by the Starmer gang, who now have unassailable control of the labour party, should be treated not as a continuing tragedy but as an ideological liberation. That does not mean that JVL should not continue to support, learn from, and educate honest left activists who choose to remain in the LP, but it should do so clearsightedly with no illusions about their prospects within that party; and there must be absolutely no prohibition on JVL members publicly campaigning for progressive candidates who stand for election against Starmer’s racist acolytes.
Traditional social democracy is collapsing the world over for clear historical reasons. In those countries where in the 20th century social democracy succeeded for a time in raising the living standards of domestic workers, it did so through a Faustian bargain: an uneasy truce between the national capitalist and working classes involving the continuing expansion of colonial and neocolonial exploitation abroad. Globalisation and the rise of a multipolar world has ensured that this economic model is now unviable and cannot be restored.