Farrell links the way workers should vote to the policies of the Labour government. But Labour won the election in spite of its program. What was striking about the election campaign - and this remains the case today - is how few workers accept Anthony Blair's appeals that they should have no expectations from his Labour government. This exposes the lie in Blair's claim that the party won because of its "New Labour" program.

Workers in their millions cast a class vote because they believe that Labour - a party that rests on the affiliated membership of 4.1 million trade unionists - can, whatever the leadership says, be used to defend their interests as workers. That's why the day after the general election there were celebrations of the Tory drubbing in factories, mines, and rail depots across Britain. Many workers in plants where CL members work expressed the view, "We've won!"

If communists had not urged a Labour vote we would be reduced to replying, "No, we haven't." Much better to say, as we did in the election campaign, "Let's fight together to commit the unions and the Labour Party to a program that defends our interests." Then, as the Labour government implements its pro-capitalist program, we can - not as prophets of doom, but concretely in the heat of the battle - explain its real character and the need for a class- struggle approach.

In the months and years to come, workers will go through the experience of Blair, the testing of other leaders, the fight for partial demands. Trade unions will engage in struggles and they'll demand that Labour supports them. Workers and youth in Scotland will take advantage of Labour's devolution referendum to push forward the fight for Scottish independence. Trade unionists will take a stand on policy conflicts and elections within the Labour Party. They'll resist Blair's continuing drive to weaken Labour's links with the unions. If we abstained from the struggle around such questions, communists could never be effective revolutionary politicians in the unions, for it will be in union struggles at work, and on the streets and picket lines, that these issues will be fought out.

And when union members next have the opportunity to vote on the continued affiliation of their unions to the Labour Party, communists will argue for a vote in favor, as the only way open, under today's conditions, to express the need for a mass party of labor, without which the struggle for power is impossible.

None of this implies declaring a political amnesty for the pro-capitalist Labour leaders - or "giving the nod" to Labour, as Farrell puts it. On the contrary, Labour is no better politically than the Tories. It's equally committed to defending the capitalist order. The example of Ireland cited by Farrell is a good one. Labour was officially silent over the partition of Ireland in 1922 and has defended the union ever since. Labour governments sent in the troops in 1969, enacted the Prevention of Terrorism Act in 1974, and have presided over some of the most draconian policing of the Six Counties.

What's at issue is not "giving the nod" to Labour but how to influence the great majority of workers who are Labour supporters - for example, in the fight to get British troops out of Ireland. Only by recognizing that Labour is different - not because of its program but because it remains based on the unions - can we give the right answer. Unions are organizations of the working class. We should never give them up to the bourgeoisie.

To become more than a revolutionary group self-satisfied in its hatred of capitalism, and to embark upon the road of forging a genuine party, revolutionaries can't abstain from the struggles within the mass organizations of the working class. We must embrace every manifestation of working-class resistance and make revolutionary propaganda in the context of the actual experience of the mass of workers. It's not, as Farrell suggests, a "cop out" to have a united front approach to Labour.

The united front approach, summed up in the election by advising a class vote for Labour, allows communists to go through common experience with the rest of our class, help other workers break from the reformist misleaders, win new adherents to our program, and pave the way for a mass communist party. As Farrell says, it was Russian revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin who first expressed this in the memorable formula of "supporting Labour as a rope supports a hanging man."

Farrell suggests that the policy adopted by Lenin toward the Labour Party is inappropriate today because conditions have changed. He cites Blair's "Christian moralism" and the preponderance of middle-class members in Labour Party branches, and concludes that now Labour is a party like the Democratic Party in the United States. But Labour has never been distinguished from the Democrats in its ideas.

Ideologically, Labour has always been a bourgeois liberal party, totally servile to the interests of the ruling class. Where Labour differs is on its relations to the labor movement and the capitalist class -it's based on the unions and for that reason, despite middle-class members, is still not the preferred party of the capitalist rulers over the long term. (It's worth noting that influence of "middle-class liberals" was also an argument used against Lenin at the time by those like Sylvia Pankhurst and Willie Gallagher who opposed Lenin's stance toward Labour.)

Farrell concludes by asking "who next will you be supporting, the [fascist] British National Party?" It was a rhetorical question, but it shows the danger, from the point of view of revolutionary tactics, of putting all bourgeois parties into the same basket. The Stalinist party in Germany in the 1930s did just that. They said that the social democrats were the same as the fascists. They called them "social fascists" and refused a united front approach to them against Hitler. The result was the greatest defeat in the history of the modern working-class movement.

- JONATHAN SILBERMAN  
 
 
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