The British Labour Party was born out of the trade unions as they were forced to go beyond purely economic struggles at the turn of the century. It remains to this day a party rooted in the trade unions, that holds the adherence of millions of workers. In that fundamental respect, it is different than a liberal bourgeois party like the Democratic Party in the United States, though its leadership has an entirely capitalist program and policies.

Like in the United States and the other imperialist countries today, the communist vanguard in the United Kingdom is a tiny nucleus. To effectively argue for a revolutionary program and course of action, communists cannot take a sectarian stance toward mass workers parties. Doing so would only serve to isolate the working-class vanguard from the big majority of the toilers, giving free reign to the class- collaborationist misleaders who dominate the trade unions and labor-type parties.

James P. Cannon, a central leader of the U.S. communist movement, explained this well in a 1948 report published in Aspects of Socialist Election Policy. "The formal program and the holiday speeches of the leaders mutter something about socialism, but in practice the British Labour Party is the governing party of British imperialism," he said. "It is the strongest pillar holding up that shaky edifice. That makes it a bourgeois party in the essence of the matter, doesn't it? And since 1914, haven't we always considered the Social Democratic parties of Europe as bourgeois parties? And haven't we characterized Stalinism as an agency of world imperialism?

"Our fundamental attitude toward such parties is the same as our attitude toward a bourgeois party of the classical type - that is an attitude of irreconcilable opposition," Cannon continued. "But the composition of such parties gives them a distinctive character which enables, and even requires, us to make a different tactical approach to them. If they are composed of workers, and even more, if they are based on the trade unions and subject to their control, we offer to make a united front with them for a concrete struggle against the capitalists, or even join with them under certain conditions, with the aim of promoting our program of `class against class.' We try to push them into class actions against the bourgeoisie. But we do not paint them as genuine organs of the working class in the political sense."

"It would be a good thing to read over again Lenin's advice to the British communists back in 1920," Cannon noted. "He explained that they ought to support the labor party candidates for parliament. But he said, `Support them in order to force them to take office so that the masses will learn by experience the futility and treachery of their program, and get through with them.' It was not solidarity with the labor reformists but hostility which dictated the tactic that Lenin recommended. I think his advice still holds good. The labor party is not our party and will not be our party unless it adopts our program. Otherwise it is an arena in which we work for our program."

Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky raised some relevant points in discussing the fight for a labor party in the United States (see excerpt from The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution on page 13). "Workers, you need your own party," he declared. The working class needs to organize itself politically, independent of the bourgeoisie and all of its parties. "Are we in favor of the creation of a reformist labor party? No. Are we in favor of a policy which can give to the trade unions the possibility to put its weight upon the balance of the forces? Yes," Trotsky explained. A labor party "can become a reformist party - it depends upon the development. Here the question of program comes in... We must have a program of transitional demands, the most complete of them being a workers' and farmers' government. We are for a party... of the toiling masses who will take power in the state."

This approach is in continuity with the course advocated by the earliest communist leaders. In the 1880s, for instance, Frederick Engels celebrated the stirrings of independent political action by the working class in the United States, despite the "muddle-headed" politics of the existing leadership. He urged collaborators in the United States to not abstain, but to work to bring clarity and direction to workers coming into political life (see Marx and Engels on the United States).

- NAOMI CRAINE  
 
 
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