Workers' Liberty

The editorial in Workers’ Liberty no. 43, Who will stop Blair, advocates a workers’ government. To develop this argument further and more effectively we need to have some reference to the objections likely to be raised in discussions in the labour movement. Many activists may well ask why we want to, or perhaps how we can expect to, impose such a radically different goverment from that of Blair’s New Labour, which after all has just won an election and therefore has a mandate for its policies, including no income tax rises, welfare-to-work and keeping to Tory spending limits.
Our answer has to be that advocacy of a workers’ government must include condemnation of the existing “democracy’’ in Britain. If this, in turn, is not to be taken to mean opposition to all democracy and support for a dictatorship, then such condemnation must be supplemented by outlining an alternative democracy, best summed by calling for workers’ democracy. That is, not just a workers’ government but a workers’ system of government.

We also need to stress that Blair has been able to get away with his attacks on the working class so far thanks to a long campaign of attacks on Labour Party democracy and on the link with the unions by the leadership, which has been echoed by trade union leaderships treating their own union memberships in a similar way. Blair has been able to use the highly bureaucratised labour movement in conjunction with Britain’s sham parliamentary democracy to dictate to the working class, as the accepted leader of its own movement, what is and is not possible in politics.

We therefore need to change not just who is in government but this underlying situation that enables New Labour to get away with Tory policies. To do this means winning back the elements of workers’ democracy that Blair and previous Labour leaders have abolished and extending workers’ democracy to new limits.

The fight for workers’ democracy is therefore a fight for thorough-going democracy in the labour movement and a fight to impose and replicate the norms of that thorough- going democracy on bourgeois politics, the bourgeois state and throughout society. This includes calling for: working- class representatives and candidates, a labour representation committee, annual election of all labour movement positions, all paid officials to receive the average wage of the workers they represent, the right to recall delegates and officials, a rank and file movement in the unions, rank and file control of labour movement conferences, annual elections for all parliaments, assemblies and councils, abolish the Monarchy and the House of Lords, reduce the voting age, directly elected committees to control the utilities, public services and branches of the state. In making the case for workers’ democracy, and illustrating the meaning of it with the above demands, Marxists can convey more effectively what a workers’ government involves, as well as how it can be won. We can also clearly present ourselves as the true democrats and expose the utter shallowness of Blair’s claims to be building a modern democracy.

The editorial in WL43 ends with the sentence, “The job of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty is to make links between those immediate demands... to impose the political economy of the working class against the priorities of profit, and the political aim of a workers’ government.” The idea of workers’ democracy is the key idea for making those links.

Bill Davies