Workers' Liberty 42, September 1997

Eric Hobsbawm somewhere discusses one of the oddest conundrums in labour historiography, one paralleled now in the historiography of IS/SWP: the 20th century reputation of the Fabian Society as far-sighted pioneers of independent labour representation - the gap between what was and what is afterwards widely accepted as having been. The facts flatly contradicted the Fabians' reputation. They opposed independent working-class politics for as long as they could, pursuing a policy of 'permeating' the Liberal Party with ideas about state and municipal enterprise. They 'come in' late to the movement...

We are now in a period where it is widely acknowledged that there is a crisis of socialist perspectives. This is particularly true for those social-democratic parties across western Europe. The essence of this debate about reform and revolution was summed up by Rosa Luxemburg at the time when she was engaged in a fight inside the German Social Democratic Party with Eduard Bernstein. Rosa said the debate between reform and revolution was not about different roads to the same goal but it was about different goals. It was a debate about two perspectives. One was the revolutionary perspective...

Tony Benn MP has posed, with remarkable clarity, the issues involved in the current battle over Labour's future. In an article for the Observer entitled "The end of choice at the ballot box", Benn has accurately spelled out the disastrous consequences of a series of related developments, especially the NEC's proposals to change Labour's structure and its decision to create a Lib-Lab cabinet committee on constitutional reform. Benn puts it like this; "The Prime Minister's decision to set up a Cabinet Consultative Committee under his chairmanship, with a wide remit, and made up of Labour...