SDP Mark 2?

International no. 7, November–December 1986, p. 31

Scanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.

intornational REVIEWS

GRAHAM RICHARDS Eric Heffer, Labour's future — socialist or SDP 2? Verso £5.95 ERIC HEFFER was defeated in this year's election for the Labour NEC, and if they didn'tknow already, readers of this book will quickly discover why the LCC hit squads responsible for his defeat went gunning for him. For Labour's Future is an all-round denunciation of Kinnockism and all its works. Eric Heffer exposes the shift to the right inside the party, the witch hunt, the leadership's attacks on Liverpool and its failure to adequately support the miners. All this is very refreshing from a member of the PLP, as is Eric Heffer's straightforward and comradely attitude towards the revolutionary left.

Truth to tell, there is not a lot of enthusiasm for socialism in the PLP Labour MP genuinely committed to fighting for socialism must find it all demoralising. Today's PLP is made up of long-term and hardened rightwingers, Tribunite old stagers gone sour and cynical over the years, putting their faith in Kinnock; those disgusting young men with shiny shoes and filofaxes using the labour movement for a leg up the careerist ladder, eyes gleaming at the orospect ot a junior ministerial post if they keep their noses clean; and a tew, a very few, genuinely committed to socialism.

For all his intransigence, Eric Heffer has had governmental experience, although not at cabinet level, and his account of his short period as a junior industry minister under Wilson is a fascinating one. During the 1970-74 Heath government Labour eleborated a new industrial strategy based on 'planning agreements'. Planning agreements, as opposed to widespread nationalisation, were a cornerstone of the 'alternative economic strategy.

Supporters of the politics of this magazine never had any confidence in this strategy because we saw planning agreements, and indeed the whole AES, as a substitute for the mobilisation of the working class needed to fight for such a socialist policy. In any case, as it turned out, Wilson and the majority of the cabinet were not in the least interested in even the kind of radical interventionism implied by planning agreements, and proceeded to sabotage the proposals from industry minister Tony Benn and his associates.

Benn was removed, and the national enterprise board became a lame supplier government cash to industry. Eric Heffer's account of this process is a INTERNATIONAL No 7 November/December 1986 graphic and timely one — an almost textbook account of how even inadequate but apparently 'left wing' policies get chopped up by the Labour right in power, in co-operation with the civil service.

The strength of Labour's Future is that it combines a review of the shift to the right inside the party and the contemporary political situation, with an overall dis cussion of political strategy for the left and for the future of socialism. Such an overall vision and level of discussion, informed in Eric Heffer's case by an obvious wide knowledge of the international labour movement and an equally wide study of classical and contemporary socialist theory, is very welcome - and very unusual among Labour MPs! In recording agreement with much of what Eric Heffer says, we also have to record some disagreements.

First, Heffer pillories the eurocommunists for their shift to the right and capitulation to pro-capitalist policies. He accurately identifies the dangers in this not so much in the very limited organisational strength of the CP, but in their growing intluence in the Labour Party and the wider labour movement. Secondly we have to record agreement with his argument against leaving the Labour Party and abandoning the fight against Kinnockism and the right. But his polemic against the SWP on this score is marred by his overall strategic conception of how socialism can be achieved.

This is summed up in the question which he poses of whether socialism can be achieved by constitutional means. He quotes Stafford Cripps' 1932 statement that 'socialism can be achieved by constitutional means... but only just with approval. It will not surprise Eric Heffer or anyone else that we disagree with this statement. It is vacuous. Either it can be achieved by constitutional means or it can't. 'But only just' merely serves to introduce some doubt into the situation. If there is doubt then the answer should be more logically 'possibly, but not certainly'. I suspect that this is really Eric Heffer's position.

In Britain the notion that socialism can be achieved constitutionally suffers from the problem that there is no written constitution and what there is is changed daily - by the whim of geriatric judges. Another way of posing the question is whether socialism can be achieved legally, through the election of a radical socialist government, without substantial extra-parliamentary opposition from the bourgeoisie, and without revolutionary mass action to defeat that resistance.

Only frenzied ultra-lefts deny that during the fight for socialism we might well experience the election of a left wing Labour government which might sincerely try to legislate important anti-capitalist measures. Then what? Answers of the order 'we'll see' or 'who knows' are inadequate. Tony Benn generally replies by stating that he is not opposed to mass action to defend a Labour government — followed by sarcastic references to tin helmets and Lee Enfield rifles. Such answers are evasive and won't do.

I would pose the reform/revolution problem in the tollowing way. Unless you are absolutely certain, both trom first principles and an analysis of British institutions, including the police and the army, that the ruling class and its agents will not resist a socialist government by extra-parliamentary, extra-legal and violent sabotaging means, then you have to prepare the working class, through education, propaganda and agitation, to mobilise to defeat such resistance. Such propaganda and agitation, if followed through to its logical conclusion, makes you a partisan of workers' control and workers' self-organisation. It makes you a partisan of the notion that the self-activity of the working class will be decisive in the transition to socialism. It excludes the 'parliamentary road', but not of course parliamentary action tout court.

This particular debate, as they say, will run and run. Our disagreement on this point should not diminish our appreciation for Eric Heffers' determined stand against the shift to the right and his championing of socialism and working class struggle. Only when socialists stand up and refuse to go along with Kinnock will the basis of a resurgence of the left be created. Eric Heffer, at least, has stood up

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