Blackpool conference this year [September 27 to October 1], the delegates faced a real dilemma. For the first time in thirteen years they were meeting under a Labour government. It holds office by the most precarious of majorities, a Labour government whose very existence was threatened almost at birth by an econo~mic crisis inherited from the Tories. The government had survived this, along with the dark threats of international finance capital. But at what cost? It threw overboard much of the programme on which it had won the election. .Now the assembled delegates from the trade unions and the Labour parties had to give their verdict on the government's record. They had to approve or disapprove, Disapproval shown in strength would mean a vote of no confidence in the Labour government. It might precipitate a general election, the defeat of Labour and the return to power of the hated Tories. This was the dilemma which faced the delegates.
Harold Wilson and his fellows on the platform were only too well aware of this and they made full use of the situation to fasten their grip on the conference. On the very first day, Chairman Ray Gunter appealed to the traditional loyalties of the movement, sure of receiving the response he wanted. With the platform dominating speak= ing time, and able to make a judicious selection of speakers to the rostrum, Gunter made sure that the left-wing case received only the minimum opportunity to be presented.
One of the main issues which the conference had to face up to was the relationship between the party and the government. Not for thirteen years had the movement been compelled to face this issue urgently, though there were substantial straws in the wind during the great debates on Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament when the late Hugh Gaitskell claimed autonomy for the Parliamentary Labour party and insisted that it was not bound by conference decisions. This was contested at the time by none other than the present prime minister, who actually fought Gaitskell for the party leadership on this very issue.
Chairman Gunter set the tone when he insisted that while there could be criticism and he even "welcomed this," it must be quite clear that the party could not tell the government what to do.
The full implications of this can be seen when the composition of the national executive committee is examined. Eleven members of the new executive are either members of Wilson's cabinet or else hold other government positions. By the peculiarities of the British constitution, which is governed by convention as much as by law, the rule of unanimity among the members of the government is sacrosanct. Al» though: elected by the conference as the representatives of the rank and file on the highest body of the party, these eleven will actually sit there in a solid bloc, defending every action of the government, no matter how contrary to the will of the conference.
The danger in this is that if Labour has a prolonged term of office, conference will be transformed from a parliament into a sounding board for the views of the government. Delegates will come only to applaud, Annual conference will simply be a massive national rally of the faithful instead of a forum where policy is hammered out and debated,
Four out of the seven elected to the constituency section of the national executive committee owed their places more to their past than to their present. Anthony Greenwood, now presiding as colonial secretary over the bloody suppression of the national liberation movement in Aden; Barbara Castle, doling out relief to the under~ developed countries as minister of Overseas Development; Richard Crossman and Wedgewood Benn, all received their big support from the constituencies because traditionally they are associated with the left.
There was very real anxiety in the constituencies that if they did not vote for these left-posturing individuals, more hardened right wingers would be elected,
What is significant is that Frank Allaun, a member of parliament and staunch critic of the leadership from the left, running for the national executive committee for the first time, collected 259,000 votes,
Most delegates came to the conference with mandates from their parties on whom to vote for. Given a free hand, the results might have been somewhat different.
The three most important debates at the conference, involving main issues of principle, occurred on the government's income policy, immigration and Vietnam.
One issue which was not debated but which occupied the minds of many delegates was re-nationalisation of the steel industry. Promised in the election programme and again in the Queen's speech at the opening of the last parliament, this was a pointed omission from Wilson's 70-minute review of the government's record.
On the government's income policy, the main discussion took place round the resolution moved by Clive Jenkins on behalf of the
Association of Supervisory Staffs, Executives and Technicians [ASSET]: "This Conference disapproves of the proposed legislation to enforse compulsory advance notification of union claims to improve wages, salaries and conditions,"
‘The much more fundamental resolution from the Nottingham West constituency party was not put to the conference. Through a manoeuvre the platform succeeded in shunting it aside, The resolution is nonetheless interesting as a reflection of views in the left wing of the Labour party. The resolution read was as follows:
"This Conference cannot effectively support the Government's ‘present Incomes Policy for the following reasons:
"(a) It does not adequately provide for the badly underpaid sections of the community, and serves only to freeze the existing injustices. Before any beginning is made on the planning of incomes, certain basic principles must be applied, particularly those of equal pay for equal work by women and youths, and the establishment of a guaranteed minimum wage, ,
t(b) It does not provide for redistribution between social sectors of incomes. A pre-condition of any acceptable incomes policy must be that it takes away from the sector of rentier incomes, and adds to that of wages and salaries.
"(c) It is not underpinned by an adequate level of social welfare provisions. Pensions still need considerable augmentation, in spite of the recent increases.
"(d) It does not adequately control property incomes, Taxation is an inadequate weapon for preventing cheating by employers, Only the complete accountability of every firm to its workpeople can ensure that the policy is being applied to property incomes, Work people must, as of right, have access to all their employers! account books, and to such professional aid as is necessary to interpret the data. Wages are already publicly known and administered by the employers and the Inland Revenue, and equity requires that profits be placed in a corresponding position,
"(e) It does not adequately control prices. Conference believes that machinery should be set up to determine prices, as opposed to the present Prices and Incomes Board policy of reviewing decisions already taken unilaterally by business. Such machinery must ensure effective workers! and consumers! participation in the determination of prices,
"(f) Conference is concerned that the incomes policy is not founded on a strategic national plan for the development of planned, publicly owned and democratically administered industry. It will thus tend to benefit private interests rather than thrust forward and defend public priorities.
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"In rejecting the incomes policy as it stands, Conference urges the Government to open immediate negotiations with the unions, so that a viable policy can be formulated to meet these objections, If this is done quickly, it may possibly save the Government from a costly and demoralising defeat, and contribute to the rallying of the Labour movement around the Socialist objectives outlined in Jlause IV of the Party Constitution."
The ASSET resolution was moved as an emergency resolution in reply to the government's threat to pass legislation which would com= pel unions to give advance notification of wage claims, As Clive Jenkins pointed out, there was no mention of dividends in the govern= ment's proposals, These were an attempt to fetter the trade unions to the state machine,
Although the conference rejected the emergency resolution on a card vote by 3,654,000 to 2,540,000, the fact that Britain's largest union, the l, 750, 000~strong Transport and General Workers!, as weil as the Amalgamated Engineering Union voted against the government on this issue will cause them to think twice before passing such legislation, It could lead to an open conflict between the industrial and political wings of the movement.
But the approval of Wilson's income policy will serve a future Tory government, which will not hesitate to use the precedent in an effort to draw the teeth of the unions.
The left fought strongly against the government's new policy on immigration, a policy of imposing restrictions on coloured immi-~ grants into Britain in direct opposition to Labour's traditional policy on this issue. Although the conference gave its approval to the government's policy, this flouting of the most basic socialist principles is not being lightly accepted by the left.
In the debate, at least one member of the government, Bob Mellish, did not hesitate to appeal to the lowest prejudices; and even some of the supporters of the racist immigrant policy were ashamed at this naked exposure of their hidden motives. Immediately after the debate, a group of members of parliament, led by Reginald Freeson for Willesden East, a constituency with a large immigrant population, issued a statement that they will continue the fight to prevent this shameful piece of legislation becoming law.
Similarly on Vietnam, the platform managed to get a substantial majority in favour of its pro-American line up. But 2,284,000 votes were cast against the government's foreign policy (4, 065, 000 in favour) and on the side of the freedom fighters in the jungles of Vietnam, A militant stand was taken on this issue by left-wing delegates, Ken Coates of Nottingham making a particularly forceful declaration, The size of the anti-imperialist vote shows a potential force to be reckoned with inside the Labour party. The conference, in fact, was the scene of one more battle in the long-drawn-out fight for a socialist
foreign policy that would ally the great British Labour movement with the freedom movements of Africa, Asia and Latin America instead of the war machine of the Pentagon.
Many delegates left Blackpool with a feeling of frustration, Their old signposts, Greenwood, Castle, Wilson himself, they feel, tricked them into voting for things they do not believe in. They have a Labour government, but a Labour government pursuing, on many issues, :the self-same policy as their Tory predecessors, This was not what they had been working for in the constituencies during the thirteen hard years of Tory rule,
This conference revealed the weakness of the left. It was fragmented, disoriented, scattered. But the very impact of the defeats has shown as never before the imperative necessity for the left to reorientate itself. The forces of the left are weak because in the constituencies, trade unions, parliament and in intellectual circles, they are out of touch with each other. They are fighting different battles and in different ways. The left must now unite, select the issues on which it will fight, and organise the fight on a nationwide basis throughout the Labour party and the trade unions,
Wilson and his cabinet colleagues want to go on acting as the executive committee of the ruling class. The left thus has no choice but to repjace them with new leaders, leaders who will take the party on the road to socialism. For this the left must now organise so that they are represented in strength when the Labour conference meets again next year.
THE NEWSIETTER EXPOSES A CASE OF “INSINCERITY"
By Peter Kork
Reporting the Labour party conference at Blackpool, the October 2 issue of the Newsletter, weekly organ of the Socialist Labour League, revealed a surprising modesty. On a number of key issues, the British Labour movement was sharply divided. It had to face the racial discrimination of the recent White Paper on Inmmigration Control, the ominous new attacks on trade-union independence which have been bruited by Messrs Wilson, Brown and Gunter, and the quite shocking subordination of Wilson's government to its patrons in Washington, nowhere more clearly revealed than in its scandalous policy in Vietnam,
On all these key issues the British workers found militant spokesmen; and significant minority votes were piled up against the platform of the conference. On Vietnam, 2,284,000 votes were cast against Wilson's endorsement of American policy, the vote in favor being 4,065,000. On the other issues, except for the rights of the
tor
Labour Party Young Socialists, the opposition vote never fell below 1,500,000. The Newsletter reports some of these results, with its usual mixture of shrill self-righteousness and sectarian spleen against other left-wing groupings.
On the question of Vietnam, for instance, much of the opposition to the platform was erystallised around a group of delegates from Nottingham. These left-wing centrists are characterised by the Newsletter as having exposed their "insincerity" in that one of them Tcongratulated Woodrow Wyatt on his courage. Wyatt is a spokesman of the right, even to Wilson's right in one matter, that he favours a formal. alignment with the rump of the once-significant British Liberal party.
Here:is what the Newsletter wrote:
"In the debate on the government's record Peter Price (Note tingham ) thought fit to congratulate Wyatt for his 'courage', thus rightly raising in everyone's mind just how much 'courage!, and resolution lay behind Price's constituency's motion against the war in Vietnam." (Page 4, column 3,
If one checks the record, one finds, of course, that the Note tingham speaker, Peter Price, said no such thing as that attributed to him. What he actually did was to note Wyatt's courage in a short speech regretting the lack-ef courage of the former left-wing members of the cabinet, who were allowing themselves to be compromised by supporting totally insupportable policies,
But the.Newsletter reveals its love of truth when, in a story in an adjoining column, it indicates that Wilson's road was not alto-= gether smooth in dealing with the Vietnam debate:
"Wilson, replying to the debate, ignored the description of the bloody war by the movers of the resolution, and ignored the ques= tion from a Nottingham delegate:
"tTf you and Stewart were in Vietnam, would you be on the side of the Vietnamese people, or of a South Vietnam prime minister [Cao Ky], who is a great admirer of Adolf Hitler?!" (Page 4, columns 5-6,)
What the Newsletter does not say is that the delegate who put this question, scarcely a compromising one, was the same Price who is tendentiously misreported earlier on the same page.
Another important speech was made in the same debate. It was that of the seconder of the critical Vietnam motion, Ken Coates, This speech was a trenchant attack on the American war, defending the fighters of the National Front for Liberation, and’ showing their affinities with the traditions of the British trade-union and labour movement.
One other newspaper maintained a discreet silence about this speech, which was widely described as the most sharply critical utterance at the conference. It was the Daily Worker, published by the Communist party.
Why was the Newsletter silent on this matter? Was it full of accounts of the interventions of its own supporters at the conference? It was not, for none were made.
If the Socialist Labour League had any delegates present, they maintained a complete and cowardly silence, not only on the issue of Vietnam, but on all other questions of concern to the left as well,
When the SLL was singled out by the right wing for expulsions, Gerry Healy, general secretary of the organization, announced that he would send ten persons back into the Labour party for every one expelled by the bureaucrats. If he did, there would be a lot of his followers at this crucial Blackpool conference.
Why were they so quiet? What subtle opportunist course were they pursuing? Is not the "sincerity" of the SLL's ultraleft rante ing gravely questioned by this unseemly docility?
THE ECONOMICS OF NEOCAPITALISM
[The following article, reviewing an essay by Ernest Mandel published in Cuba, appeared in two parts in Revolucién, the daily Havana newspaper which was recently combined with Hoy in a new pube lication, Granma, The first part was published Sepbunb er 25, the second September 29, The author of the article is Rail Roa Kouri,]
The critics of capitalism -- and still more so the Marxists -cannot fail to note the high economic level it reached in the decade from 1954 to 1964, and particularly among the countries of Western Europe and Japan, Ernest Mandel, a well-known Belgian socialist, author of numerous essays and books on Marxist economics, analyzes the phenomenon in an essay entitled, 'La economfa del neo-capitalismo,"
The growth of the capitalist economy since the second world war, declares Mandel, cannot be explained solely on the basis of reconstruction activities, although these were an important base of the industrial boom in Western Europe, From the point of view of the history of “economic cycles," we are undergoing a new "Kondratiev," i.e., a long-term wave which includes various normal cycles.
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Today it appears -- contrary to what many economists assumed in the thirties and forties -- that after the long-range cycle of stagnation that began in 1913 and ended in 1939, world capitalism entered a new cycle of accelerated growth in 1940, which will probably last until the end of the sixties, according to Mandel,
On the other hand, one of the salient features of contemporary capitalism is the existence of a movement of technical innovations == generally known under the name of the "third industrial - revolution" -- which has a tendency to be permanent, something without precedent in the history of capitalism. Its origin is precisely in the armaments race.
Traditionally, a technological innovation does not immediately follow a technological invention; on the contrary, many inventions are not utilized until the complete exhaustion of the current technological processes and the investments in fixed capital which they involve. However, the armaments race has reduced the interval between the time of a technological invention and its industrial application. The acceleration in the use of technological innovations has likewise reduced the duration of the economic cycle from 810 years to 45 years, For Marx, the length of the economic cycle depended mainly on the time utilized to renew the investment in fixed capital. With the growing utilization of technological innovations, the time has been reduced to almost half,
In the opposite direction, if the rate of technological inno} vations should diminish, as a result of partial disarmament, for example, the "life of investments in fixed capital would tend to be prolonged and the economic cycles would slow down. According to Mandel, there are indications -- not fully confirmed -- that this has actually happened in the United States since the economic recession of 1960-61,
If the history of capitalism has always been dominated by the law of unequal development between countries, regions within the same country, and between industry and agriculture, today it is necessary to center attention on the unequal development of the various branches of industry in each country. In the case of the U.S. this appears in the weak growth of the traditional sectors (steel, coal, textiles) and the enormous expansion of such sectors as chemicals, electronics and electricity. It is precisely the demand generated by the indus= tries of a high rate of development that explains the high level of expansion in the majority of the imperialist countries,
II. |
Neocapitalism, according to Ernest Mandel, is the new modus operandi of the capitalist system, the distinctive features of which flow from the organic necessities of capital itself, as well as the attempts made by the system to counteract the world development of the anticapitalist forees of the socialist camp and the national
freedom revolutions.
These can be summarized in four fundamental characteristics: (1) The growth of technological innovations and the shortening of the "life" of investments in fixed capital impose the need to carry out exact calculations on depreciation and obsolescence, as well as better planning of long-range costs, (2) The "third industrial revo« lution" produces ‘greater disparity between productive capacity and effective demand in the "market," thereby inducing a constant rise in sales costs which. reduces .surplus-value. (3) The need to prevent a crisis like that of 1929 has resulted in greater state interven= tion in the capitalist economy -- the state now guaranteeing the profits of private enterprises, directly or indirectly, through more or less disguised subsidies going so far as “nationalization of the losses. (4) The combination of these factors leads to the gradual oe eS sotion of "planning" (or, better, programming) in capitalist
economy, serving in a certain sense to "rationalize" the investment of capital,
Although the majority of these "yolans" contain considerable errors in forecasting and have not prevented the creation of excess capacity on a big scale, it would be futile, according to Mandel, to deny its usefulness to the big monopolies. If the successes of neo= capitalism appear brilliant, to judge by the results of the last decade, its internal contradictions == which are superimposed on the general contradictions of the capitalist mode of production == are already giving trouble.
In the first place, as neocapitalism generates a higher rate of growth, in such a way as to amortize fixed capital more rapidly, it also tends to reduce the industrial reserve army and to create conditions of full employment. Thus it destroys one of the basic mechanisms of the capitalist system, creating a growing contradic~ tion between the needs of neocapitalist programming and the pressure of the working class for constant wage increases.
To resolve this contradiction, neocapitalism has practiced two kinds of economic and political solutions: (a) the massive application of automation in order to reconstitute the industrial reserve army, and (b) the imposition of restrictions on the working class, such as the suppressior#*of the right to strike (Taft-Hartley Act in ‘the U.S.3 antistrike laws in France; fines, etc.).
*The Cuban author makes a theoretical mistake here, A rise in sales costs does not reduce the amount of surplus-value, but only the amount of industrial profits, -- Editor,
**rhis again is a mistake by the Cuban author. The correct term should be "limitation of the right to strike," -- Editor.
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This policy, declares Mandel, despite its favorable shorterun effects, tends to be self=defeating for the system.
A massive increase in fixed equipment, financed by means of a considerable increase in profits, cannot help but result in an extraordinary growth in the productive capacity of society, includ ing consumer goods, which, in the long-run, comes into conflict with a reduction in buying power due to the stagnation in wage levels and jobs. . ;
These contradictions indicate, in addition, that the present rate of capitalist growth cannot be kept up after the present decade,
IN THE