When Francois Mitterrand was elected President of France on 10 May, hundreds of thousands of young people crowded into the Place de la Bastille to cheer. Only three days earlier in Britain, the Labour Party romped home winning over 1,100 seats from the Tories in a local government election victory whose results were comparable to a 30 seat parliamentary majority in a general election.
The two results can not be weighed in the same balance. Mitterrand's victory represented an historic opening for the French working class: an opportunity to smash through the roadblock constituted by the Gaullist Fifth Republic, As the British press constantly reminded its readers, the local election gains were simply what one would expect at mid-term under an extremely unpopular Tory government.
Certain small features of both victories have a symptomatic significance for revolutionaries. Alain Krivine, the presidential candidate of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire, was officially invited by the Socialist Party (SP) to speak on the platform of their victory rally, And in Britain, the first major public meeting addressed by Ken Livingstone, the new leader of the Greater London Council, was a rally organised by Socialist Challenge, the newspaper sponsored by the International Marxist Group.
The fact is that revolutionary ideas and revolutionaries themselves are more welcome in the ranks of most Social Democratic parties in Europe than they have been for decades. There is a growing radicalism inside these parties and, in contrast to the 1930s, Britain is not an exception but in many respects a pace-setter.
A response to the crisis
The prime factors underlying this development are the onset of a generalised recession in the mid-1970s and the austerity measures which have been the uniform response of the ruling class. It is becoming increasingly clear that the scale of the problems faced by the working class today cannot be tackled by a strategy based on industrial action alone.
The organisational strength of the workers' movement built up over the years and extended in a rapid burst of struggle after 1968 in France, Italy, Spain and Britain was sufficient to stop a direct imposition of the full cost of the crisis onto the working class. But it was unable to cope with the political offensive launched by the bourgeoisie, often with the support and co-operation of the Labour bureaucrats, in the years that followed.
In Portugal, the 'democratic counterrevolution' spearheaded by Antonio Soares' Socialist Party pushed the working class onto the defensive following the isolation of the revolutionary vanguard following the desperate 'coup' attempt of November 1975.
The possibility of a government of the workers' parties was blocked by the 'Historic Compromise' in Italy and delayed by the Communist Party's sectarianism in France. In Spain the class-collaborationist Moncloa Pact between the leaders of the trade unions and the government so weakened the workers' movement that there are today more people unemployed than there are organised in unions.
In Britain, the political momentum developed by the miners' strike which toppled Heath was dissipated through the defeat of the left in the EEC referendum at the hands of an unholy alliance of the Labour Party right and the bourgeois parties. With Wilson and then Callaghan firmly in the saddle the Labour government and the trade union bureaucrats joined forces to impose their Social Contract which resulted, between 1976 and 1978, in the most rapid decline in living standards this century. The election in 1979 of a particularly 'ideological' right-wing Tory government led by Margaret Thatcher marked the start of a second phase of the austerity offensive of the capitalist class.
But despite these setbacks and the dramatic increase in unemployment throughout Western Europe in the last few years, the ability of the working class to resist the austerity offensive has not been decisively blunted. Evidence of this is provided by the rumbling political crisis in Belgium, the country with Europe's highest unemployment rate, where the workers continue to fight in defence of the linking of wage rises to inflation, the 'sliding scale of wages', won in the 1961 General Strike. Weaknesses opening the way to potential defeat have most often been seen in response to explicitly political attacks; a case in point is the timidness of the response of the workers' organisations to the recent attempted coup in Spain.
If Thatcher's victory marked the second stage of the bourgeois offensive, then the election of Mitterrand represents the first decisive expression of a second phase of working class response. Having reached an impasse in purely industrial struggle, the workers are increasingly looking to their traditional political parties demanding answers to the deep economic and social problems they face. This development, presaged by the growth of the Social Democratic and Communist Parties since 1978 poses questions revolutionaries have not had to face for decades.
Revolutionaries and the reformist parties
It was during the 1930s, a period of crisis of comparable depth to today, that revolutionary Marxists were last faced with the paradox of important new layers of workers looking to the historically bankrupt reformist parties of the Second and Third Internationals for answers to their pressing problems. Then, as now, historical precedents were not hard to find: the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries had grown dramatically following the February 1917 revolution in Russia as had the German Social Democratic Party after the revolutionary explosion of November 1918. The reformist parties, while unable to meet the needs of the situation or even to grant reforms, became a temporary refuge for the broad masses who were not yet ready to turn to the small and unproven forces of the revolutionary left.
The appropriate tactics for revolutionaries proposed by Trotsky under these circumstances have lost none of their force today. In Germany, the Left Opposition fought for a united front of the workers' parties against the rising threat of Hitler's fascists. With tragic results, this appeal to the Communist Party and the Communist International fell upon deaf ears finally convincing Trotsky of the need for a new Fourth International. The tactic of the united front was again advocated by Trotsky in France between 1934 and 1936, Here he argued that the revolutionaries could only take their place in the united front to 'contribute actively to revolutionary regrouping' and to 'impregnate the united front with a revolutionary content' by 'entering the Socialist Party'; this tactic was necessitated, he wrote, by the weakness of the French Trotskyists of the Communist League which prevented them becoming 'the independent axis around which the proletarian vanguard would crystallize.' (Leon Trotsky, 'The Way Out', Writings 1934-5, Pathfinder, 1971, pp 85-6).
Trotsky's advice was based on an assessment that the leaders of the Socialist Party (SFIO) would be unable to control their working class base and that the party would polarise into a revolutionary majority wing and a wing of extreme reaction grouped around the leadership: in effect, the SFIO would undergo a temporary transformation into a centrist party. Although the smallness of the Trotskyist forces was a painfully similar characteristic, no such centrist transformation was on the cards in the British Labour Party. The reserves of British Imperialism damped the radicalisation of the working class which was evident throughout the rest of Western Europe and avoided any necessity for the ruling class to risk serious sponsorship of fascist or bonapartist tendencies. Britain was out of step and, despite some isolated contrary signs like the dramatic growth of the Labour League of Youth to some 30,000 in the mid-1930s, would remain so for a whole historical period.
Britain joins the mainstream
The post-war period saw something of a synchronisation of developments inside the social democratic parties of Europe, but a negative one as far as revolutionaries were concerned The protracted boom provided unfavourable conditions for the development of mass left wings inside these parties and taken together with the weakness of the revolutionary Marxists ensured that such left developments as did occur were of a limited character. Substantial splits were rare. By the early 1960s, most West European social democratic parties had shifted decisively to the right dragging the leaders of their left wings in their trail.
Such conditions prevailed in Britain as elsewhere. The long boom meant that economic gains could be achieved through purely industrial struggles in the workplace, The central leader of the Labour Party left, Aneurin Bevan, was not forced to take a central stand in the mass struggle even in such notable class confrontations as the 1954 Docks Strike. The Labour Party did not call even the timid actions it does today to defend workers' living standards and the unions did not provide even token support for actions on political and social questions.
Today, there are signs of a creeping 'Euro-socialism' advancing through Europe: the beginning of an influx into the French SP before Mitterrand's election; a stiffening of the left in the German SPD in response to Schmidt's sharp swing to the right following the rise of Franz Josef Strauss; the beginning of similar developments in Sweden and even Norway with the growth of the Socialist Youth current.
But it is indisputable that the most advanced developments in social democracy today are those that are shaking the Labour Party in Britain. Far from the unitary character of the labour movement acting as a mute on working-class radicalisation it is starting to amplify it. The polarisation in British society is reflected day by day in the changing alliances and recompositions of the Labour Party.
The revolutionary left today is also in a numerically stronger situation than in the 1930s. The correct decision in the late 1960s to orient to the radicalising youth outside the Labour Party has brought into existence comparatively substantial — if still very small — independent organisations. But the revolutionary Marxists knew, and argued among their new adherents, that they would need to turn again towards the mass workers' parties and confront their leaderships along the road to building mass revolutionary parties. In Britain this task has now become an urgent imperative.
The present imperialist offensive under the twin banners of austerity and remilitarisation poses the need for a united front as urgently today as in the 1930s and in Britain this can only mean joint action between the Labour Party and the unions. But like their French counterparts in the 1930s the British revolutionaries of today can not expect the masses to 'crystallise' around their small organisations. Its increased weight means that the revolutionary left can, however, effect more rapid and dramatic results inside today's united front than it could in the 1930s.
At the same time the political and organisational goals of such work should be clearly defined. As Benn, and Bevan before him, realised the major obstacle to left advance inside the Labour Party is the trade union bureaucracy. Despite the conscious efforts of both to overcome the problem with 'educational' campaigns Benn's for deputy leader and Bevan's for party treasurer between 1954-56 — neither proposed organising the fight inside the unions.
The building of a new left wing in the unions based on policies of class struggle rather than class collaboration remains the key to both fighting the Tory government and overcoming the road block of the Labourite bureaucracy. Such a base, particularly in the large industrial unions, is the precondition for seizing the openings that exist in fighting for socialist policies.
Full-blooded involvement in campaigns like Benn's for deputy leader and the left's fight to win the Greater London Council or the next general election, should not lead to any tendency to play down differences between the Labour left's espousal of the 'Alternative Economic Strategy' and the policies which will form the basis of a new left wing today
Not only do the demands of the AES not break with the capitalist system they seek to reform, but the agency which it is proposed to implement them is the capitalist state itself. For this reason it is still necessary to emphasise the fact that Benn's political programme has more in common with that of Denis Healey than that of revolutionary Marxism,
Britain no longer lags behind the rest of Western Europe in the developments in the labour movement. Great opportunities are there for those who will take them. But only if revolutionaries can dedicate the majority of their forces to the fight inside the industrial unions and the Labour Party can they hope to achieve the breakthroughs that are now objectively possible.