This is an edited extract from Tony Benn's speech at the Debate of the Decade April 1980 published in "The Crisis and the Future of the I must repeat that a Labour Government was better than Thatcher then (1974-9) and it would be better than Thatcher now. But the policies it followed would not be goodenough to tackle the problems that I emphasise better than Thatcher then and now because the problem that Paul Foot and doesn't the agitation continue when Labour is in power?' — is because the rank and file of the Labour Party know that it's better to have a Labour government than a Tory government and they are not prepared to put it at risk.
We must be prepared to face the fact that the problem of balance between agitation and If we are serious we have got also to ask why . il ls unal tne socialist The real complaint that I have is not that we (the Labour Party) reformed and it failed, but Tony Benn the policy of Conference.
caucanon was not rerormea the police and reformed.
of revolutionary socialism. was a solution to their probiem now.
your revolution.
to solve our problems'.
That is what the argument going on within the Labour Party is all about. It is that industry was not reformed despite the 1973 programme. fully support, It is that the banks were not reformed despite Parliament was not reformed despite the insistent demand for the abolition of the House of Lords. The civil service was not reformed The contro of the security services was not I have had many shop stewards come to see general election. me from UCS onwards to raise their problems with the minister. What they do not want from a Labour minister was a lecture in the efficacy What they wanted If we only talk to those who have major problems about revolution then they will say to us: "You are trying to use our crisis to promote We want to use you, the Labour movement and the Labour leadership The difficulty that the socialist groups are That is my case this base to exercise power. The policies may have built up workers' self confidence in their naraly ability to co-operate with the government; but they did not build up the confidence and power to act independently once government had failconditions If anything they nurtured a dependence on government and the possibility of gaining supwhich lasted long after sympathetic ministers had left the Formal This is in danger of happening all over more damaging consequences. On the one hand the Labour Party's They Jobs, Peace and guarantees; Freedom is based on the 1973 policies which Benn tried to carry through at the Department of Industry. On the other hand, even if there is some move to the left in the leadership of the Labour Party, these industrial policies will a matter meet the same concerted and powerful attack from the Civil Service, major industrialists and financiers, as Benn met last time; more powerfully concerted in fact, if the party's leadership production. itself is at all sympathetic to the left.
So the danger is that once again workers, own slightly more cynical this time, will be sold policies by the Labour Party executive which the power in the end neither the executive nor the Labour powe leadership workers' necessary industrial and extra-parliamentary power to carry out. But neither, with their existing policies, will they have prepared for that possibility by building up the power of workers da.
Though Benn and his policies have encouraged a more political trades unionism within many shop stewards committees, it is usually political in the limited sense that it unemployment requires political solution, which means a solution from from the politicians, from someone other than themselves. So in a way it is a political trades unionism which only feeds the present erosion of industrial The reason why the Labour left's policies have tended to have this effect is that they completely underestimate the kind of power required to challenge the corporations and their allies in the state. There is a hint of this over optimism in benn's Granada lecture, ne commends the extension of collective bargaining to cover health and safety issues and to try tocover control of pension funds, and then 'Next on the agenda for trade union negotiation must be an agreement for the joint tor, planning of a whole range of company policy about. marketing, investment, mergers, manpower planning, and the distribution of profits with a requirement to agree on all these matters in, and I think they must face it, is that they are confusing extra-parliamentary struggle which I with anti-parliamentary campaigning which invites the labour movement to repudiate its past.
Here is the paradox: What is the ballot box but a revolution? Of course it is a revolution. I invite you to go round the world today, and find how many people would give up their lives for the right to do what we can do which is dismiss our government when it comes to a I think Paul Foot's party and the IMG are •so small partly because people fear that power was acquired the way Paul and Tariq and the other socialist groups wish to acquire it, the people would lose the right to dismiss them if they were not satisfied with what followed The British working class created the British Labour Party and we have the means to win consent for socialism by democracy. Any other sort of socialism is unachievable and would not be worth having even if it could be achieved. - The idea that such agreement is possible is consistent benins vener 'welfare capitalism is no longer possible for the British people' (as he said at the Labour Party special conference). It could only be under the of welfare capitalism of capitalist boom and prosperity — Illat tic con flict between workers' immediate interests and those of capital are sufficiently blunted for such agreements to be anywnere near possible Imagine Lucas Aerospace agreeing to joint planning for socially useful but not necessarily profitable products, or GEC agreeing to joint planning about mergers!
might sign formal and through som( ritualistic discussions. But these issues of investment, mergers, marketing, and such like, go to the very heart of capitalist accumulation They are not like health and safety, where it is usually of bargaining over an extra cost for the employers. Bargaining over investment, mergers, etc., especially in a recession, is like bargaining over the very basis of capitalist We need to distinguish between workers' organisations developing and fighting for their plans and proposals for an industry which can lead to temporary victories through : which such plans can help to build; and the idea of joint agreements on planning and the future of the industry. The idea of plans on investment, products, quality of the welfare state, the organisation of industry, as a means of extending workers industrial and social power, is next on the agenWorkers at Lucas Aerospace, in the powe engineering industry, in hospitals faced closure, and elsewhere have already put it on ino apre monts inn tharrangements for joint agreements on issues on the agenda is to tie workers to the illusion of welfare capitalism and weaken the power needed to create socialism. Back-up To criticise the left's industrial policies in this way does not mean that policies for a socialist government are irrelevant. It means that whereas the Labour left proposes policies which assume government will have the power to challenge private capital, and workers will provide a back-up, we are arguing for developing a strategy by which public sector and industrial workers, and community organisations will have the power to challenge the private corporations and the state, a socialist govern. ment would provide a back-up and support.
That sounds a long way away. For the pre sent it means policies, campaigns and political initiatives which not only build up the strength of workplace trade unionism in its present forms, but which also encourage links across companies, across industry and the public secacross the workplace and community organisations; in other words which encourage the kind of links which are necessary to draw up and fight for policies to meet working class needs, and at the same time to lay the basis fo * socialist society.