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Opportunism and the British Labour Party

2,246 views · Published 30 December 2018 · 15:36 · Indexed 6 November 2026

Channel: Proletarian TV · 2018 · Education

Socialism aims to bring working people of all countries an era of peace, culture, fraternity and civilisation. Yet many people, some even respectable government ministers of imperialist governments, describe themselves as socialist, without bringing about anything of the sort. So how should we judge their sincerity, or lack of it? What does real socialism look like?

Leaders of Britain's Labour Party for over 100 years have been opportunists. Clement Atlee, Ramsay McDonald, Snowdon, Clynes, Henderson, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Tony Benn, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn, Peter Hain, Lord George Robertson, Gordon Brown...

All have been described by themselves, supporters, and 'academics' as 'great leaders of labour', and as socialists. Moreover many British revisionist communists and trotskyists trail in their wake, claiming that voting for the Labour Party is the 'realistic' way to get socialism.

Let us pass over for now the actual record of the Labour Party in government and just deal with their core beliefs: what is socialism?

Lenin defined these respectable 'labour' statesmen - even the once revolutionary Karl Kautsky, late 19th and early 20th century leader of the German communist movement - not as socialists, but as opportunists. As social-chauvinists and social-imperialists.

Revolutionary marxism teaches that only power in the hands of the working-class themselves will constitute socialism; and that the workers must use that power to take all wealth, and particularly productive wealth, and the real administration not just of government but also of industry, from the exploiting class and so put the real wealth of society at the disposal of the working people.

This actual socialism (expressed in deeds, not just in words), will involve breaking the old dictatorship of capital (Westminster, parliament) and replacing it with real working-class rule - councils of workers with legislative and executive power.

Lenin taught that "Only he who recognises the dictatorship of the proletariat [the RULE of the working classes] is a socialist".

At the time of WW1, many cowardly so-called socialists caved in under pressure and sided with their own ruling capitalist class. These opportunists refused to agitate against the slaughter of workers, which was being carried out by the largest imperialist powers to defend the profits of the monopolist capitalists. They put their own comfort and petty-bribes above the lives of millions of workers they claimed to represent. The opportunists betrayed the workers and sided with their own ruling class.

All of those 'social-democratic' parties, the British Labour party most prominent among them, betrayed their fellow workers and showed themselves instead to be servants of their rulers, servile lackeys of their own exploiters, menial slaves, mentally chained to the concept of the greatness of their own slave-masters.

Lenin was quite explicit when speaking at the second congress of the Communist International (July 19-August 7, 1920)

"Of course, most of the Labour Party’s members are workingmen.

"However, whether or not a party is really a political party of the workers does not depend solely upon a membership of workers but also upon the men that lead it, and the content of its actions and its political tactics. Only this latter determines whether we really have before us a political party of the proletariat.

"Regarded from this, the only correct, point of view, the Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers with the aid of the British Noskes and Scheidemanns."

Today we can say without reservation that Jeremy Corbyn offers only capitalism with a bearded face. There is no hope for the working people of Britain and the world to be found in such an arrangement, should it come to pass!

The fight for socialism is meaningless without a fight against Labour Party opportunism.

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