Shouting Out For Marxism

By Russ Hoyle

Labor's radical voices resound with stridency--and division

We are facing the worst economic crisis in living memory," roared Marxist Union Leader Arthur Scargill. "Young people are being thrown on the scrap heap. We have to take the fight for jobs into the streets!" As Scargill stepped back from the podium, his audience of 2,000 Young Socialists jumped to their feet and broke into wild applause. Assembled at the seaside resort of Bridlington for their annual conference, the young foot soldiers of the Marxist left spent three days berating the established order. They joined in choruses of the worldwide revolutionary anthem, the Internationale. After each refrain, they raised their fists in a defiant salute and chanted: "Thatcher out! Out! Out!"

The walls inside the Spa Royal Hall were plastered with slogans depicting an array of causes: LABOR TO POWER WITH SOCIALIST POLICIES! NO CRUISE MISSILES HERE! U.S. HANDS OFF EL SALVADOR! Militant speakers went on to protest Prince Charles' upcoming wedding as a lavish indulgence at a time of high unemployment. Complained one: "This flaunting of wealth is obscene." Finally, with a lordly flourish, Andy Bevan, 29, the Young Socialists' national secretary, sounded the clarion call: "Comrades! We're at the beginning of the beginning. We see the workers flexing their muscles against unemployment and mass misery. They seek a workers' democracy like Lenin and Trotsky sought to build!"

This was all sloganeering hyperbole, to be sure. But there is little question that the Marxist left currently commands more influence than it has ever had since the Labor Party was founded in 1920. In the past year the Marxists have gained control of much of the party's machinery from its aging, moderately left leadership. They have forced rules changes that give them unprecedented power in the selection of the party leader--and potential Prime Minister--as well as strong leverage over Labor's elected representatives.

In local elections in May, militant leftists took control of London's municipal administration and installed a 35-year-old radical politician, Ken Livingstone, as leader of the Greater London Council.

Most disturbing to Britons is the fact that the radical leftists have injected many of their views into the party's national platform. Among them: withdrawal of Britain from the European Community, unilateral nuclear disarmament, nationalization of all major British industry, and abolition of the House of Lords. Recoiling from the aggressive left's surprising ascendancy, four former Labor Cabinet ministers and a group of sympathetic M.P.s broke away last February to form their own center-left Social Democratic Party. Protested Shirley Williams, longtime Labor frontbencher and dissident leader: "The party I loved and worked for over so many years no longer exists."

After years of being seen as youthful zealots playing in the sandbox of extremism, the Marxist militants are now viewed with true concern. Said former Prime Minister Harold Wilson: "I share the nausea of a majority seeing that claque of ultra-left thugs raising their clenched fists." Labor's Deputy Party Leader Denis Healey observed, "The time has come to say to those who are wrecking our movement now what Clem Attlee said to those who tried to play the same game before the election of 1945: 'A period of silence from you would be welcome.' "

No such silence is likely. Though militant activists probably number no more than 10,000--less than 5% of Labor's 220,000-strong party membership--they have penetrated all levels of British political life. They range from the elected Members of Parliament who serve on the party's national executive committee to veteran Marxist union leaders; from the polytechnic-educated civil servants of the left's ideological front, Militant Tendency, to the radical leaders of local parties and the rhetoric-spewing Young Socialists, the tireless proselytizing foot soldiers of the movement. Though their roles vary, the players on the leftist stage equal one another in stridency and aggressiveness. The left's chief pillars:

The Standardbearer. Labor M.P. and former Cabinet Minister Tony Benn, though he refuses to label himself a Marxist, has supported the militants at every turn. The meticulously courteous and aristocratic Benn, who sips tea from an earthenware mug as a gesture to the working people he has chosen to represent, insists that "capitalism is a spent force." In a bold attempt to position himself to take over as party leader after Michael Foot, Benn is challenging moderate Deputy Leader Healey for the party's No. 2 post. The showdown promises to be a bitter one. Radical socialism, Benn argues, "is not some new thing, not a foreign import that comes in by courtesy of Mr. Brezhnev. It's part of our tradition." Benn defends unilateral nuclear disarmament on the grounds that "we do not believe that an American President, whom we did not elect and cannot remove, should have the power of peace and war by firing missiles from our airfields." Says he: "It is time to make it clear where the Labor Party stands."

The Union Boss. If any one figure epitomizes the new aggressiveness of the organized Marxist left, it is "King Arthur" Scargill, the militant president of the Yorkshire Miners. A strong contender to become president of the powerful National Union of Mineworkers next year, Scargill, 43, is baldly contemptuous of the Labor Party's right wing. Says he: "We need them like a tree needs Dutch elm disease." Scargill grew up poor in Yorkshire, where in 1961 he spent his first date with his future wife at a Young Communist League debate. He has turned the Barnsley constituency in southern Yorkshire into an extension of his union fiefdom by waging all-out war on Labor right-winger and 27-year parliamentary veteran M.P. Roy Mason. "The last Labor government failed to carry out basic socialist policies," says Scargill. "It failed to impose a wealth tax, failed to abolish the House of Lords, failed to take into common ownership the means of production." Staunchly anti-American, Scargill blasts the U.S. for stationing troops in Europe and accuses the CIA of fomenting the workers' rebellion in Poland. Says he: "They're trying to overthrow socialism."

The Ideologue. Ted Grant, 67, a South African-born revolutionary, is the spiritual leader of Militant Tendency, the group of perhaps 5,000 activists that helped engineer the leftist putsch against Labor's moderates. Militant Tendency claims that it draws its strength, in part, from the backing of some 95% of the Young Socialists' 10,000-odd supporters; it is also credited with at least some control over nearly half of Labor's 635 local constituency parties. The genial Grant is confident that the time has come for the Marxist left. "There was a time when we were a tiny handful of voices crying out in the wilderness," he explains in his spartan office in London's decaying East End. "Now there is a crisis in capitalism on a world scale. When the Labor Party and trade unions are controlled by Marxists, a peaceful transformation of this country will be possible." And if the government should deem it necessary to use force against insurgent leftists? "Then we'll defend by force," he says grimly. Grant attributes to Leon Trotsky the dictum "Nobody, nobody can change the will of the working class to change society!" In fact, he says, the only place society really worked was "in the early days of Russia, from 1917 to 1923." He favors dismantling the British monarchy, but insists he would not want the royal family abandoned altogether. Says Grant with an ironic twinkle: "We would give them jobs as caretakers looking after the palaces."

Organizers. "Red Ted" Knight, an avowed Marxist and mentor to the Greater London Council's Ken Livingstone, is head of London's Lambeth borough council. He loudly protested police action during the riots, mostly by blacks, in Lambeth's Brixton section in April. Said he: "Lambeth is now under an army of occupation. Steps are being taken by the police to set up the same apparatus of surveillance as one sees in concentration camps." A fastidious dresser who drives a BMW, Knight is an unlikely looking street radical, but it is from the pavements that he draws his support. He has been widely accused of exploiting racial tensions in an attempt to rally radicals to his council campaign. Though he was thrown out of the Labor Party in the mid-'50s for being active in the Socialist Labor League, he was readmitted in the early '70s.

The Foot Soldiers. The firebrand Young Socialists provide the manpower for recruiting drives on factory floors and in local parties. "We're becoming enormously attractive to working-class youth," claims Laurence Coates, 22, an unemployed school janitor elected as Young Socialist representative to the Labor Party's 30-member national executive committee. "We're not a 'mass' force, but we're growing."

Among the converted is Margaret Reavey, 25, a public housing office receptionist in Gateshead, on the northeast coast, who became a Marxist in sympathy for the miners' strike that helped topple the Conservative government of Prime Minister Edward Heath in 1974. "You don't go to bed at night and wake up a Marxist," explains Reavey. "It comes through experience. I disliked what Heath and the Tories stood for."

Another young devotee, Sam Brown, 22, lived in Nottingham with his Jamaican-born parents before moving to London's Streatham district. He traces his radicalism to being black. As a member of the Young Socialists' London organization, Brown passed out leaflets during the Brixton riots urging young blacks and whites to protest police repression. Says Brown: "I'm a Marxist because that's the way people like me progress."

The Young Socialist canon comprises equal parts of rage against the Thatcher government and extremist idealism. Young Socialists demand full employment, a 35-hour work week and a guaranteed annual minimum wage of $9,434; the group would also curb "militarism" by creating soldiers' unions, free elections of officers and mandatory retirement of all generals currently in service. Notes Antimilitarist Coates: "Real Communism would make Brezhnev choke."

For all their noisy and strident confidence, the Marxist left has also suffered some setbacks. Labor's impressive showing in the recent local elections, in which Conservatives lost control in 23 of 54 counties, has given some encouragement to party moderates. Michael Foot used the occasion to proclaim that "the alternative government of the country is in a pretty healthy state."

Benn's candidacy for deputy party leader caused fierce controversy among members of Labor's left-wing Tribune Group, which has tried to persuade him to reconsider his plans. The reason: leftists within the party are afraid that a defeat for Benn at the annual Labor Party conference next September will mean a setback for their policies. Says leftist M.P. Eric Heffer, who up until now has been a staunch supporter of Benn: "We must not believe that any one individual must be blindly followed."

Benn has adamantly refused to back down. A full-scale intraparty war over his challenge now seems inevitable. Already the lines are being drawn in the unions, where leftist support for Benn is concentrated at the shop steward level. Most union barons, who wield unprecedented power over the selection of party leaders under the new rules, are inclined to support Healey. Electricians Union Chief Frank Chappie, a right-wing maverick, has gone so far as to call Benn a "little Stalin advocating a socialist commonwealth along the lines of Russia and Eastern Europe." The struggle ahead for the Labor Party will be long and divisive. Benn's candidacy has gathered enough steam to mute opposition from fellow militants for the moment. Ultimately the outcome could depend not so much on whether the moderates can defend themselves, but on whether the left can stay unified when real political power is within its reach. --By Russ Hoyle. Reported by Bonnie Angelo and Arthur White/London

With reporting by Bonnie Angelo, Arthur White

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