Criticism of the Article: ‘Labour Party Conference’ in the ‘ Militant Miner’ , Oct-Nov 1944, by G Russell¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter is a polemical broadside against the ‘Left Fraction’ and their article in the Militant Miner, which the author accuses of crass opportunism and a descent into left reformism. The core argument is that the ‘Left Fraction’ has fundamentally abandoned revolutionary communist principles by equating the conquest of state power with winning a parliamentary majority for a Labour government. The author insists that this confusion is not a minor error but an abyss separating their policy from genuine Trotskyism.
The key claim is that the demand for a “Third Labour Government with a majority in Parliament” collapses the question of state power into a mere electoral outcome. The author argues that even if such a government were elected, all questions would still be settled in the interests of the capitalist class unless the workers also overthrow the parliamentary set-up and substitute Soviet power. This basic principle, which distinguishes revolutionary Marxists from Social Democracy, is entirely absent from the article under fire. The text draws heavily on the theoretical legacy of Trotsky, particularly his insistence that propaganda must take the form of a dialogue with the masses, and that sectarian isolation is the twin evil of opportunist pandering. The author invokes the experience of the German Revolution of 1919 and 1923 to make a devastating counter-argument: the Militant Miner article blames the defeat on the British working class for not fighting courageously enough, whereas the real culprits were the betrayals of the Social-Democratic leadership (Noske, Ebert, Scheidemann) and the weakness of the revolutionary leadership. This misattribution is denounced as a complete inversion of Bolshevik-Leninist method.
The polemic is directed not at an individual comrade but at the ‘Left Fraction’ controlling the Militant Miner. The author accuses them of acting as a loyal left wing of the Labour Party, going so far as to claim that even Tribune is less capitulatory to the Labour bureaucracy. The article is charged with failing to characterise or criticise the Labour leadership, instead loading the crimes of social-democratic leadership onto the masses themselves. The author contrasts this with the correct tactical approach: raising the transitional demand for nationalisation of the mines without compensation under workers’ control, criticising the Labour leaders as agents of imperialism in the working class, and using the slogan “Labour to Power” not to put reformists in office but to expose their bankruptcy through the workers’ own experiences. The chapter concludes by insisting that internal disagreements must be thrashed out in the Internal Bulletin, not in open publications, and that the democratically-arrived-at decisions of the National Conference must be operated.