Why We Contest This Election¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter Digest: "Why We Contest This Election"
This chapter, published in Socialist Appeal (Vol. 6, No. 11), announces and defends the Revolutionary Communist Party’s decision to contest the Neath by-election, framing the intervention not as a bid for cheap publicity but as a principled effort to pose the fundamental question of working-class strategy before the most advanced layers of the British labour movement. The core argument is that the by-election presents a decisive moment: workers must choose between continued subordination to the Tory-Labour coalition—which the chapter denounces as a counter-revolutionary government serving capitalist interests—and an independent revolutionary struggle for workers’ power on a socialist programme.
The chapter’s key claim is that the Labour Party has undergone a steady degeneration over the past generation, losing even the militant, reformist spirit of earlier years. It cites the betrayal of the 1926 General Strike by union leaders, the treachery of Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden, and the refusal of subsequent leaders to lead a real fight against the employing class as evidence that Labour is no longer a socialist party, nor even a party of social reform. The present coalition government is presented as a direct continuation of MacDonald and Snowden’s policy, with Labour leaders acting as “doormats and policemen” for the capitalists.
The chapter’s most sustained polemic is directed against the claim that the war is a “war for democracy” against fascism. It argues this is a “terrible deception and a downright lie,” marshalling a series of quotations from Winston Churchill to demonstrate his long record of support for fascism: his praise for Mussolini in 1927, his eulogy of Hitler in Great Contemporaries, his 1938 statement that a defeated Britain would need a Hitler to lead it, and his 1940 denunciations of the Soviet Union during the Winter War as a “deadly mental and moral disease.” The chapter contends that Churchill and his class aid fascism wherever they can, citing the backing of Quislings Darlan and Badoglio, the disarming of Belgian workers, and the intervention in Greece. It argues that the war is not an anti-fascist crusade but an inter-imperialist conflict over markets, raw materials, colonial slaves, and strategic bases—a result of the contradictions of capitalism. The Labour leaders, including the so-called “left” wing that protests but refuses to give a lead, are held responsible for supporting Churchill’s policy against working-class interests.
Drawing on the historical experience of the German working class, the chapter warns that fascism can only be destroyed by the working class taking power and abolishing capitalism; even a military victory for British and American imperialism will leave the danger of fascism intact, both abroad and in Britain itself. The appeal to the workers of Neath is to use their still-existing organisations to fight for the independence of the labour movement from capitalism and prepare the struggle for power.