Building the socialist opposition
Ian Pattison, Socialist Party national committee and the Socialist campaign organiser
We are celebrating a special birthday. 60 years of the Socialist Party, and our newspaper, the Socialist.
We launched as ‘Militant’ in 1964. From a small group of socialists, our size and influence in the workers’ movement grew. The name Militant would come to represent what our party and paper stood for.
The capitalist system – based on the super-rich ruling capitalist elite ruthlessly extracting as much profit as possible – is incapable of providing a decent standard of living for the vast majority, or solving society’s problems. We want to connect socialist ideas to the fightback of the majority of people in society.
Workers and youth
‘Militant – for Labour and youth’ – the paper’s tagline summed up what we were about. We wanted to persuade young people to join the fightback… and still do!
Young people, new to these ideas, can throw themselves into struggle. We want to combine that dynamism, with the huge power of the organised working class.
The working class makes up the vast majority in society. And thrown together in workplaces, it can come together and get organised. Just look at what happened during Covid, and then the strike wave afterwards.
When we formed, Militant supporters were mainly made up of activists in the Labour Party Young Socialists. The right-wing Labour machine later shut down its own youth wing, because of our influence.
At that time, Labour still had a working-class base. Workers saw it as ‘their’ party. Today, the party has been transformed into a capitalist party.
Through building support for our ideas amongst young people and workers, Militant was able to lead mass struggles of the working class, with our paper as a key tool.
The Socialist isn’t just made in an office. Even the staff that work on producing it each week are campaigners and trade unionists in their local areas.
The Socialist is the product of everyone. It draws together the experience of working-class people. In their lives, in victorious struggles, in defeats. The Socialist is a place where the ideas in our movement can be debated and discussed.
The Socialist aims to channel all that into something that’s useful for workers to read. The whole paper does that. But so does every individual article.
And different people will get different things out of each article. And hopefully the front page will grab people, and make them think.
Capitalism is obviously an awful system. But it hasn’t been replaced by socialism yet. So we have to get organised to do that.
The Socialist is a bridge that takes workers from where they are now, to where we think they could be – organising to change society for the better. A ‘transitional programme’, as Leon Trotsky called it, one of the leaders of the 1917 Russian revolution.
The first issue of Militant said: “The most important thing is that we wish to tell the truth to the working class, against the lies and exaggerations of the capitalist class, and the half-truths of Labour’s officialdom”. The same applies today.
Hope
Militant was also hopeful about how things can change for better. And we still are, for good reason.
Trotsky, at the start of the 20th century, described a conversation between a pessimist and an optimist. The pessimist described all the problems in the world, and said to the optimist: “Surrender, you pathetic dreamer. Here I am, your long awaited 20th century, your future.”
“No”, replies the optimist. “You are only the present”. We are the future.
Read more in the ‘Rise of Militant’ book
Liverpool – answering the bosses’ lies and slander
By the mid-1980s, Militant was able to lead a citywide mass movement, including a citywide general strike, to force Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher to cough up £30 million – £100 million in today’s money.
In the 1983 local elections, Labour won a majority on Liverpool City Council. The new councillors included supporters of Militant. And our members had important influence in the District Labour Party.
Jobs and homes
Liverpool council refused to implement Thatcher’s cuts. Instead, we mobilised the city by implementing our socialist policies. We built 5,000 council homes, built nurseries, parks, and leisure facilities, and created 8,000 well-paid jobs.
As a key leader of the Liverpool struggle, Tony Mulhearn, put it: “We translated socialism into the language of jobs, housing, and social services”. Those homes still stand today.
There were 47 Labour councillors taking on Thatcher’s Tories. Militant supporters only made up a minority of the 47.
But we had the political ideas to give others the lead they needed. Our paper was vital in getting these ideas across to the movement we were building.
The capitalist class, using the capitalist press, and assisted by the right-wing of the Labour Party and trade unions, threw slander and lies at our party. Those lies needed to be answered.
An important way we did that was by taking the truth to working-class activists in the Labour Party and the trade unions, up and down the country, in the pages of our paper.
At the height of the struggle, it was necessary to produce a special supplement, the ‘Mersey Militant’, such was the need to communicate more frequently with the workers in the city participating in the struggle.
Despite what the bosses and right wing threw at us, Liverpool’s socialist council was popular. It increased its votes and support every election.
The Tories, Labour’s right wing, and the courts, had to use other dirty means to defeat the council, eventually banning the fighting councillors from office.
Capitalists and Labour
Since then, the capitalists have wrestled control of the Labour Party away from the working class. The capitalists now have Tories and Labour as parties that serve their interests, albeit in slightly different ways. Militant was central to the battle to stop Labour becoming an out-and-out capitalist party.
To achieve their goal, the capitalist class had to get the Labour leadership to expel Militant – Labour’s Marxist wing. We were tenacious in our opposition to being expelled. We organised left-wing Labour-supporting workers and youth in a mass campaign to stop it happening.
It took the right-wing Labour leaders a decade to succeed. And they could only succeed after big defeats for the working class.
Read more in ‘Liverpool – A City that Dared to Fight’ book
Raising workers’ voice in miners’ strike
The heroic miners organised a year-long strike in 1984-85 against job losses. Militant helped the Labour Party Young Socialists raise £1 million in the movement for the striking miners.
We published a special strike bulletin, ‘Militant Miner’, to help promote the demand that many were raising – a 24-hour general strike, in solidarity with the miners against the government. And 500 striking miners joined us.
Militant broadcast the voice of miners. After the police onslaught during the Battle of Orgreave, we published the workers’ side.
“The real battle began. It was the most terrifying thing I have been through in my life. What made it worse for me was that this was happening in the village where I’d lived most of my life.
“I saw an elderly miner of about 60 have his head split open by a baton. The riot police would march straight up to you shouting ‘one two, one two’, and provoking the miners: ‘Come on then, have a go’.
“And one snatch squad policeman went too far and got snatched himself! They had to send police horses in to get him back – he was in a far from healthy state when he emerged from the picket.”
Read more in ‘A Civil War Without Guns’ book
Poll Tax – organising mass civil disobedience
Militant enacted Thatcher’s final defeat. Thatcher’s Tories went too far, increasing local taxes beyond what people could afford.
‘Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay’, we said. And so did 18 million others.
Militant played a leading role in the movement that defeated the hated Poll Tax. And soon its hated architect, Thatcher, was gone too.
Our paper gave crucial advice to the 18 million-strong movement of ‘non-payers’ and ‘bailiff busters’. We even popularised the idea of ‘McKenzie Friends’ – ordinary people that could support you in court.
People’s experience of Labour’s attitude to the Poll Tax further cemented in workers’ minds that Labour was no longer ‘their’ party. Labour sent Poll Tax non-payers to court to be jailed, including two Militant Labour MPs, Dave Nellist and Terry Fields.
From Militant to the Socialist
The tasks of our party and paper have remained the same throughout their existence – to win support for our ideas, and build our organisation among workers and young people. But the environment in which we carry out those tasks changes. The outlook and understanding of the working class changes too, based on the experience of struggles, victories and defeats, nationally and internationally.
The working class internationally faced a huge setback in the 1990s. The collapse of the former Soviet states unleashed a wave of capitalist triumphalism.
Alternative to capitalism
These states were not socialist, but a grotesque caricature – top-down dictatorships, run in the interests of a narrow ruling elite. They were, however, an alternative economic system, run on the basis of nationalised planned economies.
It was an ideological defeat for the working class. Socialist ideas were knocked back.
Through a period of capitalist economic boom, it was necessary to patiently explain that crisis is an inherent feature of the capitalist system. Crisis would throw workers into struggle, and mass support for socialist ideas would begin to develop again.
Our paper now had another important job – repopularising socialist ideas. We renamed ourselves, the Socialist Party, and the paper, the Socialist. And we had a new demand to raise too – for a new mass party of the working class.
Build the socialist opposition
With every passing day, working-class opposition to Keir Starmer’s Labour government is growing. The Socialist has a crucial role in building the socialist opposition, offering a socialist programme, strategy, and tactics to the developing struggles of workers and young people.
Following the economic crisis of 2007-08, a wave of protest and struggle swept the world. The Arab Spring swept away dictatorial rulers across the Middle East and North Africa.
Across Europe, new left-wing formations sprung up. In some cases, such as Syriza in Greece, they came into government.
Jeremy Corbyn
In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party won the support of hundreds of thousands, particularly young people, for his anti-austerity programme.
The Socialist was alone in putting forward how Corbyn could win out over the right-wing Blairites looking to bring him down. We told the truth about the Blairites’ intentions, and put forward demands, such as mandatory reselections of Labour MPs, to force out the right wing.
This, and more, raised the need for Corbyn to mobilise the hundreds of thousands of his supporters to take on the capitalist enemy within.
When Jeremy Corbyn first stood and won the Labour leadership in 2015, one young woman, inspired by his campaign, said: “His ideas might seem old fashioned to others, but they’re new to me”.
In the recent strike wave too, the biggest for 30 years, a new generation has returned to ‘old fashioned’ ideas. The Socialist carried reports from the picket lines, giving a voice to workers.
Our paper called for “inflation-proof pay rises and full funding”. We explained how the strikes could coordinate together. And, on the biggest strike days, our front page called for a “24-hour general strike” to do that.
More people, striking workers, bought the Socialist on those picket lines and protests than at any point since before the pandemic.
Our members in the trade unions make the case for how they can be transformed into fighting democratic organisations. This includes working with other socialists, as part of broad lefts, and challenging for the leaderships of unions.
Where’s the party for us?
The trade unions must take steps towards establishing a new mass party of the working class. There is no other newspaper that puts forward the next concrete steps forward for the struggles of workers and young people, and links that with the need for the working class to bring about the socialist transformation of society.
A new generation of youth has seen everything from the last few years – Corbyn, Covid, the strike wave. They have been learning from what’s happening, from a capitalist system incapable of providing for them.
They have been marching on the huge protests in Britain, opposing Israeli state terror on the Palestinians. And they’re still marching.
Those youth, flooding out of tube stations to voice their anger, have snapped up the Socialist paper on those protests, and asked to join the Socialist Party.
Starmer’s Labour
All these fights will be even more vital under Starmer’s government. So help us build the socialist opposition.
Help us build the Socialist as an alternative. Your paper that tells the truth.
Read it. Subscribe. Help us sell it. Write for it. And help us promote its ideas.
And join the Socialist Party. These problems are the past, we are the future.
