Workers' Liberty 17, January 1994. Socialism and Democracy

Michael Foot: My kind of democracy (part 2)

Part 1 . Off and on during these past two and a half years since Labour's electoral defeat of May 1979, Goldsmith's famous lines have floated incongruously through my mind: When lovely woman stoops to folly And finds too late that men betray What charm can soothe her melancholy, What art can wash her guilt away? And political parties subjected to such outrages are even more difficult to soothe. It may be a slight comfort to recall that the condition is not unprecedented. The same RH Tawney, quoted last week, was the leading expert on Labour's post-1931 condition: "British socialists," he wrote...

Chapter 4: Superstition or struggle?

Chapter 4: Superstition or struggle? The workers against Stalinism The search for the original sin of Bolshevism has exercised tired and demoralised socialists for at least 50 years. Like characters in an ancient Greek drama, they seek the explanation for the Stalinist plague in some violated taboo. Was not the sin in the way the Bolshevik Party organised itself? That has always been a popular explanation, and shows signs of life now among some tired ex-radicals in the Labour Party and on its fringes. For Foot, the great sin was revolutionary violence. The diagnosis of what exactly was...

Chapter 3: The scarecrow of Stalinism

Chapter 3: The scarecrow of Stalinism Can the tiger be skinned claw by claw? In part 2 of his written oration on parliamentary democracy and those whom he denounces as its enemies (Observer, January 17 1982), Michael Foot attempts to answer the challenge he had posed to himself in part one. There, he ended by promising to undertake the difficult task of replying to those whose rejection of the idea that there can be a peaceful parliamentary road to socialism in Britain was expressed in RH Tawney's brilliant image which Foot quoted thus: "Onions can be eaten leaf by leaf, but you cannot skin a...

Chapter 2: The appeal to history

Chapter 2: The appeal to history Foot's safe good causes Foot invokes the saints of British radicalism (even the suffragettes - who were, technically, small-scale terrorists and mostly not at all radical except on votes for women). He justifies their extraparliamentary actions and claims their tradition for himself. But today it is different, he says - because then, either parliament was not available to the people at all, or the radicals were fighting for a sectional interest shut out from parliament's all-transforming portals. Wat Tyler (who led the Peasants' Revolt 600 years ago) "had no...

Chapter 1: Direct action and democracy

Chapter 1: Is direct action against an elected capitalist government undemocratic? Marxists are democrats The first thing that needs to be said about democracy is that they are lying about the Marxists and about our attitude to democracy. Those Liberals who "entered" the Labour Party long ago and made their careers as servants of the ruling class there, and those soft "lefts" like Kinnock who seem to believe in the divine right of the Liberals to rule the Labour Party, all lie through their teeth when they say that the revolutionary left is not concerned with democracy or is opposed to...

Introduction : Socialism and Democracy

The cry "For Parliamentary Democracy: the Trotskyists are the enemy of democracy" is - perhaps predictably - the political standard under which Labour's right and soft left are trying to rally forces for a counter-offensive against the serious left. The direct target is the revolutionary left. But the main target is the much bigger serious reformist left. The slippery Neil Kinnock, eager to preserve a "left" appearance for himself, has focused on this issue. The obvious intention is to confuse and divide the left which, when united, secured the victories of Brighton and Blackpool and which, if...

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