Socialist Workers’ Party, UK

THE SOCIALIST WORKERS' Party in the United Kingdom emerged in 1977 from the International Socialists, whose weekly paper had been called Socialist Worker since 1968. Ideologically and intellectually, the Socialist Workers' Party is a Trotskyist party, deeming the Soviet Union to have become a “degenerated workers' state” in which socialism had been supplanted by a form of state capitalism, managed by a new privileged bureaucratic elite that effectively exploited the Soviet [Page 407]working class. The Socialist Workers' Party was thus emphatic that the Soviet Union was not a genuinely socialist society (even though the private ownership of the means of production had formally been abolished following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution). Hence the party's de facto slogan: “Neither Washington nor Moscow, but International Socialism,” which was clearly a riposte to those who equated the Soviet regime with socialism.

The Socialist Workers' Party was an avowedly revolutionary socialist party, insisting that the parliamentary road to socialism, as traditionally advocated by Britain's Labor Party, was ultimately a dead end. According to the Socialist Workers' Party, the social reforms achieved by Labor politicians through parliament do not liberate the working class from the alleged wageslavery and exploitation of capitalism, but merely serve to integrate the workers further into that system, thereby beguiling them into believing that a fairer, more equal society can be pursued through general election victories and parliamentary majorities.

For the Socialist Workers' Party, the Labor Party has never been, and never will be, a vehicle for achieving socialism; on the contrary, it is deemed an obstacle to the liberation of the working class from the capitalist mode of production. Consequently, irrespective of the size of the parliamentary majorities variously obtained by the Labor Party in general elections, the Socialist Workers' Party is emphatic that Britain remains a capitalist state, in which the economic power of capital (even more so in the age of globalization) is infinitely greater than the political power of an election-winning Labor government, and in which the higher echelons or senior personnel of that state—judiciary, civil service, police, armed forces, and the ideological state apparatus—are instinctively and intrinsically hostile to anything more than the mildest of social reforms and workers' rights.

The Socialist Workers' Party also posits a distinction between potentially or actually militant rank-andfile workers and grassroots trade unionists, and a bureaucratic trade union leadership that is usually too eager to seek compromise solutions with employers. In this respect, both the Labor Party, and most trade union leaders, are deemed guilty of repeatedly selling out the British working class and of deliberately dissipating and dampening-down their radicalism.

Consequently, the Socialist Workers' Party sees its role as providing an independent and revolutionary socialist alternative to the Labor Party and class collaborationist trade union leaders. The first stage in this long-term process is tackling the “false consciousness” that allegedly keeps most of the working class wedded to the social reformism of the Labor Party and trade union bureaucrats, and concerned with achieving shortterm, and sometimes short-lived, gains within capitalism. The Socialist Workers' Party therefore places great emphasis on direct and active involvement in the workplace and trade unions, particularly during industrial conflict such as strikes, where and when it can seek to mobilize and educate the more advanced sections of the working class, hoping to persuade them that their particular dispute is a manifestation of the irreconcilable conflict between capital and labor inherent within capitalism, and that their struggle should be seen as part of the wider struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

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