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Britain: Liquidation conference of Socialist Alliance?
[Workers Power Global May 2003]
After almost five years of electioneering, the Socialist Alliance has recently won its first council seat, in Preston, Lancashire. The local elections saw a handful of encouraging results for the alliance (votes of over 10 per cent) The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) easily dominates the Socialist Alliance through their numerical strength, since the walk out of the Socialist Party in December 2001.
The Preston victory - a positive result in a region where the fascist BNP have been growing - was very much an SWP victory. A victory too for the SWP? role in the Stop the War campaign and for a new policy they are developing. The candidate is a member of the SWP and his victory owed much, though not everything, to the endorsement he received from a local Muslim Imam who had been involved in the Stop the War campaign.
Triumph was the predominant mood amongst the SWP majority of the 300 or so delegates gathered in London for the Socialist Alliance conference on 10 May. With a councillor and a couple of other good results in the bag they were determined that every decision at the conference was going to go their way. So, when it came to the debate on the future of the alliance, any opposition to their line of march was greeted with robust heckling from their rank and file and sneering contempt from their leaders.
In fact it was the first Socialist Alliance conference in the past five years that has felt like a normal SWP event. The attitude of relatively open and loyal political debate over differences - one of the most positive features of the Alliance - was replaced by the old SWP version, "you?e either with us or you?e against us".
All of this made recognition of the undeniable failure of the Socialist Alliance well-nigh impossible, despite the fact that it has not made any sort of electoral breakthrough to disillusioned Labour voters, and that it is increasingly seen as just one of the SWP? many fronts.
To talk of failure is regarded as heresy by the SWP after the Preston result. But the Preston result - one councillor after five years of hard work - needs to be seen in context. We have just been through a period of massive political turmoil. We have had a two million strong demonstration against the government and its war. We have seen Blair? popularity plummet.
We have seen the first real signs of open dissent in Labour ranks.
In such a crisis the Socialist Alliance should have done much better than the BNP, not worse. The fascists, during the same period, have gone from being a handful of boneheads to the second biggest party in Burnley, with 6 councillors elsewhere around the country. They are the ones talking about breakthroughs.
In Scotland the election of 6 MSPs for the Scottish Socialist Party made a real breakthrough on the back of mass opposition to Blair.
Yet the Socialist Alliance, outside of a handful of seats in May, remained stuck in the 1 to 2 per cent ghetto - and this at a time of major class polarisation and political crisis. In other words it failed to make any sort of breakthrough in exactly the conditions under which a breakthrough was necessary.
Its membership has remained static since the general election, at around 2000. Not only has the Socialist Party left, so too have people won from Labour, notably the former NEC member Liz Davies. Liz left when a serious breach of trust was revealed.
But anyone who has spoken to her knows that her main concern was over the way in which the SWP ran the alliance, promoting campaigns they liked and sidelining any that were less to their taste. She is not alone. Already the few remaining independents in the alliance are using the discussion lists to express alarm and despair over their inability to make their voices heard or their opinions count.
The fact that there were only around 300 at the conference is itself a reflection of the extent to which the alliance has failed to grow over the last period. Everyone with any honesty reports pathetically small meetings, or the absence of meetings, few campaigning activities and increasing frustration amongst those left. Saying this at the conference was enough to get the SWP hecklers shouting from the back.
The alliance is less significant, less dynamic and less of a living coalition of forces today than at anytime during its recent history. It is certainly not attracting reformist workers on any substantial scale from the Labour Party, and this at a time when we know countless members of the party were tearing up their cards in disgust at Blair? warmongering.
Yet the SWP? chosen political strategy for the alliance - an electoral united front, limited to a left reformist programme in the hope that this will attract workers away from Labour has quite simply failed. The SWP has always countered Workers Power? arguments for a clear revolutionary transitional programme for the Alliance with the argument that it would "shrink the alliance". Now thanks to the SWP? opportunist strategy it is they who have to admit, "Honey I shrunk the alliance". And they Know it, even if they dare not admit it.
They know it because they are openly preparing to replace their old strategy?and with it the whole Socialist Alliance?with something far more opportunist, far less "socialist".
SWP leading member John Rees, spelt this out clearly in a speech that showed utter contempt for everyone in the alliance who was either outside the SWP or refused to toe its line. Dismissing - and distorting - calls for a campaign for a workers?party, Rees set out his alternative:
"The new alliance that can make a difference to the politics of this country is there when Michael Lavalette [the Preston SA councillor] stands up alongside Maulana Said Ahmed [the Imam who called on Muslims to vote SA] and says We worked together to get the alliance elected in Preston. That? what the new alliance looks like ... In a week? time when I go to see the Communist Party of Britain, people we have worked closely with in the Stop the War Coalition, to discuss whether or not we can form a common platform with them for the 2004 Euro elections; or two days ago when I met the chair of the Birmingham Stop the War Coalition and an important figure in the central mosque and they said, We think we have a great deal in common with you; we want to form a joint platform with you. Can we discuss it with you??- that? what the new alliance means."
He went on to dismiss the "pointless resolution mongering" of the SA conference - what is a conference (as opposed to an SWP Rally) supposed to discuss if not resolutions to guide future action? Of course the "new alliance" policy contained in Rees?speech was not embodied in any resolution and therefore has not become the policy of the Socialist Alliance. But a lot of difference that will make to Rees and Co, in their negotiations with the CPB and the Imams. Of course the politically astute will have seen this coming. A recent Socialist Review article argued for a new alliance with Galloway, Crow and so on, along with "many in the Muslim community".
Giddy with the success of the Stop the War Coalition (mosques, trade union bureaucrats, CPB and CNFD) the SWP, never an organisation to allow political principles stand in the way, believes it can create an electoral alliance with the self-same forces. They are indeed after an altogether "new alliance" and the minute they have got their new pact in place they will dump the Socialist Alliance.
The problem isn? the idea of a new alliance - a new alliance with serious working class forces for a workers?party would be a step forward. But that is not what Rees is proposing. The party project is excluded because, laughably, the few thousand SWP members with a minimal base inside the working class, already regard themselves as THE revolutionary party. There is no need for a new party, indeed they want to stop any new party forming because it might blow their pretensions to being the party sky high.
More importantly, Rees is not proposing a socialist alliance, at all. In his article he talks of a "broad left" alliance that would be welcoming to the Muslim community. In his speech he boasts about negotiations with both the CPB and an important figure in the Birmingham Central Mosque.
But Rees is making a horrible confusion. A temporary agreement for united actions for a progressive goal can be struck with any mass popular force. A block with leaders of the Muslim Community to stop the imperialist attack on Iraq war was absolutely correct and principled?whatever the Islamophobes of the Alliance for Workers Liberty say. But to forming a new political formation with a non-working class force whose ideology is, by definition, opposed to socialism, opposed to many democratic rights (secular education, women? and gay rights, etc.) is totally unprincipled
On what conceivable programme can this alliance be founded? Of course we need to address the Muslim community?above all its working class majority and win thousands of them to the ranks of socialism.
Of course we are not frightened if many retain their religious beliefs on a private basis. But what we cannot do is form a generalised political bloc, offering ourselves to the electorate as (at least potentially) an alternative to Blair, with leaders and elders who are representatives of the bourgeoisie within the Muslim community and whose policies - most obviously on women and lesbians and gays, - are politically counterposed to socialism.
Only by diluting the already pale brew in the Socialist Alliance? programme, People before Profit, could you hope to get such an alliance.
Yet this is exactly what Rees is proposing in his "new alliance". Actually it is not new at all. If Rees has forgotten his history he should ask Andrew Murray ?chair of STW and leading light of the CPB. Indeed he has recently written an internal memo saying that the present political situation sees the best opportunity since the ?30s to realise the cherished dream of the British Stalinists, a POPULAR FRONT.
The CPB are desperate to set it up as soon as possible, and not only with Muslim elders and businessmen but also with Lib Dems and anyone you care to mention. It is a class collaborationist electoral alliance that obliges the working class to renounce, for a time (sic), the struggle for state power and socialism.
When this brilliant idea of Comrade Stalin was applied in both France and Spain in the 1930s between the workers?organisations and others (even if they are only shadows of the bourgeoisie) it led to terrible betrayal and defeat. Likewise in Chile in the 1970s. Go to Marxism in July and you will hear exactly these lessons, in the abstract. And abstract they will remain. Because the SWP cannot put them to practical use.
Of course this brilliant "new" project may collapse at the first hurdle, the negotiations John Rees is undertaking. But what the SWP has fallen victim too, under the impact of the successes of Stop the War and the Scottish Socialist Party, is good old fashioned electoral cretinism. Because they do not start out from a programme for working class power?they inevitably end asking "what will win us the most votes?" Instead of an action programme which relates this goal to the immediate burning needs of the working class and linking them together by struggles for control of the workplace, expropriation of the rich, building up the fighting strength of workers and the disintegrating the power of the capitalist state?they negotiate the lowest common denominator they can find with union bureaucrats and progressive muslim clergymen.
In contrast to this violent turn to the right by the SWP Worker? Power put forward a resolution arguing that the alliance had recognise that it had failed as a party, a proto-party or what Alex Callinicos calls a "special type" of united front. Instead we called on it to a campaign, to draw in the mass forces who clearly want to break with Labour, those who support left union leaders like Bob crow of the RMT and left MPs like George Galloway - currently suspended by Labour.
The object of the campaign would be to put the idea of a new workers?party firmly on the political agenda. The political character of that party - we argued - should be decided democratically, after a thorough debate in every major town and city and ultimately by a democratic national conference. This should be one not only with resolutions (oh horror!) but with alternative draft programmes, put forward by the forces involved in creating it.
We do not believe it should be set up on the model of the old Labour Party as George Galloway has proposed, with admirable frankness, be it said. With equal frankness we say it should be a revolutionary workers?party?a Leninist party.
An extended debate if at the same time it is accompanied by practical engagement in the class struggle, shoulder to shoulder, would give all the forces involved the chance to decide between the fundamental alternatives.
We have the confidence to believe that thousands upon thousands of workers and youth, of women and the Black and Asian communities, would use the test of action as well as test of the arguments, to demand a break from reformism altogether.
Thus, we did not lay down any preconditions that it should be revolutionary - but that this was the outcome that we, as revolutionaries would fight for.
We don? want another 100 years of betrayal. We want a party that can overthrow capitalism. But we recognise that we would need to convince the thousands of workers breaking from labour but not yet from reformism that this was a viable option.
In other words Worker? Power? resolution sought to use the slogan of a new workers?party as a means of uniting with many as yet reformist workers in the fight for a new party and as a means of convincing them that revolution was the way forward. The only real precondition, therefore, is that the new workers party in formation should be fully democratic, so that revolutionary voices can be heard as well those of the reformist union leaders or MPs.
Initially our resolution was dropped from the conference order paper because another workers?party resolution (sponsored by the Weekly Worker and others) was on the agenda. The fact that this resolution explicitly cited the SSP and Rifondazione in Italy (established left reformist parties) as models to adopt while ours explicitly left the character of the party to be decided as argued above, was ignored. However, after representations to the arrangements committee our resolution was returned to the agenda for debate and voting upon.
With the conference so overwhelmingly dominated by the SWP our resolution was easily defeated. But the alternative, put forward by Alan Thornett of the International Socialist Group (the ISG), and eagerly backed by the SWP, means that the alliance is now headed for the knackers?yard.
The ISG resolution acknowledged the problems of the alliance? failure to grow, without recognising that this was a product of its electoral ANL-like character - i.e. wheeled out when needed by the SWP: otherwise parked. It recognised that the depth of the political crisis cried out for a new socialist alternative, without saying anywhere that this would have to be a party, because it is parties, not "alliances" or "special united fronts", that contest elections, form governments and fight class political battles.
It called for engagement with wider forces, without spelling out what political programme we would want to win such forces to.
All of this meant that the ISG could present their resolution - to themselves and their members - as a means of pushing the SWP towards their chosen model of party - the SSP left reformist "multi-tendency party). But what they couldn? pretend it did was tie the SWP to doing anything different with or within the Socialist Alliance. In other words this resolution was a fig leaf to cover the shameful exposure of the SWP new alliance tactic. The naked truth would have been fat better.
The exact shape of the new alliance is yet to be seen. How successful Rees?negotiations will prove, especially as the anti-war movement recedes, is an open question. But the fact that this is the real agenda that the SWP are pushing in the Socialist Alliance (without doing us the courtesy of submitting a "pointless resolution" justifying it) means that over the next few months there will have to be a sharp fight within the alliance to stop them.
The popular front project probably wouldn? get very far in Britain today.
But it would damage the fight for socialism, squander the real opportunity of a mass break from labour to real class politics, hamper fight for a workers?party and spread confusion and demoralisation in the ranks of those workers caught up in such a project. To put it bluntly we have to fight this project in the Socialist Alliance, but more importantly in every forum of the Labour and anti-capitalist movement. Certainly if the SWP? new non-socialist alliance is formed then that is the end of the Socialist Alliance.
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