The Socialist Workers Party attracts many young people and workers because of its size and militancy. At Marxism you will hear that it stands for revolutionary politics and building the party, there will be sessions in which the SWP leaders speak about Lenin and Marx and a whole series of famous revolutions. However what is most important is not the political lessons drawn in the meetings rooms at Marxism, but whether they are applied amongst workers in their everyday struggles.
The most striking thing for those who have been attending Marxism for years is the dramatic change in some of the SWP’s “fundamental principles.” Take the current SWP project, RESPECT. Its fundamental activity, standing in elections, was rejected outright in the 1990s. Then the SWP believed that this would inevitably lead to political degeneration.
In one article they wrote:
“In words it is possible to talk about combining serious intervention in the elections with struggle outside the Commons. In practice, the two pull in opposite directions. The search for votes pushes a party towards a softening of its message, towards a search for accommodation with the union leaders in order to secure backing and finance. The alternative is to centre on struggle and to recognise that in any situation short of an insurrection revolutionary socialists will appeal to only a minority of the class.” (Socialist Worker, 25.11.95)
Now this is not true of all revolutionaries, Lenin’s Bolsheviks managed to work in the Russian Duma without compromising their politics. But for the SWP its own twenty first century practice seemed to bear out its warnings of the 1990s. At the turn of the century they joined the Socialist Alliance, a left reformist electoral alliance comprised of most of the left groups in Britain and initiated by the Socialist Party. Rapidly the SWP took control of the Alliance. They resisted all attempts to turn the SA into a party with a revolutionary programme, to extend its activities across the whole range of the class struggle instead making sure it stuck to electioneering only and on a left Labour style reformist programme. From a promising start the SA soon hit a glass ceiling of electoral support, which meant few council seats were won and a member of parliament was an unrealisable dream. Then came the war and everything changed. The exit of George Galloway from Labour and Labour’s alienation of a geographically concentrated electorate amongst Muslims presented the SWP with a golden opportunity for an electoral breakthrough. But the SWP leadership decided that the Socialist Alliances weak reformist programme was too much, and waged a campaign to ditch it. Instead of socialism being the essential political basis for our world outlook, it became an inconvenience to reaching out to new layers.
The RESPECT coalition was an organisation that as Lindsey German said was explicitly ’not socialist’. Workers Power refused to join it, then we were slandered by SWP leaders that we ’did not want to work with Muslims’ – someone only needs at look at our record on supporting the resistance in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, our participation in the anti war movement and our anti racist work with immigrant communities to see what a lie that is.
The antiwar movement and parliament
The real crime of RESPECT is that at the height of the anti war movement with 2 million on the streets and mass disaffection about not only Labour and Blair but also the undemocratic nature of British parliament itself, the SWP did not capitalise on it. The role of revolutionaries would be to explain to the mass movement the real role of parliament as a talking shop for the bosses, and that the real decisions and power lies elsewhere in society, in the hands of the unelected capitalist class. Instead of using the opportunity to win significant sections of the movement towards revolutionary positions the response of the SWP leaders, alongside George Galloway was to say effectively ’the problem with British democracy is that there is not a reformist party that speaks for the anti war movement’. The creation of RESPECT thus reinforces democratic illusions in parliament and reformist politics just at the time when we need to be making the argument that it is the whole system that is to blame, not just the policies of a party.
This error is compounded by the argument that we simply need Brown to change policy on Iraq. Imperialism is not simply a policy; it is a phase of capitalism, which necessitates wars, and the super exploitation of the third world. Changing the government cannot change imperialism. The best example is Italy where the right-winger Silvio Berlusconi was narrowly defeated by Romano Prodi a more left-wing candidate, supported by Rifondazione Comunista and the trade unions. Prodi immediately supported the continued presence of Italian troops in Afghanistan and then sent troops into Lebanon after the Israeli invasion. He supports the expansion of the huge US military base in Vicenza and is now offering to send Italian troops to Gaza for ’peacekeeping’ (i.e. fighting Hamas and the resistance).
RESPECT – a reformist diversion
What is needed is a clear revolutionary alternative for the working class – i.e. an instrument to change the entire economic and political regime not a vague change of policy. The latter can only mean spreading the illusion that this government (i.e. Brown), this party (Labour) this system (imperialism) can change to something nicer – i. e. we could have an old fashioned reformist Labour government in the style of reformist Keir Hardie. Of course George Galloway actually believes that is possible and at least has the merit of saying so openly and clearly. The SWP on the other hand does not state its “revolutionary” views in such manner within Respect. Indeed they talk just like Galloway, i.e. like reformists. The political practise of having revolutionary theory but in every day struggle putting forward reformist ideas was called ’centrism’ by Lenin.
At this point SWP leaders will indignantly point out that its revolutionary ideas are expressed at Marxism or in the party’s weekly paper, in Socialist Review and ISJ publications. Indeed but this is socialist propaganda – many ideas to a few – relative to the hundreds of thousands if not millions you address at election times. It is also relatively abstract and historical, i.e. it is not related to the concrete struggles of today. On the other hand when the party speaks to working class and Muslim voters at elections its message is a purely reformist one. Is this because it is all the SWP thinks they are capable of understanding? Or is it rather that the SWP wants to maximise the size of the vote for “revolutionaries” (at least the SWP members who stand for Respect) without scaring off any reformist voters?
If that is the case then not only are they sailing under false colours, gaining votes under false pretences, but they have fallen for the belief the most important thing is to get a big vote, win councillors, even MPs. For revolutionaries standing we believe it is it not honest for revolutionaries to seek election and win seats on policies, and with an implicit strategy (winning a majority in parliament), they do not believe in. Why build a party – and the SWP is the overwhelming majority of those building Respect – that is for all its anti war and anti cuts rhetoric – reformist?
Here the SWP leaders come up with the excuse that Respect is not a party but a united front or some sort of combination of the two. But this is in no sense a united front as understood by Lenin and Trotsky.
What kind of united front?
It was the theorisation of the ’united front of a special type’ by Alex Callinicos that has led to the particularly right wing trend developing in the SWP’s politics. Callinicos wrote back in 2002 “the most important examples … are the Socialist Alliance and Globalise Resistance. While these coalitions bring together revolutionaries and reformists, their political platform is much broader than some relatively narrowly defined campaigning issue. Most obviously, the programme of the Socialist Alliance, while it leaves open the decisive strategic question of reform or revolution, is an explicitly socialist one that demands the comprehensive transformation of British society.”
Marxists use the united front as a way of fighting alongside reformist workers around delimited but immediate objectives. You do not need to be a communist to fight against the 2% pay limit, or against the war, or racism. However revolutionaries may (almost certainly will) have important differences with the reformist leaders over tactics and methods of struggle. Therefore an essential component of the united front is the right to criticise those reformists within it. If revolutionaries do not put forward revolutionary ideas in the united fronts then they become indistinguishable from the reformists that they work alongside. The argument that workers are not ready for revolutionary ideas is an erroneous one – they will never be ready unless the revolutionaries have been clear from the beginning about what their politics are.
In the Stop the War coalition the SWP is a major component of it and helped to organise the mass demonstrations against the war. However the SWP itself offers no real strategy for the stop the war movement, all we get are large demonstrations twice a year and local rallies and protests. This is something that any reformist or pacifist could agree with, i.e. to protest against the government’s actions but do nothing to stop them. As revolutionaries we need to be arguing for methods of struggle, blockades, work stoppages, civil disobedience, collective refusal by troops to carry out orders to fight, etc, which would cripple the war effort could force the government to withdraw from Iraq. In an organisation which has nearly every major British trade union affiliated to it the campaign for such actions is essential even though it would certainly mean a clash with the union leaders. The SWP argued against strike action saying that ’people did not agree with it’ – possibly, but the role of the stop the war movement is to make the case not only against the lies and hypocrisy of the imperialists but also to explain how we can stop the imperialist bloodshed. We will never know is strike action was impossible, because the movement never fought for it.
Mass demonstrations – outside of the context of a major escalation of the war are a declining force, getting smaller each time they are organised – the one in Manchester outside Browns coronation last month had less than 3,000 people on it. There was an issue around which it could have focussed mass concern – the Gaza blockade. When a Workers Power member asked SWP leader Chris Nineham if the StWC would organise a protest against Israel’s actions he said ’no’. The reason given was that ’people were confused about it’! At the last Peoples Assembly in London the StWC adopted a position of calling for troops out by October – the same position as the Liberal Democrats. The only reason that the SWP would have dropped the principled position of troops out now is to accommodate to the right wing of the movement, they had invited such anti war luminaries as Tory MP Michael Antrim and several Liberal Democrats to speak at the event.
Relations to the TU leaders
The Organising for Fighting Unions (OFFU) campaign represents the clearest crystalisation of the new right wing method of the SWP. Revolutionary working class militants need to identify the main blockage in terms of an advancement of struggle as the backward role that the trade union bureaucracy is currently playing, holding back strikes, organising ineffective one day action, inadequately or too late trying to link up any kind of joint struggle with other workers. The OFFU campaign is a real opportunity to build a rank and file movement in the unions that can act independently of the bureaucracy when necessary. But what does OFFU do? It organises rallies and meetings where the TU leaders speak and leaves them unchallenged, their last bulletin contained the whole of PCS leader Mark Serwotka’s Mayday speech with no word of criticism about his failed strategy of one day actions around job cuts and pay limits. This is because the entire strategic approach of the SWP is currently to accommodate to the union leaders rather than challenge them. The shout that goes up is of the need for ’unity’. However, the united front on its own decides nothing; the policy of the united front decides everything. United action is crucial to winning any dispute, but when some members of the united front have wrong ideas and put these forward as the strategy for the movement, we must explain why they are wrong and offer an alternative.
The international situation
Internationally the IST is also moving rightward. The French section, organised as a platform in the LCR, wanted to support the Presidential candidature of José Bové, the farmer’s leader, against the LCR’s own candidate who would stand on a more left wing programme and was more identified as being involved in the anti CPE and banlieues struggles over the past 2 years. The LCR has now called for the formation of a new anticapitalist party, which split the IST comrades, half supporting the rejection of “anticapitalism’ in favour of a more broad alliance, including the Communist Party. In Germany Linksruck is effectively liquidating itself into the reformed Stalinist party of the Linkspartei, which has in places like Berlin been forcing through privatisation measures.
It seems that the principle the IST is now advocating internationally is to build a broad reformist party with all forces to the left of the main Social Democratic and Labour Parties. How and when this will help the working class to arrive at a revolutionary leadership, a revolutionary party, is left totally vague. The implication is that for today’s struggles such left reformist or populist parties are adequate and that all “revolutionaries” have to do is to play a major organising role within them, helping them to pile up votes in elections and recruiting any revolutionary elements to their own organisation.
This is to forget that the revolutionary programme, which involves tactics and strategy for all the various battlefronts of the class struggle, focuses on direct mass action and seeks to use election campaigns to promote this and reflect it. If councillors and MPs are won en route then they are just so many tribunes of the working class and the oppressed to use their prominence to spread the message further. If it is wrong and ultra-left to say that elections do not matter it is equally wrong to give them an independent importance and indeed an independent organisation, divorced from all the other fronts of struggle. Respect and the SA before it were and are election centred organisations and not revolutionary ones.
What is our alternative?
We believe that it is possible to pose to workers sick with Labour betrayals on privatisation, cuts and the war the need for a new working class party, a new type of party to Old and New Labour. Yes we believe such a party can and must be a revolutionary combat party. But neither are we sectarians who just pose this objective to the few thousands who already accept the need for a revolutionary party. We say to all the individuals and organisations in the trade unions and the political parties of the left, let us unite to build a new workers party. How can this be done? By a series of actions-
Fight to break the unions from funding Labour but to keep their political levies and devote them to creating a new working class party. Allied to this the budding of a rank and file movement in every union and across every union to democratise them, unionise the millions of unorganised workers and pursue a militant class struggle policy.
Unite all the forces for a new workers party on the basis of an action programme to address the most burning issues of the day – an end to the war, strike to Browns’ pay cut in the public sector, defence of Muslims and asylum seekers against state harassment and defence of our civic rights, opposition to privatisation and marketisation of health, education, etc.
Build a mass anti capitalist youth movement, with its own autonomous leadership but allied to the new workers party. We can expect the youth to be in the forefront of any attempt to build a new radical political force.
Launch a democratic debate on the fundamentals of our goal, our strategy and tactics for realising that, the place of elections and the unions within this, the role of women, youth and the racially oppressed. In short launch a serious debate on the new party’s programme in which all political currents and individuals will be free to argue for their conception.
Our aim should be a debate at every level, in the localities and the workplaces, so that whatever programme is adopted is understood by all members and is carried into action on all fronts. We ourselves will argue from day one that it must be a revolutionary programme.
Workers Power believes that the left has tremendous opportunities in Britain and internationally. The mass movements that have grown up around the war, the growing fight back by workers against pay limits and job cuts, the anti racist struggle against Islamophobia and the rise of the BNP, all represent a opportunity we will ignore at our peril to make the case for revolutionary politics. But the danger is that rather than pulling the new forces to the left and mounting a serious fight against the “Left” misleaders in the TU bureaucracy the SWP instead panders to them. Socialists must look to the revolutionary methods of Lenin and Trotsky to build a revolutionary party; Workers Power is fighting to do that – if you agree with what you have read you should join us.