Leaving behind the ghost of Cliff
The post-Cliff Socialist Workers Party is in the process of undergoing fundamental change - along with its cloned grouping, the International Socialist Tendency. In Britain this is shown in its embrace of the Socialist Alliance and the Scottish Socialist Party, while internationally talks have been held with the French grouping, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire. The documents below, penned by Alex Callinicos and Chris Harman, talk of regroupment beyond the narrow confines of the theory of state capitalism. Logically they pose the need for genuine democratic centralism, including - although this for the moment is explicitly rejected - the right to form permanent factions.
Letter to IST
Dear comrades
1. Accompanying this document you will find some notes on international regroupment on the revolutionary left. These originated as a letter that I wrote in March to Daniel Bensaïd of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, and they helped to provide the basis of discussions that took place between members of the SWP central committee and the LCR political bureau on May 17. Also accompanying are the notes that formed the basis of Chris Harman’s presentation of the SWP’s position at this meeting.
2. This meeting took place at the initiative of the LCR. The discussions showed quite a high degree of agreement over the nature of the objective situation - there was, in particular, a shared appreciation of the significance of the movement against capitalist globalisation. A number of practical issues came up: it was agreed that the SWP and the LCR would try to organise a far left rally in Genoa; in addition to the presence of a number of LCR speakers at ‘Marxism 2001’, we have been invited to attend the LCR conference in June, to participate in the Fourth International youth camp in Rome in late July, and to speak at the LCR summer camp at the end of August. The possibility of the SWP being invited to the next international executive committee of the FI was also mooted.
3. As my letter to Bensaïd makes clear, the starting point for any consideration of regroupment on the revolutionary left is the changed situation created by Seattle and the rise of the anti-capitalist movement.
More specifically: the key test of left currents today is how they relate to the anti-capitalist movement. As we know, the International Socialist Organization (US), despite its history and theory, failed this test, while currents much further away from our tradition - for example, elements from an orthodox Trotskyist background, and even the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) in Australia - have not. It would therefore be sectarian to insist that we will only work in the same organisation with revolutionaries who also accept the theory of state capitalism (though the issue, of course, closely related to Cliff’s theory of substitutionism, is still very important).
Because of the prominence of international mobilisations and conferences in the anti-capitalist movement, the different international revolutionary tendencies are coming into contact with [each other] much more than in the past 20 years. In the 1980s and 1990s each tendency ploughed its own furrow: we are now entering a period more like the 1970s, when the different international currents interact much more, whether as allies or rivals (or both).
As in the 1970s, the British SWP - still much the largest group in the Tendency - may have to make its own initiatives towards other big far left organisations. The IS Tendency made a big impact on the European left thanks to its interventions at Prague and Nice. Because of this, and because of the British SWP’s electoral initiatives with the Socialist Alliance and the Scottish Socialist Party, we are being taken more seriously as an internationally current. We can’t any longer be dismissed as the SWP and its tributaries.
4. In Britain the united front approach that the SWP has been pursuing since the outbreak of the Balkan War two years [ago] has helped to produce a process of realignment on the left. To be precise, the Socialist Alliance in England and Wales has brought together the bulk of the far left in an electoral intervention that has begun to attract the support of significant elements from a Labourist background. Some elements would like it to become a new party. We disagree, for the reasons spelled out by Lindsey German in Socialist Worker (May 5 2001). But we do envisage the SA becoming an organisation that campaigns on a broad range of issues after the election.
We have worked very well with some elements in the SA, notably certain ex-Militant cadres and the International Socialist Group (British section of the FI). We see no principled reason why they shouldn’t be integrated into the SWP. The ISG have said they will propose that the SWP is invited to the next world congress of the Fourth International in 2002.
The Scottish Socialist Party is a peculiar formation: based on a relatively small group of ex-Militant activists whose politics remains at best centrist, it has a very significant working class periphery thanks in particular to Sheridan’s high profile in Scottish politics. Their prominence is in part a consequence of our past mistakes - in particular the opening we gave to Militant through our failure properly to intervene in the anti-poll tax movement in Scotland. But the balance of forces on the ground between our Scottish comrades and the ex-Militant cadres is much more even.
The SSP hard core is divided between sectarians who are irredeemably hostile to us, and key elements in the leadership (notably Sheridan and McCombes) who recognise the contribution we can make to build a much broader workers’ party on the basis of disillusionment with New Labour. Joining the SSP involves an element of risk, but not to have done so would have thrown away an unprecedented opportunity to reshape the left in Scotland.
5. The objective situation is thus posing the question of regroupment, certainly in Britain and potentially internationally. It is important, however, to draw distinctions between the various formations with which we are coming into contact. For example, the SSP is a special case rather than a general model. It is very important to be clear about this, since what is happening in Scotland is being closely watched internationally. Centrist parties with a high public profile whose key leaders actually welcome revolutionaries joining them don’t grow on trees.
The LCR is another kettle of fish altogether. It is the USFI flagship in Europe, and did well in the recent municipal elections. It is a highly heterogeneous formation, with members ranging from left (and sometimes not so left) social democrats to genuine revolutionaries. A leading FI member described it to me as centrist.
It took an equivocal line on the Balkan War. LCR members have played an important role in the ATTAC leadership, but the organisation failed miserably to mobilise for Prague or (worse still) for Nice. Our comrades in Socialisme par en bas would be well advised to concentrate on building the broader movement through ATTAC and sharpening the small revolutionary axe within it rather than in getting involved in manoeuvres with the LCR. The same is likely often to be true of the FI groups elsewhere, which are often small and sectarian.
The DSP is involved with the International Socialist Organisation (Australia) in the Socialist Alliance, which is planning to stand candidates against Labor. It is also linked to the SSP. The DSP has plenty of money and is active internationally, notably in the Asia-Pacific region (eg, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines). Its politics remains Stalinist - it has played a key role in encouraging the PRD in Indonesia to continue pursuing a stages strategy. It is therefore definitely a rival rather than a potential ally, but it is one that we must take seriously.
6. It’s quite unclear where the discussions with the LCR and possibly the FI itself will lead. But the idea might emerge of some larger international far left grouping embracing both the FI and the IST, and possibly other currents. At that stage, the Tendency (and it would, of course, have to be the Tendency that decided) would have to make a hard-headed assessment of the pros and cons of such a move.
7. What regroupment means in individual countries is likely to vary tremendously because of the state of the local left and the situation of our group there. It may mean nothing, either because our group is too small or because the line-up on the left is pretty rigid. The very deep crisis of British Labourism that Blair has accelerated won’t necessarily be replicated elsewhere. But the left internationally is in more flux than it has been for decades. Individual groups need to think creatively about how they can seize the opportunities that this situation may create for them.
Yours fraternally
Alex Callinicos
May 17 2001
Introduction to discussion with LCR
Chris Harman’s notes for May 17 meeting
We should begin by explaining how we see international situation of left. First we need to look back over last two decades. From late 1970s to mid-1990s period which we called “the downturn” - period of defeats and demoralisation for the working class, even where there were bitter defensive battles from Chile and Argentina, through Fiat Turin to the miners and printworkers in Britain to the isolation and absorption of the guerrilla movements in Central America.
Period also of isolation and to varying degrees demoralisation and fragmentation of revolutionary left in Europe most spectacularly in Italy and Spain, but also in Britain and France.
Then when the Stalinist regimes fell apart in eastern Europe and the former USSR, despite the important role of workers’ struggles (eg, the miners’ strikes in Russia), the only ideological alternative for the democratic opposition seemed to be market capitalism which then led the oppositions to be absorbed by a wing of the nomenclature who had turned to privatisation, the Mafia, etc. This further isolated the revolutionary left in the west and the third world.
All the pressure was on revolutionaries to make concessions to reformist ideas, and, even worse, to post-Marxism, identity politics, even neo-liberalism. We analysed the beginning of the end of this period seven or eight years ago. The absence of a left focus in the crisis of the early 1990s was encouraging the rise of far right groups in important European countries. But it was also producing the first signs of a revival of class struggle and of the left. This was clear in Germany, then Italy and finally Britain and France.
The revival was both industrial and political (except in Britain, where the defeats of the 1980s meant a still very low level of class struggle). The industrial revival showed itself in the public sector and metal workers strikes in Germany, the mass strikes against the Berlusconi government in Italy, above all the November-December 1995 movement in France.
The political beneficiaries of the change were the social democrats despite their attempts to move to even more rightwing ‘third way’ positions. But we argued the revival had a tendency to spill over to the left of the social democrats, so creating a layer of disillusioned reformists who were willing to work with revolutionaries and open to revolutionary arguments.
Today this seems to us an important phenomenon in most European countries eg, the openings for the left in France, the Socialist Alliance and SSP in Britain.
At same time, new, often semi-spontaneous movements in a whole range of third world countries Indonesian revolution, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Nigeria, Algeria, etc.
Finally, the sudden growth of a generalised movement to the left such as we have not seen since the mid-1970s the ‘anti-capitalist’ movement from Seattle onwards.
Important as providing a focus for a minority which exists in every factory, mine, office, school or college in the world.
Sudden ‘respectability’ of anti-capitalist arguments.
Like movements in the US, Britain, Germany or Italy before 1968 a whole mix of different political positions reformist, anarchist, revolutionary Marxist, combinations, etc - just as you would expect in a new, spontaneous insurgency.
Test for the revolutionary left is relating to the three new components the revival of the workers’ struggle, the overflow to the left from social democracy, the anti-capitalist movement.
Central is seeing the anti-capitalist movement as key to other two the minorities it attracts among both youth and trade unionists can be key to tapping move to left of social democracy and to new militancy in industry.
There are formally revolutionary organisations who are refusing to see this. Most notably Lutte Ouvrière in France. Did not understand importance of November-December 1995. Attacks anti-capitalist movement. This has also been true of one of the organisations in our tendency, the ISO in the US. Is refusing to shift from the methods it developed in the early 1990s to relate to the new situation, and is missing enormous opportunities.
Even for our members, the shift is not easy. Great danger of sectarian response veterans of the miners’ strike dismissing 18-year-olds who are impressed by Naomi Klein and Susan George people who defended independent revolutionary organisation for 20 years not seeing possibilities with rise of layer who have half-broken with reformism.
There is also another danger. Pouring new wine into old bottles. Eg, breaking movement down into one-issue campaigns, or adoption of ‘post-Marxist’ ideas and methods within movement (eg, semi-autonomism, Ya Basta, etc) or adapting to reformist milieu (article in Labour left paper saying we will inevitably do this!) there will be pressures to do this we have to resist eg, there are important people in SSP for whom all that really matters are Scottish elections in two years time, not struggle in between.
Notes on regroupment
The starting point for our approach to regroupment is the new situation created by Seattle and the development of the anti-capitalist movement internationally. As I argue in my document, this conjuncture is creating the conditions for a major revival of the left. Political currents must be judged less on the basis of their history and more on their response to the post-Seattle movement.
It is clear that a process of political realignment is underway. We can see this in Britain with the Socialist Alliance, where very positive working relationships have developed between the SWP and comrades from other Trotskyist tendencies (for example, the ISG and some ex-Militant cadres).
This is one facet intensified by the impact of New Labour on the left and the working class movement in Britain of a much broader process. We approach the question of regroupment with the framework of our understanding of revolutionary internationalism. The experience of the early Comintern is our model of how a real International develops. It shows how major upheavals in the class struggle and the break by substantial sections of workers with reformism are necessary conditions for any attempt to create an international revolutionary organisation. Our criticism of the FI and of Trotsky before it has focused on the attempt to ‘declare’ an International in the absence of these conditions (they were, of course, completely missing in 1938; the upturn of 1968-76 provided at best the first of these conditions and certainly not the second).
The experience of the Comintern also shows how a genuine International must be a coalescence of currents with different histories in that case, for example, the Bolsheviks, Luxemburg and her supporters in Germany and Poland, North European left radicals, currents influenced to a greater and lesser extent by anarchism and syndicalism (Gramsci and Ordine Nuovo in Italy, ex-Wobblies in the US), centrists and left reformists (the USPD majority). Of course, we don’t think that 1917-23 is going to repeat itself in any simple way a new revolutionary period will take different forms, and we are far from uncritical of the Third International even in its early years (see especially Cliff Lenin Vol 4), but the three elements I have referred to social upheaval, big splits in the reformist parties, and the fusion of diverse political traditions would, we believe, be features of any future International worthy of the name.
You said that we have moved from a pluralistic conception of the International to one that is much more centralised than certainly the USFI now accepts. As evidence for our earlier views, you cited the article Pete Goodwin and I wrote for the 11th Congress of the FI in 1979. I had forgotten what we said so I had to reread the article. What we argued against then was the strategy that then seemed to prevail in the FI of a regroupment of the international far left based on the orthodox Trotskyist currents. We called this a “dogmatic and triumphalist approach” both because it overestimated the virtues of various orthodox Trotskyist tendencies (we mentioned the Lambertists, but our reservations also applied to the American SWP, then of course still affiliated to the USFI), and dismissed the Mao centrists (International Socialism 2.6, pp110-11). This argument still seems to me correct: one of the key developments of the IS Tendency was winning OSE (now SEK) in Greece, whose key leaders had been strongly attracted towards Avanguardia Operaia during the 1970s.
The IS Tendency developed as a serious current after this debate, during the 1980s and 1990s. I am attaching a note I wrote on the history of the Tendency for Cliff’s autobiography, A world to win (you will also find it, with other information on our international work, in that book). It is quite a politically homogenous grouping, for two reasons: (1) the different groups largely originated in the same theoretical tradition, defined in particular by Cliff’s theory of state capitalism; and (2) we came together, meeting annually from the mid-1980s, because we had converged (partly independently, partly through mutual influence) on the same propaganda perspective as a way of addressing the international downturn in class struggle. Therefore our meetings have always discussed not simply broad issues of analysis and strategy, but more concrete questions of perspective.
In consequence, the IST has gone through a series of reorientations based on quite sharp debates, notably over our attitude to the final phase of the first Gulf War (1987-88) and our response in 1993-94 to what we saw as a new period of class polarisation in Europe that developed in the wake of German reunification. Nevertheless the IST is a political current uniting autonomous organisations on the basis of shared theory and not a democratic centralist international organisation: the line taken at its meetings do not bind individual groups, even though the discussions have tended to influence their approach. It should be clear from my remarks in para 2 above that we do not regard the IST as an embryonic International.
The Tendency, at least in Europe, has developed a higher profile over the past couple of years. This is partly because it now comprises, in addition to the SWP in Britain, a number of substantial organisations notably in Germany, Greece, and Ireland. But this development has also reflected events that have required a more concerted international response first the Balkan War and then Seattle and the crystallisation of the anti-capitalist mood. The result has been the IST mobilisations for Prague, Nice, and Davos, and those we are preparing for Gothenburg, Barcelona, Salzburg, and Genoa.
This evolution shows how wrong Mandel was to criticise the SWP as recently as 1992 for “national communism” (see International Socialism 2.56). In any critical balance sheet of the performance of various international currents in this period, we would want to point to what we regard as the defensive and hesitant response of the LCR and other USFI groups to the Balkan War, and to the LCR’s failure to mobilise seriously for Prague and even for Nice.
It has been against this background of the IS Tendency’s clear emergence as a major international revolutionary current that the differences developed over the past two years between the ISO (US) and the rest of the IST. In themselves these disagreements over perspective would not justify a split, but it became increasingly clear that they were the symptom of a more fundamental divergence. Faced with a new period, most organisations in the Tendency have fought to reorient themselves; the ISO, by contrast, has retreated into an increasingly sectarian approach which differs not simply from the trajectory of the rest of the IST, but represents a break with its own past. This has been accompanied by the consolidation of a quasi-Healyite internal regime.
The expulsion of IST supporters in the US and the ISO’s role in provoking a breakaway from SEK faced us with a choice: either accept a continuation of this faction fight, which would mean the progressive internalisation of the IST as the two sides struggled for influence within individual groups (we had in mind the unhappy example of the struggle between the IMT and the LTF within the FI during the 1970s), or make a break with the ISO, with the implication that this would mean starting again in the US. In taking the second course, the leaderships of the SEK and SWP have had the support of the other main organisations in the Tendency.
We do not believe the conditions currently exist for an authentic International. Nevertheless, we believe that the present situation makes it worthwhile exploring the possibilities of international regroupment. The established revolutionary organisations will prove whether or not they are alive by how they respond to the post-Seattle new left. The split with the ISO has shown us that past track record and even correct theoretical stance doesn’t guarantee that an organisation will necessarily pass this test. Currents from an FI or ex-FI background have reacted better to the post-Seattle period than our former American confrères.
This does not mean that we think that the historical divergences within the Trotskyist movement have simply become irrelevant: the theoretical understanding of Stalinism provided by Cliff’s analysis allowed the IST to resist the wave of despondency that swept over the left after 1989 and to grow very substantially in the 1990s (in addition to our European growth, the decade saw the emergence of important sister organisations in the third world: for example, in South Korea and Zimbabwe).
Nor have various related issues disappeared for example, what we regard as the tendency of orthodox Trotskyists to search for substitutes for working class action (eg, left governments) and the question of the class-struggle leftwing approach versus our rank and file strategy in the trade unions. But we wish to explore, with open minds and without making these divergences a barrier, the possibilities for closer cooperation between revolutionaries from different traditions.
One issue that we will have to confront is our differing understandings of democratic centralism. The USFI has developed a conception of revolutionary organisation as involving permanent tendencies that we reject. We believe that this approach tends to institutionalise a government-versus-opposition regime that encourages members to interpret specific issues in the light of the factional struggle. We permit factions only during periods of pre-conference discussion.
This does not mean we are hostile to internal political debate: one of our main reasons for breaking with the ISO is its suppression of such debate. We have a tradition of vigorous political argument both within the SWP and in the IST more generally. But we think such argument is effective when it arises from the specific issues at hand rather than reflecting long-term divergences between institutionalised factions.
Alex Callinicos
April 2
