Weekly Worker 513 Thursday January 29 2004

No respect for equality

Ironically one of the ‘shibboleths’ voted down by the Socialist Workers Party majority at the January 25 convention was the second letter in the Respect acronym. ‘E’ supposedly stands for ‘equality’. Sadly the brief motion, ably moved by Lesley Mahmood, which would have committed all our elected representatives to take a personal salary equal to the average skilled worker - the balance being donated to the movement - was overwhelmingly defeated.

Of course, this principle has a long and honourable history. Fredrick Engels famously highlighted two “infallible means” used by the 1871 Paris Commune to guard against the “inevitable” danger of the “transformation of the state and the organs of the state from servants of society into masters of society”. Firstly, it filled all posts - administrative, judicial and educational - “by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time by the same electors”. And, secondly, all officials were paid “only the wages received by other workers”. The highest salary paid to anyone was 6,000 francs. In this way “an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism was set up” (K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 27, London 1990, p190).

The Bolsheviks upheld this democratic heritage. In Vladimir Lenin’s so-called ‘April thesis’ we read: “The salaries of all officials, all of whom are elected and displaceable at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker” (VI Lenin CW Vol 24, Moscow 1977, p23). Later in State and revolution Lenin argued for the growing “equality of wages” as a step towards introducing labour certificates and finally realising a communist society, where need, not hours worked, determines consumption.

True, the Bolsheviks were forced to conduct a complete about-turn over ‘bourgeois experts’ in 1918. To dissuade them from going over to the whites in the erupting civil war and to get them to work diligently and effectively, engineers, agronomists, scientists, etc were generously bribed by the Soviet Republic. Nevertheless till the Stalinite counterrevolution within the revolution and the first five-year plan no Communist Party member was allowed to earn more than a skilled worker. SWP founder Tony Cliff rightly said that this provision was “of great importance” (T Cliff State capitalism in Russia London 1974, p68).

And only three years ago the SWP experienced no problem over this principle in the Socialist Alliance. Indeed there was unanimity amongst us. Every one of our 98 candidates in the 2001 general election - not least our chair, Dave Nellist, the former Coventry North East MP - proudly proclaimed that they were altogether different from the self-seeking career politicians who dominate the establishment parties. They would be a workers’ representative on a worker’s wage. Tommy Sheridan and the Scottish Socialist Party made the same pledge and won considerable esteem as a result. Today their six MSPs live on something like £23,000. Roughly half the official Holyrood salary.

This approach was unproblematically extended to the entire labour movement. People before profit - the SA’s election manifesto - demands that trade union officials must be regularly elected, accountable and “receive the average wage of the workers they represent” (p7). Ditto a recent pamphlet, jointly penned by Martin Smith, SWP industrial organiser, and Dave Hayes, a central committee member. After slating the “astronomical” salaries enjoyed by the trade union bureaucracy, they confidently promise that “a rank and file trade union official” would be expected to take home the “average wage of the workers he or she represents” (M Smith and D Hayes The awkward squad London 2003, p26).

Equality in the abstract is easy and can even pass for profundity. Eg, Alex Callinicos boldly says that to “demand equality is to propose revolution” (A Callinicos Equality Cambridge 2000, p128). However, it is only when there is a price to pay - eg, a government ban, temporary unpopularity, loss of big names - do we really discover who is genuine, serious and worthwhile and who is a mere poser.

The right and centre of the German Social Democratic Party showed their true colours in August 1914 by treacherously voting for the kaiser’s war budget. The SWP did the same on January 25 2004. Its leaders like to parade themselves as committed Marxists in books and articles and at meetings. But they fail to practice what they preach. In the name of clever manoeuvring and furthering the real movement principles are casually sacrificed ... a course which if pursued to its logical conclusion must result in complete prostration before the existing order.

Even today, though, Socialist Worker reeks of hypocrisy when lambasting turncoats such as Charles Clarke, Diane Abbott and Nick Brown for betraying their principles (the same applies to International Socialist Group/Resistance leader Alan Thornett who suddenly reckons he no longer knows what an average skilled workers’ wage means).

Presumably the SWP calculated that sticking to a workers’ representative on a worker’s wage might risk George Galloway storming out. He is the sitting MP for Kelvin Glasgow, and we are breezily informed will top Respect’s list in London on ‘super Thursday’ - June 10. Galloway has publicly stated that he needs a minimum of £150,000 if he is “to function properly as a leading figure in a part of the British political system.”

Prominent SWPers, crucially John Rees and Lindsey German, vociferously defended Galloway at the convention. He has done sterling work for the Stop the War Coalition, had never claimed expenses, etc, etc. But our intention was never to single out or attack Galloway. Unlike others we prioritise politics, not personalities. Comrade Mahmood did not even mention Galloway. Instead she simply explained why we should stay true to our principles. Without them our movement becomes nothing but an empty husk.

Meanwhile in Brussels the governments of France, Sweden and Austria backed Germany in torpedoing attempts to overhaul the system of MEPs’ wages and their “lavish, no-questions-asked expenses”, which sees them pocketing an extra £10,000 simply by flying on budget airlines (The Guardian January 27). Under the proposed reform British MEPs would have got a 30% pay rise, from £55,000 to about £72,000. Maybe not enough for George, but a nice little earner nevertheless.

What is at stake is not just upholding the principle of equality, but the class orientation of Respect and, for that matter, its main component, the SWP. At first sight this may seem an exaggeration. Do not Galloway and Rees demand the repeal of Tory anti-trade union laws? Do they not oppose privatisation, discrimination, the occupation of Iraq and all imperialist wars? Do they not repeat again and again and again, in glowing language too, that they believe in socialism as a final goal.

All that is true. But the willingness, the enthusiasm, to trade away or abandon one principle after another and substitute platitudes for concrete demands is a slippery slope. Both Rees and Galloway appear to think that the less Respect has to say, the more it will attract votes. Hence principles which are solemnly proclaimed one year become merely matters of private belief, or taste, the next. The implication is clear: only by moving further and further to the right can the left garner votes - a caricature of what the SWP used to say about the sorry course plied by successive generations of Labourites.

Under the leadership of John Rees the SWP’s craving for respectability is palpable. Increasingly elections are seen not as a means of making propaganda and enhancing class combativity; rather as an opportunity to say what you think people want to hear in a desperate bid to get yourself elected - the fond hope is that lucrative careers as councillors, GLA members, MPs and MEPs beckon.

To achieve that end Respect must be all things to all people. “What you want: we’ve got it,” Galloway promises (The Guardian January 27). In other words Respect is a rainbow coalition within which any working class component finds itself listed alongside pensioners, students, muslims and other religious groups, ethnic minorities “and many others” who have been “deeply disappointed by the authoritarian social policies and profit-centred neoliberal economic strategy of the government”.

This non-class approach is understandable from Galloway. His background lies in Stalinism, third worldism and left Labourism. But for Rees and the SWP it represents a practical collapse into populism, “a form of politics which emphasises the virtues of the uncorrupt and unsophisticated common people against the double-dealing and selfishness to be expected of professional politicians and their intellectual helpers. It can therefore manifest itself in left, right or centrist forms” (A Bullock, O Stallybrass and S Trombley [eds] The Fontana dictionary of modern thought London 1988, p668).

There can be no doubt that Respect, even with the addition of Mohammed Naseen of the Birmingham central mosque, is a manifestation of left populism. Nor can there be any doubt that the SWP leadership is nowadays consciously acting as a conduit for bringing petty bourgeois influences into the socialist and workers’ movement- not least from their Stop the War Coalition reservoir.

Jack Conrad

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