Weekly Worker 514 Thursday February 5 2004

Respecting programme

What sort of political formation is Respect? Before its January 25 launch Rob Hoveman, Socialist Alliance secretary and trusted Socialist Workers Party functionary, insisted that, despite the skeletal and altogether vague platform, Respect is “absolutely socialist”. Ditto SA chair, Nick Wrack: Respect is “implicitly socialist”. Alan Thornett, leader of the International Socialist Group, enthusiastically agreed: Respect is “essentially socialist”.

And yet, faced with a detailed alternative platform which would have truly committed Respect to consistent democracy and working class power, all of the comrades mentioned above unhesitatingly voted against what they earnestly profess to believe. The same was true when it came to our amendments: ie, republicanism, free movement of people and elected representative taking a worker’s wage.

In the pinched debate SWP members took the lead against us - unfortunately the time allotted for each motion was three minutes on either side. Their basic argument amounted to this: Respect is not a socialist organisation and therefore it would be mistaken to include socialist principles in its declaration. Lindsey German even said that if people “wanted more socialism” they would by now already have joined the Socialist Alliance.

Undoubtedly the SWP’s red professors still intend to piously preach socialism to the select circles gathered together at their Marxist forums and in Socialist Worker’s turgid columns; but in practice socialism is increasingly seen as a problem. Socialism and the basic principles of Marxism repels allies, such as George Galloway, George Monbiot, Salma Yaqoob and Mohammed Naseen of Birmingham’s central mosque, and stands condemned for supposedly failing to attract enough voters. The SWP also used its majority to ensure that the “mistakes” of the SA were not repeated - the critical voices of Declan O’Neill and Marcus Ström were kept off the steering committee. So no socialism and no inclusivity.

Déjà vu. In the 1980s Neil Kinnock and the Marxism Today wing of the ‘official’ CPGB advocated exactly the same slippery slope. Stop banging on about socialism, purge the extremists and start saying what you think ordinary people want to hear. That way alone can you get a prime minister elected and thereby make a difference. Blairism stands like the grown man to this ‘new realist’ child.

Quite clearly under John Rees the SWP is galloping to the right. Heading as he does, though, a small sect without any significant social roots, comrade Rees is hardly likely to awake one fine day as the occupant of No10 Downing Street. In all probability the SWP faces crisis after crisis. It would be cowardly and irresponsible to shirk such a challenge. Indeed we communists are pledged to engage with the SWP as closely as possible in Respect so as to help ensure a positive outcome. The last thing our movement needs is another scattering of demoralised cadre to the four winds.

Equally, there are those, especially the young, who are moving to the left. We shall energetically engage with them too. In 2003 thousands upon thousands came into politics for the first time, propelled by the unprecedented anti-war upsurge. As yet they have not found political representation, let alone a political home. Attendance at regional meetings, which have averaged between 300 and 400, shows that many are seriously thinking about Respect.

Then there is the muslim population. The Muslim Association of Britain is a sign of the times. For such a well established body - with origins in late 1920s Egypt - to align itself, albeit loosely, with Respect, which includes not only the SWP but other godless communists such as Mark Serwotka and Ken Loach, shows that nowadays it is inhabited by two souls: a reactionary lament for the certainties of Muhammad and the Koran; a radical anger at the harsh realities of 21st century capitalism and the demonisation of islam.

George Galloway too is moving left. He envisages Britain undergoing some kind of democratic revolution involving socialists, liberals and even conservatives. As the leading figure in the anti-war movement he tirelessly exposed the cynical lies of both Tony Blair and George Bush and bravely urged British troops to disobey illegal orders. Because of this unpatriotic ‘crime’ he was callously witch-hunted and then expelled from the Labour Party by a kangaroo court. Nonetheless, with his mind still mired in Stalinism, left reformism and third worldism, it is hardly surprising that Galloway suffers from confusion and advocates lowest-common-denominator get-togethers.

Eg, writing in the Morning Star, Galloway blithely declares that by uniting “as the Bolsheviks once did behind the simple slogan, ‘Peace, bread and land’”, Respect can turn the June 10 European and London assembly elections into a “referendum” on “Bush and Blair, privatisation and war” (January 24). Revealingly we often hear the same argument from SWP activists - they at least should know better.

In fact the Bolsheviks took the greatest care in formulating and developing their programme: unlike the SWP, of course, whose membership have nothing authoritative to guide them, or test their leaders’ latest get-rich-quick hunches against, apart from the insubstantial ‘What we stand for’ box which appears in each edition of Socialist Worker.

Far from relying on populist slogans, banal declarations hatched from above and three-minute democracy, the Bolsheviks went into battle armed with concrete positions on all vital issues: the nature of capitalism; replacing tsarism with a democratic republic; uninterrupted revolution; land nationalisation and gaining working class hegemony over the peasant masses; opposition to separatism and support for national self-determination; a people’s militia; combating bureaucracy with measures such as the recallability of all elected representatives and limiting their pay to that of an average skilled worker; women’s equality; etc, etc. Naturally there were majorities and minorities at congresses and conferences, but no party member was asked to leave anything behind at the door: all viewpoints were rigorously discussed.

“Every step of the real movement,” Marx famously said in his May 1875 letter to Wilhelm Bracke, “is more important than a dozen programmes” (K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 24, London 1989, p78). Time and time again this remark is cited by SWP comrades. It is profoundly wrong, however, to infer, as they do, that Marx or Engels, or any Marxist for that matter, should treat their programme with anything other than the utmost seriousness.

Marx was writing in the context of the “altogether deplorable” unity-mongering being pursued by his German comrades. August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht and co wanted to fuse with their Lassallean rivals. In his subsequent Critique of the Gotha programme Marx took off the diplomatic gloves. Their policy of compromise was savaged. Given the choice between maintaining the existing Eisenach programme of 1869 and disunity, Marx definitely preferred the former. He steadfastly defended the ideas of the Communist manifesto and the theoretical knowledge the real workers’ movement had accumulated, especially since the Paris Commune of 1871.

Not that communists oppose change. On the contrary an overhaul can sometimes be essential. Our programme is a road map outlining aims and main strategic routes; it is not holy script.

Following the February 1917 revolution Lenin tenaciously fought at one hotly contested meeting after another to programmatically reorientate the Bolsheviks. The overthrow of tsarism had happened as predicted, but had produced an entirely unexpected and unique situation. Not a workers’ and peasants’ government: rather dual power and a Menshevik-Socialist Revolutionary majority in the soviets, which was intent on handing power to the capitalist class. In other words their minimum programme had half been fulfilled, but had also been left half unfulfilled. The suggestion that the Bolsheviks united behind “simple” slogans is a complete muddle. They united behind the sophisticated transitional programme first sketched out by Lenin in the notes now known as the ‘April thesis’.

Bolshevik slogans altered constantly with the ebb and flow of events. Slogans are the crystallisation of the programme, a way of propagating key demands, or calls to action serving to advance programmatic aims. Slogans without the programme have no more significance than cheap advertising jingles. Slogans certainly cannot substitute for the programme.

Take ‘Land, bread and peace’. Each word for the Bolsheviks, and their audience in Russia, had an expressly unambiguous, fully theorised and weighty content. They were not empty catch-phrases. ‘Land’ signalled the immediate seizure of the big estates by the peasants; ‘bread’ signalled workers’ control over production and distribution; ‘peace’ signalled opposing the so-called revolutionary defencism of the Right SRs and Plekhanov’s Mensheviks and transforming the imperialist war into a workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ revolution.

In the absence of the organised working class and in the absence of a programme of working class socialism Respect can only be an unstable populist coalition. To achieve this ‘step forward’ the SA has been liquidated programmatically and to all intents and purposes organisationally. An “altogether deplorable” price to pay for such unity. Respect’s declaration rightly lambastes New Labour’s “authoritarian social policies and profit-centred neoliberal economic strategy”. Yet apart from platitudes it aspires to little more than punishing Tony Blair and replacing one set of career politicians with another set of career politicians.

Jack Conrad

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