Party Notes
Back to programme
The July 16 closing rally of Marxism 2004 in London’s Friends
Meeting House afforded a brief and deeply worrying glimpse of the
future direction of the Socialist Workers Party - towards populism,
the right and rapid disintegration.
For most of the week, this Marxism was a pretty muted affair. Numbers
were down by 50% on last year, and so were spirits. The June 10 European
elections had not produced the million votes promised by George Galloway.
Only a quarter of that figure was achieved. Nor was anyone elected
- neither Galloway, Lindsey German nor John Rees. There was, in other
words, no breakthrough. So at Respect’s founding conference SWP
members had voted down basic socialist principles - open borders,
republicanism and workers’ representatives on a worker’s
wage - for what? They had kept mum on abortion and a woman’s
right to choose, for the sake of a populist alliance with Galloway
and the Muslim Association of Britain, but why? Rank opportunism had
produced not even short-term gains.
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But hope springs eternal. Attentions and carefully fostered illusions
turned to the Birmingham and Leicester by-elections. Respect’s
candidates were high-profile: the SWP’s paramount leader, John
Rees, and Yvonne Ridley, the former Express journalist who was captured
by the Taliban and subsequently converted to islam. No worker’s
wage for her, of course. If elected to the House of Commons she
would immediately demand a 400% salary hike. And not surprisingly
our would-be Plutus recommended herself to Leicester voters not
on the basis of any kind of socialism: rather that she was a self-willed
woman and a muslim.
Not that anyone in the SWP thought about MPs this time round. All
that was wanted were results that would not humiliate, or further
demoralise. As it turned out, Respect’s figures were good …
given the much lower expectations. Saving deposits is now, of course,
dubbed the “breakthrough” that has supposedly sent “shock
waves” through the whole political establishment. Nonsense,
but comforting nonsense for the battered, disoriented and much diminished
SWP cadre. And nonsense which in an instant metamorphosed them back
into snarling, strutting, but empty-headed sectarians. Morbid hostility
and brittle fear have long been characteristic features of the SWP’s
relations with others on the revolutionary left - perhaps with the
brief exception of the 2000-2001 honeymoon period enjoyed by the
Socialist Alliance.
Respect might call itself the ‘unity coalition’. However,
the SWP is perfectly clear that this unity is with forces to its
right. In that sense Respect is consciously an anti-left unity project
for the SWP. As comrade Bambery put it during one of the sessions,
“left realignment … does not mean shuffling the deck of
the existing left”. It actually excludes the “old left
who could not relate to the new movement” created by the anti-Iraq
war upsurge (Weekly Worker July 15).
So, instead of Respect’s “breakthrough” being the
opportunity to (at least metaphorically) magnanimously sling an
arm round the shoulders of other leftwingers and persuade them onboard,
the opposite is true. Last week’s results have increased the
distance separating the SWP from the other revolutionary trends
- both those inside the Labour Party and outside. With Respect reaching
the dizzy heights of 6% and 12%, the SWP thinks it has made a qualitative
leap and is now inhabiting the big time.
Maybe, but most probably maybe not. But the problem is not whether
or not Respect had made a “breakthrough”. The problem,
as always, is political. Respect is not founded upon a Marxist programme
designed to achieve working class rule and the abolition of capitalism
through the struggle for extreme democracy … and that is what
objective circumstances require at this historic juncture. Anything
else is either a positive hindrance or doomed to produce nothing
but disappointment.
Respect is a left populist formation … and organisational forms
loyally follow politics. Hence, instead of boring old meetings and
policy debates, Respect’s members are expected to content themselves
with picnics, film shows and football matches. A deeply patronising
attitude - and incidentally one guaranteed to fail. In the meantime,
while the children play, the SWP’s top leaders and their close
allies on Respect’s executive will get on with the serious
business of deciding, controlling, running everything towards a
disaster made from above.
Reality and perception are related, but hardly ever coincide. Where
the SWP thinks it is going with Respect can be gleaned from comrade
Rees and his sub-reformist and populist electoralist perspectives.
The results of Birmingham and Leicester, he told us at the Marxism
rally, had confirmed “that the hold of Labourism” on the
working class “was dissolving at an enormously fast speed”.
The previous period had seen a lot of political alternatives emerge
to fill the gap left by Labourism: now, the elections had shown
that “one organisation has emerged as a rival” - Respect.
Supposedly Britain’s fourth party - that is, if you wilfully
ignore UKIP, the Greens, the BNP.
Moreover, unlike the 1970s, no rightwing mood is growing out of
the disintegration of Labourism, as the hopeless situation of the
Tories proves. Now, the movement is to the left of Labour - and
takes the form of a competition between the Liberal Democrats and
Respect.
Elections are hugely important, he said. The Stop the War Coalition
had been “magnificent”; the phrase, “our mother ship”,
was later used. But for most of the people who live in Leicester
South or Birmingham’s Hodge Hill, the STWC had at best just
“skimmed their lives”. So, it was therefore “not
a retreat” to seriously engage in elections. In fact, it was
a “profound form of engagement”. It got to grips with
the “profound desire for something new to emerge” that
SWP comrades had encountered in their mass work, offering us the
chance to “reshape the whole of politics”.
Thus the task was of going lower and deeper. “Who do you know?”
comrade Rees asked the audience. “Can you take us to a local
mosque, a church, a trade union branch?”
For the SWP the fundamental dividing line in the workers’ movement
between reform and revolution has always been a matter of lip service.
Traditionally it would automatically vote Labour and for the rest
of the time get on with what it imagined to be the really important
work of promoting militant trade unionism. Issues such as the monarchy,
the House of Lords, the secret state and democracy in general were
of no concern. In other words a classic case of reformism in practice,
revolution only in words.
Respect pushes the SWP’s centrism so far to the right that
it puts enormous strains on the ability of its leadership and the
organisation as a whole to maintain formal adherence to Bolshevism.
What drives the SWP is no longer simply recruits and paper sales,
but votes - and that means suitably trimming and tailoring its politics.
It is always the case with sects that success in terms of connecting
with wider society - even when extremely modest in historic terms
- triggers crises. Opportunist weaknesses, long hidden under the
revolutionary rhetoric of Cliffism, had to surface under John Rees,
given the huge anti-war demonstrations in 2003 and the SWP’s
prominent role. In the last analysis everything goes back to programme.
The role of our communist programme is clear: it is designed to
firmly link our “continuous and all-encompassing agitational
work with the ultimate aim of communism … it represents …
the standard, the reference point, around which the voluntary unity
of party members is built and concretised” (J Conrad Which
road? London 1991, p235). Of course, the SWP has an unofficial programme
- whatever is considered advantageous or convenient by the current
leader or set of leaders. However, almost religiously, it shuns
the adoption of an official, fully debated and democratically agreed
one.
Putting things down in black and white might make them vulnerable
to rank and file doubts and questioning; it would certainly expose
their pretension to stand in the “revolutionary communist tradition
of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky”. Spiritually
the SWP is surely far closer to Russia’s semi-Marxist and thoroughly
eclectic Socialist Revolutionary Party, which before the 1917 revolution
used to oscillate between wildly acclaiming the educative virtues
of terrorist spectacles on the one hand and dully supporting liberal
parliamentarians on the other.
The last time the SWP, even half-seriously, touched upon the question
of programme was in the early 1990s. In what was widely taken as
a semi-official reply to those members calling for a programme commission,
Gareth Jenkins actually stated that “the Bolsheviks were light-minded
about programmes, but principled in practice” (SWP internal
Bulletin No3, November 1991).
Untrue, of course. In fact, Lenin stressed time and time again the
“tremendous importance of a programme for the consolidation
and consistent activity of a political party” (VI Lenin CW
Vol 4, Moscow 1977, p229). Programme-phobia is actually a characteristic
not of Bolshevism, but of the leaders of the SWP. Given Respect’s
populism - and the naked pursuit of votes for their own sake - it
is not really too hard to understand why a revolutionary “standard,
a reference point”, against which today’s particular zig
or zag can be judged, would be the last thing the likes of comrade
Rees would want.
Ian Mahoney
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