Weekly Worker 573 Thursday April 21 2005

SWP’s ‘parliamentary road’

John Harris So who do we vote for now? Faber and Faber, 2005, pp172, £7.99

Journalist John Harris’s slim volume is a disappointment. Despite the fact that the author claims to provide a guide for those “disaffected Labour supporters” contemplating “taking [their] vote elsewhere”, the feeble answer to the exasperated question in the book’s title turns out to be … er … vote Labour. Mostly.

We will come back to some of the reasons for this floppy anti-climax later, but first it is worthwhile highlighting some passages from the chapter titled ‘The great beyond’, dealing with the minor parties. In particular, the section on Respect is of interest to us, of course.

Unsurprisingly, given his background - Harris was politically rough-housed by the Militant Tendency in his local Labour Party Young Socialist branch in the 1980s, he sadly tells us - the man displays a weary cynicism about the left. For him the use of categories such as “working class”, “class struggle” or “exploited class” are redolent of “the kind of stiff, archaic prose that … makes the far left sound like some secular version of the Jehovah’s Witnesses” (p146). Yet there are instances when the he himself uses phrases such as “socialist” to describe his own politics (p17); expresses his continuing commitment to “the allegedly tired old concept of state provision” (p42); or observes that the justified fury expressed by workers in the health industry would be seen by “Mr Blair and his allies” as “archaic and outmoded” (p55).

The real problem for Harris seems to be that the phrases he disapproves of appeared in a copy of Socialist Worker: for him, it is the concept of revolutionary organisation and Marxist politics itself that are actually “archaic and outmoded”. One wonders, of course, if people such as John Harris believe there was a time when such politics - and the vocabulary that naturally goes with it - were relevant. He does not seem the type, frankly. Even in his mild youth, he “fervently believed” in a series of “timid notions”: “a progressive taxation system, a mixed economy, unilateral nuclear disarmament and comprehensive education”. Crazy, crazy guy …

No wonder, then, that when “a gaggle” of Militant cadre colonised Harris’s Wilmslow LPYS branch they “made my life a nightmare” - people like him were blasted as “little better than Thatcherites”(p2). Militant’s no-nonsense approach must have contrasted wonderfully with that of this “timid” Wilmslow boy. Yet Harris’s early mauling at the hands of the Grantites seems to set the tone for an interview he conducts in the book with George Galloway himself, a man he evidently likes.

There is an instructive exchange about the incongruity of the MP’s relationship with the - supposedly - unreconstructed revolutionary Marxists of the SWP: “I wondered if it felt strange, metaphorically shaking hands with people that he had once apparently despised. ‘Well, no,’ he said, as a smile crept across his face. ‘As you probably know, I can shake hands with anyone.’”

Harris presses the point, though. Granted, if Galloway could press the flesh with Saddam Hussein, then the prospect of clasping John Rees and Lindsey German might seem a tad less loathsome. But Harris confides - perhaps flashbacking to his Wilmslow nightmares - “I don’t like Trots at all.” Not a massive shock to anyone who had not skipped the previous 145 pages, of course. “And I know you don’t, from reading your book,” he tells Galloway: “‘No I don’t,’ he said. ‘I have a long track record of opposition to them."

Then what, I wondered, was he doing in an alliance with them? ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think, first of all, in this post-Soviet world, we have to redefine our terms. We’re no longer really talking about Trots. What we’re really talking about is ultra-leftism. If we come across ultra-left groups, we certainly know about it. And the SWP doesn’t behave in an ultra-left way. If it did, it wouldn’t have been the driving force behind the Stop the War movement, which brought two million people onto the streets. Millions of people have been engaged in that movement - and if the SWP had run the STWC in an ultra-left way, that would not have been possible. There aren’t two million Trotskyists in Britain.

“‘Like everyone else, they’re changing,’ he assured me. ‘Their leaders are changing. Old ideas are seen to have failed, new ones come along. I think what you’ve got now is an SWP that wants to work in a broad way. I think they’ve taken a parliamentary road; so you should rejoice, rejoice, and not be churlish about it’” (p146).

Of course, the leadership of the SWP has not yet embraced reformist politics in terms of its formal theoretical platform. But the fact is, every time the organisation makes a public outing, electorally or otherwise, the politics it espouses are indeed left reformist at best - or left populist in the case of the odd political amalgam that is Respect. Galloway is no political naive: when he tells us to “rejoice” over the SWP’s embrace of the “parliamentary road”, he is highlighting - with a characteristic panache - a real truth.

It is a law of politics that at some stage an opportunist organisation’s theory will make a leap to match its practice. Clearly, as far as the SWP leadership is concerned, the “old ideas” of working class socialism “have failed” - how long before they explicitly tag their organisation with a political label that accurately describes what they actually do day to day?

Galloway comments that his SWP-Respect party is competing for the votes of the “centre left” of the political spectrum: for him, it is a project to construct a “credible centre-left alternative” (p145). In truth, within Respect the SWP has actually played the role of substituting for an absent “centre” - or rather, the right wing. It votes down leftwing principles it pretends to uphold in Socialist Worker precisely in order to establish Respect as a “credible centre-left” alternative. In the long run, this is an extremely dangerous game to play, especially for such a theoretically lightweight sect.

Galloway’s comments on the tensions in and around Respect underline just what an easy ride he gets from his SWP pals - and which trend he regards as the real loonies. “Thus far,” Harris notes, “the only source of internal controversy had been his own opposition to abortion. ‘The ultra-left press are going bananas about that,’ he said [We take a bow, George - MF]. ‘I did expect trouble to break out between the left part and the muslim part of our coalition, but that hasn’t happened. In fact, the muslims signed up for our programme of self-determination in personal-political matters without demur. And, as I said, I’m the one getting it in the neck on those moral issues.’ He grinned. ‘But I can take it’” (pp141-142).

Harris bemoans the fact that one-time Labour loyalists such as himself have been “left hobbling towards the political fringes” by the shared common pro-market consensus of the mainstream parties (p17). Once there, however, he admits he is “buffeted from one tentative solution to another”. One day he is a Lib Dem. The next, he is puzzled to find himself attracted to Respect. Despite the fact that it is a “rum old organisation”, Harris was “initially quite taken with the idea of a newly energised challenge to Mr Blair from the far left”. But then, the bloke was also quite taken with Plaid Cymru “before - doh! - my indifference to the argument for Welsh independence” occurred to him as a possible hitch (p152). There’s a clue in the name, John bach …

It is easy to mock the confusion of the likes of Harris. Yet his forlorn search for a politically viable alternative to the left of New Labour actually parallels the profound confusion and disorientation in the ranks of the workers’ movement itself. Plaid Cymru or the Lib Dems, the building of the popular frontist SWP-Respect, a hopeless attempt to resurrect left Labour reformism with the Socialist Alliance, or (in the form of the Scottish Socialist Party) a miserable collapse into petty bourgeois nationalism - we should recall that our movement is pretty much awash with these types of doomed political projects before we get too snotty with Harris.

And this seemingly congenital inability of the revolutionary left to stand on the politics it professes to believe in (a form of politics with the real potential to win a majority in contemporary society) effectively lets Labour off the hook. However these political projects present themselves, their net effect is negligible. Their perspective does not stretch much beyond punishing Labour, not replacing it with something qualitatively different and better. This miserable lack of ambition is spelled out explicitly by Harris on the companion website to his book: “One fact that underlines the whole site: we have no wish whatsoever to see Labour out of office” (www.sonowwhodowevotefor.net/).

When there is nothing better around to replace Blair’s historically redundant party, what do we expect?
Mark Fischer