Weekly Worker 577 Thursday May 19 2005

Spontaneity and consciousness

What sort of party should we be aiming for and how will it come about? Former militant docker Alan Stevens replies to Bill Hunter of the International Socialist League

In the Weekly Worker of May 12 Bill Hunter of the International Socialist League took offence at the criticisms levelled at the United Socialist Party by former executive member Iain Hunter. However, comrade Bill fails to address real criticisms and tries to dismiss it all as “sneering”, “gutter polemics”, “confusion” and so on.

Comrade Bill starts by challenging the editorial intro that said: “The United Socialist Party … has just split”. It wasn’t a split, he says: “Four members … resigned, ostensibly because they lost the vote on a resolution.” This tries to imply that four members just fluffed out, but in the original article comrade Iain Hunter raised a number of important criticisms that went to the heart of democratic accountability and hence the viability of the whole project as an attempt to form a workers’ party. These criticisms and statements of fact go unchallenged by Bill Hunter: instead he ducks the politics and attempts to pass it off as personal petulance. The four of course were all executive members and comrade Iain had given up his job to be USP organiser - so it was a split, comrade.

And to underline the point, let us be clear. The USP does not consist of thousands or even hundreds of members. It is a tiny organisation which programmatically harks back to a non-existent golden age of the Labour Party. The only thing that gives it any credibility whatsoever is its tenuous connection with the Liverpool dockers’ strike and the Militant-influenced Liverpool council and its botched struggle in the mid-1980s against the Thatcher government.

These battles not only ended in defeat, but are history. The USP is not led by Liverpool dockers flushed with anger, confidently breaking with Labour and ready for mass action. The USP has a handful of ex-leaders of the Liverpool dockers who, after quietly leaving Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party in the 1990s, decided to form their own version of the SLP in 2004. So this is not ‘party’ building: rather a hollow echo of industrial and political defeat. Not surprisingly, though, it has attracted a few desperate survivors of Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party. Since that cult hit the rocks of reality in 1985 they have been swept this way and that as part of the general flotsam and jetsam of the disorientated left.

In that dishonest tradition Bill accuses Iain of taking us down to a “gutter level of polemics”, “appalling in its tone, with its personal attacks and witch-hunting accusations, seeking to reduce the discussion to an exchange of insults”. Well, I did not read it this way at all. It seemed to me a genuine and disappointed explanation of yet another failure. Yes, there was invective and ridicule, but he did build up a fairly solid political basis for it.

Comrade Bill seems overly sensitive. There is nothing wrong in principle with sharp invective, sarcasm and ridicule - just read Marx, Engels, Lenin or Trotsky. It is actually Bill’s own article that reads more like emotion than substance.

Bill accuses Iain of a “lamentable confusion on the nature of the USP and the road to a new mass party of the working class”. Well, I think that a lamentable confusion over the party question infects virtually the entire left. Comrade Iain does, in my view, have some badly wrong ideas: his model is the left nationalist Scottish Socialist Party and its reformist programme. However, he does rightly emphasise the cardinal importance of democracy and debate. For example, he says that “there is a debate to be had on democratic centralism and the revolutionary party”, but laments that the four did not get any such debate in the USP.

For a moment it looked as though comrade Bill was going to tackle the central question of democracy when he quoted Iain: “He tells us that attempts to build the new party have failed (in his opinion!) because of a lack of pluralism and democracy.” But, no, Bill says the real difference is “in how we see the essential role of the working class in the creation of the new party”.

Displaying his own “lamentable confusion”, comrade Bill contrasts what he appears to consider as two mutually exclusive opposites: a mass party of the class and a revolutionary party.

Firstly, Bill’s favoured perspective: “We saw the new party coming out of a development of the working class, brought about as the crisis of capitalism pushed workers into struggle, resulting in a political fight against New Labour. We thus saw the question of the new party posed as a question for masses - as it was posed at the end of the 19th century, when the Labour Party was born.”

The implication from this, together with the article taken as a whole, is that a Labour Party mark two is actually what is needed at this stage. This can be summed up as repeating the failures of 20th century social democracy. Where is Marxism? Where is revolutionary ideology and leadership? Where is the perspective beyond capitalism? That is, where are the independent political interests of the working class?

Comrade Bill proceeds to take issue with what he says is comrade Iain’s perspective of “development in a narrow sectarian way as the building of a new party out of a fusion of socialist groups (platforms) in the United Socialist Party”. Now I saw nothing in Iain’s article to suggest he had a narrow and sectarian perspective. Neither did he seem to be arguing for a narrow party of left groups as against a mass workers’ party. Indeed he started with a history of various other attempts to build a new “mass workers’ party”.

Bill seems to think that arguing for platforms and left unity is necessarily a separate process from building a mass workers’ party; that one excludes the other. In fact they are part of the same process: the aim must be a mass revolutionary party - and there is nothing that says that such a formation can only develop out of a halfway house reformist party. The workers’ party we need can only be revolutionary if it is democratic - its organisational form is democratic centralism.

The working class, particularly as they are organised in unions, can only spontaneously develop a social democratic party. What we need is a conscious struggle that moves beyond the narrow confines of trade union politics in order to create a workers’ party independent of the bourgeoisie. Some on the left wish to repeat the failure of social democracy, perhaps with a more leftish or republican tinge.
Even if that were a desirable aim (which clearly it is not), the main arena for that struggle would obviously be within the Labour Party, where it has substantial existing support amongst the trade union bureaucracies.

In fact the space for an alternative social democratic party is tiny. Attempting to create one in a way that panders to existing illusions and surrenders revolutionary politics in advance, as Bill seems to do, is not only doomed: it is wrong in principle. But unfortunately most of the left are in opportunist awe of leading militants or even ex-militants. These ‘real workers’ can certainly teach us a lot about trade union struggles, but that is no substitute for Marxist theory.

We have had 100 years of social democratic failure and there is a growing crisis of representation - the real alternative and the real yawning gap is for a revolutionary party. Circumstances favour the possibility of a mass revolutionary party, but one of the main obstacles to building it is the pathetic state of the left.

Bill argues that Iain “in no way attempts to understand the movements of the class, and ends up substituting invective for analysis and political clarity”. He claims this is clear from Iain’s “reference to the dockers’ movement and its leaders. He calls Jimmy Nolan an ‘unreconstructed Stalinist’”. Bill adds that the “use of such a characterisation shows little real connection with the dockers’ struggle, little understanding of it, and little desire to engage in a real assistance to the development of that movement.”

This is a red herring. The description “unreconstructed Stalinist” was not used to describe the dockers’ struggles, which Iain obviously admires, but in relation to Jimmy Nolan’s background and his alleged use of bureaucratic centralism within the USP and in particular the failure to follow what would be normal democratic procedure. The actual criticisms that led to the description are not challenged or dealt with by comrade Bill. So if what comrade Iain claims is true - and it stands unchallenged - then the description would appear to be accurate.

What Iain refers to by his description of Jimmy Nolan has plagued the labour movement, right and left, for decades. Some of the worst examples of this problem can be found today in the Trotskyist sects, whose own internal democracy is abysmal, and who carry that destructive method into the struggles they enter. Comrade Bill, who seems to alibi the abuse of democratic norms, tars himself with the same brush.

It is not at all surprising, then, that so many ostensibly revolutionary shop stewards and branch officials neatly fit themselves into the bureaucratic structures set up by the right wing and become left bureaucrats.

Comrade Bill gives a potted history of the Liverpool dockers’ struggle, presumably because he wants to show that the USP has been built upon everything that was positive in that struggle, which has now been taken to a higher, political level. It is only a sketch, but it shows up a number of weaknesses in Bill’s understanding.

It is idealised and separates out Liverpool from the national struggle - Liverpool was the end-game and cannot be properly understood without knowing what happened nationally - in the 1989 strike and before that in the two strikes in support of the miners. Indeed the whole history of the dock labour scheme, the unofficial committees and the changing role of the ‘official’ Communist Party are important too.

Bill is right to applaud Women of the Waterfront, but Reclaim the Streets was symptomatic of the desperation and isolation of Liverpool dockers from any significant working class support in Britain. The strike support groups were inadequate. International work, which has always been a strong feature of dockers’ struggles, was in this case increasingly elevated to substitute for lack of sufficient support at home - positive, true, but also symptomatic of a disastrous weakness in our class.

What was magnificent about the Liverpool dockers was their tenacity and fighting spirit in the face of overwhelming odds. There is much to be applauded here, and comrades like Jimmy Nolan, who had earned the trust of dockers and the respect of many other workers, is without doubt one of those tried and tested working class fighters who did not surrender. But he is not perfect either - as I am sure he would admit himself.

Bill contrasts the battle comrade Nolan and others fought against the union leadership for the right to elect shop stewards and to put all decisions before meetings of the rank and file with what he says is Iain’s abstract references to democracy - and Bill cannot help putting ‘democracy’ in quotation marks to imply that Iain’s version is a fake when it comes to the USP. But this is subterfuge. Iain’s reference was to organisational manoeuvres against democratic accountability in a political party. Bill dodges Iain’s accusations and refers to other events in a different arena - it does not wash.

In a truly dazzling display of slavishness Bill holds up the 1995-97 dockers’ dispute - organised in “a thoroughly democratic way through weekly mass meetings, taking decisions by a vote of members” - and says: “It is on the basis of this experience that they now safeguard the democratic rights of members of the USP” (my emphasis).

Except that it seems instead of openness and debate, as in Bill’s idealised mass meetings, there is organisational manoeuvre, failure to follow democratic norms and so on. Apparently a select few know what is best for the majority.

Bill then reveals a partial truth that helps us understand some of what lies behind the attitude of comrades like Jimmy Nolan. He says: “For anyone with experience of alliances of revolutionary socialist groups that break down when they spend their time fighting each other, it is no wonder that workers are wary about allowing such groups to join the USP as already existing platforms.” There is a truth here, but it is far too simplistic and one-sided, and expresses more than a wariness of left groups fighting each other.

Stalin’s rewriting of history reached deep into the working class via ‘official’ communism. The old ‘official’ CPGB, which was a significant part of the working class, held that Trotskyists were ultra-leftist wreckers. But this was generally what workers themselves learned through their own experience of Trotskyists. There were some exceptions, but the common view was that Trotskyists were outsiders who visited but did not understand and had no idea about tactics. This is partly why the desperate attempts by Trotskyist groups to build some connection with the class had such little success - even when the ‘official’ CPGB went into terminal decline. The parody of Trotskyist groups in Monty Python’s Life of Brian was funny because it was so true.

The Trotskyists’ isolation from most workers’ struggles left them bereft of experience. It also meant that their cadre base was largely drawn from students and academics and gave them, in the eyes of most workers, a petty bourgeois tinge. This is still a very common view.

Impatient for a breakthrough, many on the left run after anything that moves and then run away as soon as something else moves. Impatience, lack of connection, poverty of programmatic vision and subservience to spontaneity is rife.

Militant was the only Trotskyist group to have built anything remotely like a significant connection to the class - inside the bourgeois workers’ party. However, that connection was only a little different to that of rightwing bureaucrats. With some exceptions (like the poll tax) its struggle was overly concerned with the political machinery and winning positions. It also did little to break the illusions most workers had about social democracy. Now, as the Socialist Party, the comrades have flipped from auto-Labourism to auto-anti-Labourism.

The ‘official’ CPGB, which seemed monolithic to those outside, was in fact a hive of contradictions and a battleground of fierce ideological struggles. Criticisms can be made of its whole history, but it did play a significant role in the working class for many years. Though flawed, it was able to organise thousands of shop stewards in important sectors of the economy. Its role in the docks throws a particularly useful light on what was good about the CPGB and how it degenerated.

The most concentrated industrial action in working class history outside of the general strike occurred in the London docks in the early 1960s. In the space of three years there were over 500 unofficial strikes led by the communist-dominated unofficial committees.

A public enquiry under Lord Devlin hit upon a strategy for the employers and the government - but also for the union bureaucracy (previous public enquiries had failed miserably). This included, among other things, incorporating the unofficial committees into the union structures as official shop stewards committees, etc. It was the start of a slow bureaucratisation and corruption of rank and file organisation.

However, the now official shop stewards then proceeded to act both officially and unofficially as the situation (or mass meetings) demanded. This continued right to the end. However, the focus of the CPGB increasingly shifted away from the rank and file towards the union machinery and the broad left. As the CPGB’s already flawed programmatic focus and influence degenerated, we ended up with an increasingly complex and contradictory mish-mash.

Individual shop stewards could be on a higher official joint committee that stitched up a compromise and then be faced with a choice at a subsequent mass meeting - either to sell the compromise or flip to unofficial mode and tell the whole story. That is, the democracy of the mass meeting was either constrained or freed by the information given.

Those with an eye to progressing up through the union machinery, sometimes with a sincere and unselfish desire to fight the good fight, could easily fall prey to the philosophy that they could do a lot more good on the executive. The machinery could then start to become more important than rank and file involvement.

During the 1989 strike the unofficial national ports shop stewards committee was also intervening in official committees, manoeuvring behind the scenes with delegates to swing votes, running flying pickets and organising mass meetings in their own docks. The broad left and virtually all leftwing officials ultimately left us stranded. Southampton settled, Hull panicked and went for a deal, London was derecognised and the stewards and 600 dockers were sacked. Liverpool dug in to fight another day.

Even at its most successful in the shop stewards movement the ‘official’ CPGB’s reformist British road to socialism programme and longstanding economism impacted negatively on working class struggles and working class thinking. The party did often take the workers into battle, but it left them ideologically disarmed.

It reached a point in the 80s where, whilst many of its rank and file members continued to battle on regardless and various factions continued to fight it out, the leadership cliques and their so-called theoreticians became overtly treacherous. The ideological and theoretical underpinnings of what became Blairism had their origin in the ‘official’ CPGB.

Bourgeois influences, trade union bureaucracy and ‘official communist’ reformism all helped to sow and maintain illusions in parliamentary democracy, the Labour Party and left ginger group politics. The experience of this history, even if not thought out, is what frames the way a lot of older-generation industrial workers see things. They are the product of their times. The situation now is ripe for an alternative and many are more open to new ideas - but hang-ups and mistakes from the past linger on.
Another factor of course is numerical weakness and lack of a base. I can easily understand Jimmy Nolan slipping into organisational manoeuvring mode to deal with a perceived threat. It is a schizophrenia born out of the experience of negotiating between complex organisational forms in adverse conditions. It is what happens when there is no independent political party of the class to consciously cohere and organise action in relation to a proper strategy.

In the dire circumstances of the 89 strike or the later Liverpool struggle this type of schizophrenic ducking and diving was common - and no doubt it helped shape Jimmy’s often heroic leadership. But in the building of a workers’ party we need to progress beyond limited and defensive forms. It is precisely in these circumstances that revolutionaries need to educate and to take the high ground - not pander to illusions, existing conditions and prejudices.

What is required is an open ideological struggle, analysis that is concrete and seen in its historical context, and a conscious process of fighting for what we actually need - not a reclaimed old Labour, not a new but warmed over left or republican Labour Party, not failure and mistakes and illusion. We do not want a rerun of that past.

Bill rejects Iain’s criticism of USP secretary Eric McIntosh as dismissive labelling rather than seeking discussion. This is disingenuous. The whole point of Iain’s argument was for discussion and against the curtailment of it. And it is somewhat bizarre that the secretary of a putative new left-leaning workers’ party should advance the idea of military policing of picket lines!

Bill resents the reference to the WRP (not its former members like Bill) as “clinically insane”. Unfortunately for Bill the WRP is a part of working class folklore. I would not be surprised if it was the model for Monty Python. Also unfortunately the description “clinically insane” has a real resonance amongst the working class.

I recollect standing on a 100-strong picket line at Tilbury docks when two members of the WRP showed up. They knew we were on strike because it had been on the news. They proceeded to screech at us. Showing no understanding whatever of the strike, they denounced the union and advanced the fantasy of the general strike. They alienated every single docker there and within 10 minutes beat a retreat to avoid getting thumped. They were viewed as complete nutters. Of course, some were never that bad, some have mellowed and others have progressed - but it is a legacy that still lingers.

Comrade Bill criticises Iain’s concluding remark, “We may be waiting a good while for the thoroughly bourgeois Labour Party to deliver a breakaway.” It is not exactly clear what process Iain sees that would bring about a break with Labourism. It seems he may share the auto-anti-Labour position of the Socialist Party. Where Bill is right and Iain is wrong is over the nature of the Labour Party - it is not “thoroughly bourgeois” (the link with the unions paints a different picture): it is still a bourgeois workers’ party.

However, Bill (and Dot Gibson) are hopelessly tailist when it comes to the process. Bill refers to what are very limited spontaneous breaks - into a political wilderness: eg, by the Fire Brigades Union. The RMT had better tactics, but has no clear political direction other than being anti-New Labour.

Bill says: “Workers are breaking with the Labour Party in their own way”, but this is the problem - it is not theorised or conscious; it is anti and not pro. The spontaneous breaks are a feature of fragmentation, depoliticisation and disorganisation. Workers with no alternative are being politically atomised - as Bill says, “Some will refuse to vote. Others will vote Liberal or an independent community or socialist candidate. Nevertheless millions will be supporting this ‘thoroughly bourgeois Labour Party’ in the present general election.”

He tries to excuse this accommodation to disorganisation and political anarchy by arguing that “Development takes place through contradictions … at the end of the 19th century when the great mass of the most exploited workers formed their new unions and, having advanced in industrial enfranchisement, went on to create a new workers’ party when the unions and the socialist groups formed the Labour Party … Nevertheless, the break with old traditions did not take place evenly. Many workers voted for the Liberal Party and continued to do so for some time.”

This was a constructive process built out of struggle, forming unions and finding a political voice in parliament. What Bill and Dot surrender to is a spontaneous and disorganised break from Labour - it is an ill-disciplined and impatient desire for something to happen. The construction of a viable alternative able to cohere an organised break is better. Part of that process is battling for democracy in the workers’ own organisations - the unions.

Bill informs us that the “new party must come out of the movement of … the working class …posed by developments in the heightening of a drive to infinite war, headed by US imperialism, deep economic difficulties of British capitalism, and attacks on workers which come from those”. What is missing here is the active intervention of revolutionaries to initiate and consciously lead struggles to that end, and to seize on spontaneous developments and try to consciously turn them to that advantage.

Bowing to the ground rather than reaching for the sky, Bill says: “We are talking here of a new mass party of the working class, not about revolutionary socialist groups coming together in a new party. Of course fusions or alliances of these groups on particular policy points are certainly possible, with the prime task to assist the working class to make the break and build its own mass party.”

So a social democratic party that the left groups may be able to assist - where does socialism fit in?

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