Unity for what?
In the latest ‘broad left’ initiatives, Marxist politics are once more being forgotten, argues Peter Manson
As was only to be expected, the Socialist Party in England and Wales has reacted in a sullen, resentful way to the Socialist Workers Party’s “open letter to the left”. The SWP has called for a “conference of all those committed to presenting candidates representing working class interests at the next election”, in the hope of establishing a non-specific “united left group”.1
You might have thought that SPEW would view this development as a step forward. After all, it has been campaigning for several years now for a new, broad “mass workers’ party” to replace Labour, and the SWP’s proposed conference would, at the very least, give SPEW a platform to agitate for this in front of various sections of the left. But not a bit of it. While the statement from SPEW’s executive pays lip service to what it considers the outside possibility that the SWP leaders have “changed [their] methods, and are now willing to work together with others” (which SPEW would “of course welcome”), most of its 2,000-word reply pours cold water on the very idea of such a thing.2
In a sense SPEW’s knee-jerk response is understandable. Following the SWP’s disastrous Respect adventure and the humiliating experience of its Left List in the 2008 London assembly elections, Alex Callinicos, Martin Smith, Chris Bambery et al had written off the chances of any viable leftwing electoral intervention as being “more modest than ever” - there will just not be any space for us to contest until “after the next general election”.3
This absurd position seemed to leave the way open for SPEW. Not that its Campaign for a New Workers’ Party had been making any headway whatsoever, but when Bob Crow and the RMT union decided to launch a platform, drawn up by Brian Denny of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, to contest the June 4 European Union elections, SPEW was able, thanks to its good working relationship with comrade Crow in formations like the National Shop Stewards Network, to get in on the act.
SPEW chose not to see - and later even deny - the blatant anti-EU British nationalism of ‘No to the EU, Yes to Democracy’. No2EU was, after all, “the first electoral challenge to New Labour initiated by a national trade union, the RMT, the most militant industrial union in Britain”.4
Left nationalism
The SPEW leadership calculated that No2EU’s left nationalism was a price it had to pay to regain the initiative after June 4. It had secured a commitment from Bob Crow that - despite the CPB’s insistence that No2EU was not an attempt to launch a new party and would be wound up after the elections - a conference would be convened in late 2009 to discuss how to take the process forward. Peter Taaffe, Hannah Sell and the rest of the Socialist Party leadership were convinced that this would put SPEW in the driving seat for the 2010 general election and beyond. They thought the SWP could be written out of the equation.
However, the SWP had been quietly observing No2EU and planning its counter. Obviously No2EU could be dismissed as any kind of serious, permanent force - it did not take a genius to work out its results would be just as pathetic as were the Left List’s the previous year. So the SWP timed its “Time to fight back together” move for the week following the EU poll as a way of pulling the ground from under SPEW’s feet and attempting to win back hegemony over a dispirited, fragmented left and the thousands of despairing, unaffiliated socialists - the flotsam and jetsam.
No wonder the SPEW leadership is so upset. That is why it makes a big song and dance about the SWP’s failure to even mention No2EU in its open letter. After all, “Given that No2EU was founded only weeks before election day, we believe its vote was creditable and, particularly when taken alongside the vote for the SLP, gives an indication of the potential to create a fighting left electoral alternative.”
There must be very few people who believe that No2EU’s 1% of the vote is “creditable” - especially when it is quite likely that a fair proportion must have come from people believing an organisation named ‘No to the EU’ might be a rightwing nationalist group. Surely the SWP should have made special mention of Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party too - it did poll more votes, don’t forget. And if the SWP is to be criticised for its failure to highlight No2EU, then what about its omission in not mentioning the only marginally less “creditable” Left List? Its 0.9% in London in 2008 actually translated into a few thousand more votes than No2EU, because of the higher turnout for the assembly elections (22,583 for Left List, as against 17,758 for No2EU in the capital). But not even the SWP thinks that Left List’s successor, Left Alternative, has any credibility.
And, oh dear, the SWP had the cheek to launch its open letter without consulting with SPEW first, complain the comrades: “In the coming weeks the components of No2EU will discuss trying to build on the campaign in order to create a broader challenge for the general election. To put out an ‘appeal for unity’ which writes No2EU out of existence - with no prior formal or even informal approach to its constituent organisations - will not be considered serious by those seeking a way forward.”
So what’s the problem? How about writing back to the SWP proposing a joint conference? Well, you see, the “importance of No2EU” was that it enjoyed the “active participation” of “broader sections of militant workers” (the RMT bureaucracy) - isn’t that much better than “any of the existing socialist organisations declaring their initiative to be ‘the’ alternative”? The experience of No2EU, therefore, “should now be built on, with a new name, for the general election”.
Clearly all this whinging is just about jockeying for position. SPEW does not want to be part of any electoral alliance in which it is not the biggest organised left group - the very accusation it makes against the SWP. That was exactly what the Socialist Alliance demonstrated - SPEW walked out at the first opportunity, when the SWP refused to accede to its demands for a federal constitution and the right of any group (ie, itself) to veto decisions of which it disapproved.
But SPEW holds up the top-down No2EU as an example to emulate and compares it favourably to the Socialist Alliance under the SWP. In No2EU, “the different component organisations had complete freedom to produce their own material. The Socialist Party, for example, was able to produce leaflets putting forward our socialist programme and explaining that our candidates, if elected, would only take a worker’s wage.” This freedom to operate, claims SPEW, is “a considerable advance on the position [the SWP] adopted in the Socialist Alliance, where [it] opposed such latitude being allowed for constituent organisations.”
All this is a complete misrepresentation. For all the bureaucratic faults the SWP was guilty of in the SA, it never tried to stop component groups producing their own material. What it argued for - correctly - was for each component to distribute SA material, and there was no ban on the various groups supplementing this with their own propaganda. In fact, as far as I can tell, a parallel situation applied in No2EU - except that the content of the website, official leaflets and election addresses had been largely determined by the CPB and Crow before SPEW came on board.
In the SA, however, SPEW demanded the right to distribute its own material instead of that of the alliance itself. In the 2000 London assembly election, for example, SPEW’s Ian Page was the official London Socialist Alliance candidate for Lewisham and Greenwich. But the material put out by SPEW did not even mention the fact that the LSA was standing across London and called for a vote for a rival group, the Campaign Against Tube Privatisation!
By the way, SPEW itself brings up the inadequacy (to put it mildly) of No2EU’s platform, which it says was “limited” simply because it “brought together different organisations around a common programme in order to maximise its electoral impact”. However, that programme was definitely not “nationalist”, SPEW insists, despite the accusations of “some” SWP members. And, of course, we get the usual assertion that No2EU “called for ‘international solidarity of working class people’”, which is supposed to prove it.
In short, SPEW’s response to the SWP’s open letter does not show itself in a good light. By contrast, the SWP is bending over backwards to appear reasonable and cooperative. Socialist Worker is running a series of short responses from individuals who are either SWP members or those to its right. Some warn about the lack of trust that previous left unity initiatives have generated, but national secretary Martin Smith warns: “Now is not the time to rehash old arguments or settle old scores.”
He reveals that the SWP has “begun the process of holding meetings with other organisations and individuals on the left” (including the Socialist Party?) and looks forward to a conference that is “open to all and with no preconditions, to talk about the possibility of united electoral work” (Socialist Worker July 4)
For its own sake?
All the Socialist Worker contributors talk about the urgent need for unity - almost for its own sake. Bill Kerry wants to “keep any formation as broad as possible” - it “could be based on the simple ‘golden principle’ of believing in the need to narrow the gap between rich and poor”. And Michael Rosen pleads: “We desperately need to make the things that unite us count more than the things that divide us” (June 20). Meanwhile, Kumar Murshid looks forward to the “red, black and green platform crying out to be created” (June 27).
But what is this unity for? The idea is exactly the same as what has been propagated for the last decade: we all come together in some vague way, which must be better than staying apart - mustn’t it?
Well, actually, it depends on what we do. We could form a leftwing pressure group that hopes to get some exposure in the media. Or we could aim for a Labour Party mark two - only one where the revolutionaries are allowed to operate. Or we could simply cooperate more closely in a series of single-issue campaigns, as Permanent Revolution suggests: “… a stronger unity can be forged through common struggle and solidarity” if everyone works together constructively in the National Shop Stewards Network and Unite Against Fascism. And how about the SWP’s Right to Work campaign uniting with SPEW’s Youth Fight for Jobs?5
For its part, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty simply welcomes the call for a united left and conference of those on the left intending to contest the general election: “This is in line with our call for a new Socialist Alliance.”6
As I write, the International Socialist Group has not yet publicly responded to the open letter - although the latest Socialist Outlook (spring 2009) is still talking about “building Respect as its central project”. However, this “could mean at a later stage arguing that Respect should became a part of something bigger and broader which could do the job more effectively”. However, the ISG-sponsored Socialist Resistance is due on July 1 and its website promises a headline which “sums up the mood across the left: ‘Election disaster! Now the left must unite’”.7
Workers Power too welcomes the SWP call, while slating SPEW for its “outright sectarianism”. It goes further than the other groups in insisting on “the historic need for a new working class party” and “the need to begin building that party here and now”.
WP proposes a “nationwide discussion … on what kind of programme the party should have and what sort of party it should be”.8 Of course, Workers Power itself advocates a revolutionary party, yet poses as a key task the need to “break the hold of the Labour Party over key unions”. So what sort of party do the comrades think those key unions would want to launch?
The truth is that the left seems intent on a repeat of the ‘left unity’ debacles of the last decade - the SA, Respect, Campaign for a New Workers’ Party and now No2EU. All of them insisted that unity had to be ‘broad’, based on the “80% that unites us” - the “us” being made up of both reformists and revolutionaries. That meant watering down our own programme in order to appeal to Labourites as Labourites in the SA and ditching even more of our principles in Respect.
Yet, funnily enough, neither succeeded in recruiting many Labourites - what you had was the ‘revolutionaries’ pretending to be reformists (sometimes they did not have to try too hard). So are we set for a rerun? It seems both the SWP and SPEW want to control initial moves towards whatever new formation is eventually created - whether it be a mini-Labour Party mark two or a mere electoral alliance – crucially so as to be able to recruit from it to their own group.
But the only left unity worth fighting for is one that unites us in a democratic centralist party based on the principles of Marxism - what the SWP, SPEW, AWL, ISG, WP and PR all claim to uphold. Why won’t they fight for this unity?
