The SWP and anti-capitalism

The Socialist Workers Party, to its credit, recognised the importance of the developing anticapitalist movement. Following Seattle the SWP decided that this militant movement of mainly young people was going to play an important role in the new century.

Workers Power had recognised its potential several years earlier when we launched Revolution, the socialist youth organisation, and collaborated with Reclaim the Streets during the Liverpool dockers’ strike and in the Coalition against BP in Colombia. Revolution was virtualy the only left organistation present at the June 18 1999, (J18) Stop The City protest.

We worked with the SWP in the S26 Committee, building for the first international anti-capitalist blockade against the IMF and the World Bank summit in Prague in September 2000.

Following the success of Prague, the SWP launched Globalise Resistance in January 2001 at a series of huge conferences: Hammersmith attracted more than 1,000; Glasgow claimed to be the biggest left gathering in decades. This starting point was also the highpoint of GR: this years April 2004 conference was attended by little over 100 people.

Why did GR fail so miserably? After a reasonable start as an organiser of “teach-ins” on Globalisation and transport to mobilisations from Prague to Genoa, it went into a sharp decline. As with the Socialist Alliance, the reason for GR’s withering must be found in the SWP’s inept political leadership, rather than the hostility or disruption of a handful of egotistical anarchists.

Workers Power did not stand on the sidelines. We actively involved ourselves in GR, serving, often as lone critics, on its steering committee right up until the end of 2003. We argued throughout for an approach that could build a mass anticapitalist movement, drawing workers as well as youth, and help new life flood into and over the stagnant pond of the British left.

A movement of movements

The later 1990s was a hard time for socialists. The collapse of the Stalinist states and parties, the rightward drift of reformism, new realism in the unions, had all apparently disproved the potential of working-class organisations to change society and turned “party” into a dirty word.

The anticapitalist movement came as a breath of fresh air in these circumstances. But the courageous and militant youth also carried with them these anti-party and anti-political prejudices.

We therefore urged GR to build itself as a loose network of local organisations with a large degree of autonomy. Rather than relying on a diet of mini-conferences and set-piece mobilisations for international counter-summits, we called on GR to launch real campaigns against polluting incinerators, multinational sweatshop exploiters, privatisation. These campaigns, we argued, could develop the DIY spirit of direct action and make the movement relevant to the daily lives of local youth and workers.

Instead, GR became ever more centralised. A full-time officer from the SWP was employed from membership subscriptions without even the formality of a steering committee discussion. Platform speakers, press statements and media interviews were all organised by the SWP, not GR. The hand of the SWP was barely concealed by the GR glove puppet. No wonder it came to be scorned by the very people it wanted to recruit.

Workers Power set out to learn from the anticapitalist movement. When the Italian social forum movement kicked off, before and after Genoa 2001, we called on GR to build social forums. We were told, not yet, there is no social movement in Britain. True – and GR was an obstacle to its creation, not an instrument for achieving it.

Then came 9/11. To its eternal credit the SWP did take the initiative in building a mass social single-issue movement: Stop the War. But as the decisive moment arrived to turn mass demonstrations into mass direct action, the SWP funked it again.

With the ESF coming to London, we have again called for local social forums to be built as organising centres for the movement, linking it with the fight against cuts and privatisation, drawing in the trade unions, especially at a rank-and-file level, drawing in the radicalised youth who were the backbone of the antiwar mobilisations and actions.

At every juncture, the SWP has refused to relax its grip, even tightening it in alliance with the Socialist Action sect that dominates the GLA bureaucracy. Result: there is no organised anticapitalist movement in Britain.

Turn to the workers and the youth

The SWP continues to give prominence to the more right-wing forces in the movement, feting George Monbiot at Marxism 2003. Alex Callinicos even wrote An anticapitalist Manifesto that obscured the goal of revolution and promoted dead-end liberal schemas like the Tobin Tax.

Today, they support every demand of the TUC leaders and Blair’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, in organising the London ESF. The supposedly sovereign Organising Committee is sidelined, the far left are excluded from meetings, the Assembly of the Social Movements – the only body in the ESF that can take decisions – is to lose its stand-alone prominence. If they get their way, the London ESF will be the smallest and most conservative ever. Gone will be the opportunity to forge a new world party of social revolution from the crucible of the global anticapitalist movement. What a criminal waste!

Callinicos and Nineham scoff at this perspective. They claim that any programmatic victory in the movement will be Pyrrhic, leading immediately to the right wing splitting away, leaving a left-wing rump unable to carry out its revolutionary policies. Thus, the movement must accommodate its policies to those held by the Livingstones and Monbiots. It is a total abandonment of what is progressive in the SWP’s motto, “Socialism from Below”.

What about turning to and organising the unions’ rank and file, warning them of the inevitable betrayals of their reformist bureaucratic leaders? Only real social forums, drawing in workers in every town and city, can provide a counterweight to the general secretaries and full-time officials who are seeking to mute the voices of dissent within the movement.

Similarly with the youth: the SWP leadership has refused to build an independent revolutionary youth movement. The success of Revolution, launched with our far more limited resources, proves that such a movement can be built in the heart of the ESF process.

The SWP has repeatedly opposed Revolution’s proposals for a youth space and a youth assembly at the ESF, even denying that youth suffer oppression or need any room for self-organisation, in flat contradiction to all that the classical Marxists ever wrote or did on the question. The SWP’s control-freakery and patronising attitude to young people puts them on the side of the liberal academics and union bureaucrats in banning their right to self-organisation.

Leadership or tailism?

These are strange traits for a revolutionary organisation. Leninism is based on the understanding that the revolutionary class has many and varied world views, often imported from the ideology of the ruling class. Workers’ consciousness necessarily lags behind material reality as it tries to make sense of capitalism’s barbarity and exploitation.

But at key moments – typically during wars, economic and political crises – this political awareness can develop by leaps and bounds. That is why we need a party, composed of the most far-sighted workers and their allies, to lead the working class and turn revolutionary situations into successful revolutions.

Lenin castigated his opponents (the Economists) who wanted to water down the party’s policies and ideology in order to accommodate to workers’ existing consciousness and leaders as tailists. In What is To Be Done? he drew an analogy with a compact group who have chosen a narrow and difficult path along the edge of a marsh. He replies to those among them who advocate going into this swamp: “Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are free not only to invite us, but to go wherever you will, even into the marsh... Only let go of our hands, don’t clutch at us and don’t besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are ‘free’ to go where we please, free to fight not only against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards the marsh!”

The SWP leaders used to refer to the Labour and trade union left as the “swamp”. Now they are leading the SWP into the reformist swamp. It is time for those who do not wish to follow into the swamp to let go of those who are leading them there and find their way to genuine Bolshevism. We in Workers Power are only too willing to help them.