The recalled Convention of the Left, in Manchester, was a flop. It noted no progress from its initial event, four months ago; it attracted less than half the number that came in September; and it agreed not a single action or demand, while ruling out "the construction of another political party". Jeremy Dewar suggests that this is not incompetence, but a cowardly refusal to challenge the John McDonnells and Bob Crows, the reformist lefts.

Workers Power gave a guarded welcome to the Convention of the Left, when it met in Manchester last September, with Labour left MP McDonnell, Lindsey German of Stop the War and the Socialist Workers Party, and firefighters' leader Matt Wrack present. It could, we argued, draw together the left wing political organisations, fighting trade unions and campaigning groups into open debate on the key issues of the day - war, the economic crisis, racism and the far right, etc. - and co-ordinate resistance to the government and the bosses. As we stood on the verge of an almighty recession - which has since arrived - we believed such an initiative could prove timely.

But none of these left leaders attended the recall convention, which, by the steering committee's own admission, had failed to sink roots in the localities. Instead, the show was run by Respect Renewal - or rather its Fourth Internationalist wing, the International Socialist Group - and Permanent Revolution. The audience reflected these organisations: small, old, and preferring to relate to the movement as it is, rather than to radically change it.

Convention without a mission
The reason behind this is primarily political. Later on, we will note some of the organisational problems of the steering committee and leading forces behind the convention, but first let's examine the one document that was voted on, the Statement of Action.

This document - previously unpublished, but apparently available to some of the delegates beforehand - is utterly vacuous. It urges the left to "go local", combining campaign work with political discussion. It warns against "duplicating other campaigns or seeking to replace them", but lists a series of issues that could be tackled from fuel poverty and job cuts through to the fascist threat.

The statement failed to mark out exactly what unique contribution the convention would make to building a wider resistance that the other groups were not already doing, if it was not seeking to replace them. For instance, many speakers wanted to campaign against fascism, but there are already many local Unite Against Fascism groups on the ground, what will the Convention do differently? And if its method were more effective, wouldn't it be seeking to "replace" UAF? If it's just doing the same thing as UAF, why a convention? The public services workshop started off with a debate about the lack of council housing and its neglect and underfunding, but what would the convention do that would supplement or better the Defend Council Housing Campaign?

The statement was empty of any real content. No forms of struggle - strikes, fuel bill strikes, occupations, etc. - are proposed. No dangers - treacherous union leaders, police hostility, anti-union laws, etc. - are warned against. No demands - nationalisation of the banks and "failing" companies, raising the minimum wage, cutting the hours, not the jobs, etc. - are raised.

No new party

To drum home the political cowardice of the statement, as if workers would not have already sussed it had no lead to offer, the statement concludes, "We are not saying that this means the construction of another political party."

Of course, this sentence sticks out like a sore thumb. After all, the statement has refused to "say" or propose anything concrete at all except abstract "unity". Nevertheless, the firm exclusion of the possibility of a new political party had a real purpose. It signalled to the Labour Representation Committee (the Labour left grouping around McDonnell) and the Communist Party of Britain (Morning Star) that the Convention of the Left would not politically challenge them.

Indeed, it is debatable whether the Convention was from the beginning meant to be anything more than a creature of these forces, blocking an alternative party, with the tiny ISG and PR as the spokespeople giving this process "left cover" and bureaucratically warding off challenges to this agenda.

Any serious activist, who has thought about the effect the recession is going to have on working class livelihoods and communities, knows that politics are key to defending ourselves against the bosses. Sure, militant action can save some jobs, prevent a few closures, keep some services running. But to force the capitalist class as a whole to pay for their crisis, and to take general measures to defend our class, including the majority outside of the unions, we need a working class government.

But who can form such a government? Only a political party can take power and wield it decisively for our class. Yet no one in his or her right minds believes that Labour can be won to such a perspective. So a new party has to be founded.

It is this logic, underlying any serious attempt to combat the crisis, that means the "construction of another political party" has to remain on the agenda, no matter how many subjective failings there have been, from Respect to the Scottish Socialists. And why the real forces behind the Convention of the Left - the LRC, Respect, the CPB, and left union leaders - moved from the beginning to knock it off.

Centrist cynicism
Bill Jefferies, one of the key leaders of the convention and a member of the Permanent Revolution group, tried to deflect criticism by saying, "There's not going to be an election any time in the near future, so the question of a new party is not where it's at." It is quite tragic that a former member of Workers Power should come out with such nonsense.

First, a working class party would not just - or even mainly - be an electoral machine. It would organise the struggle in the workplaces, school and colleges, in the unions and campaigns, on the streets and picket lines. It would be an arena of debate for those anticapitalist activists to hammer out a strategy - a programme - of how to link such struggles, how to win them, and how to connect them to the revolutionary struggle for socialism. Of course it would also stand in elections, but this would not be its main strategy, only a subordinate tactic. For Leninists, this is ABC.

Second, Jefferies was wrong. There definitely will be an election in the next 12-15 months and, if we don't build a new party now, workers will have no one to vote for... except Labour! And of course this is Bill and Permanent Revolution's position, though they hardly shout about it because - as the latest opinion polls for The Independent (15 per cent Tory lead) and The Guardian (12 point Tory lead) show - workers are still turning away from Labour in revulsion.

Worst of all, if the centrists of the PRG and ISG are prepared to act as loyal servants to McDonnell and co. in the Labour Party, why would they not do the same for the TUC lefts, like Crow, Wrack and Mark Serwotka of the PCS? After all, the comrades from these organisations that are on the steering committee of the National Shop Stewards Network have for two years running blocked Worker Power's proposal that the NSSN fights "with the union officials where possible but without them where necessary".

This worship of uncritical "left unity" is the basis of the convention, with a focus on "concrete" (i.e. immediate) demands and proposals: as Bill Jefferies put it, things that everyone can agree on like anti-fascism, campaigning against postal privatisation, etc. But this means excluding demands that stress effective ways of fighting back, and forms of organisation able to ensure workers control their own actions not the labour bureaucracy.

Further, it means not advancing demands that can develop a consistent anticapitalist response to the attacks that workers face, much less a party that could lead these struggles to socialism. That is not possible in today's climate, PR and the ISG argue, and, besides, it would divide the left.

So would the convention condemn left union leaders when they call off strikes and sign agreements that seek only to swap pay rises for job cuts, as has recently happened in the PCS? Pete Keenleyside of the CWU NEC and Labour left was present; he voted for the sell-out deal that crushed the 2007 strike; yet the Convention focused on finding "what we agree on" and pushing such issues to one side. If they won't lay out this faultline now and debate ahead of time how they would deal with it, they are opening themselves up for further capitulations and cover for the "left" misleaders.

In their magazines and journals, PR and the ISG may criticise such left bureaucrats - to give them their real name - but, despite advancing a strategy of building left conventions, they are building these on a lowest common denominator that papers over the divide between the reformist bureaucracy and rank and file - after all, we're all "left". This "left" is camouflage to conceal the bureaucracy from the workers.

We expect such cynicism and subservience to reformism from the Fourth International. It is their stock in trade. But it is truly tragic that comrades in Permanent Revolution, who used to understand, expose and combat this kind of centrist humbug, now join them.

Bureaucracy
In the last session it became clear that the steering committee had knocked two properly submitted resolutions off the agenda, both calling on the trade union leaders to convene a conference to launch a new party. Under pressure, the chair, John Nicholson, allowed just two speakers to speak for these resolutions being heard and two against. Even under these unhelpful conditions, between a quarter and a third of delegates voted in favour.

A longer debate would have drawn out the consequences of banning discussion on a new, mass working class party. Who benefits from the refusal to discuss a left alternative to Labour? Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and... the Tories. They benefit directly by preventing the Labour government from being challenged on its left flank, and allowing the Tories to pull New Labour constantly to the right.

Who else benefits from the block on forming a new party? The reformist trade union and Labour left leaders. Once the convention has signalled its preparedness to help prevent a direct political threat to the Labour Party, what will stop it from stifling other challenges to their influence in the movement: on strike tactics, on breaking the anti-union laws, on supporting self defence against the far right and the police.

Exaggeration? Maybe not. Andy Young from Leeds CWU put a proposal to the workshop on public services calling for
• Rank and file control of all strikes - with the officials where possible, without them where necessary
• Co-ordination of our actions both locally and nationally against closures, cuts and privatisation, organising protests, strikes and occupations
• A new working class party based on struggle not just elections

While Andy conceded that the debate on the new workers party had, albeit inadequately, taken place, he asked John Nicholson, in the chair for the final plenary, to read out the other demands, as he had done with all the other proposals coming from workshops. However now Nicholson refused to allow it. Why?

The comrades on the steering committee, who cobbled together this shoddy statement, may complain that they personally are ready to raise all these points. And so they might be. But this is missing the point.

Socialists are not in the business of raising key political demands simply for the exercise of our brains, but to win real working class forces to fight for them. To foreclose on the convention of the left developing in this direction, by insisting that it raises no demands in its own name lest this leads to division, to deny the possibility that the struggle against the recession may lead to a new party, all this can only mean one thing. The convention of the left will not challenge the existing leaders of the labour movement. Ironically, it looks like it has already served its purpose and the LRC, the CPB and the TUC lefts will turn to more substantial forces, like the SWP and the NSSN, to roll out their people's charter.