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| Home Our monthly paper 2005 WP297 | 2005/08/15 |
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The Socialist Workers Party and the new social movementsWorkers Power 297 - Summer 2005There have been immense struggles against war, racism and neoliberalism in the past few years. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and its fraternal groups in the International Socialist Tendency have played an influential role in these struggles. Luke Carter looks critically at their turn to the anticapitalist movement six years ago and the policy they have advocated for that movement since Introduction Stop the War Coalition, Globalise Resistance and the European Social Forum The alternative to Labour: from left reformism to populism The revolutionary party and the working class Introduction On 30 November 1999, 30,000 mainly young people shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Seattle, USA. The protest signalled the coming onto the world stage of a new movement committed to fighting against “globalisation” - the economic and political project of the rich G8 nations to slash welfare spending, privatise industry and dismantle barriers to the free movement of capital. This movement challenged the conventional wisdom that free market liberalism had finally won the battle of ideas after the collapse of the Soviet Union and, with the rightward shift of social democratic and labour parties internationally, it presented rich opportunities for revolutionary socialists. Workers Power spotted this new radicalism among young people in the mid 90s and launched the socialist youth group Revolution. The SWP had ignored the beginnings of this movement but after the Seattle demonstrations it began to orientate to it and were in prime position to take full advantage of it. In the 1980s it had seen its competitors wither away. Militant Tendency was purged from the Labour party and later split in 1993. The cult-like Workers Revolutionary Party collapsed during the miners’ strike with the emergence of a sexual abuse scandal around its leader Gerry Healy. The SWP defined the period between 1975 and 1990 as one of retreat for the working class, which it called “the downturn”. The party, according to this schema, had to turn in on itself, retreating to propaganda circles amidst a tidal wave of reaction in which“the very concept of Marxism itself was at stake’1. This theory was designed to justify the SWP’s failure to make a major breakthrough and had little bearing on reality in a period in which there was mass struggle against first Labour and then the Tory governments. But having concentrated purely on propaganda work to “build the party” it was insulated from the worst effects of the defeats, could pride itself on having predicted their “inevitability” and was able to build up a sizeable cadre base, particularly on university campuses. By the 1990s it could count its membership in thousands, it had a strong party apparatus, a range of weekly, monthly and quarterly publications and a large print shop produce thousands of placards for demonstrations. The SWP cited the Seattle protests as evidence of a period of recovery from the downturn. This could not have come quickly enough for them, given that they had been arguing that the downturn had ended since 1992. The International Socialist Tendency, the umbrella that brings together the SWP’s sister organisations in other countries, upon prompting by London, also threw it itself into building this new movement. This precipitated a split with the second largest group outside of the UK, the International Socialist Organisation of the United States. In polemic with them, SWP theoretician Alex Callinicos argued that the ISO had “failed the test of Seattle” in refusing to mobilise large numbers for the demonstration2. This came on top of other tensions that had emerged with the ISO during the Balkans war. The ISO had correctly argued that revolutionaries had a duty to fight for self-determination for Kosova while also being against the Nato bombing. The SWP opposed this because they feared antagonising allies they had made in the anti-war coalitions - especially those from then official Communist parties who would brook no criticism of “socialist” Serbia and its brutal Stalinist dictator Milosevic. Already they were developing a concept that made the suspension of revolutionary criticism of their allies in joint campaigns a pre-requisite for their own participation. This became theorised as “the united front of a special kind”. This adapted version of the classical Marxist united front tactic was special for two reasons. First, the fronts were neither episodic, short-term projects for the party, nor were they to be permanent attachments to the party. They were to be formally independent organisations in which the SWP undertook the bulk of its campaigning work and kept a firm organisational grip on its membership and rigidly organised party apparatus. Second, the policy marked a conscious break with the classical notion of the united front as developed by Lenin, Trotsky and the Third International after the First World War. The newly founded Communist parties in this period had to compete with larger social democratic parties that retained their hold on the leadership of the working class movement. In order to break workers from the reformists the Communists proposed to the workers organisations, trade unions and political parties, common actions against the capitalist offensive. The purpose of this united front policy was twofold. First, to force the reformist organisations to fight on questions vital to their own members and the working class as a whole. Second, to win the best reformist militants to revolutionary ideas, by exposing the incompetence and treachery of the reformist leaders through joint action and merciless criticism. This criticism was as essential as unity in struggle as the Communist International stated: “While supporting the slogan of the greatest possible unity of all workers’ organisations in every practical action against the capitalist front, communists in no circumstances desist from putting forward their views, which are the only consistent expression of the defence of working class interests as a whole.”3 Without such criticism the counterposed character of reformism and communism would be lost and the latter would not appear as an alternative programme and leadership for the class. In the coalitions, campaigns and alliances that they have established in this period, the SWP have seen an important part of their role to be arguing against their own paper policies, for fear of isolating their coalition partners. Having attracted trade union leaders like Billy Hayes and journalists like George Monbiot on to joint platforms, the last thing that the SWP wanted to do was criticise them, or argue for them to go further and fight more militantly. In Unite against Fascism, Globalise Resistance, the Socialist Alliance and the Stop the War Coalition, the SWP have refrained from providing anything resembling revolutionary leadership. 1 SWP Pre-conference Bulletin, November 2004 2 The anticapitalist movement and the revolutionary left, Alex Callinicos, 2001 3 Comintern Thesis from ECCI 18th December 1921 Stop the War Coalition, Globalise Resistance and the European Social Forum By 2000 the anticapitalist movement was becoming big news. Meetings of the IMF, World Bank and WTO and other governmental summits were under siege from demonstrators. The SWP took the opportunity to launch Globalise Resistance (GR) as a “united front of a special kind” which it would use to build the anticapitalist movement. The founding conference brought together 1,500 young activists. The opportunity existed to build a broad movement, based on campaigning initiatives and direct action and drawing in youth and student organisations, community groups, immigrants and trade unions. Early on, it organised direct action protests against banks and American arch neo-conservative Henry Kissinger’s presence in London. But the SWP soon began to exert tight bureaucratic control on GR’s work. This naturally excluded the anarchists and libertarians, who had played an important role in the movement against the Criminal Justice Bill, Reclaim the Streets and the Stop the City “riots” in 18 June 1999. The SWP created a bureaucratic facade of an anticapitalist movement. It equipped the movement with a brand name, a logo, an office, a fulltimer and steering committee, although this did not actually steer the organisation. Unwilling to compete ideologically with the anarchists to win young activists drawn to the movement, the SWP made sure that only a sprinkling of non-party people were there to challenge them. It alternately rolled out or “parked” GR, according to the its priorities. This soon led to the radical NGOs, journalists like George Monbiot, and the Green Party withdrawing with bitter complaints about an SWP stranglehold. The SWP fulltimers who represented GR in the media put forward a classless democratic anticapitalism devoid of any socialist content. Globalise Resistance has now lost the few active branches it ever had. Was it really necessary to give the movement such a rigid organisational structure? If the united front’s role is to mobilise action, all that is needed is the common agreement of different forces to act. Blurring the distinctions between united action and political programme simply obscures the role that the revolutionary party should play in linking up the struggles and developing a revolutionary socialist strategy to see them through to victory. Workers Power, seeing the emergence in 2001 of the social forums in Italy that drew in students, trade unionists, campaigning organisations, youth and the unemployed, argued that the movement should seek to build such co-ordinations in Britain, uniting these groups around common action against war, racism and neoliberalism. The SWP opposed their formation fearing the effect they could have on their control of the “united fronts of a special kind” like GR. The antiwar movement provided rich opportunities to build real united front bodies uniting the struggles, but the SWP used their control of the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) to block the mass antiwar movement building local people’s assemblies or social forums that could have lasted beyond the conflict and campaigned around other issues. The SWP argue that StWC was a classical, not a “special”, united front. It did unite real mass organisations - trade unions, CND, the Communist Party of Britain, the Muslim Association of Britain - in common action against the war in Iraq. On 15 February 2003 it brought two million workers and youth on to the streets in Britain’s biggest ever demonstration. Yet even in a classical united front the SWP did not act as an independent revolutionary party fighting for its own strategy and tactics. It refused to do this or criticise its coalition partners. On 15 February it even let Charles Kennedy, leader of the bourgeois Liberal Democrats which supported the war as soon as it began, address the mass demonstration in Hyde Park. Union leaders were rightly given a platform in Hyde Park but SWP speakers did not take the opportunity to put them on the spot and demand that they call their members out in general strike action against the war. Nor did SWP speakers warn the hundreds of thousands listening that the union leaders might well fail to translate their words into action, and that unofficial strikes would probably be necessary to force the union leaders’ hands and to stop the slaughter. If the SWP leaders had done this, acting as Lenin and Trotsky insisted revolutionaries should do when engaged in common action with reformists, two consequences would have ensued. First, the SWP could have taken a massive step forwards in rallying union members willing to take unofficial action and challenge the grip of the do-nothing union bureaucrats. Second, those self-same bureaucrats would have been angry with the SWP. The SWP knew this and made their choice, so revealing the inevitable outcome of the “united front of the special type”. Later, when the US and UK had successfully occupied Iraq and the trade union bureaucrats began to retreat from an anti-occupation position, arguing that the coalition troops could play a progressive role in Iraq and for the support of pro-occupation trade unions like the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), the SWP argued that StWC should not fight around the slogan “troops out now” and solidarity with anti-occupation forces in Iraq. At the European Social Forum in London last November, activists from the Middle East and supporters of the League for the Fifth International protested at the presence of a member of the collaborationist IFTU on an anti-occupation platform. The protestors were condemned by Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Authority (GLA) bureaucracy and the SWP who controlled the forum. Indeed, having initiated the bid to hold the ESF in London, the SWP struck an unholy alliance with the TUC bureaucracy and the GLA and the mayor’s clique of supporters in the secretive reformist sect Socialist Action. This secured significant financial support but in return granted the reformists a veto over the event’s programme. Thus sidelining the radical youth and rank and file speakers and promoting trade union bureaucrats in their place, to the fury of much of the movement.1 The SWP’s opposition to building social forums and local co-ordinations to build for the event meant that they were left at the mercy of the trade union bureaucrats. But these bureaucrats did nothing to mobilise their memberships, leading to the ESF attracting only around 20,000 people, a third of the size of previous events in Florence and Paris. 1 See articles from Workers Power 289, 290 and 291 The alternative to Labour: from left reformism to populism The mass antiwar movement that was born out of the anticapitalist movement, the social forums and summit sieges of the last few years, has radicalised a new generation. This coupled with the rightward retreat of Labour and other social democratic parties has created real opportunities to break the hold of these parties on the working class. In the UK, there have been two main initiatives that sought to build an alternative, both connected. The Socialist Alliance, established in 1998, brought different left groups together on a left reformist programme in elections. The SWP joined it a year later at the time of the London mayoral elections as part of their turn to new movements. Due to the SWP’s large size it quickly came to dominate it. Seeing it as another “united front of a special type”, it became the most eager proponent of keeping it to a left reformist programme, that is, a programme that does not will the means - revolution - to achieving its socialist goals. They scuppered attempts to mobilise the Socialist Alliance for anything except electoral work, despite the fact that its most successful meeting was its conference of 1,500 trade unionists to discuss a campaign to democratise the political fund. The SWP blocked attempts to turn the coalition towards the task of fighting within the trade union movement for a new working class party. And, when the project failed, they drew all the wrong lessons. The SWP leadership looked empirically at the mass mobilisation of the antiwar movement on the one hand and the poor showing that the SA received in elections and inferred that there must be something wrong with the SAs. Lindsey German, a leader of the SWP, said at the founding conference of Respect that she felt “people were looking for something less explicitly socialist”. This is a bizarre thing for Marxist to say. If socialism is to mean anything, it must be the objective interests of the working class. To say that a programme that could not achieve socialism was too socialist is merely to say that it fought too consistently in the interests of the working class. The SWP were moving headlong to “non-class” based populism. They observed that large numbers of people on the antiwar mobilisations came from the Asian community. That this was because of the joint mobilisation for the demonstrations with organisations like the Muslim Association of Britain. And because the Asian community was concentrated in areas that meant its vote mobilised en masse could be significant in Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system. The SWP made it clear that principles should not stand in the way of this new project, with Lindsey German arguing at the party’s annual Marxism event in 2003 that they should not make a “shibboleth” out of gay and lesbian liberation if sections of the elders in the Muslim community did not agree with it. The expulsion from the Labour Party of George Galloway, a reformist with a strong record of opposition to the UK’s blockades and attacks on Iraq, prompted the SWP to form the populist antiwar coalition Respect in the autumn of 2003. The programme of the party was populist - it did not see class, and therefore the advancement of the interests of working class people, as its primary aim, and it did not argue that socialism was the solution. Why? Because it realised there is a powerful middle class in the Muslim community that has influence over working Muslims; businessmen and Imams who could swing the votes of hundreds of workers. To get these votes Respect was to have to defend their interests too - the interests of the propertied class. That’s why its programme reduces socialism to just the “S” in the name Respect and restricts itself to platitudes like “people before profit” and nothing else. At the recent general election, George Galloway was elected MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, ousting the arch Blairite Oona King. This marked a major breakthrough for Respect, but it is one that will pose new and difficult questions for the coalition. The revolutionary party and the working class Six years ago the SWP identified the following problem. It found itself at the head of a mass movement that wasn’t spontaneously either socialist or revolutionary. The Marxist solution to this is to organise as a revolutionary party and fight for revolutionary politics from within the movement and the working class. Lenin famously clarified this in his pamphlet What is to be Done? But from very early on in their tradition, the SWP broke with this assessment, arguing instead that in times of crisis the working class becomes spontaneously revolutionary.1 Hence, the SWP hands the job of bringing socialist consciousness to workers to a “spontaneous”, evolutionary process determined by the economics of capitalism. This underestimates both the ability of capitalism to defend itself from attack, and the spontaneous strength of reformism within the working class movement. Without a revolutionary party that fights consistently for revolutionary politics, not just in seminars but in practice, in terms of providing an alternative direction for the movement, then reformism is left unchallenged. In the 1980s, during what they called ‘the downturn’, this left the SWP unable effectively to challenge reformism because they did not believe that the working class could win. Today, with their emasculated version of the united front ‘of a special kind’, they themselves repeatedly promote and recommend reformist policies in the working class and anticapitalist movements. In both cases, the SWP deny their own agency, their ability to change and affect the class struggle and to see it through to victory. This only highlights the need for a mass revolutionary party of the working class, the type of party Workers Power is fighting to build in Britain and around the world. 1 See Marxism and the Party by John Molyneaux |
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Latest News – February issue out now
Workers Power magazine
Read latest magazine onlineContents
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