Alex Callinicos's article "The
European radical left tested electorally"
* reopens a number of important debates on the construction of broad
parties in Europe - including Respect in England and the Scottish
Socialist Party (SSP) in Scotland. Murray Smith in "The European
elections and the Radical Left" *
deals well with Callinicos's controversial remarks about the SSP. My
agreement with Murray's response allows me to concentrate on making
some additional points in response to Alex Callinicos's views about
the development of Respect and the role of the Socialist Alliance
which preceded it.
I agree with
both of them about the general significance of the June 10 election
results in Britain and the emergence of Respect. The results were both
a disaster for new Labour, the worst since 1918, and a breakthrough
for the left. Respect's votes in a number of working class inner city
areas were a qualitative advance on anything the British left has
achieved in the past - with the exception of the SSP. George Galloway
got 92,000 votes for the European Parliament in London. Lindsey German
polled just short of 5% for London Mayor, and Respect got 20% of the
vote in East London in the Greater London Assembly (GLA) elections. In
Birmingham Respect averaged 7.4% and in Leicester 10%. The support
Respect has won from what we can loosely call the 'Muslim community',
in its ethnically and culturally diverse forms, is a major step
forward in itself.
Since the
Callinicos and Smith articles were written Respect has notched up some
additional impressive electoral scores. In the Leicester South and
Birmingham Hodge Hill parliamentary bye-elections Respect polled 12.4%
and 6.4% respectively. Soon after it had an outright win in a local
council bye-election in Tower Hamlets. All these results add up to a
dramatically better start for Respect than we could have predicted at
its founding conference last January. It has found its place on the
political map in a remarkably short period of time. So how can
Respect's initial success be turned into a long-term gain for the
left?
A balance
sheet of the Socialist Alliance
Alex Callinicos is right to look at the lessons of the experience of
the Socialist Alliance (SA). However, the conclusions he draws are
seriously problematic. It is not just that he regards the SA as having
been a failure, but he locates the problems it faced in the objective
political conditions rather than in the questions of its own
development or problems of the wider English left. He argues that the
decay of the Labour Party had not reached the point where the
construction of a left alternative to new Labour was on the agenda. He
puts it this way:
From a
strategic point of view, a mass socialist party can only develop in
Britain if it succeeds in breaking away substantial sections of
Labour's base, which, despite its decay, still reaches deep into the
working class organisations and communities. The point of the SA was
to brigade together the sane elements of the far-left into a united
front (of a new kind) that could directly appeal to, and win over
significant forces from a Labourist background...
Given
that Labour held together, the SA found itself in some internal
difficulty. Had substantial ex-Labour Party supporters joined, the
SA would have had two poles, reformist and revolutionary.
I thought it
was common ground with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) that the
objective conditions for a new party to the left of Labour had matured
by the mid-1990s, or at least by the time SWP joined the SA in late
1999. True the Labour Party did not split, but the bulk of its
socialist and activist membership left in disgust; its voting base in
its traditional areas collapsed; its local meetings became moribund
and its annual conference was stripped of its powers and replaced by
policy forums. Blairism was a new kind of Labour leadership more
consciously determined to fundamentally change the class nature of the
party.
Was the
Socialist Alliance a failure? In fact the SA was by far the best
initiative towards left unity in England prior to Respect. It failed
to reach its potential, that is true. But this was due to political
problems within the SA, and the wider left in England. It is hard,
otherwise, to explain the success of the SSP in Scotland. It faced the
same objective conditions as the SA faced in England - the rise of
Blairism and a growing pool of people, including disaffected Labour
supporters, open to a new political organisation - but it went well
beyond what the SA was able to attain. The introduction of the
Scottish Parliament was an important factor, but this does not explain
the whole picture.
The SA got
some good results in the May 2000 GLA elections and then in the June
2001 General Election. It did good work in the unions around the
growing crisis of labour representation and the political fund,
organising a major rank-and-file conference in March 2001. It had a
good constitution, based on one-member-one-vote, that incorporated the
far left organisations and gave maximum leverage to the individual
non-aligned member. It also had a good manifesto that was, rightly, as
Callinicos says, not a revolutionary programme but a radical left
platform suitable for a pluralist socialist organisation. It provided
valuable experience and also a springboard from which to launch
Respect.
The SA faced,
however, a much more difficult configuration of the left in England,
than existed in Scotland. The Communist Party of Britain (CPB) stayed
outside. There was the continued existence of the Socialist Party
(SP), as a sizable organisation, which lurched increasingly towards a
sectarian and unilateralist trajectory - despite its ritualistic
propaganda about a new workers' party. The SP split from the SA at the
constitutional conference in December 2001.
There was
also a stronger presence of smaller, sectarian far-left groups in
England than in Scotland, particularly the Alliance for Workers
Liberty (AWL), but also the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).
Workers Power (WP), which was capable of a much more constructive
role, went off on a leftist binge, rejecting the idea of building
broad parties at just the time when new possibilities were opening up.
Added to this
was the dominant size of the SWP inside the SA - exacerbated by the
departure of the SP -which Alex Callinicos refers to as a 'structural
imbalance'. He is right: there was a structural imbalance. The SWP was
the biggest asset the SA had and at the same time posed one of its
trickiest problems. It was, however, to the credit of the SWP that it
had taken the strategic decision to join the SA and back the building
of a broad socialist alternative. We had serious left unity for the
first time after decades of functioning as rival organisations.
The issue,
therefore, is not whether there was a structural imbalance but whether
it was a containable problem, to be resolved as soon as possible by
the expansion of the SA, or whether it rendered the SA non-viable,
despite its achievements. Alex Callinicos seems to suggest it did,
arguing that the imbalance was due to the weakness of the SA's
reformist pole. This would raise some serious problems about the
future of Respect as I discuss below. He puts it this way:
When we
asserted ourselves, however democratically, we caused resentment.
The SP and a few well known 'independents' cited 'SWP dominance'
when they walked out of the Alliance. Usually they had their own
reasons for leaving, but in truth the SWP did dominate the SA - not
by intention, but by default, in the absence of a sufficiently
strong pole from a reformist background.
In fact there
was such a pole or 'left Labour component' inside the SA. The SA had
understood that success rested on its ability to attract ex-Labour
Party members, and it had had some success, with members in the local
branches and standing as candidates. Both Mike Marqusee and John
Nicholson were leading members, as was Dave Church and a sizeable
group of socialists from Walsall where some were ex-Labour
councillors. Liz Davies resigned from the Labour Party (and its NEC)
to become the national chair of the SA.
To have had
more from the Labour tradition would have tempered the internal
debates and improved the situation. But winning large numbers of
ex-Labour Party members was not easy. They had broken with Labour by
individual decision rather than by collective split. The decision to
join something new, therefore, was also an individual process. Some
were wary about joining an organisation with such a large far left
component and/or dominated by the SWP. The integration of this
left-Labour component was more or less a precondition to a further
breakthrough on this front. In this the actions and attitude of the
SWP was as crucial as the campaigning successes of the SA itself.
The point
here is not to put all the problems of the SA at the door of the SWP -
far from it. The SWP made important compromises in the cause of the
unity of the SA, and engaged in debates it did not want to have. But
the blunt fact is that there are things that only the dominant
organisation can do. The SWP failed to convince a lot of individual
activists that the decision-making processes of the SA were
sufficiently separate from those of the SWP itself. The result was a
growing resentment, not always based on fact, which became an
increasing problem.
Alex
Callinicos is right to say there was often resentment against the SWP
even when it acted in a perfectly democratic way. There was also
sectarianism towards the far left in general. He is wrong, however, to
suggest that it was an unmanageable situation. It was always going to
be difficult in an organisation embracing diverse traditions of the
left and far left. It meant that the SWP had to be squeaky clean when
it came to the democratic functioning of the SA, to ensure no credence
could be given to false accusations. Unfortunately there were too many
examples, particularly at a local level, of pre-emptive
decision-making by the SWP, a tendency to regard democratic procedures
as cumbersome or time-wasting.
In my view a
perceived lack of democracy was responsible for more individual
members flaking away from the SA than any other reason - particularly
those who had a history of fighting for democracy in the unions or the
Labour Party.
An example of
this pre-emptive approach at national level was the SWP's response to
9/11 and the looming invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001. The SA was
by-passed and the rally which set up the Stop the War Coalition was
called in the name of the SWP. Many of us on the SA Executive
Committee thought the initiative should have come from the SA itself.
The outcome would have been the same - a highly successful anti-war
movement - but the distinction was important. It was symptomatic of a
problem that when something important, other than an election, came
up, the SA was set aside and the SWP took over. SWP leaders argued
that only a revolutionary party could take such an initiative. But
why? Why should the elected leadership of a broad alliance, acting as
a party on a wide range of issues and developing collective
experience, not be able to take such an initiative?
Behind this
was the SWP's strategic view of the Alliance as a 'united front of a
special kind'. This effectively saw the SA as a mainly electoral
vehicle amongst several such united fronts the SWP were involved in
such as Globalise Resistance and the Anti Nazi League. But the SA was
not a united front: it was a political organisation with a rounded
programme offering itself as a political alternative. This approach
limited the SWP's commitment to the SA and caused it to counterpose
the building of the SWP to the building of the SA, as, for example, on
the anti-war demonstrations.
War on
Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US and Britain in March 2003 created a
renewed crisis for new Labour, accelerating the disenchantment amongst
Labour's traditional supporters. We saw the biggest Parliamentary
revolt of Labour MPs ever.
The scale of
these new opportunities was clear in the elections in May 2003 - just
after the fall of Baghdad - for the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh
Assembly, and some English local authorities. Labour lost control of
traditional Labour councils such as Birmingham and Brighton. The
Alliance won its first local councillor in Preston through drawing
support from the Muslim community for its anti-war stance. The most
spectacular gains were made by the SSP, which increased its
representation in the Scottish Parliament from one to six.
The SA's AGM
a few weeks later addressed this new situation and launched a new
political initiative calling for something broader and more effective
than the existing SA. Unfortunately the Communist Party of Britain, an
important component of the Stop the War Coalition, and a potential
supporter of a realignment, decided not to join but to stick to their
line of 'reclaiming' Labour for the left. This strategy looked towards
the trade union left, the so-called 'awkward squad' and the Campaign
Group of Labour MPs.
However,
George Galloway's expulsion from the Labour Party, in October 2003,
opened the situation up. He promptly appealed for a new political
coalition based on the unity forged in the anti-war movement. After a
series of discussions and rallies around the country, Respect was
launched in January 2004.
Launching
and building Respect
It is clear that Respect is a major step forward from the SA. Its
origins lie in the political situation created by the war and in the
biggest anti-war movement ever seen in Britain. Although the
conditions for a left alternative had existed for eight years or so,
dramatic new opportunities have opened up. This gives Respect a
resonance that the SA never had. The debate is now on its political
character and how to build it.
Respect
already has a bigger ex-Labour component than the SA achieved, for as
well as the traditional Labour left, Respect has attracted many from
the ethnic minority communities - the first time the left has managed
to do this. Activists were strongly represented in the Respect
candidates' lists and are evident in Respect meetings, with new people
also coming forward. But its vote is much wider than this layer.
George Galloway's expulsion for opposition to the war is the nearest
thing we have had to a split in the Labour Party. With the stature and
credibility of an ex-Labour MP he brings with him an important chunk
of the left Labour tradition.
Does this
mean that Respect has resolved the 'structural imbalance' suffered by
the SA, as Alex Callinicos implies? Emphatically no! In fact the
domination of the SWP inside Respect is no less than it was in the SA
and no less of a potential problem. As a new and more viable
organisation Respect is better placed to tackle this, but the problems
posed in developing Respect are similar to those faced by the SA:
strengthening its non-far left component; making it habitable for
non-aligned members; making it an effective vehicle for left unity;
bringing in parts of the left who are not yet convinced by it; making
a breakthrough into the unions and gaining union affiliations.
It also means
tackling this 'problem' of the dominant organisation - seeking to draw
on the strengths of the SWP whilst avoiding the pitfalls. This has to
be done by building confidence and trust in the course of day-to-day
work and Respect's decision-making processes. There are already signs
of pre-emptive decision-making at local level that set the alarm bells
ringing. This is not just about the fears of individuals. We need to
create the best conditions to bring new organisations into Respect. At
the moment the only other organised groups within Respect are
Socialist Resistance and the CPGB.
In the unions
hostility to new Labour continues to grow, yet important left leaders
hold back from embracing Respect, even those who are sceptical about
the 'reclaim Labour' position. We need to think carefully about this.
The gains made by the SA in the RMT and the CWU need to be
consolidated. The FBU, which has just broken from Labour, needs to be
won to Respect. We need to create the best possible conditions for the
unions to transfer their allegiances to Respect as a political
alternative to new Labour.
The SWP has a
much bigger commitment to Respect than it had to the SA. This is
reflected in the human, material and political resources it is
prepared to put into it. More of the SWP's leadership is committed to
Respect than was the case with the SA. SWP branches were clearly the
driving force in the recent election campaigns. Respect has a profile
in Socialist Worker that the SA never had. All this is a basis for
building Respect more consistently than was the case with the SA. At
the same time Respect has to develop politically. Out of necessity, it
went into the June elections on a limited political platform and with
embryonic organisational structures. But if it does not develop more
comprehensive and collective politics, and its own distinct political
activity, it will run into serious trouble.
Alex
Callinicos' defence of the 'Respect model' suggests that the SWP
leadership still regard Respect in the way it regarded the SA - as a
'united front of a special kind'. This is a big problem. If Respect is
to develop and consolidate it needs to move towards becoming a party
rather than a broad coalition. Only in this way can it develop the
necessary collective political experience and internal life that will
take it beyond being a collection of groupings and individuals. This
will not happen immediately, but it needs to be the medium-term
objective.
Already there
seems to be a consensus that Respect should be a multi-tendency
organisation with the political groups having the right of platform
within it. This is very important and a rejection of the authoritarian
model of Scargill's Socialist Labour Party (SLP). Respect has a clear
socialist reference point (the 'S' is for Socialism) but puts forward
its socialist and anti-capitalist ideas in a way which is consistent
with its pluralist approach, the diversity of its membership, and its
stage of development. It is crucial that it continues this way.
Respect has
towards two thousand new members who were not in the SA. These new
members will need, and will want, the democratic structures of a party
in which they can participate and have their say. They will want local
branch meetings with political discussions and debate. They were after
all attracted to Respect on the basis of its politics and its stand
against new Labour and the war. This is particularly the case with
Respect members who are not members of an affiliated organisation and
therefore have no other forum for such discussions. The October
conference that will discuss the constitution, as well as political
issues, will be a test of Respect's future viability.
Notes
* Alex Callinicos - "The European radical
left tested electorally"- The article appears in the latest issue (n°
5) of the Discussion Bulletin of the International Socialist Tendency
(IST), to which the SWP belongs. The entire bulletin can be found on
www.istendency.net.
* Murray Smith - "The European
elections and the Radical Left" - available at
Frontline online
site of the International Socialist Movement, marxist platform inside
the SSP.