Russian Krasnoe TV video report of SWP’s Marxism 2013
Thanks to Russian Krasnoe internet TV (krasnoe dot tv/node/19020#comments-info), who interviewed Stan Keable about Labour Party Marxists, as part of their upbeat video report of the Socialist Workers Party’s ‘Marxism 2013’ educational event:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ptuqoql7Es
Like Labour Party Marxists, the Socialist Appeal group (the remnant of the Militant Tendency which chose to remain in the Labour Party) is an affiliate of the Labour Representation Committee. When LPM was launched in June 2011 in response to Peter Hain’s Refounding Labour consultation document,1 we affiliated to LRC and, although I did not come across any SA comrades in London, I was aware that they were playing their part in trying to build the organisation, setting up local LRCs elsewhere – and they were always represented at national committee meetings.
Not so today, unfortunately. An LRC national committee member told me recently that they had made a decision to go elsewhere about 18 months ago. This seems to be something of an exaggeration, however. A young activist at the group’s summer school explained that SA had put the LRC “on the back burner”, as it “didn’t seem to be going anywhere”, and was torn by “sectarian strife”. SA seems to have shied away from the conflicts which erupted in the LRC in 2012 in the form of its merger with Labour Briefing, which turned out to be a split at the top of both Briefing and the LRC itself, with the loss of Labour Party national executive member Christine Shawcroft, and the publication of two competing versions of the journal.
At the summer school, held at University of London College Union, over the weekend of June 28-30, I was not surprised to learn that this reluctance to engage in a real conflict within the revolutionary and socialist left is entrenched in SA’s proclaimed “anti-sectarianism”. Marxist unity is “impractical”, because the “sectarians” always split hairs and use up all their energy in pointless arguments – “We don’t want to waste time in endless debate with sectarians.” When the class moves, it will choose which ‘Marxists’ to follow.
Nevertheless, I was made very welcome by the participants and speakers, all of whom were friendly, and I was able to intervene freely in all of the sessions I attended. In each I noticed that, after the opening lecture, the first person in discussion seemed to give a prepared supportative intervention rather than raising any differences, and very few people challenged the speakers’ views. The only other political group represented, as far as I could see, was the Socialist Party in England and Wales, whose comrade had nothing to say except that the Labour Party was “an out-and-out capitalist party”, and quoted the Falkirk candidate selection row to prove it. So I enjoyed the role of fall guy for the ‘sectarian left’, and having my views ‘corrected’ by a succession of naive students (most of those attending were students).
Several told me that they read the Weekly Worker, usually online, and were fascinated by the goings-on in the various groups of the revolutionary left, especially the Socialist Workers Party, which the WW seemed to concentrate on. They also remarked on how accurate the paper was in detailing their politics. But why on earth bother? What is the point? Some told me how, in joining SA, they had escaped the “noise” of sectarian left arguments and been directed to the more beneficial systematic study of Marxist classics – including, of course, the “legacy of Ted Grant”, upholder of “the unbroken thread of Marxism”, and “the leading theoretician of Marxism” since World War II.
I was hoping to attend the session on ‘The rise and fall of the Militant Tendency’ on the Saturday evening, but the timetable had been changed so I had missed it. As I arrived, the group’s leader, Alan Woods, was telling a lecture-theatre full of nearly 100 mostly younger comrades about “the real Lenin and Trotsky”. Fred Weston stood in for Socialist Appeal editor Rob Sewell, who was off sick, and on the Sunday I attended comrade Weston’s presentations on ‘Marxism and the Labour Party’ and ‘History of the Fourth International’.
It was only after Lenin’s death that Zinoviev, when he was siding with Stalin, coined the term ‘Trotskyism’, explained comrade Woods. “We are Leninists,” he told his young followers. “Trotsky said nothing that Lenin had not already said” – but, somehow, “in 1905, only Trotsky had the theory of permanent revolution: that the Russian proles can come to power before the Germans or the French.” However, before 1917 Trotsky had been a “unity-monger” – comrade Woods’s shibboleth against seeking Marxist unity today.
I was pleased to hear comrade Woods decry bureaucratic centralism and claim to uphold democratic centralism, freedom of expression and the right to form factions – but, unfortunately, there were always compromising caveats. “Freedom of discussion” leads to “clarity of ideas”; but this was undermined by what we might call the Callinicos principle: “We make a decision and move on”. For the Bolsheviks, “there was always freedom of factions”. But Bolshevism was “always a school of internal discussions”, and the right to form factions should apply “in certain circumstances”. Mixed messages.
Comrade Woods evidently misses the fundamental point that, for Lenin, Trotsky and both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, political differences – including factional struggles – had to be fought out in public, not internally, so that everyone can learn. This misconception underpins his repetition of the myth that “the Bolshevik faction” of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party “transformed itself into the Bolshevik Party in 1912”. The logical implication, of course, unspoken by comrade Woods, is that the party allegedly formed in 1912 was monolithic, and that the revolution was led by a party without factions.
Comrade Woods had not mentioned the ban on factions imposed in 1921 by the 10th party congress, so I brought it up in discussion time, and challenged the misconception of the 1912 Bolshevik party, pointing out that it was the liquidators, not the Menshevik faction, who had been excluded in 1912, and that the chair of that congress was in fact a Menshevik.
Opening the Sunday morning session on ‘Marxism and the Labour Party’, Fred Weston described the party, like the trade unions, as a mass organisation of the working class, but underlined that “joining does not mean supporting its bourgeois leaders”.
SA’s ‘What we stand for’ column includes “Labour to power on a bold socialist programme”, and “Trade unions must reclaim the Labour Party!” As Weekly Worker readers will know, Labour Party Marxists prefers the term “transform” to “reclaim”, because: “From the beginning the party has been dominated by the labour bureaucracy and the ideas of reformism.”2 But, happily, comrade Weston made that point himself: “Labour has always been reformist” – so SA is not pining for an imagined golden age when Labour was a socialist party. It is “democratic fighting trade unions” which must reclaim the party, with “election of all trade union officials, with the right of recall” and the wage of “the average skilled worker”.
Comrade Weston castigated SPEW for splitting Militant Tendency by choosing to leave the Labour Party. The pitiful votes obtained by SPEW’s Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition showed the folly of its attempt to find a short cut to mass support outside Labour. Militant had not been forced out of that party, he insisted. With a claimed membership of 8,000, only 200 or so had been expelled when Peter Taaffe and co decided to jump ship (a couple of older comrades told how they had been victims of Neil Kinnock’s witch-hunt). Although a ‘star chamber’ team of witch-hunters had travelled the country picking off Militant activists, they were only expelled where their local constituency party allowed it. Some had followed bad advice not to turn up at the disciplinary hearing and fight their corner. Later, after a couple of years, they were able to rejoin online without a problem.
What is SA’s perspective for Labour? Ed Miliband “does not want to win outright” in 2015, but would prefer a Lib-Lab coalition. We will probably get a Labour government continuing Tory policies, and intensified class struggle. Labour is rooted in the working class, and “will be changed by the radicalisation of the class”. When it, inevitably, fights back, the class “will try to use the trade unions to fight” and this will move the unions left, as it did in the 1970s. That in turn will move the party left, as happened in the 1980s. That is why the bourgeoisie fear Labour’s trade union link, explained comrade Weston. (Militant Tendency benefited from this leftward shift in Labour, not because it had defeated the other revolutionary left groups in argument, but simply because it was the ‘last man standing’ within Labour. Others had pulled out round about 1968.)
In a “downswing” period, like the present, participation in the movement is low, and the bureaucracy moves rightwards. But SA has “absolute faith in the working class”, which will, sooner or later, fight back. A “mass revolutionary party” will be achieved through patient work in the mass organisations (which comrade Weston counterposed to Marxist rapprochement). We have no crystal ball, said comrade Weston. Maybe we will win Labour, maybe splits will occur, to the right and/or to the left. If a mass left split occurs, we should go with it, and win them for Marxism. The Marxist party that arose would be in a position to win over the masses.
Fred Weston again substituted for the absent Rob Sewell in the session on the Fourth International. He said that Trotsky analysed the failure of the Russian Revolution, and did his most important theoretical work in the 1930s, struggling against the distortion of Marxism. Comrade Weston took us quickly through the Left Opposition; the International Left Opposition, which called itself an “expelled faction” of Comintern; Trotsky’s estimation, when Hitler was elected to power in 1933, that the communist parties were “dead for revolution”; and the formation of the International Communist League.
In truth, said comrade Weston, the Fourth International “had not taken off”. Strangely, he did not mention its 1938 programme, The death agony of capitalism. After World War II, the Fourth International was disorientated, and collapsed “because of its crisis predictions”. In 1946, Ernest Mandel and Gerry Healy were predicting “worldwide crisis”, and that the Soviet Union was “on the verge of collapse”. In 1951, Pierre Frank (France) and James Cannon (USA) were predicting “the coming World War III”, and some were claiming World War II “had not ended”. Even today, said Weston, the Lambertists claim that “capitalism has not developed the productive forces beyond their 1938 level”, desperately trying to defend the 1938 programme as dogma.
Until 1938, said comrade Weston, Trotskyism had a clean banner. Since World War II it has had a stinking banner, and we must cleanse it. And who better than the upholders of “the unbroken thread of Marxism” to do that?
1. For the LPM response see http://labourpartymarxists.org.uk/refound-labour-as-a-real-party-of-labour.
Stan Keable reports from a recent LRC National Committee meeting
On Saturday June 29, the Labour Representation Committee’s four-hour national committee meeting in London was a friendly – and businesslike – affair. The venue was, once again, the boardroom at the headquarters of the Rail, Maritime and Transport trade union, one of the LRC’s affiliates.
Comrades were outraged at the capitulation of Labour’s front bench to government austerity policies. Jenny Lennox called it a “non-oppositional opposition”. There had been a “sea change” four months ago, according to Graham Bash, when the parliamentary party had voted against the Welfare Reform Bill, but now it had gone into reverse and rejected the principle of universal benefits.
Mike Phipps thought that Ed Miliband is listening too much to Peter Mandelson, trying to please the markets to gain so-called credibility, and is being pulled to the right by the ‘public opinion’ of an electorate influenced by the rightwing media – especially young voters who have never experienced a strong labour movement. Conclusion: we need an effective press officer (Andrew Fisher used to play this role well) to put across our policies, as “our ideas are popular”.
A series of suggestions followed about how the LRC could “use public opinion” to grow by publicising LRC policies which are already popular – like rail nationalisation, taxing the rich, a house-building programme, and so on. And to make our policies more acceptable, it was proposed, we should make a list of alternatives to austerity which are “easy to argue” and “things that don’t cost”. Extending this desperate logic into the field of Labour candidate selection, we had: “You are not going to get someone selected if they say what we believe.” And: “If candidates put themselves forward as LRC, they would not get selected.”
Everyone knows that the two Eds are promising continued austerity if Labour wins in 2015. When I argued that the workers’ movement will have to oppose any government that runs British capitalism, including the next Labour government, Jon Lansman countered (probably giving the view of most NC members), that we should “influence the next Labour government, not oppose it”.
With 13 committee members present, plus me as a non-voting observer (all LRC members are traditionally permitted to attend), there were at least an equal number of apologies, and comrades speculated that some may have absented themselves because of the unpleasant row at the previous meeting on April 13 (which I had been unable to attend).
Minutes of that meeting had not yet been circulated, and exactly what happened or what was decided was still unclear. However, we were told that Pete Firmin, then joint secretary, had prepared minutes, and they would be circulated that evening. (I recall a decision some two years ago that NC minutes would be routinely published on the LRC website, so I look forward to reading them.)
Not long after the April 13 meeting, comrade Firmin resigned his post, but without publishing his reasons, and a number of NC members complained about this lack of transparency – neither the LRC membership nor many of its leadership had been properly informed about the recent travails at the top.
Having been co-opted onto the editorial board of Labour Briefing – the version now “hosted by” the LRC – I have proposed that NC meetings should always be reported in the magazine – journalistically, not as minutes – so that LRC members can read about the decisions, debates and differences of their elected leaders in their own publication. But this was rejected by a majority of the EB on the grounds that it would be “boring”, “uninteresting” or would “put people off”. So much for transparency.
Pete’s resignation came on top of the withdrawal, on paternity leave, of the other joint secretary elected at conference, Andrew Fisher. Arrangements are in hand to divide and distribute the work previously carried out by the two, with responsibilities allocated temporarily until the November 9 annual conference elects new officers.
I made the point that the distribution of tasks and election of officers would be better done by the NC than by annual conference, so that the departure of individuals for whatever reason would not throw the organisation into crisis. Not only could absence due to resignations, births, deaths and illness be handled easily – instead of by crisis measures, as at present – but also the replacement of comrades who were tasked but failing to perform, or who had a political change of heart. However, such a change would require rule changes, so until conference it seems we will make do with a number of “acting” officers.
Meanwhile, despite the storms at the top, the LRC continues to grow, with a reported trickle of a few dozen new members in May. Our database now lists roughly a thousand paid-up members, a thousand “supporters” and another thousand lapsed members, many of whom may be persuaded to pay up and get active.
There was no sign at the NC meeting of anyone from the Socialist Appeal group. That is the wing of the old Militant Tendency which stayed in the Labour Party under the leadership of Ted Grant and Alan Woods. Peter Taaffe led the majority out of the Labour Party and went on to form the Socialist Party in England and Wales. According to current SPEW doctrine, Labour is no longer a workers’ party of any kind and what is needed therefore is a Labour Party mark two. Anyhow, I had noticed that the group’s monthly paper, Socialist Appeal, has recently carried nothing about LRC. One NC member advised me that SA had taken a decision 18 months ago to abandon LRC, but I had heard nothing of that. So that afternoon I made my way to the University College London Union in Bloomsbury, where Socialist Appeal was holding its third annual Marxist school, to find out. I will write about that next week.
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Open letter from Stan Keable of Labour Party Marxists to Marshajane Thompson and Cath Elliott, withdrawing support for the ‘Women in the labour movement’ online statement (www.womeninthelabourmovement.wordpress.com)
Dear Comrades Marshajane and Cath,
Please remove my name from the list of signatories to the ‘Women in the labour movement’ statement which you launched on March 12. I signed the statement because of its good intentions, but I have come to the conclusion that its effect will be counterproductive, empowering the labour bureaucracy rather than the rank and file; further restricting freedom of discussion in our movement – the real key to making it a safer place; and unintentionally feeding the current media witch-hunt against the left.
The statement was launched within days of the 2013 Unison Women’s Conference, which carried resolution No30 “Support rape victims not rape deniers”, moved by Cath Elliott, one of the initiators of this statement. Resolution No30 calls on Unison bodies to use the ‘no platform’ tactic against George Galloway and “any speakers who are rape deniers”. Whatever the intentions of the movers, this unfortunate policy will serve to prevent the clarification of differences through open discussion, and facilitate the arbitrary banning of speakers at the whim of the union bureaucracy. Some supporters of resolution No30 have already put the Socialist Workers Party into the ‘rape denier’ category.
The statement was launched in the context of what has been rightly called ‘the revenge of the pro-war left’. Whether intentionally or not, it cannot but lend credibility to the rightwing media witch-hunt being conducted against the whole of the anti-war left by the likes of Nick Cohen (who still excuses the 2003 invasion of Iraq) and the hypocritical Daily Mail, using the SWP’s mishandling of the Delta rape case to falsely smear the SWP and all left political organisations as inherently sexist and unsafe places for women. The truth is that our labour movement organisations, especially the left and including the SWP, are already safer places than society at large.
I signed the statement because I agree that our labour movement organisations should strive to set an example to the rest of society, to be better than the existing capitalist society of exploitation, inequality and oppression in which we live, and which we are striving to change. And I agree that our trade unions and political organisations should start from a position of believing women who complain of male violence – which, of course, does not mean the accused is presumed guilty.
However, the real way to make our trade unions and political organisations safer places is to thoroughly democratise them, to break the stranglehold of the bureaucratic caste which dominates and politically suffocates our movement. The bureaucracy must be made into the servants, not the masters, of our movement. For example, trade union officials should be elected from below, not appointed from above, and paid the average wage of those they represent. Achieving that will require open debate, not political correctness, not labelling, and not blanket ‘no platforming’ of those with backward or wrong ideas.
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Stan Keable of Labour Party Marxists gives his assessment of the 40th AGM of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy
ONE COULD NOT HELP FEELING ADMIRATION for the dogged persistence of the 80 or so (mostly) ageing Labour Party comrades who packed into the Brockway room at Conway Hall for the February 23 CLPD annual general meeting. Where other leftwingers have been driven out of the party or given up the ghost in the face of New Labour’s hollowing out of party democracy, or resigned in disgust at Blair’s participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, these Labour socialists had stuck with their party and their key aims: “a real policy-making annual conference”; “an effective and accountable NEC”; and “defence of the trade union link” (www.clpd.org.uk).
But along with admiration came pity. Tenacity has long since morphed into stubbornness and blind faith in an illusory clause-four state socialism which never can and never should exist. The welfare state, with its council housing and national health service, its bureaucratic management and patronising style, was not generously delivered gratis to a grateful working class, courtesy of an enlightened, socialist Labour government. It was part of the social democratic settlement across western Europe – a concession to placate the post-war working class and keep it from socialism. A concession financed by an ascendant US superpower with its Marshall Plan. In World War II, Stalin’s bureaucratic ‘socialism’ had vastly extended its territory into eastern Europe, and mass communist parties existed in the west, constituting a potential threat to capitalism.
These conditions do not exist today, and are not about to be replicated. In particular, the US, although still the top-dog capitalist power, is in decline (along with the decline of the capitalist system as a whole), and is not in a position to finance a recovery like the post-war boom.
But a return to Clem Attlee’s 1945 Labour government and the myth of Keynesian-managed capitalism is what the CLPD comrades hopelessly long for – and they imagine this to have been a first step in the implementation of Sidney Webb’s pseudo-socialist clause four, for the nationalisation of the “means of production, distribution and exchange”. Clause four was cunningly inserted into the Labour Party constitution in 1918 to keep workers inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution within the safe limits of parliamentary socialism. Significantly, the “immediate cause” of the foundation of the CLPD “was Harold Wilson’s rejection in 1973 of the proposal to take into public ownership some 25 of the largest manufacturing companies, covering the main sections of the economy” (http://home.freeuk.net/clpd/history.htm).
Kelvin Hopkins, MP for Luton North, opening the meeting, claimed that CLPD had “saved the soul of the Labour Party” by stopping “Blair mark two” – ie, David Miliband – from becoming party leader. CLPD influence had been decisive. Comrade Hopkins was campaign manager for the left’s first choice, Diane Abbott (he omitted to say: after John McDonnell had been betrayed), but CLPD also campaigned, successfully, for second-choice votes to be cast for Ed Miliband. The Blairites are “not the force they once were”, he claimed; and, with touching naivety: Ed Miliband is “not yet a man of the left”. We’ve “got to get the Labour front bench to reject neoliberalism”, give up their “‘too far, too soon’ nonsense” and emulate the public service spending and growth of – wait for it – Ecuador. “Let’s have 1945 all over again”; the 1945 election manifesto was a wonderful thing (forgetting Labour’s imperialism). “If it wasn’t for one or two mistakes in 1951,” he mused … And then: “If we collected a fraction of the taxes due, we could pay for all the things we need, and the debt would start to come down.” So much for socialism; managed capitalism will do fine, comrade Hopkins imagines.
In the afternoon we were treated to similar well-intentioned misleadership from comrade Ann Pettifor, an economics expert who, in the 1970s, had been a member of “the Alternative Economic Strategy group”. The present crisis was not one of international capitalism, she said, but of British capitalism. The trouble started with deregulation of the banks, which began in 1971. The 1944 Labour Party pre-election policy document is “as relevant today …” What must be done is to “reposition finance as servant to production – and labour”. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. It is that beautiful, mythical, managed capitalism again. To top it off, Cathy Newman announced that Ken Loach’s new film Spirit of 1945 is in the cinemas from March 15. But is it a documentary or fiction? She did not say.
The comrades were buoyed up by the presence of a lively group of younger members preparing to make a socialist splash at the Young Labour conference (Leicester, March 2-3), as they did last year. The Blairites who run Young Labour “make up the rules as they go along”, claimed Conrad Landin and Dominic Curran. YL has no independent rules – “just a chapter in the Labour Party constitution”.
Other signs of hope were mentioned. The numbers attending CLPD fringe meetings at the 2012 party conference were up, and treasurer Russell Cartwright reported that individual membership in 2012 reached 218, including 17 new members – evidently a small turn of the previously outgoing tide, and already in the beginning of 2013 a further 17 new members had joined. Alongside the individual members, there are also a few affiliates: 18 CLPs and nine other organisations, including four national trade unions.
Chris Mullin was unable to attend, so his prepared speech, entitled “A trip down memory lane”, was read out by Jon Lansman, who added his own potted history of the organisation, as did Leicester South MP Jon Ashworth. We were reminded of the major achievements of the organisation in advancing party democracy. Mandatory reselection of parliamentary candidates before each election was achieved by 1980, so Labour MPs no longer had a seat for life. Election of the party leader by the whole party, not just the MPs, was achieved in January 1981. The CLPD had originally campaigned for election of the leader by conference, but the system adopted was an electoral college of three parts – MPs, Constituency Labour Parties and trade unions. The demand that every parliamentary short list must include a woman was achieved by 1988. As comrade Gary Heather commented, this rule had been “used and abused politically, but was nevertheless the right thing to do”.
So the CLPD can chalk up some ‘successes’, it seems. However, for Labour Party Marxists, the post of party leader is an anti-democratic abomination, with its corrupting power of patronage, dispensing jobs and prospects to careerists in and outside of parliament (labourpartymarxists.org.uk/aims-and-principles).
Labour Party NEC member Christine Shawcroft highlighted the frustration delegates felt at the 2012 party conference when the chair ignored perfectly valid calls for card votes, after they had obviously announced the wrong result on a show of hands. “Unite [the union] is angry about card votes,” reported Jon Lansman. So the CLPD included this in its Charter for a Democratic Conference, which the AGM adopted and “launched” – overwhelmingly, on a show of hands. “Calls for card votes must be respected,” it says. I wonder if the 2013 conference chair will comply … The charter sets out a wish list of improvements in the way conference is run. The conference arrangements committee “must restore its own influence (regaining control of conference from party bureaucrats, meeting without officials)” – bravo! – “and restore the role of conference as the party’s sovereign body”. More than 50% of conference time should be reserved for delegates speaking in policy debates – limiting the misuse as a public relations exercise. The criteria for motions and rule changes should be “more flexible and fair”, and voting procedures must be “fair and democratic”. Apple pie, surely? Lastly, “conference decisions and all papers should be available to party members on Membersnet” – but, strangely, there is no demand for them to be available to the public – an obvious requirement if we want to transform Labour into a mass workers’ party.
Now, an organisation which campaigns for democracy must itself be a model of good democratic practice, an embryo of what it is campaigning for in the party. But I had mixed feelings about the relaxed, easy-going consensus which prevailed at this meeting. The atmosphere was certainly friendly and inclusive, and anyone who wanted to speak had only to raise their hand and the chair allowed them to comment on the business under discussion. No time was given over for real debate on the motions, however, and almost every proposal was quickly voted through – on the understanding, it seems, that the EC would be free to amend and embellish the text where it thought fit. That was certainly the case, for example, with respect to the charter: although a text was voted on, comrades were invited to send in any further ideas for inclusion by February 28, in time to be considered at the first EC meeting.
A similar inclusiveness prevails with respect to the EC itself. Although a list of EC nominations was voted through with no discussion – and no scrutiny by the AGM as to who the comrades were or what exact politics they stood for – the longstanding secretary, Peter Willsman, blithely announced that “all are welcome on the EC” who are “willing to work hard for the organisation”. Incredibly, for an organisation of 218 members (the 2012 total), 188 of whom were, so far, paid up for 2013 (the treasurer announced), the EC nominations list which was adopted wholesale showed 43 postholders, not to speak of the 18 regional organisers (for 11 listed regions), along with representatives of the various affiliates.
The conference, then, seems to have functioned as a willing rubber stamp for the politics and proposals put before it by its trusted leadership – politics which, as I have shown above, are, to put it mildly, badly flawed.
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This article also appeared in Weekly Worker No 951, February 28 2013: http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/951/clpd-trip-down-memory-lane-with-the-hopelessly-hopeful
Stan Keable of Labour Party Marxists thinks that Owen Jones has thrown out the democratic baby with the bureaucratic bathwater.
Credit where credit is due: activists in the Labour Representation Committee feel justly proud when we see our very own Owen Jones on TV demolishing rightwing politicians and standing up for students, workers, unemployed and disabled people. But popularity carries the danger of populism, of tailoring demagogy to popular prejudices – saying things the bourgeois media like to hear, such as “The era of the SWP and its kind is over”, and “The era of Leninist party-building surely ended a long time ago”. The Daily Mail and the likes of Nick Cohen have gone into full attack mode against the whole of the left using such arguments.
In his now infamous article putting the boot into the crisis-ridden Socialist Workers Party (The Independent January 20), comrade Owen not only criticises its “autocratic leadership” and its lack of “any semblance of internal democracy”, but also throws out the democratic Bolshevik baby along with the bureaucratic bathwater. Freedom to form factions, with freedom of discussion in public, not just internally, was the norm for the Bolsheviks when they made the revolution in 1917, just as Bolshevik-led revolutionary Russia was the most democratic country in the world, until the revolution was isolated and crushed from without, and finally reversed from within by Stalin’s bureaucratic counterrevolution. Remember, universal suffrage in Britain, including votes for women, was only won later, in 1929.
The SWP’s crisis, and the splitting disease of the revolutionary left today, is directly related to its democratic deficit, its inherited Stalinist bureaucratic centralism. When factions are banned or restricted, when minority views are neither heard nor answered, when public dissent is forbidden, then differences must fester, undeveloped, in private. The real, effective alternative for the left is not networking, but genuine democratic centralism: ‘Freedom of expression, unity in action’. That is the only road to healing unity, to mergers in place of splits, to disciplined unity-in-action based on consent through understanding, not diktat. Only a democratically united revolutionary left can win the working class majority to socialist consciousness and to the Marxist programme for working class (majority) rule leading to human liberation. That is the democratic programme set out by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party – which we should proudly defend, not shamefully forget.
In philistine fashion, comrade Owen junks history. Don’t bother learning the lessons of the Russian Revolution – the greatest achievement of the working class so far. And he advises his proposed “broad”, “networked movement of the left” to avoid being another “battleground for ultra-left sects” – implicitly denigrating the battle of ideas so necessary for our class to work out its own political strategy.
“What is missing in British politics is a broad network that unites progressive opponents of the coalition. That means those in Labour who want a proper alternative to Tory austerity – Greens, independent lefties, but also those who would not otherwise identify as political, but who are furious and frustrated.” It is “a mystery” – to comrade Owen – “that such a network does not already exist”.
But surely there is no mystery here. Everyone on the left is well aware that the disunity and consequent ineffectiveness of the anti-cuts, anti-austerity movement is a direct product of the disunity of the bureaucratic left sects. Each group attempts its own ‘broad’, ‘united’, would-be mass, front organisation. The road to effective mass action is through the struggle for organisational unity, the merging of the revolutionary left groups around the political programme of Marxism. It may seem paradoxical, but organisational unity and unity in action require freedom of opinion, not suppression of dissent. Revolutionary unity requires voluntary discipline in a democratic-centralist Marxist party, not anarchist networking.
However, again, credit where credit is due. Comrade Owen rightly directs his imagined broad left network towards the Labour Party, as it is still part of the workers’ movement: “Labour’s leaders are still to offer a genuine alternative to austerity”, but, he says, so long as the trade union link ties Labour to the working class, “there is a battle to be won in compelling the party to fight for working people”. But “compelling the party” is here limited to “pressure” rather than winning democratic control over the bureaucracy by the members. If only, he says, we had “a broad network that unites progressive opponents of the coalition … the Labour leadership would face pressure that would not – for a change – come from the right”.
The LRC, however, aims much higher than merely putting our party leadership under mass pressure, according to the ‘Aims and objectives’ section of its rules and constitution (www.l-r-c.org.uk/about/constitution). Rule 2 sets out to “restore the operation of a fully democratic Labour Party”, and rule 5 seeks to “transform the Labour Party into an organisation that reflects the interests of all sections of the working class”. As an essential part of this struggle for democratic control of the party (not merely “pressure”), rule 3 appeals to “all existing Labour Party members and to all socialists outside the Labour Party who it will encourage to join or rejoin the Labour Party”.
When comrade Owen naively offers to “all those desperate for a coherent alternative to the tragedy of austerity” his dream of a broad network free of left debate, he is really leading them up the garden path. They need the truth, not imaginary short cuts. The struggle for democracy must be fought and won in all sections of the workers’ movement. In the revolutionary left organisations, in the trade unions and in the Labour Party, the bureaucracy must be made into servants, not masters.
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This article first appeared in Weekly Worker No 948, February 7 2013: http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/948/babies-and-bathwater
The November 10 AGM of the Labour Representation Committee was on balance positive. But the left is still painfully weak both organisationally and politically. Andy Gunton of Labour Party Marxists gives his assessment
Those arriving at Conway Hall were met outside by Christine Shawcroft, Lizzy Ali and Richard Price – comrades from the minority who opposed the decision to offer the Labour Briefing journal to the LRC. Flogging their own “original” LB, they declined to stay for the meeting, leaving before LRC joint chair Pete Firmin opened proceedings.
Sadly, comrade Shawcroft also has resigned her LRC membership, thankfully taking very few comrades with her. Despite that, numbers were down. There were 160 comrades compared with 180 last year. Why the organisers are claiming 200 might owe something to wishful thinking. Or was it a factional pose? The only vote to be counted on the day involved a total of just 87 comrades (for and against – with no sea of abstentions in sight). Splits, such as has occurred in LB and the LRC, might help to clarify political lines. They can, however, lead to the weak, the inexperienced, the demoralised dropping away into inactivity. And that is what seems to have happened.
The Shawcroft-Ali-Price faction is clearly rightwing. They seek an alliance with the centre of the Labour Party, crucially those in parliament. As for comrade Shawcroft’s journal, it is a vanity project for a bruised ego and exemplifies a sadly frivolous attitude to democracy and class discipline all too common on the left. That LB proper has seen subscriptions rise substantially can only but be good news. And unsurprisingly the AGM voted overwhelmingly to adopt it as the official journal of the LRC.
John McDonnell MP moved the national committee statement. He outlined the work of the LRC over the last 12 months, highlighting the LRC’s role in helping to set up Squatters’ Action for Secure Homes (Squash – www.squashcampaign.org), and challenging the “suits” in the “larger, bureaucratic unions”.
He lambasted the Labour leadership for its timidity: 85% of proposed cuts have yet to be implemented; we face a triple-dip recession; there are 3.5 million either unemployed or working part-time; and benefits are being slashed. So it is time to draw a “line in the sand” and for LRC members to set the terms of struggle in the Labour Party: “No cuts! Our class is not going to pay for their crisis.”
Comrade McDonnell called on LRC members to build up campaigns in communities to support anti-cuts councillors. It was time to target so-called ‘pay day loans’ and “bullying bailiffs”. He finished by calling for an “international struggle against capitalism” and for “systemic change”.
Veteran campaigner Tony Benn then took the stand. “The Labour Party is not a socialist party,” he told the audience. It is a “party with socialists in it”. Very true; and something those comrades who wish to ‘reclaim’ the party, as well as those who now denounce it, would do well to note.
Our party has never been a vehicle for working class power; it was founded as a voice in parliament for the trade union bureaucracy. To transform it into a genuine ‘party of labour’ requires unremitting struggle against the bureaucratic and pro-capitalist right, within the party and within the trade unions. And that requires a combative and politically educated working class. As Stan Keable of Labour Party Marxists said, moving our LPM motion, the struggle must be to “transform the Labour Party … to fight for working class interests”.
In truth, there were rather too many top-table speeches and not enough time for the real business. As a result movers of motions were restricted to three minutes, while those opposing had only two. One for and one against – that was the sum total of every debate (although the mover also had the right of reply).
Many comrades expressed frustration because amendments are not permitted at LRC conference, meaning that rather more often than not you are faced with either passing an unsatisfactory motion or leaving the LRC with no position on a pressing issue. Fortunately, however, a motion from Communist Students to accept amendments at future conferences was passed by a clear majority.
Trade union link
Moving motion 12 on the Labour Party-trade union link, Maria Exall complained that the relationship provided a transmission belt for poor Labour Party politics into the unions. The link “works in the wrong way”, she said, calling instead for “political trade unionism”.
Understandable sentiments, clearly born of frustration with the lack of democracy within the party. But the problem with our party historically was precisely that its politics bore the stamp of “political trade unionism”, rather than the reverse. Blairism represented a clear break with this, symbolised by the formal abandonment of the old clause four. That some of the affiliated unions are now fighting back, picking on the openly pro-capitalist Progress faction, is, of course, to be welcomed. But clearly it is not enough if we want to see a socialist Labour Party.
The vision of a pure trade unionism free of party politics emerged again during the debate over motion 3, which sought to commit the LRC to democracy and grassroots organisation in the unions and to support various campaigns, such as the Grass Roots Alliance in Unite. Speaking in support of the motion, comrade Keable called for democracy in the workers’ movement, while Steve Ballard demanded the “emancipation of the trade unions”.
Jon Rogers fired the first shot in opposition. He was followed by Tony Lyons: apparently it is “not within the remit of the LRC to intervene in trade unions”. A ridiculous position, which cedes control of these important bastions of working class defence to the bureaucracy.
The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s Vicky Morris regretted that, while she could support “the vast majority of what’s in the motion”, the LRC should not commit to support the Grass Roots Left in opposition to other groups in Unite. But pride of place went to Thomas Butler. He took the stand to oppose motion 10; not because of its content, but because of the organisation behind it. In what amounted to the call for its expulsion, he declared the LRC affiliation of the Stalinite New Communist Party a problem: a problem for him, and a problem for his union, Unite. Unite would not affiliate to the LRC while it played host to the likes of the NCP.
In the end motion 3 fell.
Fighting cuts
Jenny Lennox chaired the panel discussion involving Labour councillors, with Andrea Oates from Broxstowe opening. Describing herself as an “anti-cuts councillor”, she told the meeting she had been personally affected by cutbacks and expressed her “frustration with the Labour Party passing on Tory cuts”. Arguing also against rent rises, she had stood on an explicitly anti-cuts platform. But she felt isolated: “There’s not a lot of support out there,” she admitted.
Fellow Broxstowe councillor Greg Marshall told comrades that Labour councillors in nearby Nottingham were implementing cuts. However, he and comrade Oates had the support of their party branch and local trades council, and were holding regular stalls in the town.
Preston councillor Matthew Brown outlined his Proudhonist vision of council-owned, income-generating wind farms, cooperatives and worker-owned businesses creating “alternatives to capitalism locally”. (While cooperatives are something our movement should seek to develop in the process of forming our class into a future ruling class, municipal utopias are no response to the current crisis.)
Unsurprisingly, the spectre of Eric Pickles loomed large. Council chamber colleagues of Gary Waring (Hull) warned him that, should they fail to make cuts, “Pickles will step in and do the job”. Islington’s Charlynne Pullen demanded we adopt a “realist position”; Labour councillors cannot “abdicate responsibility”. Islington had brought services back in-house, implemented the Boris Johnston-touted living wage and set up a ‘fairness commission’. “And made cuts,” came a heckle from the audience.
The subsequent debate focused on motion 1, with most calling on comrades to back it. Jackie Walker from Lewisham implored comrades to “support each other and not fight among ourselves”. The AWL’s Pete Radcliff said anti-cuts Labour councillors needed to be organised and visible, that councillors and trade unions must be brought together: “the LRC should take a lead in this”.
Councillor George Barrett from Barking and Dagenham spoke of his expulsion from the Labour Party last year for standing up against cuts. We need an organisation of anti-cuts Labour councillors, he said. Dan Jeffery, a councillor from Southampton, expressed sympathy with those who called on individual councillors to make a stand, but organisation was needed. Pete Firmin recounted the experience of Lambeth councillor Kingsley Abrams, who had taken a public stance against cuts. He had reluctantly taken the whip and abandoned his opposition after pressure had been applied by Unite.
Opposition came from Ted Knight. “I do not find it difficult to vote against cuts,” he told comrades. Labour councillors should “lock Pickles out of their town halls”. There are “no two ways” to oppose cuts, he said.
Fire Brigades Union general secretary Matt Wrack opened the session on ‘Fighting back industrially’. In a wide-ranging speech he gave an accurate and honest appraisal of where we are and what we need to do. “Workplace organisation has been thrown back in the last 20 to 30 years,” he reckoned. It was not sufficient to make demands of union tops “without organisation on the ground”. He castigated the left for its fragmentation, correctly calling for a single anti-cuts organisation. But to think austerity can be defeated in Britain alone is “naive”, he warned. We require international organisation to defeat austerity, and we need to discuss what drives it. According to comrade Wrack, the “labour movement has been overly modest”; we are “failing in our task.” The crisis raised questions about what sort of society we want to live in. We need to raise the demand for “a different sort of society.”
Political weaknesses
Two motions taken during the session on internationalism brought the political weaknesses in the LRC into sharp relief.
Motion 5 addressed events in South Africa surrounding the Marikana massacre, when striking miners were gunned down by police. Mike Phipps set the tone for the subsequent debate. While moving a separate motion, he took the opportunity to urge comrades to vote it down. He alleged that the emergency motion called for the splitting of the South African trade union centre, Cosatu. Not true.
The motion included a call for the break-up of the triple alliance, which subordinates the South African Communist Party and Cosatu to the African National Congress. It demanded that they, along with the South African Communist Party, the Young Communist League and the South African Student Congress, must “fight for the political and organisational independence of the working class”.
Opposing, Robin Hanford reminded comrades that the ANC was a member of the Socialist International and therefore a fraternal organisation of the Labour Party. How could he, he demanded angrily, go to a meeting of the SI’s youth organisation and denounce the ANC? And why not, comrade? Surely, it would be inexcusable if you did not. As one comrade correctly pointed out during the debate, the ANC government is “a capitalist government”.
Moving emergency motion 1, Gerry Downing called on comrades to defend activists in the Democratic Socialist Movement of South Africa. The DSM – the South African section of Peter Taaffe’s Committee for a Workers’ International – is campaigning in support of striking miners and has been targeted by elements within the SACP as a result. Accused of being linked to, or involved in, several apartheid-era atrocities, DSM details – names, addresses and photographs – have been posted on an internet forum associated with the SACP. This amounted to a hit-list and was “an invitation to assassinate DSM members”, declared comrade Downing.
There was greater controversy with motion 4 from the Irish Republican Prisoners Support Group. It called for the release of political prisoners, highlighting Palestinians in Israel and Naxalites in India. However, it was the paragraphs dealing Irish republican prisoners which split the meeting.
Opposing motion 4, a comrade from Socialist Appeal warned, should we pass the motion, we would have to call for the release of those who had murdered prison officer David Black, shot while driving to work. Such actions were not part of working class tradition, he claimed. Presumably comrades from the AWL were of a similar opinion: they also voted against. Nevertheless, the motion was passed, by a margin of 52 to 35.
Broad church
The Labour Party Marxists motion was passed, almost unnoticed, it seems. Given the politics on display from the majority of comrades, this cannot be because Marxist ideas won out against reformism. The LRC majority has not abandoned its Labourite politics; it remains wedded to the forlorn hope that a Labour government, of whatever political stripe, is better than the Tories.
The LRC church is a broad one. It contains members, often councillors, who in times past would have been considered very much on the soft left of the party. They, alongside left Labourites masquerading as Marxists, and Marxists masquerading as left Labourites, form the core of the LRC.
Around Ted Knight, Graham Durham and Gerry Downing there exists an amorphous grouping of comrades whose ultimatist response to cuts – ‘General strike now!’ – is basically healthy in terms of class instincts, but refuses to acknowledge the parlous state of our class, politically and organisationally. We cannot call forth battalions which do not, as yet, exist, no matter how splendid our slogans sound. That is why our LPM motion specified that “Our key aim … is to rebuild, democratise and re-educate the entire labour movement.” There are no short cuts.
