SWP-Respect and London polls: it "stands as a wonder"

Submitted by martin on 1 February, 2008 - 10:47 Author: Martin Thomas

Let's look on the bright side first. As against George Galloway and his Respect-Renewal, who are now backing "Red Ken", SWP-Respect is reaffirming the need for a left challenge to Livingstone as London mayor.

Although SWP-Respect, even in its own private meetings, still cannot bring itself to use the words "working class" or "socialist", it calls for candidates in the London mayor and assembly elections (May 2008) that will respond to the needs of "working people" and present a "positive alternative".

It is emphatic - has to be, I guess, following the split-away of Galloway and most of the Respect councillors in Tower Hamlets - about the need to win votes across London and not just in Tower Hamlets and Newham, where Respect won a large chunk of its votes last time round, in 2004, on a "Respect-is-the-party-for-Muslims" pitch.

So up to a point the SWP is trying to do the right thing. But, to borrow a phrase from Hegel, the way it does it "will always stand as a wonder".

On Thursday 31 January SWP-Respect called a rally of its London supporters to choose candidates to fill the gaps left in its London Assembly list by the Galloway split.

David Broder and I were there from Workers' Liberty, with a leaflet advocating that SWP-Respect go back on its previous opposition to the rail union RMT initiating a broad working-class left list for London (a vocal minority opposition in the London Transport region RMT which may have been a factor in the RMT Executive's decision that there wasn't enough momentum behind the idea of a list to make it viable). We advocated that SWP-Respect mark a clear turn away from the "party-for-Muslims" line by seeking to support and participate in a broad working-class left list initiated by the RMT or other unions.

We didn't get to speak, because the "discussion from the floor" in the meeting consisted of four obviously pre-planned speeches. There was no discussion in the meeting, only a series of turgid speeches.

The SWP has "loosened up" a bit, I guess, in that most people took our leaflet (though a lot didn't). But the only direct response I could get from an SWPer who had read the leaflet was: "I don't understand why you want to make trouble in Respect".

It seems that the SWP has decided, for now, to try by "voluntarist" means to sustain SWP-Respect as an SWP electoral front, without seeking any new alliance to replace the broken one with Galloway and his Brick Lane businessmen. The rally launched a fund-raising drive for the £30,000 they'll need for the London election, and hectored people to recruit to SWP-Respect. SWP-Respect has been mobilising crowds of up to 60 activists on the by-election campaign it's currently running in a ward in Waltham Forest.

It'll be a hard job. The meeting was big enough not to make the hall look empty, but it was only about 150, not many given that the SWP had obviously pulled out the stops.

Since I'm just back from three days at the congress of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire, in France, the lack-lustre quality of the oratory at the SWP-Respect rally also "stood as a wonder".

Despite the repeated loud clapping from SWP loyalists for the orators at the SWP-Respect rally, and the embarrassing eulogies from the hapless chair ("what a tremendous speech!"...), the best of them didn't match the worst of maybe 100 speakers I heard at the LCR conference. And that despite the fact that many of the LCR speakers were young (none of the SWP-Respect ones were).

The LCR speakers showed an ability to "think on their feet", to register points made in debate, and to respond, which wasn't even called for from the SWP-Respect speakers.

Only one SWP-Respect speaker attained even the minimum level of competence where his speech had a clear structure and was not bogged down with meaningless verbal padding to cover hesitation and lack of logic ("and I'll tell you something else" seems to be an SWP favourite these days). That was John Rees; and all he had to do was announce the launch of a new SWP-Respect web video-clip facility and warn the crowd that "virtual" campaigning could not however replace the face-to-face real thing.

The difference is not something in the water or the weather in France, nor even any organised training that the LCR gives its members in how to speak. It is simply that the LCR has an internal life of lively debate, and an external activity of continual collaboration and debate with other political currents. LCR members learn how to speak "on the hoof".

Isaac Deutscher's comment on what happened to the German Communist Party, even in the era when its activists were sincere revolutionaries, is apposite.

"When the European communist went out to argue his case before a working class audience, he usually met there a Social Democratic opponent whose arguments he had to refute and whose slogans he had to counter. Most frequently he was unable to do this, because he lacked the habits of political debate, which were not cultivated within the party, and because his schooling deprived him of the ability to preach to the unconverted.

"He could not probe adequately into his opponent's case when he had to think all the time about his own orthodoxy ... He could propound with mechanical fanaticism a prescribed set of arguments and slogans... This ineffectiveness of the Stalinist agitation was one of the main reasons why over many years, even in the most favourable circumstances, that agitation made little or no headway against Social Democratic reformism.”

The other dimension that "stands as a wonder" is the SWP's decision to promote Lindsay German as its public figurehead. To have spent your political life in backroom "party" organising and to be a poor public speaker, to be unprepossessing and middle-aged, are by no means crimes. I'd plead "guilty" myself, though not to being quite as bad a speaker as German.

But the SWP must have members who'd do much better, if not as well as Olivier Besancenot or Arlette Laguiller in France. Why doesn't it choose them? It can only be that the SWP leadership is inordinately self-conceited and feels itself unable to trust anyone outside its little circle.

Not a good basis for rebuilding an electoral base after the Galloway debacle, or for allowing (let alone encouraging) serious debate on that experience.

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