The SWP held one of the first of their round of the "after the election" meetings in central London on 13 May. Charlie Kimber, the new editor of Socialist Worker, was the main speaker.
He sounded as if he saw his speech as part of a campaign by the SWP leadership to re-educate their membership away from the "Rage against Labour" orientation which they were pushing as recently as September 2009.
Kimber emphasised that the surprisingly buoyant Labour vote on 6 May was a class vote, and that people now rallying to Labour. Labour is now likely to talk a different language from when in office.
Ten thousand people had joined the Labour Party within the last few days, he said. Another leading SWPer, Candy Udwin, followed up from the floor by saying that this rallying of new members to the Labour Party was to be welcomed.
In this particular meeting (not very large - it was one of a series of several in different parts of London) there was no resistance from the floor to the reorientation. It may be different with SWPers in other areas: I don't know.
Kimber's practical conclusion was that SWPers should seek join with Labour people in campaigns and united fronts, and should actively support a left candidate in the Labour leadership election.
When Labour people who have previously defended cuts now start talking about fighting the cuts - Kimber gave the example of a Labour councillor on the governing body of his children's school - revolutionaries should respond by saying "yes, let's discuss how", rather than by "you're just a hypocrite".
Meanwhile, a revolutionary socialist party still necessary because Labour is tied to the system, and strikes and demonstrations are more important than elections, so people should join the SWP.
A great deal of Kimber's speech, obviously, was given over to denouncing the new government and urging, and talking up the possibilities of, direct action against the coming cuts.
Kimber said straightforwardly that he consider the TUSC results on 6 May very poor. But, he said, that didn't matter too much, because
elections are of only very secondary importance.
Asked directly whether further such election candidatures were advisable in future, he said they should not be ruled out. But he suggested (or at least it sounded that way to me) that they would probably be only at local government level.
In his summing-up Kimber said that SWP is calling for TUSC to organise a conference to discuss its results, and said the reason why is that SWP wants to "broaden it out more". What that means isn't clear to me. In practice, in the general election, TUSC's platform was reduced to opposition to cuts and opposition to British troops in Afghanistan. It is difficult to see how it could be reduced more, or what new forces are likely to rally to it on the present basis.
The way Kimber reported SWP's call for a conference suggested to me that the SP (which controls TUSC) is resisting this call, but I could be wrong about that.
Kimber is right, I think, to urge united action with Labour people who want to fight cuts, and of course he is also that we need a clear-cut revolutionary Marxist organisation.
But, as generally with the SWP, his was a "minimax" perspective. On the one hand, build "broad" campaigns (in fact that sometimes means outrightly popular-front-type "fronts", as with UAF, which advertises none other than David Cameron as a key sponsor); on the other, maintain your "revolutionary" programme (but actually that means measuring things by the gate receipts to be expected for SWP, as an organisation self-designated as "revolutionary", rather than any programmatic rigour or intransigence).
No concept of transitional demands, no concept of transforming the labour movement.
Kimber also made a great deal of claiming that the new government is "weak". This seems to me to be a matter of whistling to keep one's spirits up. For now the government is strong and has a relatively solid electoral base. It can be made weak by struggle, but that is something that has to be done, rather than something already given to us.
From the floor, I advocated a systematic approach to united-front activity designed to link in with transforming the labour movement, and proposed that the left should unite in a structured coalition not just on cuts but on a few other key issues: anti-union laws, the right of unions to finance political parties, and a push for democracy in the review of Labour Party structures promised to start from October 2010.
An effort on those issues will also require a systematic drive for democracy in the unions, at a time when union leaderships are moving in the opposite direction.