For independent workers' representation!

Submitted by AWL on 3 June, 2003 - 12:15

Socialist Alliance members, from a number of local branches, met in London on 25 May. They decided to start the process of setting up a faction within the Socialist Alliance on the principle of independent working-class politics, as against ?pink-green? electoral blocs.

A number of other Alliance activists had expressed interest in the idea, but were unable to attend on the Bank Holiday Sunday.
What will now follow is a process of consultation, discussion, debate, argument and amendment on the draft platform worked out on 25 May, up to a further meeting to establish a properly organised campaign.

We face flux and disarray on the left and in the labour movement.

Leading left-wingers in the rail union RMT are advocating that the union should support the Green Party and the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru.

Other leaders supposedly on the left of the trade union movement, such as the CWU?s Billy Hayes, talk about closer links with the Lib Dems.

The Socialist Alliance, the major vehicle through which the activist left in England and Wales has tried to organise on the electoral front, has been affected by that flux and disarray.

For example, the dominant organised group in the Alliance, the Socialist Workers Party, has backed the moves in the RMT to support Plaid Cymru. Now the Alliance is talking about sinking itself into a ?broader coalition?.

Yet the basic facts and tasks remain as they were when in 1998 the left first moved to unite to shape an independent, working-class political response to Blairism?only more so.

If the Socialist Alliance will no longer do it, then we must fight to pull it back on track, and organise as many Alliance members as possible to continue with the task the Alliance originally set out to tackle.

Martin Thomas looks at the issues.

The ?popular front? turn

Socialist Worker summarised the new turn which the SWP pushed through the 10 May Alliance conference as ?relaunching the Socialist Alliance as part of a coalition of broader left-wing forces?.
Which ?broader left-wing forces?? The conference resolution did not say. An article in the SWP?s magazine Socialist Review explains that they want to transpose Stop The War?s alliance-building into the electoral arena, so as to make good the ?social democratic deficit?. The new electoral bloc should embody ?an act of political imagination similar to the one that launched the Stop the War Coalition?.

So George Galloway, the Communist Party of Britain (Morning Star), and the (Islamic-fundamentalist) Muslim Association of Britain, the SWP?s anti-war partners, are also its intended electoral-bloc partners. The Greens and Plaid Cymru are on the edges of the field of options.

This electoral bloc-building may simply fail. But that will not be because of any principled scruples by the SWP. At the 10 May conference they also voted down an amendment to say that socialists should oppose the BNP independently, and not in blocs with the Lib-Dems and Tories.
?Anti-fascist? blocs of socialists with the politicians of the wealthy classes were the classic form of the ?Popular Front? in the 1930s. Their logic? The enemy of our ?main? enemy becomes our friend. The basic socialist effort to rouse the working class to constitute itself as an independent force, to rely only on its own forces, to obey no rules other than the logic of its own struggle, can be left to a later ?stage?.

For elections, the SWP wants blocs with Galloway or Greens, not Lib-Dems or Tories. But the logic is identical. So, for example, George Galloway?s admitted ties to hideous regimes don't matter. He is in conflict with our ?main? enemy, Blair? He can draw a crowd? He can bring votes? That is enough.

The conference resolution named ?the Muslim community??not Muslim socialists, not Muslim workers and youth, but ?the Muslim community??as a prospective bloc partner. To recruit Muslim workers to socialism, and be sensitive and patient in dealing with their religious prejudices, is essential work. But to court ?the Muslim vote? is to encourage communalism and sectarianism, with implications that could be deadly for the Muslim workers so manipulatively and patronisingly courted.

Building the Network

The 25 May meeting resolved ?to work towards launching a ?Network for Working-Class Political Representation/ Independent Socialist Alliance?.?

This would be a grouping of Socialist Alliance members, but also seek to build links outside the Alliance. It would ?advocate and propagandise in the labour movement for the principle of independent working-class political representation?; ?seek to encourage local labour movements to act on that principle?; and ?support and work with independent socialist/Labour and left Labour candidates, including SP, SSP, and Socialist Alliance?, as well as maintaining comradely relations of discussion, debate, and collaboration with other groupings within the Alliance.

The statement starts by stating our core task: ?the working class needs to re-establish its own independent political representation. No self-selected group can substitute for the working class in this. However, activists?the organised sections of the working class, in the trade unions, and in the first place the socialist activists?must play a leading role. We will fight for the trade unions to reassert themselves politically?.

We want to see socialists united in ?a new socialist party, with ample rights of tendency on the model of Rifondazione Comunista or the Scottish Socialist Party, which can become the leading political force in the fight for a reborn mass workers? party, and within that reborn mass workers? party once formed?. But it is not a matter of building our own new labour movement alongside the existing one.

We must take up ?the fight for a concerted trade-union struggle against Blairism and for trade-union and working-class interests inside the Labour structures, and the fight for accountability of the union reps in those structures. It would be short-sighted to sidestep that struggle by advocating that individual militant unions disaffiliate from Labour?.

Independent socialist candidacies will be a vital fillip?but only if ?based on clear working-class principle and a consistent effort to develop working-class self-organisation. Inside the Socialist Alliance, that will be our the basic measure by which all proposals to support broader coalitions or candidacies are to be measured?.

The statement concludes by taking a stand on the immediate issues within the Alliance. ?We are concerned about the reported moves in Birmingham to set up a ?Peace and Justice? candidate for the Euro-elections over the head of the Socialist Alliance? we oppose the decision to renounce Socialist Alliance fringe meetings at this summer?s union conferences in favour of helping with Galloway fringe meetings. We will oppose sinking the Alliance into unprincipled electoral blocs, and consider that a bloc organised with George Galloway would not be principled?.

The meeting also adopted some detailed proposals for immediate action.

  • To campaign inside the Alliance for principled preconditions, based on existing Alliance policy, for entering any ?new coalition?.
  • To argue inside the Socialist Alliance against a bloc with the Communist Party of Britain (Morning Star) for the Euro-elections;
  • To campaign inside the Alliance for democracy
  • To seek to establish contacts with Socialist Alliance activists, and other rank-and-file forces who stand for trade-union democracy, in various trade unions.

The full texts can be read at:
http://www.independentsocialistalliance.net

The interim secretaries, Phil Pope and Martin Thomas, can be contacted at:
workersrepresentation@yahoo.com

Why the Socialist Alliance?

Over the last decade, Tony Blair and his circle have constructed a neo-liberal ?party within a party? on top of the Labour Party. With big-business funding, and now state patronage, Blair?s machine has freed itself significantly from the ties that the old Labour Party had to the organised working class.

A larger gap than in previous times has developed between the political aspirations and desires of the majority of class-conscious working-class people, on the one side, and the Labour machine on the other. Millions of working-class people have effectively been disenfranchised.

The trade union leaders have mostly cringed. The Blairite machine thus has not needed to move to cut all the mechanisms of Labour?s trade-union link, as before the 1997 election it frankly indicated it might do. At present it can get union money at low cost.

The main strategic task of the organised working-class socialist left is to turn round the trade unions, to reorient the mass organisations of the working class towards struggle and towards organising new layers, and to rebuild a socialist culture in the working class.

We raise the idea of unions dissatisfied with the New Labour machine forming their own Labour Representation Committee, which might take shape initially as a ginger group in the Labour Party and later become the core of a new mass workers? party.

We promote the fundamental idea of working class political representation; the need for a mass workers? party, however formed; and the need for a workers? government, a government based on and accountable to workers? organisations which takes radical measures in the interests of the working class against the privileges of the rich. Around and in association with, that struggle, we advocate the demands and ideas which we believe can guide effective working-class politics.

Abstractly, this emphasis on the centrality of the struggle inside the trade unions could be taken to imply that we should avoid any public, high-profile challenge to Blair until a large enough section of the unions has been radicalised. This would be false because the class struggle has to be waged on the ideological and electoral-political fronts as well as in the trade unions; and we have to rally new young activists for the struggle as well as labouring to turn round the long-established organisations.

Either we abandon the whole arena of electoral politics to the Blair machine?saying, in effect, to working-class people, that we will help them fight on any number of single issues against the government but dare not counterpose an overall alternative to that government?or we take the fight for a workers? government into that arena too, by standing independent working class socialist candidates.

That task, to be done effectively, requires uniting the left?and not just electorally.

The segregation of the activist left into mutually-distanced factions, each with its own circle of readers for its press, sympathisers for its campaigns and listeners for its meetings, each pretending the others do not exist, is not a sign of vigorous practicality, eager to get on with the job without unnecessary talk. It signifies inertia, complacency, narrowness?the opposite of revolutionary thought.

Short history of the SA

In 1998 two Labour members of the European Parliament, Ken Coates and Hugh Kerr, denounced Blair and were expelled. Kerr joined the Scottish Socialist Party and Coates launched an ?Independent Labour Network? (ILN).

The ILN never came to much, but its launch encouraged socialists to unite with a view to fighting the 1999 Euro-elections in the London constituency.

The coalition, with myself as secretary and Julie Donovan of the Socialist Party as chair, also included the SWP and the ILN. It agreed a political platform and held a launch meeting, but never got to polling day because the SWP pulled out, deciding instead to back Arthur Scargill.
Broadly the same coalition reorganised under the name London Socialist Alliance (LSA) for the May 2000 Greater London Authority elections. The LSA?s results were modest overall?1.6% in the ?list? section of the poll?but with some good local scores (7% for Cecilia Prosper in North East London). The unprecedented left-group unity drew in enough extra activists to encourage the groups to move on to a national ?Socialist Alliance? effort in the June 2001 general election.

That election mobilised thousands of activists. Some hailed the results as a triumph. But the average over 98 constituencies was 1.69%?no more than presentable independent socialist candidates had been getting for decades.

Part of the problem was that rebuilding a socialist culture in the working class, after the collapse of Stalinism, involves much more than ?advertising? ourselves to voters with a jumble of popular left-wing slogans. Another part of it was that the Alliance?s dominant force, the SWP, acted as if it did involve no more than that.

The Alliance was already becoming a ?front? (?electoral united front?) for the SWP, switched on and off as the SWP saw fit, with its elements of a life of its own only tolerated as an overhead cost.

The Socialist Party?s departure?for its own bad reasons?in December 2001 worsened the problem. Now the Alliance leaders are hailing its local election results this May as another triumph. One genuinely good result in Preston and a few elsewhere do not amount to that. The average was 116 votes each for 164 candidates, out of the 10,000 or so seats being contested.
And local Alliance branches are now either not meeting at all or stale. The SWP?s answer: sink the Alliance in a ?pink-green bloc?. Ours: return to the founding impulse of 1998, independent working-class representation.

Uniting who and for what?

Division dismays, unity uplifts. Many activists who were gladdened by the degree of unity achieved in the Socialist Alliance will be unhappy to see things get to the point of an open opposition faction being formed inside the Alliance.

The unity argument has sway at a number of different levels. Some comrades support the new turn for the Socialist Alliance proposed by the SWP because it promises broader unity, and unity can?t be bad.

Others see the new turn as meaning a ?pink-green bloc?, and are unhappy with it, but think they should go along with it because Alliance unity should be paramount.

On a third level, some comrades argue that instead of setting forth a political platform like that drafted on 25 May, we should instead make paramount the unity of the anti-SWP milieu in the Alliance?all those dissatisfied, in one way or another, with the SWP?s new turn?and negotiate a political formula which can bring together all the groups and splinters of that ?opposition?.
Unity is good. But the very fact that the unity argument can be deployed on so many different levels, with different political conclusions, shows that the principle of ?unity? alone is not enough to guide us. Who will unite, for what?

Every trade-union activist knows that it is important to pose issues and demands in a way that can unite workers across barriers of prejudice and background. He or she also knows that the cry for unity can often be used by entrenched leaders, or majorities, to stifle militant, critical or new thought.

And to make ?unity? our all-overriding formula, when, as with the Alliance ?opposition? or indeed the Alliance as a whole, it would be a matter of the diplomatic unity of a congeries of small ideological groups and miscellaneous individuals, makes even less sense than in the trade union movement.

A wide range of people in the Alliance are dissatisfied with the way the dominant group, the SWP, treats the Alliance as an ?electoral united front?. They want the Alliance to become, or to work to create, ?a party?, an all-sided ?party? rather than just an electoral ?party?.

At the 10 May Alliance conference, the ?opposition? was able to unite, more or less, on two short composites, one calling on the Alliance to launch a ?campaign for a workers? party?, another calling for the Alliance to produce a regular newspaper. Those of us involved in those composites remain in touch with each other, and may be able to collaborate on some other issues, for example of democracy in the Alliance.

And more or less everyone on the left would like to see a large new workers? party. In that sense the phrase ?campaign for a workers? party? can unite everyone. Even the SWP subscribes to that general aim.

But how to campaign? In living politics the slogan means quite different things to different people. Workers? Power, the group which coined the phrase, felt politically unable to back the ?campaign for a workers? party? composite.
Some of the 10 May composite?s supporters want to reach out to other groups like the Socialist Party, some don?t. Some interpret ?campaign for a workers? party? in the trade unions as meaning a campaign for unions to disaffiliate from Labour now, some do not.

Some believe that a bloc with George Galloway could be a valid step towards a workers? party, some do not.

The draft Network platform is our view of what the positive impulse behind the phrase ?campaign for a workers? party? should and must mean in living politics, now.

Some comrades argue, in particular, that we should set the question of George Galloway aside so that the ?opposition? can unite.

But to ?unite? for working-class politics against popular-frontism in general, while ducking the question of the actual popular-front enterprise the left is being enrolled in right now, around Galloway, would be like ?uniting? against war in general on the basis of saying nothing about Iraq.
The Galloway issue is not just an incidental one. The pro-Galloway people in the Alliance ?opposition? are largely the same ones who have also supported other recent popular-front excursions, the left?s alliance with the Islamic-fundamentalist Muslim Association of Britain and the Stop The War Coalition?s pretend-parliament, the People?s Assembly.

Moreover, the argument cheats. With the left swept by Gallowaymania, silence means consent. ?Unity? on the basis of ?don?t mention Galloway? would be unity on the basis of acquiescing in the entire left appearing as pro-Galloway.

Our first duty is to state the issues and the tasks plainly. Only on that basis can we build solid unity?in time, broader and more solid than the present Alliance.

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.