Ted North reviews Martin Smith’s Why ‘British jobs for British workers’ won’t solve the crisis: why we need jobs for all Socialist Workers Party, 2009, pp26, £1.50

To be fair to Martin Smith, his short pamphlet gives some  useful facts and figures. He also presents a reasonable argument for why nationalism and racism are, well, not very nice. Finally he makes some valid criticisms of the trade union bureaucracy. Unfortunately, that is pretty much as far as the positives go.

This pamphlet is significant in two ways. Firstly, the Socialist Workers Party is the largest formally revolutionary socialist organisation in Britain, so it is simply sectarian to ignore it. Secondly, comrade Smith occupies an important position within the SWP. He is both a member of its central committee and its national secretary. In recent times he, Alex Callinicos and Chris Harman have formed an influential majority pole (ie, a faction which is not a faction) on the central committee; whilst John Rees, flanked by Lindsey German and Chris Nineham, has been pushed aside and personally blamed for the Respect debacle.

As you might expect from the title, this pamphlet revolves around the ‘British jobs for British workers’ episode, but does so within the wider context of the economic crisis and recent political developments; indeed only two pages directly address Lindsey and other similar strikes.

The dominant focus of the pamphlet is on jobs and unemployment. Whilst, of course, we are for workers being able to earn a living, we surely, as Marxists, have a much bigger vision. Surely we want to abolish wage-slavery? We defend jobs to the extent that they are better than starving to death, or rotting on the dole. But, as Marx put it in The German ideology, we should fight for a communist society, where “nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic” (www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm).

Modern sentiments might lead us to replace some of the countryside focus with, say, a morning session of website design; but Marx’s point retains its vitality. The division of labour within modern capitalism means many people spend their working lives performing the same mind-numbing sub-operation.

This pamphlet demonstrates that, like the Roman god Janus, the SWP is a strange beast with two faces. Whilst much of its operative politics reflects an opportunistic, red-tinged liberalism, it has diverged from the Marxist tradition. Comrade Smith calls for a socialism which is “based around internationalism, peace and equality for all” (p26).

The notions of “peace” and “equality” are on one level eminently reasonable. They are, however, somewhat abstract, and Smith’s aim seems to reflect a desire to cosy up with the left wing of the trade union bureaucracy and dissident sections of the bourgeoisie. The consequence of this fumbling foreplay with pacifist types is to impregnate the workers’ movement with class-collaborationism and reformism. This outweighs a hundredfold tricking in a few confused recruits. We should by all means try and draw these people in, but on the basis of Marxism.

But the SWP is hardly renowned for its consistent defence of proletarian internationalism – remember ‘We are all Hezbollah now’? Then there was the SWP voting down open borders in Respect. Now Smith claims it is the “right of every worker” to be able to move freely (p20). Quite right. But will the SWP revert to opposing things like open borders next time it wants to court left reformist allies?

Interestingly, the pamphlet’s only explicit reference to a left group other than the SWP is to the “British Communist Party” (ie, the ‘official’ CPGB). It is mentioned because Smith rightly criticises, without using the words, the idea of ‘socialism in one country’. Good, but he is wrong to claim that it was the CPGB which turned the idea of the “national struggle” for socialism “into a theory” (p16). Bukharin and Stalin did that.

Sloganeering and programme

One gets the impression that once Smith saw the slogan ‘British jobs for British workers’ he was rendered incapable of any sort of rational thought. But moralistic outrage is of little help in the struggle for universal human liberation.

Smith uses the word ‘slogan’ more than 30 times in this little pamphlet. At times the word is machine-gunned across the pages; for instance, in the last few lines of p4 and the first couple of p5 we find the word no less than five times in 10 lines. Two of the three pictures in the pamphlet are of ‘British jobs for British workers’ placards, as is the one on the cover.

Every so often he gets a whiff that things were more complicated than his caricature – for example, saying: “Many of the stewards involved in the dispute were striking against the subcontracting system and against unfair work practices. But …” (p9) No prizes for guessing that the ‘but’ is a cue for a bit of a rant about, yes, the slogan.

Compare the handsome tally for ‘slogan’ to words like ‘Marxist’ (0), ‘programme’ (0), etc. The word ‘state’ is only used twice (excluding one use of ‘welfare state’). Of course, it is not the words in themselves that are important, but what they mean. For instance, comrade Smith says the ‘British jobs’ slogan is aimed at the wrong target, but by saying “politicians and bosses”, or minor variants of this, over and over rather than ‘state’ he is, in an important sense, aiming the wrong way too. He has nothing to say about the fight for extreme democracy and human freedom, which is at the heart of the Marxist project.

Smith just cannot get beyond moral outrage at the slogan to analyse its contradictions. As an aside, the etymology of ‘slogan’ is informative. It comes from the Gaelic sluagh and ghairm (‘army’ and ‘cry’). Now the whole point of a war cry is that it is by definition not a complete political programme or an articulate list of demands. It is a provocative soundbite.

The workers at Lindsey and elsewhere used the ‘British jobs’ slogan because of the absence of a healthy left in this country, or anywhere else. It is hardly surprising that they did not spring into action with a ‘fully formed’ communist consciousness. It was also a tongue-in-cheek jab at Gordon Brown – who famously championed the phrase in 2007.

More important, surely, is what lay behind the slogan; the forces involved and the aims of the strike. But to Smith all that matters is the five words. Hence he ignores the role of groups such as the Socialist Party in the strikes, although it is presumably largely them he has in mind when he attacks some nameless “sections of the left” who “at best pretend the slogan was peripheral” (p16). He ignores the participation of ‘foreign’ workers in the strikes (Irish, Poles, etc). And most of all he ignores the actual demands of the strikers.

Good dialectics, bad dialectics

Smith seems to see things in terms of simple moral classifications of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sides. Change is simple: just lop off the ‘bad’ side and what are you left with?

But things like the ‘interpenetration of opposites’, integral to the dialectical method, are ignored. In other words he fails to move beyond the notion of thesis and antithesis.

Smith’s conception of the working class is informative of his method. His ‘worker’ is essentially a blue collar manual worker. But in reality the working class is defined by a social relationship based on separation from the means of production, and a reliance on the wage fund.

Another example of Smith’s simplistic logic is his claim that “capitalist globalisation” has “brought millions of workers nothing but instability, lower wages and longer working hours – and more wars” (p7, my emphasis).

The bad things may be true enough, but capitalism has played a historical role in preparing the ground for communism, socialising and developing production, exchange and distribution. But to understand this means transcending simple ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ categorisations.

The Brit jobs episode was upsetting for groups like the SWP because it did not fit their schema of how things ought to be – workers realising the true nature of capitalism and exploitation and flooding to ‘the party’. But Marxists should be on the front line of the class struggle – supporting workers’ actions to defend their jobs, pay and conditions, whilst arguing against racism and nationalism. It is possible to walk and chew gum at the same time.

The role played by, primarily, the Socialist Party in the recent strikes shows how much could be achieved by even the left as currently constituted if it united into a single Marxist party capable of intervening in every manifestation of the class struggle. A party of many hundreds of thousands fighting for a Marxist programme could achieve considerably more. As the working class came to see our unfolding project as an alternative centre of authority we would, if we played our cards right, win wider and wider waves of support.

For this to come about the SWP – like the rest of the left – needs to move beyond whinging moralism, sectarianism and the latter’s Siamese twin: ‘broadness’. Let us give Marxism a go.