What sort of unity?
How should the left react to the financial crisis? Should we, asks James Turley, suspend our polemics against other left groups in order to forge a more effective response?
It perhaps says something about the parlous state of today’s far left that it takes a catastrophic crisis – either, in boom times, its promise or, currently, its reality – to relieve the pallor of despondency.
It is easy, given the failures of the last few years – decades, even – to hope that the changed situation will sweep away all the obstacles that have been keeping us from our goal – the Labour Party, the appearance of inevitability of bourgeois rule and ‘the sects’ (that is, all left groups apart from one’s own).
A peculiarly concentrated version of this appeared in the Weekly Worker‘s letters page a few weeks ago, when the Radical Anthropology Group’s Chris Knight outlined a programme which, he no doubt imagined, is as close as possible to ‘existing’ consciousness as possible (October 9). Apart from leading him into some very dubious territory indeed (he called for the prosecution of various state functionaries for treason) he even predicted a date for the revolution – Halloween 2008.
But there is no sign of an outbreak of working class consciousness (although, as I write, October 31 has not yet arrived). No group has found its immaculate perspectives translated into sudden and astonishing growth. The ‘Party news’ section of the snoozeworthy The Socialist, the Socialist Party in England and Wales weekly, reports paper sales on stalls in the low double figures – as it always does. The Socialist Workers Party has no doubt picked up a few recruits at freshers fairs – but it always has … and it remains an organisation whose secondary cadre is in general decay after a period of disasters. The small, marginal groups remain small and marginal.
In reality, the crisis has had precisely the opposite effect on the left to what it has expected. The apparent urgency of the situation has typically justified a retreat from any examination of programme – a matter which, of course, has never been much of a priority, particularly for the likes of the SWP.
The even greater imperative to ‘get out there and do something’ has all but scuppered the possibility that SWP members will attempt to hold their leaders to account over the Respect disaster. John Rees and Lindsey German, the architects of the shambolic ‘electoral turn’ that saw the party giving uncritical electoral support to basically anti-socialist Bengali businessmen, have been quietly retired by the apparat seemingly without a peep from the rank and file. They, after all, have leaflets to hand out.
What about programme?
It is precisely the repressed matter of programme which the Communist Party hopes to restore to the left’s agenda. In times of capitalist crisis this becomes more important, not less.
What, then, to make of Mark Lewis’s long letter to the Weekly Worker last week (October 23)? According to him, the recent and ongoing dispute between our organisation and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty has seen both our groups “collectively disappearing up each other’s backsides”. Does anyone really care “who invited whom to debate first” (perhaps he should ask the AWL, who continue to insist on making stuff up on this score which then has to be laboriously corrected)?
Meanwhile, he tells us: “Outside your ivory tower, thousands of workers are losing their homes and jobs.” The comrade predicts “mergers and alliances” across the left, thanks to the dire need for working class solidarity. In such a situation, we in the CPGB will only “damage” such striving for unity. Instead, he suggests, we should support a laundry list of organisations – SWP, SPEW, the Morning Star‘s Communist Party of Britain – “no matter how much it sticks in your craw”.
His tone is more one of frustration that outright opposition, and indeed the content of his objections is worth examining, precisely because this is a very common sentiment among ‘outsiders’ with regard to the left – particularly at the moment: ‘Sure, capitalism’s falling to pieces, but look at you people! All you do is squabble endlessly. Can’t you get together against the main enemy?’
Undoubtedly such comments often express a healthy desire to achieve effectiveness. But this apparently common-sensical approach falls apart when we examine the content of what ‘getting together’ would mean. Are we to support the SWP People before Profit Charter, whose ambition extends to “wage rises no lower than the rate of inflation” and a minimum wage of £8 an hour? (see Socialist Worker July 19).
More ominously, a likely consequence of the current crisis is a rise in support for the far right. In facing down this threat, are we to support Unite Against Fascism, which calls for state bans in the name of common British decency, the Dunkirk spirit and all that – to say nothing of alliances on this score with figures from all the main bourgeois parties who are currently presiding over the job cuts and foreclosures which comrade Lewis claims we have not noticed?
Are we to support the CPB, when its response to the crisis has been – surprise, surprise – orthodox Keynesianism? In one particularly revolting article, CPB economics ‘expert’ Gerry Jones goes so far as to map out “Britain’s path to success” (Morning Star October 19)!
If comrade Lewis has bothered to read our own perspectives on the coming recession (his letter gives the impressing that, in spite of himself, he has been skipping straight to the dirt on Sean Matgamna), he will know that we think it likely that capitalism will swing back – is already swinging back – towards protectionism and the hardening of blocs and borders.
Keynesianism has been a vital support to that strategy in the past. Gerry Jones, to the extent he is ever visible in the bourgeois body politic, will end up looking like the outlier for Labour soft lefts he is, just as sundry leftists ended up providing cover for the ‘new deal’ in America in the 1930s.
The AWL
The 1930s brings us back to the AWL. After all, the most infamous consequence of the shift towards Keynesianism in that decade, explicit and de facto, is called World War II.
Hitler aped many of the features of Roosevelt’s ‘new deal’, but could only ultimately finance this by gearing up for war. This was equally true of Roosevelt himself. The ‘new deal’ was very much about putting America on a war footing, as much as it was about relieving the tumultuous social crisis.
Thus the possibility of war gets more real, in our time, every day. And if war breaks out it will be necessary for the socialist movement to respond in a timely, effective and politically principled manner. The presence of AWL’s social-imperialist politics within that movement can pass, in peacetime (relatively speaking, as there is never total peace under capitalism), for a local infection which we might choose to ignore in order to combat more pressing illnesses.
This is not peacetime, however – presently our own state is engaged in imperialist occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, via sanctions, fighting ‘soft war’ against Iran (not so soft for the Iranian masses, of course), with a view to a possible full military attack in the near future. The AWL refuses to clearly oppose the first two adventures, since it believes they help ‘protect the labour movement’ from the ‘clerical fascists’.
Furthermore, its leader, Sean Matgamna, has said that it is perfectly rational for the Israeli state (dependent in all military respects on the US) to pre-emptively bomb Iran to stop the “homicidal religious lunatics” in Tehran acquiring nuclear weapons – after all, these lunatics “might see a nuclear armageddon, involving a retaliatory Israeli nuclear strike against Iran in the way a god-crazed suicide bomber sees blowing himself to pieces” (Solidarity July 24). The AWL’s national council has since voted to reject the use of the word ‘oppose’ in a resolution on a possible Israeli strike.
With the threat of war looming, such sentiments amount to sabotage of the anti-war effort. We cannot but see these ideas for what they are – a cancer. Treatment of cancer has never been an easy, pretty or enjoyable process – but it needs to be done, and since the SWP et al are engaged in ploughing their sectarian furrows, the job falls to us.
Comrade Lewis suggests we dedicate our paper exclusively to Marxist analysis of the crisis. But Marxist analysis is not an end in itself – it is supposed to guide effective action. I would love our disagreements with other groups to be over trivial matters that we could resolve easily, but in reality our analysis leads us to oppose the politics of the groups he says we should support. This is because these groups’ grasp of Marxism is entirely tenuous.
I suggest he writes a letter to the SWP demanding an end to its sub-populist opportunism, to the CPB concerning its nationalist Keynesianism, and the AWL over its ghastly social-imperialism – it is they who need to be prescribed some Marxist analysis, not us.
Hi comrades
the problem is that ‘the Left’ (which i agree is in crisis) has turned it’s back on the official, mass Labour Movement(LM).
I agree that for the solving of the many and deep-seated social problems in modern society, a socialist revolution is required – that is, the taking of state and economic power away from the currently ruling Bourgeoisie: replacing it with working class power, democratically organised!
The main problem of revolution in Britain as in (western) europe is that the great mass of workers (and their families, etc) are REFORMISTS ie they don’t see the need for the smashing of capitalism, just wanting ‘a bit more’ or larger crumbs [from the table of the imperialists/capitalists that run the world]. This is what “Social Democracy” is – the mass ideology of our class.
of course, they are ‘egged on’ in this by the ‘leaders’ of the LM, and mainly workers are ‘kept in the dark’ about what’s really going on – wether that is the nature of the war in Iraq or Afghanistan (or elsewhere) or the amount of money the “TU leaders” are getting (eg Dave Prentis, ‘my leader’ in UNISON is on £86,000 not including his perks.)
You know how it is (or, this is how it is:) the workers trust their (bureaucratic) TU leaders before they trust those with a different or revolutionary viewpoint – these are the leaders of the only thing they have at work that isn’t part of management (although i can certainly qualify that too!)
So how do communists overcome this?” surely this is the central question that should be asked by those hoping to ‘change the world’ in a meaningful way, in the modern world!
Polemics are necessary – what we don’t agree on should be ebated and discussed, as hotly as is required (avoiding abuse and threats)
Yep, the dominance of Social Democracy is a big problem, Lenin’s prediction about the bourgeoisification of the British working class has arguably come to pass. And yes, these ideas need to be taken on, not just ignored as with the SWP’s auto-anti-Labour turn after Blair was elected.
‘So how do communists overcome this?’
Not by pretending to be Labourites e.g. the Socialist Party in the CNWP, SWP in Socialist Alliance and Left List! Unfortunately Labourism is also a big problem on the MARXIST left, justified with bastardizations of the Transitional Programme. Trotsky would be ashamed frankly.
We need to have confidence in our own ideas. It is difficult for members of the SP/SWP to have this when political education is not taken seriously; when most of them actually have little understanding of marxism. An unthinking membership makes it very easy for the leadership to rally everyone round their latest, crudely theorised turn.
So before we can take on the Labourism of the masses with any efficiency, we must first expunge it from our own movement. We must fight for marxist unity on the basis of marxism- and that must include freedom of debate and the right to factions.
I do tire of the throwaway SP/SWP remarks the CPGB is fond of. All too often the dreadful method of the SWP is described then without basis this is ascribed to the SP as well. To suggest that political education is not taken seriously in the SP to justify the ‘turns’ of the leadership is just simply not the case.
I do like the weekly worker, i think it has some good points and has a place in the labour movement but as a marxist who is ready to criticise my own organisation lazy attacks (often having a go at what you have decided we are saying as opposed to we actually are saying/doing like with the CNWP) doesn’t do you any favors.
Go on then, tell us what you are doing with the CNWP, don’t just say ‘you’re wrong’. Let’s get a bit of debate going.
I don’t normally get involved with political discussions on blogs because they tend to get silly and unpleasant, but if we can stay away from that I don’t see the harm.
The Campaign for a New Workers Party according to the CPGB, is an attempt by the SP to create a Labour Party Mark 2. We can then do entryist work in it and bring back the glory days of Militant.
That is what I understand your take on it to be. Please correct me on this one if I am wrong, I hate it when people argue against what they want people to say not the actual content.
But if that is the case it is fundamentally incorrect.
The SP in setting up the CNWP recognises a number of things:
There has been a huge roll back in class conciseness since the collapse of the Soviet Union, defeats of the miners etc, this and the fundamental shift in the Labour Party (the almost complete destruction of internal democracy, lack of workers involved in it) means the very idea of independent class politics needs to be rebuilt. Essentially the CNWP is a tool to promote that idea.
That the SP and its allies are not in a position to launch a party, the experience of the attempts to build new left parties in the last decade or so shows that gluing the left together is not enough, without involvement of the workers movement on a larger scale these unity projects end in sectarian collapse.
That the CNWP is a campaign, we don’t kid ourselves that the new workers party will grow from the CNWP, it might, the campaign might be over taken by events and end up joining with/supporting other party projects.
The politics of a future party cannot be decided in advance by the current CNWP supporters, the campaign is neither reformist or revolutionary, because it is not a party, it is designed to raise the need for independent working class politics. Of course the SP would much prefer a mass revolutionary party to be created, but passing a resolution at the CNWP will not make that happen, but equally the SP has not put resolutions saying “the new workers party must at first believe it is possible to reform capitalism out of existence”.
I admit the CNWP is an odd beast, and it hasn’t had runaway success, (but having said that if the CNWP was mass organisation then it would be creating a party, where we can talk program) but I think it has had an impact by raising the idea of a new party.
The SP do not want a labour party mk2, go back to secret organisation and fighting expulsions, no thank you. We need fighting organisations of the working class, where Marxists can operate openly and try to become the majority.
I think the CPGB’s problem is lack of (sorry this sounds stereotypical but I think it is true) a materialist outlook and a dialectical approach.
Your lack of materialism means you cannot seem to appreciate that it will be events (economic and political) that will provide the spark for a new party (conditions determine consciousness). Groups like the CNWP are there to try to make sure any real opportunities are not lost by getting the idea of a new party spread as far and wide as possible.
You are un-dialectical because you counter pose building a Marxist party with building a new workers party, the process is not that simple, it may be the growth of a new party forces the Marxist left together, it may be a new party quickly splits and the Marxist gain from that, it maybe that long patient work in the new formation is necessary and the various ultra left group run off being unable to handle being a minority. It may be that the economic situation becomes so bad so quick that Marxist ideas are immediately taken up on mass and a revolutionary party is created almost immediately!
I hope that makes sense. Its late and has been a bit of a ramble.
I do think one question which has been raised in the SP but not really gone through in our publications is whether that really is the material basis for reformist parties to re-establish themselves permanently. Not sure myself…
Phil
Phil,
Agreed about discussions on political blogs- I usually steer clear too! Hopefully on the CS site a comradely decorum can be maintained.
Certainly we in CS would see the CNWP as a Labour Mk2, but I don’t think it’s an attempt to create another party to be Militant in, which would plainly be ridiculous. The first point stands though; the politics of the campaign’s statement are left Labourite statist policies. I don’t buy this avant-garde vacuousness about a party ‘not programmatically delimited between reform and revolution’.
From the CNWP declaration:
‘Keep health and education public’
‘For decent, affordable public housing’
‘No to the capitalist profit system’
It’s reformist. It is easy to say, after the event, that ‘Of course the SP would much prefer a mass revolutionary party to be created, but passing a resolution at the CNWP will not make that happen’. No-one is saying that is the case- though I think it would be a step forward if the SP won some people to marxism through this process. I would argue that genuine marxism entails never hiding one’s politics. This is evidently a matter of disagreement- though you say
‘we need organisations… where Marxists can operate openly and try to become the majority.on the left’
you admit the SP hides it’s full politics in the CNWP. So let’s take the argument on it’s own terms and ask a pertinent question- how is artificially creating a reformist party going to advance the struggle for socialism?
As a marxist I am in favour of agitating wherever we can do so, including in the Labour Party, though I don’t think it’s a very fruitful avenue to pursue at the moment. In Britain the Labour party, a bourgeois worker’s party then and now, has a long and treacherous history with the working class and needs to be exposed as a reformist illusion from within and without. But for a tiny marxist group to enlist a few union tops and declare a (campaign for a) new workers party, and to push the sort of social democratic illusions which are crumbling all over Europe looks, well, ridiculous. This project needs to be justified.
Whoah, you’re throwing materialism and dialectics around there with no respect for their meaning whatsoever. The radical nature of marxist theory is not just the discovery that conditions determine consciousness, but the assertion that conscioussness can determine conditions too! That people can change the future. This necessitates mass critical subjectivity, which in Britain in 2008 may seem a distant hope, but it is possible, necessary and exciting. Far more so than reheated versions of parliamentary socialism.
Comradely, Laurie
Phil,
You’re spot on on the nature of these discussions online – they are not exactly propitious to clear and honest debate, and largely consist of insulting diversions as opposed to politics. More heat than light etc
Laurie has focused on one side of the argument, namely how it is wrong politically for revolutionaries to put forward a reformist, populist or ‘broad front’ project (expressed in Mandelism as something not programatically delimited between reform and revolution) in the name of making ‘real gains’. He is of course right. Such projects are not some sort of sign post towards Marxism, but as Rosa Luxemburg points out beautifully in Sozialreform oder Revolution?, actual diversions from where we need to get to.
But there is another level to all this.In my opinion it is not only wrong politically (nowhere should Marxists propagate politics which aren’t the ideas they formally uphold) but actually it is a fatuous project and one that will not succeed.
Why?
In the 20th Century, the mediating forces between capital and labour,consisted predominantly of social democracy (linked to the union bureaucracy of course) and Stalinism (linked to the Stalinist bureaucracy). Both are now in historical crisis for very good objective reasons – Stalinism has more or less completely collapsed into capitalism and social democracy has presided over the destruction of some of the reforms which it threw down as palliative measures in the past.
What the task of revolutionaries is today is to break politically and organisationally with such methods, expose them for what they are and then to win the majority of society to the lively and inspiring project of Marxism. Although in the very short term this may not exactly seem the way of winning millions, if the left can get its act together then I am confident we could make massive gains relatively quickly. This is why we think the main obstacle to the left’s success is actually the left and that we must engage in a political struggle for a re-articulation of Marxism.
A very good book which takes up a lot of these questions might be of interest to you. He introduces it here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8682919597603842499
All the best comrade
Ben
I think we need to look a bit harder at the basis for our positions if we are to get anywhere on this issue. Obviously your organisation thinks pushing for anything other than a revolutionary Marxist party is ‘artificial’ and ‘fatuous’ and by leaving the question of party programme open we are ‘hiding’ our politics, the Socialist Party doesn’t agree.
So how have we got to these different conclusions?
I recon it is based on the following differences:
The amount to which class consciousness has been pushed back since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the defeats of the 80s. The Socialist Party (I would suggest because of its greater roots in the actual class struggle) recognises the real extent of this and how far back the class has been thrown. The role facing Marxists is a dual one, although they should not be seen as in any way separate, (if that makes sense!), we must build revolutionary organisations but also we have a key role in rebuilding the idea that workers need independent political representation at all. I don’t think the CPGB has really looked at the effects on the class of the collapse of Stalinism/defeat of the TUs battle of the 80s, it has only looked at the movements of the left groups, and ignored the masses.
Secondly I think we differ on our position on the Labour Party and how it has changed of the last couple of decades. The CPGB see it as ‘a bourgeois worker’s party then and now’ and this informs your conclusions.
The SP recognises that there has been a fundamental change in the nature of the Labour Party. It is now a bourgeois party plain and simple. Yes it has some parts of its past still attached, the union links are still there, but what are they now apart from a way to for the LP to get money? It has a small band of Left MPs and activists who are still worth something to the labour movement, again a historical leftover. The fact is that for all its faults the Labour Party used to be a party with many thousands of working class members and seen by nearly all workers as their party. With the shutting down of internal democracy, the complete collapse of w/c membership, the shift to the right politically and of course the expulsion of the Marxist current within it mean the Labour party has changed and with it the political terrain we work on.
You also seem to think that the capitalist crisis has undermined social democratic politics, and because it is social democratic politics that have ‘presided over the destruction of some of the reforms which it threw down as palliative measures in the past’ that is has been discredited
It may have been (to different extent in different European countries) the parties that used to be social democratic that have been in power but no one believes it is traditional labourist/Keynesian policies that have been enacted by these governments and the capitalist crisis has certainly not caused social democratic illusions to crumble, they are really just beginning to come back in many ways.
It is as I have said before, very possible that the material base for long term social democratic parties no longer exist, as they did during the post war boom, so any reformist organisation could be quite temporary and unstable, this is where we should be involved to put across Marxist ideas.
Moving on to the politics of the CPGB, to turn the discussion round for a bit, how do you really see a new Marxist party coming together? I am not asking you for predictions or anything silly, I am genuinely interested in your strategy. You see the current left parties as vital but want them to throw off their leaderships and all that – ok, but what attitude would you want the SP (for example) to take to the SWP? I ask because I am constantly amazed (I should have learnt not to be!) by their ability to piss off everyone in sight, treat other activists so badly, continually fail to ever sink roots in the class yet remain a solid organisation. I expect you will point me in the direction of the book as you did previously, but please tell me it’s more insightful than that dreadful video.
Comradely, Phil
(Is that book you have done on Religion any good, (decent Marxist works looking at religion on a broad scale aren’t all that easy to find).