05.12.2024
What sort of partyism?
Since September a range of left groups have put forward ‘pro-party’ arguments. Mike Macnair explores the good and the bad
What follows was triggered by Archie Woodrow’s letter in last week’s Weekly Worker (‘Party press’ November 28), responding to my article, ‘What sort of party?’ (November 21), which was written in the first place in response to Prometheus magazine’s invitation to submit articles on the party question (and published there).1 Comrade Woodrow comments at an early stage of his letter:
Macnair’s claim that an online publication cannot be agenda-setting seems self-refuting - his own article was written as a response to a call-out by an online publication! And there are plenty of other examples - during the Corbyn years, online publications such as Novara Media or Skwawkbox at times had significant impact in setting the agenda for the left. Meanwhile, online rightwing publications, such as Guido Fawkes, have often had enormous effects on setting the agenda for mainstream media.
Comrade Woodrow here displays one of the fundamental common errors of the British left: the confusion between taking initiatives, on the one hand, and setting the political agenda, on the other. Working backwards, Guido Fawkes has produced a great many stories. Among these, it is only those, many fewer, stories that were picked up by the Tory daily press that became politically agenda-setting. Secondly, but slightly differently, Novara Media and Skwawkbox also produced a wide range of stories with ephemeral excitement around them: but the whole political agenda of the Corbyn years continued to be framed by Britain’s road to socialism and the ideas and methods of the Morning Star.
(I should add in this context that the political approaches of both the Socialist Party in England and Wales and its splinters, and the Socialist Workers Party and its offshoots, are also framed by the political agenda, the ideas and methods of the Morning Star - in particular, by Georgi Dimitrov’s conception of the united front, in which unity in action requires suppressing or toning down political differences.)
And, thirdly, I submitted my piece to Prometheus because, that online magazine being in some respects politically close to the CPGB, it seemed worthwhile to do so. But it is not Prometheus’s initiative that has put the ‘party question’ on the left’s agenda, but the election of a Labour government and the fact that the rumours of Jeremy Corbyn and others taking the initiative in starting a new left party have now largely died down.2
Socialist Alternative already published in September a pamphlet, The new left party we need. ‘Pelican House’ in Bethnal Green hosted a series of meetings called ‘Party time’ in September-November, with the usual bureaucratic format of ‘left celebrities’ discussing the party question.3 Conversely, RS21 has some members involved with Prometheus; but its response to Prometheus’s call seems to have been not to join up or propose a common discussion, but to issue its own call for discussion of the issue on the RS21 site.4 Initiative thus calls forth counter-initiative to block any agenda-setting effect: a pattern that has characterised the French and British far left since the 1970s, though this time on an unusually small scale.
I can welcome Prometheus’s call, and offer a contribution, without in the least imagining that it is agenda-setting for the left. (I would remind the Prometheus comrades that an earlier small-group initiative some of them were involved in, the ‘New Anti-Capitalist Initiative’ of 2012, completely failed to set the agenda for the left.)
What follows is, then, my attempt to survey some of the written contributions to this discussion to date. I begin with the Socialist Alternative pamphlet, which in some respects is the most developed argument. I move from there to the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (better called ‘Atlanticists for Workers’ Loyalism’), calling for left unity in response to the election of Donald Trump (November 13) and reprinting their own ideas about left unity from 1988 (November 20), most recently their editorial, ‘Unity: an open letter to the left’ (December 4).5 Next comes Dave Kellaway’s ‘Debate on the left in Britain - towards a new broad left party’ from Anti-Capitalist Resistance November 19.6 These three will be covered this week.
A second article next week will start with RS21’s call and ‘We like to party: a contribution to “Party time”’ by Tomi A, Harry H, Lotta S and Tassie T (November 25) - out of chronological order, but representing forces on the same scale as the AWL and ACR.7 Finally, I will come to the Prometheus contributions other than my own: comrade Woodrow’s own ‘There are parties and then there are parties’ (November 22)8 and Lawrence Parker’s ‘The communist party: yesterday and tomorrow’ (November 29).9 With this, I will also return briefly to the more substantive arguments of comrade Woodrow’s letter.
SocAlt
Socialist Alternative (SocAlt) is the British section of International Socialist Alternative (ISA), which appeared as a result of the 2019 split in the Committee for a Workers’ International, the oil slick international of the Socialist Party in England and Wales. In that split the SPEW leadership asserted what may roughly be called ‘founders’ rights’ of the CWI secretariat to expel the majority of the CWI international executive committee (and probably the majority of the CWI’s membership). The underlying political dispute concerned ‘socialist feminism’ and its promotion by the Irish section of the CWI.10 Since then, the ISA experienced a split in 2021 of its Greek, Turkish and Cypriot sections, over ‘centralism’ versus ‘federalism’ and over ‘safeguarding’ policy.11 And it has now experienced further splits in the US over perspectives and internal democracy,12 and the disaffiliation of the Irish section over ‘safeguarding’ issues.13
Naturally enough, the British SocAlt is a much smaller group than SPEW: the apparatus control of information flows, in groups that separate internal discussion from public discussion, naturally produces national baronies within international organisations, and premature splittism (whether from majorities or minorities) leaves political debates underdeveloped and weakly understood in the ranks.
I refer to this history for two reasons. The first is that, because SocAlt is a lot smaller than SPEW, it is probably less familiar as a group to readers of this paper. The second is that SocAlt’s pamphlet correctly makes a good deal of the importance of democracy to any new left party. But the history of SocAlt/ISA itself implies that without an explicit, public, self-critical balance sheet of its own history, we should prima facie expect that what SocAlt would actually promote would be bureaucratic centralism in the standard style of Trot groups.
SocAlt’s pamphlet is actually the most developed argument of those I plan to discuss - unsurprisingly, since it occupies 67 pages (albeit small and heavily illustrated), nine chapters plus a foreword and introduction. Chapter one gives the usual argument for broad-leftist projects, that Labour has decisively ceased to be a workers’ party. Chapter two offers a negative balance-sheet of Corbynism, seeing it as defeated by clinging to the idea of Labour as a ‘big tent’. Chapter three tells us that the Greens lack “organic links” with the trade union movement, are shifting right (ditching their historic opposition to Nato) and do not “offer a sufficient vehicle for pushing forward and developing the political struggle against this rotten system” (a considerable understatement).
Chapter four, ‘An organisation of struggle’, expresses the standard far-left idea that (as it is put in one of the subheads - p31) “Struggle starts outside of parliament”. We are told (falsely) that “this is how the Labour Party itself broke through the ‘glass ceiling’ of the British two-party system, then dominated by the Tories and Liberals” (p32). Chapter five, ‘A mass party rooted in the workers’ movement’, celebrates the anti-war independents, while rejecting “small parties such as Transform” and George Galloway’s Workers’ Party of Britain. A party would, then, be based on the trade unions (pp37-38); “social movements” meaning “activists organising round the climate, Gaza, LGBTQ rights and other movements” (p38); and “smaller left campaigns in recent elections, as well as a variety of socialists” (p38).
This issue of the potential social base is mixed in the chapter with issues of democratic functioning: that party members should be activists and the party must actively organise its members (pp36-37); that “all participating groups should have the right to put their own points of view forward and exist openly within the party” (p38); and that the party would need regular local meetings, and elected officials should get no more than an average workers’ wage and be recallable (p39).
Chapter six, ‘Lessons from around the world’, argues that new mass left parties have been created elsewhere. But SocAlt correctly points out that Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, the Left Bloc in Portugal and the Party of Socialism and Liberty in Brazil have all been drawn into the coalition game and as a result defeated (pp41‑42). They go on to argue that the problem was “working to change the capitalist institutions from within” (a very imprecise formula) and that “The best, and only effective, way to win lasting reforms in parliament is to win them first of all in our workplaces, on the streets and in our communities, where the class balance of forces is really expressed” (p43).
They go on to argue that “half measures will not do” (subhead, p43). The content of what they counterpose to “half measures” is “a clear programme of socialist change” - expropriations and “massive taxes on the super-rich”, together with (undefined) “democratic structures” (p44). That is, a kind of “socialism in one country”, which fails to address the impact of capital flight and the need for planning in natura - of physical production - to address the resulting dislocation of the economy; or, in consequence, the level of integration of individual countries in the world economy.
SDF
Chapter seven, ‘Lessons from Labour’s formation’, gives a standard ‘New Left Trotskyist’ narrative of the origins of the Labour Party, starting with Chartism (downplayed), omitting the role of British trade unions in the First International in 1864-70 and the suffrage campaign in the 1860s leading up to the Second Reform Act, and repeating Engels’ illusions in the failed ‘Socialist League’ project of William Morris and Ernest Belfort Bax (1885-87, when it became an anarchist formation) at the expense of the longer-lasting Social Democratic Federation - British Socialist Party. Omitted are the successes of socialist groups in local election campaigning in the 1890s. Equally omitted is the role of agreement with the Liberal Party in Labour Party electoral successes in 1906. And Labour only became a contender to serve in government, rather than a small third party, as a result of the extension of the vote in 1918 - itself a response to the Russian Revolution.14
This ‘standard narrative’ represents the Labour Party as growing immediately out of a radicalisation in the trade union movement, and leaves out of account European influences (the rise of the SPD and Second International; the Russian Revolution), the growth of left groups (SDF as well as ILP), the counter-manoeuvres of the Lib-Lab wing, and the result: a ‘Labour Party’ that was from the beginning committed to voting with the Liberals on questions of defence and foreign policy. It thus imagines a past Labour Party more democratic, and further left, than was ever true.
Chapter eight, ‘Lessons from recent history’, covers Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, the Socialist Alliance (and briefly the more recent ‘Left Unity’, the Scottish Socialist Party, Respect and the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. The narrative here shows that you can take the SocAlt boy or girl out of SPEW, but it’s not so easy to take SPEW out of the boy or girl. It is entirely a SPEW-self-serving narrative: in particular, defending SPEW’s decision to split the Socialist Alliance in defence of federalism against ‘one person, one vote’. The comment on Left Unity (pp52-53), claiming that this group was “predominantly made up of small sects”, shows plain ignorance: few of the left groups went into Left Unity, which was mainly composed of ‘independents’. And what brought LU down was (like Tusc) the Corbyn movement.
Programme
Chapter nine, ‘What should a new party stand for?’, is a more or less standard outline Trotskyist ‘What we fight for’. It begins with economic demands (pp58-61), including the indexation of wages (p58), which if it is to be effective requires worker control of the ‘basket’ of goods indexed, and as a result amounts to the abolition of money and introduction of rationing. And it includes, contradictorily with this proposal, the delusive demand to “tax the rich to fully fund all these services” (p61) - which requires not only the continuation of money, but also the continued exploitation of the world by the City of London.
‘Genuine democracy’ (p62) starts well with calling for the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords. But it goes on to call for nationalisation of media, including printing presses, “open to all allocated on the basis of public support”. This policy is in practice likely to mean bureaucratic control, with a threshold of ‘social weight’ for access: why should a grouplet like SocAlt get access to printing? The section calls for the abolition of “repressive laws”, unspecified; and “a reorganisation of the police force, under democratic community and trade union-led control”: why not the abolition of the mercenary/volunteer police force, along with the standing army, and their replacement by people’s militia? On the national question, the text seems to call simultaneously for independence for Scotland and for a federation: which? (In chapter eight it appears that they are for Scottish independence.)
Beyond this point, ‘No to racism’ (p63) makes the standard demands. ‘Defend trans rights! For a socialist feminism’ (pp64-65) is weirdly skewed, making the defence of trans rights (for a very small percentage of the population) primary and the liberation of women (the majority) secondary. Disabled people are then tacked on to the end of this section. ‘Climate’ (p65) is insubstantial. ‘Internationalism’ (p66) rightly opposes imperialism and Nato, and military expenditure. ‘Socialist change’ (pp66-67) calls for the need to prevent ‘capital strikes’ and urges that “to prevent this, it will be necessary to take the banks and the top 150 corporations that dominate our economy into democratic ownership and control” - a traditional Militant/SPEW slogan, which, as with the discussion in chapter six, assumes the practicality of socialism in a single country.
The programme is rightly presented as an example of what is needed, not an ultimatum (p57). But it has to be said that it is fundamentally marked by the problems of the method of the ‘transitional programme’: preponderant economism, fashion-following, inability to draw clear lines on the question of state power, and reduction of ‘socialist change’ to nationalisations in one country.
SocAlt’s pamphlet has real strengths. In particular, it repeatedly emphasises the importance of democracy in the party, and makes a limited attempt to address the question of democracy in the state. At the same time, however, as I said at the outset, the assessment of SocAlt’s own history in Militant, SPEW-CWI and ISA is insufficient to give any confidence that what is being proposed is not merely to repeat this tendency’s prior mistakes. On the contrary, the pamphlet defends these mistakes in chapter eight.
Equally, it is a strength of the pamphlet that it does not merely see the need for a new party in terms of the immediate political conjuncture, but looks back at the history of the movement, including both that of the Labour Party and of recent attempts. But it displays the usual problem of such Trotskyist histories, that the old ‘official’ CPGB is treated as marginal, and the way to a new party is imagined to lie through the trade unions and initiatives from some ‘official lefts’ (p52), without addressing the problem of the disunity of the Marxist left.
AWL
The AWL is a social-imperialist organisation, which has now for decades been campaigning in indirect support of US and British foreign policy objectives and military operations, by promoting ‘non-condemnation’ and ‘anti-anti-imperialism’. It was a pioneer of the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign that was later deployed against the Corbyn movement from 2015 and that has now become a more generalised regime of speech control. It is different from the ex-leftist ‘Eustonites’ and ‘Spiked’ only in that it still falsely claims to be a part of the Marxist left. It is thus an exact equivalent of HM Hyndman’s and HG Wells’s ‘National Socialist Party’ in 1916-22.
The AWL’s ‘Open Letter’ (December 4) argues:
- The left must explore additional ways to unite in practical activity;
- Where we disagree socialists should attempt to spell out clearly and honestly our differences, so that political lines are clear. We should debate differences;
- The creation of single-faction, pseudo parties on the left, in which debate is stifled, is debilitating and counterproductive.
- And a fourth we would like to raise now, which is connected with the rejection of the defensive, sealed-in sect politics of much of the Marxist left: the need for the socialists to orientate outwards, to the existing labour movement, with the intention of helping to transform it into a movement capable of fighting for the interests of the working class.
On its face this appeal appears sensible. The left does need unity in action. It does need openly identifying differences. The restriction of left groups to single factions based on theoretical agreement is “debilitating and counterproductive”.
There are two basic problems, however. The first and most trivial is that the group round Sean Matgamna, of which the AWL is the latest incarnation, has a long history (going back to the 1970s) of dishonestly claiming to seek unity and open debate; but then after a sort of unity is achieved - one which leaves the Matgamna-ites in control of the apparatus and finances - the Matgamnaites use salami tactics and spurious claims of indiscipline to drive out opponents and prevent open debate. Thus with Workers Power; thus with the ‘Socialist Organiser’ Labour left paper; thus with the fusion with the Workers Socialist League. Thus, at a lower level, in various Matgamnaite campaign fronts since then. Without an explicit self-criticism of this conduct from the Matgamnaite core, any unity with them for more than strike support or such-like activities will certainly lead to united formations bureaucratically stitched up by that clique.
The second and far more fundamental problem is that, given the role of the AWL in promoting the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign, political unity with it has the exact same meaning for the Marxist left that the unity of the Corbynistas with the Labour-right witch-hunters had in 2015-19: setting yourself up to promote your enemies and the supporters of the capitalist (imperialist) state.
Associated with this is the grave ambiguity of the AWL’s fourth point, “the need for the socialists to orientate outwards, to the existing labour movement”. The reality is that a great many socialists have been expelled from the Labour Party under witch-hunting operations round the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign. The AWL pro forma opposed the expulsions, but continued - and continues - to promote the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear. (It also continues to promote US security apparat ‘news’ lines on Ukraine, Georgia, Hong Kong, Xinjiang …). “The existing labour movement” here cannot mean the trade unions: beyond small ‘left communist’ groups, the whole left participates in the trade unions. It means a commitment to the Labour right.
We need more than a variety of left unity ‘campaigns’ and ‘blocs’. We need a party. A large left organisation that had clear public anti-imperialist commitments and anti-imperialist campaigning activities could accept the existence of the AWL as an opposition faction - though, like the SPD before World War I, we would need to prevent the pro-imperialist opposition from controlling the party press (as in the Vorwärts affair in 1904-05) and deselect those voting for their line in parliament (as in the cases of Paul Göhre and Max Schippel at the same period).15 The left today is in a different situation. A small new party or proto-party formation, which included the AWL on the basis of some sort of negotiated agreement with them for united action, would discredit itself among the broader left.
ACR
Anti-Capitalist Resistance is the British section of the Mandelite Fourth International: formerly ‘Socialist Resistance’, before that ‘Socialist Outlook’ and the ‘International Socialist Group’, which was the largest of the fragments of the old International Marxist Group (renamed ‘Socialist League’ in 1982) after it broke up in 1985-88. The Mandelites have a history going back at least to the 1980s of advocating the creation of ‘broad front’ parties “not programmatically delimited between reform and revolution”.16 The policy has, in fact, been strikingly unsuccessful. In a variety of broad-front parties, the Mandelites have played the role of left flank guards for their bureaucratic/‘official left’ leaders against Trotskyist and other opponents. But they invariably get dumped by these leaders sooner or later.17
In 2013, I thought that the Mandelites had to some extent drawn a self-critical balance-sheet of these disastrous operations. This, however, seems to have been ephemeral: the effect of the French Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire’s decision to launch the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste as an openly anti-capitalist formation. Since then, the NPA was defeated as an attempt to seize the initiative by the counter-initiative of Jean-Luc Mélenchon splitting from the Parti Socialiste to form the Parti de Gauche (2008) and has failed more generally, ending in a stupid split in December 2022. Dave Kellaway’s article for ACR shows a move to the right as a response to this failure.
The first two-thirds of comrade Kellaway’s article is merely the usual analysis of the outcome of the general election, followed by a brief and ill-informed discussion of the history of Trotskyist entry in the Labour Party, with the usual Trotskyist habit (as with SocAlt) of ignoring the influence of the old ‘official’ CPGB.18 The last third consists of a series of numbered points, some of which are good and others disastrous.
Good is number 1, “A top-down party directed by personalities or a cartel of existing left currents is not a recipe for success.”, with a hat-tip to Harry Holmes’s useful article, ‘Revenge of the network left’ - though Kellaway’s point is marred by a complete failure to take a self-critical attitude to his own tendency’s work enabling the ‘Galloway cult’. So too number 2, “Any fake democratic structure where leaders use internet/referendum systems should be avoided.” And the first sentence (only!) of number 7, “Any new party should allow tendencies to exist and have the right to express their opinions openly, including in any press.” Number 9 - “While the strategy of a new broad party means confronting Labour in elections, this does not mean taking a sectarian line against the remaining Labour left MPs, such as John McDonnell, Diane Abbott or Zarah Sultana” - expresses a sound general principle.
Numbers 10-12 are merely ‘motherhood and apple pie’: the new party should aim to build inside the trade unions (as I said above, the existing left routinely does so); it will need to prioritise recruiting youth and bringing them on to leadership; it “should be intervening culturally too”. So too number 5, “eco socialism”: real issues, but not addressed effectively by tailing the greens; and number 8, “Whatever happens, we need to be modest and cautious”.
Ambiguous is number 3, “Caucus rights for LGBQT and black, women and disabled members should be recognised”. The right to caucus is merely a necessary consequence of the right to form tendencies or factions. Compulsory caucuses or caucuses with ‘official standing’ are disastrous - as we already saw in Left Unity and have seen many times before.
Bad are number 4, “The programme and policies of the new party should reflect a broad class struggle party and not a revolutionary Marxist one.” And, going along with it, number 6:
A flexible approach to international issues like Ukraine or Palestine will be necessary if we want to be broad-based. Solidarity with Palestine against the Israeli state and a right to resistance, an end of occupation and the right to return would need to be the minimum basis. But a new party could remain open about a two-state or one-state solution. On Ukraine we would need to agree on Russia withdrawal, a ceasefire and self-determination, but leaving the arms issue for further debate.
A party that was pro-Ukraine would be pro-Nato, pro-US and pro-British imperialism.
Equally disastrous is the rest of number 7:
However, we would have to encourage currents to not pre-caucus every decision and policy. Once the basic principles were agreed, debate going beyond that - the sort of discussions a revolutionary Marxist party would have needs to be set aside. Otherwise you have a continual debate like we had in Left Unity around programme and workers’ militias. This is one of the most difficult things to manage. If you have an open, democratic party, it is difficult to stop revolutionary currents joining, but how do you stop their ‘raids’ and endless propagandising? I think you have to make sure there is enough of a genuine mass base and healthy local groups that have a majority who are not already members of organised groups.
This proposal is, in substance, to deny the possibility of the new party being politically democratic. Suppose you exclude the groups. The reality is that the issues of difference will arise among the independents themselves. It is just the same as Jim Sillars purging the Trots in the Scottish Labour Party in the 1970s, or Arthur Scargill’s successive purges in the Socialist Labour Party in the 1990s. This sort of control would in practice sterilise any new party. It would also guarantee the repetition of the pattern of Mandelite failure in ‘new parties of the left’.
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weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1516/what-sort-of-party; and prometheusjournal.org/2024/11/26/why-a-party-and-what-sort.↩︎
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See, for example, Carla Roberts, ‘Whimpering out of existence’ Weekly Worker November 14: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1515/whimpering-out-of-existence.↩︎
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revsoc21.uk/2024/11/25/is-it-time-for-a-new-left-party-in-britain.↩︎
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Issues available at www.workersliberty.org/index.php/solidarity-all.↩︎
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anticapitalistresistance.org/debate-on-the-left-in-britain-towards-a-new-broad-party.↩︎
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See above, note 4.↩︎
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prometheusjournal.org/2024/11/22/there-are-parties-and-then-there-are-parties.↩︎
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prometheusjournal.org/2024/11/29/the-communist-party-yesterday-and-tomorrow.↩︎
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Covered by Paul Demarty in this paper (articles at weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/categories/socialist-party-in-england-and-wales).↩︎
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www.internationaliststandpoint.org/why-we-disaffiliate-from-the-isa-open-letter-by-the-isa-sections-in-greece-turkey-and-cyprus.↩︎
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www.documentcloud.org/documents/25041448-why-were-launching-revolutionary-workers-leaving-socialist-alternative.↩︎
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www.socialistparty.ie/2024/07/a-marxist-international-must-be-socialist-feminist.↩︎
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On the defects of the standard leftist history see my own review of Graham Bash’s and Andrew Fisher’s 100 years of Labour in Weekly Worker September 27 2006: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/642/100-years-hard-labour/, and for some possible theoretical underpinnings my 2009 ‘Labour Party blues’ (July 22 2009): weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/779/labour-party-blues; and ‘Making and unmaking Labour’ (July 29 2009): weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/780/making-and-unmaking-labour.↩︎
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B Lewis, ‘Sources, streams and confluence’ Weekly Worker August 25 2016: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1119/sources-streams-and-confluence.↩︎
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In fact, this policy goes back substantially further, at least to broad-front operations in the Belgian Socialist Party in the early 1960s and in the British Labour Party in the later 1960s. It may have its roots in the role of Pierre Frank, who was a broad-front advocate and operator in the 1930s in the reconstitution of the Fourth International in Europe from 1945.↩︎
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See M Macnair, ‘The Fourth International and failed perspectives’ Weekly Worker June 6 2012: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/917/the-fourth-international-and-failed-perspectives; and ‘Strategy and freedom of criticism’ (June 13 2012): weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/918/strategy-and-freedom-of-criticism; also ‘Broad parties: theories of deception’ (June 20 2013): weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/967/broad-parties-theories-of-deception.↩︎
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For a little more depth, see M Macnair, ‘In, out, shake it all about’ Weekly Worker October 28 2010: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/839/in-out-shake-it-all-about; ‘Entries and exits’ (November 4 2010): weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/840/entries-and-exits; ‘Dances with scabs’ (November 11 2010): weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/841/dances-with-scabs.↩︎