12.12.2024

What sort of Partyism?

Ideas that party building can be skipped, that programmatic differences ought to be avoided, that there should be bureaucratic restrictions on polemics - all are roads to nowhere. In the second part of his discussion Mike Macnair focuses on a group of RS21 members and Joe Todd’s recent contributions

It is worth beginning with brief observations about the contributions discussed last week. In essence, SocAlt proposes a new and more leftwing version of the Labour Party: a federal party based on the trade unions. This character is expressed in the idea that Labour has decisively lost its connection to the working class, so that a new Labour Party is possible; that any new party needs “organic links” with the trade union movement; that it must be “rooted in the workers’ movement”; their standard ‘New Left Trotskyist’ narrative of the origins of the Labour Party, which prettifies early Labour and sees it arising only from radicalisation in their trade unions; and their defence of the Socialist Party in England and Wales’s line in relation to left regroupment projects between the 1990s and 2015: in particular SPEW’s decision to split the Socialist Alliance in defence of organisational federalism. This is not, then, a new proposal, but merely a proposal for a new Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition without Peter Taaffe, Hannah Sell and Clive Heemskerk. It is less likely to work than the existing Tusc.

The AWL’s proposal is not totally transparent, because it defends its own history of non-transparency in dealing with the rest of the left. But its reprint of what the AWL argued in 1988 makes it clear that, like the 19th century French ‘Legitimist’ monarchists, it has ‘forgotten nothing and learned nothing’. What it is proposing is a broad-left bloc that is capable of including the AWL, on the road to acceptance of the AWL’s project. That is, that a ‘coherent’ left is needed (meaning, another sect grounded on theory - in this case Max Shachtman’s theory as interpreted by Sean Matgamna and Martin Thomas). But this Matgamnaite project would be committed to unity with the Labour right around support for US and British foreign policy and wars. It differentiates itself from the Labour right merely around economic issues, where it proposes the delusional idea of “Tax the rich” in Britain (but the rich are only in Britain because the country is a tax haven). The commitment to unity with the Labour right on foreign policy would make economic leftism delusional for the exact same reason as the Corbyn movement.

Anticapitalist Resistance has learned something - but what it has learned is merely to move right. Its proposal is a broad-front “class struggle party” without the supposedly disruptive far left, and in consequence, with sharp limitations on its internal democracy. This is merely to repeat the errors the Mandelite Fourth International committed in the Brazilian Workers Party, in Italy in Rifondazione Comunista, in Spain in Podemos, and so on; that the ‘Fourth International Supporters Caucus’ committed in the Socialist Labour Party, and that the precursors of ACR itself committed in Respect and Respect Renewal. The only difference is to abandon the early hope of a democratic unity that all these projects (except Respect) at first offered, and enter immediately into the phase of bureaucratic controls, which leads to demoralisation of the ranks and failure.

Gang of four

Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century is the larger part of the 2013 split from the Socialist Workers’ Party over the Martin Smith rape allegations. The comrades who have contributed on the ‘party question’ say that it “has attempted to thread the needle between bureaucratic narrow groups and the network model of many groups”.¹ Comrade Woodrow in his Prometheus contribution says rather more about the group:

RS21 is not perfect, does not claim to be perfect, does not claim to have a blueprint for what leftist political organisations should look like, and certainly does not claim to be the party (it doesn’t even claim to be a party). RS21’s political basis document,² adopted in 2024, states that “We are committed to working with others to create a mass revolutionary party rooted in the working class”, but there is no worked out consensus within RS21 about what such a party should look like, or about what RS21 (or anyone else) should be doing to help bring about the creation of such a party.

I think this lack of clarity or strategic direction is typical of RS21’s main limitations (besides its small size). I think RS21 is a brilliant organisation and I’m glad to be a member, but it isn’t an organisation with a particularly clear sense of direction or active purpose. We agree about our long-term aims, and there’s some agreement on the kinds of activity members should be engaged in at a local level, or some of the interventions we need to make into other movements or campaigns, but it’s not really clear that we have a cohesive strategy collectively as an organisation.

As far as I can tell, this is in large part to do with RS21’s history, and the way it emerged as a separate organisation in response to the SWP’s cover-up of a sexual assault case in 2013. RS21’s founding members (correctly) concluded that the cover-up was not just some one-off mistake, but reflected broader problems with the SWP’s internal culture and with its structure. Consequently, RS21 abandoned the SWP’s model and adopted a very minimalistic form of organisation, with little in the way of centralisation, internal discipline, formal processes or structures, or explicit collective political positions.

The 2024 “political basis document” is, in fact, intermediate between Trotskyism, on the one hand, and ‘New Left’ and Eurocommunist “resisting class reductionism”, on the other:

RS21 is a Marxist organisation. We see the Russian Revolution as the highest point of working class struggle and stand in the tradition of those who opposed the Stalinist counterrevolution. We also enrich this tradition by drawing on the best of the anti-colonial, feminist and anti-racist radical movements which have emerged over the last century. Resisting crude class reductionism, RS21 is attempting in thought and practice to produce a socialist politics appropriate for today.

The first two sentences are Trotskyist; the remaining two are Eurocommunist or ‘New Left’ in character.

It is just worth observing that at the time of the 2013 split, the CPGB approached RS21 for discussions and were told that our publication of internal materials from the debate in the SWP made any discussions (not merely actual unity) unacceptable. Some discussions took place between RS21 and Socialist Resistance (now Anticapitalist Resistance); it is not at all obvious from the two sites what the obstacle to unity was (or is).

The RS21 contribution on the party discussion is a document which, we are told, was solicited from RS21 participants by the organisers of the ‘Party Time’ discussions at Pelican House, Bethnal Green. Four RS21ers - Tomi A, Harry H, Lotta S and Taisie T - have then contributed a short document on the issue. The basic orientation they offer is that:

For us, the ‘party’ is not just an electoral initiative, akin to the Labour or Green parties - it should not just be about election activities. Nor is the party just a case of getting enough members and declaring ourselves ‘the party’.

For us, the party must be a democratic coming together of sufficient socialist forces, capable of coordinating across spheres of activity (electoral, industrial, liberation movements, etc), and facilitating strategic debate and deliberation across those spheres. This must be rooted in the struggles of the working classes across Britain.

Not “just” an electoral initiative - but it is far from clear from this formulation why the party should be concerned with electoral initiatives at all.

What follows is a series of questions. In the first place, they ask: “How do we ensure the membership sets the policy of the organisation, and that any elected figures are accountable to those decisions?” - a real question, but with no real suggestion how to overcome it. The next point requires quotation for clarity:

Opposing the British state: Opposition to the state’s support for the genocide in Palestine, to its police murders and violence, to the expansion of the border regime, to its violence against trans people - all these struggles, which have inspired us all, share a desire for real freedom against the British state and our ruling classes. If we are serious about an organisation which reflects and builds these struggles, we should be preparing for the British media and state system to turn on the organisation hard - to attempt to win over the most rightward element of our base and membership to soft loyalty to the British state. How can we work together to ensure the organisation is steadfast in these struggles against the British state?

This formulation addresses state violence, but does not address the state form (the constitutional order), or the international alliance systems of which the British state is a part.

There is a very curious claim about political geography: “The uneven development of the left: Different areas of Britain will need different types of political activity and focuses of struggle. It won’t be electoral work everywhere, nor should it be” - but then, what should it be? What are the concrete differences?

The comrades claim that “Liberation movements are class politics: Anti-racist organising, feminist and queer movements are part of class struggle, and there is no chance of a socialist future without them.” They end this paragraph with the sort of counterweight that “It will be crucial to work against any separation between organised socialists and workers in unions, and that will require ground-level involvement in workplace struggles around the country.” The problem here is that “equality and diversity” politics in human resources departments, etc are not class politics, but equivalents of what Marxists before the era of the people’s front policy called “bourgeois feminism”. The coloration of leftism that movements of the oppressed took on in the 1960s-70s was a side-effect of the politics of the cold war.

Trinity politics

It does not solve the problem to posit the trade unions as the counterweight representation of class politics; Lenin’s characterisation of tred-iunionizm (transcribing the English word to refer to the apolitical ‘trade unionism’ of early 20th century Britain and the US) as “bourgeois politics of the working class”, was plainly enough true, and the paragraph reads desperately like the old CPUSA’s ‘trinity’ of race (black nationalists and similar figures), gender (liberal feminists) and class (Rooseveltian Democrat trade unionists).³

It is a strength of the document that it insists on an opposition project, “Being an opposition organisation”, rather than the immediate pursuit of an alternative government. But then the comrades go on to spoil the point by arguing:

A year into the genocide, as the murderer of Chris Kaba is acquitted, and Tommy Robinson attempts to organise off the back of racist riots, with ecological breakdown in view - we can’t just be patiently building the infrastructure for a small electoral opposition. This is why we would need to incorporate militant activists from extra-parliamentary movements within the membership, ensure we are rooted in wider mass struggle, and be capable of mobilising when moments of crisis emerge.

This argument is too similar to the title of the old International Marxist Group’s 1971 Perspectives Document: “No, we haven’t got all the time in the world”. The result of this argument from the urgency of the conjuncture to impatient politics was the waste of the time which, in fact, was available: 53 years later revolutionary crisis has not yet broken out, and the organised far left has repeatedly falsely predicted its imminence.

Lenin in 1913 (and again in 1915 and 1920) made the point that

Oppression alone, no matter how great, does not always give rise to a revolutionary situation in a country. In most cases it is not enough for revolution that the lower classes should not want to live in the old way. It is also necessary that the upper classes should be unable to rule and govern in the old way.⁴

The far left’s repeated over-prediction of imminent revolutionary crisis reflects precisely failure to assess accurately the reserves of flexibility available to the regime.

We have just in the last few years seen three examples at work. First, in 2015-16, the unexpected success of the Corbyn campaign was neutralised by the ability of the ‘Dererite’ faction of the Labour Party, committed to strategic unity with the ‘centre left’ (and thus to unity with the right) to capture control of the Corbyn movement through Jon Lansman’s proprietary Momentum project. Second, in 2017‑19, the securocrat, Sir Keir Starmer (as director of public prosecutions he would have had to be a security apparat insider), manoeuvred the party into the position of tail for the unprincipled manoeuvres of the ‘Tory remainers’; while, at the same time, a coordinated media campaign deployed the tropes of anti-racism to smear the left as anti-Semites. The result was Boris Johnson’s Tory landslide and the ongoing purge of Labour. Third, the private sector largely ended the post-pandemic and inflation strike movement by concessions on pay in 2022-23, but the Tories held fast in relation to the public sector; in 2024, capital temporarily dumped the Tories, and the new Labour government has been able to end much of the strike movement by similar concessions.

(We saw this on a larger scale in 1974: massive economic concessions, immediately removed through inflation, allowed the Wilson government to bring in a modified form of the ‘industrial relations’ legislation that had been defeated when Labour put them forward as In place of strife in 1969, and defeated again in 1971-74, as Heath’s Industrial Relations Act produced what looked a lot more like an approaching revolutionary crisis.)

RS21 broke with the SWP over the Martin Smith affair, and broke with the SWP’s bureaucratic centralism. But the comrades who have contributed to the party debate have not broken from the SWP’s version of the anti-parliamentarism Lenin criticised in Leftwing communism: an infantile disorder. In particular:

It is because, in western Europe, the backward masses of the workers and - to an even greater degree - of the small peasants are much more imbued with bourgeois-democratic and parliamentary prejudices than they were in Russia because of that, it is only from within such institutions as bourgeois parliaments that communists can (and must) wage a long and persistent struggle, undaunted by any difficulties, to expose, dispel and overcome these prejudices.⁵

The RS21 comrades cannot, in the context of the ‘party discussion’, directly argue for the rejection of electoral intervention, but they can downplay it as much as possible - and do so.

My examples, just given, illustrate how useless this project is of “coordinating across spheres of activity (electoral, industrial, liberation movements, etc), and facilitating strategic debate and deliberation across those spheres” without a clear sense of the point of electoral and parliamentary activity. It is the political voice in the form of the parliamentary fraction, if we can get one, and the party press, which can “wage a long and persistent struggle, undaunted by any difficulties”, to expose the nature of the regime’s political, legislative and judicial manoeuvres against the workers’ movement.

Momentum officer

Joe Todd was a press and communications officer for Momentum.⁶ In July 2024 he was writing optimistically on Novara Media about the possibilities of a new “popular left alliance” on the basis of the victories of the Greens and of pro-Palestinian independents in the general election.⁷ His Prometheus article, ‘Maybe a party, definitely an organisation’, is significantly more downbeat.⁸

He begins with an argument against a new electoral party. The first point is that (as he argued in July), the strongest electoralist case is for leftists to join the Greens to “keep the Greens left”. (I should say that the result would pretty certainly be the fate of the many, many German leftists who joined Die Grünen: absorption in a rightward-moving politics or marginalisation.) But, he says,

the Greens have a ceiling. In a broader context of polarisation between urban graduates and small-town/rural non-graduates (see Trump’s re-election or the collapse of the German left party into a new ‘left conservative alliance’) it’s unlikely that they’ll consistently win outside of urban centres any time soon.

This is a little startling. Bristol Central is a university seat, true. Brighton Pavilion is a seat in a seaside town, and not the most ‘studenty’ part of that city. The difference from Ukip/Reform-leaning seaside seats is general prosperity. It was held by the Tories from 1950 to 1997. Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire are both straightforwardly rural seats previously held by the Tories.⁹

Behind this plain misrepresentation of the Greens’ 2024 general election result is - as is apparent in the quotation - a much larger schema of “polarisation between urban graduates and small-town/rural non-graduates”, which he develops in the following paragraphs. This schema is, in essence, low-grade journalistic/PR guys’ oversimplified ‘psephology’. The graduate proportion of the population is, it is true, higher in London and the major conurbations, but it is not low anywhere outside run-down areas, where there are few jobs for anyone.¹⁰ Comrade Todd’s claim that “Hating on landlords made sense for those of us who rented in cities, but missed the fact that a mortgage on a cheap second home is a route to retirement for many” is a remarkable example of identifying country and small-town people with the petty-bourgeoisie as a class: housing is just as much a problem in these areas.¹¹

He goes on to argue that in any case a new electoral party is practically infeasible, because it is impossible to build and fund quickly enough for a 2029 general election. And he doubts it is desirable:

And all this without grappling with more existential questions about electoralism: did Corbynism suck the life out of social movements and union organising? Can we really move beyond capitalism by building electoral parties that, in the best case medium-term scenario, end up doing deals with Labour? How does the urgent tempo of the climate crisis fit with a patient build of a party over decades? Are we attracted to elections because they’re clear and declarative moments of political expression in an increasingly chaotic, indeterminate world? What does it mean for socialists and communists to campaign for social democracy in the context of falling growth, crumbling institutions and fragile supply chains? Did the dream of the Green New Deal die with Corbyn 2019 and Sanders 2020? These questions leave me, and I think many others, feeling just a little lost and hopeless.

The assumption of these arguments is that to campaign for election is necessarily with a view to forming a government: not with a view to providing an opposition voice and campaigning for legislative reforms (which can be won from opposition, contrary to common views). The idea that “Corbynism suck[ed] the life out of social movements and union organising” is plain nonsense.

Safe space

His alternative proposal is elaborated, but actually rather thin. He starts with the proposition that there are millions of unorganised ‘socialists’ self-identified in polls: an unhelpful category, because the Labour Party self-identifies as a ‘democratic socialist party’, so that to self-identify in polls as a ‘socialist’ may be merely to self-identify as a Labour voter. These unorganised socialists, he argues, are politically homeless. What is needed is:

An explicitly anti-capitalist organisation open to every socialist, leftist, anarchist, communist and Marxist in the country. A place of mutual support, deep relationships and trust that replenishes us and gives us the energy to continue …

If we do it right, it could be an organisation we actually want to be in. With a shared desire to move beyond capitalism and the spaces of contestation being primarily out there, we can prioritise culture as well as output, building a place of generosity, honesty and vulnerability.

What is being sought, then, is a “safe space” for socialists without contestation. I have argued against this approach in the past, in Left Unity in 2014 (where it got mixed up with the disputes/disciplinary procedures), and I do not propose to repeat these arguments here.¹²

I add, though, a single anecdote. Back in the late 1970s, walking home drunk, I was either queer-bashed or Pabloite-bashed (I was never certain which) by a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party Young Socialists. I was saved from more serious injury than I actually suffered by the intervention of a Labour rightwing member of the Transport and General Workers Union branch of which I was a member, who stopped his car to end the attack (on a person who I do not think he recognised at the time).

The relevance of this story is that solidarity does not grow out of the absence of political contestation. It grows out of the recognition of the elementary need for solidarity that makes us join trade unions (and cooperatives, and so on) - and which made urban working class districts turn out in large numbers to defeat the ‘Cleggmania’ media attempt to drive Labour into third place in 2010. This recognition of the need for solidarity makes us continue in trade unions despite political differences, and similarly in the Labour Party - and indeed in the smaller organised left groups. Left Unity, with its elaborate ‘safe spaces’ principles, wound up bogged down in endless interpersonal disputes - before Corbynism in 2015 effectively marginalised it.

Comrade Todd argues for a fundraising campaign for paid organisers, because “Voluntarism just doesn’t cut it when organising the non-political. It takes the deep and sustained engagement only a paid organiser can provide.” But the experience of Momentum, of which he was part, suggests the exact opposite: the dominance of paid organisers is an obstacle to organising in the localities.

Further, he proposes “a relentless focus on the disorganised left”, “a hard-coded, deeply intentional and almost maniacal focus on leftists not like us”. But this is just the arguments run by the Eurocommunists in the 1980s (which led only to … Blairism) and by John Rees and others in Respect - which led to efforts to depoliticise Respect’s local branches, and ultimately to a senseless split between the SWP and the ‘Galloway wing’.

Indeed, it is the aspiration to ‘face only outwards’, the “relentless focus” comrade Todd calls for, which demands of the left the anti-democratic practices that make left organisations ‘hostile environments’ for militants as soon as initial enthusiasm for the project has faded. The basic conception of “educate, agitate, organise” - on trade union banners from the past history of the movement - gives space to the existing members as well as the outward-facing work - and in the result, creates better outward-facing work.

The reality is, then, that comrade Todd’s proposal is to create another left group, without a clear political programme or strategic orientation, but with funds and organisers and a violently outward-facing orientation. That would be another Momentum - but without the backing from the leader of the Labour Party, and without the proprietary database created in Corbyn’s election campaign that was the spine of Momentum’s ability to organise. There is not the slightest reason to suppose that such a project could succeed in unifying the left.

In a third article I will address the contributions of Archie Woodrow (November 22) and comrade Woodrow’s November 28 letter to this paper, and of Lawrence Parker (November 29).

1. srevsoc21.uk/2024/11/25/is-it-time-for-a-new-left-party-in-britain.↩︎

2. srevsoc21.uk/2024/04/21/new-rs21-about-us (hyperlink in the quoted passage).↩︎

3. sMore in M Macnair, ‘Intersectionalism, the highest stage of western Stalinism?’ Critique Vol 46, pp541-58 (2018); more extended though less documented discussion is in ‘Intersectionality is a dead end’ Weekly Worker June 7 2018 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1206/intersectionality-is-a-dead-end); ‘Race and class’, June 21 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1208/race-and-class); ‘Mistaken versions of Maoism’, June 28 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1209/mistaken-versions-of-maoism); ‘Getting beyond capitalism’, July 5 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1210/getting-beyond-capitalism).↩︎

4. sThe quote is from www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/jun/15.htm; the 1915 usage is at www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/csi/ii.htm, and the 1920 at www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch09.htm.↩︎

5. swww.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch07.htm.↩︎

6. swww.theguardian.com/politics/2016/sep/18/momentum-activists-labour-jeremy-corbyn-feature; www.newstatesman.com/politics/2017/07/how-labour-activists-are-already-building-digital-strategy-win-next; novaramedia.com/2018/02/11/how-labours-campaigns-attempted-to-make-the-political-personal; www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/inside-momentums-plan-to-defy-the-polls-and-make-corbyn-pm (December 10 2019).↩︎

7. snovaramedia.com/2024/07/11/what-can-the-left-learn-from-nigel-farage.↩︎

8. sprometheusjournal.org/2024/12/04/maybe-a-party-definitely-an-organisation.↩︎

9. sWaveney Valley is technically a new seat. But all the parts of which it was composed were Tory-held before 2024.↩︎

10. swww.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/migrationwithintheuk/articles/exploringeducationalattainmentandinternalmigrationwithinenglishtraveltoworkareas/2002to2019.↩︎

11. slordslibrary.parliament.uk/housing-in-rural-and-coastal-communities.↩︎

12. sleftunity.org/alternative-to-safe-spaces; leftunity.org/speaking-bitterness-and-left-unity. I give these references because they include critical comments on my articles, which are also available (without the comments) at weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1012/left-unity-safe-spaces-are-not-liberating (May 29 2014) and weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1015/speaking-bitterness-and-left-unity (June 19 2014).↩︎