18.06.1998

For inclusion

Martin Ralph of the International Socialist League joins the debate on Socialist Alliances

Some of the points raised by John Pearson (‘Manchester SA collapses’ Weekly Worker May 21) are important in relation to how a revolutionary working class leadership can develop in this country and what lessons can be learnt from the recent period for developing a new workers’ party in Britain.

Any party or alliance which seeks to be a representative party of the working class must allow full rights to tendencies. There is an important experience which the International Workers League had in Brazil in helping to build the PT (Workers Party) and later the PSTU (United Socialist Workers Party). We have material on these experiences in English.

In dealing with the problems of the Socialist Alliance in Manchester Pearson does not give the full story, or give a historic background, or exactly what he thinks should be done now and only some points can be taken up in this article.

He uses a certain amount of invective such as his comment on the ‘independents’: “tired and oh so worldly-wise cynics, condemned the utter futility of socialists trying to create an independent working class electoral challenge”. It is no wonder that Pearson finds it difficult to win support from independents when he lumps the whole lot together - his comment seems to be based on ‘Look what they did to me!’

The International Socialist League only attended the last one and a half hours of the alliance conference because we had supported the Tameside careworkers’ demonstration on that day.

Pearson does say that we voted for the lost amendment which maintained the original basis of the Socialist Alliance: that all political tendencies inside the Socialist Alliance have a right to be represented on the committee. Clearly the original basis of the Socialist Alliance was removed.

A fact which Pearson misses out is that after that the ISL voted for the CPGB and the CDSLP comrades to be included in the committee as well as ourselves. It became clear that the committee would be restricted to 12 and that the comrades of the CPGB would be excluded. In the process the Socialist Party were given three places on the committee; surely this is against Dave Nellist’s idea of an 80%-20% process. There is not one organisation that is involved that has more than 10 active comrades.

The comrades of the CPGB remained in the Alliance conference and participated in the new election process. They lost the vote but they participated in the process, as we did.

The ISL comrade on the new committee moved at the next meeting that one comrade of the CPGB be brought onto the committee - he was in a minority of one but he and the ISL will continue to fight to reverse the anti-democratic decision.

How does this state of affairs come about? The Socialist Party and others have treated the Socialist Alliance as a left discussion group and the Alliance has not turned out to any great extent to intervene in the working class and has not built in the working class. It helped set up the dockworkers’ support group which worked for two years, but did not work directly in it; and it is a similar story, with some exceptions, elsewhere.

Last November the CPGB rejected an alliance with the ISL - based on the fact that we had some joint work in the working class (the dockworkers’ struggle) and that we had some common understanding of history (the Russian Revolution). A possible political basis for the rejection of such an alliance emerged later when the CPGB made two positions clear: the boycott of the Irish referendum and a position of neutrality on the European Union expressed in an article by Pearson. Both positions we think are anti-Marxist and anti-internationalist and come from the pressure of British exceptionalism. These are positions to the right of some of the people you are opposing in the Socialist Alliance.

But there are further problems in discussion with the CPGB as expressed in writing and discussions with the Manchester comrades: that a future communist party would be non-ideological and that your analysis on Trotsky’s positions is that it was purely anti-Stalinist and therefore, because Stalinism is dead, that Trotskyism and Trotsky’s positions are dead but at the same time it is thought that a communist party can be rebuilt with Trotskyist tendencies! Those within the Trotskyist movement who hold similar positions are moving away from international proletarian positions.

We sent you our programmatic documents on the development of an international liaison committee in November last year because the Manchester comrades said they wanted a programmatic discussion; although the CPGB did not reply, you should be familiar with our approach to political alliances: that it is possible to develop principled national and international political liaisons based on programmatic discussions and common work. The work of the liaison committee began to bear fruit in May in an international conference held in Moscow. The meeting brought together Russian, Ukrainian, Greek, South African, Turkish and IWL representatives. The new international coordinating committee is based on the fact that all political tendencies have the right to a place on the committee, and each political tendency has one vote. There is agreement on the need for a proletarian revolutionary international and we adopted a declaration. We voted, amongst other things, to develop the campaign for Russian workers - many thousands are now on strike.

One further point. We invite you to consider supporting our candidates for the Brazilian presidential elections to be held in October as part of the process which you support in Britain of standing candidates which fight for the independence of the working class. The LIT is standing a union and workers’ leader for president and a landless peasants’ leader as vice-president. They are standing against Lula (leader of the PT) because Lula has become a Blairite and his vice-president is a large landowner and against the landless workers. Our candidates are beginning to receive international support, but not from the Socialist Party (CWI), or the United Secretariat.