16.07.1998
Opportunism knocks
The SLP’s Simon Harvey last week gave a summary of the second delegate recall conference of the United Campaign to Repeal the Anti-Trade Union Laws (Weekly Worker July 9). That campaign still has the possibility of mobilising workers, despite its bureaucratic approach and its pessimistic lack of belief in rank and file workers (it will only succeed if led by the TUC, according to its chair, Bob Crow, and one of its joint secretaries, John Hendy). A movement, around its limited, legalistic demands, may yet arise. This is not least due to its initial sponsorship by Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party (comrades Crow and Hendy are both SLP members).
Yet such a campaign in and of itself will not lead to the birth of a truly self-liberatory workers’ movement. It will not build the type of fighting unions that our class needs. However, the intervention of communists and revolutionaries in such a campaign - in concrete and active support of its demands, yet in criticism of its orientation to the labour bureaucracy - could begin to lay the foundations for the type of movement we need.
So far, the main role of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty in the United Campaign has been to give the bureaucratic strategy of comrades Crow and Hendy revolutionary respectability. The United Campaign is attempting to ‘unite’ the existing trade union bureaucracy into mobilising around its important, yet limited, demands. Political organisations and rank and file bodies are spefically barred from affiliating. Only ‘bona fide’ trade union organisations, as determined by the committee, are acceptable. How the AWL’s Free Trade Union Campaign and the SLP’s Reclaim Our Rights qualify, where the Campaign for a Fighting and Democratic Unison does not, remains unanswered.
The AWL’s complete capitulation to this edict makes the words of Mark Sandell ring hollow. Comrade Sandell is an FTUC (ie, AWL) representative on the United Campaign committee. Writing in the Weekly Worker (Letters, May 21) in response to earlier criticism from Simon Harvey of the deal between the AWL and the SLP, comrade Sandell states that the campaign’s first delegate recall conference on April 18 “was only to set up an interim committee to get things moving and to prepare for the delegate recall conference in July that will have the authority and the breadth to elect an executive, decide on policy and adopt a democratic constitution”. He continues: “It was in that context that I supported the temporary structure designed to aid unity and organise action until July.”
It was clear then as it is concrete now that the structure and strategy established at the April 18 meeting were not so interim. The AWL has championed an orientation to the bureaucracy. It kept mum on what sort of trade union movement our class actually needs, and has accommodated to what seems immediately acceptable and achievable for the bureaucracy.
Comrade Sandell’s eagerness to achieve quick results is questionable, as is his no doubt heartfelt wish that any reborn labour movement be not merely a lash-up of sects and the usual old lefties, but a real movement, “representing tens, hundreds of thousands and millions”, as he said at the United Campaign conference on July 4. In a period such as now, when the “struggle against capitalism and for socialism is narrowed down to ... small group[s] of socialists preparing for the future”, the
“desire to achieve ‘something’ becomes seductive and warps and replaces the fresh, clean, young sense of what is necessary and worth striving to achieve, whatever the cost and however long the struggle. The long view and the overview give way to shorter, discrete, unintegrated views. Impatience breeds opportunism and induces indifference to the seemingly less immediate concerns. The business of achieving a little bit now displaces the old goal, or pushes it beyond the horizon” (Sean Matgamna Workers’ Liberty June 1998).
Unfortunately, comrade Sandell seems to have been seduced by the seemingly easier task of “achieving a little bit now”. Opportunism has replaced principle. Central to the problem is the AWL’s Labourism. Without breaking from a position where ‘the party’ means the bosses’ workers’ party - the Labour Party - to a position for political independence for our class and a fight for its own revolutionary party against Labour, AWL will always be susceptible to falling in behind the labour bureaucracy.
Whether or not the opportunist approach to trade union work of comrade Sandell is also criticised by the AWL’s principled minority on the Irish referendum (see ‘Around the left’, p7) I do not know. But for sure opportunism cannot be restricted to one issue. Nor did it come out of thin air. The majority’s rightism on the May 22 vote and its capitulation to the trade union bureaucracy in the United Campaign is an outcome of a method fostered by comrade Matgamna himself.
Nevertheless the AWL is a current in the workers’ movement with an admirable respect for open debate before the class. It eschews the traditional Trotskyist method of treating differences between communists as something to be ashamed of, as private matters to be hidden from the workers, who just ‘won’t understand our arguments’. Revolutionaries are an important and all too rare commodity nowadays - as are their debates.
Marcus Larsen