18.02.1999

Socialist Alliance: Meeting the challenge

Michael Malkin reports on the latest developments in London

The last 10 years have been profoundly demoralising for many sections of the labour movement: liquidators and reformists have had a field day; many cadres have abandoned the struggle and retreated to the illusory pleasures of ‘private life’; the working class itself is atomised, passive, lacking in self-belief and leaderless.

In these circumstances, the call for ‘left unity’ is no mere slogan expressive of a pious desire to fight against the evils of Blairism - it is an objective necessity imposed by life itself. However daunting the task may seem to be, we must fight hard to demonstrate that ‘the left’ is not a collection of hopelessly divided sectarian grouplets propounding an outmoded ideology and more interested in battling against one another than against the real foe. If we fail to do so, we shall inflict further damage on the labour movement and be guilty of nothing less than a betrayal of the working class.

In January this year a beginning was made. Fighting under the banner of Socialist Unity, comrades from the Communist Party of Great Britain, the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Party and the Socialist Labour Party, united their efforts in support of a common platform, campaigning on behalf of the CPGB’s Anne Murphy in the North Defoe ward by-election in Hackney. The experience of hammering out an agreed manifesto and engaging in practical action together did much to dispel the mistrust and misgivings that have bedevilled our relations for too long. For the SWP comrades, North Defoe surely represented a real watershed. It was the first time in 20 years that they had chosen to work in support of a candidate standing against the Labour Party. Given the special circumstances - Labour’s determination to regain overall control of the council by wresting the seat from the Greens - Socialist Unity’s 2.8% of the poll was a creditable performance.

Now the focus of struggle has shifted to more important terrain: left groups have set about pooling their resources in order to fight the June 1999 European elections. Readers will already be aware that the CPGB has joined forces with five other organisations in the United Socialists project with the intention of fielding a slate comprising 10 candidates for the London region. The other groups involved are the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Party, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, the Independent Labour Network and Socialist Outlook. In addition, representatives of Workers Power have been attending meetings, but have yet to decide whether to become full participants in the project.

At the latest meeting of their organisation committee on February 8, in a move bringing them into conformity with the nomenclature adopted by the West Midlands region, London’s United Socialists agreed to register for the forthcoming elections as the “Socialist Alliance” (SA). The name may cause some confusion, but it is a useful starting point for examining the complexion and political orientation of the joint venture.

Let us begin with the word socialist, which immediately raises issues of programme and platform. The participating groups represent a broad spectrum of opinion, ranging from our own CPGB on the extreme left, with its commitment to the revolutionary democratic overthrow of the United Kingdom state and the arming of the masses, to the left social democracy of the ILN and Socialist Outlook. Nominally at least, a majority of the forces involved are revolutionaries, so some people (ourselves included) are bound to be dissatisfied with the economistic, rightist, milk and water contents of the platform in its current form, as exemplified by a leaflet produced for immediate distribution, pending the drafting of a formal manifesto. From our own theoretical perspectives, this document, with its concentration on “saving jobs and services”, “people before profit”, “save the environment”, “end discrimination” and “the unity of workers and jobless in a socialist Europe” - however worthy these things may be - cannot realistically be described as anything more than a workerist shopping list. In essence, it goes no further than seeking to resurrect the failed social palliatives of old Labour’s left social democrats.

Worse still, as Mark Fischer reported recently (Weekly Worker February 4), tensions between the Leeds and London centres of the ILN, together with the evident existence of an informal bloc between the latter and Socialist Outlook, threaten to create pressure for a further rightist dilution of an already weak platform. In his wisdom, comrade Mike Davies, the maverick quasi-New Labourite who paradoxically sits atop a quite radical group of disaffected leftwingers in Leeds ILN, has decreed that the current platform is “sectarian”, “ultra-left” [!], and therefore “not viable”.

Yet, according to Davies, the “problem” can be solved by the renegotiation of the platform in its fundamentals. Such renegotiation is not to be conducted openly and democratically, of course, but by pressure and influence behind the scenes. This is the sort of dishonest, backroom politics to which so many Labourite activists have become congenitally addicted. It poses a danger to the hard-won cohesion and cooperation underlying the SA, factors that represent a sine qua non for any move towards left unity, and is plainly unacceptable.

Discussions at the February 8 meeting confirmed that the form and content of the eventual SA election manifesto will constitute a source of continuing tension. Comrade Dave Packer of Socialist Outlook, frankly stating that the chances of any electoral success or significant impact by the SA were zero - if that is the case, one wonders why he is bothering to take part at all - contended that the SA’s platform must eschew any revolutionary content; the agreed position “corresponds to the issues of the day” and must primarily focus on meeting the challenge posed by the Greens. Whatever the subject under discussion, all we hear from comrade Packer is the same mournful, wretchedly defeatist dirge - a “leftwing carve-up” would fatally damage the SA; only a “broad” platform and a “broad” slate are realistically feasible. What the comrade means by “broad” is obvious: not merely non-revolutionary but also non-socialist, except in the “broadest” - ie, the most dismally reformist - sense of the term. Behind the comrade’s cautionary homilies, we hear the admonitions of comrade Davies and other siren-voiced ‘possibilists’, whose efforts, if successful, will ensure that the SA as a coherent political force is aborted or at best stillborn.

Much the same can be said for the position taken at the meeting by comrade Richard Garside of the London ILN, who advocated a programme that avoids any revolutionary content in favour of “something which reaches beyond to ordinary working people”. While maintaining (in a clear reference to Davies’s machinations) that the London ILN does not wish to re-open the agreed platform for discussion, the comrade stressed the importance of a “pragmatic” (viz, a “broad”) approach.

What applies to questions of platform applies equally to issues concerning the SA’s campaign strategy and the composition of the SA slate. Again we hear earnest calls for the greatest possible “broadness” in both areas. Comrade Garside (a member of the media sub-committee) told the February 8 meeting that what was needed was a campaign fought on a “broad front”, rather than specific campaigns by individual organisations - soundbites and slogans should be devised to appeal to the greatest possible number of electors. We find no fault with such suggestions in principle, but suspect that in practice the language of “broadness” is a cover for seeking to run a campaign from which all genuinely socialist content has been sanitised.

As regards the slate, the ILN-Socialist Outlook bloc urges the SA to look for candidates outside the alliance. The name of Ken Loach surfaced more than once as a good choice. Mr Loach is a talented director of films, but by no stretch of the imagination can he be seen as a socialist politician, nor is he someone whose name is exactly a household word in the working class. The whole idea of looking for ‘names’ who can supposedly bolster the SA’s credibility with the electorate once again smacks of an opportunistic, fundamentally defeatist approach. Socialist politicians arguing forcefully and cogently for a genuine alternative to the status quo are evidently deemed inadequate for the task in hand.

Is it not also significant that the ILN is even now not in a position to say who it wants to run? Are we to assume that this is merely a matter of continuing deliberation within the ILN, or does it perhaps indicate that their commitment to the project is conditional upon the SA’s acceptance of “broadness” in all its ramifications? Similarly, one wonders why comrade Packer, with a characteristically downbeat shrug of the shoulders, announced that his organisation would propose only one candidate in the form of Greg Tucker, while stressing that big names were required if the SA were to avoid accusations of foisting a “narrow” leftwing slate on an unwilling electorate.

The response of some of the other participating groups to the clearly perceptible intentions of the ILN-Socialist Outlook bloc of rightists was disheartening. To foster conciliation and consensus is one thing - clearly we must do all that we can to keep the SA vessel afloat; but to acquiesce in a situation whereby a minority of the crew could force the ship to sail under radically different colours is something quite different.

The position of the CPGB in relation to these issues is well known. We were effectively locked out of the United Socialists (aka Socialist Alliance) during the vital period of formation and therefore had no hand in influencing the project’s platform. Even after we began to attend and make constructive contributions to the organisation committee’s sessions, our name was mysteriously (though no doubt ‘accidentally’) omitted from publicity material and other draft documents.

When we questioned this on February 8, we were told that the other parties still doubted the seriousness of our commitment. Let there be no room for doubt. We are committed to making the SA a viable force capable of putting forward a genuine socialist alternative. We make no secret of the fact that, from our viewpoint, the SA’s current platform, as expressed in its leaflet, is woefully inadequate, and that if the platform question is to be reopened, we shall argue for a much more radical, socialist and democratic document.

This does not mean that we are blind to the exigencies of working cooperatively with other organisations. Comrade Julie Donovan was right when she said that the SA’s platform is “fragile” and of necessity a “fudge”. What has weakened the SA’s programmatic formation so far, however, has not been the inescapable need to accommodate varying positions; it has been the tendency for important matters of this kind to be decided at the level of subcommittees, whose conclusions are communicated to the main committee for approval.

On the platform in general, we say: let the discussion be open and democratic. Even when a common position is arrived at, let all concerned feel free to criticise those aspects of the platform with which they cannot agree. In other words, as comrade Fischer puts it, “no gagging orders”. On the SA manifesto, we say: let the candidates speak for themselves. The manifesto should consist primarily not of lowest-common-denominator platitudes, but of specific, personal statements from each of the candidates outlining their political affiliation and policies. In this way, the electorate, whose political acuity we seem chronically to underestimate, will have something concrete to think about.

In this respect, although we respect his sincerity and commitment, we disagree profoundly with the conclusions drawn by comrade Nick Long of the Socialist Democracy Group and London ILN in his analysis of the significance of North Defoe, conclusions which he summarised in a letter to this newspaper (Weekly Worker February 4) and reiterated on February 8. Local campaigning on grassroots issues in the boroughs is no doubt a part of our work as socialist activists, but is decidedly not “the answer”. Our experience of canvassing the working class estates in North Defoe indicated, per contra, that what the class needs is a party capable of restoring the socialist project. In other words, we must rearticulate a global vision.

Finally, let us turn to the other component in the SA’s new name. An alliance, if it is to have any meaning beyond the purely formalistic, must be based on full equality for all its participants; it must function democratically and openly. The SA thus far has exhibited some serious shortcomings in this vital respect. The real work of the alliance has been carried out behind closed doors in sub-committee, with the full organisation committee being expected effectively to rubber-stamp all decisions. Voting on matters of policy has been regarded as dangerously divisive, a potential threat to the continued cohesion of a “fragile” coalition of disparate organisations. We believe this is unhealthy. We welcome the decision of the February 8 meeting to accord the CPGB full membership rights on all sub-committees and urge the SA to make the minutes and decisions of these bodies open to the collective participants in the alliance as a whole, amenable to debate and, where appropriate, democratic endorsement by voting. In this way, we shall demonstrate the political maturity and mutual, comradely confidence that are fundamental prerequisites of any serious attempt to build meaningful unity on the left.