08.04.1999

Open letter to SWP members

Since last month your political committee has been cleaved down the middle. The immediate issue is stark and clear-cut. The leadership has been deadlocked over whether or not to maintain or abandon its electoral turn - agreed only at the end of 1998. Pat Stack frankly admitted the split to the London Socialist Alliance - the AWL-CPGB- ILN-ISG-SPEW-SWP electoral bloc - in late March. Comrade Stack’s willingness to ignore the restrictions of bureaucratic centralism and go public surely testifies to the seriousness of the crisis. As does its duration.

Unsurprisingly Socialist Worker refuses to involve you in the debate. Policy-making is the monopoly of a closed circle. A circle traditionally centred around the now frail personality of comrade Tony Cliff. Unlike the Bolsheviks there is no enlightening polemical clash between openly contending factions. Nor is there a members’ bulletin to serve as a clumsy and leaky substitute. Activists and branches grope in the dark. Potential dissidents are either cowed with threats or fobbed off with private assurances that Tony Cliff, Chris Harman, Lindsey German, Chris Bambery and other tops know best. Internal gossip and the Weekly Worker are the only source of information for those below. Clearly the SWP has a huge democratic deficit.

Your crisis has cost the Socialist Alliance in London dear. Time is slipping by. Candidates are unchosen. Finances, even the minimum necessary for a deposit, are noticeably absent. Our manifesto has yet to be ratified. No labour movement support has been garnered.

The SWP was asked to come to a firm decision by March 29. One deadline after another has passed. The message is that the SWP is neither out nor is it committed to active participation.

The official excuse for the disarray was the eminently predictable decree by Arthur Scargill that he was to head the SLP’s list in the capital. Besides Scargill, the SLP is fielding a strange mix of ultra-Stalinists and warmed-over left reformists. Half of them - Joti Brar, Ella Rule, Amanda Rose, Harpal Brar and Hardev Dhillon - are actually members of the Stalin Society. London’s regional committee is in rebellion. So the would-be labour dictator imposed his 10 candidates via the SLP’s national executive committee. We say, expose Scargill. Do not let him divide and silence us.

Giving the lie to the official excuse, the SWP’s crisis is not confined to London. Your representatives have failed to appear at other Socialist Alliance meetings. Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, etc. Coincidentally at least two cars have supposedly broken down en route. Having long campaigned and paid a big political price to secure an agreement with the left nationalist Scottish Socialist Party for next month’s elections to the Holyrood parliament - no place on the list - the SWP leadership has suddenly developed cold feet when it comes to June’s Euro elections.

Evidently nothing to do with Scargill. Evidently the SWP leadership is riven by a crisis of perspectives and programme.

For over two decades the SWP eschewed even token candidates. Auto-Labourism was combined with syndicalistic abstentionism. Rightist practice with leftist posturing. The SWP would as a matter of routine print its ‘Vote Labour, but … ’ posters, all the while telling its cadres that elections are not important for bone fide revolutionaries. A position in complete contradistinction to the theory and practice of the Bolsheviks and the Communist International - both of which you in the SWP claim to be the living continuation of.

Bolshevik deputies famously sat in and brilliantly exploited the tsar’s duma. Even after the October Revolution the Russian Communist Party stood for the Constituent Assembly - in form a bourgeois parliament. Except under the most promising circumstances - “an immediate move to armed struggle for power” - the newly formed Communist International considered parliamentary work obligatory for affiliated sections (A Alder (ed) Theses, resolution and manifestos of the first four congresses of the Third International London 1980, p235).

Apart from a brief, unsatisfactory, fling in the latter half of the 1970s, the SWP has left parliament to Labour. As a direct corollary the leadership has shunned presenting its strategy for socialism in the form of a testable and democratically sanctioned programme. Socialist Worker’s ‘What we stand for’ column is all very well for propaganda purposes. But its abstractions bear little or no relationship to daily practice or any discernible vision of how the working class is to make itself into a ruling class. That, when it comes to the SWP, is a mystery.

Indeed comrade Cliff and other SWP intellectuals have made a virtue of anti-programmism. They have written on countless occasions about the advantages of not being tied down. Without a programme, it is true, the rank and file cannot seriously hold the leadership to account. Since it came into existence as a trend the SWP’s history has therefore been one of sudden opportunist zigzags. Any line can be adopted as long as it is perceived to serve short-term interests, usually judged arithmetically in crude membership figures.

Again this is contrary to the spirit and example of the Bolsheviks. Lenin’s party united around and fought on the basis of a minimum-maximum programme originally presented to the 2nd Congress back in 1903. Indeed it is no exaggeration to say that without the revolutionary programme there would have been no revolutionary party. Naturally key sections were modified, given developments in the struggle. But only after extensive, often exhaustive, debate and a democratic vote.

The programme was considered of cardinal importance. That is why attempts to compromise or liquidate it were met with the fiercest hostility. Around the programme the Bolsheviks were able to organise the workers not merely in defence of their own economic terms and conditions, but as the hegemon or vanguard of the revolution. The tiny working class was empowered by the scientific rigour of the programme - it summed up the Marxist analysis of Russia and placed it in the context of the world revolution. As a result the workers came to master, or take a lead, in all political questions - national self-determination, anti-semitism, war and peace, women’s equality, etc - and crucially were able to put themselves at the head of the broad peasant masses in the fight to overthrow tsarism.

Your ‘Action programme’ would seem to represent a break with the past. Since it was first published in September 1998 it has not only been reproduced as a glossy brochure, but there has been an effort to get labour movement bodies to adopt it as their own. Sad to say though, what we actually have is another zigzag, not a conversion to Bolshevism.

The ‘Action programme’ is premised on a fundamentally incorrect understanding of the period and, for all the revolutionary eloquence employed to sell it, the content amounts to nothing more than a repackaging of economism. Instead of a fully rounded and comprehensive alternative to Blair’s constitutional revolution from above - ie, a minimum programme from below - the SWP leadership concentrates entirely on minimal questions of pay, hours and union recognition. The workers are to be left as an economic class of slaves, not elevated to a political class of self-activating revolutionaries.

When it does make an appearance, politics is entirely within the narrow horizons of militant trade unionism. Reducing the arms bill, curbing financial speculations, etc. All very well and good, but completely inadequate. How our rulers rule through the UK’s constitutional monarchy system is entirely absent. No mention then of crucial political questions like abolishing the monarchy and the House of Lords, or the fight for self-determination for Ireland, Wales and Scotland. That is, democratic demands through which the working class can and must take up as part of its historic mission to free humanity. The SWP leadership effectively hands such matters over to Blair.

The ‘Action programme’ is backed with reference to Trotsky’s 1934 ‘Action programme for France’ (see Alex Callinicos International Socialism No81 and John Rees Socialist Review January 1999). But the boldest claim is that it is based on Trotsky’s 1938 ‘Transitional programme’.

In my opinion Trotsky was badly mistaken in 1938. He maintained that capitalism was in terminal decline. It could no longer develop the productive forces or grant meaningful reforms. Hence, he declared, defence of economic gains would spontaneously produce an apocalyptic collision with capitalism. No matter how we excuse Trotsky in terms of how things appeared on the eve of World War II, there is no escaping that he was wrong in fact and method.

In the midst of the miners’ Great Strike - a strategic contest of class against class - the SWP specialised in pessimism. The year-long strike - with its hit squads, mass pickets, support groups, women against pit closure movement, etc - was, said Chris Harman, an “extreme example” of what the SWP called the “downturn”. Such dire pessimism along with congenital anti-programmism led comrade Cliff to write - only six years ago - that Trotsky’s ‘Transitional programme’ was only relevant when there was “a situation of general crisis, of capitalism in deep slump”, and that many of the programme’s proposals - eg, workers’ defence squads - “did not fit a non-revolutionary situation” (T Cliff Trotsky: The darker the night, the brighter the star London 1993, pp299-300).

Now misplaced pessimism has given way to misplaced millenarian optimism. With working class confidence at an all-time low and revolutionary consciousness almost non-existent, the SWP has decided that pursuit of even the most minimal demands is all that is needed to fell a supposedly tottering capitalism. In his most recent work comrade Cliff insists that we live not in a period of reaction (of a special type), but imminent revolution. “Capitalism in the advanced countries,” he writes,

“is no longer expanding and so the words of the 1938 ‘Transitional programme’ that ‘there can be no discussion of systematic social reforms and raising the masses’ living standards’ fits reality again” (T Cliff Trotskyism after Trotsky London 1999, pp81-2).

Pure fantasy. For those in work, especially in the private sector, living standards continue to climb in real terms. Worst paid labour is now benefiting from the minimum wage, albeit far below subsistence levels. Pathetically the ‘Action programme’ thunders that “at the very least” such workers need “£1 an hour more”. Even if economic struggles were all that it takes to transform the workers into a class for itself - which they are definitely not - capitalism in Britain still exhibits the potential to concede substantial reforms. The financial crash is confined in the main to Japan and other Asian economies.

Here lies the root of the SWP’s crisis. The leadership wants you to believe that capitalism is in terminal crisis, that there is a yearning for socialist ideas, that there is “deep bitterness against the government in Britain” (Socialist Worker February 13). Needless to say, both political committee factions have enough gumption to realise that the left will in all probability get a small - for some a derisory - vote in the June elections. There is then a dilemma. Not to stand will expose the grandiose pretensions and end-is-nigh predictions. By the same measure to stand will do just the same.

We in the CPGB earnestly hope that the SWP will fight alongside us in June. Either way, only a completely honest and thorough debate can put your organisation onto the firm programmatic foundations needed for the challenges of the future.

Jack Conrad