22.04.1999

Social-pacifists and peaceniks unite

Around 300 attended the launch rally, on April 13, of Manchester Against War in the Balkans - a Socialist Workers Party-led collaboration with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, following the pattern last used as “Manchester Coalition Against War in the Gulf” in February 1998.

Bruce Kent, the former leader of CND, opened the proceedings with a speech which was, unsurprisingly, entirely devoid of any socialist or working class content. It nevertheless contained the only call made from this platform for any kind of militant action to confront the United Kingdom state. Nato’s military action in Yugoslavia is illegal - in breach of the United Nations charter - Kent insisted, and armed services personnel are under no obligation to obey illegal orders. The anti-war movement should be calling on them to disobey orders, he urged.

Whilst the key issue was to stop the Nato bombing, he continued, it is also important to put forward demands for real action on the humanitarian issue. The intervention of the British government, far from helping the Kosovar people, has turned hundreds of thousands of them into refugees. We must demand of Blair that they be admitted to Britain and welcomed here for as long as they themselves feel it necessary to stay, he said.

It was when he turned to the issue of addressing the political crisis in the Balkans that Kent showed his vacuity. He described graphically the terror and murder being inflicted by Blair and Clinton, but then identified the chief victim as - the United Nations. Whilst a Kofi Anan intervention was Kent’s favoured way forward, he was prepared to consider that UN credibility might not be rebuildable in this instance, and the mantle might have to pass to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Kent’s political emptiness was as nothing compared to that exhibited by the next speaker, former Salford Labour MP, and spokesperson for Labour Action for Peace, Frank Allaun. Comrade Allaun described his deep shame that a British Labour government was conducting a murderous bombing campaign against another country. He expressed his fears of a return to the Cold War. All the marvellous armaments reduction progress initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev was now seriously prejudiced, he pronounced.

But his calls for action were rather pathetic - along with a campaign of letters to the press, we should appreciate Tony Benn’s efforts in parliament to stop the war; we should repeat Winston Churchill’s one-time opportune maxim, “jaw, jaw is better than war, war”; we should recall the words of an unnamed poet: “We are the people of England, and we have not spoken yet”.

John Nicholson, convenor of Greater Manchester Socialist Alliance, saw the central problem facing the anti-war movement as the need to grapple with the view, “we have to do something” (about ethnic cleansing of the Kosovars). His suggested line of argument was that “this should not mean that we have to do something that is wrong”. Bombing does not bring peace and reconciliation, he perorated.

The rest of the comrade’s speech concentrated on instancing the hypocrisy of our rulers. Their heart-bleeding speeches on the plight of refugees are accompanied by a refusal to offer any meaningful aid and refuge, together with a winding to new heights of the British state’s persecution of asylum-seekers in the 1999 Asylum Bill. Brown’s budgetary prudence is suddenly of no consequence when it comes to spending billions of pounds, without any parliamentary approval, on war-mongering. And Blair’s branding of life-long anti-fascist fighters within the anti-war movement as “appeasers of fascism” was particularly sickening, comrade Nicholson stated. Where was Blair whenever we were fighting the British fascists?, he asked.

Moving only briefly to address the question of how to conduct the fightback, comrade Nicholson observed that the cause of modern wars is capitalism, and that the answer is socialism. Then came a hint of a plan of action. Local council and European elections are looming, comrade Nicholson reminded the audience. These could be used to good effect. Had there been a shift by Nicholson/GMSA towards favouring the Socialist Alliance electoral challenges? No, there had not. We should “challenge candidates on where they stand on the war”, he climaxed. Thus did a second socialist speaker publicly eschew any serious challenge to Blair or the power of the capitalist state.

Norma Wilson, spokesperson for Greater Manchester CND, focused on that organisation’s core concerns. Already the Nato action had seriously set back progress on nuclear disarmament, with both the Belarus and Ukrainian governments now rescinding their repudiation of nuclear weaponry. More ominously, Russia had suspended the latest round of strategic arms reduction talks. Ms Wilson went on to describe in detail the dangers of the depleted uranium shells being relied upon by the Nato forces. She ended by echoing the emphasis by her former leader upon the need to reassert the authority of the UN and the OSCE. Working class power is clearly a more horrifying prospect than the H-bomb to the liberals and the sprinkling of ex-‘official communists’ in the CND.

The 20th century is ending as it started, the SWP’s Julie Waterson began. Capitalist powers are again embarking upon warfare in pursuit of their greater dominance of the world. Whenever you hear them talk about “humanity” substitute “hypocrisy”, she suggested. These same imperialist ‘humanitarians’ continue relentlessly to kill 6,000 children a month in Iraq with their anti-human sanctions, she instanced, although she pointedly failed to hurl back at her liberal pacifist co-speakers that the anti-Iraqi sanctions are precisely UN-mandated.

Comrade Waterson went on to debunk the ‘Milosevic equals Hitler’ propaganda of Blair’s media cheerleaders. It is an insult to our intelligence that we should be invited to equate the threat posed by a rump nation of 10 million people, which was virtually defenceless against the military might of imperialism, with the actions of the century’s second biggest economic and military power. It was also ridiculous to put on a par the Nazi holocaust and the Serbian state’s pogroms and mass deportations against the Kosovars, she said.

Whilst correctly identifying the working class as the only possible bearer of a solution to the crisis of the Balkans and to imperialist warmongering generally, the comrade refrained from advocating the need for the working class to champion the right of the Kosovars to self-determination and to an independent state. The working class had been the very force which had shaken Milosevic in 1988, when they had launched mass strikes and demonstrations demanding real socialism, she asserted. The Nato bombing was now deliberately destroying that force.

Our enemy is at home, comrade Waterson concluded. But where was the SWP’s programme to defeat that enemy? We waited in vain. “Build the anti-war movement”, support demonstrations, and “lobby” election candidates, MPs, and Blair’s ministers, was the clarion call.

Remarkably, comrade Waterson resumed her seat just seconds before the SWP chairperson announced that the hall booking had expired and we were to leave immediately. No contributions from the floor were permitted. A rally held in Liverpool a few days earlier had followed an identical format.

The Weekly Worker has recently featured the behaviour of the SWP in withdrawing from the Socialist Alliance slates for the forthcoming European elections. The latter project can provide a highly effective means of taking a working class anti-war fight onto Blair’s territory. But participation in an active alliance of revolutionaries forces the SWP to fight for its politics. It also exposes their passive rank and file to the dangers of being drawn into real political debate, and in particular to be challenged on the question of programme.

The alternative model of organisation that is preferred by the conservatives who currently have the upper hand in the SWP’s leadership faction fight is undoubtedly that which has once again manifested itself in the infant Manchester Against War in the Balkans, and in similar bodies in other regions. This is a much less risky venture. Leadership of a potential mass movement is seized by means of linking with bourgeois pacifists to create a ‘critical mass’ which then sucks in the smaller left groups. The SWP ensures its dominance through its numerical supremacy and through bureaucratic suppression of debate. It easily finds fig leaves on offer from the likes of comrade Nicholson, whose 80%-20% approach to united front work neatly dovetails with SWP hegemony.

It is in the anti-war movement where, at the present time, communists will have to confront the dead-hand politics of the SWP and its junior partners. We will have to take on the battle to show that, whilst the working class is indeed the only force which can overcome capitalism and its warmongering, it can be forged as a class for itself only in the context of a struggle to win the battle of democracy. In that struggle the questions, ‘How are we ruled?’, ‘Who rules?’ and ‘Whose democracy?’ must be constantly pushed to the fore.

The ruling class of the future will certainly not be made through the cocooning and gagging that we saw at the Manchester rally. The old, entrenched political methods of the SWP betray an approach to socialism and to the working class that is not that much apart from the ‘great leader’ approach of Arthur Scargill. It is small wonder that, under its presently dominant leadership faction, the SWP has defected from the side of revolutionary unity to that of support for their supposed ‘credible’ working class icon, Scargill.

These are not the politics of the struggle for the revolutionary seizure of class power.

Derek Hunter