22.07.1999
Cryptic SWP
Party notes
A telling symptom of the crisis of the left’s programmatic perspective is its increasingly erratic politics. New ventures, which seemingly overturn decades of consistently held theorised positions, are embarked on frivolously, in a piecemeal fashion and without any clear accounting with what the organisation was saying yesterday.
Over the past few years, we have seen the Socialist Party in England and Wales justify its open turn by the assertion (and it has been little else) that Labour is now “a bourgeois party”. More recently, Workers Power seems to have dropped its electoral support to Labour, an auto-reflex that had characterised it since birth. The Labour Party looks set to limp on: the fate of WP is more in the balance, I would suggest. Now, we even have the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty - once the most ferocious in their protective concern for Labour - actually standing against it in elections.
None of these important shifts can have taken place without debate and controversy within at least the leaderships of such organisations - assuming these are not composed of brain-dead dolts, of course. Yet, with the partial exception of the AWL, none of this has found expression in the open. To grasp what is going on, we have to subject articles to forensic investigation to uncover their true significance.
Recent issues of Socialist Worker provide examples. We have already commented that the SWP’s myopically upbeat perspectives about this period have been ‘tweaked’. Where once its staff writers would talk up the official strike figures, desperately trying to prove that the UK was indeed riven with industrial strife, now they baldly assert “the level of open struggle is fantastically low by any historical standard” (Socialist Worker July 10). An accurate observation, if woefully late.
This same article - ‘What kind of alternative’ by Paul McGarr - provides us with an interesting insight into current internal tensions, although it is written in the usual cryptic style of SWPers.
McGarr tells us that “some people” (who, where?) “conclude that” this low level of struggle “will continue indefinitely”. He counters this silliness by citing the relatively sleepy periods that preceded the Chartist revolt, the events of 1968 and the French public sector strike in 1995. Personally, I am not aware of any left organisation that peddles the idea that we have seen the last of strikes and struggle. Obviously there is Tony Blair, New Labour and the trade union bureaucracy. But the main target of comrade McGarr is the ‘electoralist’ wing of the SWP leadership itself. He is articulating the views of the syndicalist majority in the leadership which - while it has been forced to recognise what class struggle has been screaming at it for a whole period - still urges the organisation to carry on as usual - albeit with a boycottist adaptation to the reality of New Labour.
This whole question of the level of the class struggle and the electoral tactic is a threat for the SWP. Its raison d’être is recruitment, routine activism and the provision of sustenance to its apparatus. Anything, such as testing its support through standing in election, that forces the SWP to objectively look at itself - above all its absence of roots in working class communities and society at large - endangers the integrity of the group. The rank and file must be kept flogging papers, recruiting and definitely not thinking.
McGarr warns his comrades on elections. He tells us that “... a good vote, or even getting a few candidates elected, is not the central way to win real change”. The recent spate of electoral challenges to Blair are “welcome”, but “hugely limited”. Even a successful candidate like Tommy Sheridan “would acknowledge that little can be achieved in the parliament itself and that struggles outside are more important”.
Ostensibly, McGarr’s article is making points against the continuing electoralist illusions of Labour Party members as they become embittered against Blair. The important sub-text of his piece, however, is to reassure those members of the SWP who may be dismayed by its ignominious withdrawal from the Socialist Alliance electoral bloc prior to the EU elections and the poor results of its candidates in Wales and Scotland: ‘Don’t worry,’ he tells them. ‘It really doesn’t matter. The struggle going on outside parliament is what counts.’
Which is where he impales himself on the horns of a dilemma. As comrade McGarr notes, “If an alternative to New Labour must be focused primarily on ... struggles, there is an immediate and very obvious problem in Britain today.” Quite.
Sanguine reassurances that “no-one predicted” big upsurges in the past or promissory notes for “enormous potential” in the future will not satisfy the thinking members in the ranks. What is called for as a matter of urgency is an honest and exacting reappraisal of perspectives, a democratic and open holding of the leadership to account by the organisation as a whole. We can now surely expect a growing unease from wide layers of cadre, a situation which is not without its irony. For, while McGarr and other leading aparatchiks write of contemporary society as being characterised by “a calm on the surface but an undercurrent of ... discontent ...”, his words might actually more accurately describe the situation in the SWP itself.
Roll on the day when SWP scribes write what they mean and mean what they write.
Mark Fischer
national organiser