05.07.2000

RDG to rejoin SWP?

The Revolutionary Democratic Group wrote to the Socialist Workers Party central committee on June 26 about the possibility of rejoining the SWP. Some comrades may find this surprising, given that it was only last December that the RDG announced that we had formally given up our designation of 'faction of the SWP'.

The ending of our 'faction' could easily be interpreted as 'goodbye' to the SWP. Now it looks like we are getting ready to say 'hello, we're back'. In fact our statement about the end of the faction made clear we were not abandoning the SWP. We were merely clearing the decks of the debris of the previous battle, in preparation for the next.

Between 1990 and 1996, the RDG campaigned as a faction to change the SWP line. We gained SWP supporters and sympathisers in London, Peterborough, Liverpool and Canterbury. We began to make progress. We intervened regularly at the SWP's annual 'Marxism' schools and SWP conferences. In the mid-1990s the opportunity of a breakthrough came and went with the launch and collapse of Andy Wilson's International Socialist Group.

Our agitation concentrated on four key themes. First we called for the SWP to bring its programme out into the open and make it accessible to all the members. We urged the SWP to take the programme seriously. We called for the SWP to develop a new revolutionary republican programme.

The programme question related to political activity. The main activity of the SWP was to recruit, recruit, again and again. The more recruitment was emphasised, the faster was the revolving door of membership turnover. The average SWP member came to understand programme in a completely opportunist way. A programme was useless for recruitment. It could put people off and get in the way of signing up new members.

The RDG did not stress the fight for recruits, but the political struggle against the Tories and Labour. Our second point was to demand a break with automatically voting Labour. We called for standing revolutionary candidates against them. We sought to identify Labour in the minds of advanced workers as an enemy party. For this kind of work, a programme is absolutely essential. As soon as we put up candidates, we are forced to explain our programme to the working class.

Thirdly the RDG was in favour of working with the rest of the left in various united fronts and electoral blocs. In the 1980s we called for an anti-Thatcher/anti-Kinnock united front. We called for the SWP to work with the Labour left and the rest of the Marxist movement to unite against the common enemy, the capitalists and the two main political parties that serve their interests.

Finally the RDG called for genuine democratic centralism. We condemned the bureaucratic internal regime that had stifled any creative politics and condemned the rank and file of the SWP to a political life of passivity and demoralisation. We pointed out that a formal programme was the foundation of democratic centralism. It makes the politics of the party open and accountable to the rank and file. The failure of the SWP to adopt democratic centralism was shown up starkly in unprincipled expulsions. The expulsions carried out by the party bureaucracy against Chris Jones, an SWP member from Liverpool, and later Andy Wilson, who had been a full-time party worker, were anti-working class, anti-Marxist.

The essential correctness of the demands made by the RDG can be seen by the fact that the SWP has moved towards some of these positions. The SWP has started to stand candidates. It is working with the left in the London Socialist Alliance. It has even come up with a programme, albeit a reformist one. We are not claiming that this was a result of our agitation, which had ceased over the last few years. But it does indicate that the demands we placed on the SWP were in tune with the needs of the class struggle and the guiding imperatives of Marxist theory.

What is really on trial is the SWP leadership's method of conducting politics. They have consistently refused to debate or discuss politics with those within their own ranks and on their periphery who are critical of them. Yet Marxism is a critical science and criticism is its lifeblood. Any Marxist organisation that discourages debate within its own ranks and with its periphery and uses bureaucratic measures to attack critics and demonise them is doomed to repeat all the political failures normally associated with Stalinism.

So on the eve of 'Marxism 2000' it is a useful moment to take stock of the politics of the RDG. The history of the RDG can be divided into three phases or stages. The first period begins with the foundation of the group up until the split in 1989. The second stage begins from then and covers the work we did around the SWP in the first half of the 1990s. The third stage began in the latter part of the 90s with the launch of Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party. Now of course we may be at the beginning of a new fourth stage. Only time will tell.

From the beginning, the theory of state capitalism, of which there are many versions, has tied the RDG, like an umbilical cord, to the SWP. Our origins were inside the SWP as an officially recognised faction. The Republican Faction campaigned in 1980-1 for the SWP to take the national question seriously and to include the demand for a federal republic in the party's programme. The faction argued that the SWP had underestimated the long-term importance of the national question in Scotland and Wales. What began as a criticism of one point in the SWP unwritten programme eventually became a critique of the whole anti-programme method of the SWP.

In some ways the RDG was born prematurely, by force of circumstances. It was a result of a change in direction by Cliff and the central committee known as the 'downturn thesis'. The Republican Faction did not question that the employers were on the offensive and the workers' movement on the defensive. But we concluded that the united front tactic should inform all the SWP's work. This was the opposite of the conclusion drawn by Cliff.

In 1982-3 the 'downturn thesis' led to a number of SWP militants being driven out of the party. This included the expulsion of virtually the whole of the Bradford branch. The dissidents who wanted to fight back formed the Socialist Federation. Some of the Republican Faction supporters helped to organise the federation and set up the RDG to represent our views within it.

The miners' strike in 1984 torpedoed the 'downturn' by showing that the real politics of that period was indeed the united front, as expressed in the miners' support committees. Between 1984 and 1989 the RDG developed our critique of the SWP on issues of programme, republicanism, the national question, Ireland, trade union action and the united front. Between the miners' struggle and the anti-poll tax movement the united front tactic showed the way. We intervened in the SWP, campaigning for left unity and opposing bans and witch-hunts.

Campaigning against the policies of the SWP leadership was difficult. There was no significant growth in our influence in a period of demoralisation following the miners' defeat. The SWP's leading and middle cadre were hostile and sectarian. The membership were in the main loyal and passive. This took its toll inside the RDG. Those who wanted a softer option would eventually 'theorise' their capitulation to the SWP leadership in terms of a new 'tough' left turn. They would counter the sectarian hostility of the SWP to the RDG by dismissing the SWP as irrelevant.

In parallel with this were growing strains from the national question and the different tempo of politics in Edinburgh and London. In Scotland the anti-poll tax movement was significant, while opportunities for agitation around the SWP were more restricted. In terms of Scottish politics, it made more sense to become a faction of the Militant Tendency than a faction of the SWP, as the poll tax struggle showed. Whereas in London the SWP was involved in the Wapping dispute (Murdoch press), the GLC and the poll tax.

These growing strains within the RDG produced two separate factions, deteriorating relations and eventually a split more or less along national lines. The RDG majority were with one exception in Edinburgh and the minority were based in London.

When the dust had settled and we had gone our separate ways, we could see more clearly what it had all been about. The RDG majority changed their name to the Republican Worker Tendency and embraced left nationalism with the slogan of a Scottish workers' republic. The minority took back the name of the RDG (faction of the SWP) and upheld the RDG's traditional position of fighting for a federal republic.

By 1996 the RDG reached a temporary impasse and needed to find a new way forward. We began a new stage in our development. The expulsion of Chris Jones and the liquidation of Andy Wilson's ISG had set us back. Almost by accident, we came across the CPGB. We began to work with and develop an alliance with them. The CPGB were appealing for rapprochement with other Marxists. Since the RDG is not a sect and is ready to cooperate with other Marxists, we responded to this call.

We have worked together over a number of years and debated some of our differences. At one point we considered joining the CPGB as a faction. Although this did not happen, we have cemented our alliance through common support for the revolutionary democratic approach to politics, the slogan of a federal republic, the agreement to work together in the Republican Communist Network and the RDG's financial and political support for the Weekly Worker.

With the launch of Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party, the RDG was quick to see the political opportunity. We joined the new party. The SLP declared its intention of developing a new programme and opposing Blair's Labour Party in every constituency possible. Our intervention was aimed at winning the support of the SLP for our republican programme and the demand for a federal republic, as the best basis for standing candidates.

Joining the SLP meant that we could put our perspective on programme and electoral struggle into practice, in conditions where the SWP had capitulated to Labourism by refusing to stand candidates. As an SWP member Chris Jones had called on the party to stand candidates. After he was expelled, he joined the RDG's move into the SLP. He became a parliamentary candidate. This was the best answer Chris could give to the central committee that had expelled him.

The SLP put pressure on the SWP leadership. The SLP appeared out of the blue and by taking up the electoral fight was soon in a position to push the SWP out of its central position on the left. The SWP at one stage told its members to vote for the SLP. For the RDG, joining the SLP was a far better means of pressurising the SWP central committee than leafleting 'Marxism' and SWP conferences. The SWP had to wake up. It had to begin moving in an electoral and programmatic direction.

It is not surprising that, despite the short-term gains from joining the SLP, it should prove a dead-end. It soon began to degenerate into a factional battle between Stalinism and Trotskyism, with Scargill backing the former. Eventually the 'Trots' were ousted and Scargill was left in charge of a rump. The significance of the SLP was that it ploughed up the field of left politics.

The result of our work with the CPGB and SLP took us away from direct intervention in the SWP. Now a new perspective was opening up, which was soon to be theorised in the Weekly Worker. Originally we took one route to the party. It was the struggle between the SWP and the RDG. But through experience of relating to other forces, such as the CPGB and the SLP, we had come up with another perspective - route two.

Route two was a more indirect road to the same end - a mass revolutionary democratic communist party. The crisis of Labour, the vacuum on the left and the emergence of the SLP pointed to a different way forward. We began to argue for a mass party of the left - not in some distant future, but now. It was possible and necessary right now to unite the best elements of the Labour left, the Trotskyists, Stalinists and the revolutionary democratic communists into a single organisation.

We used the term 'communist-Labour party' to describe the kind of party that was needed in the current stage of the class struggle. In historical terms our model was German Social Democracy with a Labourite (Bernstein) and communist (eg, Rosa Luxemburg) wing. Whilst we are absolutely clear that this is not the kind of party that can achieve our goals, it is necessary to build resistance to Labour and the Tories.

Political realignments of this type are emerging spontaneously. We cite the socialist alliances, the SLP, the Scottish Socialist Party and more recently the London Socialist Alliance. Such organisations can have an influence on mass politics, which communists alone cannot. It is our duty to join and work in such formations and work constructively in a non-sectarian way. To isolate ourselves from such developments would be the most crass political sectarianism.

Route two, the communist-Labour perspective, requires the organisation of a revolutionary democratic communist tendency, as the left wing of such a party. The RDG has therefore begun campaigning for the formation of such a tendency. We have identified the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, the CPGB, the Communist Tendency and the RDG as organisations that could be forged into a left tendency with a common programme. The newly formed Republican Communist Network is not a tendency, but may do invaluable service to the working class by helping to facilitate this.

We have now gone full circle and arrived back at the beginning. The task of combating the SWP has to begin again from scratch. The meaningless title of faction would be a distraction. The work we have done means that the battle will start again from a higher level than our 'high point' in the mid-1990s.

Building a workers' party is not and never has been a question of numbers. It is first and foremost a question of strategy and programme. Trotsky was absolutely right to say, when he was struggling to build a new party - 'programme first'. That is where the SWP's Republican Faction began. That is where we must begin.