08.02.2001

Party notes

Welcome move

We are pleased to reprint the excellent statement on revolutionary unity issued by the Alliance for Workers' Liberty (see 'Call for a single party'). The Communist Party - which has already been in detailed discussions with the AWL over our differing approaches to key issues such as programme, revolutionary tradition and permanent revolution - will certainly respond positively to this initiative (see Weekly Worker July 27, August 24, September 28, October 12 2000 for reports).

The statement represents an important move forward from the group's previous position. For example, a special issue of its monthly, Workers' Liberty, from January 1999, was dedicated to the question of "Reorienting the left: how do we get left unity?" Although many of the ideas it contains are correct and principled, the fact that the concrete question of the Socialist Alliance project was not actually mentioned once lent its arguments a rather strange, abstract quality. This lack of focus was perhaps due to the balance of forces in the AWL at this time, an idea reinforced by a comment in a section titled 'Working class candidates against Blair-Labour?'

Here we were told that the AWL was "still debating out the issue", but that it seemed "to many of us that to continue on the old lines dogmatically is increasingly to boycott our own socialist politics and our own proper working class concerns". By July of that same year, the advocates of breaking from auto-Labourism had won the day and the AWL was actually contesting elections under its own banner, albeit on a miserably low-level, sub-reformist platform (Weekly Worker July 8, July 22 1999). An active engagement with the SA has followed and now we have this January 18 statement. Significantly, this correctly starts with the Socialist Alliance and the concrete level of unity it has achieved so far, a victory that "should inspire and encourage us all".

The move into the SA has clearly not been without its problems for this group. Certainly, amongst its leading members in London, it is fairly easy to distinguish those who are more reluctant participants, often simply by negative body language and impatient face-gurning at meetings. Indeed, differences within the AWL have become more pronounced during this fluid and exacting period.

A quite sharp debate flared up in the group recently over its orientation to the truckers' revolt. Essentially, leading AWL comrades such as Mark Osborne, Kate Ahern and Tom Rigby took an enthusiastic, almost uncritical approach to the petty bourgeois revolt. In this, they seemed to paint the protesters red, impatience pushing them to see their pickets as a substitute for the workers' movement itself. Other AWLers, headed by Sean Matgamna, intervened sharply to correct this dangerous lurch to who knows where. Nevertheless the spat was instructive.

There is palpable tension between what could broadly be called the 'politicians' and the 'trade unionists'. Having practised an economistic approach to working class politics for decades, it is hardly surprising that a layer of cadre would take an almost apolitical, knee-jerk response to manifestations of militancy, even if these were coming from a different class. Classically, economists have tailed all sorts of protests movements and struggles, so the collapse of these leading AWLers was unsurprising in that sense (commendably, much of the debate was public - see Action for Solidarity October 12 2000, for example).

Behind this division in the AWL lies the key question, alluded to but not explicitly drawn out in the statement. That of programme.

The process of uniting the revolutionary left under a regime of genuine democratic centralism is reliant on the fight for programmatic clarity. The statement suggests that a "united organisation would [need] a skeleton of shared basic principles (on class struggle, the state, internationalism, and so on) and some broad agreement on where to go now". Beyond that, it "could live with big differences on analytical and theoretical questions, and on tactics".

A programme does indeed provide a skeletal frame in that it is the crystallisation of the party majority's main principles and strategic approach to the conquest of state power by the working class. It is the foundation for building the party in that it links all our agitational work - in the trade unions, the anti-capitalist movement or around fuel protests, say - with our ultimate aim (for a discussion of the role, structure and importance of programme, see Jack Conrad's Which road? pp235-248). Thus, there is no place in it for the tactics of the day or for comments on the contemporary political scene.

In this context, it is one-sided for the comrades to identify as "major issues needing discussion as we work towards the creation of a united party" questions such as joint work in the trade unions, the need for the "recreation of a mass workers' party based on the trade unions" or their call for a "reforming working class government [which could] destabilise and weaken capitalism". In other words, some of the distinctive political positions that define the AWL as a trend.

Of course, these questions are important and need to be addressed (not least the notion that we must fight for principled revolutionary unity amongst communists, while advocating the "recreation" of Labourism for the broader movement). But not as issues that must be resolved before unity. I hope the comrades from the AWL agree.

What resonance will this statement have? There is clearly a pronounced unease amongst some AWLers that their correct calls for revolutionary unity bring them into alignment with the Communist Party. Indeed, one comrade has explicitly stated that the CPGB has "made the running on the question so far". However, like any aspect of truth, the objective need for a single party has no logo on it. We welcome the fact that this organisation is starting to reach similar conclusions to us on the need for an SA party, as well as on strategically important questions such as the demand for a federal republic. We look forward to continuing and deepening our cooperation and the process of programmatic clarification.

Mark Fischer
national organiser