WeeklyWorker

27.06.2001

Towards a republican socialist party

Position paper by Chris Jones, chair of Merseyside SA and a member of the Revolutionary Democratic Group

1. Where we are now

The Socialist Alliance intervention in the 2001 general election has provided the focus for a wider debate about the type of political opposition that we need to develop to New Labour.

The election confirmed the existence of a significant layer opposed to New Labour and a much wider discontented layer that was not prepared to vote, let alone vote for the Socialist Alliance. Even amongst loyal Labour voters there is a sense that New Labour is now on trial, a message reinforced by New Labour?s own recognition of this message in terms of ?delivery? in their second term and significant votes at the FBU and Unison conferences in relation to the political funds.

The debate has been framed within the SA as one about organisation: in particular whether the Socialist Alliance should become a party or not. In many ways this debate misses key points that need consideration. Firstly for the Socialist Alliance to be a party it needs to achieve a degree of programmatic unity. A beginning has been made in the election manifesto, but much remains to be done in developing a coherent platform around which the organisation can develop.

A second range of issues is obscured by the focus on whether the SA should become a party and these cluster around what type of organisational forms such a party should have. For example should members of a party agree with the overall programme or simply accept it. Would members of such a party have the right to organise fractions? Would party organisation be geographic, reflecting electoral boundaries, or should the party adopt a different functional structure organised around activity, not locality?

The backdrop to this discussion has wider roots in the national and international workers? movement. It comes at a point in history following the collapse of Soviet communism and the defeat of classic social democracy. Globally organised neo-liberal ideas inform the dominant politics of the day. In the United Kingdom this general historic moment has a particular flavour. Communism never had a particularly large following or deep roots beyond a significant but small minority. Social democracy had a highly specific form in Labourism, a politics that was dogmatic about one thing - parliament, not socialism - that dominated the entire working class movement for over 80 years.

Labourism has now been defeated: not by an assault from the left, but by a combination of erosion from within and repeated assaults from the right during the period of the Thatcher and Major governments. The ideological bedrock of Labourism was that the working class could achieve social and economic reforms within the existing political structures. Labour in one sense was not even a reforming party: it accepted the political structure of Britain after 1918. Soon after World War I Labour abandoned even those minimal political reforms it had inherited from radical liberalism such as proportional representation.

The Socialist Alliance has an immediate political task in shaping the new working class political landscape that Labour is beginning to abandon. As it stands the Socialist Alliance has not completed its basic tasks. As we stand we do not have a full Socialist Alliance:

The Socialist Alliance is trying to build a political party of the working class following a period of defeats. This means that the Socialist Alliance cannot passively follow current trends, but it also cannot simply wish for better conditions than currently exist. The challenge for the Socialist Alliance is to engage with the current struggles of the working class, building a new political expression in that class as it comes out from the period of defeats.

2. Labourism - the historic compromise

The historic compromise between Labour and the political class in the United Kingdom was forged in World War I. The Labour Party was brought into government and Labour leaders at all levels were absorbed in assisting the fledgling wartime state. In a series of crises at the end of the war senior Labour leaders - in particular Henderson - were convinced that Labour had to break from government and forge a party that would provide an independent electoral machine to ensure their future in helping to steer the state.

The Labour Party was born in its modern form in 1918 with a new programme and a national structure that remained recognisably the same until the politics of New Labour and the abandonment of clause four. The Labour Party of 1918 had a ?socialist? programme, self-consciously written to head off a Russian-style revolution, but it had no serious political programme for reform, let alone revolutionary overthrow of the state. The monarchy and the entire regime of the imperialist British state was left largely untouched in Labour?s programme or practice.

Communism in Britain, though based on a significant layer of advanced workers, never broke out from the shadow of Labour. The communist tradition built significant influence in the trade unions, but never had a significant independent political life in United Kingdom politics. The British Road to Socialism, the CPGB?s political programme in the post-war years, recognised this, arguing for a limited supporting role for communists.

Whilst the impact of communist politics was never significant at a general level, traditions of communist organisation have had a significant impact on both working class organisations directly influenced by communists and the various left organisations such as the Socialist Labour League/Workers Revolutionary Party, Militant/Socialist Party, International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party, etc that have wielded significant degrees of political influence.

Indeed it is striking that Labourism divided political struggle from economic struggle, but this division was paralleled by a division of labour within working class organisation. Labour organised the ?high? political intervention in parliament and beyond and the CPGB and a variety of other left organisations were key to industrial organisation and many of the key mass political campaigns in the country: eg, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Anti-Nazi League, the anti-poll tax movement, etc.

3. The Socialist Alliance: a communist-Labour alliance

The Socialist Alliance as it is currently formed is composed largely of political cadres that have come from one part of the revolutionary Marxist tradition or another. Some members are still organised in the SWP, Socialist Party and the range of smaller Marxist groups, whereas others have joined as individuals. There are a minority who have joined directly from a non-Marxist Labour background. The political description of the Socialist Alliance as a communist-Labour party is accurate. It describes the current membership and an immediate aim: to draw Labour and socialist activists from the communist tradition into common activity.

The unifying feature of both Labour and communist traditions in the Socialist Alliance is their mutual desire to reforge the working class as a political class. We all want to see workers active in political campaigns and in political life, including elections. The Socialist Alliance cannot be a Labour Party mark two because the political basis for such a movement no longer exists. Equally it cannot be a Communist Party mark two because the political basis for that formation - an international revolutionary tide - is also absent. In the current world situation there is no working class mass revolutionary current.

In the past other left groups have declared themselves to be parties without building a significant independent current in the working class: the WRP, the SWP and the Socialist Party were all narrow political groups based on members agreeing with a clearly defined political philosophy, if not a political programme. They all illustrate the problem with building a political formation by small numbers simply announcing themselves to the class.

The Socialist Alliance needs to have in place a strategy for the next five years. This strategy should build towards a vision of what the Socialist Alliance can become, but it must be based on leaving the boundaries of the Socialist Alliance relatively open. The recent experience of the Socialist Labour Party provides a warning.

The SLP set out to define itself very quickly. Like its leader, Arthur Scargill, the SLP was intended to provide a focus by standing in front of the class with fixed policies and structures. The role of the working class was to lend support to policies and structures that were already fully defined. This was a serious mistake and not only made it difficult for the SLP to grow organically, but it repelled existing members and supporters who in many cases drifted away.

4. Towards a republican socialist party

The Socialist Alliance is an idea that fits the current period and it is not yet complete. New supporters are likely to come, individually or in groups, from existing political traditions, including new traditions that have their own distinctive ideas, such as the emergent anti-capitalist movement. New support will need to ?grow? into the Socialist Alliance. Hard boundaries and excessive precision too early in this process will hamper the development of the healthy culture needed to develop a new politics.

To develop, the Socialist Alliance will need an active base of support built on struggle. Several key issues that the SA will need to build around already stand out:

A basis for unity is a platform of democratic republicanism based upon working class activity. Republicanism unites both Labour and communist traditions and it provides a link into other political traditions, both nationalist and green. Democratic republicanism from above, a Charter 88-style citizenry, is not our aim. Workers? political action is based on the need for a political structure through which they can achieve their social and economic aims.

5. Organisation and structures

A party is naturally formed by it politics. The discussion of whether the SA should be a party or not has not focused on politics: rather it has an organisational flavour. The SWP in Lindsey German?s article put the argument in three options:

None of these formulations poses the political nature of the problem that faces both the Socialist Alliance and the working class.

Leaving things as they are is not likely to be allowed by the ?six principal organisations? in the SA. More importantly the Socialist Alliance has already outgrown the politics and structures it had developed previously. New members and contacts drawn towards us during the election need to be integrated into the politics and structures of a coherent organisation. They did not join a local alliance or one of the affiliate organisations; they joined the Socialist Alliance. If the Socialist Alliance is to be more than a transmission belt to its constituent parts, it has to develop a political platform and organisational form of its own. In this sense the Socialist Alliance is in process of forming a party.

The CPGB and Weekly Worker have promoted the idea of a ?Socialist Alliance party? and Workers Power and the Alliance for Workers? Liberty have joined them. The aim of the CPGB is clear: it is to reforge the Communist Party. The problem with the formulation of a Socialist Alliance party is that it does not clarify the politics of this formation.

It remains an open question whether the CPGB see a Socialist Alliance party as the new Communist Party or just a step towards it. If they think of the Socialist Alliance party as the Communist Party, then will it need to have a minimum-maximum programme that looks forward to the dictatorship of the proletariat. On the other hand they might envisage the Socialist Alliance party as a party built on a minimum programme. This would be more realistic than trying to force the Socialist Alliance into a communist mould, but even a party built on a minimum programme is in advance of the currently agreed policies of the alliance.

The CPGB stance on a Socialist Alliance party obscures the political basis on which it will be built. The formation of a Communist Party would not be possible with the existing levels of consciousness and activity within our class. If a rapid and artificial march towards such a party were made, it could only be done at the expense of narrowness and the exclusion of leftward-moving ex-Labour elements. The Socialist Alliance is not in the position to forge a Communist Party, though an alliance can easily contain groups and individuals who are open and committed revolutionaries.

The ?third way?, advocated by the SWP, is an organisational solution to a political question. The position proposed places organisational details ahead of political programme. Lindsey German envisages an office with full-time staff and a system of affiliations to finance the new arrangement. To control the new structure a national steering committee is imagined with delegate meetings three times a year and a national conference.

There is an old saying: ?If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck.? The ?third way? position of the SWP is a proposal for a party, but a party based on the lowest common denominator. The politics upon which it would be based are those agreed for the election. In particular, ?the Socialist Alliance adopted election pledges at its conference which are the basis for its manifesto and campaign? (Socialist Worker May 5).

This strange formulation inverts the process of the Socialist Alliance conference as the bullet points have become the basis of the manifesto rather than the other way around. In any case neither the bullet points nor the manifesto are a programme for a party. In so far as these proposals express a politics, it is simple left Labourism: the desire for social and economic reforms without any change in the political structure.

This would be a political step backwards for the Socialist Alliance as individual members have left New Labour for socialist politics and trade unions have begun to question their organisational links to Labour. These changes are the result of personal and organisational conflicts with the New Labour Party and the politics of Labourism itself. They raise the possibility of a party built around a bureaucratic centre without a clear politics beyond the politics of Labour that have so clearly failed.

The structures and organisational forms adopted by a party need to reflect the aims of the party as well as good organisational practice. A party that simply develops itself by organisational means - such as recruitment, finding sources of income and developing a party centre - will not survive long. The political landscape in the UK is currently very unstable. The Socialist Alliance or a party that develops from it will need solid political foundations to survive.

The argument of this position paper is that we must start with the politics of the Socialist Alliance, but that this process cannot be rushed. The Socialist Alliance is an unfinished project and the transition to a party will require the alliance to develop further. Nonetheless we propose that the alliance needs to advance in structure as it develops its political programme. In particular we propose:

6. Merseyside SA

The Merseyside Socialist Alliance had a great success in the election building a St Helens SA from the campaign against Shaun Woodward. The MSA needs to build on that strengthening by developing local Socialist Alliances within Merseyside. In particular we believe Socialist Alliances in the Wirral and Knowsley are immediate priorities.

We believe our general election result illustrated that we built best on previous interventions and as a consequence we would argue for a strategic intervention in the council elections in 2002.

The MSA has no systematic industrial organisation and, whilst trade union work in general has a largely national focus, public sector initiatives often have a highly local aspect. The MSA should build a capacity to intervene in local trade union organisation, including the trades councils and in industrial disputes.

In order for there to be a basis for political development and for the proper discussion of business the MSA needs to develop a better structure. The present sovereign body is the members? meeting, which runs on a basis of consensus. The level of organisation that should now run on this basis is the local area SA. The MSA should reconstitute itself as an area body coordinating the local area SAs.

The MSA should encourage the regular meeting of a North West region SA. This body should be encouraged to coordinate local campaigns, organise large regional events and initiatives and intervention in European elections and around the proposal for a North West region and an assembly.