04.07.2001

Southwark

Defend organisational unity

Our Socialist Alliance has been busily assessing the results of its election campaign, and debating its future in terms of organisation and perspectives.

The latter process has really only just begun, though differences have already appeared - largely between the organisational preferences of the Socialist Workers Party on the one hand, and the supporters of the smaller components of the alliance and indeed independent comrades on the other.

Both of the Southwark constituency campaigns have had reasonably successful local meetings since the general election, and have begun to draw up a balance sheet of what was achieved and discuss plans for the future. However, many comrades, particularly those who are not supporters of the SWP, have been concerned to retain a Southwark-wide focus, and to resist the SWP's evident and short-sighted aim to break the organisation down into constituency-based Socialist Alliance units, in effect mirroring the structure of the Labour Party, where parliamentary elections are the be-all and end-all of political organisation.

Given that London boroughs are the chief local executive political unit by which the population are governed, and the borough council is arguably the strategic local employer and the likely focus for a whole range of struggles involving public service workers - in fact the sharp end of the Blairite offensive on privatisation, in my opinion this is the basic political unit we should organise around. Smaller local groups should be subordinate to the borough alliances, in order to prevent the atrophying of the local alliances into apolitical localism, and indeed, quite likely in many cases, into thinly disguised SWP branches - with all that implies for the withering away of a democratic internal life for such groupings.

This could be a disastrous mistake for the alliance: a repetition of the kind of fragmented constituency-based structure Arthur Scargill imposed on the membership of the Socialist Labour Party in order to purge it of the influence of 'troublemakers' - in reality it quickly led to the death of most political life amongst the rank and file membership of the SLP and ultimately contributed to the dead sect we see today. In Southwark, the SWP has at least felt compelled to fight for its localist perspective in a democratic manner, due to the strong influence of non-SWP and independent comrades.

On June 27 Southwark SA held a public meeting on the perspectives for the Socialist Alliance after the elections, in which some comrades were able to take the opportunity to argue for a borough structure. On the platform were John Rees from the SWP leadership, former Labour executive member Liz Davies and Nick Wrack, the chair of Southwark SA.

Comrade Davies took the opportunity to advocate a very democratic charter of rights for Socialist Alliance members, to protect the diversity of the alliance, including enshrining the right to publicly disagree with official material, the right to write for and sell publications, the right to stand for selection as a candidate for election, and much more besides. It was pointed out from the floor that this should also include the right of the membership to recall those candidates selected. No doubt comrade Davies will be elaborating her ideas on this kind of question in writing in the near future.

Then on July 2 we held a special meeting to discuss future forms of organisation. No motions were circulated in advance, but at the meeting comrade Pervin, a leading local SWP member and secretary of Southwark SA, handed out a longish resolution that contained a blueprint for a form of organisation whose basic unit is the constituency. Constituency SAs would meet monthly, and every two months there would be a borough aggregate. However, the borough executive was to be abolished, and replaced by an aggregate of the three executives of the constituency alliances.

The only real concession to borough-wide organisation was a proposal for a all-Southwark SA newsletter, which, since there is no longer to be any unitary borough executive, seems somewhat out of step with the rest of the proposal and thereby likely in practice to wither.

The strongest section of the resolution called for the establishment of an SA organisation in Bermondsey. In truth that is one thing that ought to, and quite likely would have, happened already, were it not for the political decision taken by the dominant organisations in Southwark SA - the SWP and to a lesser extent the International Socialist Group - to effectively give unconditional support to a not very dynamic fake-left Labour candidacy in that constituency, abjuring the very idea of mounting an SA general election campaign. However, the Bermondsey proposal still does not necessarily imply that constituency-based branches should be the primary or normal form of organisation in the alliance.

A number of leading non-aligned comrades and supporters of the smaller components of the alliance (CPGB, ISG, Alliance for Workers' Liberty and partially Workers Power) expressed differences with the perspectives laid out in the motion, and indeed in some cases misgivings about the future democracy of the alliance, given what was being laid out. In any case, it was pointed out that, since the motion had not been circulated to the membership, it would be wrong to vote on it, a point which both its SWP initiators and its non-aligned seconder, former Dulwich candidate Brian Kelly, readily conceded.

Comrade Pervin's motion was remitted to the Southwark executive, with the aim of inviting amendments and formulating a clear choice or choices on the structure of the alliance so that a future meeting could take a formal decision. The next, decision-making, meeting of Southwark SA will take place at the end of July.

It was also resolved to call a meeting of SA comrades in Bermondsey, in order to establish a local organisation, without pre-empting the status of such local organisations, which will be decided at a borough level. Hopefully we will preserve an organisational structure in which the larger and more politically varied borough-level collective is primary, with local groups subordinate to it.

Ian Donovan