01.08.2001

Southwark

Conflict and compromise

On July 26, Southwark Socialist Alliance held an important membership meeting, to take decisions that had been held over from an earlier, inconclusive discussion on the forms which our developing, but still in reality quite embryonic, organisation needs to adopt for the coming period.

At this level there are two main trends of thought - on the one side, those that wanted to maintain a purely constituency-based structure and severely curtail the Southwark-wide borough organisation (mainly, though not exclusively, Socialist Workers Party comrades); and, on the other, those wanting to centre our work around a larger, more politically vibrant and varied borough-based organisation - managed to reach an agreement that appeared to satisfy the two sides. An earlier meeting of the Southwark officers had in fact thrashed out a resolution that was acceptable to both viewpoints.

First of all, however, the meeting heard eye-witness reports from a couple of comrades who had just returned from Genoa. Since many of the issues raised have been dealt with at greater length in other articles, it would be repetitious to go into them here. It was, however, rightly considered essential that Southwark SA should prioritise building for as massive a protest as possible outside the coming Labour Party conference, to tap into the potential that the Genoa events, for all their problems, show exists for building a much more significant, potentially socialist-led movement that can be a stepping stone towards mass influence for the revolutionary left.

Following this, the main discussion was taken on the resolution drawn up by the Southwark officers. The resolution, which was passed with all in favour except for two abstentions in a meeting of over 30 comrades, basically lays down a dual structure. There will be monthly membership meetings of Southwark SA, and a recallable executive committee, in part consisting of at least five officers elected by an annual general meeting of the Southwark membership.

There will also be local meetings, also once a month, of initially two, hopefully expanding to three, separate groupings to carry out a division of labour involving particular local campaigns in which some Southwark comrades are deeply involved. These will be based loosely around the Peckham/central area and the Dulwich/south area of the borough. Steps aimed at initiating a Bermondsey grouping are also to be taken.

Each of these local groups will be free to elect their own functionaries as they see fit, but also they will each elect three local representatives to the Southwark officers committee. This expanded committee of borough-wide elected officers and elected local representatives will be the executive body responsible for running and overseeing all borough SA work.

The committee will therefore hopefully embody the best of both worlds - being able to tap into the local roots of comrades who are heavily involved in particular campaigns and struggles, while at the same time centralising them according to a more unified vision, based on the political unit that is most likely to be key in terms of public sector struggles in particular, not to mention the prospect of running election campaigns against the Blairites on the local council. While comrades of course have to guard against any tendency towards borough-based parochialism, it has to be said that this will be far easier to combat, given the variety of political experiences that this arrangement centralises, than would have been the case with the SWP?s original proposal to break down into purely localist, constituency-based groups.

This discussion, though resolved in what appears to be a satisfactory way, nevertheless is symptomatic of the phase that the Socialist Alliance is going through. Increasingly, the logic of the project points to the birth of a new political organism in the most complete sense of the term - ie, a party - that aims to gain a mass following in the working class in its own right. This logic is becoming more and more clear to the non-aligned comrades in the alliance, since the only way they can exercise the proper influence to which they (rightly) feel entitled is through a unitary membership organisation in which all members are on an equal footing. Most of the smaller organisations within the alliance face similar pressures in terms of the logic of fighting within a project with such obvious potential to appeal to large numbers of working people.

The main organisation that has a problem with this logic is the SWP, which unfortunately has trained its cadre over a long period of time to believe that it is ?the party? and therefore is having great difficulties in theorising what it is being pushed to carry out in practice. The SWP leadership therefore instinctively tries to marginalise the influence of the independents and the smaller alliance organisations, and maximise the influence of its large and scattered membership, by pushing for the SA to break down into small local groups. At the same time, such flexing of the SWP?s muscle is transparent in its purpose to most experienced leftists, and fortunately, realising the potential damage to unity that will result from imposing such moves, the SWP has been able to compromise.

As Southwark shows, conflict over such questions can be educative and fruitful. Indeed, maintaining a correct political balance between involvement in local struggles, on the one hand, and a broader, more generalised political vision and leadership, on the other, is one of the most difficult aspects of building a new working class party. Providing these questions are fought out properly and in a democratic manner, there is every reason to believe, in fact, that such discussions can actually strengthen our common project.

That, at least, was my impression and that of many other comrades at the conclusion of this meeting.

Ian Donovan