06.12.2001

Socialist Party splits from SA

The walkout of the Socialist Party from the December 1 Socialist Alliance conference has resolved a contradiction that has been holding back the SA for at least two years. Yet at the same time it has weakened the prestige of the SA whose raison d'être is, for many members and supporters, the project of a united left.

The well choreographed departure came after conference voted for the constitution proposed by the Socialist Workers Party, the International Socialist Group and five leading independent comrades. This constitution won 345 votes, as against 311 in total for the five other alternatives.

The very visible disunity is, however, not an indictment of the SA project, but rather a reversion to the crudest sectism on the part of the Socialist Party leadership. It is exacerbated by the inability of the SA's biggest component, the Socialist Workers Party, to exorcise the suspicion that it too is putting its own sect interests to the fore in transmuting the SA into a unitary membership organisation, in which its own regimented membership could exercise hegemony, if not the crude caricature of absolute control-freakery put about by the SP.

The accusation that the SA is to be an electoral version of the Anti-Nazi League, a pliable front organisation for the SWP, gains currency, for example, in the overruling of the 30% or so of the SA membership that voted for the alliance to have its own newspaper.

If this conference illustrated anything, it showed just how far the British left has to travel to really overcome sect politics. Indeed, the depth of sect politics on the left was illustrated not just by the SWP, but by the speech by Workers Power's Mark Hoskisson, opposing the composite calling for an SA political paper.

The comrade complained that such a publication, given the different political views that make up the alliance, would have to be a bland publication with no politics, expressing the lowest common denominator of views that are deemed to be shared by the components of the alliance. Or else it would be, according to comrade Hoskisson, a "tower of Babel" - ie, a publication in which the diverse views of the alliance's members would all find expression, and by implication, some kind of anarchic mess.

Comrade Hoskisson, in common with the SWP comrades, thereby merely restates his own sect conception of a party and of the future of the SA. The SA, in his view, in order to become a real working class party, will have to have public unanimity on all important questions. Minority views in the SA will have to have been either eliminated, or their proponents persuaded to accept that they cannot possibly be expressed in the public domain, before the SA could have its own political paper. In other words, the SA cannot be allowed a paper until it becomes another sect in the image of the SWP or WP.

In its own way, this vote was just as significant as an illustration of continued sect backwardness as was the walkout of the Socialist Party. Both events showed that the steps so far towards unity are only skin-deep for the bureaucratic centralist Trotskyist sects that still politically dominate the alliance, and the left in general.

This sect conception of party is the most concrete obstacle to the future development of the Socialist Alliance. If not corrected and defeated in favour of a genuine, partyist culture of free, open and public political debate, then, far from evolving into something that can even match the modest influence of the Scottish Socialist Party in the working class (as many comrades rightly hope), another possibility could be on the horizon. The sects are quite capable of doing in England what the followers of Peter Taaffe and the post-Cliff SWP have pulled off in Ireland - the dissolution of the Socialist Alliance.

Of course, this is not a predetermined outcome, and it can and must be successfully fought. Apart from the negative, sectarian features of the conference, there were also a number of more positive signs. The close vote on the hurried SWP proposal to go immediately to an AGM was an early sign that the SWP would not get its own way on everything. As indeed was the partial emasculation of the national council, a body that had the potential to act as a 'House of Lords' for the SWP within the alliance - it will no longer be able to remove elected members of the executive between conferences.

There was also a partial victory on the question of platforms - the constitution now recognises their right to exist in the SA, though unfortunately, not their automatic right to attend with a voice at executive meetings. Other gains, such as the inclusion of a properly constituted appeals committee, independent of the executive, were the result of either outright defeats for the SWP, or them being forced to back off from more outrageous attempts at control-freakery.

In many ways, this is why the splittist activity of the SP was so criminal - having declared that the SA would become an SWP front if it adopted a unitary, and not federal, constitution, the SP seemed intent on bringing about this situation by default through handing the SWP an overwhelming dominance of the alliance on a plate.

Thus the SP's supposed championing of minorities and independent members is revealed as a complete fraud - what the Taaffe leadership was most concerned with was to find an excuse to walk out, thus conveniently isolating the rank and file of their disintegrating sect from the possibility of sustained collaboration with other socialists, and from the possibility that the SP membership will begin to question the infallibility of their high priests.

The sectarian nature of the SP's whole project was revealed by the tone of hostility their loyalists adopted to SA supporters who are not involved in the any of the principal organisations. The SP's attacks on "so-called independents", particularly those who broadly (though not uncritically) allied themselves with the SWP in seeking a unitary membership organisation, gave a very strange impression indeed. Particularly, since a number of the people they were so attacking are formerly prominent members of the SP itself. One thinks of Nick Wrack (former editor of Militant) and Lesley Mahmood (the pioneer Militant Labour candidate against Kinnock's Labour Party in the Liverpool Walton by-election in 1991), who were both elected to the SA executive.

In fact, far from being hounded out of the alliance, as the SP will no doubt pretend, this was undoubtedly the most civilised split anyone can remember, with comrade Dave Nellist, the departing chair of the alliance, being given a massive ovation by the supporters of the majority on whom he was objectively spitting by leading the walkout of SP members. That comrade Nellist, bound by the discipline of the SP sect, felt compelled to throw away the years of constructive work he has done for the SA project, is a personal tragedy that he will likely soon regret (if he does not already).

At least one SP comrade was not able to go along with Taaffe's diktat to crap on fellow socialists in this way - comrade Matt Wrack, the prominent FBU militant who successfully moved a motion at this summer's FBU conference opening the door to union support for leftists standing against New Labour, stayed in the conference hall with the majority and thereby broke with Taaffe's organisation.

The pro-party minority in the SA, though defeated, made a respectable showing in the conference in other ways. Indeed, the respectable vote for the CPGB's stem constitution, which with 42 votes, represented the hard pro-party, pro-paper left. Indeed opposition to a paper is in many ways the touchstone of sectism in the SA. Comrade Hoskisson may have done the SA project a favour by spelling out so clearly the sectarian rationale behind the opposition to a paper - the minority who are not under sect discipline to agree with him will find an outlet for their aspirations initially without the SWP and WP if necessary.

After all, the SA constitution guarantees their right to write for publications, and to publish their views openly. There is nothing in the constitution to say that an SA paper cannot be founded by the pro-party, anti-sectarian minority. Let us show in practice what can be achieved by a democratic SA paper that strikes the right balance between agitation, propaganda and open political discussion.

This was certainly the spirit put forward at the fringe meeting, called under the auspices of the multi-current statement 'For a democratic and effective Socialist Alliance' after the close of the conference. CPGB, AWL and independent speakers pledged to explore, with some urgency, the project of launching such a pro-party publication.

Ian Donovan