04.09.2002
The fight for an SA paper
Marcus Ström looks back at how the Socialist Alliance has developed and points to the immediate task ahead
The Socialist Alliance movement - to the extent that it is a movement - goes back to the mid-1990s, when SAs began to appear in various parts of England and, importantly, north of the border, where the Scottish Socialist Alliance developed rapidly into the Scottish Socialist Party. The Welsh Socialist Alliance was created and even in Northern Ireland a Socialist and Environmental Alliance contested the last general election. Outside the UK state the idea has also spread, with the formation of the Socialist Alliance of Australia, involving a large number of the left groups. The Labour Party Pakistan too is pursuing the possibility of a Socialist Alliance. What is the objective basis for the development of the Socialist Alliance movement in Britain? On the one hand we have seen the defeat of the working class represented by the miners' strike and on the other with the collapse of the Soviet Union the extinguishing, on a global level of any idea of an alternative society among the mass of the population. Alongside the crisis of 'official communism' there has been a crisis in Labourism and traditional social democracy. The post-World War II social democratic consensus around a welfare state of some sort, which included even the Tory Party, has given way to increasingly aggressive neoliberal attacks on the working class as part of the new world order. Against this backdrop an ideological and organisational political vacuum opened up in many parts of the world, including this country. On the face of it, the Socialist Alliance was an accident of history. I am sure when Dave Nellist was scratching his head wondering what to do next after being expelled from the Labour Party, he had no idea that his Coventry and Warwickshire SA would be the first of many, that a national organisation would be born, that the Socialist Workers Party would be a part of it, but the Socialist Party would not. The idea was simply to give what was then Militant Labour a pool to swim in outside the Labour Party. At first the Network of Socialist Alliances enjoyed very limited support. Much to the annoyance of Militant, we in the CPGB were pretty much the only serious organisation which wanted to be involved, and we were not really the sort of people they were looking for, so they tended to play it pretty much with a dead bat. This early period was associated with crass amateurism, dire localism and the dangerous illusion that forces other than socialists had to be incorporated - greens, and so on. When a certain 'Swampy' declared at one stage he would be a candidate in the 1997 general election, some in the NSA were delighted. That is how desperate things were. So it is important to retain a sense of proportion if comrades sometimes feel demoralised by the current state of play in the Socialist Alliance. If you think things are bad now, think back to that period. Think back to The All Red and Green, a lovely Gestetner-type job put out by Pete McLaren. It was an absolutely woeful rag, which was bereft of any working class notion of socialism. In one sense we can include the Socialist Labour Party in the early period of the development of the Socialist Alliance movement, since the SLP was attempting to fill the same political vacuum. As we know, Arthur Scargill went on to destroy his own progeny, and now has an albatross around his neck in the ultra-Stalinite shape of Harpal Brar. Scargill's name lives as a memory amongst a section of militants and he is still a figure who retains some popular weight - he cannot be dismissed completely - as, for example, Rob Hoveman of the SWP appears to do in terms of the euro referendum. The mainstream of British society likes to ridicule Scargill from time to time, but he is still someone regarded with a certain fondness by some workers. Nevertheless I do not think that his party is going anywhere. The Socialist Alliance movement - which despite the nationalism of the SSP has reached its highest level in Scotland - received a tremendous fillip in England with the SWP's at first hesitant and then full-blown involvement. With the SWP's participation the idea that the SA movement would be built purely from the bottom up was consigned to the dustbin, where it deserves to be. To the extent that the Socialist Alliance has been established in British politics, it owes its - extremely marginal and tenuous - presence to the centralism, the degree of professionalism and top-down building we managed to achieve, first for the Greater London Assembly elections, and then the general election after that. Whereas previously we had been hamstrung by federalism and localism, the involvement of the SWP has at least pointed us in the direction we need to go. The CPGB for its part was always a partisan of centralism, always stressed that a new organisation in the first instance would have to be built from the top down. The initiative for the European Social Forum came from the World Social Forum. If it is correct for this broad conglomeration - everyone from revolutionaries to Christian Aiders - to attempt to construct a movement in this way, I do not know why socialists should not do so, as our localists insisted. I was very glad when the SWP came in and helped us replace this red-green mish-mash with the red flag of working class unity. The SWP helped transform the NSA into a Socialist Alliance. But we still are faced with some rearguard forces. National chair Liz Davies is talking about altering our image - apparently workers get very confused if you turn up on the doorstep wearing a red rosette, because they think you are a Labour Party canvasser. She has proposed a red-green-purple rosette instead. In the 2001 general election the Socialist Alliance really began to act for the first time as a national force. We stood 92 candidates in England and a further six in Wales. We agreed a common programme, held regular executive meetings and we had a common media campaign. We got into the press and had a TV and radio broadcast. The general election saw the SA operate under the highest degree of centralism that we have so far managed, and it is no coincidence that this campaign was the most successful that we have been able to organise. Through that process we were able to establish scores of Socialist Alliance branches (although many of them have since withered on the vine, and now exist in name only). The recent local elections were in many ways a step back from the general election. Instead of a nationally coordinated intervention what we experienced was a whole number of separate local campaigns. In the circumstances I was pleasantly surprised by the number of votes we got. True, people had three votes in many areas, so they could afford to be generous and give one of them to the Socialist Alliance. But I still think we did relatively well. Undeniably though, to some extent there has been a retreat into amateurism. The fact that we now have a national office is a great victory. However, comrades will perhaps remember that at the time of its establishment the SA executive agreed that the principal (then six, now five) supporting organisations would contribute equally to financing it. Unfortunately that is still not happening. The International Socialist Group is apparently unable to raise its share either from its own coffers of from their richer comrades across the Channel. Similarly Workers Power and the Alliance for Workers' Liberty are either lacking the funds or - more likely, I think - the political will to commit equal resources to the running of that office. Only the CPGB and SWP have put our money where our mouth is. This state of affairs is completely unacceptable, especially when we look at current political developments. We now have an elected general secretary of a significant union - comrade Mark Serwotka of the PCSU - who openly identifies with the Socialist Alliance. That is a very significant development. The red scare that bobbed to the surface over the past year has centred on the actual or alleged SA association of certain trade union activists. There has been excited talk of the Socialist Alliance and others gaining influence and organising militant action in the unions. We have said in the Weekly Worker before that there exists a gap between this claim - if only we were that organised - and reality. We in the CPGB, as the most pro-party element in the Socialist Alliance, regard it as our duty to fight for a Socialist Alliance paper as absolutely central to the struggle for a Socialist Alliance party. I am on the SA national executive, yet I do not know what goes on in our branches. I do not know if they are meeting. There is a complete lack of coordination. Some of this can perhaps be put down to SWP control-freakery, but that is not the main problem. The problem is that we have not built a real knitted movement. In order to do that we need a paper. There are several historical analogies we can cite. After 1916 The Call became known as the consistent anti-war paper of the British Socialist Party. Yet The Call started out as a minority paper which took its stand against the pro-war jingoism of Henry Hyndman. The BSP subsequently went on to provide the main membership base for the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920. There is a lesson here for the Socialist Alliance: if we are forced to establish an unofficial paper, far from being 'disruptive', it could well lead to the kind of official publication we need. Such a paper, as well as knitting together disparate struggles, would also serve to educate our own membership. Why should debates in the Socialist Alliance - like the one at Communist University between Rob Hoveman and John Bridge on the euro - be restricted to the Weekly Worker and not a far wider readership? The whole of the SA membership should be privy to these discussions that are taking place in isolation up and down the country rather than just those who happen to come upon them in the existing left press or on the internet. This is an extremely haphazard and undemocratic state of affairs and it is one of the main reasons why the Socialist Alliance is being held back. What about the vital discussions on our engagement with the Labour Party? The question of the trade union link to Labour is of central strategic importance for the development of the Socialist Alliance. The recent 'After New Labour' conference demonstrated the possibility of the rebirth of a Labour left. What must Liz Davies have been thinking when John Edmonds in front of all those trade union leaders and Socialist Campaign Group people said he had come to bury New Labour? That must have provoked a few thoughts in comrade Davies's head about her decision to leave Labour for the Socialist Alliance. Faced with the possible rebirth of the Labour left, why would the left in the union movement or Labour Party find the Socialist Alliance attractive? The idea that the Labour left could never revive was a fantasy. Yet without a vibrant paper of the Socialist Alliance we will be unable to engage with the crisis of Labourism or its left wing. Let us take another example from the history of the Communist Party. In the 1920s, the CPGB, through the National Left Wing Movement and its paper The Sunday Worker, was able to make great gains in terms of its dialogue with the Labour left. Circulation reached 100,000. This was a real united front between communists and the Labour left, which hugely extended the influence of communist ideas. That is the sort of example we need to emulate. At present, the SWP is running the Socialist Alliance as a safe home for disillusioned reformists, with disillusioned reformist politics, and yet no dialogue exists with the Labour left. The SWP wants people coming over from Labour to remain Labourite - except, of course, those who it believes it can cherry-pick for the SWP. Before it declares its revolutionary colours within the Socialist Alliance, it is waiting for a reformist majority. So the SWP is not able to reflect the truth of what the alliance actually is - the coming together of the left groups. At the December 2001 conference of the Socialist Alliance there was a motion for a paper backed by the International Socialist Group, the Alliance for Workers' Liberty and of course the CPGB. Although we lost the vote, we won the support of the majority of non-SWP members. There was a brief period afterwards when there was an opportunity to launch an unofficial Socialist Alliance paper. We could have joined forces with the AWL - the ISG rejected overtures to discuss such a move, on the grounds that an unofficial paper would be 'undemocratic' (ironically it has since got together with the Socialist Solidarity Network to launch their own separate publication, which will "fight for the Socialist Alliance to become a broad socialist party"). Unfortunately, we were unable to take advantage of that window of opportunity. Quite shamefully, the AWL used the lack of active backing from the SA independents as an excuse to cover its own lack of will or unity on the nature of the Socialist Alliance project. Is the SA just 'one area of work', or is it the site of rapprochement of Marxists, of revolutionaries, where we can seriously begin to engage with the working class? The independents cannot be relied upon for anything, let alone an SA paper. Who are they? In general, they are tired and constitute something of an anti-group - they are in the Socialist Alliance but dread any repetition of bureaucratic centralism of the kind that so many of them experienced in the various sects. Most have thrown out the baby with the bathwater and reject genuine democratic centralism in favour of the 'higher' right of the individual. The Socialist Party and our friends in the Revolutionary Democratic Group jumped on this anarcho-backward approach to defend their own narrow perspectives. Frankly the various arguments against an SA paper are totally and completely disingenuous. 'We haven't got the resources for a monthly, let alone a weekly' is one. Yet the alliance's supporting organisations produce between them two weeklies, a fortnightly, a couple of monthlies and a whole range of less frequent publications. The idea that collectively we do not have the resources is simply not true. We do have the resources, but there is no political will. Another argument is 'Let's just build the local bulletins and see what happens.' As I have shown, this bowing to localism and the spontaneous gets us nowhere. The initiative in the SSP, by contrast, to launch the admittedly dull Scottish Socialist Voice came from the top. Even Arthur Scargill realised that any organisation worthy of the name needs a paper. I am a member of the Automobile Association, which of course has its own publication. Political organisations in particular must have a means of communicating with the parts in order to make the whole work. That is not happening in the Socialist Alliance. The CPGB has said that, if the AWL and ourselves were to launch a joint paper, we would close down the Weekly Worker. We have proposed that the politics of the new paper should be based on People before profit, the document agreed at the time of the SA's general election intervention. There is a degree of commonality between our two tendencies on the question of revolutionary democracy and a number of other issues that would allow us to enrich People before profit in a very positive direction and defend it from any rightwing inroads made by the SWP or anyone else. Such a paper would be used to recruit to the Socialist Alliance, but in the longer term the aim would be for it to become an official paper, just as The Call became the official paper of the BSP. We would aim to become the majority on the basis of dynamic movement and an all-Britain paper. There have been some fears expressed within our own organisation that the offer to close down our own paper is a liquidationist move on the part of the CPGB leadership. But the Weekly Worker would only cease publication on the basis that our views and our politics would appear in the new paper. We did not demand that the AWL close down Solidarity, though we would hope that would happen. Is the idea of a Socialist Alliance paper dead and, if so, is the Socialist Alliance itself dead? That is the question that comrades from the AWL need to ask themselves. I do not think the SA movement is dead at all. It is the only game in town at the moment. It can intersect with the crisis of Labourism and the shift to the left in the trade union movement. There were 1,000 people - Derek Simpson among them - at the SA's March 16 trade union rally. Not huge, but still significant. Between now and the SA's February 2003 AGM we must reinvigorate the campaign for a Socialist Alliance paper. We cannot rely on local journals, we certainly cannot rely on Socialist Worker and if we go on trying to rely on the Weekly Worker and Solidarity, we will continue duplicating our resources, and waste the opportunity of building the Socialist Alliance as a real force in UK politics. We need a united paper to fulfil the role of educator, agitator and organiser. We need a paper that carries debate and controversy. The movement needs a common journal in order to be able to think and therefore act. It not only needs to thrash out the questions. It must seek to agitate concretely, not only in the trade unions but in the anti-capitalist movement, in the European Social Forum and so forth. It has to be that sort of a publication. It will in all likelihood begin as a paper of the minority but that should not prevent us from doing what is necessary.
Worker