30.04.2003
Anatomy of the hard left
For the tens of thousands of people mobilised against the war on Iraq who have been drawn towards political action for the first time, the myriad of groups on the far left must seem bewildering. Ian Mahoney supplies a rough guide to a few of the more prominent
When people join the Communist Party, we expect them to know what they are signing up for and why - we take ourselves and our recruits seriously, in other words. An essential part of this is our insistence that comrades are aware of the politics of our opponents on the revolutionary left.
Obviously, the Weekly Worker reports extensively on the ideas and political activities of other groups. It does this with a partisan slant, of course - we are in the business to win the arguments for a particular approach to politics, not simply to provide a neutral 'news service' to the revolutionary left. However, we understand that this argument is best advanced by honestly presenting the opinions of your opponents - upending straw men is wasted effort.
Thus, all Party committees - from the leadership down - have a standing item on their agendas in which comrades report on the publications of other left trends, assessing strengths and weaknesses in their coverage of political developments, trying - sometimes by almost forensic examination - to glean what the organisation in question is actually thinking, what different trends and tensions are latent in its ranks.
We are not train-spotters, however. We actually agree with Lenin that without the politically thinking sections of our class being aware of all the shades of opinion and differences in the fractured revolutionary movement today, we will be incapable of building a unified revolutionary party tomorrow. This culture stands in stark contrast to most revolutionary groups.
For instance, only one of the groups listed below include a link to our website on their own. Most have links to innocuous campaigns, trade unions or bourgeois news sources and their own fraternal organisations in other countries.
For example, if you want to learn all about revolutionary politics in German, Workers Power - which refused an explicit request for a links-exchange with the CPGB, by the way - helpfully recommends you visit the site of the micro-version of itself in that country, Arbeitermacht. It has no links to any other site of a revolutionary organisation in Britain - are they trying to con first-time visitors that WP is the only thing that exists, one wonders? Now that would be frightening.
This sort of behaviour is quite typical, unfortunately. However, it would be a profound mistake to adopt a brand of 'anti-sectarian' sectarianism - the rest of the left is not interested in principled unity and is mostly motivated by sect-spite, so fuck the lot of 'em!
Yes, the left groups listed below are part of the problem, holding back the political development of valuable activists - but they could also be a vital part of the answer. We urge new readers who have come to our press over the recent period not only to look at what we have to say about them here, but also to study what they have to say about themselves.
We cover four of the five principal supporting organisations of the Socialist Alliance (that is, excluding ourselves, of course), plus the Socialist Party and the Scottish Socialist Party. Between them, these unite the majority of revolutionaries active today outside the Labour Party.
'Splitters'!
If they were being honest, seasoned lefties would concede that the scene in wonderful Monty Python's life of Brian in which the hero first encounters the People's Front of Judea is depressingly familiar.
The location is the Jerusalem Coliseum, and the children's matinee is in full swing. Brian, anxious to dedicate his life to the struggle against Roman occupation, innocently asks a small group of earnest revolutionaries, "Are you the Judean People's Front?"
The leader - the transparently self-serving Reg - is not impressed: "Fuck off!" he tells the potential new recruit. "Judean People's Front! We're The People's Front of Judea! Judean People's Front, god!", the only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front."
The rest of group join in, denouncing a series of other sects - all bearing confusingly similar names - as "splitters!" Eventually, the turn of the Popular Front comes around and one of the group wonders, "Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?" "He's over there," comes the reply and the group unitedly yell a particularly venomous "Splitter!" at a harmless-looking old bloke, sitting quietly on his own in the front row.
Just like in ancient Palestine, the differences that have fractured the contemporary left are not unimportant, but they do not justify the division of the left into a series of ineffectual sects organised on the basis of this or that "shibboleth", as Marx put it. These groups and grouplets replicate effort and largely define themselves by hostility to each other, not the state.
The coming together of the organisations described below into a democratically centralised party is long overdue - then perhaps we could start to get some proper work done.