25.03.2004

Two conferences

Party notes

The contrast between the Scottish Socialist Party and the Socialist Alliance in England and Wales could hardly be more marked. One is living, confident and growing; the other lies dying - struck down, foully murdered by its own misleadership.

By a margin of two to one the SA’s March 13 special conference voted not only to suspend electoral work - which in effect means ending all activity - but to actually forbid surviving branches from standing in the forthcoming June 10 local elections. This control-freakery was imposed at the insistence of the Socialist Workers Party. No opposition was brooked. There could be no compromise nor any accounting for different, specific local circumstances. Everything, above all the continued existence of the SA, must be subordinated to the untried and untested Respect coalition and getting John Rees elected as an MEP.

Not that the SWP is itself giving 100%. Before London’s March 20 Stop the War Coalition demonstration Chris Bambery, SWP national secretary, issued one of his infamous weekly circulars: only 100 SWPers were to be assigned to work for Respect (email, March 18). The rest were told to sell Socialist Worker and dish out SWP placards. According to what we know about the real size of the SWP’s membership that translates in the language of mathematics into a mere 5% commitment to Respect.

The March 27-28 SSP conference in Edinburgh faces no such demands to liquidate from the Socialist Worker platform, nor from any other faction for that matter. On the contrary the SSP faces the challenges that come with proven success and growth. Specifically that means quickly integrating RMT and other potential trade union affiliates into its regional and national structures (there is a whole raft of constitutional changes proposed by the SSP executive committee) - that and gearing up for the June 10 elections, in which the SSP is expected to do well.

As with the SA, the SSP began as a unity project between left groups. In that sense the SSP holds up a mirror of what might have been in the rest of Britain. Quite clearly the much more favourable situation in Scotland results not from objective conditions. Eg, strikes throughout Britain remain at historically low levels and the 2003 anti-war movement saw its biggest manifestations in London, not Glasgow or Edinburgh.

The difference is subjective. Scottish Militant Labour, under the leadership of Alan McCombes and Tommy Sheridan, had the necessary foresight and accumulated organisational weight behind them to rally the left in Scotland and then patiently build a party based on a culture which still tolerates minorities and generally operates in a spirit of openness.

Not that we communists are uncritical. The SSP cannot strictly be regarded as a socialist party. Yes, unlike Respect, it calls for socialism week in and week out in the pages of Scottish Socialist Voice and in every election manifesto. Tommy Sheridan eloquently expounds upon its virtues and rails against the inequalities of capitalism. The SSP’s five other MSPs hammer home the same message. However, the socialism of the SSP is both reformist and nationalist.

For Marxism, of course, socialism is a universal, revolutionary task. The capitalist state has to be dismantled by the armed power of the working class, and capital superseded at the global level. Using the existing state to introduce ‘socialism’ - which usually means nothing more than the nationalisation of the means of production - inevitably leads to attacks on the working class. Nationalised capital is still capital and workers remain exploited wage slaves. That is the lesson of history and the real movement of the working class in the 20th century. In short, there can be no socialism in one country, not even in a breakaway Scotland.

SSP leaders disagree. The ‘tartan revolution’ would not, we are assured, suffer the horrible starvation and wars of intervention witnessed in Russia or Cuba’s isolation and grinding poverty. Scotland will not be “brought to its knees” by an American economic blockade. A socialist Scotland will be able to “stand up” to the forces of global capitalism and become an international “symbol of resistance” to economic and social injustice (T Sheridan and A McCombes Imagine Edinburgh 2000, p189).

Scotland can succeed apparently where others before it have failed because it is “fabulously wealthy”. Scotland already has the “material foundations” for a “thriving” socialist democracy. Besides “long coastlines” and a “clean environment”, Scotland has a “flourishing” culture and “legions” of internationally acclaimed musicians, writers, actors and film directors. On top of these blessings Scotland has “land, water, fish, timber, oil, gas and electricity in abundance”. Better still, Scotland has a “moderate climate” (ibid p189). While a “fully-fledged socialist society” might not be possible in Scotland, nonetheless a “socialist government” could move in that direction by taking control of the country’s wealth and using it for the common good (ibid p190).

Frankly this is threadbare and deeply worrying. Joseph Stalin used to rebuff Leon Trotsky with reference to Russia’s continental proportions and immense wealth in natural resources. Land, oil, forests, gold, a population that stood at around 150 million ... and a very, very long coastline. He did not mention a “moderate climate”, true. Despite that absence Stalin boasted in his version of Imagine - the second edition of Foundations of Leninism - that Russia had all it needed internally. Not to achieve the “final and complete victory of socialism” - that needed the efforts of other countries - but to “build up a socialist society” (JV Stalin Works Vol 6, Moscow 1953, p111).

In the McCombes-Sheridan schema Scottish nationalism is proletarian. British nationalism bourgeois.

Logically this has led the SSP leadership to pursue a strategic alliance with the Scottish National Party. Nowadays the SSP is quite clear: independence in and of itself would be progress. A capitalist Scotland which has its own armed forces, currency and bureaucracy is bizarrely proclaimed as a step in the direction of socialism. Last year the SSP national council duly agreed the perspectives document, ‘Where now for independence and socialism?’, drafted by comrade McCombes, and subsequently an independence convention was launched.

Thankfully there is some opposition - implicit and explicit - to this outright capitulation to left nationalism (though unsurprisingly not from the Republican Communist Network). Motions 9, 10 and 11, plus the amendment to motion 11 from the Workers Unity platform, all appear to take issue with the McCombes-Sheridan strategy.

Motion 9, submitted by Edinburgh Pentland, is, to be frank, mealy-mouthed and to all intents and purposes worthless: eg, the position of the SSP regarding Scottish independence should be based on whether it “will strengthen or weaken the political, ideological and industrial position of the working class”. The Cathcart West and Cathcart East motion 11 is no better. It too has the sticky fingerprints of the SW platform all over it. Being for, or against, independence is conveniently skirted round. Pure opportunism.

On the other hand motion 10 from Dundee West reflects the new thinking of the Committee for a Workers’ International. They want to put some clear red water between themselves and their former Militant comrades who now dominate the SSP leadership. The independence convention was “mistaken”. No “significant numbers” have been attracted and “support for national independence” has fallen in the past few years.

Though damning the “concessions” made to nationalism by the McCombes-Sheridan leadership, the CWI shares essentially the same rotten programme. It would “support” an independent capitalist Scotland, “as a democratic right”, if wished for by the majority of the population (supporting self-determination does not, of course, oblige communists to advocate the Balkanisation of Britain - or anywhere else, for that matter). But instead of campaigning for this outcome the CWI wants to “prioritise” other issues - “the fight for a decent minimum wage, the scrapping of the council tax, a shorter working week, public ownership of industry and anti-war work.”

Nevertheless the CWI holds out the long-term goal of achieving independence. This would, though, be a “socialist Scotland” and part of a “voluntary and democratic socialist confederation with England, Wales and Ireland”.

But why exactly the British nation-state needs to be broken up remains unexplained. As is well known, the CPGB calls for a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales and an independent, united Ireland under existing socio-political conditions. That would simultaneously provide a democratic solution to the national question and deepen working class unity in the British Isles. But it should be emphasised that in general Marxists seek to bring about the organisation of the working class in the biggest possible, centralised states. Federalism in Britain and an independent Ireland would today represent a real step in that direction.

The only remotely principled position is the one advocated by the Workers Unity platform. Though is appears to reject the right of the Scottish people to self-determination - a piece of unnecessary Luxemburgism - the comrades advocate working class unity, not as a pious, empty slogan, but concretely. They call for unity against the existing United Kingdom state and sketch out a plan for the “building of a British socialist party” using the “strength of the SSP” as a lever.

Naturally such a genuinely internationalist and partyist approach commands our support.