Letters

Vote Respect?

I was one of the individuals at the last aggregate to vote for the motion referred to in last week’s ‘Party notes’, which called for the CPGB “to work to ensure the biggest possible vote for Respect on June 10” (Weekly Worker April 1). Leaving aside the motion’s inappropriate and awkward point of introduction at the meeting, I voted for it very hesitantly and doubts about its content remain.

Despite the leadership of the CPGB claiming at the aggregate that the question of our future involvement in Respect is ‘on hold’ and that we should await the outcome of the June elections before making a decision, I suspect that the coming weeks are unlikely to reveal much positive content. I would like to be proved wrong.

Comrade Marcus Ström’s attempt to inject optimism by carving an image of a reformed Respect following an election success is also unconvincing. Why “a Respect party would be forced to substitute hard policies for the current platitudes” is unclear. Given its unprincipled position now on the worker’s wage issue, for example, why would it ‘see the light’ should it find itself somewhat successful at the elections? Given too the rightward drift of comrades Rees and German, they are more likely to maintain their populist platitudes in order to consolidate any newly acquired status.

The coming weeks and the run-up to the election do not motivate me much. However, unless our organisation decides otherwise, the motion passed at the last aggregate currently forms CPGB policy. Myself and other members are therefore duty-bound to seriously work for its aims. Yet I am increasingly finding any ‘inspiration’ for campaigning for a vote for Respect comes in the fact that a better alternative is yet to materialise. Nagging doubts about our intervention remain and attempting to win any part of Respect to our politics seems unlikely, given the dominance of the SWP.

Vote Respect?
Vote Respect?

Right move

Well done, Marcus Ström and the CPGB for standing up to the islamophobic, sectarian muddleheads in the so-called Democracy Platform of the Socialist Alliance (otherwise known as “the tail that seeks to wag the Socialist Workers Party dog”).

Respect is an attempt to get out of the utterly marginal status that has bedevilled the British Marxist left historically. There has never been anything approaching a mass Marxist party in Britain - as there was in just about every other major European country in the 1920s. When the Comintern was first established, Lenin and the Bolsheviks regarded the CPGB as a “complete failure”. While virtually the whole of the French Socialist Party joined the Comintern, en bloc, the CPGB could only muster a few thousands. While it was still revolutionary, the party was a joke in real political terms - as opposed to the never-never land inhabited by the small-minded, sectarian British left.

Now the immediate objective of Respect is to recruit 10,000 members in the next few months. This might seem like a sizeable number to many on the left today. However, it doesn’t even register on the scale of serious political forces. Even Rifondazione Comunista, which claims over 100,000 members and has an activist base of perhaps 20,000, is seen as still only marginal in Italy. The British far left sometimes forgets how utterly irrelevant and impotent it is, as it squabbles bitterly over this or that hotly disputed issue. But it is time they realised that they are talking only to themselves.

It is hardly surprising that the left has been so puny historically since it has been living in the heart of the imperialist monster. There have always been enough financial resources to buy off, neutralise or distract key sectors of the working class. The British left has historically been swamped by a sea of suburban Mr Joneses on one side and an ocean of tabloid-reading Alf Garnetts on the other. Meanwhile, the majority of the class-conscious working class vanguard ignored what the far left had to say: it was otherwise engaged - at the football match, watching mindless, escapist TV, in a semi-permanent state of inebriation, or busy playing with its cars and hi-tech toys.

The fact of the matter is that people only turn to revolutionary parties when they are desperate; when their backs are to the wall. Things never quite got to that stage in the gradualist, reformist British working class. There has only ever been one general strike and that was so long ago that hardly anyone remembers it. Historically, there were too many checks and balances in the system to allow things to get to that stage. The far left was suspended on the shore in splendid isolation.

The task before the British left today is to wake up at least a part of the broad working class vanguard and get its attention. And there are signs that it is beginning to happen. Branches of the RMT are affiliating to Respect. There are signs of life in the other public sector unions too: PCS, CWU and FBU. Some of these unions may change their rules to allow for the democratisation of their political fund.

Why are union branches affiliating now to Respect and not before to the SA? I think the answer is that, while SA was a very worthy attempt to fight back, it never really succeeded in breaking out of the left ghetto. Perhaps it was too busy perfecting its beautifully pristine programme and constitution and not sufficiently engaged in reaching out to the broader workers’ vanguard and the Asian community? The Iraq war has certainly had an effect. It has woken up a layer of the vanguard and the Asian community. And quantity is beginning to turn into quality in the struggle of the public sector unions against Blair’s neoliberal assault.

It would be nice to think that, for once in its long and unlucky history, the British left might seize an opportunity and run with it: try to get a mass opposition off the ground and then bend it into shape as it does so, instead of waiting for a perfectly-formed workers’ party to fall from the skies.

If the whole of the British far left were to put everything it has got into building Respect, there is a undoubtedly a possibility of success. But my fear is that a part of the left is congenitally incapable of doing so. At any rate, I am glad to see that the CPGB has made the right move.

Right move
Right move

Bickering

Whether Respect succeeds or not, how do you break the cycle of the left consisting of small parties and talking to itself, while there is a much wider audience alien to Marxism?

The Bolshevik Party had only 23,000 members after the February revolution, and there were only three million workers in a population of 150 million in Russia. With approximately 23 million workers in Britain, we need to start off with at least a party of 250,000 members if the Bolshevik model is anything to go by. But people joining leftwing parties don’t grow on trees.

Reformism and anarcho-radicalism do not have any answers to the problems of capitalism. However, while in times of upturn in the struggle, something like Respect may initially be successful, there will come a time when the left has to demarcate class politics. And if it fails, then at least it will be able to draw in members.

So it’s not really a question of the Poverty of philosophy: just one of the poverty of left organisations arguing over their brand of Marxism. When the might of the working class moves, will there be a proper revolutionary socialist party waiting for them or a tiny, bickering left pursuing their own agendas?

Bickering
Bickering

Shove Respect

I have to say after reading two articles regarding Respect (‘Vote Respect’ and ‘South West: yes to republic’, March 25), I am more inclined than ever not to vote for them.

According to the report-back from the South West Respect convention, the West Midlands prospective candidate, Majid Khan supposedly endorsed ‘gender segregation’. If this is a true account of the meeting and what was actually said, then did anyone challenge this sexist claptrap? Or have people lost their critical minds? Did members of the CPGB challenge the content of Majid Khan’s speech as well as challenging Galloway et al on why the demand for a republic was rejected at the Respect founding conference? Or did people just ignore these comments?

I understand the arguments made by Marcus Ström in his article regarding why people should vote for Respect, but as a socialist feminist I just cannot stomach voting for a bunch of people who are willing to ignore these kind of offensive views being made in the name of Respect.

Well, so much for equality and the respect for women. I am still undecided about who will get my vote but, as regards Respect, they can shove it.

Shove Respect
Shove Respect

Auto-Labourism

The SWP’s internal mailing sent out just before the anti-war demo on March 20 makes very interesting reading, not simply for its less than wholehearted commitment to Respect highlighted by Jack Conrad (Weekly Worker March 25).

Leading SWPer Chris Bambery rounds off the email with this passage: “Prescott might try and scare Labour voters by saying a vote for Respect is a vote for Michael Howard, but the Tories cannot win the Euro or GLA elections. We will never have a better chance to punish Blair!”

If it is safe to vote for Respect now because the Tories are only just beginning the long climb out of their electoral hole, what about when they are clearly a viable election force again? Will the SWP - in keeping with its history - simply cave in to the pressure to ‘keep the Tories out’ and revert to their previous auto-Labourism every election time?

Precisely because the Respect project does not seem to go beyond the task of ‘punishing’ Blair in June, this sort of political collapse remains a danger. Perhaps - in this sense - Respect will one day be viewed not simply as the SWP’s vehicle for ditching the Socialist Alliance and the project of left unity it implied, but also its way back to supporting Labour at the ballot box?

Auto-Labourism
Auto-Labourism

Demoralisation

The chance of Galloway, Rees and Lavalette being elected as MEPs is pretty much zero, and the Weekly Worker should say so. The real danger of Respect is the high level of demoralisation that might take place after the June elections.

Demoralisation
Demoralisation

Green recruit

As a socialist, gay and human rights campaigner, I have decided to join the Green Party, which, unlike Respect, is grassroots and democratic.

The Green Party’s Manifesto for a sustainable society incorporates all the key socialist values. It rejects privatisation, free market economics and globalisation; it embodies a strong commitment to public ownership, workers’ rights, economic democracy, progressive taxation, and the redistribution of wealth and power.

The Greens’ manifesto has the unique advantage of modernising this anti-capitalist agenda in ways that can help avert the looming ecological catastrophe of global warming, resource depletion, biosphere pollution and species extinction. It is anti-privatisation, anti-war and anti-globalisation. No socialist can disagree with that.

Green recruit
Green recruit

Patience

Readers of the Weekly Worker will already be aware that Ron ‘moment of madness’ Davies has joined Forward Wales. This is the small group founded by John Marek, the former Labour Welsh assembly member.

Interestingly, Davies told BBC Wales that he had joined this new organisation to help fill the “vacuum” in Welsh politics. Plaid Cymru, which poses to the left of Labour here, were “just disqualifying themselves for serious consideration” because of their “continuing dalliance with the idea of independence” (www.bbc.co.uk, February 23).

I was wondering where this flat rejection of independence leaves Mark Davies and his mates in the left nationalist grouplet, Cymru Goch. Comrades will recall that this nasty little sect conspired to exclude what they despicably dubbed the “Brit left” (ie, non-nationalists) from the Marek-hosted ‘summer gathering’ of the left in Wales last year. This paper exposed their sordid little plot and printed email exchanges where they made clear their real agenda in what subsequently became Forward Wales.

Essentially, comrade Marek - not a nationalist by political inclination - was to act as a host organism for the parasite, Cymru Goch. CG’s Mark Davies put it pretty bluntly: “Marek is a left Labourite and will remain one despite his organisational break with Labour - we have to be realistic about this and take him as far as we can. He retires in less than four years time - I’m a patient person” (Weekly Worker September 11 2003).

Given Ron Davies’s recruitment to FW, it looks like Mark might have to be patient a little while longer. Or do he and his left-nat chums have another cunning plan for a short cut to the big time?

Patience
Patience