05.05.2004

Sectarian delusions

Peter Manson replies to the open letter to the CPGB from the Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform

Thank you for your invitation to rejoin the Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform. While the CPGB will certainly cooperate with the SADP comrades whenever the occasion arises, we must nevertheless decline your invitation to rejoin.

As you point out, the CPGB “played an active role in setting up the SADP”. We did so because, as the most partisan of the principal supporting groups, we sought to further our aim of transforming the Socialist Alliance into the core of a working class party. To that end it was vital to secure democracy - the space to fight for that objective, including against the SWP-led majority which was bent on restricting the alliance to the role of an on-off electoral front.

We agree that the SA “represented a positive gain for the socialist movement” - not just because the left was organising together, but because the very logic of uniting under a common manifesto pointed towards a democratic centralist party. When we fought for the “SA project, its programme and constitution”, we did so not for its own sake, but only inasmuch as the SA could be regarded as a step towards such a party. Left unity is not just a nice idea. It is a process that must continuously be deepened and strengthened, a process that culminates organisationally in a Communist Party, armed with a revolutionary programme.

We recognise that many comrades, including within the SADP, have never shared our partyist vision. For some the SA was an end in itself - a loose network was all that was needed. For others a federal structure, one that deliberately held back from closer unity, was sufficient. Yet others, not least the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, saw the SA as just ‘another area of work’. The AWL, now the largest grouping within the SADP, likes to pose as the most intransigent champion of the SA, but its attitude has been, at the very best, one of ambivalence, even when the prospects were far more favourable than now.

Thanks to the actions of the SWP, the Socialist Alliance is now effectively dead. Those who pretend otherwise are deluding themselves. The mere act of observing and recognising this liquidation certainly does not make us liquidationists. In this context, we have downgraded SA work - call that “abandoning the fight for the SA project” if you like. Suffice to say, the fight for a working class party that we conducted in the Socialist Alliance and that we are now conducting elsewhere is one we shall never abandon.

The main site for this struggle is at present within Respect. To say this is not to deny that Respect is “inferior to the SA in terms of its programme and democratic constitution”. However, it is superior to the SA in one vital sense: it is not dead. Respect, not the SA cadaver, is the main left force contesting the European and Greater London Authority elections. Whatever we think of the SWP for its strangling of the Socialist Alliance, for its junking of the SA’s programmatic gains in favour of the platitudes of Respect, that is a simple statement of fact.

For all our criticisms of Respect’s platform, it is the only force widely contesting the EU and GLA elections on the basis of defending elementary working class interests - in however inadequate a way. That is why it has attracted some measure of trade union support - various RMT branches, Mark Serwotka, the FBU’s Linda Smith, etc. The SADP’s decision “not to join or support Respect” is thus sectarian. No doubt it is based on understandable anger and frustration at the SWP’s unprincipled retreat, but sectarian it is nevertheless.

Comrade McLaren says that the “issue that led to [the CPGB’s] walkout” from the Democracy Platform was “the decision to allow non-members of the SA to join the SADP”. That was indeed the occasion, but there was nothing minor or petty about it. That decision marked the transformation of the SADP from an internal opposition, united on a very limited set of tactics and politics, into an external ‘party’. A ‘party’ with all the localist, economistic and reformist limitations of the SA, yet with none of its weight … second time farce. We note that the SADP has registered itself as a political party in order to contest the June 10 elections in a handful of council wards. We wish the candidates well, but the SADP is not, and cannot, substitute itself for the Socialist Alliance - which primarily had significance to the extent it united Britain’s main left groups.

Comrade McLaren alleges that our refusal to go along with this transformation of the SADP into a ‘party’ was, in reality, “the beginning of a CPGB move to realign itself with the SWP-ISG bloc”. Perhaps he no longer reads our press - but even a cursory glance at the Weekly Worker would surely be enough to convince him that we are hardly trying to curry favour with the SWP-ISG leadership. It is a strange ‘realignment’ that, week after week, manifests itself in a thorough exposure of the watering down and abandonment of one working class principle after another.

Finally, comrade McLaren claims that by resigning as SA nominating officer the CPGB’s Marcus Ström “undermined” the efforts of SA branches wishing to stand candidates and “saved the SWP some difficulty or embarrassment”. This is really scraping the barrel. Comrade Ström publicly resigned during the afternoon session of SA’s March 13 special conference - which the majority of the SADP boycotted - in protest against the SWP’s closure of the SA. Had he remained in post, that would not have resulted in a single official SA candidate - something comrade McLaren knows full well. Comrade Ström would immediately have been replaced if he had defied what was, after all, the democratic decision of the conference.

The CPGB will continue to fight for the unity of all socialists in a single working class party. We will do so in Respect, in the Labour Party and in whatever other arena life itself throws up.