19.05.2004

Polls apart

seeing red

Peter Manson makes a serious attempt to critique the stance taken by Red Platform comrades on Respect (Weekly Worker May 6). His argument goes something like this. The political positions taken by Respect do not constitute a qualitative break with the positions taken by a variety of different groups - the Socialist Alliance, Socialist Labour Party, Socialist Party in England and Wales and Scottish Socialist Party - we have critically supported in elections in recent years. Therefore, it is sectarian to place conditions on our support for the unity coalition.

We beg to disagree. Not only does the populist programme of Respect mark a new low in terms of political positions; it also sharply deviates from what made those other formations, despite their obvious political shortcomings, supportable. That is attempting to organise the working class on socialist politics, whilst, in the case of the SA and SSP, a clear recognition of the necessity of uniting divided forces of the left.

Respect, therefore, marks the negation of what might be called the socialist alliance project. Its strategy of uniting with non-working class and non socialist forces marks a qualitative break from the method adopted by socialists in recent years. We do not look at this 'project' as some golden era of partyism and principle, but it marked a real step forward. Respect, in this sense, is a real step backwards.

Let us not underestimate how far the Socialist Workers Party has travelled to the right in recent times. Look at what Tony Cliff had to say about the electoralism of the SLP in an interview with Chris Nineham (Socialist Review November 1996): "Scargill's ideas reflect electoralism. He speaks in parliamentary terms - for example, he says we need a bill for a four-day working week - but what about the real struggle in the here and now? At the SLP conference someone moved a motion against immigration controls and Scargill argued to reject it. Of course he used a leftwing argument - what if a fascist wants to come in? - but everyone knows that immigration controls are used against black people."

How the Old Man was correct! Yet the present-day SWP/Respect has gone way beyond the electoralism of the SLP in its heyday. Even what you might consider less controversial issues, like abortion, do not merit even a mention in Respect's manifesto.

Whatever the economistic errors Cliff made to justify not standing in elections, his point was a very good one. Perhaps, I am more Cliffite than today's SWP.

Although the turn to electoralism began when Cliff was alive, its early orientation was rather different than what it is in June 2004. This is what Lindsey German had to write in the late 1990s about the electoralism of some sections of the European far left: "Since the downturn in class struggle from the mid-1970s, some of the biggest groups have retreated into electoral politics as their major orientation. This has not only led them into alliances with non-socialists such as the Greens; it has also led them to judge their success inside the working class movement by the number of votes they receive, rather than by their underlying strength in the factories and workplaces.

"This has led in turn to their elevating individuals who achieve electoral success above anyone else. Yet this only builds up the notion of MPs or councillors as the most important people in the movement" (my emphasis Socialist Review June 1998).

From today's vantage point such a statement is comical. Isn't this the Lindsey who was so disappointed when the non-socialist Green Party refused to enter into a pact with Respect? Isn't this the Lindsey who bows and scrapes to George Galloway? Isn't this the Lindsey who has so assiduously courted the mosque, MAB and now, apparently, the homophobic People's Justice Party in Birmingham?

Yet such hypocrisy is not really comical. It is tragic. Today the SWP is a deeply disoriented party, frustrated by its failure to break out of the far-left ghetto, despite its key role in the anti-war movement. For all the hype about being able to humiliate Blair on June 10, its popular frontist attempt to reach out to non-working class forces, reveals a profound pessimism about the prospects for socialists.

It is the business of communists to state the truth about Respect. This is not because we want to score points over the SWP. Rather because we want to reorientate the dedicated militants of the SWP to the principled position of fighting for a unified, democratic centralist, all-Britain Communist Party. This is the future, not Respect.

We do SWP members no favours by claiming that Respect marks no qualitative break from the socialist alliance project. In doing so we demean the achievements of the SA and actually make it more difficult to persuade SWP members that Respect marks a retreat from independent working class politics.

Jack Conrad put it succinctly in 'Party notes' following the January 25 Respect conference: "The willingness, the enthusiasm, to trade away or abandon one principle after another and substitute platitudes for concrete demands is a slippery slope. Both Rees and Galloway appear to think that, the less Respect has to say, the more it will attract votes. Hence principles which are solemnly proclaimed one year become merely matters of private belief, or taste, the next.

"The implication is clear: only by moving further and further to the right can the left garner votes - a caricature of what the SWP used to say about the sorry course plied by successive generations of Labourites" (Weekly Worker January 29).

Peter says that we need to start from where the left is, not from where we would like it to be. We disagree with his method. We start from what the working class needs and Respect is not it in any shape or form. This is why Red Platform refuses to give unconditional backing to Respect

Postscript: Missing 'Party democracy'?

The Red Platform originally planned to run another article in 'Seeing red', but the editor, comrade Peter Manson, decided that to publish comrade Richards's reply to his own criticism of our politics in addition to our planned 'Seeing red' would give the platform "too much prominence" in this issue, and insisted we ran one or the other. We strongly disagree. The Red Platform represents over a 10th of the CPGB's membership, and democratic norms suggest the right to proportional representation in our paper: actually more than a page every week.

We have, in fact, sought far less than this in the two previous issues, but, as the editor himself chose to write a piece criticising our politics, we feel we should have been allowed a full page this week to deal with his arguments, and continue our series on the points of our founding statement. Given the insistence that we run one piece or the other, we have chosen to reply to comrade Manson's critique here, but our full argument on this question, plus the article we planned to run (ironically, on the subject of 'Party democracy'), can be found on our website, at www.cpgb.org.uk/red/democracy.