21.07.2004

Party Notes: Back to programme

In this week's 'Party Notes' Mark Fischer argues that the lack of a programme is coming to haunt the Socialist Workers Party

But hope springs eternal. Attentions and carefully fostered illusions turned to the Birmingham and Leicester by-elections. Respect’s candidates were high-profile: the SWP’s paramount leader, John Rees, and Yvonne Ridley, the former Express journalist who was captured by the Taliban and subsequently converted to islam. No worker’s wage for her, of course. If elected to the House of Commons she would immediately demand a 400% salary hike. And not surprisingly our would-be Plutus recommended herself to Leicester voters not on the basis of any kind of socialism: rather that she was a self-willed woman and a muslim.

Not that anyone in the SWP thought about MPs this time round. All that was wanted were results that would not humiliate, or further demoralise. As it turned out, Respect’s figures were good … given the much lower expectations. Saving deposits is now, of course, dubbed the “breakthrough” that has supposedly sent “shock waves” through the whole political establishment. Nonsense, but comforting nonsense for the battered, disoriented and much diminished SWP cadre. And nonsense which in an instant metamorphosed them back into snarling, strutting, but empty-headed sectarians. Morbid hostility and brittle fear have long been characteristic features of the SWP’s relations with others on the revolutionary left - perhaps with the brief exception of the 2000-2001 honeymoon period enjoyed by the Socialist Alliance.

Respect might call itself the ‘unity coalition’. However, the SWP is perfectly clear that this unity is with forces to its right. In that sense Respect is consciously an anti-left unity project for the SWP. As comrade Bambery put it during one of the sessions, “left realignment … does not mean shuffling the deck of the existing left”. It actually excludes the “old left who could not relate to the new movement” created by the anti-Iraq war upsurge (Weekly Worker July 15).

So, instead of Respect’s “breakthrough” being the opportunity to (at least metaphorically) magnanimously sling an arm round the shoulders of other leftwingers and persuade them onboard, the opposite is true. Last week’s results have increased the distance separating the SWP from the other revolutionary trends - both those inside the Labour Party and outside. With Respect reaching the dizzy heights of 6% and 12%, the SWP thinks it has made a qualitative leap and is now inhabiting the big time.

Maybe, but most probably maybe not. But the problem is not whether or not Respect had made a “breakthrough”. The problem, as always, is political. Respect is not founded upon a Marxist programme designed to achieve working class rule and the abolition of capitalism through the struggle for extreme democracy … and that is what objective circumstances require at this historic juncture. Anything else is either a positive hindrance or doomed to produce nothing but disappointment.

Respect is a left populist formation … and organisational forms loyally follow politics. Hence, instead of boring old meetings and policy debates, Respect’s members are expected to content themselves with picnics, film shows and football matches. A deeply patronising attitude - and incidentally one guaranteed to fail. In the meantime, while the children play, the SWP’s top leaders and their close allies on Respect’s executive will get on with the serious business of deciding, controlling, running everything towards a disaster made from above.

Reality and perception are related, but hardly ever coincide. Where the SWP thinks it is going with Respect can be gleaned from comrade Rees and his sub-reformist and populist electoralist perspectives. The results of Birmingham and Leicester, he told us at the Marxism rally, had confirmed “that the hold of Labourism” on the working class “was dissolving at an enormously fast speed”.

The previous period had seen a lot of political alternatives emerge to fill the gap left by Labourism: now, the elections had shown that “one organisation has emerged as a rival” - Respect. Supposedly Britain’s fourth party - that is, if you wilfully ignore UKIP, the Greens, the BNP.

Moreover, unlike the 1970s, no rightwing mood is growing out of the disintegration of Labourism, as the hopeless situation of the Tories proves. Now, the movement is to the left of Labour - and takes the form of a competition between the Liberal Democrats and Respect.

Elections are hugely important, he said. The Stop the War Coalition had been “magnificent”; the phrase, “our mother ship”, was later used. But for most of the people who live in Leicester South or Birmingham’s Hodge Hill, the STWC had at best just “skimmed their lives”. So, it was therefore “not a retreat” to seriously engage in elections. In fact, it was a “profound form of engagement”. It got to grips with the “profound desire for something new to emerge” that SWP comrades had encountered in their mass work, offering us the chance to “reshape the whole of politics”.

Thus the task was of going lower and deeper. “Who do you know?” comrade Rees asked the audience. “Can you take us to a local mosque, a church, a trade union branch?”

For the SWP the fundamental dividing line in the workers’ movement between reform and revolution has always been a matter of lip service. Traditionally it would automatically vote Labour and for the rest of the time get on with what it imagined to be the really important work of promoting militant trade unionism. Issues such as the monarchy, the House of Lords, the secret state and democracy in general were of no concern. In other words a classic case of reformism in practice, revolution only in words.

Respect pushes the SWP’s centrism so far to the right that it puts enormous strains on the ability of its leadership and the organisation as a whole to maintain formal adherence to Bolshevism. What drives the SWP is no longer simply recruits and paper sales, but votes - and that means suitably trimming and tailoring its politics.

It is always the case with sects that success in terms of connecting with wider society - even when extremely modest in historic terms - triggers crises. Opportunist weaknesses, long hidden under the revolutionary rhetoric of Cliffism, had to surface under John Rees, given the huge anti-war demonstrations in 2003 and the SWP’s prominent role. In the last analysis everything goes back to programme.

The role of our communist programme is clear: it is designed to firmly link our “continuous and all-encompassing agitational work with the ultimate aim of communism … it represents … the standard, the reference point, around which the voluntary unity of party members is built and concretised” (J Conrad Which road? London 1991, p235). Of course, the SWP has an unofficial programme - whatever is considered advantageous or convenient by the current leader or set of leaders. However, almost religiously, it shuns the adoption of an official, fully debated and democratically agreed one.

Putting things down in black and white might make them vulnerable to rank and file doubts and questioning; it would certainly expose their pretension to stand in the “revolutionary communist tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky”. Spiritually the SWP is surely far closer to Russia’s semi-Marxist and thoroughly eclectic Socialist Revolutionary Party, which before the 1917 revolution used to oscillate between wildly acclaiming the educative virtues of terrorist spectacles on the one hand and dully supporting liberal parliamentarians on the other.

The last time the SWP, even half-seriously, touched upon the question of programme was in the early 1990s. In what was widely taken as a semi-official reply to those members calling for a programme commission, Gareth Jenkins actually stated that “the Bolsheviks were light-minded about programmes, but principled in practice” (SWP internal Bulletin No3, November 1991).

Untrue, of course. In fact, Lenin stressed time and time again the “tremendous importance of a programme for the consolidation and consistent activity of a political party” (VI Lenin CW Vol 4, Moscow 1977, p229). Programme-phobia is actually a characteristic not of Bolshevism, but of the leaders of the SWP. Given Respect’s populism - and the naked pursuit of votes for their own sake - it is not really too hard to understand why a revolutionary “standard, a reference point”, against which today’s particular zig or zag can be judged, would be the last thing the likes of comrade Rees would want.