13.10.2004

Guide to the British left: Whose left at the ESF?

The British left is renowned for its fractious and sectarian nature. The European Social Forum in London will enhance that reputation enormously, writes Ian Mahoney

The European Social Forum is a strange beast. Its is lauded by some as the embodiment of a new democratic anti-capitalist movement that leaves behind the statist and hierarchical traditions of the ‘old’ left. In truth it largely represents the reconstitution of that ‘old’ left in a new - rather dishonest - form.
Thus, at the 2002 ESF in Florence, what was on show were the strengths and weaknesses of Rifondazione Comunista. In Paris last year, we saw the social pull of the French Communist Party and the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire. And London in 2004 will reveal to our comrades across Europe the true state of the British far left. Below, we give a thumbnail sketch of some of the groups comrades are likely to encounter in one form or another (we leave aside the trade union and mainstream Labour left as well as the Morning Star’s deeply divided and largely moribund Communist Party of Britain).

Socialist Workers Party
Newspaper: Socialist Worker (weekly, but will go daily during the ESF).
Other journals: International Socialism (quarterly), Socialist Review (monthly).
Website: www.swp.org.uk.
Prominent members: John Rees (editor of International Socialism and national secretary of Respect); Lindsey German (Stop the War Coalition convenor and member of Respect executive); Alex Callinicos (responsible for international work through the SWP’s International Socialist Tendency, and authoritative writer); Chris Bambery (Socialist Worker editor and member of Respect executive).
Size: Claims in the recent past have ranged from 10,000 to 15,000 card-carriers - in truth, around 1,200 real members.
Comments: For a number of years, there has been speculation about a split. Many find it had to believe that a group could be so consistently opportunist, so cynically cavalier with its own political tradition and so bureaucratically heavy-handed in everything it touches without provoking sharp internal dissent.
There have been signs of acute problems of late. The organisation made a lunge for the big time following the success of the mass mobilisations again the Iraq war within which the Stop the War Coalition was prominent. The SWP leadership gleefully ditched political principle and its allies on the left in the Socialist Alliance in a search for votes via its new front, the Respect coalition - but it has had very little return so far. Similarly, the SWP lobbied hard for the ESF to come to London as part of its attempt to project itself one of the ‘main players’ in Europe, alongside the likes of RC in Italy and the LRC in France.

We suspect that many comrades in Europe now have a clearer idea of why the SWP is so universally disliked and mistrusted on the British left. For example, the it’s blatant hijacking of the ESF demonstration on October 17 was an example of the method it habitually uses in the workers’ movement in Britain.

The organisation is always busy with the next campaign to be built, the next meeting or march to be mobilised for - normally with organisers telling everyone how “excited” they are. Yet its field of work is actually extremely narrow. Where are the SWP’s trade union general secretaries, councillors or MPs, the layers it influences in the Labour Party, etc?

A politically disorientated membership is prodded from one campaign to another, from one priority to the next. In any organisation with a functioning democratic culture, such manipulation would provoke criticism, revolt even. Yet, apart from a few individuals here and there, the ranks of the SWP remain remarkably passive. This is achieved through a politically pulverising, undemocratic internal regime. The membership is further disempowered by the fact that the SWP leadership has made it a point of principle not to have a programme.

Thus politics for the SWP consists in adapting itself to prevailing moods in society, attempting to give a left coloration to the existing consciousness of the class. This accounts for the organisation’s position on Europe - an attempt to tailor its politics to existing anti-European prejudices in wider society rather than give a genuine, principled lead - for a Europe united by militant action from below.

Position on Europe: For withdrawal from the EU. “There are very good reasons for workers to be wholly against the European project,” says Charlie Kimber (Socialist Worker August 24 2002).

Alliance for Workers’ Liberty
Newspaper: Solidarity (fortnightly).
Other journals: Workers’ Liberty (occasional).
Website: www.workersliberty.org.uk
Prominent members: Sean Matgamna, Martin Thomas, Mark Osborn.
Size: Around 100 members, with a very small periphery beyond that.
Comments: Origins in the International Socialists, forerunners of the SWP. From 1974 onwards, became a Labour Party entryist group.

The AWL attempts to position itself as a ‘third campist’ trend. (The first camp being imperialism, the second Stalinism and the third camp that of the working class and independent proletarian politics.) However, characteristic of the AWL throughout its ‘third camp’ manifestation has been slippage - it constantly veers towards the first camp and a fatal softness on oppressor peoples (eg, comrade Matgmana calls himself a Zionist). Just as telling has been its equivocal stance on the Iraq war. Essentially, the organisation regards the victory of imperialism as the lesser evil and refuses to call for the immediate withdrawal of US-UK troops.

Nevertheless, a group with a relatively healthy regime, an interesting paper and comrades who, in general, are prepared to debate with others on the left - although not always in a way that is designed to bring enlightenment.

Position on Europe: For a boycott of any referendum on the euro; position on any referendum on the constitution not yet decided, but the group could well end up calling for a boycott of that too. Nevertheless, it has a basically correct approach of “building on what the bourgeoisie has created and uniting the working class across the EU to fight the bourgeoisie for democratic and social reform and, in the course of doing that, building towards socialist transformation by working class revolution on a European scale” (website).

Workers Power
Newspaper: Workers Power (monthly).
Other journals: Revolution - paper of the formally “independent” youth group “in political solidarity” with WP.
Website: www.workerspower.com
Prominent members: Mark Hoskisson, Dave Stockton, Keith Hassle.
Size: Probably between 40 and 50 domestically, perhaps a couple of hundred worldwide, when you tot up the numbers in its rebranded international grouping, the League for a Fifth International.
Comments: Originated in International Socialists faction fights of the 1970s. Briefly fused with what went on to become the AWL (although the claim on the AWL website that WP is “to a considerable extent our creation” seems a little overblown). Has undergone a number of political u-turns over the years - no sin in itself, of course. But - like much of the left - it has simply announced these fundamental changes in its world view.

Its comrades have distinguished themselves in the ESF preparatory meetings in Britain by repeatedly calling for a “youth space” - they did not have much to say about anything else that was going on. The idea is, of course, to create a “space” at the ESF for its own youth group, Revolution - a recruiting pool for the ‘parent’ organisation (members of other political trends are told to bugger off).

International Socialist Group
Newspaper: Resistance (a co-sponsored monthly).
Other journals: International Viewpoint, journal of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.
Website: www.zoo.co.uk/~z8001063/International-Socialist-Group
Prominent members: Alan Thornett (member of Respect executive); Greg Tucker (leading militant in the RMT rail union).
Size: Up to 100 members, I have been informed, but 25 seems more realistic
Comments: Official section of the Fourth International in Britain - although that is much less impressive than it sounds. Via a whole series of splits, realignments and cruel historical ironies, this is what remains of the dynamic but politically unstable, student-based International Marxist Group, which was prominent in the anti-Vietnam war movement of the 1960s and was led - amongst others - by Tariq Ali. Thus, it has a family relationship to Socialist Action - which neither organisation boasts about too loudly these days (see below).

In more recent years, the ISG has constituted itself as apologist for the SWP’s more crass manoeuvres - first in the Socialist Alliance and now in Respect. During the ESF, it will be flogging two issues of a newspaper produced jointly with its fraternal organisation, the LCR - this should be marginally more interesting that its turgid monthly.

Position on Europe: For withdrawal, using the reasoning that as the EU is a “bosses’ club” and workers are better off out of it. It has been pointed out that Britain is also a “bosses’ club” … but the comrades have that one covered. They are for the break-up of Britain too - along nationalist lines.

Socialist Party
Newspaper: The Socialist (weekly).
Other journals: Socialism Today (monthly).
Prominent members: Peter Taaffe (leader); Dave Nellist (SP councillor in Coventry); Roger Bannister (executive of Unison trade union).
Website: www.socialistparty.org.uk
Size: Hard to tell, but probably in the region of 200 to 300 genuine members, with a small periphery.
Comments: Today’s Socialist Party is what is left over from the once (relatively) sizeable Militant Tendency. By the early 1990s, it could plausibly refer to itself as the “largest organised force on the left”. It claimed the allegiance of three Labour MPs, numerous Labour councillors and a layer of trade union officials; it ran the highly effective anti-poll tax campaign that was partially instrumental in the fall of Margaret Thatcher.

Life outside the Labour Party proved much tougher than anticipated. Throughout the “red 90s” - as it dubbed them - the SP suffered loss after loss: just about its whole Scottish section (which went on to form the core of today’s Scottish Socialist Party), most of its organisation in Liverpool, its section in Pakistan, etc. Membership plummeted. Yet no debate on this crisis was featured in the pages of The Socialist - only the Weekly Worker comprehensively covered the issues involved in the fragmentation of this once significant left organisation.

A real merit of the Militant tradition has been its ability to nurture genuine working class leaders - comrades such as Tommy Sheridan, Dave Nellist and even Derek Hatton (deputy leader of Liverpool council in his time).

Position on Europe: Fairly standard left stance of “no to the European constitution”, “no to the euro”, “for a socialist Europe” - but without explaining how we get from where we are to that bright tomorrow.

Scottish Socialist Party
Newspaper: Scottish Socialist Voice (weekly).
Website: www.scottishsocialistparty.org
Prominent members: Tommy Sheridan (national convenor and member of the Scottish parliament); Alan McCombes (editor Scottish Socialist Voice); Allan Green (national secretary).
Size: Between 3,000 and 3,500 on paper.
Comments: Unlike its all-Britain counterparts based in London, the SSP has made a real impact north of the border. It saw five other representatives elected to sit alongside Tommy Sheridan in the Scottish parliament in May 2003.

Whereas the SWP fought shy of leading the Socialist Alliance in England and Wales along the road to becoming an inclusive party - eventually strangling this unity project altogether - that is precisely what Scottish Militant Labour did within the Scottish Socialist Alliance in the late 1990s.

Factions - or platforms - are constitutionally permitted and members enjoy a regime of openness that is largely lacking south of the border.

However, in its current form the SSP cannot become the model for the kind of left unity we need, since it has bought into Scottish nationalism hook, line and sinker.

Position on Europe: Despite its poisonous call for the break-up of Britain, and therefore of its working class movement, the SSP has a more contradictory position on the EU. It calls for both a Scottish withdrawal and “a congress of the peoples of Europe, to be elected by ballot, country by country. This congress would then have the task of drawing up a draft constitution, which would then be voted upon country by country.”

Socialist Action
Publications: None - Socialist Action last appeared in 1999.
Size: Hard to gauge, but probably no more than 40.
Website: ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/sa_review/sahome.htm - although last updated in April 2003 with the text of a pamphlet on the Iraq war.
Prominent members: Redmond O’Neill, Simon Fletcher, John Ross: all three have been appointed by Livingstone to work for the GLA - Redmond O’Neill is on a salary of £111,000.
Comment: This very small sect undertakes no public work under its own banner. Spookily, however, this is probably the most influential organisation involved in the whole show. SA has played a pivotal role at every stage of the London ESF organisation - essentially as bureaucratic stooges for the London mayor, Ken Livingstone, who is in basic control of the event. For decades now, the political project of this clandestine grouplet has been to insinuate itself in various official campaigns and into the entourage of the likes of Livingstone. Its members and sympathisers have ensconced themselves in longstanding campaigns such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and help staff various GLA-sponsored organisations like the National Assembly Against Racism.

This tiny group has a set of pretty distasteful Stalinoid positions. It has backed regimes as unpleasant as general Aideed in Somalia, the “Serbian people” (ie, supporters of Milosevic) and the Chinese bureaucracy: SA actually critically supported the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. How did this small organisation come to occupy such a (relatively) large number of influential positions?

In fact SA has far more in common with a political conspiracy than a political organisation in the conventional understanding of the term. Characteristically, its comrades will operate as administrators but will be at pains not to politically differentiate themselves. They do, however, provide an extremely useful policing role. Its comrades are well versed in techniques of crude manipulation and are fanatically committed to fighting anything, such as the revolutionary left, which would undermine ‘unity’.

Position on Europe: Hard to pin down on specifics, especially as it has to maintain an unprincipled balancing act between competing political pressures (eg, Ken Livingstone, who is pro-Europe, and the Campaign Group of Labour MPs, which is anti). However, an article on its inert website does criticise the notion that “the EU can be a vehicle for reform and progress for the working class in Europe”, as “the EU is specifically structured to prevent the labour movement bringing about such pressure for reforms”. It seems the group would vote ‘no’ in any referendum on the euro, but has more of a pick ’n’ mix approach to other EU questions.