17.11.2005
SP rival to Respect?
Joni Wells reports on the Socialist Party's Campaign for a New Workers Party
The Socialist Party kicked off its Campaign for a New Workers Party at an upbeat rally of well over 500 comrades at the end of Socialism 2005. The CNWP demonstrates that the comrades are now - still tentatively, it is true - starting to put a little more flesh on the abstract call for a mass workers' party that they have spoken about in general terms for years. In this sense it is a reflection of their renewed confidence. The SP believes it has reached a "watershed" in its fortunes, as Linda Taaffe, the chair of the rally, put it. Speaker after speaker from the platform referred to the number of young people at the event: their presence was "inspiring", said Janice Godrich, SP member and PCSU president, and one of 26 members of the organisation who sit on the national leaderships of various unions, we were informed by SPer Roger Bannister of Unison. This buoyant mood is explained by a number of interrelated features - the continued rightward evolution of the Blair government and the big vacuum it leaves to its left; what is perceived as the political (and organisational) bankruptcy of the its main rival, the SWP, and its Respect adventure; and, lastly, the SP's success in pulling itself out of the organisation slump it endured through the 1990s into the early years of this century, with its new layers of mainly young recruits. One SP member gently teased a CPGB comrade earlier in the day about the series of articles we ran chronicling the SP's decline under the general heading of 'Socialist Party in crisis' (see www.cpgb.org.uk/spewcrisis/). He should reread them - he clearly missed the point. The organisational travails of the SP in the past - catastrophic membership losses, the haemorrhaging of important areas such as Scotland, Merseyside and Pakistan - were organisational expressions of a programmatic crisis. In truth, the launch of this campaign has the potential to exacerbate that most fundamental of problems - what sort of politics should people who dub themselves Marxists fight for any new formation to adopt? For the SP the answer is clear, even though it was not explicitly spelled out at the closing rally. The declaration announcing the new campaign - signed by 21 SPers, prominent as trade unionists or local councillors - tells us: "In the past the Labour Party, however imperfectly, provided a voice for the working class." True, of course, but an organisation that embodied the voice of the proletariat rather better was the Communist Party, founded in 1920 as part of the Third International headed by Lenin and Trotsky. However, the SP shares the general prejudice of the left that the working class are somehow allergic to the message of Marxism. In an earlier session on Iraq an SP comrade stated that a new workers' party was needed so that socialists could at least start to get the ear of workers again. Then slowly they can be pulled towards 'Marxism' and into the Socialist Party. Challenged by a CPGB supporter as to whether this meant that comrades from the SP would dilute their demands within this new party, the chair spoke out strongly against any such idea: "There will be no dilution of principles," he stressed. Comrades from the SWP would also deny any such "dilution" through involvement in Respect "¦ and point to their formal adherence to such principles, as embodied in the 'What the SWP stands for' column, carried weekly in their newspaper. The trouble is that principles that are not applied concretely in the course of day-to-day political work become dead letters - meaningless words contradicted daily by the organisation's actual practice. Thus, it is instructive how comrade Dave Nellist - by far the best speaker at the closing rally - formulated the need for this new party: "In the long term," he stated, "we need not just regime change, but system change." That requires "a new party, which is for the working class, which is open and democratic. We want all groups to test ideas out, perhaps put a cap on numbers so no group ends up dominating". Even more explicitly, he stated the possibility of the need for the SP to show "self-restraint" in pushing for its politics, at least in the early days. Comrade Nellist tells us: "The Socialist Party will provide the spine "¦ the arguments for the development of the new workers' party" that was explicitly characterised by Tony Mulhearn, a veteran of the Militant-led debacle in Liverpool in the mid-1980s, as a "broad left formation". This is SP-speak for the conviction that the new workers' party must be Labourite, not revolutionary Marxist. And this is the brand of politics the comrades intend to actually take the lead in fighting for. This odd brand of 'revolutionary' self-effacement will be nothing new to regular readers, of course - comrades will recall the rightist role that the SP played in the Socialist Alliance. For example, speaking in support of the SP proposal to delete the reference to the scrapping of all immigration laws at the SA's March 10 2001 policy conference, Hannah Sell laid out its wretched method. Obviously "we do agree with" the demand, she said, but it was not a good idea to "write down what is blatantly true and we all believe", since even the "most advanced sections of the working class" are convinced that border controls are necessary (Weekly Worker March 15 2001). Obviously we would expect the SP to behave in exactly the same way - or worse - in any new formation. After all, the programmatic outlines adopted by the SP in its earlier incarnation as the Militant Tendency actually consisted of a brand of Labourite reformism in the first place. We have analysed this in some depth in our paper over the years, but most comprehensively in Jack Conrad's Which road? Comrade Conrad showed that, the occasional rhetorical flourish aside, Militant/the SP is committed to the achievement of 'socialism' "through an enabling bill in parliament", not the revolutionary democratic struggle of the masses themselves (P Taaffe What we stand for June 1990, p8). Thus a "socialist Britain" could apparently be achieved "through parliament backed by the mobilised power of the labour movement outside" (our emphasis, Militant International Review no33, autumn 1986, p9). In other words, exactly the sort of auxiliary 'walk on, walk off' role assigned to the action of the masses by reformism historically - and with the same treacherous logic. What the real prospects are for the SP's CNWP remain to be seen. Dave Nellist informed us that an event was planned for the early spring of 2006 to bring activists of the campaign together to discuss the way forward. This was timed and tailored to ease into the slipstream of the RMT's January conference on the question of working class representation, which is viewed more as a place to air options than plump for hard choices. But to what extent the SP will be successful in bringing on board serious figures from the trade unions is debatable. Some remain committed to a 'reclaim Labour' perspective; others - including Mark Serwotka, Matt Wrack and Bob Crow - seem happy with a pick 'n' mix approach to the organisations they are currently prepared to support - perhaps that will change when something of more substance comes along. However, this initiative from a serious working class organisation creates another forum to carry forward a debate that is starting to embroil strategically important sections of the workers' movement and the left - what sort of party does the working class need? In particular, we welcome comrade Nellist's closing remarks to the rally to the effect that new campaign must be an "open, democratic and welcoming" place where "all groups" have the space to make their arguments. By contrast, according to general secretary Peter Taaffe, speaking at the previous evening's rally, Respect is "not open, not inclusive and not democratic". What is more, Respect is "too narrow", since it is "based on one section" (he meant muslims). Clearly the SP is looking to form a rival 'broad' organisation whose pulling power will be its inclusivity. The CNWP founding declaration states that "a new party, and any pre-party formations" should offer the right to "all groups and individuals, providing they are in agreement with the basic aims of the party, [to] "¦ democratically organise and argue for their point of view". We look forward to engaging in that debate, comrades. Related articles * Reviving left reformism The Socialist Party's weekend school demonstrated that sectarianism brings short-term advantages, says Peter Manson * SP rival to Respect? Joni Wells reports on the Socialist Party's Campaign for a New Workers Party * Short-termist and dishonest Peter Manson looks at the role of the Socialist Party in the public service pensions sell-out