09.05.2007

Ten versus ten

Jack Conrad offers an alternative to the Socialist Party's method and its programme in the run-up to this Saturday's conference of the Campaign for a New Workers' Party

The Campaign for a New Workers’ Party was launched just over a year ago. This weekend sees its second national conference/rally at the University College of London. Its central and abiding aim seems to be founding a new, albeit leftwing, Labour Party in England and Wales. Scotland is left outside the frame in deference to left nationalist sects. Apart from gathering some 2,500 signatures and holding a few regional and trade union conference fringe meetings, since then activity and initiative have been almost entirely absent. The reason is twofold.

Firstly, the main movers behind CNWP, the Socialist Party in England and Wales, treats it as an on-off front. Like the Socialist Workers Party, Workers Power, etc, SPEW is a typical confessional sect which portrays itself internally as the ‘revolutionary party’. However, because of its suffocating lack of democracy, ban on open debate and abject theoretical poverty, SPEW finds itself socially marginal. Few find the prospect of joining or supporting such an outfit attractive. Therefore in the attempt to con wider sections of the population, SPEW dresses CNWP in the garb of old Labour. People are not so easily fooled though.

Secondly, there is no objective movement towards a new mass reformist party. The Labour Party has changed under Tony Blair. It is a Tory-Labour party. But that was essentially the case under Kier Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald and Clement Attlee - in spite of SPEW claims to the contrary. The Labour Party was and remains a bourgeois workers’ party, a party which loyally and consistently carries out the wishes and policies of British capitalism at home and abroad. The Labour Party never represented working class interests, even imperfectly. However, the big trade unions are not about to disaffiliate from Labour and throw their lot in with SPEW. That is clear. They bank on exerting influence on a Gordon Brown government. As they succeeded in doing, no matter how pathetically, with the Tony Blair government.

What is needed today, and what is certainly within our reach, is the unity of the existing left groups and activists into a single Marxist party; a party that not only allows, but actively encourages, the widest debate and the fullest democracy. Without that there can be no effective or lasting centralism.

The inadequacy and cynicism of SPEW and its trusted allies can be seen in its whole approach to the May 12 conference. CNWP’s 10 central demands being presented for a conference vote are in general unobjectionable, but together they add up to little more than a banal set of economistic priorities.

1. Keep health and education public. Stop and reverse the cuts in, and the sell-off of, our public services. For properly funded, democratically controlled public services for all.
2. For decent, affordable public housing for all who want it.
3. For free education for all.
4. No to racism and discrimination - oppose the divisive BNP. No to the specific oppressions that people suffer due to their ethnic background, nationality, gender, sexuality, age, disabilities or health.
5. Repeal the anti-trade union laws.
6. For a living wage of at least £8 an hour, and a living pension - restore the link with earnings now.
7. No to Trident nuclear weapons - spend the £76 billion on public services.
8. For decisive action to save the planet - including, in particular, public ownership and planning of energy and transport, leading to massive investment and expansion of renewable energy and clean, public transport.
9. Immediate withdrawal of the troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
10. No to the capitalist profit system. For a democratic socialist society, based on the public ownership of the major corporations that dominate the economy, and run to meet the needs of all, and to protect our environment for future generations, instead of the profits of a few.

Where there are high politics they have no relationship, no dynamic, towards the conquest of power by the working class. Equally to the point, the 10 demands were drafted by a closed little circle and only released to supporters and affiliate organisations a week or so ago. Before that only those ‘in the know’ were allowed in on the process.

In other words comrades who have a different vision, those who reject the idea of a Labour Party mark II, those who want unity of the left and the working class on the basis of Marxism, had only a few days to put together, to discuss and agree their alternatives and no time whatsoever to publicise, let alone test, them in debate with SPEW and win a majority. That is fundamentally undemocratic. It makes a complete mockery of claims that CNWP “is open, democratic and welcoming”.

Democracy does not consist of mere votes. There must be time and space for minorities. Minorities must be able to scrutinise, input and map out alternative ideas. In other words minorities must have the right to become the majority. Impossible without extensive debate and impossible without full information. Effectively SPEW is submitting its 10-point programme for an acclamatory vote. The device of bureaucrats and dictators down the ages.

Despite that the CPGB is offering an alternative set of 10 campaigning demands. Though there is no chance of getting a proper hearing, we are submitting them as an amendment.

1. Socialism can only be achieved by the self-emancipation of the working class. This consists of the conquest of political power by that class and the revolutionary overthrow of all existing social conditions.
2. Socialism is international or it is nothing. There is no national road to socialism. The attempt by Stalin and his imitators to consolidate revolutionary power in a single country resulted not in working class power, but power over the workers. We recognise the necessity of building a single working class party in Britain; that would be a significant contribution towards the fight for a united Marxist party in the European Union and a new international.
3. We stand for a Marxist party through which the working class can find political self-expression, which requires that the party operates on the basis of the maximum possible democracy objective circumstances permit. This implies the accountability and recallability of the leadership and individual leaders, and the willingness of minorities to implement majority decisions, while expressing their political differences before and after agreed actions. There must be the right to form platforms, tendencies and factions and to establish oppositional publications. There ought to be representation of minority factions on leading committees.
4. The self-emancipation of the working class requires unity and therefore political struggle against everything which divides us. Therefore we fight against nationalism, opportunism, racism, male chauvinism and homophobia. On the same basis we oppose all immigration controls. The product is free to move globally - so must the worker be free too.
5. The self-emancipation of the working class requires the fullest democracy in the workers’ movement. Trade union leaders and all workers’ representatives must be subject to regular election and their pay capped to that of the average skilled worker. End state interference in the workers’ movement. Repeal the anti-trade union laws.
6. The self-emancipation of the working class requires the fullest democracy against the capitalist state. Abolish the monarchy, House of Lords, MI5, MI6 and the whole securitate. Replace the standing army with a system a popular militias. For the unity of Ireland. For Scottish and Welsh self-determination. For the voluntary unity of England, Scotland and Wales. For a democratic European Union.
7. Against religious discrimination and for secularism. That means combating islamophobia, discrimination against catholics and other religious minorities. It also means disestablishing the Church of England, ending subsidies to religious schools and institutions and a rational, scientific and rounded education in state-financed schools.
8. For the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of UK and US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. No sanctions and no attack on Iran. Against the theocracy in Iran. Oppose Zionism and Israeli expansionism. For an Arab federation under the leadership of the working class.
9. We are for production and distribution organised not according to the principle of profit, but need. We are for the immediate provision of free heath, education and urban public transport under democratic control. We are for the provision of affordable, high-quality public housing. The minimum wage, pensions, unemployment, sickness and other benefits must be set according to need - determined according to the country’s general level of culture. We are for a radical reduction of working hours with no loss of pay. For a maximum 30-hour working week and a minimum of two months holiday a year.
10. Capitalism threatens ecological destruction because it is based on production for the sake of production. Only the working class, the battle for extreme democracy and socialism offer humanity a viable alternative. Returning to a mythical past of peasant agriculture or small-scale capitalism offers no solution. The working class needs to develop its own ecological programme. We must ideologically combat the Green Party and all forms of conservative, feudal and capitalist greenism.

A campaign for new workers’ party that champions such vital and readily understood aims and principles would represent a fundamental break with both the bankrupt politics of Labourism and the sterility of the 57 varieties of confessional sect.

CPGB emergency motion

Conference notes that:

Despite a wave of repression and arrests before and after this year’s May Day in Iran, workers still managed to disrupt the official government events in Tehran. Representatives of ‘pro-reformist’ front organisations for workers set up by sections of the reactionary regime were loudly booed. Militant demonstrations broke out after the official gatherings and there were clashes with security forces who tried to quell the protests. For a time, street battles stopped traffic in Taleghani Avenue, one of the main streets in central Tehran

These protests saw Mansour Ossanlou (president of Tehran Vahed busworkers) briefly arrested. He was only released after protests and interventions by demonstrators and passers-by. Yagoub Salimi of the Vahed bus company was also arrested and is currently in custody. Subsequently, 30 workers from the Vahed bus company staged a sit-in outside the Tehran prosecutor’s office demanding the release of their fellow workers.

These protests are typical of a rising mood of revolt and resistance that has seen militant action and explicitly anti-regime protests by workers, students and women.

There is an urgent need to build a principled solidarity campaign with the people of Iran. Such a movement must unambiguously oppose both the imperialist war plans and the repressive theocracy in Tehran, which is using the threat of attack to divert attention away from the country’s endemic crisis, deflect popular anger onto foreign enemies and thus prolong its reactionary rule.

Conference therefore resolves:

• To unconditionally oppose all imperialist pressure on Iran, whether this takes the form of sanctions, diplomatic pressure, limited strikes or bombing the country back to the stone age.
• To oppose attempts by the reactionary regime to cynically use the pretext of external threats to justify increased internal repression.
• To demand the immediate release of Yagoub Salimi and all other activists and militants that the regime detains - now and in the future - in its crackdown on political opponents, workers, women and youth.
• To become involved in the work of the newly established Hands Off the People of Iran campaign and help it in its work of both opposing any new imperialist attack in the Middle East and also organising practical work of solidarity with the progressive movements of Iran, not with that country’s reactionary ruling elite.
• To participate in the campaign’s conference later this year and - if the CNWP steering committee think it appropriate - to take positions on the Hopi leadership.

Campaign for a Marxist Party motion

This conference recognises that a party which honestly serves the interests of the working class can only be a party which openly advocates the ideas of Marxism. To attempt to win support by pretending to be reformists is self-defeating.

1. Socialism can only be achieved by the self-emancipation of the working class. This consists of the conquest of political power and the revolutionary overthrow of existing capitalist exploitation.
2. The self-emancipation of the working class requires the struggle for the most extensive possible democracy, both against the capitalist state and the bureaucracy in the workers’ movement. This floodtide of democracy cannot be contained within capitalism.
3. There is no national road to socialism. Socialism is international or it is nothing. The international solidarity of workers is opposed to all forms of nationalism.