11.07.2007
Strategic thinking?
Over a thousand people packed into the July 5 opening rally of this year's Marxism, held as usual in London's Friends Meeting House. Mark Fischer reports
The hall plus the balcony were noticeably fuller than last year's corresponding event, so - traditional hyperbole from the chair about this being a "huge Marxism" aside - the numbers did seem to be up from 2006.
The mood was correspondingly upbeat and the comrade who introduced the appeal for funds told us that some 6,000 people had registered for the event, up from the 4,100 figure given at last year's closing rally - although registration does not necessarily guarantee attendance, of course.
Also of interest was the total bill this comrade gave for the cost of the school - over £130,00. So clearly it is a major undertaking for an organisation such as the SWP that, although it may loom large on the British far left, is still very small in the wider scheme of things.
The political content of the rally was instructive in an odd sort of way. Aside from the international speakers - Trevor Ngwane, a former ANC councillor and founder of the South Africa Anti-Privatisation Forum, and Kamal Khalil from the Egyptian 'Enough' campaign - it was far more Respect-centred than in recent years and far more rightwing.
Of course, Respect's achievements have been pretty unspectacular in the preceding 12 months, so we had the SWP speakers - Michael Lavalette and Lindsey German - struggling very hard to be enthusiastic about rather modest advances. For instance, both comrades rather grandly promised to speak of the "future strategy" for Respect. However, this seemed to amount to little more that a by-election in the offing in London and Lindsey's electoral challenge for London mayor next year. And that, incredibly, was more or less it.
While there was a great deal of routine condemnation of New Labour - not to mention Blair, Brown and the Iraq war - there was no notion of what might replace it as the 'natural' party of the working class and how Respect fits into a model of how such a tectonic realignment of class relations in Britain might be given adequate political expression. No genuinely strategic thinking, in other words, despite the big build-up from comrades Lavalette and German.
What was clearly underlined, however, was the extent to which leading SWP comrades have consolidated a populist framework for their version of 'viable' politics in this present period of British - and world - history. This was explicit in the form and content of both comrades' contributions and implicit in comrade German's closing remarks.
In these, she observed that comrades were "at the beginning of five days of very, very exciting debates and discussion". Over that time, "we are going to talk about history and ideas and all the things that are so important about our tradition and what we stand for". But Marxism is "not just about discussions". It is also "about doing things". So it was not only a question of listening to the erudite talks at Marxism and agreeing that "the world was a terrible place", but committing yourself to doing "something about it."
What is problematic about this formally uncontroversial comment, however, was the fact that nowhere in her preceding speech did I hear the comrade talk about socialism. She had mention the galvanising role of the intervention of groups of "socialists" on CWU picket lines, in the anti-war movement, in movements of protest in general, it is true. But quite how this was meant to join up socialism as a goal with what Respect does on a day-to-day basis - ie, the "something" that comrade German urged her audience to crack on with - was simply absent. Clearly the comrades have firmly internalised the lesson to the effect that - whatever dusty old orthodoxy is paraded annually at Marxism - the way to "make a difference", in the pregnant words of John Rees, is to propagate populism. That is, a form of politics which emphasises the virtues of the uncorrupt and unsophisticated common people against the double-dealing and selfishness to be expected of professional politicians and their intellectual helpers.
Comrade German's speech was particular awful in this context. She spoke of the large number of people who have died in Iraq; she told us that Tony Blair is the least qualified person in the world to be a Middle East peace envoy other than George Bush; that Brown will be just as bad; that, "deplorable" though the recent attempting bombings in London and Glasgow were, they are hardly surprising, given the imperialist carnage that the UK is partly responsible for in Iraq. She listed examples of the double standards of imperialism - for instance, over the incarceration of British journalist Alan Johnson (whose release she welcomed) and the thousands of Palestinians that Israel locks up; she remarked that British and US children have extremely poor standards of life, according to the UN, and that is because of the money wasted on war by these countries; she asserted that Britain has become "a country of the rich" and - as an example of how Labour failed the workers - that Sean Woodward, the recent Tory defector to Labour, has a butler.
As her speech drew to a close, she noted the chronic weakness of the Labour left, as revealed by the limpness of the John McDonnell campaign for the party leadership. People are disillusioned with Labour and reaching for an "alternative", she said, because "they are sick of war and privatisation, of hypocrisy and double standards and blaming the kids for everything and blaming the parents when the kids go wrong. They are sick of all those things "¦"
Like comrade Lavalette, Lindsey German's "strategic" thinking therefore seemed to boil down to calling for people to get out on the knocker for the forthcoming Southall by-election and to go onto a "war footing" for next year's London assembly elections. Clearly, this brand of politics was tailored to chime with the quite large new layer of younger SWP recruits who were very visible at this year's event. One might call these the 'Respect generation' - talk of the experience of the Socialist Alliance leaves them cold and uncomprehending, I found.
The SWP has traditionally travelled extraordinarily light in terms of its own avowed principles. Clearly, the rift between these increasingly formal 'shibboleths' and the organisation's real practice in the world is become huge.