30.10.2008
Another politics is possible
Dave Isaacson reports on this weekend's launch of the latest SWP student front
Since the end of its involvement in the Respect popular front, the Socialist Workers Party has looked rather lost. Without electoralism the SWP has no glue to hold its work together.
The organisation’s response to the ongoing financial crisis has at times suggested that it is swopping blind electoralism for blind anarchism. The SWP has recently prominently republished three excerpts from articles by Leon Trotsky on ‘Booms and slumps’ (www.swp.org.uk/swp_archive_list.php?issue_id=398), which previously appeared in International Socialism in 1983 as part of its ‘downturn’ analysis and the propagandist, sectarian isolationism that was consequently adopted.
Commenting on these articles in Socialist Worker recently, John Rees remarks: “Trotsky started by rejecting the crude association of recession with rising class struggle” (October 4). But the SWP has not (yet?) announced another ‘downturn’ in that struggle. Comrade Rees’s article sits on the fence over what to expect from the current crisis. Nevertheless, he calls on SWPers to “bend our every effort to ensure that the weaknesses of the movement are diminished and the possibilities of resistance are magnified”. By this he means more blind activism.
Blind activism is the tool the SWP leadership uses to keep its members busy while it works out what it is going to do, and attempts to settle the differences on the central committee that are so obviously there. Members are being sent off to organise ‘marches on the City’ while they are being kept out of, and even unaware of, key debates on the future of the SWP. The rank and file must be kept busy doing almost anything, rather than taking time to think through and account for the failure of Respect and the ever diminishing support for Stop the War Coalition events (the STWC annual conference, due in November, has been deferred until February 2009 while the leadership decides how to attempt to reinvigorate it).
There is a strict division of labour in the SWP: politics for the leadership and blind activism for the rank and file. Since the dismal failure of the Left List slate in the GLA elections we have seen drives to boost anti-British National Party campaigning through Unite Against Fascism and strike-chasing. Of course, anti-fascism and trade unions are important fields of activity for socialists, but the unthinking approach that the SWP pursues is riven with economism and opportunist deals with the labour bureaucracy.
In the field of the SWP’s student work things are much the same. As soon as the alliance with George Galloway and the Bengali businessmen started to turn sour, the Respect stalls and meetings were replaced by those of the Socialist Worker Student Society (SWSS) - the SWP’s public face on the campuses. The internal Party Notes of September 30 gives some guidance on student work following on from freshers fairs. It argues for “a culture of recruitment [to the SWSS and SWP] and SW sales”, and the drive towards blind activism is just as prominent, if not more so, amongst the SWP’s students - “Agitate: We need to get stuck into activity straightaway,” Party Notes insists. But there is no strategy at all here, the comrades are being told to find some activity - any activity - and get stuck in: “In every college we need to be on the lookout for campaigns on campus and linking up with wider agitation, be it Tesco’s protests, strikes, etc.”
Comrades, activism for activism’s sake will get us nowhere in the fight for socialism. Of course, we must be involved in campaigns and work to put our politics into practice, but to be effective our activity needs to be systematic and theorised. In terms of how we treat new recruits, we need to teach them to be fully rounded revolutionaries, not just burn them out in a frenzy of blind activism.
As with the rest of the left, there have been various unity calls over the years, but left unity initiatives have tended to fall apart acrimoniously or not get off the ground in the first place. The SWP has zig-zagged from one mess to another. Back in the late 1990s there were United Left slates in National Union of Students elections, but the SWP could not stomach being so close to the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty for too long.
The SWP never introduced the Socialist Alliance into its student work. It wanted to preserve the dominance of SWSS, which it directly controlled, not introduce its student activists to comrades and ideas from other left groups - far better to keep them cocooned in SWSS land. But then it was not long before we (I was convenor of Essex University SWSS group at the time) were ordered by SWP centre to wind down our SWSS groups and launch Globalise Resistance (the SWP’s latest front of the time) on campus, which was to be the centre of our activity. After all, the anti-capitalist movement offered massive opportunities for socialists! So where is Globalise Resistance now?
Most recently we had Student Respect, which did not really involve many people beyond the ranks of the SWP and was based on the most appallingly popular frontist politics. There was not a word of criticism from the SWP of Galloway’s demagogy, opposition to a woman’s right to choose an abortion, support for immigration controls or even the belief that Britain’s finest hour came during the inter-imperialist struggle of World War II.
Yet, when Galloway and the SWP finally fell out and the leadership gave the nod, there were hysterical denunciations being shouted from the rooftops. The SWP made itself sound just like the AWL with its bandying around of words like ‘communalism’ with no basis in fact.
Now, as the SWP moves from one perspective to another, from a zig to a zag, it should come as no surprise that it is launching yet another student front group. This time it will be called Another Education is Possible (AEP). Its launch conference will be this weekend, on Saturday November 1. And as ever there has been no attempt to learn the lessons of the past. Any public accounting for mistakes made in previous projects is simply not allowed in the SWP - after all, there is no time for that, with all the ‘important’ blind activity comrades must throw themselves into.
Both in terms of its name and its proposed political platform AEP seems very similar to the AWL-dominated Education Not for Sale. While ENS has done very little since its Reclaim the Campus relaunch conference (the ENS website has not been updated since October 3), with the backing of the SWP and its resources AEP will certainly have more legs in the short term. But where will these legs take it? With its completely insufficient political platform and already visible lack of democracy, it is hardly going to advance the struggle for socialism or even arm students for that struggle.
AEP is being set up against the background of persistent attempts by the NUS leadership to gut the National Union of Students of the very small amount of democracy that it currently has. The NUS has always been a playground for the bureaucrats, in which the left has struggled to gain even a toehold. Now the bureaucrats want to hegemonise every last swing and slide and keep the left down for good. For over a year now they have been pushing a governance review which will tidy up their rule by banishing things like conferences and elections, and replace them with conventions and appointment.
The left is absolutely right to fight against these attacks, and Communist Students has always been involved in this fight. Our two delegates at this year’s NUS conference were amongst those who broke undemocratic mandates to stop the governance review gaining the majority it needed. But CS has been insistent throughout that we are not out to defend the NUS as it is and will play no part in spreading illusions in how great it currently is - because it isn’t! Any decent campaign to stop these attacks must be based on a fight for a democratic and militant student movement.
The SWP refused to do this in the Save NUS Democracy campaign, whose very title suggested that the NUS was democratic in the first place. Not only this, but they ran the campaign in a secretive and underhand manner, refusing to let either CS or the Socialist Party’s Socialist Students get involved in its organisation. Now the NUS bureaucrats have organised another extraordinary conference (extraordinarily easy for the bureaucrats to manipulate, that means), which they will pack with their supporters on November 12 in Wolverhampton. The governance review will most likely be passed there, although it will then have to be ratified at a further conference.
AEP is going to be just another front. The SWP is so confident of its ability to stitch things up the way it wants it that it has already been standing SWSS members in student union elections under the AEP banner. But what does this banner mean? Well the phrase itself - another education is possible - is entirely true, but, to put it mildly, extremely vague. As of yet there has been no conference and there are no policies or political positions behind this vague platitude. As ever when launching a front, the SWP attempts to involve layers of activists beyond its own ranks. In many ways this is framed as another left unity project. But the people the SWP would really rather did not turn up are ... other left groups. It is really interested in the unaligned individuals whom they hope to eventually recruit to the SWP.
At the conference there will be only one motion up for discussion - the one submitted by the organisers. Not content with its renowned ability to use superior numbers to push through whatever policy it wants, the SWP is not even going to allow anybody else to put forward their own motion.
Apparently, we will be allowed to submit amendments to this motion – but of no more than 250 words. We will have only three minutes to speak on them. Conference guidelines on “democratic structures” also says: “Although we can’t insist on it, we strongly encourage amendments based on potential initiatives and actions for the network to support.” So basically no politics. When it comes to elections to the proposed steering committee, which is supposed to then run this organisation, there will be no hustings speeches and manifestos for candidates are limited to 100 words!
It is frankly ludicrous that the slogan under which AEP is being launched is: “Building a democratic, campaigning student movement”. Most of this conference will have nothing to do with democracy and will simply be an opportunity for an assortment of invited top-table speakers to lecture us on what we need to do.
As for the motion that is being proposed as a political platform, it comes nowhere near giving students the basis to move forward. It studiously avoids using the term ‘socialism’, let alone Marxism. At its most radical it calls for us to “challenge the priorities of the capitalist, profit-driven system”, but we do not want to merely challenge capitalism’s priorities: we want to tear up the whole rotten system and replace it with one based on democratic planning and freedom for all. We need to offer a positive alternative; we need to make the argument for communism.
In this sense it is no surprise that members of the AWL see little to disagree with in this motion. They are two peas in an economistic pod. AWL student member Ed Maltby has stated on the ENS discussion e-list: “It all seems quite fair in terms of content. By the recent standards of the SWP it looks very good. But it’s vague.” It is more than vague - it is wholly insufficient. The current financial crisis makes more clear than ever the need, now, for a Communist Party. For communists to organise as communists and seek to mobilise the working class to take political power.
By burying our heads in economistic activism we neglect the urgent necessity of this task. If we are to move forward, rather than round in circles, we need to learn from the mistakes of the past (eg, Globalise Resistance, Respect and Left List) and take theory as well as activity seriously.
