10.06.2009

Yes, comrades: 'Time to fight back together'

Ben Lewis replies to the SWP's "Open letter to the left" (Socialist Worker June 13)

We read your open letter with great interest. The fact that you are addressing the left as a whole is welcome, as is your stress on the need for a working class force capable of responding to the worst capitalist crisis since the 1930s.

We also welcome your recognition that this is something that the left must address through debate. Hopefully this marks a break with the SWP’s recent past, where leading comrades have dismissed such obviously necessary debate as navel-gazing ‘sectarianism’.

Worse, when the SWP previously launched Respect as an electoral ‘united front’, it called on us to discard or water down our Marxist principles in the hope of “reaching to the people locked out of politics” by voting “for what they want” (Weekly Worker July 1 2004).

We sense that this call not only represents a response to the success of the British National Party in the European and local elections, but is also a means by which you are attempting to regain the initiative on the left. Remember, in 2008 your leaders somewhat bizarrely declared that there is no electoral space for the left in this period.

Following the Respect disaster and the humiliation of the Left List, you are now quite clearly trying to take advantage of the poor result obtained by No2EU by presenting yourself as a reliable partner to the likes of Bob Crow and Mark Serwotka.

In the Socialist Worker article alongside your open letter you talk of the “absence of a credible left group” and the “potential for a united left group to make a real impact” (Socialist Worker June 13). This is indicative of the kind of thinking which marked your behaviour in the Socialist Alliance - where you considered this proto-party to be merely an electoral ‘united front’ through which you could build the already existing revolutionary party - the SWP. But then, as now, the left is divided into competing sects and there is no Marxist party.

The left needs to break with such amateurism. What is needed is not a ‘group’, ‘electoral bloc’ or ‘united front’ but a party formation that can become rooted in society and offer radical solutions to all the problems, grievances and issues capitalism engenders - explicitly linking the economic and political struggle with the fight for working class rule. The fact that the BNP won two MEPs does not change this fundamental task at all. The problem with your appeal is that it appears to treat the marginal increase in support for the BNP as the most pressing problem that needs to be overcome.

What is needed is not a “group” formed specifically to stop the BNP, but a party with a programme for the working class to become the ruling class by “winning the battle of democracy”, as Marx and Engels put it in the Communist manifesto. That is why Alex Callinicos is wrong when he says that it is important the left “doesn’t get trapped in a debate about constitutional reform” (Socialist Worker June 6). Leaving aside the loaded word, “trapped”, the left in Britain has never taken the struggle for democracy seriously.

We note that, in its initial leaflet form, your open letter is headed: “It’s time to create a socialist alternative”; but in Socialist Worker the same appeal is titled: “Left must unite to create an alternative”. The open letter does not contain the word ‘socialist’ apart from in the name of your own organisation. So what sort of “alternative” are you hoping will emerge? It is all very well admitting you do not “have all the answers or a perfect prescription for a leftwing alternative”, but it would be helpful if you would specify what organisational form you have in mind.

We feel that by focussing your open letter on stopping the BNP as the most important question, you are signalling your intention to create yet another ‘united front’ viewed as a means of channelling recruits into the SWP.

We too are “aware of the differences and difficulties involved in constructing such an alternative” - particularly the tendency to place the interests of one’s own grouping above the need to fight for a genuine party with an open and healthy democratic culture and an accountable and recallable leadership. Given that many on the left are utterly distrustful of the SWP for both closing down the SA and engineering a split in Respect, your call may well be greeted with a degree of cynicism. One way to combat this would be to publicly account for the disastrous mistakes of the past.

We look forward to hearing your response and will certainly participate in the conference you suggest should be convened.