Reading between the lines of some of the recent discussion on Respect I think I’ve
detected a slight undercurrent of hostility to the project and some of its principal personalities. Or maybe I’ve misunderstood.
The view I’ve got least sympathy for is any variant on the the theme “we don’t need another party. We’ve got Labour. That’s where the real action is.” Those arguments have been gone over so thoroughly that I see no useful purpose raising them again. Apparently some loyal fans continue to buy each new album from the Rolling Stones in case it might be less than dreadful. A similar impressive dedication must be what drives people to remain with Labour.
A more interesting line of discussion is the one developed by supporters of Permanent Revolution which remains the best journal produced on the British far left. Writing in the Autumn 2007 issue Stuart King argues that where the Socialist Alliance, and subsequently Respect, went wrong was that they declined the opportunity of saying to the working class “that the alternative needed to Labourism was revolutionary communism”. (p.17). He asks the question “Could an election campaign, waged on a revolutionary programme…win support?”
It should be pretty easy to test out that proposal. Pick a ward or constituency, throw everything you’ve got at it for as long as you can and then wait till election night. The reason no one does it in 2007 is because to ask the question is to answer it. Virtually every fight that the British working class has fought in the last couple of decades has been defensive and usually by an isolated sector. The one constant factor is that the union bureaucracies have either tried to prevent or curtail militant action and a lot of the time their justification has either been the need to re-elect Labour or the obligation to obey Labour’s anti-union laws.
That goes some part of the way to explaining why the principal strategic task for the left is to help create a mass alternative party to Labour. Until Labour’s political grip on union activists and vanguard workers is weakened by the creation of a plausible alternative we are unlikely to see the emergence of large scale class struggle formations in the unions. I think this also holds true of struggles around issues like housing and ecology.
The experience of both the Socialist Alliance and Respect shows that the initial core components of such a new formation will come from the Marxist left. The manner in which they administer and organise the new formation will have a huge bearing on how it develops. The SWP opted for a tight central control while allowing George Galloway and the councillors to operate independently. As we have seen that forced out most socialists and made it very unattractive to most class struggle militants.
Respect has a left reformist political programme. Stuart describes it as “populist” as well. For sure it has made more populist statements than you can shake a stick at. Some months ago it tried to launch a short lived campaign to “name and shame” people going to lapdancing clubs. But Marxists have never had a problem about working in reformist parties, particularly ones that are explicitly anti-imperialist and anti-neoliberal. It all depends on what you try to do inside them.
A party is both something that you use to fight and something inside which you fight. The only reason that LGBT rights are now accepted inside the Labour Party was because people organised to fight for them. Respect too is an arena of struggle. It was supporters of Socialist Resistance who in 2005 took up the issue of LGBT rights inside the organisation. In that year it was five SR supporters and a handful of others who were Respect’s presence at Pride. In 2007 the organisation had a float at the event. Admittedly this was due to internal politics but the issue is now on the table again and can only result in a shared understanding that LGBT rights are an integral part of any socialist organisation’s programme.
Similarly with the debate around internal democracy. All the demands that have been central to SR’s involvement in Respect are now right at the heart of the discussion.
The debate on the question of reform or revolution only becomes real and live inside an organisation like Respect when it is being talked about inside the working class. That’s not a conversation that is often had round here at the moment. That’s why I find Stuart’s blunt posing of the issue dogmatic and unenlightening. The more meaningful questions at the moment are “how can one engage in struggles in a way that makes them successful, develops consciousness and combativity and helps those involved draw political and organisational conclusions?”
I can’t speak for the SWP or George Galloway but I do know that not one supporter of Socialist Resistance sees Respect as the new mass alternative to Labour. It will be, or sections of it will be, part of such an alternative. Now that a real strategic discussion is happening inside it there is a chance to introduce the ideas of socialist democracy to a new audience with the aim of making the organisation attractive to new forces.
At the same time it is possible to function as an independent Marxist current. Half a dozen SR supporters are going to the ecosocialist panning meeting in Paris this weekend. This too is part of our commitment to helping develop a mass class struggle alternative to social democracy.
I’ll write up a report of that on my return.
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