The SWP say that it’s a very straightforward left / right split and they are on the side of the red angels. Dave Osler contends that there aren’t any politics behind it. Well of course there must be. There is always a political rationale behind a split even when it is not expressed in political terms either because the participants don’t have the vocabulary or they choose not to use it.
In this case the witch hunting, red baiting allegations are just ludicrous. What happened to the Militant in the Labour Party was an example of how you do these things properly. Labour used the bourgeois press for months, drafted in the union bureaucracy, mobilised the party right. To its credit Militant had some idea of how to fight a defensive battle. It didn’t flounce off at the earliest opportunity. That’s the way to resist a witch hunt. Instead what what we have seen, most obviously in Tower Hamlets, was a moderately coherent group of people finally lose patience with a bureaucratic controlling way of running Respect. Some of their politics are confused, under-developed and, on some issues reactionary. My contention has always been that by retaining the coalition model they would not be given the chance to develop politically because in a coalition every point of view is as valid as every other one.
Most of the time this bureaucratic control was masked with an organisational looseness. There is a revealing sentence in the SWP’s October ’07 Pre-Conference Bulletin (PCB).
“The diversity of political forces represented in a formation such as Respect is best served by a relatively loose constitutional structure that allows supporting organisations such as the SWP to retain their own distinct identity.”
Of course the other great thing about a loose constitutional structure is that for most of the time you can pretend that the only people who really drone on about boring things like constitutions, structures, rules and procedures are the sort who don’t want to turn the movement outwards and who want to restrict to the old left. So if you have your people in the top jobs they are free to make up the rules as they go along. And they don’t have to stop at making up the rules. They can decide on the politics, the internal regime and the staffing as well and justify it on the grounds of revolutionary elan, necessity or anything else. Right from the start of Respect in Tower Hamlets I argued for regular branch meetings, branch committee meetings, in person reports from elected officials to the branch committee but it was explained to me that the “old, boring” way of doing politics puts people off.
There is another aspect that has not been mentioned in the discussion. Is there an evolution in the SWP’s thinking away from the conception of a broad, left formation. Some quotes from the PCB may illustrate this.
The emergence of these new left formations as broad coalitions of different kinds, involving both revolutionaries and reformists, was a very important development and one that our international tendency has actively supported and participated in.
True that. In fact this was pretty much the basis on which Socialist Resistance was established.
But the new left parties are facing a different context from the heady days of the Genoa protests in July 2001, the first ESF in Florence in November 2002, and the great anti-war protests of February arid March 2003. A polarisation is developing between left and right in the movements resisting liberalism and war.
Accordingly, the radical left is in crisis in a number of countries. In Italy Rifondazione has moved sharply to the right, joined Romano Prodi’s centre-left coalition government, and expelled a far-left senator for voting against Italy’s military mission in Afghanistan.
You can’t argue with that either. Though what is doesn’t mention is the fact that Sinistra Critica have resumed the struggle to build just such a party
Most abject of all, the SSP has, since the defeat of both its and Solidarity’s candidates in the Scottish parliamentary elections in May, -virtually disappeared off the political radar screen. Die Linke in Germany was only finally formed in June and it represents the biggest break so far within the ranks of reformism, but precisely for that reason there is a powerful right wing that will want to form a federal government with the Social Democratic Party when the latter’s Grand Coalition with Angela Merkel and the Christian Democratic Union collapses.
Now here you have an incredibly subtle line of argument that only the brightest minds of their generation could deconstruct. Can you remember who provided Solidarity with its foot soldiers when the SWP decided that the days of fusty old democratic, socialist parties were over and what was needed was a charismatic leader to head a coalition? Tough question that. The support given to Sheridan’s vanity project is what weakened the SSP, ended Sheridan’s political career and is allowed to pass without a mention. Then, and this is the clever bit, it’s followed in the same paragraph by a (probably accurate) prediction of the struggle that might happen in Die Linke. Conclusive evidence that all these projects are fundamentally dodgy. But when the document was written the authors had to hedge their bets.
None of these actual or potential crises invalidates the strategy that we have pursued of building Respect as a broad coalition of the radical left. As we have already argued, space to the left of New Labour and its counterparts in continental Europe continues to exist, and it is likely to grow over time. But Respect and formations like it will also continue to face tough challenges posed by their larger political and social environments. Just because they are coalitions of different kinds, uniting diverse political forces, there will often be divided responses on how to react to these pressures. Revolutionaries need to understand this, and to be prepared to fight to preserve these formations as coalitions of the left challenging social liberalism.
Not entirely accurate that bit. Is it? There is no evidence that Respect’s present leadership has pursued a strategy of building a broad coalition of the radical left. Most of the radical left, if questioned, would give answers either saying “good idea but not just now thank you” or something about a bargepole. In fact it was left to Alan Thornett to produce a resolution after John Mc Donnell’s campaign calling for Respect to open a dialogue with the Labour left and the Communist Party.
Now let’s consider the bit about “reacting to the pressures”. It’s been a first class demonstration of how not to do it. Having defended George Galloway when he embarrassed every Respect supporter in the country the current leadership demonises him as a red-baiter for suggesting that a bit more democracy and transparency might be helpful. This set in train a process that is, without doubt, going to split Respect. Why do something so shortsighted? It’s probably got something to do with the way the SWP functions. Essentially what George Galloway was challenging was the transplanting of the SWP’s internal regime into Respect. To accept the validity of this set of criticisms inside Respect has the potential of allowing that discussion to spread. That is why there does not exist a refutation of the points made in Galloway’s original letter or any of the subsequent statements. Where there should be political answers there is a cloud of false argumentation over non existent charges.
Without the Tower Hamlets Respect votes Lindsey German’s GLA election aspirations are fantasy. At the moment I’d be sceptical that the SWP councillors who have resigned the Respect whip have a real chance of getting re-elected. Now it is unlikely that the organisation will make an overnight turn away from some form of electoral work but it will be doing so having cut itself off from the mass of its voting base. Indicating the weaknesses and failures of the other left formations in Europe is putting down the marker that the time for ending this tactic is drawing near. Reality butted in with the Galloway letter and speeded things up but it seems that the SWP’s strategic project from 2008 is going to be a return to recruiting in ones and twos.
Liam redux 
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