The recent split in Respect once again confirms the fruitless attempts to form left-wing rivals to the Labour Party, which still, despite everything, retains the allegiance of the bulk of the trade union movement.
The “Respect” party was initially set up by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) with the support from the ex-Labour MP George Galloway. They were hoping to capitalise on the success of the anti-war movement and offer a political alternative to New Labour. We predicted at the time that this venture, as with other similar initiatives, would end in failure. The whole of the last century has been littered with the wreckage of sectarian groups hoping to replace the traditional organisations of the working class.
Unfortunately, there are no short cuts in winning the working class to socialism, beginning with its mass organisations. All the failed attempts to set up “alternatives” have ended in disappointment and failure. Such attempts base themselves on the right-wing domination of the movement and the frustrations of the more advanced sections of the working class, who have become disappointed with the lack of response from the ordinary mass. This makes them look for short cuts. They are fed false perspective from the various sectarian groups that it is possible to by-pass the traditional mass organisations. Very soon this is shown to be false by experience. Then these organisations enter into crisis and eventually split and disintegrate.
This has recently happened to Respect, and it is only a matter of time before they go the same way as the SLP, the Socialist Alliance, etc. In the faction fight within Respect, three senior SWP members, Rob Hoveman, Kevin Ovenden and Nick Wrack, were expelled from the SWP for lining up with Galloway. Neither Galloway nor the SWP will gain anything from this adventure.
The problem with the SWP leadership is that over the years they have jumped from one failed experiment to another in a desperate attempt to build its organization. What they do not understand is that there is no such thing as a short-cut to the building of a mass revolutionary party of the working class.
They originally huddled together with different small left groupings to promote the Socialist Alliance. That also was announced as the “alternative” to Labour, but proved to be nothing of the kind and the various components of the Socialist Alliance went on their own individual ways.
If there was ever a time when an alternative to New Labour might have been possible, it was now. Millions have been radicalised by the imperialist wars. We had gone through ten years of Blairism, with all the attacks and counter-reforms that this has entailed. But nothing has come of it only splits and demoralisation.
After the Socialist Alliance fell apart, the SWP decided to throw in their lot with George Galloway, who had been looking for a home after his expulsion from the Labour Party. They established Respect and within a short period managed to win one MP (Galloway) and a handful of councillors.
This, however, was achieved mainly by cultivating the Muslim vote – which the SWP justified, but is now attacking Galloway for opportunism and communalism – a fatal mistake which has blown up in their faces. Not surprisingly, where there were pockets of success for Respect, such as in Tower Hamlets, Asian businessmen began to join and pack meetings with their supporters, keen to use the party for their own interests. The SWP leaders turned a blind eye to what was going on, as it suited them in building up support for Respect.
Now, however, the SWP leaders are raising their hands in horror, as they discover that meetings were apparently packed and elections rigged – against them. The chickens have come home to roost with a vengeance.
Now they vigorously protest, but they had only themselves to blame. It was their opportunistic pandering to the “Islamic vote”, with communalism that resulted in the creation of this Frankenstein’s monster that they can no longer control. They also naively believed they could use and control George Galloway. But Galloway knows that without him the SWP are nothing. The success of the party counted on the figurehead of Galloway, as the SSP in Scotland relied on Tommy Sheridan. Added to all this mess is the undemocratic manner in which the SWP have operated inside Respect which has alienated its former allies.
In Scotland, the SWP tried a different tactic. They joined the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) led by Tommy Sheridan. This organization imploded when the bulk of the leadership of the SSP came out against Sheridan and refused to back him over allegations in the press of sexual licentiousness. The SWP have now joined Sheridan’s new group called Solidarity, but this is likely to be short lived as this group descends into oblivion. There are already rumours that the SWP are now looking for a new home.
Without any clear perspectives the SWP leaders jump opportunistically from one adventure to the other. Unfortunately for them, there is no quick-fix solution to the building of a revolutionary organisation. History is littered with such attempts.
Today, the SWP with around one thousand supporters is probably the largest sectarian group in Britain. But, as with all the sectarians, they swing from ultra-leftism to opportunism and back again searching for a panacea to growth.
The SWP’s stated aim is the building of a mass revolutionary organization. They originally believed that this could be done by simply proclaiming themselves the revolutionary party, and the masses would rush towards them.
Thus, in 1973, they changed their name from the International Socialists to the Socialist Workers’ Party. When this failed to provide the desired results, they began looking for a “bridge” to the masses through vehicles such as the Socialist Alliance, the SSP, Solidarity or Respect. But they have an insurmountable problem. They have no understanding of the British working class, its traditions, or how it moves into action through its traditional organizations. The SWP, as with all the sects, lacking any real perspectives, adopt a completely empirical approach, which forces them to jump from one adventure to the next.
Today the leaders of the SWP (formerly the International Socialists or the “IS”) would prefer not to be reminded of the period (1950 to 1967) when they worked inside the Labour Party. The problem is that they were working in it in an opportunist fashion. Because of this, they did not get the results they were hoping for.
Thus in 1967 they split away (although nobody noticed at the time) declaring it impossible to work in such a “historically bankrupt” reformist party (how many times have we heard that one? They had recruited a layer of radicalised students. The natural instinct of this layer led them to have no liking for the Labour Party. But instead of educating them in the traditions and methods of the working class, they pandered to their prejudiced and decided to leave the party. In the process, they changed the name of their paper from ‘Labour Worker’ to ‘Socialist Worker’.
Prior to this, Tony Cliff, their historical leader, had declared that, they “would stick to the Labour Party like glue”! Like all sectarians, when they were in the Labour Party they did not know how to relate to the party ranks, and their work was characterized by complete opportunism. Paul Foot admitted to as much in 1971 when he wrote: “It is certainly true that anyone who attempt to behave during the entrist period in the Labour Party as a Red Revolutionary would have been expelled almost immediately.” This fear led them to paint themselves in a somewhat pink colouring before the Labour establishment. “The IS no longer pursue an entrist tactic, we do not have to mute any criticism that we might have in relation to the Labour Party or the trade union bureaucracy.” [Our emphasis]. By their own admission, they were “muted” when they were in the Labour Party. Their opportunism arose from their inability to explain the full programme of Marxism in the language of Labour workers and trade unionists.
At this time, before the days of Respect and Solidarity, they held the romantic view that the SWP would be built like the Bolshevik Party, although they clearly did not understand how the Bolshevik Party (or the Communist International) was built. They had the mechanical and simplistic view that once reformism betrayed the workers, the masses would see through the leadership and turn to the SWP. But it was not to be so simple, and history has proved this beyond any doubt. Reformism (and Stalinism) has a long history of betrayal over decades. And yet, their ideas still dominate the labour and trade union movement. The SWP leaders cannot explain why this is. They do not understand that when the masses move in a serious manner they do so in the first instance through the traditional mass organisations, including the Labour Party. It is not possible to construct mass revolutionary parties by ignoring the processes taking place inside the traditional mass organisations.
The masses will go through the experience again and again, and again, until a mass revolutionary tendency is built within the traditional organisations. And only with the aid of this mass Marxist tendency within the framework of the traditional organizations will it be possible to construct a viable alternative to reformism.
This is a historical law. The masses always take the line of least resistance. When they move into political action in a mass fashion, they always move through the existing mass organizations, which in Britain, are the trade unions and their political expression, the Labour Party. Whether we like it or not, this is a social law. We have to understand things as they are and not how we would like them to be. It is the hallmark of the sectarian to impose on the real objective process his or her own subjective desires. Anyone who attempts to build revolutionary parties in the abstract, without any reference to the real movement and history of the working class is doomed to fail.
The SWP leadership have no conception of this understanding. Their party building “methods” are reduced to pleas for people to join the SWP. A large number of their recruits are young students. That in and of itself is not a problem. The problem is that the SWP does not give them a rounded out Marxist education and as soon as reality proves not to fit nicely into the schema prepared by the leaders these youth drop away.
People are simply signed up, even unwittingly. As one ex-member explained: “Anyone who has ever been an SWP branch secretary or treasurer will know that you get sent lists of members supposedly in your branch from the centre, 75% of whom do not consider themselves members, often names you have never heard of – many of whom had no idea they had ever ‘joined’.” Clearly, this method of recruitment gives rise to a “revolving door syndrome”, where the party is built on sand. As new recruits drop out, others are drawn in to take their place, until they also drop out.
The sectarian organizations outside the framework of the mass movement are not capable of gaining the ear of the masses, which will not even notice, never mind listen to their arguments. The sects believe that simply by calling themselves a “party” they become one. They puff themselves up with grandiloquent names. But the declaration of a “party” means nothing if there is no mass following behind it. As the experience of the Socialist Workers’ Party, Workers Revolutionary Party, Socialist Party, etc, shows, the declaration of a Party does not make the solution of finding a road to the masses any easier. It is necessary to understand the process first of how the masses move and to work out clear perspectives in order to intervene and influence them.
Given this fundamental failing, the SWP shifts its politics from ultra-leftism to opportunism and back again. They have never been able to grasp the fact that where in history mass revolutionary parties have been created, like in the period 1917-1923 in the form of the Communist International under Lenin and Trotsky, these were formed out of mass splits in the traditional organizations of the working class. In 1920, the French Socialist Party majority voted to change their name to the Communist Party; in the same year, the German Independent Social Democratic Party voted to affiliate to the Communist International and become the mass German Communist Party; the Italian Communist Party emerged as a mass split from the Socialist Party in 1921 and so on. Even the Russian Bolshevik Party was born out of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Conversely, in Britain where the CP came into existence as a small force outside the Labour Party, it failed to become a mass force. That is why Lenin and the Communist International urged the British CP to affiliate to the Labour Party in 1920. However, these lessons are a closed book to the SWP leadership. As with all sects, history only begins with themselves.
As Marxists we understand that a revolutionary party, before anything else, is a programme, a method, ideas. With correct methods and ideas a small group can be transformed into a mass force once the conditions allow. But with incorrect methods and ideas even a sizeable party can be destroyed by events. The roots of the SWP’s problems go right back to its founding days.
It was founded in 1950 (as the Socialist Review group) by Tony Cliff, a secondary leader in the Revolutionary Communist Party, who supported the idea that Russia was “state capitalist” instead of a “deformed workers’ state”, the classic position of Trotskyism. This incorrect analysis led his grouping to remain neutral during the Korean War, refusing to defend the deformed workers’ states of China and Korea against the aggression of US imperialism.
The theory of State Capitalism had been sharply criticized by Trotsky, particularly in his books Revolution Betrayed and In Defence of Marxism. Trotsky’s last struggle before his death was in fact against a petit-bourgeois opposition in the American SWP [the then US section of the Fourth International] which rejected the defence of the USSR against imperialism, as well as the whole method of Marxism, dialectical materialism, both of which were inseparable. For a full criticism of this false theory, see Ted Grant’s Russia from revolution to counter-revolution, Part Four: The Nature of Stalinism (available online).
This theory led Cliff and his supporters to remain neutral in the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s. Chris Harman, a leading member of the SWP, stated that, “the move from the command economy to the market is neither a step forward nor a step backwards, but a step sideways.”
For Tony Cliff, “privatisation was an irrelevant question.” Here Cliff mixes up revolution and counter-revolution! And if privatisation is irrelevant, why should workers oppose it, not only in the Soviet Union, but in Britain, or France or anywhere else? If there was no fundamental difference between a nationalised planned economy and a capitalist economy, what was the reason for the Cold War that lasted nearly 50 years? And how do they explain the incredible collapse in the productive forces of the former Soviet Union? The theory of State Capitalism proved to be a useless tool that could not explain anything.
The supporters of the theory of State Capitalism were not prepared to defend the fundamental gains of the October Revolution, namely the nationalised planned economy. They had either forgotten or had never understood Trotsky’s analysis. As Trotsky explained, the deformed workers’ state is like a corrupt trade union in power. In the struggle between a corrupt trade union and the bosses, every class-conscious worker would support the trade union against the class enemy. They would also conduct a struggle to democratise the union, drive out the bureaucrats, and bring it under the control of the membership. One does not contradict the other.
During the Korean War, they remained neutral in the face of imperialist aggression. It was, of course, not fashionable to criticize the imperialists at that time. However, when it became fashionable amongst students to defend the Vietnamese Revolution (which, according to the SWP, was introducing State Capitalism) in the 1960s, they jumped on the bandwagon. Not only did they support the Vietnamese Revolution, but they welcomed the victory of NLF uncritically. In fact they criticised our tendency at the time for calling for the creation of workers’ and peasants’ committees and for a genuinely socialist Vietnam. To call for socialism they said was “ultimatist”!
Again, in relation to Cuba (which they regard as State Capitalism), as it was fashionable, they defended the “revolution” against US imperialism. But why defend State Capitalism against Market Capitalism when the victory of the USA would simply mean “a shift from one form of capitalism to another, from bureaucratic state capitalism to market capitalism”, to quote Cliff?
The fact that they are totally inconsistent appears irrelevant to the SWP leaders. In the present circumstances, the overthrow of Castro, who is determined to defend the planned economy, would be a catastrophe for the Revolution and a victory of the counter-revolution. It would destroy the gains of the revolution and introduce new property relations. But, if the SWP were consistent and applied the same approach as they did in relation to Russia and Eastern Europe in the past, there would, in their view, be no fundamental difference. It would simply be a “shift sideways”!
Cliff stated (in his pamphlet ‘Trotskyism after Trotsky’) that it was “necessary to defend the spirit of Trotskyism while rejecting some of his words.” The problem was that Cliff was not merely rejecting a few out-of-date words, but Trotsky’s whole dialectical method, the very basis of Marxism.
Engels could have been writing about the SWP when he said, “What these gentlemen lack is dialectics… As far as they are concerned Hegel never existed…” Trotsky’s contribution to the understanding of Stalinism, which he developed over nearly 20 years, was one of his outstanding contributions to the theory of Marxism, and not some incidental extras. It is grounded in the method of Marxism. But, to paraphrase Engels, “As far as they are concerned Trotsky never existed…”
One of the key problems that faced Tony Cliff as he developed his theory of State Capitalism was the absence of any boom-slump cycle in the USSR, an essential feature of capitalist economy. To plug the gap, in May 1957 Cliff went on to develop a further revisionist theory known as “the Permanent Arms Economy” (note the use of the word permanent). He used it to explain the lack of booms and slumps in the Soviet Union, as well as the reason for the post-war economic upswing of 1948-74. Cliff explained that military spending led to the taking on of workers, generated demand, but produced no overproduction in the system, thereby guaranteeing stability. This theory was very similar to that of the bourgeois economist John Maynard Keyes’, who suggested paying workers to dig and fill in holes in order to generate demand to prevent capitalist crisis.
To quote Tony Cliff, the Permanent Arms Economy “increased purchasing power of the people, together with the new state demand for arms, army clothing, barracks, etc, gives greater opening for sales and staves off crises of overproduction.” (Trotsky after Trotskyism, p.56). This is pure Keynesianism, the cornerstone of classical reformism.
Cliff concluded that until the war economy became untenable (through the arms race), the system would be secure. But if arms expenditure was the cause of the stability in the USSR and the world economy, why did the USSR collapse and the world upswing come to an end, when there were record levels ‑ then as today ‑ of military expenditure? The first deep world slump for capitalism came in 1974 and had nothing to do with falls in military expenditure. As the crisis intensified, the burden on arms continued to grow and aggravated the problem of declining profits, a far deeper problem for world capitalism.
The post-war world upswing was not due to the arms race, which was an enormous drain on the productive forces and produced massive inflationary consequences. The upswing was a produce of a whole series of inter-related factors, as Ted Grant explained in Will There be a Slump? (1960) which can be read online. These factors, which spurred on the upswing, also had their limits, which manifested themselves in the mid-1970s. Above all, the massive development of world trade allowed capitalism to partially overcome its contradictions and develop the productive forces at an unprecedented rate.
We have dedicated some time to what we consider to be important theoretical errors on the part of the SWP leadership spanning over more than five decades. Of course, our differences with the SWP are not simply matters of academic “high theory” about state capitalism, permanent arms economy, etc. The key thing to understand is that these differences lead to different perspectives, in other words, a different understanding of “what is happening”. From perspectives flow the programme, the strategy and tactics, the method and approach, which are all based upon it.
Trotsky argued that it was not enough to simply issue a call for the abolition of capitalism and the setting up of a new society. This approach remains abstract propaganda, far in advance of the consciousness of the mass of the working class. As well as immediate and partial demands which arise from day to day struggles, Trotsky stressed the need for transitional demands. Namely those demands which relate to present-day consciousness, but also act as a bridge to the fight for socialism.
“The strategic task of the next period – pre-revolutionary period of agitation, propaganda and organization – consists in overcoming the contradiction between the maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard (the confusion and disappointment of the older generation, the inexperience of the younger generation. It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demand and the socialist programme of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.” (Trotsky, The Transitional Programme)
The problem is that the SWP rejects the Transitional Programme. According to Duncan Hallas, it has become “irrelevant or false”. What he fails to understand is not the application or relevance of this or that demand, but the method of the transitional programme itself. Because they do not understand the method of the Transitional Programme, the SWP’s demands are posed in a very abstract and general fashion, combined with cheap demagogy.
“Tax the Rich” has been very popular ‑ and is something we would support of course. The problem is that it is not the income or wealth of the rich but their ownership of the productive forces that is the problem. To simply present the demand in this way leaves one with the idea that a solution can be found within the context of capitalism. If we could tax the rich more, this would help solve our problems, which is not the case.
The problems facing the working class arise from the crisis of capitalism and not the distribution of taxation. In the Socialist Worker column about “Where we stand” there is no mention of nationalisation or workers’ control and management. There is nothing about socialist planned economy as an alternative to the market. It talks generally about “Workers create all the wealth under capitalism. A new society can only be constructed when they collectively seize control of that wealth and plan its production and distribution according to need.” All very good, but what are the concrete tasks needed to fulfil this aspiration? The need to nationalize the 150 monopolies, banks and insurance companies under workers’ control and management is the only way forward.
The split in Respect – And why we reject the politics of the SWP (part 2)
