The significance of the British Socialist Workers Party’s call for a new “left alternative”

Part one

By Tony Robson and Chris Marsden
28 July 2009

This is the first of a two-part series on an open letter issued by the Socialist Workers Party in Britain.

The Socialist Workers Party in Britain has issued an open letter under the title: “Left Must Unite to Create an Alternative.”

It published its appeal on June 9, two days after the European elections and local authority elections in the UK.

These elections certainly underscored the need for the building of an alternative political leadership for the working class. Labour’s vote in the European elections collapsed to an all-time low, coming in third behind the Conservatives and the right-wing nationalist United Kingdom Independence Party. For the first time, the far-right British National Party (BNP) had two candidates elected to the European Parliament after winning more than 6 percent of the vote.

The answer required is the construction of a new socialist and internationalist party, independent of the labour and trade union bureaucracies and based on the theoretical and programmatic heritage of the Marxist movement.

The SWP is bitterly opposed to this perspective. Its aim is, rather, to utilise Labour’s crisis to reiterate its longstanding demand for a regroupment of Britain’s various left tendencies into a new electoral vehicle dominated by the trade union bureaucracy and whatever disaffected Labour Members of Parliament (MPs) they can attract. It hopes that an exaggerated insistence on the threat posed by the BNP can be used in the interests of furthering this project—to convince sections of the bureaucracy that a political vacuum has opened up that can be filled by other forces and to demand that its “left” rivals do whatever is necessary to make themselves acceptable to the bureaucrats they are seeking to court.

“Never before have fascists achieved such a success in Britain,” the SWP states. “History teaches us that fascism can be fought and stopped, but only if we unite to resist.”

The audience the SWP is targeting is exemplified by the letter’s posing of how to respond to the European election results. “One answer to the problem is to say we should swallow everything New Labour has done and back it to keep [Conservative Party leader] David Cameron, and the BNP, out,” the SWP writes.

Who apart from the bureaucracy would make such an argument? The single most important development revealed by the European elections is the universal collapse in support for social democracy. That right-wing conservative and even fascistic parties had some degree of success is not evidence of a swing to the right. Rather, millions of workers turned their back on their old parties because they no longer believe they are in any way different from the traditional parties of big business, but did so in the main by refusing to vote for anyone.

On average, across Europe, the social democrats, Socialist parties and Labourites received only 22 percent of the vote in a record low turnout averaging just 43 percent.

The results in Britain were the most developed expression of this process. Successive Labour governments have imposed Thatcherite economic policies of privatisation and tax cuts for the wealthy, launched deeply unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and implemented a sustained offensive against democratic rights. The belief that replacing Tony Blair with Gordon Brown as prime minister would give the party a fresh lease on life has been dashed. Instead, factional warfare and scandals over MPs’ expenses have threatened the party’s disintegration.

Labour has been deserted by its former social base in the working class, and faces electoral oblivion. It won just 16 percent of the vote on a 34.5 percent turnout. That only around 5 percent of the electorate voted for the party is because it is not seen as an alternative to the Tories. Labour’s vote went down by around a quarter in London, by a third in the Northwest, and was almost halved in Yorkshire and the Northeast.

That is why, in answer to its own question, the SWP warns, “Yet it would take a miracle for Gordon Brown to be elected back into Downing Street. The danger is that by simply clinging on we would be pulled down with the wreckage of New Labour.”

The BNP managed to pass the threshold required to be elected under the proportional representation formula only because of this massive decline in support for Labour and the level of abstention. The Northwest region and the Yorkshire and Humber region were amongst those regions that witnessed the most severe collapse in Labour’s vote and had the highest levels of abstention, with voter turnout at 31.9 percent and 32.51 percent respectively—a decline of 10 percent since 2004. Nationally, the BNP’s share of the vote rose from 2004 by just 1.3 percent, with an increase of votes from 808,200 to 943,598.

The SWP has for many years calculated that the rightward course of the Labour government would lead to a split-off by a section of the Labour Party and the trade unions, for which it could serve as “left” adviser. But the attempt to constitute a new party on such a perspective has ended in abject failure because, to date, no significant section of the bureaucracy has broken with Labour.

The SWP-backed “Respect—the Unity Coalition” was formed to accommodate just one former Labour MP, George Galloway, who found himself without a political vehicle because he was expelled from Labour in October 2003 for his anti-Iraq war stance. The SWP accepted Galloway’s leadership of Respect, accommodated to his opportunist orientation to Muslim businessmen, Islamist groups and regimes in the Middle East, and tried to use this to raise its own political profile. This broke down only when Galloway decided that association with the “Trotskyists” of the SWP was playing badly with his anti-communist political backers, and he dispensed with their services.

The SWP hopes that Labour’s crisis will open the doors to the bureaucracy hitherto closed to them, and they intend to utilise the successes of the BNP to give political legitimacy to their project. The bottom line is their readiness to accept any political compromise necessary to this end, and, specifically, not to allow efforts to cling to socialist and revolutionary phrases undermine their political respectability in the eyes of the bureaucracy.

The NPA in France

The SWP is not alone in pursuing “left” regroupment. It has been placed in a poor position by the failure of Respect, when compared, in particular, with the Ligue Communiste Revolutionaire, the French affiliate to the Pabloite United Secretariat, which this year formed the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA).

The Pabloites have argued that it is necessary to maintain a rhetorical distance from the social democrats and to stress the left credentials of the NPA. They came to this conclusion not only after surveying the wreckage of Respect and the Scottish Socialist Party, but from considering the political damage they suffered due to their support for and participation in Rifondazione Communista (PRC) in Italy and similar “dissident” Stalinist and reformist tendencies.

As part of Romano Prodi’s Union government, elected in 2006, PRC leader Fausto Bertinotti was elected president of the Chamber of Deputies. The PRC stayed in government as it imposed cuts and austerity measures and voted to continue the Italian military presence in Afghanistan and send troops to Lebanon.

The Italian Pabloites, working within the PRC, were directly implicated in this political betrayal. Among those supporting Prodi in a vote of confidence in 2007, based on agreement to a 12-point ultimatum that included support for Italy’s military intervention in Afghanistan and the “reform” of Italy’s pension system, was Senator Franco Turigliatto of the Pabloite Sinistra Critica (Critical Left).

Polemicising against the NPA in the SWP’s theoretical journal International Socialism, (“Revolutionary Paths: A Reply to Panos Garganas and François Sabado,” March 31), Alex Callinicos opposed the Pabloites for their posture of opposition to collaboration with the social democrats.

“We in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) are enthusiasts for the New Anti-Capitalist Party (Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, NPA),” Callinicos states. But, he goes on, “there are other cases in which the most important break is by forces that reject social liberalism but have not broken with overt reformism—Die Linke [Left Party] in Germany, the Partito della Rifondazione Communist (PRC) in Italy under both its old and its new leadership, Synaspismos in Greece, and some elements in the Left Bloc in Portugal.”

After declaring that, in Britain and Germany, “social democracy has been deeply entrenched,” he continues, “This is why the emergence of Die Linke in Germany is such a historic development... for the first time in decades, the decay of social democracy has produced a serious breakaway to the left. Of course, Die Linke’s politics is left reformist: what else could it be given the balance of forces in Germany?”

Die Linke was formed in June 2007 through an alliance between the ex-Stalinists of the Party of Democratic Socialism in the former East Germany and forces who quit the Social Democratic Party in the West, led by former German Finance Minister Oskar Lafontaine and mainly constituting trade union bureaucrats. The SWP’s co-thinkers function within Die Linke based on their acceptance of the reformist programme laid down by Lafontaine.

Callinicos insists that this is all that is possible, going so far as to claim that the development of the class struggle does not provide any possibility of winning the working class to a revolutionary perspective, but rather, “by drawing new layers of workers into class-conscious activity, will tend to expand the base of reformist politics.”

He says of the SWP’s own experience, “The continuing influence of reformism constrains us in different ways. Respect was doomed ultimately by its failure to bring about a major split in the Labour Party... a radical left party is like a united front of the classical kind in that it brings together politically heterogeneous forces. This is partly a consequence of the relatively open character of such parties’ programmes, which generally finesse the alternatives of reform or revolution.”

The lesson of Respect, for Callinicos, is that what the Labour and trade union bureaucracy demands, the left groups must deliver. In a subsequent article, “Labour Collapse, BNP Victories—Political Meltdown,” July 2009, he warns his “left” co-thinkers that “if we are brutally honest about our own strengths and weaknesses, it has to be admitted that the radical left is in pretty bad shape.”

If the BNP and other far-right parties are not to profit from Labour’s collapse, “we need to get our act together electorally. This requires, on the part of the different fragments of the radical left, an acknowledgement of our collective failure.... As long as we each harbour the illusion that we can make the breakthrough on our own, we are sunk.”

The political cynicism of the SWP is boundless. While threatening its potential electoral allies with the spectre of the right, Callinicos acknowledges in the same piece that “It’s important not to overstate” this threat. “The British National Party’s (BNP) vote actually fell in the two constituencies where it won seats. The Nazis got in thanks to massive abstentions by Labour voters” and “there is very little sign of the kind of generalised shift to the right in British society that brought Thatcher to office 30 years ago.”

In other words, the SWP is moved to issue its “open letter” not by a genuine concern over the danger of fascism—its polemic would have been largely unchanged had the BNP crashed and burned. Its essential political motivation is to outlaw any genuine socialist opposition to the Labour and trade union bureaucracy.

Callinicos even complains of the “chronic, historic weakness of the Labour left” in Britain, before insisting that this “would not matter so much if their ideas were not still supported by millions of people (as is indicated by the immense popularity Tony Benn enjoys well into his eighties).”

It should be noted that Benn, who is hardly a major force in politics today, has repeatedly declared that he will die, as he has lived, as a loyal member of the Labour Party.

The significance of the British Socialist Workers Party’s call for a new “left alternative”

Part two

By Tony Robson and Chris Marsden
29 July 2009

This is the conclusion of a two-part series on an open letter issued by the Socialist Workers Party in Britain. The first part was posted July 28.

Even now, the Socialist Workers Party has very little to back up its claim that the future lies with a possible break from Labour by a section of the bureaucracy. During the last 12 years, the trade unions have enabled the Labour government to pursue its free market agenda by isolating every manifestation of working class resistance.

The Rail Maritime and Transport union (RMT) stood candidates against Labour in the European elections, as part of the No2EU slate formed in alliance with the Communist Party of Britain and the Socialist Party. However, this front, which the RMT said it would not repeat in a general election, was so right-wing and nationalist that the SWP balked at lending its support. But should the prospect of the Labour government being replaced by the Tories in next year’s general election come to pass, then any split that took place would be on a similar perspective to that advanced by No2EU.

For the present, the open letter is reduced to citing “Mark Serwotka, the general secretary of the PCS [Public and Communication Service] civil service workers union,” who has proposed that “trade unions stand candidates.”

The SWP concludes by advocating “one simple step”—the convening of a conference “of all those committed to presenting candidates representing working class interests at the next election.” On such a formless basis, the difference between reform and revolution would not merely be “finessed.” The SWP and others would rather act as apologists and foot soldiers for a desperate attempt at rebranding by the very forces that have betrayed the working class.

The united front

Callinicos and the SWP routinely describe their call for a new electoral party dominated by the trade unions as a “united front of a special type.” This is a transparent attempt to dress up their manoeuvres in language associated with the struggle waged by Leon Trotsky in the 1930s to mobilise the working class against the growth of fascism in Germany, which represented an immediate and mortal danger to the working class.

He raised the demand for a united front against the position taken by the German Communist Party, under the Stalinist leadership of the Communist International, which rejected common action with the social democrats, whom they denounced as “social fascist.” His aim was to break the influence of the social democratic leaders, to whom millions of workers continued to look, believing that they represented a socialist alternative.

Trotsky fought for the German Communist Party to propose a united front with the Social Democratic Party in order to organise joint action against the Nazis and in defence of workers’ organisations. By this means, the Communist Party could take the lead in uniting the working class and either expose the Social Democracy for its refusal to mount common defensive action against the class enemy or prove the superiority of the leadership of the revolutionary party in such mass struggles by the working class.

However, he insisted that it was absolutely impermissible to subordinate the revolutionaries within a united front to the reformist bureaucracy or conceal programmatic differences. The antithesis of a united front is any form of electoral alliance or political combination with the reformists, let alone the development of a common party that, to quote Callinicos, seeks to “finesse the alternatives of reform or revolution.”

It was the refusal by the Third International to even discuss the Stalinist leadership’s world historic betrayal that allowed Hitler to come to power that led Trotsky to call for the founding of the Fourth International. The Stalinists responded to the disaster produced by their ultra-left policies in Germany by adopting the right-opportunist policy of the Popular Front—based on the assertion that in the struggle against the greater danger of fascism, the working class had to ally itself with and accept the leadership of the democratic bourgeois parties and regimes.

This was, in fact, a counterrevolutionary policy. It meant the renunciation of any revolutionary or socialist demands as well as the struggle for workers’ power. It led to one catastrophe for the working class after another—in Spain, France and the rest of Europe—and paved the way for the eruption of a second imperialist world war.

The SWP’s policy—of an electoral alliance and even common party with the bureaucracy—is in line with the policies of Stalin, not Trotsky.

This is not the first time that the Socialist Workers Party has utilised the issue of fascism as a mechanism for opposing a political struggle against the Labour and trade union bureaucracy. In 1977, it set up the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), with the backing of some trade unions and the endorsement of former Young Liberal leader Peter Hain (now Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s secretary of state for Wales, but then the communications officer of the postal workers’ union), the deputy general secretary of the engineering union AUEW, Ernest Roberts, and one Neil Kinnock, later to become leader of the Labour Party.

The ANL sought to focus the efforts of mainly young people on the supposed “common fight” against the National Front, the forerunner of the British National Party (BNP). This was at a time when the working class was in direct conflict with the Labour government of James Callaghan, which was imposing IMF-dictated austerity measures, culminating in the 1979 Winter of Discontent and the election of the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher.

There is, however, a significant difference between the 1970s and today. Whereas in 1977, the SWP acted with the benediction of the Labour and trade union lefts, today it speaks as the officially designated representative of the Trades Union Congress.

The SWP has over decades integrated itself into the highest echelons of the trade union bureaucracy, assuming leading positions in a number of unions to accompany the niche it has established within academia. It speaks today not merely as the bureaucracy’s apologist, but as its officially recognised spokesman on the left.

Paralleling the development of Respect, the SWP liquidated the ANL into Unite Against Fascism (UAF) in 2003 by forming an alliance with the National Assembly Against Racism, led politically by the Labour Party’s Black Section. Its sole purpose is to promote tactical voting as a way of preventing the BNP from “gaining an electoral foothold in this country.”

The UAF is endorsed by the TUC, funded by the trade unions and functions out of offices supplied by the PCS union, led by former Respect member Mark Serwotka. Its chairman is the former Labour Party mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. Weyman Bennett of the SWP is the co-chair of UAF, and Martin Smith, the SWP’s national organiser, sits on its steering committee.

The SWP has been entrusted with this position because it is now widely recognised as a party that has been fully incorporated into the structures of official politics. Its radical rhetoric and advocacy of trade union action and social reforms have not proved to be a hindrance to this cooption into the establishment, but an asset that the political elite understands can provide a useful safety valve.

In October 2008, for example, the World Socialist Web Site drew attention to the nomination of SWP member Sabiha Iqbal as a consultant on the 22-strong Young Muslim Advisory Group. (See “Britain: Socialist Workers Party member becomes government adviser”). YMAG was set up by the Brown government to advise it on how to combat the influence of Islamic extremism and “how best to boost the representation and participation of young Muslims in civic life.”

Then-Communities Secretary Hazel Blears said of Iqbal’s political affiliations, “If you don’t want to change the world at 17, that’s a shame.” Iqbal would become one of what Blears described as “the next generation of Muslim community leaders.”

An open defence of the state

The SWP’s open letter and its role in the UAF demonstrate just how far it has gone beyond its historic function as an apologist for the trade union apparatus to now stand as the open defender of the entire bourgeois parliamentary state apparatus.

In the immediate aftermath of the European elections, Martin Smith acted as the spokesman for the UAF and was interviewed by Channel 4 and BBC Newsnight. Rather than using the opportunity to indict the whole political establishment, their promotion of anti-immigration policies and attacks on workers’ livelihoods, for the growth of the BNP, he called for all parliamentarians to come together to avert the BNP threat.

He said of the BNP that “The biggest problem is giving them the air of legitimacy.”

Smith stated that every political party “has a right to speak,” except the BNP because it does “not pursue a legitimate democratic structure (sic). They have a completely different view, really a revolutionary fascist view. They will use Parliament to put forward their views.”

These are significant statements. The BNP is denounced for being “revolutionary” and utilising Parliament to advance policies that do not fit a “legitimate democratic structure.”

A UAF statement for media workers similarly warns that “when fascist parties are allowed to worm their way into the political and media establishment...[t]hey use the platforms they are granted to consolidate their presence in the political mainstream, normalise their racist arguments, pull the political spectrum to the right and build their organisations on the ground. As they grow, so do the pressures on people to capitulate to them. The danger today is that the BNP breaks through the ‘cordon sanitaire’ to become a regular fixture in our media” (emphasis added).

Such calls for censorship and proscription of fascist tendencies and their activities, when they are responded to by the establishment, are invariably utilised primarily against the workers’ movement and the left. One only has to recall that the Public Order Act was originally enacted in 1936 on the pretext of opposing Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. In both its original and subsequent incarnations, it has been employed to prevent political marches from going ahead, and was used extensively during the 1984-1985 miners’ strike. It prohibits any “association of persons” that seeks to usurp “the functions of the police or of the armed forces of the Crown” and bans the use of “physical force in promoting any political object.”

The SWP is indifferent to such principled considerations. Its open defence of bourgeois parliamentarianism and its denunciation of the BNP for not being part of a “legitimate democratic structure” is a constant theme. The Socialist Worker newspaper regularly runs articles with headlines such as “How the BNP Poses as a Respectable Party” and “BNP’s ‘Respectable’ Veneer Slips.”

This speaks volumes about the SWP’s own political concerns. They seek nothing more than acceptance into the fold of bourgeois respectability. In reality, one of the reasons for the growth in support for the BNP is that it has cast itself as an outsider and opponent of the political establishment.

If anything is guaranteed to facilitate the growth of such far-right tendencies, it is the SWP’s efforts to invoke the sanctity of Parliament and to boost the political credentials of the trade unions and the Labour left. But the SWP’s leadership of the UAF shows that it is fully prepared to ally itself with bourgeois political tendencies other than the trade union and Labour bureaucracy. Those to whom the UAF appeals to maintain a “cordon sanitaire” around the BNP include not only dozens of Labour MPs and “our media” (the Daily Mirror is a signatory), but all of the major parties.

In this light, it is even more striking that only after an extended warning of the dangers posed by the BNP does the SWP’s open letter turn to what it describes as the “second lesson from the European elections”—the need for “a united fightback to save jobs and services.” If Conservative Party leader David Cameron is elected, the SWP writes, “[He] will attempt to drive through policies of austerity at the expense of the vast majority of the British people.”

Even then, the SWP portrays the threat posed by the Tories as somehow less than that represented by the BNP, claiming that because the Conservative Party’s vote fell, “they are nervous about pushing through attacks.”

The SWP writes this in its own newspaper at the same time as it is in a political alliance with Cameron and the Conservatives—precisely on the basis that they are fellow democrats and thus allies in the fight against the BNP!

Cameron and other top Conservatives such as Sir Teddy Taylor, Edward Garnier and Anthony Steen are signatories to the UAF. If Cameron comes to power in 2010, he will have done so, at least in part, thanks to the SWP portraying the Conservatives as a “legitimate” democratic force rather than the party of big capital and minimising the danger of a Tory government marshalling the full force of the state against the working class.