The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is one of the largest groups to the left of Labour in Britain. It is the animating force in Stand Up to Racism and has a presence in the unions – in particular, education unions – though in recent years its strong position on university campuses has been challenged by the RCP and others.
It has been debating its future, its active members will be mindful of changed conditions with the arrival of a Labour government and mindful of their actions under the last Labour government.
An editorial of the SWP’s paper has declared:
“A left alternative at the ballot box, where different forces can work together, would be positive.”
And at its recent conference, this position was approved by delegates.
For the rest of the left, we now have to consider how to relate to this group and how to draw out the best from its tradition.
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SWoP stories
The SWP is an ‘unorthodox Trotskyist’ organisation believing that the Soviet Union and other actually-existing socialist states were/are not socialist but state-capitalist. This is in contrast to orthodox Trotskyists who believe in the existence of degenerated or deformed workers’ states.
The practical consequence of this position for the SWP was that they did not have a theoretical basis for the defence of bureaucratic forms of socialism.
They could and can wash their hands of the existing party-states and put their emphasis on socialism from below, stressing the role of workplace representatives and the formation of workers’ councils rather than parliamentary elections or the actions of full-time officials. This is not to say that they are indifferent or automatically hostile to the trade unions’ formal structures or the results of local or general elections.
Their late founder Tony Cliff led what was previously the much looser International Socialists in the 1960s into becoming a ‘party’ during the Labour government of 1974-79. With the collapse of the CPGB in the 80s, the SWP became one of the major leftwing forces in the unions and social movements in Britain, conducting front work in the Anti-Nazi League, and later electoral work with the Socialist Alliance and Scottish Socialist Party.
As the Labour government participated in the US-led ‘global war on terror’ during the 2000s, the SWP helped launch the Stop the War Coalition and the Respect electoral coalition to try to unite opposition to imperialist wars involving the British state.
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Pre-communist balloting
The SWP started out on their modern electoral turn when they circulated an Action Programme in the late 1990s. This was a list of immediate demands raised through the trade union movement shortly after the New Labour government took office.
The function of this programme was to draw trade unionists and community activists into the party, certainly. But the sincerity of the comrades cannot be doubted – they wanted the workers’ movement to respond to this programme with agreement and common campaign work.
However, the theoretical justification for the programme situated it in the tradition of the Communist International not left-reformism. In the party’s International Socialism journal, leading member Alex Callinicos quoted the Communist International’s critique of the social democrats’ use of the minimum programme when separated from maximal goals.
Prefacing this, Callinicos wrote:
“Pre-war social democracy had been based on a ‘minimum programme’ of reforms which would improve workers’ immediate situation while leaving capitalism untouched, and the ‘maximum programme’ of socialism. When forced to choose, the leaders of the Second International had opted for the former and, in order to rescue capitalism, even abandoned the most limited reforms.”
Yet curiously this split between minimum and maximum programme was exactly what the SWP was doing with its Action Programme – it did not call for a workers’ republic in Britain, or for international socialism. It is as if these were to be retained as private positions of the group, which itself lacks a formal programme.
And when forced to choose, the SWP opted to rescue left-reformism and abandoned the call for a republic when it came to deciding the policies of Respect. The practice of the SWP in both the Socialist Alliance and in Respect was not to emphasise maximum goals but to try to act as ‘old Labour’, seemingly trying to reanimate the corpse of leftwing social democracy for electoral purposes.
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Neither reformism nor ultra-leftism
This bind is inevitable for an avowedly revolutionary organisation of a certain size which aims to reproduce itself over time. We see the same phenomena with the old CPGB – and Militant within the Labour Party. We should not be surprised that it happens outside of the Labour Party, too. How else to survive but to pick your battles?
This is not to justify the practice of holding back one’s full programme. The Socialist Alliance issued a 2001 general election manifesto which spoke with candour about the need to abolish the monarchy and the House of Lords and introduce proportional representation for elections to the Commons. These democratic demands were the beginning of a coherent political alternative to labourism.
So it is possible to avoid ‘parliamentary cretinism’ and yet still retain an intervention in the ‘high politics’ of the state.
But until such time as enduring independent electoral representation is possible, those left-reformists breaking from Labour and those revolutionary organisations seeking to reach broader layers will form a marriage of convenience for electoral purposes.
Given the gradual coalescing of forces within Corbyn’s arms-length Collective, Marxists can and should argue for the broadest possible alliance of working-class forces to pose a leftwing challenge to the Labour Right – but that doesn’t mean narrowing our own horizons and hiding our views. Rather, we have to give careful consideration as to how we argue for our ideas.
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Reasons for concern
How wide can an electoral coalition be?
Some people will hold a negative view about the SWP being involved in a new leftwing electoral front. Their handling of the ‘comrade Delta’ scandal was atrocious, and although it has taken far too long – a total of eleven years – they have issued a formal statement in which they claim to have improved their disputes policy.
This ‘apology’ should have been made privately before any public statement was issued. It is understandable that there will be great deal of caution about working with the SWP in light of this insensitivity towards the survivors.
The turmoil in the SWP demonstrated the problems with the organisational model of a combat party operating without permanent factions. There have been many similar cases of abusive behaviour and mishandled ‘investigations’ within similarly-structured organisations. No political trend is free of this type of problem, but bureaucratic centralism does make it harder to uproot abusive behaviour by individuals with power.
All this being said, it would be a mistake to accept bans and proscriptions on sectarian grounds in a left-of-Labour electoral alliance – using forms of bureaucratic centralism to fight bureaucratic centralism is like fighting fire with fire.
We should expect the highest standards of conduct but this can’t be enforced on a factional basis because no faction can be assumed to be free of individuals capable of misconduct.
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From a party to a network?
What would the SWP do if admitted to a new electoral alliance? Would it still style itself as ‘the party’?
The SWP could follow their comrades in Ireland and become something like the Socialist Workers Network, maintaining their own organisation and press, and seeking to operate within an electoral project similar to that of People Before Profit.
But unlike with People Before Profit, entry into an electoral alliance in Britain offers little hope in the short term of the SWP playing the leading role or even winning parliamentary representation.
If a credible left-of-Labour electoral alliance emerges in the next year with the aim of eventually becoming a new party, we should expect the SWP, and other groups like it, to express an interest in joining.
It is incumbent upon Marxists to refuse the impulse to block left groups from a left bloc
The Socialist Party is now to be part of Collective, the biggest effort at unity – it is to be hoped they will argue against bans and proscriptions and for principled unity. Sadly, the SWP seem to want to exclude the Workers Party even as they call for a pluralist leftwing electoral organisation.
Before we write comrades off as a lost cause, we should at least try to reach a principled agreement. Reason in revolt, yes, but we should also be reasonable in revolt and hold conferences to agree as much unity as possible.