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Galloway's Iranian propaganda?

Ellie Keen — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 23:12:55 +0000

George Galloway, the Leftwing Respect MP, has been accused of making allegations that border on paedophile smears and play to homophobic prejudice. He claims that the boyfriend of gay Iranian asylum seeker Mehdi Kazemi was executed for “committing sex crimes against young men”.

The insinuation of such a claim is that Mehdi’s boyfriend was a rapist or a child sex abuser. It also stigmatises Mehdi with the shame that he was the partner of someone who committed sexual assaults on male youths. He will suffer with this stigma when he is returned to the UK and could face considerable personal hostility from people who have heard and believe these allegations against his boyfriend.

Mr Galloway made his astonishing allegation on Channel Five’s The Wright Stuff. You can watch his interview here.

He has been asked to explain the source of his claim, but has so far failed to do so.

I am not aware of any paedophile-style sex abuse claims against Mehdi’s partner. Moreover, no human rights group has mentioned any evidence that Mehdi’s boyfriend was a rapist or a child molester.

Although the regime in Tehran frequently defames political, religious, ethnic and sexual dissidents with false claims of kidnapping, rape, alcoholism, sodomy, adultery, drug-taking and hooliganism, even the most extreme ayatollahs have not made allegations that Mehdi Kazemi’s boyfriend was involved in sex abuse.

Nevertheless, Galloway has broadcast this very serious, potentially defamatory, allegation to the British public, and has then failed to back it up with evidence.

To some people, Galloway’s claims look like propaganda in defence of the totalitarian, homophobic Islamic Republic of Iran. His passionate opposition to a war against Iran, which I share, seems to have clouded his judgement; leading him to downplay the regime’s persecution of lesbians and gays, which includes state-sanctioned executions.

In the same interview for The Wright Stuff, Galloway went on to state: “All the [British] papers seem to imply that you get executed in Iran for being gay. That’s not true.”

His claim that lesbian and gay people are not at risk of execution in Iran is refuted by every reputable human rights organisation, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and the International Lesbian and Gay Association. None of these esteemed bodies are anti-Iran warmongers, as Galloway has subsequently seemed to imply.

The leftwing US journalist, Doug Ireland, has documented cases of the flogging and execution of men who have sex with men in Iran. These are just the cases we know about. It is likely that some similar executions never get media coverage in Iran and are therefore unknown to the outside world.

The Iranian Queer Rights Organisation also confirms that homosexuality is a capital offence and that gay Iranians are subjected to brutal punishments, including torture and hanging.

The government of Iran admits that it has the death penalty for homosexuality. Gay people are sometimes tortured to make confessions – even false confessions. Iranian law makes no distinction between consensual and non-consensual same-sex relations. Both are punishable by execution.

If Iran doesn’t execute queers, why does it need to retain the death penalty for same-sex relations? Why doesn’t it repeal a law it supposedly never enforces? Why doesn’t it announce a moratorium on hangings for homosexuality?

As with other dissidents, gay men are usually hanged in public by the barbaric slow strangulation method which is deliberately designed to maximise and prolong the suffering of the victim. These gruesome public barbarisms are also designed to terrorise the gay population.

To discredit the gay people it hangs, and to stir up public homophobia in support of its medieval religious-inspired punishments, the regime sometimes frames gay people with false charges of rape and child sex abuse. It wants to create the impression that homosexuals are monsters, in order to deter men from seeking same-sex relations.

This is what happened in the case of 21-year-old Makwan Moloudzadeh, who was executed in Iran last December. He was hanged for alleged sex offences against male teenagers, when he himself was a mere 13 years old. Amnesty International condemned his trial as “grossly flawed” and a “mockery of justice.”

Human Rights Watch reports that Moloudzadeh was coerced and tortured into making a confession. According to Amnesty International, his accusers retracted their sex assault allegations and admitted that they had been pressured into making false claims against him.

Even if Moloudzadeh had been guilty as charged, he should never have been hanged because the alleged offence was committed while he was a minor.

Strong evidence for Moloudzadeh’s innocence is the fact that hundreds of villagers turned out for his funeral; which would not have happened if the official Iranian account that he was a child sex abuser was true.

In a second interview on The Wright Stuff, Galloway launched into a scurrilous attack on Medhi’s friends and supporters, and the defenders of lesbian, gay and bisexual human rights in Iran, including myself:

“This (Mehdi Kazemi’s case) is a useful story for the war propaganda machine, the khaki machine now taking on a tinge of pink….what I will not accept is people being used, as Tatchell is, as the pink end of the war machine. That’s what Peter Tatchell has become by attacking Iran in the way that he does.”

At the antiwar protest in London on March 15, which I supported and attended, Galloway repeated these claims in his keynote speech. He said the “khaki war machine now has its pink contingent”. He went on to imply that people who support gay rights in Iran are “useful idiots” and said their aim is to “bamboozle the public to go along with mass murder in Iran”.

It is untrue and deeply offensive to suggest that those of us who oppose homophobic persecution in Iran are backing the bombing and invasion of Iran. We are not.

I am on record in my writings and speeches as opposing an attack on Iran. When, for example, I exposed Tehran’s racist and neocolonial persecution of its Ahwazi Arab ethnic minority, I stated categorically:

“I am part of a new campaign group, Hands Off the People of Iran (HOPI). HOPI opposes both a US war on Iran and the tyranny of the Iranian regime. My motto is: Neither Washington nor Tehran!

A war against Iran would be another disastrous neo-imperial adventure, which would strengthen the Tehran dictatorship. President Ahmadinejad would play the patriot and manipulate nationalism to rally the population behind him. He would use a US military attack as an excuse to further crack down on dissent in the name of safeguarding national security.

The overthrow of the theocratic police state by the Iranian people – not by US military intervention – is the best way to resolve the nuclear crisis and prevent a needless, unjustified war. With no dictatorship in Tehran, President Bush and the neo cons would lose the rationale for a military strike against Iran.”

Galloway’s insinuation that I am banging the war drum and siding with imperialism is both laughable and dishonourable.

For nearly 40 years I have supported the Iranian people’s struggle against dictatorship, first against the western-backed Shah and, since 1979, against the clerical tyranny of the ayatollahs. I have been totally consistent. I am not suddenly focusing on Iran’s human rights abuses and doing the dirty work of the Washington neocons, as Galloway seems to suggest.

Undeterred by criticisms that his outbursts collude with homophobia and with a viciously anti-gay regime in Tehran, Mr Galloway boasts: “I have an unblemished record of support for lesbian and gay equality.”

Well, not quite. The Public Whip website (which monitors MPs votes) notes that Galloway did not vote on 8 out of 10 of the major parliamentary votes on gay law reform in recent years. His repeat absence is a strange way to express support for gay rights. Most other MPs turned up to vote. Why not George?

Galloway is, of course, a Respect MP. A commitment to gay rights was entirely absent from Respect’s 2005 general election manifesto. Some insiders claim gay equality was originally included but was removed to appease Muslim fundamentalist voters (this apparent assumption by Respect that all Muslims are homophobic fundamentalists is just plain wrong – they are not).

The policy section of the Respect website has included a one-line opposition to discrimination based on sexual orientation but it is hidden away under “other policies”. Not exactly upfront.

One of Respect’s major funders is Dr Mohammed Naseem. He is a one-time member of their executive and was a Respect parliamentary candidate. He is also a leading member of the Islamic Party of Britain (IPB) which appears to advocate the death penalty for consenting adult homosexuality in certain circumstances.

The IPB is viciously homophobic in other respects too, as it’s website explains, and as my OutRage! colleague, Brett Lock, has revealed.

Naseem is a strange bedfellow for a supposedly pro-gay rights MP.

George Galloway was magnificent before the US Senate, exposing the Iraq debacle. Sadly, he now sometimes seems to be exonerating a cruel, unjust regime in Tehran that is responsible for some of the worst state-sanctioned homophobia in the world. This regime is also responsible for the equally heinous persecution of trade unionists, women’s rights campaigners, student leaders, human rights advocates, investigative journalists and activists who defend Iran’s subjugated minority nationalities, such as the Kurds, Arabs and Baluchis.

Misguided, untruthful attacks on Iranian gay people, the queer rights movement and the pink community do not strengthen the antiwar movement and the struggle against US imperialism. On the contrary, they play straight into the hands of the tyrants in Tehran and their mirror opposites in Washington. They betray all Iranians who are yearning and striving for democracy, human rights, social justice and the self-rule of Iran’s oppressed minority nations.

Alan Thornett’s Denunciation of Trotskyism (Part1)

Ellie Keen — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:50:24 +0000

Part 1 (Part 2 can be found here)

The January edition of International Viewpoint publishes a statement by the Socialist Resistance steering committee entitled “Democratic Centralism and Broad Left Parties.” Also known as the International Socialist Group, the group is led by Alan Thornett.

Thornett has recently secured his position as chief advisor to Member of Parliament George Galloway in Respect Renewal, the organisation formed following Galloway’s split with the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) last November.

The SWP was the motive force for the creation of Respect-The Unity Coalition, which was formed in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war. The SWP conceived of Respect as a political extension of the alliance of antiwar Labour MPs, trade union bureaucrats, Stalinists, Greens, Liberal Democrats and Muslim groups that constituted the Stop the War Coalition.

The SWP calculated that such a coalition could successfully challenge the Labour Party in elections, provided only that it did not place any obstacles in the way of such a regroupment. The biggest obstacle would be to insist that the new party be explicitly socialist. The SWP therefore stated that Respect would be a “broad coalition” with socialists within it, but raising only those demands that were acceptable to all the antiwar forces that joined it.

The “socialist” component of Respect would be made up of the SWP itself, but more importantly, the left Labour MPs and trade union bureaucrats it anticipated would break from the Blair government as a result of the war in Iraq and in opposition to Blair’s pro-business policies. These dissident Labourites would provide the real leadership of Respect.

The SWP thus oriented itself not to the hundreds of thousands of workers and young people who mobilised against the war, but to the political forces that were able to dominate the anti-war movement and ensure that no political struggle was waged against the Blair government.

Such a party, based on widely disparate political tendencies rooted in opposing class forces, and with no agreement on programme other than being “deeply disappointed by the authoritarian social policies and profit-centred, neo-liberal economic strategy of the government,” could under no conditions be viable. But Respect’s fate was to be doubly disastrous, given that the break by a significant layer of Labourites from the party never materialised. The token opposition demonstrated by a handful of MPs to the war in Iraq evaporated once the war was underway. None of them were about to sacrifice their comfortable careers within Labour’s ranks.

Only Galloway found himself outside Labour’s ranks when he was expelled for his opposition to the war. For this reason, Respect became primarily a vehicle for Galloway to win back a seat in parliament.

Moreover, the reliance on Galloway helped to deepen the SWP’s own adaptation begun during the anti-war movement to Imams, Muslim businessmen, petty bourgeois leaders and groups such as the Muslim Association of Britain, as well as to the Middle Eastern regimes to which Galloway is oriented. The SWP did so, hoping to capitalise on Galloway’s connections in order to secure its own electoral advances.

The plan backfired badly for the SWP. Galloway eventually moved against his erstwhile allies when the Muslim politicians and business figures made clear their hostility to the alliance with the SWP—an opposition motivated to some degree by anti-communism, but mostly by petty organisational rivalries and a belief that the SWP exerted too much influence over who was in the leadership and who would stand as candidates.

Thornett, whose small group of supporters were the only other nominally left group in Respect, stepped in to paint Galloway’s Muslim-dominated faction as a great reforming movement against the undemocratic practices of the SWP. He jumped at the chance to “renew” Respect, even handing over his party’s press to it.

An attack on revolutionary socialism

The article by Thornett’s tendency’s in International Viewpoint is framed as a polemic against the SWP, claiming that it was responsible for the failure to secure the “broad alliance of progressive forces” that was originally envisioned as the basis for Respect. But in the process, Thornett delivers one of the most unalloyed presentations of the cynical, unprincipled and anti-socialist politics behind all such efforts to construct new parties from the decaying fragments and breakaways from the old social democratic and Stalinist organisations.

Thornett speaks as the leader of the British Section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USec), whose affiliate parties—such as the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire in France—are engaged in similar political efforts throughout the world. He makes clear that the essential basis for all such projects is a deep political hostility to Trotskyism and a repudiation of the essential task of building an independent political leadership for the working class, guided by the socialist and internationalist perspective of Marxism.

The statement acknowledges that “there were no principled questions of politics involved” in the split in Respect, but insists that it is significant nevertheless. Respect failed, Thornett claims, because, unlike the International Socialism Group and the USec, the SWP maintains a commitment to “the models of political organisation and habits of engagement with the rest of the left adopted by some self-proclaimed Trotskyist organisations” that “were strongly pressurised by third period Stalinism and organisational methods and assumptions inherited from the Stalinised Comintern.” He adds that “no section of British Trotskyism was entirely unaffected by this pressure.” (1)

Thornett’s accusation that other left groups in Britain have historically suffered from an ultra-left attitude to the old mass workers’ parties and a Stalinist organisational approach sets the stage for his insistence that no one should make the same mistake regarding the new “broad left” parties formed since the late 1990s. He hails organisations such as Rifondazione Comunista in Italy and, more recently, the Left Party in Germany as a rebirth of the left that has rendered unnecessary and divisive efforts to build an independent Marxist party.

“It is absurd to imagine,” the statement declares, “that it is possible to take off the shelf wholesale texts written in Russia in 1902 or even 1917, and apply them in an unmediated way in 2007. Even less credible is the idea of taking the form of revolutionary organisation and politics appropriate for Minneapolis in 1934 (2) and simply attempting to extrapolate it in a situation where revolutionary politics has been transformed by central new issues (of gender and the environment in particular); where the working class itself has been transformed in terms of its cultural level, geographical distribution and political and trade union organisation; and where the experience of mass social movements and the balance sheet of Stalinism (and social democracy) has radically reaffirmed the centrality of self-organisation and democracy at the heart of the revolutionary project.”

Thornett is not arguing against an uncritical application of Lenin’s writings. He is rejecting any possibility of building a socialist party based on the working class. The future lies, rather, in liquidating into the new “broad left” formations.

He is forced to acknowledge that workers have already had bitter experiences with the very parties he champions, such as Rifondazione Comunista’s “support for Italian participation in the Afghanistan war” and the “neo-liberal domestic policies” of Lula’s Workers Party in Brazil. These, he states, were “of course massive defeats for the left.” But he reserves his venom for anyone opposing the betrayals of these parties.

His document insists: “For some on the revolutionary left, what we might call the ‘clean hands and spotless banner’ tendency, this shows that attempts at political recomposition are a waste of time. Far better to just build your organisation, sell your paper, hold your meetings, criticise everyone else and maintain your own spotless banner…. In our view this simplistic ‘build the party’ option is no longer operable.”

This cynical dismissal of the “clean hands and spotless banner” tendency is a reference to the closing paragraphs of the Transitional Programme of 1938, the founding document of the Fourth International (FI).

Trotsky’s formation of the FI was in political response to world historic defeats inflicted on the international working class as a result of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union and the affiliated parties of the Communist (Third) International under the leadership of Joseph Stalin: the 1926 General Strike in Britain, the Chinese Revolution in 1927, and, above all, the victory of Hitler in Germany.

It was the failure of any party of the Third International to oppose this betrayal that led Trotsky to proclaim its death as a revolutionary organisation and to call for the founding of the Fourth International. He did so in political opposition to centrist parties, such as the POUM in Spain, which opposed building a new international and whose refusal to politically challenge Stalinism led to further bloody defeats. The Stalinist bureaucracy’s response to Trotsky’s challenge was to launch the political purges of the 1930s that culminated in the infamous Moscow Trials.

It was against this background, and on the eve of the Second World War, that the Fourth International was established. Drawing on these terrible experiences, Trotsky wrote: “The present crisis in human culture is the crisis in the proletarian leadership. The advanced workers, united in the Fourth International, show their class the way out of the crisis. They offer a programme based on international experience in the struggle of the proletariat and of all the oppressed of the world for liberation. They offer a spotless banner.”

Thornett rejects entirely Trotsky’s struggle to build the Fourth International, proclaiming it irrelevant in the modern period. He rails against “a false conception of the configuration of the workers’ movement and the left, a misreading of ideas from the 1930s, that is common in some sections of the Trotskyist movement. This ‘map’ sees basically the working class and its trade unions, the reformists (Stalinists), various forms of ‘centrism’ (tendencies which vacillate between reform and revolution) and the revolutionary Marxists—with maybe the anarchists as a complicating factor.”

“On the basis of this kind of map,” the statement continues, “Trotsky could say in 1938 ‘There is no revolutionary tendency worthy of the name on the face of the earth outside the Fourth International.’ If this idea was ever operable, it is certainly not today.”

“Today the ‘thin red line of Bolshevism’ conception of revolutionary politics doesn’t work,” the document insists. Why? Because “this idea often prioritises formal programmatic agreement, sometimes on arcane or secondary questions, above the realities of organisation and class struggle on the ground” [emphasis added] .

Pabloite liquidationism

For Thornett, it is not permissible to speak of Stalinism, reformism and centrism, because the parties he is seeking to construct can be formed and win influence only if the working class is kept ignorant of the political record of these discredited tendencies and is unaware that their remnants form the backbone of the new parties.

Anyone familiar with the history of Stalinism, for example, would not have been surprised by Rifondazione Comunista’s support for Italian participation in the Afghan war. It did so as a coalition partner of Romano Prodi’s government alongside the Left Democrats, which also emerged from the Italian Communist Party.

Various “left” groups had claimed that Rifondazione Comunista would function as a left alternative to the Left Democrats. But Rifondazione Comunista continued to support the government despite its role in Lebanon, is support for the expansion of a US military base in Northern Italy and its implementation of austerity measures that led to its fall from power in February.

The same can be said of the attacks on workers’ living standards by Lula’s so-called Workers Party and the record of any of the other formations held up by Thornett as having rendered Trotskyism obsolete. Thornett’s aim is to provide a political amnesty for organisations such as the German Left Party, set up by a section of social democratic functionaries led by Oskar Lafontaine and ex-Stalinists from East Germany, into which all manner of “left” groups have liquidated, including the sister party of the British SWP.

Thornett accompanies his denunciation of programmatic agreement with a list of “general guidelines” on how to operate in these “broad left” parties. The most significant of these is his insistence that “no revolutionary current can have the ‘disciplined Phalanx’ concept of operation…. [W]e are not doing entry work or fighting a bureaucratic leadership.”

What do Thornett’s prescriptions say of the type of parties he favours? No struggle for programmatic agreement means that there will be no challenge to the pro-capitalist programme of the leading figures in these parties. His tendency is “not fighting a bureaucratic leadership.”

The same is true of Thornett’s rejection of accountability within his own organisation or the broad party (Respect Renewal or some other formation) in which his co-thinkers operate. He does not speak for the rights of the rank and file, but for a leadership of which he is now a well-established representative. Everything can be discussed, any and all views held, only so long as nothing interferes with the right of the leaders to ignore the nominal programme of their party and the mandate of their members and do precisely what they want.

That is what has happened in the case of Rifondazione Comunista’s support for Italian participation in the Afghanistan war. And that is what will happen with Respect Renewal in Britain, should it ever win significant support.

In a related document, David Packer of Thornett’s group makes this abundantly clear. He states clearly how “in the present context we should not, nor have we, been fighting for Respect to adopt a revolutionary programme or revolutionary forms of organisation.”

He goes on to give at least one example of how the “freedom” the Thornett group espouses works in practice. He writes, “I am sure we agree that our bottom line on abortion is a ‘woman’s right to choose,’ but this is not supported by our only MP [George Galloway], nor by some other forces in Respect…. Clearly, we would not expect [Galloway], an avowed Roman Catholic, to argue for a woman’s right to choose….”

Far from issuing forth some newfound wisdom prompted by developments unforseen by Trotsky, Thornett merely revives arguments previously marshalled in order to oppose a struggle against the old and now discredited reformist and Stalinist parties.

His is a warmed-over version of the politics long associated with the United Secretariat and its founding theoreticians, Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel. (3)

Throughout the post-war period, the Pabloite groups have insisted that Trotskyism has no independent role to play. The struggle for socialism would proceed by revolutionaries entering into the “mass workers’ parties” that dominated in any given country—Stalinist, reformist or nationalist—which they would steer in a socialist direction by building alliances and giving loyal advice in the hope of influencing their leaders.

In words foreshadowing Thornett’s document, Pablo called in 1951 for “the most effective possible regroupment of conscious revolutionary forces larger than our own” and, through a “fusion with them,” the eventual creation of “big Marxist revolutionary parties.”

Pablo, too, dismissed with contempt Trotsky’s insistence that outside the Fourth International “there does not exist a single revolutionary current on this planet really meriting the name.” He wrote in October 1953, “In the present concrete historical conditions the variant which is more and more the least probable is the one where the masses, disillusioned by the reformists and Stalinists, break with their traditional mass organisations to come to polarise themselves around our present nuclei, the latter acting exclusively and essentially in an independent manner, from without.”

It was in a struggle against this liquidationist tendency that the International Committee of the Fourth International was formed in 1953. Its founding statement, the “Open Letter to the World Trotskyist Movement,” issued by US Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon, declared: “The attempt to revise the accepted Trotskyist analysis of the nature of Stalinism and the Lenin-Trotsky theory of the party, and thereby in effect, to deprive the Trotskyist parties and the Fourth International as a whole of any historical justification for independent existence, is at the bottom of the present crisis in our international movement” (The Heritage We Defend, by David North, Chapter 18: “James P. Cannon’s ‘Open Letter’”).

Cannon could have been writing against Thornett’s document.

For decades, particularly during the revolutionary wave that swept Europe between 1968 and 1975, the Pabloite groups played a key role as apologists for the Stalinist, social democratic and bourgeois nationalist regimes and movements—employing Trotskyist phrases only to justify a policy of complete prostration before the labour bureaucracies.

This loyalty to the bureaucracy has an objective basis. The Pabloites articulated the interests of a layer of the petty bourgeoisie and better-off sections of workers whose social position depended on the welfare state mechanisms and other concessions the bourgeoisie was forced to grant in the post-war period.

The impulse for the ruling class doing so was a fear of a revolutionary development in the working class. However, the instruments through which these concessions were secured and administered were the social democratic and Stalinist parties, which constituted a substantial layer of privileged state apparatchiks in central and local government and the machinery of trade unions, as well as numerous left-leaning academics in the universities and colleges. It was this milieu that was the political tap-root of the various left radical groups, which specialised in demanding more energetic and greater reforms, from which they benefited, while opposing any development that would bite the bureaucratic hand that fed them.

These same considerations shaped the response of the USec’s affiliate organisations to the collapse of the Stalinist, social democratic and bourgeois nationalist parties in the 1990s. This was the decade in which the perspective historically upheld by Pabloism suffered its most crushing refutation.

The revolutionary “self-reform” of the Stalinist bureaucracy that Pabloism had predicted turned out to be its transformation into a capitalist oligarchy that oversaw the reintroduction of private property and market relations in the former Soviet Union. In the West, the reformist Labour parties and trade unions were refashioned as vehicles for implementing Thatcherite policies of privatisation and the destruction of essential services that has resulted in a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth from working people to the super-rich.

In every country, support for these old organisations has haemorrhaged, prompting efforts by sections of the bureaucracy to form new organisations—such as Lula’s Workers Party in Brazil and the Stalinist-led Rifondazione Comunista in Italy—in an attempt to maintain control over the working class. Every such effort was hailed by the Pabloites as a new political dawn.

Only after what remains of the social democratic and Stalinist left decided to make such an organisational break did the USec’s sections finally remove themselves from the decaying carcasses of the old parties. And they did so only to ensconce themselves as comfortably as possible in the new political creations of the self-same bureaucracy—redoubling their efforts to pour scorn on Trotskyism as a sign of their absolute loyalty.

Thus the USec insisted in 2003 that the great danger was that “sections of the revolutionary Marxist movement” had “fetishised their programmatic inheritance into a reified object to be defended against all comers.” What was necessary was “a rejection of the conception of an enlightened, arrogant vanguard that parasites on or subjugates the movement.”

Read Part 2.

Notes:

(1) During the “Third Period,” beginning in 1928, the Communist International declared that social revolution was imminent. In Germany, the Communist Party took an ultra-left line, denouncing the Social Democrats as “social fascists” and opposing Trotsky’s call for a United Front against Hitler as a means of defeating fascism by exposing the Social Democratic leaders and winning the allegiance to communism of the millions of workers who were supportive of the reformists. The Communist Party’s policies were instrumental in ensuring Hitler’s victory.
(2) The Minneapolis general strike of 1934 was led by Trotskyists and resulted in a substantial growth in support for socialism amongst American workers.
(3) The United Secretariat emerged as a political tendency in the years immediately following World War II. Under the leadership of Michel Pablo, the secretary of the Fourth International at the time, it represented an opportunist adaptation to the stabilisation of capitalism. The stabilisation was based on the political betrayal carried out by Stalinism of incipient revolutionary movements in Europe and elsewhere, and the role played by the United States in resuscitating European and Japanese capitalism.

The division of Europe agreed at Yalta and Potsdam and the subsequent onset of the Cold War obliged the Stalinist bureaucracy to reluctantly carry out a programme of nationalisations in the East European buffer states. Pablo responded to this by rejecting the struggle to build independent Marxist parties, based on the central understanding that the instrument for the realisation of socialism was the working class itself. Instead, he argued that the conflict between imperialism and the Stalinist regimes had forced the Stalinist bureaucracy to project a revolutionary orientation and would force it to do so again in future.

This capitulation to Stalinism developed into a comprehensive perspective both justifying and actively seeking the liquidation of the Fourth International. Pablo’s initial prognosis of “centuries of deformed workers’ states” gave way to more modest claims that a process of gradual “self-reform” of the bureaucracy was under way.

The Stalinists were, moreover, only one of a number of “blunt instruments” that could substitute for the revolutionary role previously assigned to the Fourth International. In countries where the social democratic bureaucracies dominated the workers movement, they would be the vehicle for socialist transformation, provided only that enough militant pressure was brought to bear on them by the working class. In the semi-colonial countries, various bourgeois nationalist regimes and parties—from Peronism in Latin America to, later, Castroism in Cuba—would play the same role.

News from the South

Ellie Keen — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:29:11 +0000

”The left has the difficult task of accepting and explaining to others that the old routes into the exercise of power and influence involving internal Labour Party mobilisations and manoeuvres have largely been closed down. We have to face up to the challenge of identifying and developing new routes into effective political activity.”

The endorsement of Gordon Brown for leader of the Labour Party in May could not have been more overwhelming, with 308 MPs nominating Brown, including rebels like Bob Marshall-Andrews. Left candidate, McDonnell, failed to achieve the support of even the soft left within the parliamentary party, nor the backing of any major union, and on the National Executive Committee (NEC), when a motion was moved to reduce the required number of nominations only two members voted for it.

Those of the neo-liberal right within Labour have irreversibly and structurally embedded their victory into the party’s DNA. The rules and constitution have been changed to eliminate the levers that the left used to exercise influence; the conference is a meaningless rally; the social composition of the membership has shifted hugely towards managerial types; the pro-business, pro-war policies mean few activists under thirty would look at the party as anything remotely progressive. Ward meetings are sparse and poorly attended, and the party apparatus is an empty shell in most of the country. Milbank prevents left candidates being selected and the reduced powers of local authorities have removed the base from which the left has in the past built support from the bottom up. The union link now exists more in form than in content. Whereas union branches used to send delegates to General Committee meetings (the old General Management Committees) in each Constituency Labour Party (CLP), this practice has almost disappeared; lay activists and even full-timers are much less likely to be Labour Party members than they ever were before. The only concession won by the affiliated unions was the sop of the Warwick agreement before the election, none of which polices have been implemented. And now they have relinquished their right to pose policy motions to conference.

The aspect of hope in the situation is that the Labour Party may have irrevocably been won for the right, but the political views of its electoral base have not followed and are now to the left of it. And some trade unions find themselves in the position of directly being the ideological opponents of neo-liberalism without the intermediate role of the Labour Party, for example with the GMB’s campaign over Private equity, or the RMT’s campaign for public ownership of the railways. What is more, in the Labour Party’s deputy leader ballot some 100,000 trade unionists voted for the centre left, Jon Cruddas. Compass, the organisation within the Labour Party associated with Jon Cruddas, produces a consistent left critique of New Labour, in both ideological and policy terms.

The major unions will not abandon the Labour Party, as there is no other viable option for them to pursue for influencing government. And as long as the Labour Party relies upon union funding, and the active support of TU officials during elections, the Party will retain the link, which in turn obscures the full extent to which Labour has become, in the words of Jon Cruddas and Jon Tricket: “a party that continues the neo-liberal revolution’”(New Statesman 6 December 2007).

The constructive legacy of the McDonnell campaign is a nucleus of activists who are less isolated and more motivated than they were before, reflected in the relatively buoyant conference of the Labour Representation Committee in November. There is an increased recognition, as John McDonnell puts it, that ‘the left needs to open itself to co-operation with progressive campaigns within our community, learning from them, treating them with mutual respect, rejecting any patronising or sectarian approach and, where needed, to serve as the catalyst to instigate and facilitate campaigning activity. Creativity is also needed to stimulate the analysis, debate and discussion of the ideas and principles which we may share in our wish to transform our society” (Morning Star 28 September 2007).

Outside the Labour Party the most significant left organisations are the Green Party and Respect. The Greens include a significant left wing, and the Marxist Derek Wall has twice won elections to represent the party as national speaker. The Green Left platform within the party is seeking to consolidate the gains that the left has made in terms of policy. There are very many impressive Green Party members at local and national level. However, the decentralised nature of the party has also allowed local Green councillors to go into coalition with Lib Dems and Tories; the electoralism of the Greens means they are not a party immediately attractive to campaigning activists; and the culture within the party is unappealing to trade unionists.

A much younger project than the Green Party, Respect – the Unity Coalition, hit the ground running and is the first English party to the left of Labour to win a seat in Westminster since 1945. Respect was also only 3,000 votes short of winning a second seat in parliament. It was the first time that the left had sunk deep roots among non-white disadvantaged inner city communities, with opposition to the Iraq war leading to many Muslims voting for Respect. In May 2006, Respect built on its success by winning 15 council seats in East London, and one in Birmingham. It has subsequently won council elections in Preston, Bolsover, and another seat in Birmingham

Yet for all this electoral success there were problems. Membership was shrinking not growing and a key layer of former Labour Party left-wingers who had been active in the Socialist Alliance (an earlier attempt at uniting England’s highly divided far-left) either never joined Respect or left it within the first two years. The national conferences in both 2004 and 2005 were marked by numerous independent socialists resigning afterwards, due to an intolerant atmosphere where any disagreement was shouted down. The decision of Galloway to enter the reality TV show Big Brother damaged Respect’s reputation, and exposed the weak relationship between Galloway and Respect national officers. Galloway’s judgement on that occasion was questionable, but his subsequent media exposure, (his Talksport radio show gets 750,000 listeners) has allowed him to reach a truly mass audience for socialist politics.

Outside the strongholds of East London, Birmingham and Preston, Respect attracted very few activists who were not also SWP members. Many had written Respect off, including myself. but Respect’s ability to hold a council seat in the Shadwell ward in Tower Hamlets in August, after a councillor had resigned, showed that the electoral base is sustainable. Respect has now split. With Galloway, the majority of the councillors and most independent activists on one side (Respect Renewal), and on the other side largely just the SWP, and very few others. Significantly, a number of new activists have now joined Respect Renewal. The precise details of the split have been thrashed out on the internet, but they follow a fairly critical, yet diplomatically worded, letter from George Galloway to the Respect National Council in August (see www.socialistunity.com/?p=726). The subsequent response by the SWP to that letter and resulting polarisation in Respect led to escalating tension and two rival conferences in November.

The immediate cause of the crisis was the realisation by Galloway that with the prospect of a snap general election, Respect had no candidates selected, no money in the bank and had lost half its members. These in themselves would have been sufficient reasons to doubt the competence of the National Secretary, but in addition John Rees had allegedly mishandled a potentially illegal foreign financial donation behind Galloway’s back, a matter that has now been referred to the Electoral Commission for investigation. The political reasons for the inertia and breakdown of relationships within Respect are more complex. The SWP’s theory of Respect being a ‘united front of a special type’ led it to try to build two organisations in parallel, the SWP and Respect. But when relating to wider campaigns, and in the unions, they wear their SWP hat. On demonstrations they carry Socialist Worker placards, they sell their own newspaper and blocked launching a Respect paper. They seek to recruit to the SWP, not Respect.

SWP theoretician Alex Callinicos argues “in such broad coalitions it is essential for revolutionaries to retain independent organisation in order to combine building the coalition with the objective that gives this work its meaning – the construction of a mass revolutionary party” (International Socialist Tendency, Bulletin 2, 2002). And John Rees has expressed his view of the SWP’s role very clearly: “In this project the socialists in Respect, who have the clearest understanding of the general situation in which we operate and the greatest organisational ability to create the alliances, have a crucial role to play. Where they are capable of engaging and leading the wider forces, Respect will succeed. If they fail, Respect will fail. There is too much at stake to allow this to happen, and too much to be won not to succeed’”(Socialist Worker 14 May 2005).

So there was a two-tier membership as the SWP built its own organisation but sought to play the decisive political role in guiding Respect. As John Rees admitted, the SWP believed there was too much at stake for them to fail to be the leading force within Respect, so other members of Respect who saw it as their main political project had to rotate around the SWP’s agenda. Non-SWP members of Respect believe that building Respect is worth doing in its own terms, and is not only worth doing as a step towards ‘the construction of a mass revolutionary party. Fundamentally the SWP had a different agenda to other Respect members. The part of Respect aligned with George Galloway has the main base of membership in East London and Birmingham, and viable groups in Manchester, Cambridge, Bristol and elsewhere. They will also retain the voter loyalty. So Respect is in a contradictory position of having strong local electoral bases, and a high national profile, without having a national organisation. Galloway is also a controversial figure, who is simultaneously probably more able than anyone else of building a loyal electoral base and a mass audience, but is not always popular among labour movement activists.

So socialists in England are dispersed over a mosaic of organisations: the Labour Party, The Greens and Respect, as well as smaller groups, and of course non-aligned activists. Each of these projects has sufficient weight to retain the loyalty of their own supporters, but none is strong enough to pull everyone else towards it. The task must therefore to be to seek some mutual support or at least non-aggression on the electoral front while simultaneously seeking collaborative practical work over campaigning issues, without organisational pre-conditions. In this way trust and confidence can be built, as well as exploring the scope for possible future convergence. Where local campaigning issues present themselves this is more straightforward, but elsewhere there needs to be some imagination about perhaps local publications or conferences, as well of course as work in the unions.

Andy Newman, lives in Swindon, is a member of Respect, and an Associate Member of the Respect Renewal National Council. He is also a National Steering Committee member of the Stop the War Coalition and runs the blog www.socialistunity.com.

Car Crash on the Left

Tim Holmes — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 20:37:09 +0000

‘A spectacular car crash’ is how George Galloway MP describes the split in the Respect coalition. An initiative that can boast more electoral success in England than any other left group outside Labour since the Communist Party in its heyday, has torn itself apart less than four years after its inception. The row exploded in late August when Galloway penned a letter critical of the Socialist Workers Party – by far the biggest group within Respect. In response, according to one member of Respect’s national council, the SWP leadership decided to ‘go nuclear’.

A brief period of compromise quickly gave way to escalation on both sides, ending in a complete breakdown. The balance of forces made for a fairly even split on the national council, and soon there were two groups claiming to be the legitimate Respect. In one corner stood the SWP and Respect national secretary John Rees (also of the SWP’s central committee), presiding over the apparatus. In the other was Galloway, Salma Yaqoob, Ken Loach and nearly all the non-SWP members of the national council. The SWP described it as a left-right split, saying that Galloway and his allies had moved right, chasing Muslim votes for the expected snap election, and had then attacked and witch-hunted the left. The other side dismissed this as fantasy, instead slamming the SWP leadership for its control freakery.

Genesis of the row

The genesis of the row lay in the manner of Respect’s formation. The coalition was hastily pulled together after the Iraq war to give electoral expression to the anti-war movement. The aim was to reach out to a wide constituency – peace activists, Muslims, socialists, disaffected Labour supporters and trade unionists. But due to a tight electoral timetable, some felt that the new formation came as a fait accompli that failed to capitalise on the breadth of the movement. Others from the Socialist Alliance, the previous electoral initiative which the SWP dumped in favour of Respect, saw the new coalition as opportunist and bound to fail.

There was also concern about an organisation based on an alliance between the SWP and a controversial charismatic figure. Galloway, one of the best orators in the country, has been central to Respect’s success. But he is regarded even by supporters as a maverick. For its part, the SWP has a habit of building spokespeople up, seemingly always to knock them down again. And sure enough, where once it defended him, the SWP can now be heard attacking Galloway over Big Brother and his earnings.

Whatever George Galloway is, he is not a control freak, and he has come to agree that the coalition was not broad enough at the outset. ‘The roots of this problem definitely are in the fact that not enough groups, trends, parties or individual personalities came into Respect,’ he told Red Pepper. ‘Therefore the perception was created that it was an organisation dominated by the SWP, who have form, or dominated by me, or, later, dominated by Muslims.’ In particular, Galloway and others regret that the Communist Party of Britain voted against joining, which they believe would have acted as a counter-balance to the SWP and influenced developments on the Labour left and in the unions – an area where Respect has not forged the alliances it had hoped.

Successes

Yet despite these factors Respect did well. At its high point it could boast 16 councillors, 12 of whom made up the official opposition on Tower Hamlets council. In Birmingham, Salma Yaqoob was elected with 49 per cent of the vote; in Preston, councillor Michael Lavalette increased his vote as a Respect candidate after initially being elected for the Socialist Alliance in 2003. And famously Galloway was elected MP for Bethnal Green and Bow. More than this, in Muslim areas Respect gave a political voice to some of the most disadvantaged and alienated people in society, bringing them into democratic politics and acting, in Galloway’s words, as ‘the antidote to fundamentalism’.

According to John Rees, these achievements brought an electoral pressure that ultimately led to the split. The SWP leadership does not accept that its conduct was the issue. ‘With success came problems,’ he says. ‘When we started we had to hunt around for people to stand as candidates. Now tens of people come forward for nomination in Tower Hamlets and Birmingham. Some of these people are there because they’ve been frustrated elsewhere, and not because they agree with the principles.’ ‘The key question is how do you respond to that electoral pressure?’ says Rees. ‘Do you select people who are community leaders no matter what, or do you say we want electoral success but not at any price?’

Communalism

This logic led to the most incendiary accusation levelled in the row: communalism, a word that in Respect circles is equivalent to saying poppadom on Big Brother. In March the SWP used the term in an internal publication, saying that in Birmingham ‘serious elements of Respect are pulled by communalist forces’. (Like all the key documents throughout the crisis, it found its way on to the internet. Blogs have been the battlefield in this war, making democratic centralism infinitely more problematic and forever changing the way left political groups fall apart.)

A later SWP release explained: ‘Promising favours to people who posed as the “community leaders” of particular ethnic or religious groupings if they would use their influence to deliver votes … is what is known as … “communal” politics’. In Birmingham, because Respect had in February this year selected seven Pakistani men to stand in its target seats, it was ‘doing what our opponents had always accused us falsely of doing – acting as a cross-class party whose horizons were limited to representing just one “community”’. These events ‘could seem to confirm’ to others that Respect was a ‘communalist party’.

Salma Yaqoob, at whom these accusations were especially directed, rebutted them fiercely, saying she is the figure most closely associated with addressing ‘communal’ tensions between African-Caribbean and Asian communities in Birmingham. She believes the criticism stems from frustration at the low number of SWP members elected as councillors.

‘They should be working hard to build in weaker areas, like they have in Preston and Bristol,’ she says of the SWP. ‘But the leadership want to put their candidates into ‘safe seats’. To me it’s like leeching behaviour. When Muslims are their vote fodder, we’re the community. When they don’t get their way, we’re the communalists.’

The underlying factor is the uneven development of Respect across the country, and the tension between a predominantly socialist and SWP-influenced national organisation and a localised, not exclusively socialist support base largely centred in Muslim community groups. Partly this is down to the strategy of targeting areas with the best chance of success – a necessary response to the British electoral system. As John Rees says, ‘Under first past the post you have to do it to make a breakthrough and establish yourself as a serious player’.

The result was great success in east London, Birmingham and Preston, where a significant proportion of the voters are Muslim, as well as Bolsover, where there are no Muslims, but nothing in many other areas. Some Respect branches are moribund, while Tower Hamlets is huge, with around 570 members, entitling it to around a quarter of the delegates at the coalition’s annual conference.

Tower Hamlets

This has made the borough the centre of the strife. First, the selection of conference delegates was contested in a series of highly charged meetings, then four SWP-sympathising councillors resigned the whip, prompting the other side to declare that the SWP had split Respect.

The row centred around Abjol Miah, the leader of Respect’s Tower Hamlets councillors and close to Galloway, and councillor Oliur Rahman from the SWP camp, who led the breakaway group. Miah, tipped as a parliamentary candidate for Bethnal Green and Bow when Galloway moves to neighbouring Poplar at the next election, believes the SWP was reacting to a loss of control.

‘They never forecast that the community would outgrow them in Tower Hamlets,’ he says. ‘To start with they had a majority in meetings of eight people, but now we have 570 members of which they are about 30. They can’t bully people. If anything the SWP were being communalist in the way they acted. When it was an advantage for them to use so-called Muslim “businessmen” they did. It was like a chess game for them. Now it’s not going their way they have a problem with it.’

According to one former leading SWP member, the turning point was May 2006, when John Rees stood for Tower Hamlets council but came 200 votes short of winning a seat. All 12 elected councillors were Bangladeshi. The SWP leadership started to fall out of love with Respect, believing it was increasingly controlled by ‘reformist’ forces and that the SWP was not getting its fair share of the spoils or growing its own membership. Nevertheless, according to the source, the leadership continued to compromise for the sake of getting SWP central committee member Lindsay German elected to the Greater London Assembly in 2008.

Even John Rees believes he made errors. ‘The mistake I made was not to raise the situation in Tower Hamlets nationally, because I didn’t want to make a local issue into a national argument. We [the SWP] gave away too much ground in Tower Hamlets and were too soft with George. But that’s the real world … We should have raised the issue of the accountability of our elected representatives after the 2006 local elections.’

Personal or political?

It can seem like the split in Respect is entirely down to organisational issues and personality clashes, and nothing to do with policy. But both sides in the dispute insist it is political. For Yaqoob, ‘the way the SWP works has become a point of principle, because that’s not how to build a pluralistic coalition. People can’t believe they are the sole repositories of the truth. We were trying to replicate the experience of the anti-war movement, where the SWP were good – to give credit and support to the broad movement without taking over.’

Galloway echoes this vision. ‘There are people who agree with us on quite a significant number of things, who definitely don’t describe themselves as radical left. However, if we’re to have a meaningful force, you have to have them on board. So it has to be pluralist, democratic, mutually respectful, and no one section or force can be allowed to dominate it. Now I thought the SWP agreed with that, but if you will the end you have to will the means.’

For Rees it is political in a different way. ‘In an electoral organisation it’s very important who gets selected,’ he says. ‘If you have candidates who rarely turn up on demos and don’t articulate policy effectively then the candidates become an issue as to whether the policies come off the paper. And the lack of a strong socialist spine allows us to be picked off – one of the Tower Hamlets councillors defected to Labour.’

Galloway wholly disagrees. ‘You cannot have a Leninist group micro-managing a Respect branch of 570 people,’ he says. ‘What does it matter if Mr A or Mrs B is the branch secretary of Respect? If you decide that not only do you prefer Mr A, you’re going to whip all your members along to a meeting and try to exclude other people on bureaucratic grounds, you will be suspected, in this case correctly, of control freakery for the sake of it. This is impossible.

‘In my concept these organisational issues first of all are not that important, and secondly if decisions are not made by negotiation it’s the beginning of the end if you start packing the meetings to decide them on a hands-up for dumpling basis. That’s fatal.’

Front organisation?

A further criticism of the way the SWP has operated is that it has treated Respect as something to be taken out of the drawer at election time, without allowing it to have an independent life. This allegation is made about Manchester, where there are two Respect branches, North and South.

The North branch has a core of members who have left the SWP, such as Clive Searle from Respect’s national council and his brother Richard. It has regular meetings and produces a 12-page newspaper. The South branch is largely made up of SWP members and, according to Richard Searle, did not meet for six months: ‘The difference is that SWP members see the SWP as their main thing whereas in North Manchester people are simply Respect members.’

Clive Searle believes the SWP has come to see Respect as the competition. ‘For the previous 10 years there’d been nothing in the space between the SWP and New Labour. But now they’ve created something that is becoming a route out of the SWP. They’ve lost a lot of people.’

In the SWP’s defence, John Rees points out that its members are highly active in a plethora of campaigns from council housing to the NHS, and can’t do everything. But he denies that SWP-dominated Respect branches are less active. ‘In branches where the SWP is influential there is lots of activity, like in Preston and Bristol. It’s got nothing to do with differential numbers of SWP members.’

Indeed, Preston is a success story, an example of the SWP at its best. There councillor Michael Lavalette has helped build just the kind of open movement that Respect was supposed to be, involving ex-Labour elements and Muslim community activists.

‘The aim is to work with as broad an alliance as possible,’ Lavalette says. ‘I have meetings with some left Labour councillors; we have a newsletter that goes out to local unions; we’ve been central to Preston Keep Our NHS Public; we’re carrying on with the anti-war movement. This is about new ways of working.’

On the ground Lavalette has put in the effort. ‘The first thing I did was have surgeries – no other councillors were doing that. At first no one came so I took it out to where people were meeting – the church, the mosque, the temple, trade union meetings, community events. I started to gather casework’. As a result his vote shot up in 2007.

The Preston coalition, in which the SWP is a minority, has run so smoothly that when the national crisis exploded Lavalette was ‘completely disorientated – it came out of the blue. I decided to try to find my own way through as best I could. In Preston we are united. We hope that long term we can get back to being a coalition.’

Critics point to an apparent discrepancy between the SWP on the ground and the central committee in London. Even Galloway and Yaqoob laud the work of local SWP activists. But Lavalette does not renounce his party’s leadership. He says that Unite Against Fascism and Stop the War have shown that the sectarian stereotype is out of date. And he has signed the SWP appeals and epistles that have defined the party’s position in the crisis.

John Rees’s analysis is revealing as to the thinking of the SWP leadership and its relationship with the coalition: ‘In Preston Michael Lavalette and Val Wise, who is ex-Labour not SWP, have shaped the project and others have come into that structure and it has worked very well. In Tower Hamlets it hasn’t been shaped in a way that enables the left to participate meaningfully.’

Left-right split?

The presentation of the crisis as a left-right split has been the SWP’s key line. In October an ‘Appeal against the witch hunt’ was launched, which claimed ‘there is a campaign of vilification of the left in Respect that can only result in Respect’s destruction as a serious left wing force’. John Lister, a member of Respect’s national council from the International Socialist Group, is scathing. ‘One hundred per cent bollocks,’ he says. ‘There is no left-right split. How could anyone believe that Alan Thornett and Ken Loach are engaged in a socialist witch-hunt?’

For Lister the tactics smack of desperation. ‘It’s hard to imagine how the SWP leadership could have played it worse. They’ll come out with no credibility having lost members. They’ll be faced with 20 years of oblivion and rebuilding. I never thought they would smash up something they’ve put so much into. That takes a special talent.’

Lister, Galloway and co now believe that the SWP is embarked on a scorched earth policy to ensure that no viable competitor is left behind. Rees denies that. But the sudden death of Respect is a real possibility. As Richard Searle says, ‘It could end up like the Scottish Socialist Party, and you don’t hear anything from Scotland.’

The SWP will carry on in the original organisation. But without the strongholds of Tower Hamlets and Birmingham and national figures like Galloway and Yaqoob, not to mention a distinct lack of coalition partners, it is difficult to see it going far. Meanwhile, the other side hopes to attract sections of the left that were initially put off by the SWP – trade unions, greens, communists – to their pluralist vision. But the fact remains that with the SWP gone they will have lost at least half the membership and a good number of key activists.

Ultimately there were two visions at the heart of Respect. The SWP saw it as a ‘united front of a special kind’, a catchy term for an electoral alliance that came second to the party’s interests, while the others regarded it as something more permanent and the primary focus of their activity.

But on one point they are agreed – there is still a yawning gap to the left of Labour. With the split in Respect, the British left has once again shown a particular skill in failing to fill it.

‘The roots of this problem are in the fact that not enough groups, trends, parties or individual personalities came into Respect’ George Galloway, Respect MP

‘The key question is do you select people who are community leaders no matter what, or do you say we want electoral success but not at any price?’ John Rees, Respect national secretary

‘To me it’s like leeching behaviour. When Muslims are their vote fodder, we’re the community. When they don’t get their way, we’re the communalists’ Salma Yaqoob, Birmingham Respect councillor

‘I was completely disorientated – it came out of the blue. In Preston we are united. We hope that long term we can get back to being a coalition’ Michael Lavalette, Preston Respect councillor

Any Respect Left?

Ellie Keen — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 00:16:12 +0000

The gap to the left of Labour grows ever wider, but once again the left has failed even to lay down even a solid foundation stone towards filling it. Witness the implosion of Respect, with two rival meetings this Saturday.

Can anything be learned for the future or is this simply a moment of despair?

Personally, I didn’t invest energy in Respect, beyond cheering Galloway’s victory in a BBC studio on election night. I’d learned the hard way in the Socialist Alliance that the SWP leadership was not going to abandon its sectarian determination always to build itself rather than put its considerable capacities into the building of a far more broadly based and plural political voice of the left. And to be honest, although I was impressed by Galloway’s oratorical skills, my feminism, my instinctive dislike of leaderism and my aghast observations of the Scargill and then the Sheridan debacles made me wary of an organisation that depended so much on a hero.

But it’s not all bad. There are positive lessons as well as negative ones, especially if one looks beyond London (always a good idea). In Preston and Birmingham, Respect branches have begun to practice a different kind of politics, different both from the varieties of parliamentary socialism and from the vanguardist pretensions of the SWP leadership.

When Michael Lavalette became a councillor, initially for the Socialist Alliance and then Respect, in an inner city ward of Preston, he found that no Labour councillors held individual surgeries. He made it one of his first priorities to take up personal cases by making connections with national and international issues. His method was to be available where people gather, from the Catholic church and the mosque to trade union and community meetings. As well as having a massive caseload, he and an alliance of left Labour (and sometimes Liberal Democrat) councillors have won numerous victories, through a mixture of campaigning pressure outside the council and shrewd alliance-building inside it. Over 50% of resolutions proposed by Lavalette have been successful, including an environmental audit of all council policies, a commitment to an integrated transport system, and the successful blocking of the South African multinational Netcare’s involvement in the local hospital. He is one of two SWP members on Respect’s local branch committee of six, and very insistent on the SWP’s role as a minority in a much wider coalition. Salma Yaqoob and Mohammed Ishtiaq work in a similar way in Birmingham, working with community and trade union campaigns and challenging the council leadership on issues on which everyone else is silent, for instance the damaging consequences of the private finance initiative for the city.

Here are two experiments in creating a new politics, giving discontent a political voice at a time when critical opinion otherwise gets drowned in an apolitical miasma of consultations, partnerships, targets and overstressed voluntary organisations, bogged down in bidding for funds to meet basic social needs.

The point of drawing attention to these is not to create a warm feeling in a cold climate, nor to polish the tarnished image of Respect(s): similar examples could be drawn from the work of Socialist party councillors in Coventry or the Independent Working Class Organisation councillors in Oxford, Green party councillors in Brighton and so on.

The point for me about such local experiments is that they are effective because they are answer questions that we (“we” being a wide spectrum of independent and open-minded pluralist socialists) must face if we are to effectively develop an organised political force. (And here I am leaving aside for the moment the urgent need for a proportional electoral system.)

First, what is the point of a political party? As we answer this we should bear in mind two important features of the present situation. On the one hand, there is the serious crisis of the institutions of representative democracy. Any political party of the left that is not in control of its own identity and aware of its independence from these institutions can become controlled by them – a factor in the Respect debacle.

On the other hand, in this age of social movements and networks, a political party has no monopoly over the process of social change. A party of the left must have its fulcrum in the movements and networks that have been built up in the past decades outside political institutions, but must at the same time promote the demands and needs of these struggles within and against these institutions, seeking all the time to open them up and redistribute power outwards. This is how Lavalette and Yaqoob are interpreting the role of Respect, building it as a federal coalition without seeking to corral it into one organisation.

So the second question is how do we build a political party that is modest in its role, rooted in society and social conflicts, not imprisoned in the institutions, plural and open in its culture, democratic in its internal structures and participatory in its recognition of the capacity and knowledge of all? The brevity required by the art of blogging requires me to leave this as an open question (see the forthcoming Red Pepper for an extended analysis of the Respect story, by Alex Nunns). But a test of whether either of the remnants of Respect who meet tomorrow are capable of learning from their process of self-destruction will be whether such principles are explicitly agreed.

A Route to Sanity

JamieSW — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 19:50:27 +0000

Whatever happens to Respect will be far from satisfactory, but the disorienting effect of this crisis leaves us with some important work to do, whatever side of the dispute one is on. (In this regard, the highly apolitical and slightly psychotic tone of discussion on some blogs, coupled with the total failure to integrate it into a broader conjunctural analysis, reflects serious political immaturity including from people who have every reason to know better). We have a number of tasks in the immediate term, which we can separate formally as long as we recognise their interdependence in practise. First of all, the struggle against the Royal Mail deal among postal workers is crucial. If the posties accept this deal, it is a serious defeat, because the deal rolls back fundamental conditions and entitlements and reclaiming the lost territory will be immensely more difficult in the future than it is now. The postal workers need to be convinced that a) they can beat management and their New Labour backers, and b) they are far better freeing their political fund than pouring it into the pockets of the government bullies. The more successful their struggle with Royal Mail management, the more confident they will feel about breaking with New Labour. A success for the postal workers would also resonate more broadly in the organised working class, since this argument about the political fund is crucial everywhere – the crisis of Labourism is a fact regardless of anything else that happens. New Labour’s strategy for overcoming this is undoubtedly to break the resistance to Brown’s pay cuts and instil a deep pessimism in the labour movement, which they hope will reconcile workers to paying for the Labour Party’s election campaigns. In that way they can also push through further privatisation and neoliberalism. So, the postal workers dispute taps into a whole range of issues about pay, working conditions and public service provision in Britain – it taps into the fact that workers have a very different idea about how Britain should be than New Labour does.

Secondly, the antiwar movement is obliged to kick it up a gear. Recent polls suggest that 52% of Americans would back a strike on Iran: the hysterical propaganda about Iran’s genocidal nuke threat (repeated by Blair recently) is having some successes. The American election campaign has been characterised by threats to Iran from both Hilary Clinton and Rudi Guiliani, the two front-runners, and the latter’s campaign team is populated by neocon purveyors of sordid Islamaturgy such as Norman Podhoretz. The Bush team clearly want to discipline the Iranian president, and the recent intensification of sanctions was a clear message of this intent. There was much hilarity at Horowitz’s “Islamofascism Awareness Week”, but the fact is that every week is “Islamofascism Awareness Week”, because there is hardly a day that goes by without a big, mainstream publication in Europe and America attacking Islam and outlining the clash-of-civilisations thesis, or ‘exposing extremism’ in mosques or something of that kind, and all for the purpose of providing a spurious consistency to a foreign policy determined by the exigencies of power. Yet, the American Left has its strengths. For example, Cindy Sheehan is effectively utilising the attempt by liberals to sentimentally coopt her for a domesticated antiwar critique to push a much more radical message. And in Britain, the StWC remains very strong and very broad. Though its members range well beyond the organised left, it is the organisational lynchpin for the Left. Its ‘Troops Out’ call is probably the most popular political slogan in Britain today, and the antiwar movement has been the root and cause of a profound crisis of legitimacy for the governing party. New Labour’s third election victory was so hollow and so inauspicious and contained so many stunning reversals (yes, indeed, not least in Bethnal Green & Bow), that it didn’t look like much of a victory at all. Brown has been forced to make some concessions on withdrawal, and a quiet mutiny is being reported among the troops. Yet, Brown is likely to go along with any American attack on Iran, and so we have to be prepared for sustained civil disobedience in the event of such an action.

The antiwar movement also intersects with the need to defend Muslims and, relatedly, immigrants. David Cameron’s recent rightist lurch on this is probably produced by a structural impasse for the Conservatives – Tory England is dying on its arse, but the conservatives can’t effectively take the ‘centre ground’, and nor can they really criticise the government on any of the points on which they are truly weak. Attacks on immigrants as a source of social breakdown are vicious, but also somewhat desperate, and don’t reflect the confidence of possessing an attractive political programme. (This doesn’t mean, of course, that they can’t be effective). The strongest riposte to establishment racism has been grassroots solidarity in the antiwar movement, which threw all the suburban car-washing bastards into the streets with the multicultural urban working class, and produced forms of conviviality and, er, respect that has acted as a prophylactic against the ‘populist’ (racist) right. Were it not for the antiwar movement’s sharp intervention after, say, 7/7, I’m convinced that gnashers like Melanie Phillips would have the run of things (well, maybe a slight overstatement, but only slight).

Electoral activity has to be part of this, but not electoral activity as an autonomous component, independent of the attempt to break the hold of New Labour on the organised working class or of sustained antiwar mobilisation. That would subordinate important struggles to the logic of electoralism, which is a sure route to political timidity and accomodation. If one thing characterises the current period of British politics, it is disillusionment with the same-old-same-old style of the main three parties who speak in the language of different policy flavours while proposing similar policy substance. Part of the reason they do this is because they treat politics as a multi-layered psephological operation – radical politics is not an appealing option if you’re obsessed with key marginals, not pissing off important constituencies, getting the newspapers onside etc. It’s not possible to conduct an electoral campaign with a Beautiful Soul and clean hands, but it is essential to ensure that the politics of the movement drive the electoral campaign, rather than the other way about. If you look at Respect’s campaigns, there has always been an effort to infuse them with the politics, ethics and aesthetics of the movements of which it is a tributary. (Aesthetically, holding open space rallies, and putting up handmade banners of the red and green all over the place, have been a way of accentuating the fact that Respect is a movement coming from up from the streets.) Dave Allen used to say that the first response you’ll hear if you ask someone for directions in the Republic of Ireland is “I wouldn’t start from here”. No one would start from here, but whatever emerges from the current bitter struggle, the route back to sanity is signposted by the antiwar movement and the labour movement.