LEFT COLUMN: 14.06.2001

What we think

Why we need a working-class and labour movement orientation

The future of the Socialist Alliance

On 7 June the Socialist Alliance made a start, and won some good results. That is an important achievement. Lots of new experience was gained, and lots of lessons can be learned. The elections can provide a springboard to take the Alliance on to a new stage of growth - as an active, lively, democratically-structured movement, pulling together thousands of socialists previously scattered and disunited, developing a dialogue with hundreds of thousands outside it, and winning real roots in some working-class areas. Future success depends on honest and sober assessment of our first efforts.

Millions of longtime Labour voters stayed home or voted Labour very reluctantly. Some went Lib-Dem because the Lib-Dems seemed to be a "realistic" protest alternative a shade to the left of New Labour. The Socialist Alliance has so far made only very marginal inroads into those millions.

The Alliance's average vote, 1.75%, was no higher than the common run of scores won by left-socialist candidates for many years now. Over 92 seats, the Alliance got slightly fewer votes than Arthur Scargill's Stalinist-reformist Socialist Labour Party got over 114. Since the SLP is now just a signboard, no longer a functioning party; did no election work on the ground; and has nothing going for it but the 16-year old lustre of Scargill's name, this is sober statistical proof that we have not yet established ourselves with working-class voters as qualitatively less of a sideshow than the extravagantly sectarian SLP. It was never going to be easy. We are not in the middle of a big radicalisation. However much we welcome the Seattle, Prague and Genoa protests, they do not amount to "a new mood" in the working class generally, as the SWP claims. Strike figures are still near their lowest since statistics began. Disillusion, frustration, low confidence, and, often, demoralisation in the working class are lifting only patchily. If we cannot face up to these facts, we will never be able to help change them.

Why the Socialist Alliance? Not because of a great growth of a new left. But because we must take on the job of fighting to recreate independent working-class political representation as Blair closes the channels for that representation which used to exist in the Labour Party structure. That job cannot be done just by raising a "profile" and waiting for workers to flock to it. It requires years of work to recreate a broad socialist confidence in the working class, and to establish a doorstep credibility for the Socialist Alliance as a force sensitive to and active on every democratic, socialist, and working-class battle. It requires serious political work in the trade unions around the aim of regaining the working-class parliamentary representation which the Blairite hijacking of the Labour Party has, effectively, taken away from trade unionists. That should be done alongside, and in part on the basis of, work to organise the rank and file in the unions against the bureaucrats and for union democracy.

We need to use the connections and experience we have won in the general election to begin sustained effort in local government elections, in preparation for the next general election. That is how to build on the ground. In targeted areas, the Socialist Alliance can and should develop the sort of consistent, week-in-week-out responsiveness to local working-class concerns which builds roots in local communities. We should map out political programmes for how we think councils should serve their local working class and become bases for struggle against central government rather than executors of government cuts.

We have made a start. What lessons can we learn by examining it critically?

Unity in the Socialist Alliance in elections and campaigns is only a start towards what is needed.

Analysing the figures

Of course, our average score was pulled down by a number of candidacies put up primarily to get the quota for an election broadcast, whereas all previous left-socialist election efforts for a long time past focused on a smaller number of local bases. But was our 1.75% the maximum we could have got, given the general political situation and the number of activists we had to start with?

The result in Wyre Forest, where a local doctor won the seat as an independent backed by Health Concern, the local campaign to save Kidderminster Hospital, is proof that it is possible for new forces to win ground fast - if they can establish themselves as authentic voices of central working-class concerns. The fact that Health Concern has formed a coalition with the Tories to run the local council does not cancel out that proof.

To get what Lindsey German in Socialist Worker (5 May) defined as "a good result" - five per cent - across the board was probably never realistic. Was it beyond imagining that we could have got five per cent in "a number of seats" - half a dozen, maybe? - as we suggested in AfS 41? The Socialist Alliance beat five per cent in two seats - Coventry North East, with former Labour MP Dave Nellist on 7.1%, and St Helens South, where Neil Thompson got 6.9% against the ex-Tory Shaun Woodward, parachuted in by Millbank as Labour's candidate against local trade-union wishes. It came close in two others. The SWP's Cecilia Prosper got 4.6% in Hackney South, where the Alliance has won a name by fighting the Tory-Labour coalition council's emergency cuts, and Ian Page got 4.3% in Lewisham Deptford, where he is a sitting local councillor.

The next best results were Nottingham East (3.8%), Coventry South (3.7%), Tottenham (3.7%), Liverpool Riverside (3.6%), and Manchester Withington (3.5%). Coventry South is where Dave Nellist stood in 1997; Riverside's and Tottenham's candidates had stood before. Nottingham East's and Withington's results, the best without such "special circumstances", need noting for further analysis.

Some results were poor, even in constituencies where the Alliance has comparatively large numbers. In Camberwell and Peckham, a strong local Socialist Alliance put out a quarter of a million leaflets to get 478 votes, 1.9%. The SLP got 188, 0.7%. In 1997 - when millions voted Labour to get the hated Tories out after 18 years, when New Labour had not yet been tested in office, and when local MP Harriet Harman had not yet been exposed as the woman who would cut single parents' benefits - the SLP got 685 votes, 2.3% and the Socialist Party 233, 0.8%, in the same constituency. Some constituencies promoted nationally as "flagships" or models by the SWP (the biggest group in the Socialist Alliance) scored unspectacularly - Blackburn, 1.3%, Hornsey and Wood Green, 2.5%, Vauxhall, 2.6%, Streatham, 2.4%, York, 1.4%. In Cardiff Central, where the SLP got 2230 votes in 1997, the Socialist Alliance got only 283 this time out.

Sectarianism and the "long, hard view"

All sorts of factors can affect local results - the presence or absence of Green candidates, for example.

But it is wrong to take too much comfort from the idea that we were bound to do badly "first time out". That is only in part true. The "socialist" banner is not new. It has been waved - in one form or another - for many years now. Butt with some voters, the forms in which it has been waved make the past as much a liability to us as an asset. They have been *sectarian*.

When narrow-minded people wail about "sectarianism" they mean being argumentative, or unyielding about principles - qualities which are merits for socialists. We mean something different. Too often, visible socialist politics has been sectarian in the sense of putting the promotion of a particular little "party" machine above the broad class struggle. The Socialist Alliance is a great opportunity to go beyond sectarianism. How far have we progressed? What problems do we still have to tackle?

Marx defined sectarianism in the Communist Manifesto: "The Communists have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement... The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: Formation of the proletariat into a class..." And again, in a letter to the German socialist Schweitzer: "The sect sees the justification for its existence and its "point of honour" not in what it has in common with the class movement but in the particular shibboleth which distinguishes it from it". Leon Trotsky expressed the same thought by arguing that the rule for socialists must be "to base one's programme on the logic of the class struggle".

The growth of the Socialist Alliance reflects a wide desire to break with the "rally -round-our-rostrum" methods of the past. But we have a way to go yet. The dominant Socialist Alliance literature did not give *workers' representation* its proper centrality. Instead it emphasised a call to voters to "break with New Labour" and come over to a "socialist alternative". With no indication of how New Labour is qualitatively different from Old Labour, and what to do about it strategically, this approach is inescapably narrow. It translates as: "Break with the traditional labour movement and gather round our 'profile'." It must maximise the carry-over onto the Socialist Alliance of voters' bad impressions from previous sectarian socialist candidacies and campaigns.

The best results

Nottingham East's result - the best for a Socialist Alliance in a "routine" constituency - was won by consciously taking a different approach to the dominant one in the Alliance, favoured by the SWP, of raising a "profile" for "the socialist alternative" by stunts, loudspeaker cars, showbiz-star endorsements, and general leaflets, and waiting for votes to flock in. Local activists did what they could to get the Socialist Alliance's name known, and leafletted extensively - but they also set out to engage as many voters as possible in serious dialogue.

They knocked on doors and talked with voters (canvassed). The count showed much better results from the areas that had been canvassed than from those which had just been leafletted.

The canvassing educated the canvassers as well as the voters. Canvassers heard the arguments which were important to the voters. That enabled them better to do targetted leaflets - for hospitals, schools, postal depots, colleges - and to design their final leaflet to fit the arguments heard on the doorsteps.

Their final leaflet raised squarely the question of workers' representation, which was downplayed or ignored in the dominant Socialist Alliance literature.

"The Labour Party is not what it was. It is now dominated by big business - in its policies and party structure. The democratic channels which once existed for working-class people and trade unions to influence the party have largely gone. Tony Blair treats trade unionists and ordinary Labour Party members with contempt... The Socialist Alliance is the only party in the election that opposes the domination of politics by business interests. Socialist Alliance candidates, if elected, will only take an average workers' wage. For us, representing working people is a privilege not a route to a personal fortune!"

Manchester Withington also made that central in their leaflets. "New Labour has abandoned all commitments to meet the needs of working-class people. It has abandoned the original reason for setting up as a political party, to fight for labour against capital. We now have to build again for proper political representation. The Socialist Alliance is part of that building process".

One local activist reflects: "Our campaign profited from taking a longer, harder view, making the argument, and building up the support accordingly. We had more 'old Labour' input and were an 'alliance' more genuinely than other constituencies - though we didn't win the argument to canvass as much as some of us thought necessary".

The strange story of the "anti-canvassing" drive

In the last two or three weeks, the SWP launched a frantic and somewhat mystifying drive to tell Socialist Alliance activists not to canvass, but instead *only* to leaflet, organise loudspeaker cars, etc. That drive dominated the last part of the campaign in many constituencies.

It was a strangely dogmatic "anti-canvassing", much more than "pro-leafletting". Even apart from the disruption involved - time and energy spent denouncing canvassers as "sectarians" (!) would be better spent on almost anything else - this drive was counterproductive. To harangue activists that only the very strongest local Alliances could possibly canvass; to throw out wildly exaggerated estimates of the numbers of activists needed to canvass effectively; and to insist that there should be no canvassing *anywhere* until there was perfect and repeated leafletting *everywhere* - could not but tend to "level down" our campaign.

The push for a highly centralised, uniform campaign, run not from any elected committee but from an unelected national office, may have suited the SWP, but made local Socialist Alliances less able to develop real dialogue with voters.

The SWP also denounced canvassers as "pessimists" who did not understand the "new mood". The results put the lid on that argument. There is not a "new mood" of people waiting only for a leaflet to drop through their letterbox in order to rally to the Socialist Alliance. There are millions of disillusioned, perplexed ex-Labour voters who can be convinced. But to convince them requires patient dialogue. The numbers we can reach through canvassing are limited - but not so limited that the gains won by it will be a negligible proportion of our vote.

Scientific precision is impossible here. But what if you have 30 constituency activists, and each puts in 30 hours' canvassing, speaks to 600 people, and convinces 15 of them? Is that improbable? It is an extra 450 votes - the difference between a poor result and a reasonable one.

The "longer, harder view, making the argument", and an emphasis on dialogue, are also better for drawing new activists into the Alliance - much better, certainly, than the hectic no-time-to-talk approach which resulted in some local Alliances actually narrowing down, rather than broadening out, as the election campaign progressed.

Leon Trotsky once wrote: "Agitation is not only the means of communicating to the masses this or that slogan, calling the masses to action, etc. For a party, agitation is also a means of lending an ear to the masses, of sounding out their moods and thoughts, and reaching this or another decision in accordance with the results. Only the Stalinists have transformed agitation into a noisy monologue. For the Marxists, the Leninists, agitation is always a dialogue with the masses".

The Stalinists, fortunately, are no longer on the scene. Their methods of agitation remain. The Alliance needs to get back to the Marxist way of doing it.

Building a democratic Alliance

Just as the Alliance needs to develop dialogue with working-class voters, so also it needs to develop democratic dialogue inside its own structures. This is not a luxury. Lessons can never be drawn, reorientations can never be made, disparate groups can never come together in a political "melting pot", unless there is space for civilised and careful debate. The SWP's "anti-canvassing" drive raises questions here too, by way of its timing and form.

Up to, and at, the Socialist Alliance executive meeting on 12 May, no-one opposed canvassing. The SWP was unenthusiastic; usually SWP members did not themselves canvass; but the SWP made no effort to stop or dissuade agents and organisers who wanted to canvass.

Our manifesto was launched on 16 May with the written promise, in the introduction, that unlike other parties who address the electorate from a distance, the Socialist Alliance would be out canvassing. The "no canvas, only leaflet" method is, after all, really only a poor person's version of the through-the-media-only approach to the electorate now dominant in New Labour. It must be the quickest-broken manifesto promise in history! Either the SWP had sudden second thoughts - and, rather than discuss them with its Alliance allies, chose to use the weight of the SWP apparatus to impose them across the constituencies - or it had deliberately avoided debate on 12 May in order to bypass Alliance structures. Within days the SWP had launched a vehement "anti-canvassing" drive in most key areas. The whole campaign thereby suffered from the imposition of a stultifying centralism; the biggest group in it tried to impose something akin to its own "party" regime on the Alliance.

Making the Socialist Alliance a party?

The Socialist Alliance has become "a party" in common parlance just by contesting the general election. If it continues as an active movement now - whatever the formal nomenclature and structure - it cannot but move more to becoming a party in the socialist sense, active in a united way on the industrial, ideological, and political-campaign fronts as well as the electoral. Should the Socialist Alliance become a party? Or, "more of a party"? Yes. But what sort of party?

An attempt to squeeze the Socialist Alliance into the sort of "party" commonplace on the left for many decades - monochrome and single-faction except perhaps on limited issues and in limited periods, and with every member compelled to spout "the line" whether they agree with it or not - would be destructive. It would abort what has so far been achieved, and create nothing but a new edition of the old SWP.

Lenin's version of democratic centralism was different. He explained: "The principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for local Party organisations implies universal and free freedom to criticise, so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action... Criticism within the basis of the principles of the party programme must be quite free.... not only at party meetings but also at public meetings" (Collected Works volume 10 p.442).

Lenin also (in "Left Wing Communism") argued that the political conditions for democratic centralism could be "created only by prolonged effort and hard-won experience". "Without these conditions, all attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end up in phrasemongering and clowning". To attempt any sort of democratic centralism, let alone the SWP's non-Leninist authoritarian version, would be inappropriate for the Socialist Alliance at this stage of its development. Yet what happened over canvassing was a drive within the Alliance to impose a first approximation of the SWP's version of democratic-centralist discipline.

In Lindsey German's article in Socialist Worker of 5 May, the SWP advocates that "resolution-mongering" should be kept down. It is an odd echo of the Blairites' scorn for "resolutionary socialism", and a poor welcome for ex-Labour activists. In New Labour, the space for resolutions and debate from the floor, which used to be sacrosanct even in right-wing Labour Parties, is being squeezed out or nullified. We must not have the same in the Socialist Alliance.

Lindsey German's formula means few formal structures - and Socialist Alliance centralised primarily by being driven through an SWP-financed "national office" and full-timers. It is presented as a common-sense midway house between immediately declaring a formal "party" structure, and just letting the Alliance wither; but could institutionalise the regime the Alliance had in the election campaign.

Class orientation

The distance we have yet to go in breaking adequately with old sectarian "gather-round-our-profile" traditions was reflected in much of the nationally-produced Alliance literature.

The "socialist alternative" propounded conveyed no general idea of socialism (radical democracy, common ownership, workers' control). Nor was it structured as a coherently fitted-together emergency plan to address workers' central concerns. Instead it was an unstructured shopping-list of old-Labour type "priority pledges" (mostly good and valuable in themselves) deemed likely to "catch the mood". It was less an attempt to argue through the issues with working-class voters than an "advertisement": "Look, we support these policies you find attractive". Even in respect of "catching the mood", it was deficient by lack of adequate attention to the pivotal issue of the Health Service.

In general, the "national" literature lacked focus, sharpness, particularity - in short, clear thought about what was being done - in the spirit of stock, routine, typical SWP agitation.

It lacked *class* orientation, often coming no nearer to that than a populist appeal to "ordinary people". The central class issue of *repealing the anti-union laws* was much underplayed.

The Socialist Alliance needs a clear *working-class* orientation. The three main pillars would be: free trade unions; good-quality health care, education and public services for all, by right, unprivatised, and funded by taxing the rich and big business; and working-class political representation.

In general, no-one in the Alliance would disagree: we need a *working-class and labour movement* orientation. But how do we do it? How, in practice, do we "base our programme on the logic of the class struggle"?

Towards a more class-focused political message; towards democracy, discussion, dialogue, both in the relation between the Alliance and the working class, and within the Alliance; and towards a serious approach in the trade unions - that, we suggest, is the turn we need to make.

Postscript: the case for workers' representation

Over the last five years or so, Tony Blair and his circle have constructed a neo-liberal "party within a party" on top of the Labour Party. With big-business funding, and now state patronage, Blair's machine has lifted itself away from the ties that the old Labour Party had to the organised working class.

In the old, loose, federal Labour Party, workers could fight for a political voice through using the trade unions and the constituency Labour Parties to impose policies on Labour or to deselect MPs. Now the constituency Labour Parties have been deprived of any possibility of influencing policy, or selecting candidates out of favour with the leadership. The trade unions are left with only residual "emergency" powers in the New Labour structure, which at present they are very far from using. The National Executive Committee has become a rubber-stamp for the Blair machine. The Labour Party conference is more like a trade fair than a conference. In this way millions of working-class people have effectively been disenfranchised.

If we understand that socialist advance is impossible without mass working-class politics to make it happen, then this "New Labour" shift in those mass working-class politics - and the tasks of resistance to the shift - set the frame for us. Although left unity is tremendously valuable, and painstaking advocacy of clear socialist ideas always essential, our fundamental task is not so much to make a "profile" for a conglomerate of socialist groups as to fight for the working class, in the first place the class-conscious and organised section of the working class, to assert itself politically.

Working-class representation - the principle of workers being able to elect their own representatives in politics, rather than having to opt for the "lesser evil" among capitalist alternatives, or abstain - should be our cutting edge. Specific socialist ideas, on health care, jobs, education, and many other issues, and general advocacy of socialism, are vital within that. Independent working-class political representation eventually becomes not independent at all unless it is given shape with socialist ideas. But socialist politics outside a struggle for mass working-class political representation are an empty form of words, a sideshow.

Our campaign cannot be effective as just a loose collection of "good causes". It has to have an integrating idea - that workers should assert themselves independently in politics and combat their effective disenfranchisement by the New Labour machine. We should stand to allow workers to use the ballot-box to send a clear and simple message to each other and to the Establishment - we want policies in the interests of the working class and not of profits.

The main strategic task of the organised working-class socialist left is to turn round the trade unions, to reorient the mass organisations of the working class towards struggle and towards organising new layers, and to rebuild a political culture for self-emancipation in the working class. Our electoral efforts make sense only in that context. We need to argue for a workers' government, a government based on and accountable to workers' organisations which takes radical measures in the interests of the working class against the privileges of the rich.

This is not a matter of demanding that the British working class repeat the experience of the 20th century Labour Party, but rather of basing ourselves on the actual political axes and organisations of today. We do not know how a mass working-class socialist party will emerge in Britain. What we do know, however, is that the unions are currently being pushed back to the status of political "clients" (like the US unions in the Democratic Party) and they should fight against that. In any case a new mass working-class socialist party will not emerge without convulsions inside the unions. It cannot be built just by leftists declaring and recruiting to "our own" labour movement alongside the one that has developed in Britain over 200 years.