The politics of the SWP

A political school for socialists

Hosted by the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, Saturday 1st and Sunday 2nd July, 2000

Preparatory Reading

The Labour Party

Clive Bradley, SO 235, July 1985

Socialist Worker's current appeal to Militant for a 'united organisation' shows quite clearly a lot of the problems with the SWP's basic politics. The SWP says that the main problem with Militant is that it is in the Labour Party. The renewed witch-hunt poses for Socialist Worker the basic problem of the Labour Party very sharply. As last week's Socialist Worker (6 July) put it:

"Socialists in the Labour Party face a clear choice. Either stop rocking the boat, stop taking up 'fringe issues' and drop your principles, or get out".

And Socialist Worker concludes bluntly: "socialists must be prepared to get out and build an independent, fighting socialist party."

For Militant - which the SWP believes has grown because it appeared to offer hard, Marxist politics to the Labour left - that choice is posed particularly starkly. Since the only principled choice to make will result in expulsion, Socialist Worker concludes that Militant must join with them to build "a real and visible revolutionary alternative" (SW, May 11th)

There is a flat logical contradiction in Socialist Worker's argument. Militant are being witch-hunted, and it is important to defend them. Yet at the same time, Militant - and by implication other serious socialists in the Labour Party - should voluntarily give up the fight against the witch-hunt because they have no chance of winning it.

Suppose that the only possible outcome of a serious fight against the witch-hunt is expulsion. The best way to guarantee that a left-wing force of some size is built as a result is to fight, not just give up. And the best contribution Socialist Worker could make to that fight, surely, would be to join it, to participate fully, to put their full weight behind it - to take the fight into the Labour Party itself, and not confine it to the unions.

Expulsions initiated by a Labour Party conference would then have to be fought through in the Constituency Labour Parties. Serious fighters against the witch-hunt would have to take up the issue there, too.

And the witch-hunt is hardly new. The first big assault on Militant was in 1976. The first wave of expulsions was in 1983. At that time, the SWP just pontificated about the inevitability of such things. Only now, after five years of major battles by the Labour left, the split that created the SDP, the offensive of the Kinnockites and the development of the witch-hunt, are the SWP taking it seriously.

So what has changed? Why does Socialist Worker appeal to Militant now, while it didn't throughout 1982-3, when the witch-hunt was much more ferocious and hysterical - and the left wing resistance to it broader and bolder?

The simple answer is that the SWP has suddenly panicked at the discovery that - as a result of the witch-hunt - Militant is now the bigger of the two groups. Socialist Worker has realised that most good socialists are in or around the Labour Party, and has readjusted its sights. Apart from that, nothing has changed since 1982-3. So if Socialist Worker is right now, rationally the SWP should have been in the Labour Party in 1982-3 or even in 1976.

But then how would Socialist Worker deal with Militant's line on Ireland? On the police? On the possibility of a 'peaceful road to socialism'? Either the SWP would forget a lot of their present politics or they would find themselves in sharp conflict with Militant on every major political question. The common terrain would only highlight the issues of political programme.

Today Socialist Worker can declare with self-conscious naivete: "Of course, in such a united organisation there would be differences of opinion on many matters, but they could be argued out democratically as we fought together against the Tories and the right wing inside the movement," (SW, June 28, 1985), But the SWP's insistence that this is a sincere and honest proposal is hard to swallow. It is plainly a catchpenny gimmick to try to recruit a few Militant supporters.

Underlying the whole business is something yet more basic to the SWP's idea of politics, and of Marxist organisation. The SWP has a fundamentally organisational conception of the revolutionary party: it is about 'linking militants together'; and it is defined crucially by its organisational independence. The basic way that they relate to Militant therefore is mainly by counterposing organisational separation from the Labour Party to membership of it, rather than arguing about what socialism is, and about socialist answers to living struggles. This is, in fact, characteristic of the main way the SWP takes on the Labour left as a whole.

For revolutionary Marxism - that is Bolshevism - politics come first.

Organisational issues are secondary, and should be decided on the basis of maximum tactical flexibility.

A Marxist organisation is defined above all by its political programme, by independent working class politics, not just by where it chooses to fight for those politics.

For the SWP on the other hand, organisational questions come first and politics second. Organisational separation from the Labour Party is proclaimed as the basic principle, and political issues are subordinated to the task of 'organising militants,.

So, for example, in August 1969 the SWP (then IS) dropped the call for Troops Out of Ireland for a while after the troops were deployed in the streets. In June 1971 it abandoned its internationalist position on the EEC - that it makes no difference to workers whether they are in a capitalist Britain or a capitalist 'Europe' - for the sake of joining in an anti-EEC campaign to 'win support'.

And so their arguments about the Labour Party are fundamentally apolitical, concentrating on the need to build an 'independent' party without clear definitions of what distinguishes Marxist politics. The difference between themselves and Labour is defined primarily in terms of orientation: where the SWP focuses on strikes and immediate struggles, Labour focuses exclusively on elections. 'The SWP looks after strikes. Labour looks after the rest'.

Socialist Worker argues that the basic problem with Labour is that its desire to win elections necessarily means abandoning any commitment to socialism in order to 'win the middle ground'. Trying to win elections necessarily cuts across an orientation towards direct action struggles, because the audience for socialist ideas is only ever the 'militant minority'. Serious socialists in the Labour Party, therefore, should orient towards this 'militant minority' rather than try to win elections.

"Once it is seen that politics arise from the everyday struggles in the workplaces, that it is here rather than in elections that workers begin to question the prevailing ideas of capitalism, then you can see that the road to socialism is quite different to that taken by the Labour Party." (September 29, 1984).

"Since the left were as committed to electoral politics as the right, they did not know how to argue back when the right said socialist policies had to be jettisoned so as to regain votes." (SW, June 29).

This is a very odd view of the basic problem with reformism - indeed of what reformism is. The problem with the 'parliamentary road to socialism' is not the wish to win elections. It is the inevitability of violent ruling class resistance if an elected left government seriously tries to fight for its programme.

The problem with Allende in Chile is not that he ran for election, but that he did not go on from election victory to move decisively against the old ruling class.

Do left policies lose votes for Labour? Sometimes they do - when the Labour leadership sabotages the election campaign by denouncing the Party's policies, and by engaging in a witch-hunt. If the Labour leaders say Labour's policy is ultra-left lunacy, no wonder voters agree.

The Labour left replies that we need a Labour leadership that will fight for Labour policies. A real campaign by Labour for socialist policies would gain votes. But the SWP accepts the basic terms of reference of the Labour right about how to win elections: that 'winning the middle ground' means 'being moderate'.

What's wrong with Labour is not that it tries to win votes. You have to win votes even to go on strike. You would have to win votes indeed - not a Parliamentary election perhaps, but votes all the same, in workers' councils, for example - to make a revolution.

And the basic fault of the Labour left is neither a failure to get involved in strikes, nor that it doesn't know how to answer the arguments about winning elections. It answers the vote-catching arguments rather better than the SWP does. Many ordinary Labour Party members do get involved in strikes - many, indeed, run them. The SWP know about Labour Party members' involvement in the miners' strike.

Of course, the Labour Party does function primarily as an electoral machine, and this is a serious problem with it. But electoral activity is not necessarily counterposed to working class action.

The Bolsheviks made great efforts to get representatives elected to the Duma - the parliament in Tsarist Russia. The Communist International, when it was still revolutionary, took electoral activity very seriously - not just to make propaganda, though that was central, but with the intention of winning elections.

The basic problem with Labour is much deeper. The Labour Party is controlled by a bureaucratic apparatus closely entwined with the trade union bureaucracy. And the central feature of this overall labour bureaucracy is its accommodation to, and dependence upon, the capitalist state. Labour governments have rested upon the capitalist state; and what has crucially distinguished them from Tory governments is the greater degree of collaboration between the state and the trade union bureaucracy that they have been able to organise. A future Labour government would draw much of its strength, as a government, from its ability to draw the trade union bureaucracy back into 'the corridors of power' from which they have more recently been so unceremoniously booted.

It is this relationship between the Labour bureaucracy and the state that makes Labour a reformist party, not the fact that it wants to win elections. The question for revolutionary socialists, therefore, is this: how can we break the labour movement as a whole from its reliance on the state? Of course, as the SWP argues a focus on direct working class struggles, and a fight to give those struggles direction, is irreplaceable for socialists.

Any Marxist organisation worthy of the name sees those struggles as the central arena of its work. But just to build an organisation that promotes those struggles is not an answer to the problem of a labour movement fundamentally compromised with the capitalist state.

Merely to put the argument "socialists need a Party quite different to the Labour Party" (SW, September 29) begs the question. We need a reality quite different to the present one. Yet we have to start from present day reality. The Labour Party exists; it is enormously powerful; it structures, shapes and profoundly affects and limits the class struggle; and a real alternative to Labourism cannot be built just by putting out an appeal for it.

The Labour Party is not just a band of vote-fetishists cut off and separate from the labour movement as a whole. Organisationally it has intimate connections to the trade unions. And the reformism of the Labour Party is no more than one aspect of the overtly political reformism of the whole labour movement.

Where the Labour Party expresses the political concerns of reformism, the trade unions express its economic concerns. Labourism is trade unionism extended into the 'political'-i.e. Parliamentary- arena. It is the principle of trade unionism-bargaining within the system-applied to society as a whole.

The problem of Labourism is therefore not just a problem of the Labour Party - with its electoral focus - but a problem of the overall politics of the entire labour movement.

The deep-rooted reformism of the labour movement does have a profound effect on individual militants. Often they do move to the right, get sucked in, become bureaucratised. Leon Trotsky said: "The trade unions are a culture medium for opportunism." The Labour Party, too. But what's the answer? Splendid isolation, sectarian 'purity'? No: it is to link participation in the broad movement with the development of an organised tendency ideologically sharp enough to fight the pressures to accommodation; to integrate individual activists into that tendency rather than leaving them as individuals.

The SWP's perspective lacks a real strategy for working class power. Essentially, they can provide no link between 'small strikes now' and some 'big bang' Armageddon in the future. Logically, their strategy is just to build up an organisation through immediate struggles until the day... Because that perspective involves simply bypassing the real limitations of the movement now, it is no real perspective at all.

In theory, an organisation of some size could be built purely out of direct struggles-strikes in particular. But unless it relates to the overall questions-how to change fundamentally the very nature of the working class movement - it will be fundamentally sterile, especially during big political upheavals.

The SWP completely underestimates the real hold of Labourism and therefore the importance of a political challenge to it. In 1971 they wrote: "...the Labour Party is no longer a reformist party in the sense that it still was in the '50s and even the early '60s. It is committed to the modernisation of British capitalism in conditions which effectively exclude the possibility of serious reforms...This is the basic reason why it is objectively possible to build a revolutionary socialist party in the years ahead," (IS journal no. 48).

IS started to proclaim itself the organisational alternative to the Labour Party. And this was to be done on the basis of demands which "are reformist in form but transitional in content." (ibid).

The SWP has criticised this wrong assessment more recently, but failed to draw any conclusions. Despite the SWP's perspective, back in the real world the actual political product of the mass struggles against Heath was the Labour government of 1974-9.

Just before the 1979 election that brought the Tories into office, Paul Foot commented in the Daily Mirror: 'For the next three weeks I shall be a very strong Labour supporter'. In practice, the SWP had nothing to say but 'vote Labour because the Tories are worse'. Socialist Organiser, on the other hand, organised an alternative election campaign to 'vote Labour and prepare to fight'; we tried to organise the left to fight the Labour leadership even through the course of the election and prepare for battles to come-whether against the Tories or Labour. Where the SWP focused exclusively on how bad the Tories would be, we focused also on sharp criticisms of Labour's record in office.

The SWP's apparently very left-wing and revolutionary attitude to elections - that they are a reformist business, to be shunned by true Marxists - ends up being quite right-wing in practice. They abandon whole spheres of politics to the Labour leaders. Marxists should be interested in elections - not because we think there is a Parliamentary road to socialism, but because elections are a major part of politics for the working class now. 'Build the revolutionary party' or 'have lots of small strikes' are no answer at all to the question in most workers' minds: what can we replace the Tories with?

The suggestion that the solution to the left's "inability to answer the arguments about losing votes" is to ignore the issue of government altogether (by joining the SWP) is absolutely idiotic. The labour movement is profoundly and rightly concerned about government. The task is to give the movement, and in the first place the left, an answer that does address the question of government. We say: don't back down, don't cave in to the right, keep fighting. And we fight for our programme, our political answers. Otherwise we let the Labour leaders off the hook.

Revolutionary politics cannot be just 'workers' struggles' versus 'elections'. Industrial militancy is not in itself a political answer to anything. A political answer must deal with issues of the overall running of society -to point towards ways to defend workers' interests at a society-wide level, to begin to organise the working class to take power.

How do we fight unemployment? 'Organise, occupy, fight for the right to work' the SWP used to chant. Yes, but how? Share out the work, establish workers' control over hours with no loss of pay.

How to fight declining living standards? Go on strike, says the SWP, for higher wages. Fine: but such sectional struggles need to be linked to an overall working class solution - automatic wage rises in line with a workers' cost of living index.

Marxists have to carry out a political struggle to convince workers of these solutions. Part of that struggle is demanding of the existing Labour leaders that they support struggles now; fighting them if they don't; and fighting for our overall political solutions throughout the labour movement. The SWP's one-sidedness leads them to low-level concentration on 'basics' - workplace organisation - at the expense of giving general political answers. During the miners' strike for example, it led to ultra-pessimism, and a failure to argue for the necessary class-wide solidarity action.

Now they conclude that workplace militancy is off the agenda for a period, and that they can do nothing much but fish among the Labour left. But they prove as unable to assess the Labour left accurately as they were to assess the miners' struggle.

Last October, Socialist Worker put out 'an appeal to the organisations of the Labour left' to 'build united support' for the miners. They addressed it to the Editorial Boards of Tribune, Militant, Labour Herald and to the Labour Coordinating Committee. They proposed:

1. Joint meetings of our editorial boards to discuss what can be done to build solidarity with the miners (such as) spreading the network of miners' support committees...collecting money...preparing for...solidarity action...

2. Joint meetings of our supporters...to discuss strengthening miners' support committees...

3. Joint meetings...to organise the collection of money..." (SW, October 2, 1984).

Very good - except that neither Tribune, Militant, Labour Herald nor LCC were visible as organised forces in the miners' support committees. Most support committee activists were non-aligned Labour Party members. If the SWP had really wanted to address the main organised groups active in the committees they would have written to Socialist Organiser, Socialist Action and Labour Briefing. They didn't because it would not have suited their purposes of catchpenny opportunism.

The SWP can maintain itself only by denying that it is possible to be in the Labour Party for any period and to remain a serious socialist. But their own current tactic gives them the lie. How come there are any good socialists in the Labour Party for Socialist Worker to send open letters to? Why have they not had their brains rotted? After all, many of them have been in the Labour Party for many years. How come they are worth relating to? Perhaps being in the Labour Party doesn't automatically pull you to the right?

There is no reason at all why a Marxist organisation, with firm principles and clear heads, need be dragged to the right just by being in the Labour Party. It says something about the SWP that they have so little confidence in their own principles that they think (and probably correctly) this would happen to them.