The National Shop Steward Network Conference (26 June) brought together around 200 trade union militants from around the country to discuss the threat posed by the capitalist crisis and to organise a response. In the opening plenary, speeches concentrated on the strike-busting anti-union laws, the threat to public services and the spineless leaders at the top of the movement. The message was clear – we need to build a rank-and-file movement across the unions.
The central theme of the day was a proposal from the steering committee to push the unions and the TUC to build for a national demonstration against the cuts. This seems to be a worthwhile suggestion and something that serious trade unionists should push in their unions. The last demonstration in March was a miserable affair of less that 5,000 people (mostly union full timers). We need to be energetic in building for this demonstration and other action by the "official" trade union movement and use it to force a working-class alternative to the government’s cuts into public view.
The NSSN is an initiative set up by the Socialist Party and various anarcho-syndicalists in order to build a movement in the unions from the bottom up. At the moment it feels that it is very much in its infancy and could potentially be a useful vehicle for organising the rank and file. The conference itself was surprisingly dull considering it brought together leading trade union militants on the eve of a massive assault on our class. Instead of discussing strategies for beating the cuts, delegates spent most of time making general speeches for socialism. “My name’s... I’m from...I’m involved in [insert worthy cause]...we did a street stall and lots of people were interested...I hate my boss...socialism is the answer”.
However, bubbling under the surface of this left consensus, there were some serious clashes that show the left is ill-prepared for the challenges to come.
Round one: In the opening session, a member of the Workers’ Power group spoke from the floor and criticised his Unison convenor, who also happens to be in the Socialist Party. He said that the convenor had played down the need to fight voluntary redundancies in a recent branch newsletter. He did not identify the convenor by name but presumably his comrades in the SP knew exactly who was being talked about. Later, during lunchtime, a Workers’ Liberty member and another delegate turned a quiet corner in the venue’s grounds to find the SPer holding the WPer in a headlock and screaming in his face. They pulled the SPer off and the pair went their separate ways.
(Apparently the Unison branch has since discussed this incident: the SPer has apologised, and the apology has been accepted. But shouldn't the NSSN, as well as the union branch, have intervened, since the incident happened at the NSSN conference).
Round two: Given the Socialist Party’s principled position on anti-fascism, it was a surprise that NSSN invited UAF to speak at the conference. Again the session was full of niceties and tub thumping, until a delegate from Salford TUC took the floor and recounted how UAF had behaved in the run up to the Bolton anti-EDL demonstration. He described his position as an organiser of the local anti-fascist network and the delegated organiser from Salford TUC and his Unite Region to coordinate the response to the EDL threat in Bolton.
In the weeks running up to the Bolton EDL demo (which saw many antifascists imprisoned and beaten up by the police), Weymann Bennett (UAF’s national organiser) had met with this local antifascist organiser and said “If you think you’re going to have anything to do with this, you can fuck off”. Bennett’s approach of “Uniting” against Fascism is well known in the movement – it means keeping your mouth shut and falling into line behind himself, the Lib Dems and his coterie of religious bigots. However, telling the truth about the UAF in a public forum was too much for the UAF speaker, who became hysterical, started screaming and stormed out of the room with the words: “You promised me this wouldn’t be a debate”.
Round three: Whilst retelling this ridiculous behaviour, another senior SWP activist eavesdrops into the conversation. In attempting to defend UAF’s behaviour, he ends up accusing the Salford anti-fascist of being on the side of the police (?!). Much acrimony and shouting ensued before the SWPer skuttles off accusing us of “sectarianism”. Later this develops into another full blown argument over the fact that UAF is a popular front – i.e. a Stalinist policy to unite working-class people behind middle-class bourgeois politicians. It is not an argument in the traditional sense because the SWP are arguing that it is sectarian to disagree with them. They say that if we continue to disagree with them, they will refuse to work with us. Presumably, the Liberal Democrats offer similar ultimatums to UAF, which is why the SWP-led anti-fascist campaign preaches middle-class liberalism. Against all this the AWL comrades argued that debate and discussion were a healthy part of the movement and part of the Bolshevik tradition. However, this only provoked threats of violence: “you’re not in a Bolshevik organisation. And look what the bolsheviks did to their political opponents – they threw them in the canal!”
Round four: The public sector cuts session was addressed by Roger Bannister, who recently split the left vote in the Unison General Secretary election by insisting that he stand as a Socialist Party candidate against the United Left candidate Paul Holmes. The SP claim that they could not support Holmes because he believed in maintaining and using the Labour Link.
The SP believe the key issue in any Unison election is the link with Labour. But scratch their ultra-leftism on the Labour Party question and you find a bunch of opportunists who prioritise their own party-building project above the interests of the working-class. More worryingly, though the room was full of Unison United Left members who are fuming at the Socialist Party, only one AWL member raised this question in the public forum. Leading SWPers (who are also in Unison United Left) made no attempt to address this issue. The Socialist Party at least had the decency to argue their Labour Party position after the public session had finished.
The sectarian left
Beneath the vague consensus about “socialism”, the conference shows a left dominated by sectarians. A common misconception is that sectarians spend their whole time arguing and bickering. In reality the opposite is the case. Sectarians on the left shut discussion down, seek to silence criticism and make their own bureaucratic deals behind closed doors. A scientific description of sectarianism is “putting the interests of the party before the interests of the class as a whole”. The sectarians are well aware that party organisations can be built quickly as long as you keep rallying the troops and don’t expect them to think too much. Criticism of the “party” is the cardinal sin and all critics must be silenced. However, in the absence of healthy debate and internal democracy and with a soul focus on party-building, socialist organisations tend to go mad.
Apparatus Marxism, the political philosophy that prioritises building the party apparatus, distorts Marxism into a self-defeating hobby. Sectarians abandon consistent revolutionary policy rooted in the class struggle and attempt to build the party by policy zig-zags trying to suck up people sympathetic to the current line. The sect veers between ultra leftism (e.g. The Socialist Party’s belief that the working-class masses are rallying to the Campaign for a New Workers Party) and mild left reformism (e.g. The Socialist Party’s bureaucratic tactics whenever they are in a position of power inside the unions).
By putting “party” before “class”, the policy of these organisations become irrational from any class struggle perspective. In an attempt to maintain unity with the Liberal Democrats and other bourgeois forces inside UAF, the SWP threaten physical violence against other working-class revolutionaries. In order to prevent conference hearing about the centrism of some of the Socialist Party “militants”, Andy Tullis resorts to thuggery to silence his critics. In a belief that the Labour Party is the cause of Unison’s quietism, the Socialist Party throw away the chance of standing a single left candidate and delivering an important blow to the most right-wing trade union bureaucracy in the movement.
On the whole, the NSSN is an excellent initiative and may become a vehicle for some effective rank and file organising. At present it lacks some basic structures that would give such an organisation life.
The network has no formal democracy or an elected steering committee. Any suggestions raised by delegates were “taken into consideration” by the unelected steering committee, which cut against having any sharp arguments and concentrated power into the hands of the mysterious central clique. Possibly the Socialist Party and the syndicalists made a calculation that the network is too small to organise anything significant and it is more important to rally the troops. However, this decision did make a lot of the content fairly bland and the very real disagreements that were suppressed found their manifestation in confrontations outside of the formal meetings.
With the anti-union laws increasingly preventing effective strike action, such organisation at the grassroots of the movement will become increasingly important. Despite the lunacy of much of the left, a revival in the working-class movement, will hopefully blast through much of the thuggery and sectarianism that infects the leading organisations. Physical violence is used by those who cannot justify their irrational political positions – it is one expression of the Stalinist filth that still infects our movement. Serious class struggle activists and people coming into the movement for the first time need to confront this nonsense and assert the basic Trotskyist principle that debate and discussion are the life blood of working-class organisation.
Comments
"No argument to be had".
Yeah, fair point. Just assert that "there's no argument to be had", repeat the claims you've already made, chuck in a bit of "you support New Labour" demagogy, and... job done, eh?
I don't know if you actually bothered to read what I wrote but if so you'll notice that nothing I said was a defence of or advocacy for UUL, nor did I claim that Paul Holmes was a revolutionary. My point was that, from the point of view of the project of building a democratic rank-and-file body in Unison(rather than from the point of view of building the Socialist Party), Holmes and his record represented a more substantial opportunity than Bannister's candidacy given that he (Bannister) is accountable to no-one but the SP and that his candidacy represented nothing but a continuation of the SP's sectarian project to build itself.
Bannister's membership of a (notionally) Marxist organisation does not mean that other Marxists in his union are obliged to support him. The key question is not in fact whether someone is "formally closer" to our own politics - it's what they represent in a given situation and what possibilities for developing rank-and-file organisation would be opened up by supporting them. The idea that we would back Bannister just because he "formally" agrees with us on revolution vs. reform is pretty dumb (particularly given that the specifically revolutionary Marxist content of Bannister's candidacy was non-existent).
On the "gossip" issue, I find it depressing - if not surprising - that you think the circumstance of a senior member of your organisation physically attacking a left-wing critic (in public, at the conference of a campaign you control) is not worth reporting because the "issue has been dealt with". It's even more depressing that you implicitly deny that the incident even took place (you refer to it as "whatever incident your gossip-monger says he saw"). The person in question (who, unlike you, at least has the decency to admit that the incident happened - it's hard to deny that you put someone in a headlock when there were several eye-witnesses...) may have apologised, but the actual "issue" at hand is the Stalinoid methods your organisation is using to deal with criticism; that "issue" has most definitely not been dealt with.
Three short points
1) Supporting and working alongside a man who has organised and leads a union branch so strong that it has to hire a football stadium for its reps meetings offers no possibilities for developing rank-and-file organisation in Unison? Okay, fine. Let's just say we have extremely different conceptions of what rank-and-file organising means and leave it at that.
2) Your "Israeli flags" demagogy is actually embarrassing. Do you actually know the slightest fucking thing about the incident(s) you think you're referring to? Do you actually side with Islamists and hysterical pro-Hamas "socialists" against us? (Given your extremely flippant attitude to the use of violence to silence criticism my guess would be yes, you do.) A quick minute ago you were waffling about how the SP's politics are "formally closer" to ours than Paul Holmes, so let me turn the tables; your politics on Israel/Palestine are "formally closer" to ours than those that hegemonise the Palestine solidarity movement, but here you are uncritically backing up the mainstream and dismissing our criticisms as "hilarious yelping". I guess the difference between us is that we have the spine to actually stand up for our positions (and deal with whatever gets thrown our way as a consequence), while you'd rather keep your heads down, swim along with the current and not do or say anything that might be a bit contentious (beyond a bit of weak-as-piss "socialism is the answer" abstractions) in the hope that you'll recruit more people that way. Good luck.
3) You've made your attitude to "thuggery" in the movement very clear. You can stop now. I don't really have anything else to say other than that I hope I never get on the wrong side of you in an actual meeting or on a demo because I get the feeling I'd be ducking punches before very long.
Union officers on a worker's wage?
Hi Mark,
Could you explain why your Socialist Party comrades opposed, spoke against and voted against this motion at PCS conference?
Conference notes that:
* In 2008 gross annual median earnings for a full-time permanent employee in the Civil Service in 2008 were £22,520 and 60% of permanent full time civil servants earned less than £25,000 pa;
* The highest PCS full time salary is over £80,500 and within the top 2% of earners in the UK.
Conference instructs the NEC to immediately commence negotiations with the GMB with the aim of ensuring that full time officer pay rates in PCS are much closer to the pay received by the majority of PCS members.
Sacha Ismail
Draw your own conclusions
People can read what we say about Israel/Palestine for themselves and conclude whether Mark's claims that our intervention into the demos were simply about "waving Israeli flags" around.
You have been consistently flippant and dismissive about the use of physical violence to intimidate critics within the left/labour movement and I'm apparently the one who's "obnoxious"?
I'd be interested to hear your response to Sacha's question.
rank and file
MarkP - from the point of view of building a democratic, rank-and-file grouping in UNISON, should we support a candidate who
1) consistently stands unilaterally, irrespective of what any other groupings in the UNISON left say?
2) doesn't even pretend to be part of a broader initiative, but is a single-issue 'build the socialist party' candidate?
3) is accountable only to the SP, not to other rank-and-file activists?
4) is accountable to an organisation which has sold out the pensions of all the young members in the union it *does* control (PCS) and funds itself by refusing to fight for a workers' wage for officials in that union (indeed, by fighting *against* attempts to impose a workers' wage)?
5) has an attitude to the Labour-union link which can only be described as depoliticising - you basically advocate that all unions do what the FBU do and disaffiliate as quickly as possible from their only link into national politics, renounce any fight to hold their funded MPs to account, and drift off... again, if there was any mileage at all in your 'new workers' party' initiative, i.e. if it was not just a dead-end strategy calculated as a recruitment tool for the SP, then the PCS would be affiliated to a new workers' party already.
Standing a single-issue build-the-SP candidate in UNISON elections who makes no attempts to build a network of left activists to which he can be accountable does not advance any project of rank-and-file control over unions. Rather than offering activists a strategy for taking back their union, the Bannister candidacy says to them, 'vote for me, leave it to me, I'll sort it out' and 'if you like this, join the SP!'. It's a bureaucratic, ultimatistic way of relating to struggles for union democracy.
Holmes is a candidate with much greater credibility in terms of building a democratic network of rank-and-file activists which *asserts itself* rather than passively soaking up whatever the SP candidate chucks them that day. Building a rank-and-file network is a rather different task than winning votes based on an apolitical campaign of the kind that Bannister ran, whose major selling point was name-recognition and nothing more. The evidence for this? Holmes got more branch nominations than Bannister, and a broader range of groupings and individuals were prepared to get involved in his campaign, because here was a candidate who was offering them openness, rather than a series of ultimatums of the 'join my party then we'll talk' variety that Bannister has to offer.
Before you continue chest-beating about how bad it is to not support the candidate you stood unilaterally, why don't you attempt to reassure us that a win for Bannister won't just mean a repeat of the disgusting careerist debacle which is SP control of the PCS?
Confusion
This isn't the place for an extended discussion on Israel-Palestine, but briefly: you're confusing two things, and getting both of them wrong:
a) In Sheffield, one of our placards - among others, and alongside a banner denouncing the occupation - said "No to the IDF, no to Hamas". This was ripped out of a young, female comrade's hands, torn up and stamped on. I don't think "No to the IDF, no to Hamas" was a particularly good slogan in the context, but that's hardly the main issue.
b) An AWL member went to a demonstration in London with both Israeli and Palestinian flags - on his own initiative. This in the context of massive anti-Israeli chauvinism among the mostly Muslim youth who dominated the demonstrations. This was a comrade, btw, who was tireless in his activity against the Gaza occupation and who was arrested more than once during the struggle. Again, I'm not sure the flags were a good idea, but your hysterical outrage says more about you than about the tactic.
On the more general issue of how socialists should approach Israel-Palestine, see the link Mark posted above.
www.workersliberty.org/story/2009/01/28/sp-and-gaza-socialism-evasion
Back on the labour movement, an answer on the worker's wage would be appreciated.
Sacha
Idiot
Tough business
It's cool, Mark. I'm sure the business of enmeshing yourself with the bureaucracy of a big union and then failing to do anything remotely radical with your position of leadership is very time-consuming/serious, etc. Stooping to answer "sectarian" questions about why your members in PCS have jettisoned a principle that in other unions you've made the most noise about is well beneath the likes of you...
Yes, it's a collective personality disorder
How DARE we put a motion for officials on a worker's wage!
"The problem is not so much that it was being put forward by sectarian imbeciles as that it was a motion serving the disruptional factional purposes of those imbeciles, aimed not at achieving its ends but at disrupting the coalition between Left Unity, PCS Democrats and Serwotka."
So in other words you voted against a motion to move the union towards the worker's wage principle not out of factional bile (which would be bad enough) but because to do so would disrupt your alliance with the former Blairite faction of the union and with a union leader who is now happily pocketing £70,000+ a year? Even if that was a good alliance, isn't that a little... unprincipled?
"The Socialist Party is still strongly in favour of the workers wage principle in the unions and all SP members, in PCS or elsewhere, are bound by it."
Erm, then why did you vote against the motion? And why have you done nothing about this in the eight years Left Unity has dominated the PCS leadership?
"The motion served its secondary factional purpose, which was to give you the chance to denounce the "sell outs" of larger left groups, so no doubt you can consider it time well spent."
Yes, of course: we're not really interested in the worker's wage demand at all, it's pure factionalism. Our fault for raising it, not the SP's for opposing it! How dare we be so sectarian?
Sacha
"Not particularly interesting gossip"
Reports of senior SP trade unionists literally beating up their political critics at meetings of campaigns the SP undemocratically controls = "not particularly interesting gossip".
Says a lot, really.
On Unison; despite their relative votes (much of which can, in my view, be attributed to Roger Bannister having built up a national profile by standing consistently almost as a matter of religious principle in a number of general secretary elections over the years), I do not think it is unreasonable to question whether Paul Holmes - the man who leads what is arguably the best-organised Unison branch in the country and who received substantially more nominations from branches than Bannister - was not in fact the stronger of the two candidates.
But anyway - the question of who was splitting whose vote is actually secondary. Holmes has better politics than Bannister and his candidacy represented the opportunity to build a democratic, fighting rank-and-file in Unison. Bannister's candidacy represented nothing except the opportunity to build the SP.
Forgive us if we're not particularly keen to jump on board.