Paris Thompson, one of the “Facebook Four” whose expulsion from the SWP almost a year ago started the continuing crisis in that group, wrote on 29 September:
“A new Leeds Left Unity branch has been declared unofficially by the appointed organiser and the Leeds Left Unity Facebook group is being bureaucratically shut down by an unelected administrator (who also happens to have, and refuses to make common property, the membership list). None of which has ever been discussed in the Leeds Left Unity meetings. Nothing like a good old bureaucratically-engineered split to prove your anti ‘sect’ credentials”.
Dave Kirk, a Workers’ Liberty member active in Leeds Left Unity, reports: “The backstory is... dwindling numbers [though Leeds LU has been one of the most successful local groups]. Left Party Platform supporters are asserting that ‘sectarians’ and ‘sects’ (ISN and Workers Power) are to blame, and that the only way to save LU would be to establish a new group”.
Vicki Morris reports on Nottingham LU: “The [latest] meeting was cancelled, at the behest, I think, of the Left Unity head office or whatever they have.
“Someone has taken exception to the local vice-chair. He has been banned from Left Unity by bureaucratic diktat and is rightly angry.
“We are not allowed to meet again until after the conference”.
Left Unity was initiated about a year ago by Andrew Burgin (long a central figure in Stop The War) and Kate Hudson (secretary of CND and a former member of the Communist Party of Britain) after they quit Respect in disgust at George Galloway’s behaviour. It gained momentum in March 2013, when the film-maker Ken Loach came out in support.
Local groups have been set up, involving a total of some hundreds of people across the country, and are currently debating platforms to be decided on at a founding conference on 30 November 2013.
Burgin, Hudson, and others propose a “Left Party platform” to create a group which would be like Die Linke in Germany, Syriza in Greece, or the Front de Gauche in France.
Others propose a “Socialist Platform”, explicitly socialist and working-class. They argue that the scheme of building an instant big party by blurring everything other the minimum required to appear more left than Labour won’t work, and would be inadequate even if it did draw instant large numbers. AWL supports the SP.
The conflicts in Leeds and Nottingham seem not to be LPP vs SP, and it is not AWL who are blamed as being the “sectarians”. Rather, the LPP search for “broadness” seems to require marginalising or excluding even the more left-wing backers of the LPP.
The promise is that their approach will, in return, bring in lots of people who liked the “Occupy” movement but dislike the terms “socialism” or “working-class”. That is unlikely. And, anyway, having a socialist platform in no way contradicts allying in struggle with people who are not socialists.
The SWP-splinter International Socialist Network, of which Thompson is a member, has broadly backed the LPP, but recommended amendments to both LPP and SP.
In the SP, it proposes to replace “aims... to end capitalism” with “aims... to challenge capitalism”. We all come across challenging behaviour often, from workmates, neighbours, or friends, and usually we deal with it. It is not fatal. The capitalist class is skilled at deflecting and dealing with challenges. To limit ourselves to challenging it, rather than ending it, is to bow down to that skill.
Other ISN amendments delete (without substitute) the SP’s statement that capitalist state institutions must be replaced by different ones, and its assertion that the Stalinist states were not socialist.
There can often be tactical good sense in small socialist groups participating in big left parties which are reformist, or unclear about Stalinism. We participate and argue patiently against the reformist and Stalinist ideas. What is the sense of a small socialist group, like ISN, intervening in an only-slightly-less-small group, Left Unity, in order to argue against rejecting reformism and Stalinism?
The ISN’s amendments to the LPP try to make the LPP more left-wing.
In the LPP as it stands, there is only one reference to socialism, and a minimal one: “we need a new left party which will present an alternative set of values of equality and justice: socialist, feminist, environmentalist...”
The ISN amendment would have the LPP talk about “the socialist transformation of society”. “We believe that working people have the power to create a new society based on collective organisation, democratic coordination and the planning of economic activity in the interests of humanity”.
The effort to “keep it broad” here results in hopeless vagueness. What does “working people” mean? Do the ISN really look to an alliance comprising working capitalists (as distinct from rentiers), small employers and self-employed, and employed workers, but excluding unemployed workers, students, retired workers, etc., to change the world?
Capitalism is based on “collective organisation” (read chapter 13 of Capital)! “Democratic coordination”? In modern bourgeois democracies, capitalism has a form of that, too. “Planning of economic activity”? Big-business strategists do that!
The ISN’s definition of socialism says nothing about who owns and controls the means of production. The only distinctively socialistic thing in it is the phrase “in the interests of humanity”, but that nails things down no more than the original LPP talk of “alternative values of equality and justice”.
If the ISN’s sentence were in a hurried article or leaflet, we’d read it as just an inept but good-spirited attempt to find new words to explain socialism. But this is supposed to be an amendment to a platform statement, to make it more precise.
Let’s hope that their treatment in Leeds makes the ISN reflect on the shortcomings of the approach in which socialists, in the hope of being “broad”, blur talk of socialism.
Meanwhile, the SWP has started its pre-conference period (the only time under SWP rules when relatively open debate is allowed), running up to a conference on 13-15 December; and, following a meeting on 21 September, a new opposition faction has been formed, with broadly the same people who formed the “moderate” opposition at the SWP conference in January 2014.
Its platform limits itself to mild questioning of the regime and procedures of the SWP, without comment on the SWP’s public policies. The first SWP pre-conference discussion bulletins, however, shows some bubbling underneath.
One opposition writer argues “the Party [i.e. SWP] needs to shift its primary focus from the left bureaucracy in trade unions to the workplace”.
The Central Committee’s main document reaffirms what another oppositionist calls the “one final push strategy”. With only a few reservations, it reckons “the period” has “an explosive character”, “marked by ‘abrupt changes of the political flows and ebbs’, with ‘constant spasmodic class struggle’ and ‘frenzied oscillations of the political situation towards the Left and towards the Right’.” It claims that Unite the Resistance, the SWP’s lacklustre vehicle for putting leftish union officials on platforms, “fits”.
It slams the opposition as “characterised by a tendency towards pessimism over the potential for resistance by the organised working class”, or even as questioning “the centrality of the working class”.
The bulletin also shows different strands in the pro-CC camp. One lot denounce the opposition “as a permanent group, separate from the Party, in opposition to our agreed perspectives and our elected leadership bodies”, and urge that “comrades who continue to belong to a permanent faction should be expelled”.
Others warn gently that the CC may, after all, have made mistakes, and urge reasoned dialogue.
