SWP & PBPA

Monday March 19, 2007 21:53

by Activist

The following is a document presented to the SWP leadership prior to the founding of PBPA.

Building The New Left

1. The centre point of our strategy over the next few years must be the development of a new Left. It is vital to understand why.

2. We have entered a unique period in the history of capitalism that may be characterised as follows

a) the system is far more unstable than at any time since the late 1940s. The end of the Second World War ushered in a period of huge growth for the world system. This was known as the Golden Age of capitalism and it created the material conditions for the nearly complete hegemony of reformist ideas. Workers expected that their sons and daughters would do better than themselves and they wanted a welfare state to moderate the worst excesses of capitalism.

The Golden Age came to an end in the recession of 1971 –73 and there was an important period of change.. The US increased the military leverage on the USSR and forced its collapse – but simultaneously they developed important weaknesses themselves. The removal of the dollar as the anchor of the financial system in 1971, symbolised the US’s relative decline against Germany and Japan. Since then the rise of China as an economic powerhouse has added to its future woes.

The US responded to this in three ways:-

- it used its political clout to gain leverage over rivals. So, for example, it forced the re-valuation of the yen and helped to trigger off a decade long decline of Japanese capitalism in the 1990s.

- it adopted the strategy of globalisation – using the IMF, World Bank WTO to open up new markets while US capital sought extra competitive advantage by locating in developing countries and promoting ‘dollarisation’ to gain rentier income.

- Backing all this up, however was a strategy to play the military card to force its allies to tow the line

There has been growth in the world economy since the nineties – but it is profoundly uneven and it is leading to ever more tensions and pressures. The localised spurts of growth do not in any way resemble the Golden Age. Far from it – there is debt induced growth; growth that is linked to growing inequalities; growth accompanied by more pressure on workers. The stimulus to much of the growth is an extraordinary level of US debt that is fuelled by the willingness of the Chinese state to invest in US capital markets and keep its currency pegged to the dollar. Hardly, a reciepe for the stability.

b) the greatest imperial power in the world is locked down in Iraq.

The strategy of the US empire of compensating for declining economic influence with military power is not working. It is locked down in a war in Iraq it cannot win. The early rhetoric of the neo-cons about a ‘revolution in military strategy’ has failed and instead an old truth has re – asserted itself - empires can easily defeat small countries but it takes far more to successfully occupy them.

US deaths and injuries are escalating to Vietnam style proportions and, crucially, recruitment to the US army is drying up. The US is not able to fight on two or three fronts at once – as Rumsfeld and Chaney had hoped. Their problem, though is that they have to. They cannot defeat the Taliban –only to see them re-take significant sections of Afghanistan. They cannot destroy Saddam – only to allow Iran to increase its influence in the area.

The lock down of the US has given Chavez a chance to breathe. It has also created the space for countries like Brazil, India and Argentina to stand up to IMF/World Bank demands. But the beast of the US empire will be back – more bloody and deadly than before.

3) The political cadre of the working class movement has been diuluted.

It is difficult to over-state how important this is. Working class politics since 1948, as been dominated by the twin poles of Stalinism and social democracy. The core networks that sustained a class perspective came in one way or other from these two poles.

Today, Stalinism is dead. The old Communist Parties of the world are rudderless and in many cases their supporters are open to revolutionary influence.

The leadership and apparatus of social democracy has embraced social liberalism. The basis of reformist politics was to make capitalism work – and then to grant reforms. The new phase of capitalism, however, has made this far more difficult as almost every major reformist demand comes up against the limits of the system far more quickly. The result is that once social democrats come into office, the apparatus of social democracy turns on its own supporters in a more profound way than in the past.

This is not to suggest that social democrats cannot maintain a working class base by tacking left on occasions. The German SPD attacked capitalists as ‘locusts’ and rhetorically embraced an anti-war position. But their room for manouevre in office is much less and their grass roots membership is in decline.

4) The working class movement is tentatively starting to fight – but without a political backbone.

Workers fight in a much more general ways than in the past – because they have to. Whether on pensions, social security or against the McCreevy directive, vast numbers mobilise on issues that attack the very heart of the system.

This is very different form the sixties when there was a huge, confident militancy – but it was a sort of ‘do-it yourself’ reformism where you fought your individual boss and did not take on central pillars of the system itself, in many cases.
Today, a weakened working class movement has to fight in a hugely political way for the most basic of rights.

3. Whatever about the bad habits that our tendency picked up in the long period of working class defeat, the key to the SWP tradition is starting with the political needs of workers.
Everything we have argued up to now indicates that the key task for the moment is the creation of a new political home for tens of thousands of working class activists whose ideas are in flux.

The creation of such a political home is a process – it cannot be declared by small groups; it cannot arise from any one blueprint – it will be messy and surprising.

Because of the scale of capitalist instability and the political dislocation of the working class, that political home has to bring together revolutionaries and reformists who want to fight. In other words, it is not about re-grouping an old far left but of opening out to new forces who have come in through social movements.

Within that formation revolutionaries have immense opportunities provided they know what they are doing.
If they play an active role in bringing this new alliance into existence, they will help shape the ideas of many. It will not happen automatically and we will have to argue – but we will learn how to argue and gain a respect that will give our ideas a hearing they did not have before.

It is, therefore, not a question of collapsing revolutionary organisations into such formations – but of building trust so that we can both build these new formations and maintain our own distinct position within them.

In Italy, for example, we need to be building Refundatione Comunista – but we have to fight hard against a leadership that wants to enter coalition.

In Britain, we need to build Respect – but after the Big Brother debacle we need to quickly establish the party beyond Galloway.

4. The SWP in Ireland has experienced huge difficulties making the turn to a New Left. The essential reason is that for more than a decade our strategy has been to combine general propaganda with episodic mass campaigns on single issues.

The methods that flowed from this has become crust or protective shell.

It was a highly successful strategy in the nineties. We campaigned on the streets for the idea of a minimum wage – and got huge support. We took up the issue of Iraq from an early stage and helped build an anti-war movement. We built support for strikes and got big audiences.

Internally, though, we combined this a high level of politics. Our members were the best politically educated activists because we had no fear of discussing every possible issue.
But there was a gap – between a small propagandist group – and the mass campaigns which won temporary support.
The weakness in the method was that it did not put us into an enduring organic relationship with layers of people who did not agree with us – and who we had to win over patiently.
From this has flowed a style that we now have to fully jettison. This includes forms of substitutionism, where we believe we are the only ‘movers and shakers’. Or vagueness and imprecision over detail because we are not held accountable for our actions. Or long abstract forms of speechifying that do not connect to practical problems.

What is at the heart of the battle within the party over the New Left is breaking fundamentally form these methods.

5. The methods of operating as a small propaganda group while engaging in mass single issue campaigns is no longer sustainable.

We need clear strategic goals that link together and give direction and sense to our work.

Over the next period, we shall therefore operate in three major domains.

a) we will help develop a wider anti-war movement that is focussed on March 18th and beyond.
b) We shall seek to give political expression to the wider movement of the past few years through developing the building People Before Profit.
c) We shall engage in a major recruitment campaign to renew and expand the SWP branch network.
The rest of this document focuses on the second of these goals.

4. The idea of People before Profit has mass appeal because tens of thousands of workers sense that Pat Rabbittte is a Tony Blair in the making – and they do not regard Sinn Fein as their political voice.

Rabbitte’s desperate bid to capture a soft racist vote by calling for work permits shows his political bankruptcy. His attacks on socialists such as Declan Bree shows there is already a price being paid for coalition with Fine Gael.
Sinn Fein have gained from this – but there are major contradictions at the heart of the party.

Firstly, Sinn Fein supporters have already established a beach head position within the business elite. The Northern Catholic middle class have moved towards Sinn Fein and with that comes money. Not just US money from companies like Coca Cola but home grown money accumulated through property speculation and construction companies.

Second, while the party seeks to opportunistically express the anger of workers it has no tradition of promoting working class self organisation. The result is that it associates itself with struggles – but does not build them. This can work for a period but the more people move into struggle the more scrutiny SF politics come under.

Third, the wider strategy of the SF leadership is that a united Ireland will come through being in coalition both sides of the border. Their spokesperson Caoimhin O Caoilean has made it clear that ‘coalition is a nettle that Sinn Fein wrasp’.

For as long as the armed struggle was in place, these contradictions could be contained under the need for ‘loyalty to the leadership’. But with the transformation of the IRA into a commemoration society and the revelation of spies at leadership level, they no longer can cement over the cracks.
In February, SF is due to revise its party programme at their Ard Fheis. They will dilute their radical policies – arguing, for example, for a mere 17.5% corporation profits tax to align themselves to a consensus that has already emerged in the ESRI circles.

As the spotlight falls on Sinn Fein economic policies, the space for a further left alternative will grow.

5. The argument for a New left applies as much to the North as the South. As we predicted there has been a rise of sectarianism because of the Belfast agreement. Indeed the argument that Eamonn McCann championed about institutionalised sectarianism has now almost become a common place.

With the rise in sectarianism and the revelations about spies, there has also been a profound growth of cynicism and a tendency for individuals to withdrawal from political life.
But while these are important obstacles, revolutionaries also need to be dialectical.

That means understanding that workers have contradictory ideas – pulled by the zero sum gain of which ‘community’ gains over the other but also sensing and wanting to hear people who talk about class.

In addition new spaces are opening up to debate issues which are held in check during the war years. The Make Poverty History rally and the good attendance at the Belfast conference on social justice and globalisation shows this.
On top of that the overall agenda of the British state to run down state spending constitutes a major threat to the living standards of workers. The decision of NIPSA to ballot for all-out strike action over Hain’s offer of 0.2% to civil servants (no – that is not a misprint) shows what is in store.

All of this means that a space has been created by which a minority of activists initially can be won to a New Left alliance. The trick is to move from global issues where the left has won a hearing to developing popular class arguments about the North itself.

5. We face, however, serious obstacles to the building of a new left – and unfortunately, they will not be solved overnight.
The first is the appalling sectarian legacy of the Irish Left. The largest component, the Socialist party, have retreated from broad based movement to concentrate on an internalised form of party building. Their perspective is crude in the extreme – they want to elect a second TD and then become the centre point for the re-alaignment of left-right politics. The problem is that even if they succeeded in getting a second TD, their sectarian methods will become a bigger obstacle in future. The Gama dispute shows precisely why..

Here Joe Higgins played a magnificent role in following up and exposing the conspiracy to defraud workers. But once it was exposed his party refused to broaden out the struggle to other activists. The result was limied impact in SIPTU – the main union the workers belonged to. A simple strategy of calling together a network of activists within SIPTU could have put far more pressure on the leadership.

The second problem is that the independents who have posed as left wing are now lining themselves up for coalition. To take an example: we engaged in discussions with Finian McGrath about becoming part of People Before Profit and he was at first positively disposed but later there was a friendly brush off. We have now learnt the reason: he and Jerry Cowley have been promoting the independent block as possible coalition partners – as long as they get a government Ministry!

Finally, if this was not enough, the grouping around Seamus Healy refuse to work with the SWP and are also quite demoralised.

Given all these difficulties it might be tempting to retreat to a nineties style perspective where we sought to lead single issue campaigns while trying to build up the SWP.

However, this is not practical either in terms of the wider trajectory of the working class politics or creating the environment where revolutionaries develop a style and a practice that is in tune with large numbers of activists.

6. Our aim therefore over the next year is to build People before Profit through a combination of forging a united front from above – and developing real groupings from below.
In the first phase of this process, we have engaged in extensive discussion with a wide variety of people on the left. In the new phase, we need to focus on developing an electoral challenge.

Over the past few weeks and months we have engaged with our allies and built up trust. There has been no manoeuvring or short sighted attempts to impose our view from above. Rather, we have taken seriously our own injunction to ensure that People before Profit looks, smells and sounds different to SWP.

Not everyone within the alliance was initially agreed on election and some still are not. Our aim, however, should be to convince a minimum of seven strong candidates candidates to emerge in the coming months.

Most of our energy, however, now needs to go into developing groups at local level. These groupings need to start by a serious, well prepared initiative whereby activists from different campaigns send out a letter to people in their areas to call an initial meeting.

Where this is done properly, we would expect 20+ to found the local groups on a constituency basis.

Once this has occured, it is vital that the groups become self sustaining through an alliance structure that allows others to make an input. At all costs, SWP need to avoid seeing itself as the shadow force that decides what PBP is doing. We are not interested in fronts or name changes but creating a space for activists from different backgrounds.

The local groups need to meet monthly and develop a programme of a activity which SWP needs to adjust to.
Finally, we need an island wide strategy rather than simply adapting to local city conditions.

The bourgeois forces on this island are co-ordinating strategies and preparing to set the agenda for a united Ireland in the future – one where sectarian blocks feed nicely into the hegemony if right wing parties.

We cannot have one strategy for the South, one for Derry and one for Belfast.

Our strategic goal must therefore be to develop People Before Profit into a all Ireland movement. For an initial period this may mean working under the auspices of the Socialist Environmental Alliance in Derry and developing a new left formation in Belfast.

But within both, we should be arguing for a pulling together of the left forces throughout the whole country.