Following on from the decimation of the Scottish left as a result of divisions within the Scottish Socialist Party, and the earlier eclipse of the Socialist Labour party, the dissension within Respect, between the highly disciplined neo-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and followers of the brilliant but erratic leftist demagogue, George Galloway, demonstrates both the weaknesses and strengths of the left in Britain.
At such a time one would expect some sort of analysis from the country's only quasi-"Marxist" organisation, the Communist Party of Britain, inheritors of the opportunist legacy of the Communist Party of Great Britain. All we have seen to date has been a couple of gloating articles in the Morning Star (headlined "The death of Respect" and "Final Nail in the Coffin") plus a commentary by a Green Party spokesperson.
Presumably no one from CPB was available for comment, preoccupied as they are with the doomed project to "reclaim the Labour Party", as if Labourism hasn't always been a Fifth Column within the labour movement. The much-lamented Clause 4, for instance, was originally inserted by the Fabians into Labour's constitution in an attempt to divert the working class away from its natural allegiance to the Communist Party. Hence the divisive "hand OR brain" formulation, when "hand AND brain" would have been more socially correct.
If the CPB and its TUC friends had been more astute, when Blair put reform of Clause 4 on to the agenda, they could have welcomed the opportunity to give the clause some class-conscious teeth, rather than fighting to preserve its flawed purism.
Despite the manifest weaknesses of the Respect project, the demise of any of the left forces is to be regretted at the time when the British ruling class, via its political New Labour surrogates, is removing all the rights and liberties that have been won over preceding centuries.
Of course, it could be argued that the survival of this or that grouping within the bourgeois parliamentary system has little bearing on the struggle to overthrow that system and replace it by a popular dictatorship, and that, indeed, such groupings only serve to confuse the working class and hold back their revolutionary class consciousness. But since such confusion is endemic, not only in the population at large but also within all the various Communist and Trotskyist organisations, in the absence of an organisation dedicated to revolutionary change ,the possible demise of Respect as a political force must be seen as a serious setback for the nascent forces of resistance to the New Labour project.
(For the benefit of readers outside UK, it should be explained that Respect was formed by the rebel Scottish Labour MP George Galloway, who successfully trounced the Blairite sitting MP in Bermondsey, Oona King. A number of Respect candidates in the local elections secured seats on the local council. Four of these have resigned the Respect whip. Respect has been in many ways a front for the Socialist Workers Party, which despite its obeisance to the writings of Trotsky and excoriation of all things "Stalinist", is not affiliated to the Fourth International. The SWP also plays a powerful role in the Stop the War Coalition, though the StW chair is Andrew Murray of the Communist Party of Britain.)
What are the issues that need to be addressed in analysis of this situation?
The creation of groupings around this or that charismatic leader (Scargill in the SLP, Sheridan in the SSP, Galloway in Respect) are doomed to failure. Such attempts are minor local manifestations of the hagiography of the left in the years since 1917. Obviously, as Plekhanov pointed out, historical individuals do play a part. But if Stalin had not triumphed over Trotsky in the inner-party struggle, the latter's role would no doubt be assessed today in similar terms to Stalin's. It was Trotsky, after all, who directed the attack upon the Kronstadt sailors.
Despite calls in the Morning Star for the re-establishment of Trotsky in the socialist pantheon, the rehabilitation of this or that historical individual is less important than a reassessment of their ideas. Whether the ex-Menshevik Trotsky was in fact the chief architect of Red October (as even Stalin himself once famously testified), it is uncontrovertably true that Trotskyism has played a divisively negative role in struggle throughout the world.
Therefore, while the need for analysis of the manner of Trotsky's expulsion from the CPSU and the USSR and his subsequent murder, by the KGB acting in collusion with the FBI, is not the most urgent item on our agenda, given that the SWP plays such a significant role in the British anti-war movement requires that, alongside the necessity of preserving the unity of the broad forces in the Stop the War Coalition, the negative impact of the SWP cannot be ignored.
Today, for instance, the failure of StW to mobilise mass direct action against the continued wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is reminiscent of the way the SWP-led mass protests against the Poll Tax were not translated into the removal of the Thatcherite Tories from office. There also needs to be acknowledgement of the complicity of the CPB in the obsessive legalism of StW strategy.
It is significant that, when the year-long mass blockade of the Faslane nuclear base in Scotland was firing the imagination of new recruits to struggle (and particularly among the youth) neither the CPB nor the SWP made involvement in this non-violent direct action matters of party discipline. This is hardly surprising. The CPB has abandoned the very concept of party discipline and while the SWP is good at quasi-revolutionary rhetoric, it appears suspicious of involvement in any broad movement that it cannot guarantee to control.
Lenin's analysis of the need for revolutionaries ALSO (but never ONLY) to involve themselves in bourgeois parliamentary politics needs to be reassessed in the light of the concrete contemporary situation.
Clearly, as Lenin pointed out to Gallagher, it would be quixotic of revolutionaries to walk away from the potential of political rights for which so many of our class have fought and died throughout the struggles of the past.
Later, and more controversially, Dimitrov urged those in the fascist countries where workers' organisations were no longer legal, to enter the fascist mass organisations since these were the only available medium through which work could be done legally.
But this did not remove the necessity for illegal work. On the contrary, legal entryism and illegal underground activity were two sides of the same struggle.
Of course, though New Labour is playing its classic role of acting as a stalking horse for the most reactionary elements in the ruling class, Britain is not yet a fascist state, though there are alarming parallels that should not be ignored.
Not least of these is the fact that following the stock market crash of 1929, the ruling class in Italy and Germany resorted to institutional terrorism to solve the economic contradictions of the day. Then, however, fascism was not the only possible outcome; in the New Deal, elements of the US ruling class were able to channel some of their riches into social projects to divert the masses from the attractions of revolution.
Today, it is the increasing instability of the global capitalist system following the anti-Soviet counter revolution (for the Soviet and socialist economies had acted as a stabilising factor in the world economy) which means that Roosevelt-style concessions to working class needs are no longer possible. The oppressors may seem to have observed the disastrous outcome (to them) of naked inner-state terrorism, which resulted, almost inevitably, in the raising of the red flag from Berlin to Beijing.
But, externally, state-sponsored terrorism in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan indicates that the capitalist leopard has not really changed its spots.
Internally, for the moment at least, the grinning fatuity of a Blair or Bush may seem to be more effective than the histrionic ranting of a Hitler, that Storm Troopers and concentration camps may not be the best way of staving off the coming crisis, to the indigenous victims of imperialist aggression this distinction may seem more apparent than real.
The thousands of Palestinians who have vanished into Israeli jails without being brought to trial, the victims of Abu Ghraib torture, the hundreds imprisoned illegally in Guantanamo, the nameless many who have kidnapped under the "extraordinary rendition" policy and taken to be tortured to unknown destinations (sometimes to formerly socialist countries like Poland or Khazakhstan), the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who have died since Bush made his "mission accomplished" boast – all these examples, and more, are evidences of weakness, not strength. They demonstrate the growing desperation of the ruling class as the necessary end of its hegemony draws ever closer.
But though that end may indeed be NECESSARY, as compared with the only alternative, the extinction of the human race, it is by no means INEVITABLE. History is littered with the remains of once great civilisations, which have declined into moribundity when they failed to advance to the next required stage in their development. But the US imperialist project is the first such that carries within it not merely its own gravediggers but the gravediggers of us all. The fate of the entire planet hangs in the balance.
In the face of such a stark choice, the incestuous wranglings within the only possible alternative movement seems not merely ridiculous, but positively criminal. We may have not yet reached a situation where legal opposition to the gadarene rush to destruction is no longer possible. But we have to acknowledge that all such legalisms have so far ended in failure.
Detailed analysis of the reasons for this or that failure, from the SWP's failure to move the anti-Poll Tax movement on to obtain governmental change to the fact that New Labour was able to ignore two million marching (legally) in opposition to war, produces one irresistable conclusion, that the common factor throughout has been the lack of a truly revolutionary party.
Such a party would, of course, utilise all legal opportunities to oppose the stampede into destruction, outside parliament as well as within it. Never for a moment being in any misapprehension about the possibilities of, and limitations upon, such legal opposition, it would nevertheless exploit each and every contradiction within the ruling class and its parliamentary representatives. Where the strength of mass protest made it possible, as was undoubtedly the case on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, it would not shy away from the possibilities of direct action to change government policy.
The state would no doubt respond to such actions with a violence proportionate to how threatened it felt itself to be, but a revolutionary party would see such a response as confirmation of the correctness of the oppositional strategy, a working out of the beginnings of the revolutionary dialectic. As the state escalates the violence of its oppression, its innately violent nature becomes increasingly obvious to all but the most blinkered.
Of course, as is already being demonstrated by the draconian limitations upon freedoms of assembly and expression already on the parliamentary agenda, the leaders of opposition must expect the full force of oppression to fall upon them, individually and collectively.
Were the legal apparatus of the revolutionary mass movement to be beheaded, by imprisonment or worse, then it could only to continue to develop if there were already a parallel leadership (or leaderships) ready to take their places, being in fact a semi-legal (or potentially illegal) apparatus, drawing on the experience off anti-Nazi and anti-Japanese underground forces throughout Europe and Asia in World War II.
If informed by a revolutionary perspective, the limitations of legal struggle are not reasons for abandoning it in favour of some conspiratorial alternative. The revolutionary dialectic requires both legal and illegal methods of work to be developed, in parallel and in dynamic relation with each other. This will become more self-evident if legal opposition becomes so effective that it is made ILLEGAL. A movement that only uses legal methods will become disarmed if the ruling class changes the rules of engagement. But a movement that depends only on illegal methodology condemns itself to isolation, which is exactly what the ruling class requires.
How does the implosion of Respect impact on the imperatives of this situation?
Clearly there is as yet no leftist grouping or party linking revolutionary of theory and praxis as the situation demands. Nor may we, at this concrete stage in British history (the future may produce a different perspective), urge people to vote for or against ALL candidates of any of the bourgeois political parties. In many constituencies, where New Labour, Tory or LibDem candidates are equally unacceptable, it may be necessary to urge voters to spoil their ballots, writing in "none of the above" or suchlike slogans. But this should not be an individual decisions; in such constituencies a "spoiler" campaign will be required, to ensure mass support for such action.
But while elections provide the basis for making clear to the electorate that the only way to change anything is by changing the system, we should be aware that this is no mere propaganda. It is actually true.
Whether New Labour or the re-invented Old Tories win, the rich will continue to get richer and the poor more oppressed. It is even likely that if the victors are New Labour, then they will bring in worse oppression than the Tories would ever dare to attempt. If we have urged the population to give blanket support to New Labour, we should not be surprised if the people turn away from us in disgust.
Where can they turn to? To Respect, or any such ad hoc grouping, reactive rather than proactive in the situation of worsening state oppression? Recent examples do not hold out much that could transpire positively from such allegiances, though they might offer potential in the short term.
The SWP might be the most likely organisation to benefit from such disaffection with the established bourgeois parties. But it needs to be recognised that, despite its Trotskyist rhetoric, the SWP is itself part of the bourgeois political system.
The same is true of the CPB, whose role has become increasingly reformist since Andrew Murray led in his Straight Left faction (whose effective complicity in the destruction of the CPGB tells us everything we need to know about them) to take over positions in the leadership of the party.
As at present constituted, the CPB is at best an irrelevance in present circumstances, in most cases a positive hindrance to the development of struggle, as the role of Murray within the Stop the War coalition has demonstrated.
But that could change. When Fidel led the uprising in Cuba, the Cuban Communist Party (which was legal under Batista) denounced him as a petit-bourgeois adventurist. Today, the Cuban Communist Party is the ruling party and Castro its beloved leader.
We live in volatile times. There is no "one size fits all" solution to our present political ills. But it is still true, as it has always been, that without a revolutionary party there cannot be a revolution. Whether any grouping on the left has sufficient maturity ever to be able to assume such a role remains to be seen.
But, as they are constituted at present, there does not appear to be any chance of their doing so.
11/11/07
No comments:
Post a Comment