Monday, November 12, 2007
Electoral Slates and Joint Slates
by Duncan Hallas
by Duncan Hallas
Socialist Workers Party Bulletin No 3 May 1977
Introduction by neprimerimye
The following article by Duncan Hallas, a founder of the Socialist Review Group in 1950 and for many years a leader of International Socialists, does not appear on the Marxist Internet Archive. It is a fascinating document which reveals much about both the SWP and its rival groups nearly thirty years ago. A reading of this article is a useful exercise in debunking much of the accumulated bunkum of the intervening years.
The article is also extremely funny when read with the benefit of hndsight as it is replete with considerable ironies. For example in reference to the unity mongers of the International Maggot Group (IMG) Hallas talks of them placing the emphasis of their politics on many varied social groups but not on the working class to whch they paid lip service as supposed marxists. In particular Hallas subjects the IMG to some ridicule with regard to its front groups in Scotland and in Birmingham amongst the Asian population. Given that the SWP of today has adopted the IMG's position on Scotland, worse it tails Scottish nationalism in the form of Tommy Sheridans personal project 'Solidarity', and panders to a communalism more reactionary than that of the Asian Socialist League one can only wonder what the author would have to say today if his younger self were confronted with such a blatant political degeneration.
Perhaps the greatest virtue of the article is that it stands as an effective polemic against the SWP's turn to electoralism, with the still born Socialist Alliance, and more recently to a grotesque populism with the misnamed Respect. The strident tone of the piece should not be neglected however and detracts from the essays considerable merits as an educational piece. This almost hysterical tone can only be explained in reference to the factional struggles that had rent IS in the years immediately prior to the foundation of the SWP. A subject this blog will without doubt return to in the future.
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Some comrades have asked if we should reconsider our attitude towards an electoral pact with other organisations on the revolutionary left.
In practice, this is only raised in connection with the IMG, since the other organisations which have run candidates in the past, the WRP, etc, are not interested. The IMG, on the other hand, is making the issue a central feature of its propaganda and is directing 90 per cent of this propaganda at SWP members and sympathisers.
At Stechford, IMG members distributed leaflets at Paul Foot's meetings which deplored competition between Foot and Heron (the IMG candidate) and concluded; "the IMG repeats its call to the SWP to discuss with us the possibility of united far-left slates in the coming elections and especially in the General Election. All socialists will pay a price for needless disunity in the future." They had previously called for a joint candidate in Stechford, a joint slate in GLC elections and so on.
Well, why not? We are certainly in favour of joint action with everyone in the working class movement, whether Labour Party members, CP members, independents or whatever to fight the fascists, to fight hospital closures, to fight the Social Contract and so on and so forth - always provided it is action. We do not, however, form blocs to make propaganda. We put forward our own ideas in our own paper.
The distinction is obvious enough. Unity in action with everyone who can be pulled in to support the particular action, irrespective of their views on other matters. Independent expression of our own ideas at all times. We don't stay out of any genuine working class struggle and we don't make our participation conditional on others agreeing with us. At the same time, we don't hide or dilute our politics or pretend to be other than we are.
How does this apply to parliamentary etc. elections?
Revolutionary intervention in parliamentary elections at present is essentially a propaganda operation, a means of contacting people and involving them in some of our activities and of recruiting.
We judge our success (or failure) in a contest by members recruited, contacts made, SW readers gained and so on and not mainly by votes gained.
Of course, it is very pleasing if we get a better than expected vote, a little disappointing if we get a lower than expected vote. But it is not the main thing. We are not parliamentary roaders.
Even in circumstances where there is a serious prospect of winning a particular contest this remains true. It would be very useful for propaganda and, indeed, agitational purposes to have a revolutionary MP, or even better to have several.
But this will always be secondary to building the party in the workplaces, to fighting for leadership in the day to day struggles of working people and inside the unions.
Our aim in contesting parliamentary elections is to build the SWP. We do not put the emphasis on getting the biggest possible vote for the 'far-left'.
Protest votes, and that is what is being spoken of, are not without significance, but they are incomparably less important than building the party.
Where does this leave us with respect to the IMG? Since many of our members do not come into contact with this organisation, it may be useful to say a little about it.
The IMG regards itself as a Trotskyist organisation and is affiliated to the biggest of the various bodies claiming to be 'the Fourth International'. It claims top have 680 members. Some of these - I do not know what proportion - operate inside the Labour Party as 'entrists'.
The IMG differs from us politically on a number of matters; for example, it regards Russia, China, etc, as workers' states, although degenerated or deformed and it is keen on slogans like 'the sliding scale of wages', 'open the books' and so on.
But, the most important difference, I believe, is not these disagreements, but the approach to building the revolutionary party. The IMG puts the emphasis on building blocs, fronts, alliances etc with other organisations, and what it calls 'the broad vanguard' (ie unaffiliated left wingers) and within these blocs etc it hopes to establish its own 'hegemony' - meaning dominance. It hopes to dominate a sort of left coalition which will develop, it hopes, into a party.
The IMG regards the SWP as the biggest obstacle in its path - rightly so in view of the relationship of forces - and tries hard to use other (non-IMG) people to put pressure on us. For unless the growth of the SWP can be checked, their strategy can't work.
Thus it has set up a Socialist Teachers Alliance in opposition to Rank and File Teacher )from which the IMG teachers split). The STA includes a fair number of non-IMG people, mostly to the right of the IMG, and, having come out of split, denounces R&F people as 'sectarians' and 'splitters'.
"The time has come", says a writer in a recent issue of the IMG's paper "for the SWP/R&F to break out of its sectarian politics, acknowledge the STA as a force with equal, if not greater influence both in London and nationally, and unite to win a massive vote....etc." But we were united in R&F until they split.
In fact, the STA is an unstable alliance held together by a dislike of unofficial action and hostility to the SWP. Its leaders regard R&F as tending to 'adventurism' - as in the 'no-cover' campaign - and put nearly all their emphasis on work in the union machine. It runs candidates against R&F candidates in union elections.
After the recent NUT conference, the IMG paper claimed that the STA had definitely replaced R&F as 'the main tendency' on the left and had had 50 delegates (15 recruited at conference). The real significance of the conference was the decisive victory of the right on, all issues. The STA is, to some degree, an adaptation to right wing dominance, a soft option for soft lefts.
Similarly, a Socialist Students Alliance has been set up (on much the same basis) as a rival to NOISS, and the IMG paper tells us "the SSA has now replaced NOISS as the major force after the Broad Left", a claim as hollow as those made for other 'fronts' the IMG has sponsored over the years.
The SSA ran its own slate against NOISS (as well as the Broad Left and the Tories) at the recent NUS conference.
There is no Socialist Engineers Alliance or Socialist Electricians Alliance but that is only because the IMG has few people in industry (although they do support the 'independent Broad Left' paper Engineering Voice against Engineering Charter). In the recent TGWU's General Secretary election the IMG called for a vote for Thornett, not Riley.
Where the IMG has no possibility of setting up a rival organisation, it often 'supports' SWP efforts. The Right to Work Campaign is a good example and it is not unfair to say that IMG 'support' for the Right to Work marches last year was of the sort Lenin called 'support as the rope supports the man being hanged'.
For weeks on end, the IMG paper carried attacks from all and sundry on the 'bureaucratic', 'sectarian' and of course, politically hopeless RTW leadership, complete with atrocity stories. Red Weekly sees this sort of thing as unimportant. Nearly every issue contains attacks on the SWP (three per issue is the norm) alongside calls for 'unity'! Compare the absence of attacks on the IMG in Socialist Worker.
In spite of our forbearance, they continually denounce the SWP as 'sectarian'!
Now we learn that the IMG is going to launch a new weekly paper called Socialist Challenge which will also serve its various front organisations - these now include a Scottish Socialist League and an Asian Socialist League (in Birmingham) as well as the various Alliances and the IMG members in the Labour Party. It will, so Red Weekly tells us, "be a non-sectarian polemical paper". There are no prizes for guessing who most of the polemics will be aimed at!
Some of our comrades understandably get indignant about this kind of thing, but we should not take it too seriously. It does us little damage, but to reply in kind would do us much more damage. And it will not build the IMG.
Hiding your politics, sailing under false colours, never builds in the long run.
The 'electoral unity' proposals have to be seen against this background.
What the IMG has in mind is not a practical arrangement that seeks to avoid, or at any rate minimize, the Stechford type situation of two far-left candidates. What they are after is, as they admit, a 'joint-slate', a common platform and a united campaign - and not only an electoral one.An article in Red Weekly on the French municipal election agreement between far-left groups puts the line very clearly: "while Lutte Ouvriere initially saw the agreement as requiring only joint electoral work, the LCR (the French IMG) correctly insisted on the need for a national joint platform...
Our comrades also argued for joint activity to extend beyond the electoral arena, to build the implantation of the revolutionary organisations".
Now this is nonsense. Either there is basic agreement about building the party - in which case the organisations ought to unite in a single party - or there is not, in which case they cannot 'build the implantation'. How can we build jointly with the IMG when, wherever they have the strength, they build blocs against us with forces to the right of us? To repeat, we are out to build the revolutionary arty, not to maximise the vote by alliances Which hinder building.
Is actual unity feasible? The differences on Russia etc are, in principle, containable in a single democratic-centralist organisation provided that there is an agreed approach to building the party in the working class.
In the past, the IMG has put the emphasis on work everywhere except in the working class, but in the last few years it has changed its line and says it agrees with us on this.
Unfortunately, it has moved well to the right at the same time and thinks in terms of blocs with various 'independents' who have official positions, rather than building rank and file movements. Another problem is that the IMG is a coalition of permanent factions (they call them tendencies), a state of affairs they regard as positively desirable, and are not likely to accept democratic-centralism as we understand it. And, of course, they want to stay affiliated to their 'Fourth International'.
But the basic difficulty, I believe, is that most of them do not want unity at all but only 'unity manoeuvres' to try to strengthen themselves at our expense. Their problem is that we would have a huge majority in a united organisation. If we accept, as we must, that they seriously believe in their own political conceptions, then their attitude is understandable.
Understanding, however, is not the same thing as weakness and it would be both weak and extremely foolish to give countenance to these 'unity manoeuvres.'
The IMG has developed a theory to justify its peculiar tactics. This theory says that it is 'sectarian' to put the emphasis on building the revolutionary party. 'Unfortunately, the present sectarian course of the SWP placed the needs of their organisation above the best interests of the working class," says the Red Weekly. This goes down well with people who like to be on the left but don't want to commit themselves to an organisation. It is not so new either.
Years ago Trotsky wrote of the SAP, a left breakaway from the German Social Democrats, that when they "criticise the 'party egoism' of the Social-Democracy and of the Communist Party; when Seydewitz (an SAP leader) assures us that so far as he is concerned 'the interests of the class come before the interests of the party,' they only fall into political sentimentalism or, what is worse, behind this sentimental phraseology they screen the interests of their own party. This method is no good... The interests of the class cannot be formulated otherwise than in the shape of a programme, the programme cannot be defended otherwise than by creating the party."
That is our position and it used to be the position of the IMG too. "We start from a profound conviction that the problem of carrying out a social transformation in Britain requires above all the building of a mass revolutionary party," wrote Pat Jordan, then National Secretary of the IMG, in 1969; "We regard the present fragmentation of the left as arising from the lack of such a party. Once the process of building the revolutionary party proceeds beyond its embryonic stage - that is when a given tendency clearly established its hegemony in theory and practice - regroupment will commence."
This was written, in part, to defend the IMG's rejection of the IS proposal to unite the two organisations into a single party which was our policy in 1968 and 1969. In those days, they believed that they could build their organisation faster and better than ours could be built. then we would unite when they had the majority.
In the event, we built and they did not - they are little stronger now than they were then. One reason is that we turned our backs on sectarian bickering and they did not.
Jordan also dealt, in this article on Unity and Sectarianism, with the sort of approach the IMG now has, the method of blocs and alliances: "such a project is fraught with dangers. It is one thing to organise a campaign on a single issue such as Vietnam, where for revolutionaries the issue is so clear cut, but another thing once one attempts to cover a whole series of questions, each of which can give rise to political and tactical differences."
This was directed against various 'independents' and 'New Lefts' who wanted a bloc rather than a party.
The IMG has changed its line because of our growth, its marked inferiority to the SWP and its unwillingness to go for real unity. An electoral bloc of the sort they propose is not on. Submerging the SWP in some 'front' is out of the question. We fight under our own colours.
There is a fundamental issue involved. We know that the revolutionary party can only be built by involvement in workers' struggles. In these terms the IMG is irrelevant in most cases. They believe that the way forward is argument - polemic is the word they use - about policies between people who regard themselves as revolutionaries. We left that kind of thing behind years ago.
Labels: Duncan Hallas, International Socialists, Revolutionary Archive, Trotskyism
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
What Kind of Programme?Introduction by Neprimerimye
The document below belongs to a debate that took place in the International Socialists in the early 1970’s. It was but one of many contributions to a debate that was in the end fruitless in that no programme was ever published. In fact the debate was never satisfactorily concluded and the very idea of a programme became something of a touchstone for successive oppositional tendencies within the group.
The debate rumbled on through the early 1970’s as IS developed a small foothold in the working class with pride of place being given to the toeholds in blue collar industries. By 1974 IS was the largest and most theoretically grounded of the revolutionary groups. It was beginning what was hoped to be its transformation into the core of a revolutionary communist party based in the mass production industries. It was not to be and within a year its toeholds in blue collar industry and a large section of the central cadre of the group had departed from the organisation.
One result of the factional havoc wreaked on IS was that the question of a programme for the group was quietly forgotten about by everybody concerned. The debate too was to be left forgotten, orphaned and lonesome in the pages of dusty Internal Bulletins, hidden away in attics and suburban garages. Several drafts and numerous contributions to the debate were simply washed away as if the subject had not been raised at all. And when the IS was rebranded as the Socialist Workers Party the new party failed to adopt a programme.
Nevertheless fragments thrown off by the IS did adopt programmes and made grandiose claims for their productions. Indeed it was claimed that so called programmatic work was absolutely vital to the construction of a new revolutionary party. Years after beginning such work the small groups which took this approach are of course no larger but rather older in composition than they were all those years ago. More to the point the programmes so proudly produced have proven to be wrong in part and useless in general.
Despite which the argument that a new revolutionary party based on a new programme can be heard from time to time in the less well populated, if sometimes more intelligent and certainly better read, sections of the far left. Even sections of the Guardian reading intelligentsia (sic) have felt the need for a programme of sorts and have been provided with one by George Monbiot the radical aristocrat. Not to be left out the equally aristocratic theoretician of the SWP, Alex Callinicos, has produced his own personal programme. The latter being an interesting contribution as it can be argued that it is not a revolutionary programme but a programme of something vague and amorphous, an anti-capitalist manifesto as its author described it, whatever that might mean.
It is a sad pass indeed when one of the leading revolutionaries in this country can produce a programme that is not explicitly revolutionary at a time when the party he is a member of has no programme at all. Which latter point a cynic might point to as an advantage for the leadership of that party. The author of this introduction is however of the opinion that it is but a consequence of the failure of the revolutionary leader concerned, and of his party as a whole, to place the working class at the centre of their work on all levels other than the historical.
In light of the above then the document below is reproduced here to illustrate some of the concerns of revolutionaries when last this debate was taken up by a revolutionary organisation that sought to win a hearing within the working classes. It was, it should be noted, but a single contribution to what was a long and largely verbal debate. It has then the fault, if we may call it that, of drawing on past debates in the revolutionary movement and directing us to those debates rather than seeking to innovate. More importantly it makes the point, or rather repeats the point first made by Lenin, that a revolutionary programme, and by extension the revolutionary party, cannot but develop out of the struggle of the working classes against capitalist exploitation.
The essential irreducible argument of the document being that only an organisation that seeks to root itself in the struggles of the working class both theoretically and in practice can develop a genuinely revolutionary programme. The alternative, especially in a period characterised by a low strike level and few social struggles of any size, is for small socially isolated political revolutionary groups to write programmes which only further illustrate the distance between them and the organised workers movement leave alone the class as a whole. Such an undertaking can only reinforce tendencies towards academicism and substitutionism and must be fought if revolutionary clarity is the aim of any discussion as to the question of what kind of programme.
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What Kind of Programme?
Steve Jeffries
For years IS has not had a programme. We have published journals, and newspapers, books and pamphlets, but along with our correct reluctance to declare ourselves the Party, there has been until now little sustained pressure to produce a Programme.
The reason for this has nothing to do with a lack of theory or perspectives. At any time during the past five years we could have mobilised our resources to produce a document that contained the IS world-view, our Marxism, our origins, traditions and future. No, our non-production of a Programme has itself been a more or less conscious result of our understanding of exactly what a Marxist programme is about.
The first thing that a Marxist Programme is about is the relationship between organised revolutionaries and the working class movement, a relationship that is above all an active one. Thus in 1899 Lenin advanced three reasons why the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party should adopt a Programme: “the tremendous importance of a Programme for the consolidation and consistent activity of a political party; the fact that a period of fierce polemics about Russian Marxism had just ended; and lastly because the upswing in activity of both workers and revolutionaries “showed clearly that the demand for a Programme grew out of the needs of the movement itself”. (A Draft Programme of our Party”).
Engels had made a similar point a quarter of a century earlier when he wrote to Bebel about the Gotha Programme that “as a rule, the official Programme of a Party is less important than what it does”. If the Party doesn’t do anything, or is too small and the working class too passive for its actions to mean anything, then the Programme becomes totally unimportant. In these circumstances Marxists would still retain their theories and perspectives, but the element that distinguishes a Marxist Programme from any other variety utopian or bourgeois, the overriding notion of active organisation in struggle to change the world, would be missing.
IS is now in the throes of debate as to what our programme should contain precisely because our relationship with the working class is becoming increasingly active. We are now contending for leadership in particular situations, and many workers are beginning to look for leadership from us. Our Programme, therefore, must provide an overall revolutionary strategy responsive to the needs of the working class in the present period.
Later in the same article quoted above, Lenin summarises the requirements of the Programme as follows:
“The Programme must formulate our basic views; precisely establish our immediate political tasks; point out the immediate demands that must show the area of agitational activity; give unity to the agitational work, expand and deepen it from fragmentary partial agitation for petty, isolated demands to the status of agitation for the sum total of Social-Democratic demands”.
Attacking Plekhanov’s “Second Draft Programme” some three years later, Lenin sharply criticised its resemblance to an academic commentary on international capitalism as exemplified in Russia:
“The Programme of the Russian Social-Democratic Party should begin with a definition (and indictment) of Russian capitalism - and only then stress the international character of the movement….”
And explaining what such a “definition” would involve, he adds:
“As to what capitalism is - that will of itself follow from our definition of exactly how matters stand.”
He adopts this approach because his Programme is aimed at the “fighting proletariat”, and not at intellectuals or as a contribution to inner-Party education.
It is totally wrong to reject Lenin’s starting point, as comrade Hallas did at the June NC, by arguing that Lenin’s Programme could start there only because their audience was fully acquainted with the Marxist world-view as established in the widely-circulated Erfurt Programme of the German Social-Democrats. Lenin chose his starting point because as a Marxist he believed that being determines consciousness:
“The fighting proletariat learns what capitalism is, not from academic definitions (as one learns from textbooks), but from practical acquaintance with the contradictions of capitalism and with the development of society and its consequences.” (“On Plekhanov’s Second Draft Programme”, 1902).
It is this view of the Programme’s readership, and not false assumptions about its prior knowledge of international Marxists writings, that persuaded Lenin to begin with a clear statement of the pace and character of capitalist development in Russia.
Later on in the same article, he spells out his position even more clearly. Because the Programme is an active weapon in the hands of the Party, it should contain “only what the contradictions of capitalism consists in and what its tendency is”. Quoting Engels on that same Erfurt Programme, he repeats “All that is superfluous in a Programme weakens it”, and goes on to suggest that “all explanations of why things are proceeding in just thins way” should be left to accompanying commentaries.
Seeing the Programme as an important item in the Party’s armoury, should it then lay down highly detailed policy statements? This was another area investigated by Lenin in those early years of the Russian Social-Democratic party. His conclusion was that the Programme can only lay down the principles and strategy within which Party Congresses, the leadership and the members operate tactically.
“questions of tactics can hardly be introduced in the Programme (with the exception of the most important questions, questions of principle, such as our attitude to other fighters against autocracy).” (“A Draft Programme of our Party” 1899).
And writing of which basic working class demands to include he continues:
“In drawing up this section of the Programme, we should strive, therefore, to avoid two extremes - on the one hand, we must not omit any one of the main basic demands that hold great significance for the entire working class; on the other, we must not go into minute particulars with which it would hardly be rational to load the Programme”.
The debate inside Isis primarily between those who support the general line of the Leninist Programme, and those who, pricked by accusations of anti-intellectualism, feel the need to produce an “IS Manifesto” that might rank in future with good old Marx’s. It is not that we don’t need such a general statement of a Revolutionary Socialist world-view for the 1970’s. In my synopsis of a Programme (reproduced in this bulletin) I argued that the “Draft Programme” rejected at Conference should form the basis of some kind of IS Manifesto. But we cannot afford the luxury of producing such a work as our Programme.
The IS Programme should if possible represent an advance on Lenin’s, and most certainly not a retreat. It must be shaped as a weapon to guide, develop and deepen our members’ intervention in the class struggle, and must positively assist the building of the Party. By establishing clear principles and an overall strategy, it guards against both opportunism and dogmatism. Against opportunism by limiting the scope of tactical manoeuvres to those which do not conflict with our principles. And against dogmatism by encouraging the membership to determine changes in tactics in response to the developing struggle.
The General Line of the synopsis rejected by the June NC was an attempt at indicating the main direction of such a Programme. It began with a picture of the main tendencies at work in present-day British capitalism. It then described the major contradictions in the system (without neglecting its international character, as comrade Hallas charged), and went on to pick out British capitalism as one weak link in the chain. Turning to the consequences of this for the major classes in Britain, it then focussed in depth on the working class response, and in particular on the combination of developed trade union organisation with virtual political impotence. The rejection of the politics of reformism (obviously including the CP) then led on to a general statement of the need for a working class revolutionary party. This party has both immediate and long term aims which were then to be spelled out in the course of which its commitment to the International class struggle would be strongly emphasised.
The second half of this synopsis was basically about IS and our strategy for building such a Party. It reviewed our origins, which are clearly related to the consequences of the international decay of organised Marxism from the 1920’s. but because the document is a Programme an not anything else, only the broad line should be drawn in here, with the details being left to a separate manifesto or commentary. Finally, it isolated the main guiding principles behind our strategy for the revolution, and related them to our principle positions in the major arenas of the class struggle.
Such a programme at least attempts to answer the questions that a Marxist programme should - why be a revolutionary, what do revolutionaries think about the major world issues, and how should a revolutionary best work for the revolution? The danger of the old rejected “Draft Programme” and of the decision by the June NC to reject rather than amend my “Draft Synopsis”, is that the thinking behind it doesn’t appear to even recognise the questions. It is turning inwards and not out towards the “fighting proletariat”.
Steve Jeffries
Glasgow North branch
IS Bulletin August 1972
Labels: International Socialists, Programme, Rank and File, Socialist Workers' Party, Trotskyism
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Afterword
to
IS Policy Statement on Industrial Work
The importance of the Policy Statement on Industrial Work adopted by the International Socialists in 1971 lies in that none of the established leaders of IS wrote it. There can be no doubt that had Jim Higgins, as the groups most authoritative trades unionist, or any of the leading theorists of IS written the document that it would have been superior in every way. Except it would not have represented, as it does, the collective experience of that small layer of industrial, primarily blue collar, militants who had been won to IS in the previous few years.
It represents the collective views of the most politically advanced militants with regard to internal union democracy and its relationship to the struggle against the employers. It represents a set of views that were not confined to IS, although best represented by the organisation, but were to be found throughout the entire workers movement at the height of post-war militancy from which time the document dates. The role of IS in the production of the document was that of a fraction of the class defined by its politics but not separate from the class, or the embryonic vanguard within it, as a whole.
This is in contrast to the role played by the ‘orthodox Trotskyists’ of the period who also had a small following within the class. They, namely the Socialist Labour League of Gerry Healy, saw their task as bringing knowledge of sacred scriptures (the Transitional Program, etc.) to the workers and thereby enlightening them. This policy, substitutionist by its very nature, was seen as being based on the idea of the revolutionary party bringing revolutionary class consciousness to the working class from outside its ranks, a parody of Kautskys views as quoted by Lenin in What Is To Be Done? and was often counter-posed to the supposed economism attributed to IS.
In fact the writing of the document bears witness to IS acting as a part of the class, of a party of its vanguard if you like, developing itself by developing roots within the class and its trade union organisations. Central to this effort was the development of rank and file bodies within the unions themselves but based on workplace or industrial location. Such a strategic conception being very different from the efforts of the orthodox whose entire efforts were to win ‘leadership’ in the class by counter-posing their own narrow party organisation to the reformist bureaucracy within the unions. In its concreteness having nothing abstract about it we may also legitimately contrast the rank and file strategy to the conception of a ‘class struggle left’ that the Mandelites touted at this time as they turned away from their infatuation with guerrilla warfare.
More importantly although the document could easily be subscribed to by the present day SWP it is arguable that its practice is very far from the IS conception of rank and fileism as represented in the Policy Statement. Despite its verbal genuflections to rank and fileism the practice of the SWP is reminiscent of nothing so much as the Mandelite idea of a class struggle left wing in its very amorphousness. Thus on the one hand the SWP claim to be producing rank and file papers, lacking any genuine basis of support from the union rank and file, while on the other hand their members on the executive of PCS vote to drop the ‘suspended strike’ on the pensions issue. This in contrast to the spirit of the Policy Statement which demanded negotiations with the bosses be subject to the ratification of mass meetings.
It should be noted just how much has changed in the field of trades unionism since the document was passed and how the context of 1971 shaped the document. Thus by demanding that negotiations be submitted to mass meetings the document reveals its roots as lying in the blue collar unions of the mass production industries of the time particularly engineering. Today even in that reduced industry mass meetings are rare and have always been less typical of white collar unionism. The Policy Statement is then marked by its origins from deep within a tradition of the British trade union movement which no longer exists on the same scale or in quite the same forms it did between the rise of the General Unions and the defeat of the Miners Strike.
Despite the restructuring of British capitalism since 1979 the efforts of IS to understand the lessons of earlier class struggles, as represented so well in the contents of the issue of the International Socialism journal in which the Policy Statement appeared (see here for a full list of contents), continues to yield results from which revolutionaries can benefit. For example the Policy Statement makes considerable efforts to develop a number of principles by which militants can struggle for workers’ democracy within the trades unions. One aspect of which struggle was the fight against bureaucratism and the co-option of militants into the bureaucracy itself.
Today, if anything, that anti-bureaucratic struggle is more important than it was in 1971. At that time in those plants where Joint Shop Steward Committees existed they were unofficial bodies outside the direct control of either the union bureaucracies or of the state. Today by contrast such committees are recognised and governed by both law and the union bureaucracies with the result that they have all too often become bureaucratised and incorporated into the machinery erected by the bosses to police the workers. Indeed despite the decrease in union density and absolute numbers of unionists there has been a proportionate increase in the size of the union bureaucracy parasitic on the dues paid by the rank and file membership.
It becomes even more important then for revolutionaries to emphasise the need to resist the union bureaucracies and their politics of class collaborationism. Given which it is critical to avoid the possibility of naïve revolutionaries becoming detached from their class base in the workplaces not only by virtue of accepting appointed positions in the union bureaucracy but also by becoming elected to leading committees when lacking support for class struggle policies. If anything the Policy Statement neglects these dual dangers as at the time it was written the number of serious activists of all political hues within the unions was far greater and the level of class struggle far higher so that such a likelihood was unlikely.
What may come as a shock to many young revolutionaries today is the stress placed on workplace organisation in the document. It is then worth contrasting it to those sections of the Transitional Program which discuss trades unionism marked as they are by the authors knowledge of the French working class scene and, to a lesser extent, by the then recent experiences of the American working class in forging the CIO. As such the Transitional Program points towards the absolute importance of workplace democracy in a fashion similar to the main drive of the Policy Statement although the specifics of this are obscured by the roots of the Transitional Program in a union tradition very different to those of Britain in 1971 a fact which the orthodox Trotskyists neglected to their cost.
What emerges from both the Policy Statement and the relevant sections of the Transitional Program is a commitment to workers’ democracy based on the workers own organs of struggle. Such organs, in the first instance strike committees and mass meetings, are however extremely unlikely to emerge if militants allow themselves to become enmeshed with the union bureaucracy when lacking support for their politics at grassroots level. The domination of say the PCS National Executive by members of various left groups is then meaningless when they cannot if so much as lift a finger to defend hard won pension rights. The same is true of the SWP members on the PCS executive who voted against strike action, not only were they betraying the interests of new entrants to the civil service for purely opportunist reasons, but they were also lining up against the need of the proletariat to learn from its own experiences of class struggle in favour of a conception of socialism that sees it as something which ‘leaders’ can deliver to the class through clever negotiations rather than something that must be fought for by the workers ourselves.
Labels: International Socialists, Rank and Fileism, Trades Unionism
Saturday, January 06, 2007
International Socialists
Policy Statement on Industrial Work
1971
This policy statement was adopted at a conference of IS members active in industrial and trade union work, and endorsed by the National Committee. It gives the general guidelines for revolutionary socialists on the question. Of course a fight for ‘democracy’ in the abstract will not succeed. The democratic demands have to be linked, in every-case, with specific policy demands on wages, conditions, safety and so on. The formulation of realistic revolutionary policies in the various industries and unions is the task IS industrial militants are now tackling. The present statement is a common element in all of them.
Conference recognises that, under modern conditions, the trade union bureaucracy is a special social group which is used in the maintenance of capitalist class rule.
While the bureaucracy reflects in varying degrees at different times, the pressure of the membership, it also serves as an instrument through which the employers and the State try to discipline and control workers, to limit and often sabotage disputes, to check solidarity actions and to prevent the union of political and industrial struggles. This dual role does not depend mainly on the political outlook of the individual official, though this is of some importance. It depends on the actual position of the bureaucracy in capitalist society. The officials are a relatively privileged group organised in hierarchies enjoying better pay, conditions and, usually, job security than the rank and file militant. They are under very strong pressure to conform to the model of the ‘responsible’ trade union officer, responsible not to the membership, but to the standards of the employer and the state machine.
Under pressure from both the workers and the employers, the bureaucracies try all the time to become independent, to change their position from that of servant of the membership to that of master. To the extent that they succeed in this the unions become mainly organisations for controlling the workers and only secondarily organisations of the workers.
Even where this has already happened to a large extent, Conference rejects the idea that the unions can be bypassed or ignored or that breakaway unions should be promoted. The experience of the last sixty years shows that these views lead to a dangerous isolation of militants from the mass of their fellow workers and so to a strengthening of the bureaucracy. The struggle against the bureaucracy requires the needs a combination of rank and file activity and work in the union machine. Unofficial and official organisations must both be used.
In the longer term the struggle against the bureaucracy requires the development of a national rank and file organisation and a program of action which combines immediate and long term demands. Central to this program is the question of control by the membership.
Therefore Conference recognises the urgent need to campaign for rank and file control of the trade unions. We recognise the that no democratic constitution alone guarantees active democracy, that being dependent on the degree of participation by the membership at large. Where rank and file members draw up programmes of demands specific to their individual union, these should (a) be based on the principles outlined below and (b) be related to the immediate experience of trade unionists in struggle and not mere blueprints abstracted from the present level of class activity.
Officials
1. All officials should be elected and subject to constant recall.
2. All full-time officials should be paid the average wage in their industry.
3. Union policy-making bodies should be comprised of elected lay officials only.
4. Election addresses to be circulated unaltered for candidates for all elected positions in the union.
5. Any educational qualifications for union office should be abolished.
6. No member to be disqualified from holding office on political grounds.
7. Full minutes and voting records of policy making bodies should be circularised.
8. No political censorship of union journal.
National Conference
1. National delegate conferences should be held annually.
2. Standing Orders committees should annually comprise of elected lay-officials.
3. No branch block voting.
Appeals Court
1. Appeals Committees should be comprised of elected lay-officials.
Amalgamations
1. While in principle we support industrial unions and any amalgamations contributing to that end, the priority remains for maximum rank and file unity, for joint shop stewards committees, factory and combine wide.
Negotiations.
1. No secret negotiations.
2. Every stage of negotiations should be subject to rank and file ratifications at mass meetings.
3. Mass meetings should never be presented with package deals unless each part of the deal has been voted on separately beforehand.
Strikes.
1. All strikes in support of trade union principle, conditions or wages be made official.
2. Dispute benefit to be raised by levy of entire membership when necessary.
Closed Shop
1. Support of 100 per cent trade unionism and the right of trade unionists to enforce closed shops.
2. Opposition to check-off system.
3. Opposition to employer policed ‘agency shops’.
4. Support of the right for trade unionists to discipline fellow workers who flout democratic decisions.
5. Access to job waiting lists by shop stewards committees. Waiting lists to be on the basis, first applied first employed.
Shop Stewards
1. Opposition to any ‘managerial policing’ by shop stewards. No participation on management committees intended to keep shop stewards off the shop floor for long periods.
2. Shop stewards to hold regular report back meetings: insistence on allocated time for such meetings; especially where there is shift working.
Individual Rights
1. Right of members to criticise union policy
2. Right of members to meet unofficially and visit other branches.
3. Right of members to communicate with the press.
4. Right of members to write, circularise and/or sell political literature.
5. Right of appeal direct to Appeals court.
6. Right of all members, irrespective of sex or race, to pay equal contributions, to receive equal benefits and to have equal access to all union delegacies and offices.
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International Socialism Number 48 June/July 1971
Labels: International Socialists, Rank and Fileism, Revolutionary Archive, Trades Unionism
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Electoral Slates and Joint Slates
by Duncan Hallas
Socialist Workers Party Bulletin No 3 May 1977
Introduction by neprimerimye
The following article by Duncan Hallas, a founder of the Socialist Review Group in 1950 and for many years a leader of International Socialists, does not appear on the Marxist Internet Archive. It is a fascinating document which reveals much about both the SWP and its rival groups nearly thirty years ago. A reading of this article is a useful exercise in debunking much of the accumulated bunkum of the intervening years.
The article is also extremely funny when read with the benefit of hndsight as it is replete with considerable ironies. For example in reference to the unity mongers of the International Maggot Group (IMG) Hallas talks of them placing the emphasis of their politics on many varied social groups but not on the working class to whch they paid lip service as supposed marxists. In particular Hallas subjects the IMG to some ridicule with regard to its front groups in Scotland and in Birmingham amongst the Asian population. Given that the SWP of today has adopted the IMG's position on Scotland, worse it tails Scottish nationalism in the form of Tommy Sheridans personal project 'Solidarity', and panders to a communalism more reactionary than that of the Asian Socialist League one can only wonder what the author would have to say today if hisyounger self were confronted with such a blatant political degeneration.
Perhaps the greatest virtue of the article is that it stands as an effective polemic against the SWP's turn to electoralism, with the still born Socialist Alliance, and more recently to a grotesque populism with the misnamed Respect. The strident tone of the piece should not be neglected however and detracts from the essays considerable merits as an educational piece. This almost hysterical tone can only be explained in reference to the factional struggles that had rent IS in the years immediately prior to the foundation of the SWP. A subject this blog will without doubt return to in the future.
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Some comrades have asked if we should reconsider our attitude towards an electoral pact with other organisations on the revolutionary left.
In practice, this is only raised in connection with the IMG, since the other organisations which have run candidates in the past, the WRP, etc, are not interested. The IMG, on the other hand, is making the issue a central feature of its propaganda and is directing 90 per cent of this propaganda at SWP members and sympathisers.
At Stechford, IMG members distributed leaflets at Paul Foot's meetings which deplored competition between Foot and Heron (the IMG candidate) and concluded; "the IMG repeats its call to the SWP to discuss with us the possibility of united far-left slates in the coming elections and especially in the General Election. All socialists will pay a price for needless disunity in the future." They had previously called for a joint candidate in Stechford, a joint slate in GLC elections and so on.
Well, why not? We are certainly in favour of joint action with everyone in the working class movement, whether Labour Party members, CP members, independents or whatever to fight the fascists, to fight hospital closures, to fight the Social Contract and so on and so forth - always provided it is action. We do not, however, form blocs to make propaganda. We put forward our own ideas in our own paper.
The distinction is obvious enough. Unity in action with everyone who can be pulled in to support the particular action, irrespective of their views on other matters. Independent expression of our own ideas at all times. We don't stay out of any genuine working class struggle and we don't make our participation conditional on others agreeing with us. At the same time, we don't hide or dilute our politics or pretend to be other than we are.
How does this apply to parliamentary etc. elections?
Revolutionary intervention in parliamentary elections at present is essentially a propaganda operation, a means of contacting people and involving them in some of our activities and of recruiting.
We judge our success (or failure) in a contest by members recruited, contacts made, SW readers gained and so on and not mainly by votes gained.
Of course, it is very pleasing if we get a better than expected vote, a little disappointing if we get a lower than expected vote. But it is not the main thing. We are not parliamentary roaders.
Even in circumstances where there is a serious prospect of winning a particular contest this remains true. It would be very useful for propaganda and, indeed, agitational purposes to have a revolutionary MP, or even better to have several.
But this will always be secondary to building the party in the workplaces, to fighting for leadership in the day to day struggles of working people and inside the unions.
Our aim in contesting parliamentary elections is to build the SWP. We do not put the emphasis on getting the biggest possible vote for the 'far-left'.
Protest votes, and that is what is being spoken of, are not without significance, but they are incomparably less important than building the party.
Where does this leave us with respect to the IMG? Since many of our members do not come into contact with this organisation, it may be useful to say a little about it.
The IMG regards itself as a Trotskyist organisation and is affiliated to the biggest of the various bodies claiming to be 'the Fourth International'. It claims top have 680 members. Some of these - I do not know what proportion - operate inside the Labour Party as 'entrists'.
The IMG differs from us politically on a number of matters; for example, it regards Russia, China, etc, as workers' states, although degenerated or deformed and it is keen on slogans like 'the sliding scale of wages', 'open the books' and so on.
But, the most important difference, I believe, is not these disagreements, but the approach to building the revolutionary party. The IMG puts the emphasis on building blocs, fronts, alliances etc with other organisations, and what it calls 'the broad vanguard' (ie unaffiliated left wingers) and within these blocs etc it hopes to establish its own 'hegemony' - meaning dominance. It hopes to dominate a sort of left coalition which will develop, it hopes, into a party.
The IMG regards the SWP as the biggest obstacle in its path - rightly so in view of the relationship of forces - and tries hard to use other (non-IMG) people to put pressure on us. For unless the growth of the SWP can be checked, their strategy can't work.
Thus it has set up a Socialist Teachers Alliance in opposition to Rank and File Teacher )from which the IMG teachers split). The STA includes a fair number of non-IMG people, mostly to the right of the IMG, and, having come out of split, denounces R&F people as 'sectarians' and 'splitters'.
"The time has come", says a writer in a recent issue of the IMG's paper "for the SWP/R&F to break out of its sectarian politics, acknowledge the STA as a force with equal, if not greater influence both in London and nationally, and unite to win a massive vote....etc." But we were united in R&F until they split.
In fact, the STA is an unstable alliance held together by a dislike of unofficial action and hostility to the SWP. Its leaders regard R&F as tending to 'adventurism' - as in the 'no-cover' campaign - and put nearly all their emphasis on work in the union machine. It runs candidates against R&F candidates in union elections.
After the recent NUT conference, the IMG paper claimed that the STA had definitely replaced R&F as 'the main tendency' on the left and had had 50 delegates (15 recruited at conference). The real significance of the conference was the decisive victory of the right on, all issues. The STA is, to some degree, an adaptation to right wing dominance, a soft option for soft lefts.
Similarly, a Socialist Students Alliance has been set up (on much the same basis) as a rival to NOISS, and the IMG paper tells us "the SSA has now replaced NOISS as the major force after the Broad Left", a claim as hollow as those made for other 'fronts' the IMG has sponsored over the years.
The SSA ran its own slate against NOISS (as well as the Broad Left and the Tories) at the recent NUS conference.
There is no Socialist Engineers Alliance or Socialist Electricians Alliance but that is only because the IMG has few people in industry (although they do support the 'independent Broad Left' paper Engineering Voice against Engineering Charter). In the recent TGWU's General Secretary election the IMG called for a vote for Thornett, not Riley.
Where the IMG has no possibility of setting up a rival organisation, it often 'supports' SWP efforts. The Right to Work Campaign is a good example and it is not unfair to say that IMG 'support' for the Right to Work marches last year was of the sort Lenin called 'support as the rope supports the man being hanged'.
For weeks on end, the IMG paper carried attacks from all and sundry on the 'bureaucratic', 'sectarian' and of course, politically hopeless RTW leadership, complete with atrocity stories.
Red Weekly sees this sport of thing as unimportant. Nearly every issue contains attacks on the SWP (three per issue is the norm) alongside calls for 'unity'! Compare the absence of attacks on the IMG in Socialist Worker.
Red Weekly sees this sport of thing as unimportant. Nearly every issue contains attacks on the SWP (three per issue is the norm) alongside calls for 'unity'! Compare the absence of attacks on the IMG in Socialist Worker.
In spite of our forbearance, they continually denounce the SWP as 'sectarian'!
Now we learn that the IMG is going to launch a new weekly paper called Socialist Challenge which will also serve its various front organisations - these now include a Scottish Socialist League and an Asian Socialist League (in Birmingham) as well as the various Alliances and the IMG members in the Labour Party. It will, so Red Weekly tells us, "be a non-sectarian polemical paper". There are no prizes for guessing who most of the polemics will be aimed at!
Some of our comrades understandably get indignant about this kind of thing, but we should not take it too seriously. It does us little damage, but to reply in kind would do us much more damage. And it will not build the IMG.
Hiding your politics, sailing under false colours, never builds in the long run.
The 'electoral unity' proposals have to be seen against this background.
What the IMG has in mind is not a practical arrangement that seeks to avoid, or at any rate minimize, the Stechford type situation of two far-left candidates. What they are after is, as they admit, a 'joint-slate', a common platform and a united campaign - and not only an electoral one.
An article in Red Weekly on the French municipal election agreement between far-left groups puts the line very clearly: "while Lutte Ouvriere initially saw the agreement as requiring only joint electoral work, the LCR (the French IMG) correctly insisted on the need for a national joint platform...
Our comrades also argued for joint activity to extend beyond the electoral arena, to build the implantation of the revolutionary organisations".
Now this is nonsense. Either there is basic agreement about building the party - in which case the organisations ought to unite in a single party - or there is not, in which case they cannot 'build the implantation'. How can we build jointly with the IMG when, wherever they have the strength, they build blocs against us with forces to the right of us? to repeat, we are out to build the revolutionary arty, not to maximise the vote by alliances Which hinder building.
Is actual unity feasible? The differences on Russia etc are, in principle, containable in a single democratic-centralist organisation provided that there is an agreed approach to building the party in the working class.
In the past, the IMG has put the emphasis on work everywhere except in the working class, but in the last few years it has changed its line and says it agrees with us on this.
Unfortunately, it has moved well to the right at the same time and thinks in terms of blocs with various 'independents' who have official positions, rather than building rank and file movements.
Another problem is that the IMG is a coalition of permanent factions (they call them tendencies), a state of affairs they regard as positively desirable, and are not likely to accept democratic-centralism as we understand it. And, of course, they want to stay affiliated to their 'Fourth International'.
But the basic difficulty, I believe, is that most of them do not want unity at all but only 'unity manoeuvres' to try to strengthen themselves at our expense. Their problem is that we would have a huge majority in a united organisation. If we accept, as we must, that they seriously believe in their own political conceptions, then their attitude is understandable.
Understanding, however, is not the same thing as weakness and it would be both weak and extremely foolish to give countenance to these 'unity manoeuvres.'
The IMG has developed a theory to justify its peculiar tactics. This theory says that it is 'sectarian' to put the emphasis on building the revolutionary party. 'Unfortunately, the present sectarian course of the SWP placed the needs of their organisation above the best interests of the working class," says the Red Weekly. This goes down well with people who like to be on the left but don't want to commit themselves to an organisation. It is not so new either.
Years ago Trotsky wrote of the SAP, a left breakaway from the German Social Democrats, that when they "criticise the 'party egoism' of the Social-Democracy and of the Communist Party; when Seydewitz (an SAP leader) assures us that so far as he is concerned 'the interests of the class come before the interests of the party,' they only fall into political sentimentalism or, what is worse, behind this sentimental phraseology they screen the interests of their own party. This method is no good... The interests of the class cannot be formulated otherwise than in the shape of a programme, the programme cannot be defended otherwise than by creating the party."
That is our position and it used to be the position of the IMG too. "We start from a profound conviction that the problem of carrying out a social transformation in Britain requires above all the building of a mass revolutionary party," wrote Pat Jordan, then National Secretary of the IMG, in 1969; "We regard the present fragmentation of the left as arising from the lack of such a party. Once the process of building the revolutionary party proceeds beyond its embryonic stage - that is when a given tendency clearly established its hegemony in theory and practice - regroupment will commence."
This was written, in part, to defend the IMG's rejection of the IS proposal to unite the to organisations into a single party which was our policy in 1968 and 1969. In those days, they believed that they could build their organisation faster and better than ours could be built. then we would unite when they had the majority.
In the event, we built and they did not - they are little stronger now than they were then. One reason is that we turned our backs on sectarian bickering and they did not.
Jordan also dealt, in this article on Unity and Sectarianism, with the sort of approach the IMG now has, the method of blocs and alliances: "such a project is fraught with dangers. It is one thing to organise a campaign on a single issue such as Vietnam, where for revolutionaries the issue is so clear cut, but another thing once one attempts to cover a whole series of questions, each of which can give rise to political and tactical differences."
This was directed against various 'independents' and 'New Lefts' who wanted a bloc rather than a party.
The IMG has changed its line because of our growth, its marked inferiority to the SWP and its unwillingness to go for real unity. An electoral bloc of the sort they propose is not on. Submerging the SWP in some 'front' is out of the question. We fight under our own colours.
There is a fundamental issue involved. We know that the revolutionary party can only be built by involvement in workers' struggles. In these terms the IMG is irrelevant in most cases. They believe that the way forward is argument - polemic is the word they use - about policies between people who regard themselves as revolutionaries. We left that kind of thing behind years ago.
Labels: Duncan Hallas, Elections, International Socialists, Revolutionary Archive
