Report of Hands Off the People of Iran AGM

The following report is by Mark Harrison of The Commune group

Saturday 28th November saw 50-odd people congregate in central London for the 2009 Annual General Meeting of the Hands Off The People of Iran campaign. Being a internationalist socialist campaign this gave oneself the chance to mix with some of the more principled elements of the British left, from class struggle anarchists to the LRC.

The day was opened by a report from Hopi secretary Mark Fischer of the CPGB, he explained that the protest movement emerging this summer around the fraudulent elections had vindicated the organisation’s position. He also attacked the leadership of the Stop The War Coalition for continuing to bar Hopi from affiliation due to our “working class common sense” position of opposing both imperialism and the theocratic regime. In June Hopi approached both SPEW and the SWP for a joint solidarity drive but received no response.

Following the June elections the SWP made one of their characteristically cumbersome shifts in position and now seemingly uncritically supports the Green movement (see Socialist Worker Issue 2156, “People power rocks Iran”). However, they tarnish the meaning of socialism less than the Stalinist George Galloway who appeared on Iranian state television shamelessly defending Ahmadinejad’s government and attacking enemies of the ‘Islamic Revolution’.

The second half of comrade Fischer’s presentation included campaigning priorities for the next 12 months: he bemoaned that although we have strengthened links with dissidents within Iran and the Hopi vs LRC cricket match showed the untapped potential for us to explore, our activist base is the same as last year and we have failed to make any significant breakthrough with trade union affiliations. He ended by suggesting that the employment of a part-timer would help fix these problems.

Speaking from the floor, Charlie Pottins (Jewish Socialists Group) and Andrew Coates said they were disappointed that not enough Hopi supporters were attending demonstrations outside the Iranian embassy as this would be an ideal opportunity to spread our message. Tina Becker commented that although she would welcome the suggestion of a part-timer, she doubted that enough money would be available to pay one. Comrade Becker also mentioned the campaign’s attempts to have its voice heard in a wider a wider selection of media: the piece in Red Pepper was the most viewed on their website for a whole month. However attempts to contact The Guardian and The Independent failed to yield any response.

The next session was entitled ‘Imperialism’s need for conflict and the situation in the Middle East’ with Mike Macnair and Moshé Machover. Comrade Macnair (CPGB) demonstrated using historical examples how capitalism required a ‘top dog’ wheather it be The Netherlands, Britain or America due to the needs of credit money and a central bank. He also claimed that American imperialism is in terminal decline and compared the Vietnam war to the Crimea.

Comrade Machover (founder of the Israeli socialist organisation Matzpen) explained that even if Barack Obama wanted to take a more peaceful turn in US foreign policy this would not happen as he is being constantly hounded by the American right and members of this own party. The comrade warned of the growing threat of war. Benny Morris, one of the ‘New Historians’ has been in the media recently justifying an attack on Iran – this could have the gravest of consequences. Moshé Machover brought his speech to a close by moving his motion, ‘For a Middle East Free of Nuclear Weapons and other WMDs’.

An amendment from Tina Becker was passed which deleted the demand for “effective democratic international supervision” for the decommissioning of nuclear weapons as this could be misread to mean the United Nations. Peter Manson of the CPGB proposed an amendment to state that Hopi is against a ‘mullahs’ bomb’. Some criticised this phrasing, and the manner in which it was proposed – as a reaction to criticism by the Trotskyist group AWL – however, an amendment by Ben Lewis (CPGB) and David Broder (The Commune) stating unequivocal opposition to any development of nuclear weapons in Iran was passed by conference.

Gerry Downing (Socialist Fight) opposed the motion on the grounds that an Iranian nuclear weapon could be used to dissuade an American or Israeli attack and this could become a ‘workers’ bomb’ in the future, the comrade continued that the only reason that the Western world did not launch a nuclear attack on the USSR was due to its own nuclear capabilities. Jack Conrad (CPGB) defended the motion by stating there can be no such thing as this ‘workers’ bomb’ if it is intended to destroy other workers. Moreover, the Soviet Union was not able to hit mainland American until the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The motion was overwhelmingly passed.

Next came elections to the new steering committee, it was decided as only 11 candidates were standing they should all be elected unless anyone was opposed or wished to stand themselves. One comrade questioned the re-election of Stuart King as he was not present and the comrade also questioned Permanent Revolution’s commitment to Hopi, however the record of Stuart and of PR was defended by a majority of those present. The CPGB now hold four out of the positions on the steering committee although I would reject the notion of Hopi being a Weekly Worker front.

After lunch Marsha-Jane Thompson of the LRC read out a message of support from John McDonnell MP which received a round of applause. Comrade Thompson chaired the session lead by Cyrus Bina who attacked the idea of Iranian demonstrators mostly coming from the middle classes as 3 million people had been on the streets at one point. He also pointed out that sanctions are often a precursor to war and hit the country’s poorest the hardest, as was seen in Iraq from 1990 to 2003 – Hussein and his gang still lived in comfort whilst an estimated 500,000 lives were needlessly lost due to sanctions. (See Unicef reports)

Heading into the final session Iranian exile and Hopi chair Yassamine Mather spoke on the activity of the Iranian workers’ movement since June and moved a motion opposing sanctions which was passed unanimously. As was a motion from Ben Lewis (CPGB) which called for a day of solidarity with Iranian workers.

The final piece of business of the afternoon was a motion entitled ‘No to state murders’ moved by Charlie Pottins. On the 11th of November, Ehsa Fattahian, a Kurdish socialist was killed by the Islamic Republic. Pottins called for workers to oppose the repressive nature of the Iranian regime and the oppression of national minorities like the Kurds. The motion also attacked the Iranian state for becoming a platform for Holocaust deniers as well as refuting capitalist propaganda which compares the Islamicist regime with Hitler’s fascism. I voted for an amendment moved by Gerry Downing which called for a re-wording of the phrase ‘self-determination for all.’ However this amendment was defeated.

I considered the day a success, however it is worrying that we cannot attract more support for our cause.

Is it the oil, stupid?

To say that oil figures prominently in the Middle East is to state the obvious. However, does this mean that the politics of imperialism in the region should be solely or mainly explained through attempts to gain control over oilfields and pipelines? That has certainly been the approach of much of the left in Britain and elsewhere. Noted US-based academic Cyrus Bina, author of The economics of the oil crisis, disagrees with such crude simplifications. Having studied the oil industry, international relations and global economics for many years, he has developed a sophisticated Marxist theory of the oil crisis, oil rent, and monopoly and competition in the oil industry. Here, in this short, representative, article, first published in 2004, he makes a convincing case that the US under George W Bush was not concerned with obtaining direct control over oilfields.¹ With the ongoing US-UK campaign to impose tougher sanctions on Iran, including its huge oil industry, plans for regime change brought about from above and, failing that, a devastating military strike, the left urgently needs to correct past mistakes. Cyrus Bina is about to embark on a speaking tour of Britain that will include meetings in Manchester, Glasgow and London. In particular he will be addressing the November 28 annual general meeting of Hands Off the People of Iran

Saddam Hussein was an ideal enemy and Iraq was an easy target. Iraq had already lost nearly two thirds of its forces and more than 80% of its infrastructure and civil society in the 1990-91 Gulf War and, if that was not enough, it was subjected to frequent American and British bombings, along with nearly 12 years of stringent sanctions. The war against a weak symbolic enemy seemed inevitable.²

In the May 12 2003 issue of The Nation, there appeared a tiny piece entitled, ‘It’s the oil, stupid’, by Michael T Klare, who – like much of the majority of the popular left – is obsessed with oil in connection with the deceitful invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration.

To be sure, the motivation of the Cheney-Wolfowitz gang and the impeachable actions of the president himself all point in the direction of personal gain. Similarly, the fact of the transfer of tens of billions of dollars from the public coffers to the willing hands of a handful of favourite companies that were readily chosen as the beneficiary of this destructive creation is beyond dispute. Yet, to be worthy of analysis, one needs to be brave enough to go beyond surface phenomena in order to grasp the complexities associated with deeper epochal understanding of this bizarre tragedy.

Writers like Klare and George Caffentzis (the latter, incidentally, holds that oil is a “metaphysical” commodity) should realise that their oil scenario, firstly, ignores the analytical periodisation of oil history into: (a) the cartelisation of oil; (b) the transitional period of 1950-72; and (c) the globalisation of the entire oil industry since the mid-1970s. Secondly, it overlooks the distinction between ‘administrative pricing’ and value theoretic price formation. Thirdly, it neglects the nature of property relations, formation of differential oil rents, and character of the Organisation of Oil-Exporting Countries (Opec) in the (post-1974) globalisation of oil. Fourthly, it discounts the pivotal role of the least productive US oilfields that is key to the worldwide pricing of oil. Fifthly, it fails to recognise that Opec prices are constrained by worldwide competitive spot (oil) prices, and thus Opec oil rents are subject to global competition. And finally their oil scenario fails to realise that the unqualified usage of words, such as ‘access’, ‘dependency’ and ‘control’, in the context of a globalised oil industry, is anachronistic.³

Hegemony and mediation

The concept of hegemony is indivisible and ‘organic’ in respect to its constituent economic, political and ideological counterparts. And it is due to the consensual internal dynamics and intrinsic ideological power of the whole that one can exert minimal external and antagonistic power projection. This, in a broad measure, defines hegemony and its relevance to international relations, for instance, during the rise and fall of Pax Americana (1945-79). Gramsci, nevertheless, focuses on the “organic intellectuals” and examines their relationship with the “world of production” mediated through the complex intricacies of “civil society” and “political society”.⁴

Hegemony, in my view, has four characteristics. It must be: (a) organically consensual; (b) internally driven; (c) historically endowed; and (d) institutionally mediating. The focus here is upon the rise and fall of Pax Americana, a historically specific inter-state transnational system that rose after 1945 and fell in the late 1970s. The matter of hegemony and hegemonic structure is the mutual characteristic of the system as a whole, and not a separate property of the hegemon. Therefore, given the demise of Pax Americana, the claim of American hegemony remains baseless.

The epochal measure of hegemony

In order to see the concrete manifestation of hegemony in the then-ascendant Pax Americana,⁵ one has to focus on the application of the (tripartite) ‘doctrine of global containment’ after World War II. This doctrine embodied: (a) the containment of the Soviet Union; (b) the containment of democratic/nationalist movements in the ‘third world’; and (c) the containment, cooption and moulding of the social, political and intellectual atmosphere in the United States.⁶

The example of the first containment is the forceful confinement of the Soviets behind the ‘iron curtain’ and imposition of cold war. The cold war was a multidimensional hegemonic phenomenon, spanning the economy, polity and the entire realm of culture and ideology worldwide.

Evidence of the second type of containment is the declaration of an anti-colonial policy, on the one hand, and subversion of the democratic national movements in the ‘third world’, on the other. This doctrine often led to covert campaigns and coup d’etats that brought a number of dictatorial regimes to power whose contradictory material existence and discursive mirror image have, nevertheless, become an embodiment of Pax Americana itself.⁷ At the same time, America’s deliberate attempt at the speedy economic transformation of these social formations – for instance, via the introduction and forceful implementation of universal land reform programmes – has led to their hasty inclusion within the capitalist sphere of transnational exploitation and transnational markets.

Finally, the third containment strategy was implemented in terms of US domestic thought control and marginalisation of independent and militant institutions and labour unions within America’s ‘civil society’. Thus, historically, the American state smashed the militant labour unions and political and professional institutions of the left in order to universalise a ‘hegemonic model’ of intellectual emulation that shifted the entire American political spectrum significantly to the reactionary right. McCarthyism was just the tip of the iceberg in this regard.⁸ Here, underpinning social relations, on the one hand, and the mediating economic, political and ideological institutions, on the other hand, have reflected the measure of hegemony embedded in this system.

At a more concrete level, since the 1970s, it is through the particular historical relationship of state and the manifold social, political and economic integration and disintegration vis-à-vis transnational capital that the US-dominated hierarchy of Pax Americana and thus American hegemony has come to an end. Yet during the ‘golden age’, Soviet containment had its own manifold objectives that proved successful. The containment of democracy and independence in the third world chunk of Pax Americana had, nonetheless, left some degree of formal national sovereignty. And post-war containment of people’s political thought and action in US domestic ‘civil society’ had not led to the establishment of a police state with arbitrary, pre-emptive and systemic totalitarian objectives, if not practices.

In December 2001, the Bush administration unveiled its ‘National strategy to combat weapons of mass destruction’.⁹ The Bush administration used the unfortunate events of September 11 2001 as a convenient cover in order to advance toward its ‘permanent war’ policy.¹⁰ This was a formal annunciation of the Doctrine of pre-emption, a fundamental policy break from the Doctrine of containment, as follows:

“An effective strategy for countering WMD [weapons of mass destruction], including their use and further proliferation, is an integral component of the national security strategy of the United States of America. As with the war on terrorism [ie, invasion of Afghanistan, etc], our strategy for homeland security, and our new concept of deterrence, the US approach to combat WMD represents a fundamental change from the past ….

“Because deterrence may not succeed, and because of the potentially devastating consequences of WMD use against our forces and civilian population, US military forces and appropriate civilian agencies must have the capability to defend against WMD-armed adversaries, including in appropriate cases through pre-emptive measures. This requires capabilities to detect and destroy an adversary’s WMD assets before these weapons are used” (emphasis added).¹¹

The mismeasure of ‘blood for oil’

Institutionally, the traditional petroleum cartels must be viewed as a precursor to, and not a substitute for, the highly developed contemporary global oil market. Today’s oil sector is globally structured and competitive.¹²

Here, contrary to the bourgeois reading of the term, competition is neither perfect nor imperfect. It rather reflects the coercive aspect of concentration and centralisation of capital in the oil industry. Yet, the myth of the war-for-oil scenario is hard to resist.

On the right, in an interview, James Schlesinger remarked: “The United States [Bush, the father] has gone to war now, and the American people presume this will lead to a secure oil supply. As a society we have made a choice to secure access to oil by military means. The alternative is to become independent to a large degree of that secure access.”¹³ On the left, Michael Klare declared: “Two key concerns underlie the administration’s [Bush, the son] thinking: First, the United States is becoming dangerously dependent on imported petroleum to meet its daily energy requirements, and second, Iraq possesses the world’s largest reserves of untapped petroleum after Saudi Arabia.”¹⁴

Thus, the positions of the right and the left on the cause of these wars are remarkably identical. The question is, why? Is it because of the correctness of rightwing neoclassical theory in revealing the universal truth? Or is it because of the fallacious economic ideology that is uncritically accepted by the theoryless and clueless left?

Finally, the Indian leftist electronic journal Aspects of India’s economy devoted its entire December 2002 double-issue to ‘What is behind the invasion of Iraq’.¹⁵ The authors conclude, among other things, that the attempted conversion of oil revenues from the US dollar to the euro prompted the invasion of Iraq by United States. As Krugman pointed out in a short note, any possible shift from the US dollar to the euro on the part of Opec will result in a “small change”.¹⁶

However, the fly-by-night authors do not lose any opportunity to grasp this straw in the midst of dreadful confusion. The globalisation of oil since the mid-1970s has rendered the sui generis categories of ‘access’ and ‘dependency’ meaningless.¹⁷ Based on my value-theoretic framework, I distinguish between what is ‘organic’ and what is ‘conjectural’ in the pricing of oil. To be sure, the price of production of the highly explored oilfields within the US lower 48 states is the global centre of gravity of oil prices everywhere. As a result, in competition, the more productive oilfields in the world are potentially able to collect additional profits in terms of oil rents.

Let us look at a simple exercise, attempting the calculation of the value of all Iraqi proven oil reserves in today’s prices.¹⁸ Given the Iraqi proven oil reserves of nearly 110 billion barrels, in two separate assumptions, let us assume two alternative production schedules of 2.5 and 5 million daily barrels, as follows:

If the rate of utilisation of these reserves, ceteris paribus, will be set at 2.5 and 5 million average daily barrels, these oil reserves would be exhausted within nearly 120 years and 60 years, respectively. Accordingly, our respective annual production schedules are:
1. (2.5 x 365 = 912.5) 912.5 million annual barrels
2. (5 x 365 = 1,825) 1,825 million annual barrels.

Assuming $20 per barrel for the price of Iraqi oil (viz the 1990s average market price) and about $10 for the Persian Gulf differential oil rent.¹⁹

Let us further assume:
1. an 8% real discount rate;
2. a 3% annual inflation rate;
3. a 3% annual growth rate of addition to the proven reserves.

Scenario 1

1. The assumption of 2.5 million daily barrels: Given an annual production volume of 912.5 million barrels within 120 years and $10 of differential oil rent per barrel, the value of differential oil rents for 120 years is as follows:
912.5 million x 120 = 109.5 billion barrels
109.5 billion x $10 = $1.095 trillion

Given an 8% annual discount rate, a 3% annual rate inflation and a 3% annual growth rate of addition to proven reserves, we have applicable rate of discount of 8%. Thus, the present value of $1.095 trillion at 8% discount rate to be received in a lump sum after 120 years is $106.8 million.

2. The assumption of five million daily barrels: Given an annual production volume of 1,825 million barrels within 60 years and a $10 differential oil rent per barrel, the value of differential oil rents at the end of 60 years is as follows:
1,825 million x 60 = 109.5 billion barrels
109.5 billion x $10 = $1.095 trillion

Given an 8% annual discount rate, a 3% annual rate inflation and a 3% annual growth rate of addition to the proven reserves, we would have applicable rate of discount of 8%. Thus, present value of $1.095 trillion at 8% discount rate to be received in lump sum after 60 years is $10.81 billion.

Based upon the second, much larger figure of the two, the price tag for differential oil rents in Iraq is slightly less than $11 billion. Now, let us assume that the Iraqi oil reserves are underestimated: say, that they are five times the reported figures. Thus, ceteris paribus, one would arrive at $11 billion x 5 = $55 billion. Now, let us double our reasonable figure of $10 for differential rent per barrel. Again, we would never arrive at a figure much larger than $110 billion for the present value of all differential oil rents to be paid to the Iraqis. In other words, the ‘Iraqi oil price tag’ does not exceed $110 billion to be received in lump sum at the end of the period. This is indeed chump change, given the staggering costs associated with prosecuting the war and the unanticipated financial and incalculable human costs of the occupation of Iraq.

Scenario 2

Let us further assume that the proceeds from differential oil rents in Iraq will be received on an annual basis: say, for 55 years. In other words, assume that the Bush administration and its future successors are able to invent a pill that tranquillises not only the people of Iraq, but also the people of the entire world in order to calmly and comfortably steal the Iraqi oil rents for 55 years, till 2058. Now we need to calculate the summation of the present value of annuitised annual Iraqi oil rents for the period of 55 years. This scenario is more realistic, since the payments of oil rents are made on an annual basis. Again, for the sake of argument, we have chosen a much larger average figure of 5 million daily barrels, assuming a very optimistic production schedule:
5 million x 365 = 1.825 billion annual barrels
1.825 billion x $10 = $18.25 billion

The present value of $18.250 billion annual payment, to be paid for 55 consecutive years is equal to $224.8 billion.

According to the Nordhaus estimates, the direct and indirect costs of forceful occupation of Iraq would range somewhere between $120 billion and $1.6 trillion over a 10-year period.²⁰ Should my estimated value of Iraqi oil warrant such a huge undertaking? As we can see, the reductionist view of ‘no blood for oil’ is hardly an answer to the complex objective forces that – despite the misleading intention of new US foreign policy – are underlying the upheavals of present global polity. Rather such misleading intention, and prior and subsequent actions on the part of the US government, are readily explicable by the underlying epochal forces that so irreversibly led to America’s loss of hegemony, on the one hand, and American refusal to accept it gracefully, on the other hand.

This is the main and real cause of the new world disorder rather than this ad hoc ‘oil scenario’ that the popular left harps on about.

Notes

1. This article originally appeared in Union for Radical Political Economics Newsletter of spring 2004. See www.urpe.org/index.html
2. See, for instance, a neo-conservative view by Kenneth Adelman: ‘Cakewalk in Iraq’, The Washington Post February 13 2002.
3. For theoretical underpinnings see C Bina The economics of the oil crisis New York 1985.
4. A Gramsci The prison notebooks New York1971, p161.
5. See R Steel Pax Americana New York 1977.
6. See GF Kennan Memoirs: 1925-1950 Boston 1967.
7. The 1953 and 1954 CIA coups against Mossadegh and Arbenz are but the two prime examples.
8. See MB Levin Political hysteria in America: the democratic capacity for repression New York 1971.
9. One has to distinguish between epochal and temporal reflections of the Bush administration.
10. The Wolfowitz-Berle neo-conservative project of permanent war, particularly for ‘redrawing’ the map of the Middle East, was formulated long before September 11 2001.
11. White House The national security strategy of the United States of America September 17 2002, pp1,3.
12. Here competition is defined in Marxian terms.
13. J Schlesinger, interview: ‘Will war yield oil security?’ Challenge March-April 1991.
14. MT Klare, ‘Oiling the wheels of war’ The Nation October 7 2002. As a corollary, the ‘necessity’ of oil exploration from Alaska’s wildlife can also be justified by such arguments.
15. ‘Behind the invasion of Iraq’ Aspects of India’s economy No33-34, December 2002.
16. See P Krugman, ‘Nothing for money’, March 14 2003: www.wwsprinceton.edu/~pkrugman/oildollar.html
17. MT Klare, ‘Oiling the wheels of war’ The Nation October 7 2002.
18. This is a rough exercise just for the sake of illustration and approximation of the order of magnitude of Iraqi oil rents. One or two points in the discount rate or inflation rate would not make a significant difference in the basic argument. The figure of $224.8 billion is for 55 consecutive years. If the occupation of Iraq is assumed to be for a 10-year period or so, then a fraction of this figure will be relevant, which in turn will be even much smaller in magnitude than the commonly estimated cost of US war and occupation of Iraq.
19. See C Bina The economics of the oil crisis New York 1985.
20. WD Nordhaus, ‘Iraq: the economic consequences of war’ New York Review of Books Vol 49 (19), December 5 2002.

SWP: Bring Loftus to account

Dave Isaacson condemns leading SWP members who continually undermine and sabotage attempts to forge rank and file organisation

There was one significant omission in Jim Moody’s article on the sell-out of the postal strike by the Communication Workers Union leadership, which allowed CWU president Jane Loftus to come out of it looking rather good, when actually she has been an utter disgrace (‘Militants condemn sell-out’, November 12).

Loftus, a long-standing member of the Socialist Workers Party and therefore supposedly a revolutionary, is also a member of the CWU’s postal executive committee (PEC), which voted unanimously on November 5 to accept the interim agreement and call off the strikes, just as the strength of the postal workers was starting to be realised. This goes completely against the position of Loftus’s organisation. Socialist Worker has rightly stated that “Leaders of the postal workers’ union were wrong to suspend strikes at Royal Mail last week … There was no reason for the union to sign up to the agreement. The proposed escalation of strike action – that would have seen two 24-hour strikes in close succession last week – had widespread support within the union” (November 14).

Another Socialist Worker article by Cambridge CWU rep Paul Turnbull calls on postal workers to “restart the strikes immediately”. Yet neither questions why Jane Loftus did not vote against this sell-out – indeed her name is not mentioned at all. Activists in the SWP and militants in the CWU need to ask what is going on here. The SWP’s newspaper, Socialist Worker, is arguing one thing, while their highest placed member in the CWU is doing the exact opposite. Like other socialists all over the country, SWP activists put massive amounts of time and energy into supporting the postal workers and their strike. No wonder Socialist Worker might not want them to know that their own comrade on the CWU leadership colluded in undermining that hard work.

Many would expect better from a member of the SWP, but this kind of behaviour is not an aberration. Back in 2007 Loftus failed to speak out against the rotten deal which ended that dispute. The only PEC members who openly campaigned against the 2007 sell-out were Dave Warren and Phil Brown. Loftus also colluded with the bureaucracy by keeping their secrets and withholding vital information from the membership during closed-door negotiations with management. The SWP failed to use this information to warn strikers of the impending sell-out and call on workers to organise independently of the bureaucracy. Again, back in 2003-04 Loftus voted for the Major Change agreement, a management package that involved job cuts.

Loftus is certainly not alone, however. Her actions are reminiscent of those of Martin John and Sue Bond in the Public and Commercial Services union. Similarly, these were the SWP’s leading comrades in a union with a left general secretary (Mark Serwotka) and leadership (dominated by the Socialist Party in England and Wales). The SWP has consistently downplayed (or kept silent about) any criticisms it may have of left union leaders such as these in order to try and draw them into supporting various SWP ‘united fronts’. In the process the SWPers closest to them in the trade unions clearly bought into the ‘awkward squad’ hype and are in thrall to these bureaucrats.

There are plenty of perks to the job and other social pressures which weigh upon those who enter the upper echelons of the union structures. A revolutionary party should be constantly on guard and fighting against the effects of these pressures on its militants, yet the actions of the SWP leadership often do just the opposite of that. Their desire to get close to and win the approval of ‘left’ union leaders creates a culture of diplomatic silence and conciliationism, while what is necessary for accountability within the unions is open debate and rank and file independence from the bureaucracy.

As members of the PCS national executive committee Martin John and Sue Bond had failed to support SWP policy within the union on a number of occasions, and then in 2005 they knowingly went against SWP directions and policy to vote with Serwotka and SPEW for a scandalous pension deal which sold away the rights of new entrants. Only after regular exposures of their actions (not least in the reports of CPGB member Lee Rock in the Weekly Worker), and growing complaints from other SWP members, was the leadership forced to take action against these renegades.

Initially Socialist Worker ignored the actions of its members on the PCS NEC, while condemning the deal as a betrayal of future generations of workers – sound familiar? Even after disciplinary action was begun Sue Bond got off very lightly with a letter of apology in which she stated: “I do regret the position our vote left comrades in, and the significant implications for the left in other public sector unions. I can certainly assure comrades that I have no intention of breaking party discipline in the future” (Weekly Worker November 17 2005). Martin John flounced out of the SWP the day before he was due to face a meeting of the SWP fraction within PCS. It was not until four weeks after the pensions deal was voted on that news of all this made it into Socialist Worker.

However, it is not just a few individual SWP members succumbing to the pressures of the bureaucracy. The SWP itself has consistently failed to use its positions of influence within unions to build genuine rank and file movements which are independent of the union bureaucracy. The SWP-sponsored occasional publication, Post Worker, does not openly take on the likes of general secretary Billy Hayes and his deputy Dave Ward when they act against the interests of their members. Rather, it regularly gives over significant space for them to promote themselves. It might as well be an official union publication.

SWP members may well wonder about the priorities of their leadership, when Alex Snowden – a Reesite Left Platform supporter – has been expelled for “factionalism” (during the pre-conference period when temporary factions are allowed), yet Jane Loftus seems to have got off scot-free for a blatant act of treachery. Comrades in the SWP need to ensure that Jane Loftus is held to account and faces disciplinary action. She must be called before a fraction meeting of SWP comrades in the CWU and made to explain her actions. She must either recant and campaign openly against the acceptance of the interim agreement in line with SWP policy, or it is she who should face expulsion. Beyond this, major questions have to be asked about whether she can continue to be the SWP’s leading representative within the CWU, given her track record. And all of this must be done openly with full reports in Socialist Worker.

I have been told that CWU executive members can only subsequently campaign against majority decisions if they immediately registered their dissent. If this is the case, then Loftus must be made to step down from the PEC in order to campaign within the CWU accordingly.

Prior to this latest sell-out, Socialist Worker quite correctly asked the question, “How do we fight when union leaders waver?” Matthew Cookson wrote: “The best way to take the struggle forward is to organise workers on a rank-and-file level. A strong organisation of this nature could support the officials as long as they were representing the union members, but could act independently the moment their leaders began to look for some way to settle their dispute unfavourably” (October 31).

Yes, but the actions of leading SWP members continually undermine and sabotage attempts at forging such rank and file organisation. Comrades in the SWP need to think much more deeply about the role their organisation plays within the unions. They must be free to use Socialist Worker as a tool to explore why it is their leading representatives in the unions end up acting against the interests of the working class.

Respect conference report

No coalition with ‘son of No2EU’

Issues of left and right are not so clear-cut when it comes to Respect. Mike Macnair reports on its annual conference, held in Birmingham on Saturday November 14

Respect’s annual conference was marked by somewhat confused debates on anti-fascist activity, and on the so far unnamed ‘son of No2EU’ electoral coalition. These have given rise to somewhat ill-tempered exchanges between the participants and among others in the ‘blogosphere’ in the last few days.¹

The conference also changed the name of the organisation from ‘Respect – the Unity Coalition’ to ‘The Respect Party’, altered the mode of election of the leadership, and passed a number of leftwing ‘motherhood and apple pie’ resolutions on international questions, and constructive resolutions on constitutional issues and on free public transport.

This report focuses mainly on the controversies. I have tried to give as much as possible of what was argued on the different sides, so that readers can form their own views of the arguments.

The official report of the conference says that 210 delegates attended² (‘delegates’ were, of course, any Respect members who had agreed to pay the conference fee, rather than people elected by branches). However, I counted around 100 present in the main hall in each of the morning and afternoon sessions, and in the one vote which was counted (to be discussed below) 113 votes were cast; but it may well be that people coming and going or in circulation outside the hall meant that numbers were higher than I saw. Clive Searle reported that Respect now has 850 members, with a significant growth in recruitment in the last months; it would be interesting to know whether these members are concentrated in east London and Birmingham or more widely spread.

At the beginning of the conference a decision was taken to elect the same number of national council (NC) members as there were nominees, avoiding the need for a contested election. The resulting committee of 47 is overlarge from a group of 850, but, of course, the actual leadership will be some body delegated from the NC.

As if to reaffirm this point, almost the last decision taken at the end of the conference was to adopt for the future a variant of the Socialist Workers Party’s method of election of a ‘party council’, with 40% to be elected by the conference and 60% by regional meetings. Clive Searle moved the proposal on behalf of Manchester Respect with classic SWP arguments: election by conference would tend to favour “people who talk a lot”, while “people who do a lot” do not get elected.

In reality, though, most political work consists of ‘talking a lot’ – on the doorstep, on stalls, in trade union meetings, in public meetings, in discussions with colleagues and neighbours. People who “do a lot” turn out to be, as the SWP experience of this form of election reveals … apparatus yes-men and women. Moreover, a regionally-elected NC lacks the clear lines of authority which would allow it to overrule and remove, if necessary, the actual leadership. This was one of the few contentious votes, but the principle of local/regional election was not controverted: Southwark Respect merely proposed election by branches rather than regions. This proposal was opposed by Ger Francis, Salma Yaqoob and Alan Thornett, on the ground of the very variable development of Respect branches across the country, and overwhelmingly defeated.

The conference started late, and the agenda had to be shuffled because George Galloway, who was supposed to introduce the first session, ‘Resisting the cuts agenda’, was stuck in traffic on the M1, so that the first item taken was the discussion on ‘One society, many cultures’ – in fact on fighting racism and Islamophobia – introduced by Salma Yaqoob. In general, the discussions were quite seriously cramped, with a small number of floor speakers restricted to three minutes.

Racism and fascism

Salma Yaqoob (as usual) started with the personal-political: her experience of growing demonisation of Muslims in the wake of the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, which brought her into politics, moving on to a recent expensive racist smear-job leaflet about her which has been circulated to white voters only in the Sparkbrook constituency; and from there to mainstream politicians exploiting the Islamophobic climate, while making mealy-mouthed efforts to dissociate themselves from the British National Party. Terrorist radicalisation in this country arose from British state terrorist operations overseas, rather than the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq reducing the threat of terrorism here. It was not just the English Defence League which had crawled out of the woodwork; mainstream politicians had whipped up issues around immigration and foreigners, to the benefit of the British National Party. They refused to admit that it was their neoliberal economic policies which had led to the present crisis.

She argued that Respect’s stance, in contrast, was to insist on telling the truth. We had told the truth about unjust wars abroad; now we had to tell the truth about immigration. Britain benefited from immigration; even Boris Johnson admitted that half a million illegal immigrants in London needed to be legitimised, since if they were deported the city would grind to a halt. Society is richer for diversity and pluralism. Respect believes in the solidarity of all human beings. There is a 13,000 waiting list for social housing in Birmingham, which breeds resentment. If we invested in social housing, in infrastructure, in the hardworking working class people of this country, we would strike racism at the root. “We will fight together,” she concluded, “black, white, Asian, Christian, Muslim, Jew and atheist, for the betterment of all.”

This was not a sharply contentious speech. However, the second floor speaker, Stuart Richardson of Socialist Resistance, focussed his attention on ‘the anti-fascist struggle’. The context of the rise of the far right was the decline of the framework of working class politics; this made space for the demagogues of fascism. The EDL had come to Birmingham three times. The first time was unopposed. In early August, Asian youth had mobilised against them, but had been regrettably isolated. Unite Against Fascism had issued a statement calling for resistance to the EDL. But when they came the third time UAF refused to mobilise, and called for a police ban. In fact, the only police ban was on a ‘Birmingham United’ meeting called by a local journalist, and the EDL were unopposed. The EDL needed to be opposed whenever they came. And – anticipating the second debate – unless there was a broad left coalition in the coming general election, there would be massive space for the growth of the far right.

Among several very varied non-contentious contributions from the floor, comrade Richardson’s was opposed by a number of speakers, including Ger Francis and Kevin Ovenden, and by Salma Yaqoob in her reply to the debate. The gist of these arguments was that as a matter of tactics the EDL was aiming to cause a ‘race riot’, which could then be exploited to smear Asian/Muslim communities and win votes for the far right. In this situation the problem was how to avoid the youth getting into a ruck with the police; if this happened, said comrade Ovenden, it would not be people like comrade Richardson who ended up in jail. It was tactically necessary to call for police bans, precisely in order to avoid being seen to call for a ruck. If they came into Sparkbrook, said another speaker, a confrontation would be inevitable; but turning small demonstrations in Birmingham city centre into street fights was tactically wrong. Salma Yaqoob argued that we were fighting a propaganda war, not just a barney. The police had initially repeated the EDL lie that it was not a racist organisation, but had been forced to recant on this by UAF’s tactics.

Various blogosphere commentators have described the conference as a shift to the right, and this debate was one of the supposed symptoms. In fact, it is less clear. Both sides in the debate – the supposed ‘left’ as well as the supposed ‘right’ – framed the ‘anti-fascist issue’ within the popular-frontist ‘broadest possible coalition approach’ of UAF. Within this framework, Stuart Richardson’s argument was standard far-left, head-banging, ‘no platform’ politics. His opponents were certainly correct to say that going for a ruck with small EDL demonstrations in Birmingham city centre would have been bad tactics. The defence of Sparkbrook, if it had been posed, or the defence of a Harrow mosque – which actually happened – is a different matter. The point is that the left’s and migrant communities’ response to far-right mobilisations has to both be, and be seen by broad masses to be, clearly defensive.

The question of calling for police bans undoubtedly does place Socialist Resistance on the left of the discussion, as against Ovenden and co. The evidence of history, including recent history, is perfectly clear: police bans are used primarily to assist the far right against its opponents. For the left to call for them serves merely to legitimise the use of similar legal moves against the left. But then, of course, this is also a difference with … the SWP.

At a more fundamental level, comrade Richardson’s argument – connected both to the commitment to UAF, and to his views on ‘son of No2EU’ – is fundamentally mistaken. As Salma Yaqoob and others said, in order to confront far-right racism it is necessary to confront the myths about immigration promoted by the mainstream media and parties. And in order to confront these myths, it is necessary to fight for public services – housing, health, welfare – to meet the needs of all. It follows that a revival of “the framework of working class politics” or a broad left coalition which was unwilling to take on the immigration myths head-on and raise clear demands on production for need, not for profit, would not succeed in defeating the far right. In this respect Salma Yaqoob and co-thinkers have made a partial but fundamental step to the left of the standard Anti-Nazi League/UAF ideology. And so too has Abjol Miah, who spoke to the same point – the need to fight for public services in order to undercut racism – in the second debate.

Electoral strategy

The sharper debate came in the second session, ‘Resisting the cuts agenda’, actually about electoral strategy. The session was opened by Nick Wrack raising a point of order: an emergency motion he and others had proposed calling for support to the ‘son of No2EU’ coalition, had been ruled out of order. The point was deferred to after the lunch break (after George Galloway had introduced the session and there had been a brief question and answer session). It then took the form of Clive Searle giving a conference arrangements committee report, which argued that neither this motion, nor another on anti-fascism moved after the deadline, were genuine emergency motions on the basis of new circumstances.

Nick Wrack now moved reference back of the report. Left unity had been discussed over the last year, and comrades who favoured support for a project of this sort had been constantly told that nothing concrete had been agreed. Now something concrete had been agreed. This was a development since the deadline for motions, and therefore justified an emergency motion. The proposal for reference back was, however, defeated by 79 votes to 34.

From the technical or procedural point of view the conference arrangements committee was right. Nick Wrack and his co-thinkers could perfectly well have proposed before the deadline a motion supporting ‘son of No2EU’ on the assumption that the negotiators for this coalition might agree something. However, from the points of view of a clear, therefore democratic vote on the issues, the decision was wrong. The issue was central to the debate. When it came to the vote at the end of the session, however, both the motions which had been proposed on this issue were accepted nem con. It is reasonably clear that this would not have been the case if Nick Wrack and co’s motion had been allowed to go to the vote. In this sense the decision to rule the motion out of order obfuscated the decision-making process: the vote on the reference-back is left to stand as an indirect proxy for the scale of support for the ‘Wrackite’ position.

George Galloway’s introduction to the session displayed his usual rhetorical skills, targeted on New Labour, on anti-immigration, and on the all-party consensus for cuts – and also on the advocates of support for ‘son of No2EU’. Respect has to offer an alternative, because none of the mainstream parties will; the problem, he argued, is how to do so effectively. Respect is back on its feet and has a good chance of getting three MPs elected: “It is not for us to sew together a coalition which can get 1.8% of the vote. We want a breakthrough into the big time.” Long-standing membership of far-left organisations seems, he said, to be an obstacle to unity because comrades find it hard to break bad habits.

In the question and answer session, among other contributors, Stuart Richardson argued for a coalition; and for the possibility of mass strikes to stop the cuts, as in Ireland. George Barrett, from Barking, asked what help Respect could give to fighting the fascists in Barking. Another contributor asked what vote George would recommend where Respect was not standing. Kevin Ovenden asked what the impact on politics would be if Respect won three MPs.

These questions set the framework for George Galloway’s reply. In the first place, he argued for a Labour vote to try to minimise the Tory landslide. The Tories are worse than Labour because they have no connection with working people, while Labour depends on the trade unions for funding. In Glasgow North East, Labour was running “as insurgents” against the Scottish National Party, and the candidate made himself sound leftwing like a Respect candidate; he was not to be believed, but it reflects pressures Labour is under. Secondly, Respect had to make a choice whether to aim to coalesce with small forces to its left, or with larger forces who are now Labour supporters; this was a strategic choice which needed to be discussed through and settled.

In response to George Barrett, he said that the answer was practically no help could be given and this would remain the case unless Respect got a lot bigger and had more resources. To parachute a far-left candidate into Barking would, if anything, increase Griffin’s chances of success. Stuart Richardson, he said, was living in a fantasy world in relation to mass strikes against cuts. Respect had no leading trade unionists in a position to call for strikes, and in any case the unions had been so weakened that they would have difficulty sustaining such serious action. In some cases, like the NHS, what was needed was not strike action, but unity between workers and services users.

We should not call for a Labour vote across the board, Galloway said, but needed to consider the degree to which Labour candidates were implicated in government, and the degree of their venality, and also the likelihood that left candidates would win the seat rather than give the seat to the Tories. We should support Caroline Lucas (Green Party) in Brighton, and perhaps Peter Tatchell (also Green) in Oxford East. But we needed to avoid “auto-anti-Labourism” (nice to hear a phrase borrowed from this paper … even if it was used in service of the Morning Star’s line).

It was important to avoid illusions in the trade union movement, Galloway concluded; just as EP Thompson showed how the British working class was made, today it has been unmade as a class. We should keep nostalgia for mass strikes or storming the Winter Palace at home, and develop new ideas for a new world. Respect has, he repeated, a real chance of three MPs. If it achieves this goal it will become the magnet around which the left coalesces.

Debate

The afternoon session, after a speech by fraternal speaker Andrew Murray of the Stop the War Coalition, saw a continuation of this debate. Kevin Ovenden moved a motion from the outgoing NC, urging that the main aim is to win three MPs in the target seats, but beyond this the importance of flexibility; the Greens have agreed to stand down in Sparkbrook in favour of Salma Yaqoob; we could support, for example, the People’s Party in Blaenau Gwent, Val Wise in Preston, or David Nellist in Coventry. Alan Thornett, moving a motion from Southwark, was carefully ambiguous on the disputed issues: though Respect needed to reach out to its right, he said, it was also necessary to collaborate with others to our left to build up a system of socialist candidates. We should not only support candidates who could win: for example, even if Dave Nellist could not win, we should support him against Bob Ainsworth. At the last resort we should vote Labour. And it was right for Respect to stand in its own name.

Ian Donovan, moving another motion on alliances, spoke in effect for the emergency motion not taken (to which he was a signatory). ‘Son of No2EU’ was more serious than comrade Galloway had suggested: the Communist Party of Britain was not a sect, and comrade Galloway writes for the Morning Star. The general secretaries of three trade unions were on the platform at the RMT conference. This was a partial break by the trade unions from Labour, and leftists should approach it “sympathetically”.

Ger Francis said that comrades were presenting a divide between those for and those against unity. The question was, rather, what sort of unity. The advocates of ‘son of No2EU’ had wanted Respect to stand in the Euro elections (in fact, they wanted Respect to support No2EU in those elections). In contrast, by choosing not to stand then, Respect had prepared the way for a similar action by the Greens in Sparkbrook. ‘Son of No2EU’ was exaggerated: all three general secretaries on the platform had been speaking in a personal capacity. The scheme was too close to the old Socialist Alliance, which got marginal votes.

Nick Wrack said that no-one was denigrating Respect or advocating that Respect not stand in its own name. But we need “a new party which brings together all strands of working class opinion against New Labour”. Respect candidates will only reach perhaps 2-3 million of an electorate of 20-30 million. Comrades were underestimating ‘son of No2EU’: these were not small, unpopular organisations. Many former Labour voters will not vote Labour. What alternative do we offer them? Salma Yaqoob said that the argument was about what sort of unity. By standing down in the Euro elections Respect showed the Greens we were able to work with others. Nick had opposed that.

Fred Leplat from Socialist Resistance argued for the need to collaborate with ‘son of No2EU’. It was a big step to have two trade union general secretaries and a leftwing daily saying they would back candidates to the left of Labour. It was like what was happening in Europe with Die Linke. John Nicholson from Manchester said that unity required an offer of trust. That was what Respect had done with the Greens in the Euro elections. ‘Son of No2EU’ was the opposite: “You do not build up trust by announcing an unnamed coalition shortly before an election and after having refused to work with others in No2EU.”

Curiously, George Galloway’s reply to the debate was held until after the votes had been taken (mostly, as I said, nem con) and a message of support read out from Peter Cranie, the defeated Green candidate in the North West Euro constituency. Comrade Galloway’s reply was quite sharply polemical. He argued that No2EU had “objectively helped Griffin into the European parliament”. Now there was another coalition being set up with no name, which would adopt the same schematic approach to elections. He is against it. There is a clear choice of priorities: if everything is a priority, nothing is. Respect should focus on its target constituencies, not divert resources to building a broader coalition.

It is true, he said, that he writes for the Morning Star, but the Communist Party of Britain is electorally marginal and an electoral liability. He does not want to be in a coalition with communist and Trotskyist groups. He doubts that Brian Caton will be able to swing his members in the Prison Officers Association, who are not exactly leftwingers; or that the RMT or FBU will back the coalition when it comes to the crunch. Even if it gets off the ground, in the vast majority of constituencies the coalition will not be a serious contender, and the right answer will to be to vote Labour. At all costs we need to avoid the possibility of being seen to help the Tories to a landslide victory. We have to be able to say after the election: we stood where we were strong, and in a few constituencies on this or that principle against the sitting Labour MP, but in the main we did what we could to stop the Tories.

I spoke briefly to Nick Wrack in the tea break. He said – as Ian Donovan, and some Socialist Resistance supporters, also did – that there was an underlying issue of direction. Was the orientation of Respect to be to a ‘left’ including the Greens, or, on the other hand, to a working class movement? ‘Son of No2EU’ meant some very tentative steps towards a trade union break with Labour; it was important not to ‘diss’ these steps, but to encourage them.

A move to the right?

Was this a left-right debate and did it, as some blogosphere commentators suggest, amount to a move to the right? It is in my opinion much more ambiguous, and it is necessary to disentangle the different threads. In the first place, neither Galloway’s underlying position that Labour is preferable to the Tories nor his and his co-thinkers’ willingness to reach stand-down agreements with the Greens if possible is a novelty. Respect has always been a project for a ‘left’ defined in non-class or cross-class terms. So this is not a move to the right.

If anything, the arguments of Galloway, Yaqoob and Miah at this conference were posed more in terms of the working class and of collectivism than they were in previous years. (The cause is probably the crash and the threat of massive cuts to public services, which has forced everyone – even sections of the right – to think to some extent in these terms.)

Secondly, he and other platform and floor speakers showed considerable willingness to take on anti-immigration arguments directly and upfront. At the early Respect conferences, Galloway argued explicitly against opposition to immigration controls and I have no idea whether he has actually changed his view on this question (probably not). But the pro-migrant emphasis represents a substantial shift to the left. If it is followed in the run-up to the general election, and if the as-yet-unknown political platform of ‘son of No2EU’ is anything like that of No2EU itself, Respect will be well to the left of it on this front, on constitutional issues and on internationalism.

Thirdly, in my personal opinion Galloway’s judgment of the British political dynamics in the run-up to the coming general election and of the likely success of No2EU is much more realistic than that of the advocates of support for ‘son of No2EU’. The next general election will be fought under conditions of a realistic prospect of a Tory victory, and that will squeeze any ‘left of Labour’ vote, (as happened in 1979), precisely because – though Galloway did not use this expression – Labour remains a ‘bourgeois workers’ party’. ‘Son of No2EU’ remains – a little more than four months before the last possible date for an election – without a name, a political platform, target constituencies or candidates selected. It would take a miracle for it to make a serious impact. That said, Galloway and his co-thinkers’ hopes for Respect winning three MPs are also probably overstated: the squeeze on ‘left of Labour’ votes will hit them, too.

In a sense the core issue is, on the one hand, the arguments of the ‘Wrackites’ that ‘son of No2EU’ represents a class movement because of its trade union basis; and, on the other, Galloway’s arguments, casually thrown into his reply to questions, about an “unmaking of the British working class”; and connected, but sitting on one side, the issue of stand-down agreements with the Greens.

The ‘Wrackite’ argument is probably unsound. If ‘son of No2EU’ really involved trade unions turning out large numbers of rank and file activists as canvassers, fundraisers and local activists of the new project, we could really speak of a mass working class movement. No2EU itself, however, involved nothing of the sort. It would be surprising if it had, since the trade unions have never directly mobilised much more than money in support of the Labour Party – the grunt work being done originally by the affiliated socialist groups, later by the constituency and ward parties as a sort of socialist group.

Conversely, while in one sense Galloway is correct to talk of an “unmaking” – that is, the decay from within of the still formally and numerically imposing institutions of the working class – his argument is, like that of the Eurocommunists from which it is derived, overstated. Class is still a large feature of lived experience in Britain and one which has real influence on practical politics; and workers in industry and infrastructure, though fewer than they once were, retain very substantial numbers and are to a considerable extent organised in trade unions. It is this fact, which actually underlies the political dynamics of the general election, which Galloway throws at his opponents.

This in turn affects the issue of the Greens. The Greens are, quite simply, a semi-leftist petty bourgeois party: meaning by that that their financial and activist base is among professionals and small businesspeople. This is reflected in their conduct in local government office, which tends to be similar to that of the Liberal Democrats.

This does not imply that stand-down agreements with the Greens are unprincipled. On the contrary: it would be a perfectly principled tactic for a Communist Party, in order to overcome undemocratic hurdles to electoral representation, to enter into stand-down agreements with leftish petty bourgeois parties, as long as these agreements did not involve ‘mixing the banners’ or pretending that class did not matter.

Respect is, of course, not a Communist Party, but – as constructed – a cross-class, left-populist formation. But, paradoxically, the debate at its 2009 conference shows the ‘right wing’ in some ways closer to the idea of a Communist Party than the ‘left wing’. The reason is that the ‘right wing’ recognises that Labour is in some degraded sense still a workers’ party, and hence is groping towards a policy alternative to Labour. Meanwhile the ‘left wing’, believing Labour has ceased to be a ‘bourgeois workers’ party’, is hoping to reinvent Labour on the basis of a trade union coalition without any real policy alternative to Labour.

Notes

 

1. For example, on Liam Mac Uaid’s blog: liammacuaid.wordpress.com/2009/11/15/respect-conference-2/; on Andy Newman’s Socialist Unity site: www.socialistunity.com/?p=4884; on Dave Osler’s Dave’s Part: www.davidosler.com/2009/11/respect_dead_end_for_the_serio.html
2. www.therespectparty.net/breakingnews.php?id=767

Soviet ‘planning’ and bolt-on democracy

The Socialist Party in England and Wales’ Socialism event in London had a session on Stalinism’s collapse. Mark Fischer points out what it represents for Marxists

Socialist Party general secretary Peter Taaffe made a number of rather dubious claims in his competently delivered session entitled ‘Why did Stalinism collapse in the Soviet Union – what have the consequences been?’

Prominent amongst these was the assertion that his was “the only organisation” that recognised that the collapse of the Soviet Union – and in particular, the ignominious manner of its defeat – represented an important “ideological defeat” for the left as a whole that precipitated a rightwing global offensive on working class gains. He used the Labour Party as an especially pertinent example, correctly pinpointing the removal of clause four and growing confidence of the right as a political consequence of the collapse of Stalinism.

He did not even qualify this – manifestly untrue – statement about the ‘unique’ position of his organisation by admitting that the Socialist Party had arrived at it in hindsight. This was, after all, the same Peter Taaffe who told us in 1989 that talk of “capitalist restoration” was a “chimera” (Militant July 21 1989). Indeed, he once thought that “Gorbachev’s coming to power signified the beginning of the political revolution” and would define the coming decade as the “red 90s” (Militant January 19 1990). A tad on the over-optimistic side, I’m sure even comrade Taaffe would now concede.

He was not alone in this confusion, of course. Practically the entire Trotskyist/Trotskyoid left mechanically insisted that there were only two possibilities open to societies such as the USSR. There “will either be totalitarian rule under a one-party state” (i.e. the status quo) “or there will be control of industry and state by the workers” (i.e. a healthy workers’ state – Ted Grant, writing in Militant October 3 1980). Ironically, this was quoted as an example of how “Militant was absolutely correct and born out by events” in the May 1989 introduction to Grant’s selected works, The unbroken thread.

In vivid contrast, our organisation – despite its very different evaluation of the nature of bureaucratic socialism in those days – was able to point to the obvious fact that “in these countries capitalism is being restored with the consent of the broad mass of the population and that for the full-blown reintroduction of capitalism there exists no necessity for violently smashing the existing state” (editorial The Leninist April 1 1990). To halt this process, we called for “a real political revolution” in the USSR, not the counterrevolutionary farce headed by Gorbachev (The Leninist November 21 1987) – a simple fact that belies comrade Taaffe’s assertion in his reply to remarks I made during the discussion that it was our now highly critical attitude to the Stalinist states that was retrospective and that “no wing” of the Communist Party had made these sorts of criticisms at the time.

I decided not to explore these rather involved questions in my five-minute contribution to the discussion. Instead, I took issue with a much more straightforward difference – the notion that collapse of Stalinism equated with the “liquidation of planned economies”, an historical ‘gain’ of the revolution that had been preserved despite the bureaucratic excrescences.

I pointed out that planning for Marxists was not simply target-setting – it must have a genuine social content. Specifically, the democratic formulation of that plan by the direct producers themselves. The farcical nature of bureaucratic ‘planning’ in the USSR was perfectly illustrated in the five-year plans, when Stalin and Molotov arbitrarily leapfrogged one crazily unrealistic set of targets by another, with no concern for equilibrium or balance in the economy, nor indeed for genuine utility of the outputs.

Comrade Taaffe would later reply to discussion and underline that the “vital issues” that were raised as we endeavour to “understand Stalinism” would have a “direct bearing on our coming struggles”. This was not simply relevant to regimes such as Venezuela and its creeping Bonapartist authoritarianism, he suggested, but also because Stalin would be “used as a scarecrow to frighten new generations away from socialism”.

Absolutely. And the fact that SPEW comrades – including Peter Taaffe himself – can still see the unviable monstrosity of the USSR as an “anticipation from an economic point of view” of the society of the future is a pretty frightening prospect in itself. Summing up, the comrade told the meeting that what existed in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe was “planning in a rudimentary form” (although quite why and how it “disintegrated” in the 1980s he did not elaborate) and, even in this primitive form, the mass of simple “empirical evidence” countered my claim about the absence of planning. I actually got quite nostalgic when comrade Taaffe cited achievements such as Sputnik and other SPEWers talked of the rights enjoyed by Soviet citizens to “a home, a job, a decent health service” – it was like being in a CPGB meeting from the mid-70s again.

One comrade put it particularly crudely. After listing all the economic advantages conferred on the population by even bureaucratic ‘planning’, he conceded “the bit that was missing was democracy”.

The notion that democracy is a desirable, but non-essential bolt-on in a workers’ state underlines that SPEW – in common with much of the rest of the left – in practice has a top-down, paternalistic view of socialism. Many of the comrades were reduced to citing the catastrophic collapse in living standards that followed the counterrevolutions as circumstantial evidence of the partially progressive nature of these regimes. Living standards are hardly an irrelevance, but the key when we evaluate such societies should be the levels of proletarian consciousness and organisation, its room for independent initiative and the genuine workers’ control that can be observed. It simply is not Marxism to work backwards from the growth in pig iron production or even – an example closer to home – the number of council houses put up in Liverpool and extrapolate from this dull “empirical evidence” that what we have in front of us is a working class entity in any meaningful sense.

Militants condemn sell-out

Abandoning postal strikes in the run-up to Christmas is at best mistaken, writes Jim Moody

Did they jump or were they pushed? No doubt various factors exercised the leaders of the Communication Workers Union in deciding to abandon last week’s scheduled strike action.

As the CWU’s postal executive committee discussions and negotiations with Royal Mail were in closed sessions, we may never know the full facts. Nor is the CWU’s national executive committee forthcoming. But despite the pious promises made in return for the CWU calling off the strike action, postal workers have been placed in an impossible position, and their struggle to secure their long-term future has basically been abandoned by their so-called leaders.

Concessions by Royal Mail are minimal. Its promise to negotiate on job security is by no means a guarantee that there will be no redundancies or even no compulsory redundancies. It was certainly far from sufficient reason to call off a strike when the employer was at its most vulnerable, as Royal Mail was when faced with being unable to deliver a sizeable chunk of the Christmas post.

Worse, many unagreed changes locally imposed by management ‘executive action’ – enforced switches in shifts and delivery rounds, for example, not to mention the ‘temporary’ transfer of mail centre work to ‘out houses’ staffed by casual labour – remain in place. In response branch officers are talking about requesting authorisation for fresh local strikes.

When it comes down to it, general secretary Billy Hayes and deputy general secretary Dave Ward have achieved what they have been suggesting to management in speeches for months: we can call off the strikes if you give us something we can sell. One member of the NEC told me that there was a distinct lack of clarity within the union at all levels on the aims of the strike anyway.

Management has therefore not had to give very much away: Hayes and Ward declared themselves amenable to compromise if management would only show itself in similar colours. That is why some of the reasons put forward for the sell-out are more likely erroneous than not. For example, some have suggested that management might have threatened to press on immediately with derecognition of the union, something that a secret Royal Mail plan did envisage.

Or perhaps the Broad Left minority (eight out of 28 voting members on the NEC), the more rightwing Effective Left (dubbed ‘Defective Left’ by opponents), plus unorganised members – erstwhile militants almost to a man and woman – on leading CWU committees wanted to abase themselves before New Labour to bolster its fading electoral fortunes rather than do the job they were put in place to do: represent the interests of CWU members. As it happens, most of the Broad Left members of the NEC are on the telecoms side.

But neither of these two scenarios appears likely to union militants. They consider it much more probable that union leaders felt they risked losing control of the strikes if they continued with them. To get more than paper concessions from Royal Mail it would have been necessary to escalate the action, without doubt. This would have involved ceding control over the day-to-day running of the strikes to the mass of the members, who would have needed to organise picket rotas, solidarity appeals, etc. without the involvement of national bureaucrats.

Nonetheless, abandoning strikes in the run-up to Christmas, Royal Mail’s busiest time of the year, is at best mistaken and at worst a treacherous turn by CWU leaders. Both sides are well aware that comparatively few items of post are delivered in January, which is the earliest that the union’s leadership expects to contemplate further action, should it deem necessary. And why would it not be necessary, since management promises to negotiate can simply come down to reiterating previous positions on job losses and speed-ups? Having lost its purchase by abandoning strikes now, the union faces an uphill battle against a bellicose foe in the new year. Is it more likely that postal workers would rather fight now or after the Christmas break? No-one can in all seriousness suggest the second, if they want the workers to win.

One militant postal worker to whom I spoke told me that the mood in the workplace is roughly, “What the fuck are we going back to work for?” As days go by, this is settling into a ‘making the best of a bad job’ attitude. He said: “It’s a sell-out masquerading as something else” – an assessment that is still to be disproved. Nonetheless, postal workers do intend pushing the promises about local arrangements in the interim agreement as far as they can – and even further.

Of course, the biggest worry about the November 5 interim agreement among the membership is whether it represents a truce or a surrender. Many militants thought that involving the TUC would mean an immediate cave-in by the union; in the event, it took the CWU leaders a week to come up with the interim agreement with management.

Local industrial action by postal workers was the engine that propelled the union bureaucracy into calling national strikes: first one-day affairs, then a planned, but now aborted, couple of days as we started into November. The evident militancy fuelled by the mass of members’ anger over Royal Mail’s destruction of jobs and speed-ups (euphemistically labelled ‘pace’ in the recent agreement) now has nowhere to go, given the demoralising effect that the leadership’s action will inevitably have had.

Despite calls from some far-left groups for the union membership in the localities to restart the strike under its own control, the absence of rank and file organisation within the CWU means that such calls cannot be fleshed out in any meaningful way. There is no network and no organised debates at any level about the rights and wrongs of the action being taken. No-one, apart from those making the calls, sees this happening. This is a national issue.

The same goes for officially sanctioned local actions (which in any case will clearly not be approved by the NEC). At present, most lower-level union officials at the regional level fully support the interim agreement, so they form a barrier that extends down from national level to any attempt by local union organisations to take back the strike as their own on a large geographical base. Even cooperation across London, which led the way in militancy during the local strike wave earlier this year, is hampered by this regional lethargy.

While the sole Socialist Workers Party member of the national executive, vice-president Jane Loftus, has pitched up at meetings and in articles to promote the strike, there has been hardly a squeak out of the two national executive members who are members of the Socialist Party in England and Wales, Gary Jones and Bernard Roome. But maybe their silence is because of the extreme compartmentalisation within the union that favours bureaucratic manoeuvring by full-time officials. Telecoms members of the NEC are, after all, not expected to interest themselves (or ‘interfere’) in disputes involving the postal side. On the face of it, this obstacle to internal solidarity is in massive contradiction to the solidarity in the rest of the working class movement that postal workers ought to expect as their right in their current struggle.

What the interim agreement does do is pass things back to the localities on a bad basis. They will be left to their own devices, rather than being part of a nationally organised dispute. Local negotiations may have been reinstated, which is all well and good, but how long will they continue and what can they achieve in terms of binding agreements? The interim agreement calls for fortnightly reviews of progress over the next five weeks. Of course, five weeks takes us close to the end of December, which is pretty convenient for management. If anything goes awry by the end of this period of the cessation of hostilities, then we shall be into a stage when Royal Mail is already breathing easier, having finagled a solution to its Christmas delivery problem.

As for the most important questions concerning job losses and speed-ups, the interim agreement has only platitudes to offer. One paragraph reads: “This agreement between Royal Mail and the CWU, reached under the auspices of the TUC, provides the basis for a ‘period of calm’ free of industrial action, during which the parties are firmly committed to work together intensively, to reach agreements that will enable further change and modernisation to be implemented from the beginning of 2010 onward.”

So “modernisation”, though given a different content by management and the CWU, is accepted by both sides. The words “change and modernisation” have a deadly ring about them for the mass of postal workers, however, for they have seen where they have already led: the loss of many thousands of jobs.

It is pretty clear that Royal Mail has sewn up what for it is a great deal in order to buy time – a most valued asset. Management must be cock-a-hoop. At the end of the local review discussions that the agreement document lays down management can quite easily revert to its former positions and again bully, victimise and call for ‘pace’.

By settling for a period of no strikes on the basis of mere promises the union leadership has forfeited any real leverage. None of the CWU leaders who have spoken to meetings of union reps since the interim agreement was announced have dared to suggest that it has been accepted because of the union membership’s weakness or lack of resolve: this has clearly not been the case. There has been no trace of any drift back to work in the course of the strike.

It may not be exactly a perfidious leadership that has brought this dispute to the pretty pass it has, but the inability of rank and file members to bring leaders to heel by organising themselves independently has taken its toll in allowing the bureaucrats free rein. Unless postal workers organise themselves independently of their officials, they will be unable to change this state of affairs – or inspire other workers who, make no mistake, will also be in the firing line.

Royal Mail’s assault and our political tasks

As expected, attempts to broker a deal between Royal Mail and the Communication Workers Union have been unsuccessful. Mike Macnair examines why Royal Mail, encouraged by the government, has been determined to push ahead with confrontation, and looks at the implications of this decision

A Sunday Times front-page headline reads: “Brown faces winter of discontent” (October 25). In other words, this is not the only industrial dispute in the pipeline at the moment. There are a whole range of them expected to come to a head in the next six months.

There is a risk – one that would not be at all surprising, as it is normal to the British political cycle – that the last months of this Labour government will be characterised by large-scale industrial disputes and substantial disruption. This will therefore see an increasing degree of support for the Tories from suburban middle class voters due to the perceived lack of Labour control over the trade unions. Certainly the Tories are already winning a substantial number of votes. Nonetheless, the fear of a “winter of discontent” is plainly an element in the calculations of the government in relation to its attitude toward the current postal dispute.

The media are producing their usual outpouring of anti-strike propaganda. In particular it is said that Royal Mail is habitually losing money – surprise, surprise! Most postal services across Europe are subsidised. Even the early privately owned Thurn und Taxis postal service back in 17th century Germany had to have state-backed monopoly rights, for the very simple reason that a profit could not – and still cannot – be made without them. A universal postal service is, precisely, public infrastructure. Privatising the postal service or requiring it to make profits is like selling off the public highways in pieces or prohibiting public expenditure on ‘unprofitable’ repairs to roads and bridges.

It is true that the universal postal service is, in some senses, of decreasing use because people have turned to email and other forms of electronic communication. The same has been the case in relation to businesses for quite some time: private couriers offering same-day delivery were used for some time before fax and email became routine.

So there is lower demand for postal services than there has been in the past. The government has been looking for ways to undermine wages and conditions, drastically reduce its pensions commitment, casualise the workforce and hopefully even get rid of the universal service obligation. This assault is aimed at creating conditions for privatising the postal service – government subsidies would be withdrawn without too much worry about the major losers: people living in the countryside.

There would actually be some losses for business out of this policy. Who will deliver all the junk mail – probably the bulk of most post bags these days? Equally, online mail order operations like Amazon could suffer, as it is unlikely that private couriers could actually deliver with the same coverage and at the same price.

The government and its servants in Royal Mail management demand ‘modernisation’. What this actually means is not primarily automation. That claim is bullshit. What it means is a major speed-up, attacks on working conditions and a move to, in effect, piece work, resulting in people not getting paid for a full shift. The language of ‘modernisation’ is merely code for a huge attack on the workforce.

Provocations

In reality there has been industrial guerrilla warfare in Royal Mail locally for at least four or five years. Certainly there were major disputes going on in the more militant sorting offices as far back as the last general election. It was clearly decided in the spring/summer of this year to bring this simmering guerrilla warfare to a head, and have a massive, national confrontation with the CWU.

I say ‘clearly decided’ because it is obvious that in the last six to nine months there has been an escalation of unilateral action by management in the form of provocations, victimisations, etc. Actions that can only be intended to trigger local action and a climate of militancy, leading to a massive vote in support of industrial action. It is equally clear that management (and behind them business secretary Peter Mandelson) intended, as Thatcher and co intended in the 1984-85 miners’ strike, to control the timing of the national dispute. Here the point is if possible to break the union before we get into the Christmas run-up, which is the peak of the mail service business.

Similarly Thatcher aimed to bring out the miners before the overtime ban had reduced the coal stocks to the point where there would be forced power cuts. These tactics have been reflected in the political sphere, with absolute and complete intransigence on the part of Mandelson. And with Mandelson’s unequivocal backing, the Royal Mail management has stood firm to its assertion that it will not go to the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service without a pure and unambiguous guarantee from the CWU that there will be no strikes. But  the CWU could not deliver this even if it wanted to, because most of the industrial action has been local, over which the national union has less direct control.

Of course, this is not all one-sided. The CWU executive is generally seen among the membership as a militant leadership, and it, too, has been using the period of local and guerrilla struggles to prepare for the larger struggle which has now arrived.

What we have seen in the last months in relation to this dispute is therefore the run-up to a major class confrontation just like in 1984-85. There is an intention in government – at least among Peter Mandelson and his co-thinkers – and among Royal Mail management, to have a big confrontation and inflict a massive defeat on the CWU workers similar to that of the miners’ strike. This is expected to knock on the head any serious industrial militancy in the next six to nine months, as it will be an object lesson to other unions and other workers.

It will also be an object lesson in a second sense. The Labour government will demonstrate to capital, and to the capitalist media, that they are a safe hand on the tiller, that it is possible for a Labour government to smash an industrial offensive of the working class before it gets off the ground, and therefore capital should leave Labour in place rather than back Tory leader David Cameron.

The bourgeoisie has its concerns over Cameron. Yes, there is at the moment massive support for the Tories. Yes, the media have been backing him. But there are worries about how safe Cameron and shadow chancellor George Osborne will be as managers of the economy, at a time when quite a lot of media commentators are worrying about when the second shoe is going to drop in relation to the economic crisis.

There are also worries that a Cameron government might tip relations with Europe so far into Eurosceptic territory that Britain can no longer build alliances to block further EU integration. This is a central part of the role Britain plays for the United States in Europe: controlling a possible global rival by building alliances against Franco-German integration proposals.

So there are reasons for the capitalist class to have concerns about a Cameron administration. And if the Labour government can show, in these circumstances, that it can break a substantial public sector trade union, derecognise it and casualise its workforce, then Labour might, from that point of view, be in with a chance of regaining some of its lost bourgeois and middle class support prior to the next general election. There are, then, clear political calculations why this government might be thinking about doing a ‘Thatcher on the miners’ job in relation to the CWU.

Labour Party

In discussing the government’s policy I have referred particularly to Peter Mandelson. The reason is not merely that he is the relevant minister, but that there are indications that Gordon Brown is rather less up for a full-on confrontation (see Financial Times October 24); the failed TUC-sponsored talks (without the precondition demanded by Mandelson and management that the strikes be called off) represented a slight retreat by the government.

Behind this is a fundamental political fact. For Thatcher to set up a major class confrontation with the aim of breaking the National Union of Mineworkers was ‘extreme’ from the point of view of the 1940s-70s, but perfectly consistent with the longer historical role of the Tory Party. For a Labour government to actually smash one of its own major affiliated unions in a major national class confrontation would be something different altogether. Rather than allowing Labour to retain power, it would be more likely to break up the Labour Party. The result could be a split by the unions and the left, or – as in the 1931 fall of the Labour administration and the formation of the National government – a party revolt, leading to a split of the right to join up with the Tories to force the confrontation through.

True, the current Labour government since 1997 has faced down trade union action more than once (for example in the case of the firefighters). But in general the workers’ movement had not responded in a militant way. What appears to be different this time is the willingness of the movement to fight. A major conflict between the government and the CWU would pose severe problems for the Labour Party, that is for sure.

If Brown does back down from an all-out confrontation, it will be presented by the media as yet another Brown U-turn. Brown’s reputation for dithering not only reflects a hostile media, but is a real phenomenon. Unlike cynical careerists such as Blair, Mandelson and co, Brown was a genuine convert to neoliberalism from the left; hence, the 2007-08 crash shook his convictions and left him rudderless in policy terms. If Labour does go ahead with a major attack on the CWU, and the result is not a major split in the party, we in the CPGB will certainly need to reassess our current judgment that Labour remains a bourgeois workers’ party: the event would look like the party finally ditching the ‘workers’ side of the contradiction.

But, whatever exact diagnosis we make, if the government goes ahead with plans to break and derecognise one of the Labour Party’s major affiliated trade unions, this will be a fundamental shift in politics and in particular of Labour Party politics.

Our tasks

I have no idea why CWU general secretary Billy Hayes let himself be reported as saying he is in a stronger position than Arthur Scargill was (The Times October 17).

True, strike action has received very clear majority support in a ballot. But the actual underlying sectional economic positions are if anything weaker than those of the NUM in the 1980s, and the ability of the postal workers to sustain their internal solidarity in relation to a furious media offensive is likely to be less than the miners. The miners lived in concentrated communities, had networks of solidarity outside the pits in place, and indeed, as a workforce, were highly concentrated. Postal workers are concentrated only in sorting offices, but atomised when out on the streets. So the actual position of the CWU is relatively weak in the purely trade unionist, sectionalist-syndicalist sense of its ability to disrupt the economy.

However, this situation is to a considerable extent general in the service sector (and, indeed in some industrial sectors dominated by highly automated plant with small workforces). In this sense in future disputes the CWU will indeed look like a union with strong sectional power. But this is entirely consistent with my fundamental point: namely simple reliance on ‘industrial muscle’ – ie, sectional ability to disrupt production – is decreasingly adequate as a strategy to defend working people’s immediate interests.

Even if the sectional strength is less than Billy Hayes’ Times interview suggested, the possibilities of the strike winning broad public support are real. Precisely because of the increasing atmosphere of class confrontation in the dispute, because of the intransigent alignment of the government behind Royal Mail management and because we see the unanimity of the bourgeois media behind ideas most clearly expressed in the Daily Mail headline, “The lemming strike is on” (October 22), there has been some public reaction against the capitalist united front. We are beginning to see some, inchoate, inadequately politically represented, support for the postal workers. A poll reported in The Independent on October 24 showed 50% supporting the postal workers and only 25% supporting management and Mandelson.

So where does that leave us? It looks like we are headed for a major class confrontation with a serious and unambiguous effort to break the CWU, and thereby give an object lesson to the rest of the trade union movement, in the hope of preventing a “winter of discontent”.

What should the political left be doing? There are two sorts of task: simple solidarity ones, and those that are specifically political. The first of these are tasks that the labour movement and left will probably do well in spite of divisions and disorganisation. Raising the issue in other trade unions, getting CWU speakers to meetings, organising solidarity campaigns and support groups, collecting for strikers in hardship and so on. Promoting the idea of solidarity action: thus, for example, in Unite the question of instructing the managers not to scab has been posed.

The Socialist Workers Party is therefore entirely correct to advocate the rapid formation of strike support groups, which can play a critical role in mobilising public support and solidarity. There is also the question of international solidarity. Even if this is only symbolic in character – as, in this dispute, it inevitably is – such international solidarity would strengthen the morale of strikers and assist the struggle for broader solidarity within Britain.

A specific task lies in the student movement, because traditionally students have been recruited as casuals by the Royal Mail. We must agitate against students acting as scabs – this is an issue to be raised, addressed and spread. Indeed the general attitude towards scabs is critical. Casualisation is already extensive in the Royal Mail, partly inevitably because of the seasonal nature of the business. Nevertheless it is vital to get across the message that during this dispute taking casual jobs is scabbing. This is partly a job for the student movement; but it is also a job for strikers themselves: the movement needs to revive the basic ideas of non-cooperation with scabs, and that picket lines mean don’t cross. And it is also a job for PCS members working in job centres and so on: scab ‘casual’ jobs in Royal Mail are not ‘normal’ jobs to which the unemployed should be sent and PCS members should refuse to fill them.

Political tasks

The other aspect, where the far left is traditionally much weaker, concerns specifically political tasks. The far left is bad at these because they are the tasks of a party. Solidarity campaigns are necessarily broad movements of all those of whatever political complexion who wish to support the strikers. Hence they necessarily find it hard to address the politics of the strike.

For example, there is an early day motion opposing Royal Mail management’s intransigence, etc. Has your local Labour MP signed it? If not, why not? If your local Labour MP is supporting ‘modernisation’ and all that crap, perhaps it is time that his/her constituency office or surgery should be besieged by strikers and their supporters.

This sounds like a solidarity campaign-type action. But actually it turns out that broad solidarity organisations find it extraordinarily hard to undertake campaigns to besiege scab Labour MPs or whatever, because the Labour lefts and the trade union officials would be unwilling to pursue them. Stop the War Coalition in the 2005 election is an excellent example of the problem – it was unable to make any recommendation on who to vote for. Even in the 1984-85 miners’ strike this issue was posed, as the union leadership was very reluctant either to enter on the terrain of politics itself or for the support groups to do so.

What was said above about the Labour Party means that an absolutely central issue is the question of sharpening the divisions between left and right which a major confrontation with the CWU will inevitably produce. Parts of the left will undoubtedly call for the CWU to disaffiliate from Labour. But at the moment that would be a counsel of retreat and a road to depoliticising the union: neither ‘son of No2EU’ nor any of the other left groups and ‘unity projects’ presently represents a realistic alternative electoral project. What is immediately needed is for the CWU to adopt a tactic of reducing general financial contributions to Labour, targeting any support on Labour MPs and candidates who have backed the strike, and also being willing to back selected workers’ movement candidates outside Labour; if this leads to the party leadership seeking to remove affiliation, the union should fight back.

In other words, the requirement is not (yet) to run away from the Labour Party, but to promote and sharpen a fight both within and outside it against the most pro-capitalist wing of the party.

Equally important is explaining both the character of what is going on, that it is a class confrontation motivated and driven by politics. That is a task for a Communist Party, for communist papers, and for leaflets addressing the broad masses in the districts where they live. The far-left press and the splintered groups do part of these jobs, but we are too limited by our divisions and the left press and leaflets often restrict themselves to basic trade union solidarity – the Morning Star as a daily is closer to having the resources, but prints only what suits leading union officials.

Strike support groups cannot substitute for these tasks, for the reasons already given. Neither can the splintered organised left and the even more splintered ‘independents’. A coalition of the far left could begin to do some of them. In doing so such a coalition would be beginning to act as a party. But for the moment most of the far-left groups fetishise either their own independence as ‘the revolutionary party’ (all 57-plus of them); or ‘broad unity’, which leads to an inability to take political action because it has to include some element of the ‘official lefts’; or both at the same time. So, as valuable as a far-left coalition for the purposes of political solidarity with the postal workers would be, it probably will not happen.

CPGB

Realistically, the CPGB cannot play this role either, because of our very limited resources. We can and should argue for Communist Students to campaign for students not to scab on the postal workers: a campaign which could be conducted in unity with other left student groups and could be very successful. Our contacts, through Hands Off the People of Iran, with the Iranian workers’ movement, can and should be used to promote symbolic international solidarity with the strike.

More generally, what we can do is largely limited to the use of the Weekly Worker, with which we can propagandise around the idea that solidarity has to be more than just hardship support and agitation in the trade union movement; that solidarity has to address the politics, the MPs and the political context of the strike.

The paper also needs to make an effort to contact CWU militants in the localities and get their stories. In spite of the fact that this is something the whole of the left is doing, in the context of the bourgeois media overwhelmingly giving the management and government version of the story, low-level exposures of the provocations management has been engaged in is a useful activity. We need to develop more and broader contacts across different localities, and get the information into the paper.

Equally militants and the left need information about the political alignments within the CWU and about what is going on in the dispute at national level. Are the far-lefts, some of whom sit on the CWU national executive, acting as communists or merely as trade union officials? We need to try to get the information and publicise it.

Across all this, the fundamental point is to use all the resources we have to try and develop the sense of the political context of the dispute, its significance and the question of solidarity of the working class as a whole with the strikers.

Timely questioning of no-platform fetish

James Turley sees SWP politics reduced to ultra-shrill self-parody

It has been a busy week for the Socialist Workers Party – the largest and most visible far-left group in Britain today. Its members and periphery formed the biggest part of Saturday’s demo against the Afghanistan war, as well as the bulk of Thursday’s shrill protest at the appearance of the bumbling British National Party leader Nick Griffin before a hostile Question time audience.

All this against the background of the ‘pre-conference discussion period’ – that is, the three months every year when the SWP membership is allowed to discuss things other than how many leaflets are needed for Saturday’s Stop the War stall. This is the second year running that the usually dull autumn exchanges have halfway merited the name ‘discussion’ – and both times the name at the core of the disputes is that of John Rees, the erstwhile prima inter pares on the SWP central committee who was ousted last year.

On the ‘anti-fascism’ front, there have been no perceptible public changes in the stance of the SWP – no news, in this case, being bad news. The big ‘event’ this week is, obviously, the Question time episode, to which Griffin had been controversially invited following his election as an MEP. The show itself was a high point in terms of audience figures; the same cannot be said for the turnout for the hysterical protest outside BBC television centre, staged by Unite Against Fascism, which is staffed by the SWP.

It falls to the never-knowingly-perceptive party organ, Socialist Worker, to solve the contradiction posed by almost every concrete activity the SWP today undertakes – that is, directing endless opprobrium at the sheer awfulness of the current state of affairs, while simultaneously talking up its own influence on events.

True to form, Esme Choonara writes a report this week entitled ‘Nick Griffin’s BBC appearance sparks angry protest’ (Socialist Worker October 31). That contradiction is visible from the off: “Thousands of anti-fascists laid siege to the BBC’s studios in London on Thursday of last week as fascist British National Party (BNP) leader Nick Griffin was handed an unprecedented publicity coup on Question time.” Apart from the fact that there were probably only a thousand or so anti-fascists, they failed in their objective of stopping the broadcast. Later on we are told that “anti-fascists came very close to breaking through and were only held back by security gates and lines of police”. To which one can only respond: what other obstacles are there to breaking into a building that were successfully overcome by these intrepid demonstrators to justify it even being mentioned? The gruelling walk to the police lines from White City tube station?

Unfortunately, the heroic failure of UAF to stop the QT circus bodes ill for the British and indeed European masses. Griffin has cultivated links with various organisations in Europe, with a view to forming a “new Europe-wide Nazi group”. “Outrageously, the BBC hid behind claims of ‘impartiality’ to hand a Nazi organisation a platform to peddle racist and homophobic lies” – which seems rather compatible with the dictionary definition of ‘impartial’ – unlike, say, the absence of any far-left forces on the platform. Whether or not the BNP is fascist, meanwhile, it is certainly ‘peddling lies’ to call it ‘Nazi’ (even in the 1980s, it was the rump National Front which identified more closely with Nazism). But the BBC would not have to face this particular moral dilemma, even if a left electoral success forced it to invite, say, Weyman Bennett onto Question time, as SWP members take the trouble to no-platform themselves by refusing to debate the likes of Griffin face to face.

All this is much of a muchness with the SWP-style ‘anti-fascism’ we have gotten rather used to – an insistence on labelling anyone to the right of the Tory Party (barring, for some reason, the UK Independence Party) Nazi and nothing less; an implicit contempt for the masses who will apparently be won instantly to Griffin’s programme if he appears on TV; a pseudo-politics based entirely on moral distance from ideological degenerates who simply cannot be touched; and a millenarian view of the consequences of budging on this (gas chambers all the way down).

Yet, to believe a motion put before the October 10 SWP party council (the delegate body which meets a couple of times between annual conferences), the central committee is on the verge of abandoning all this. This critical motion is reproduced in the first SWP Pre-conference Bulletin (known as the Internal Bulletin or IB) over an extensive list of names, including those of Rees, his partner and close collaborator Lindsey German, and long-time ally Chris Nineham. It is obviously enough the work of Rees’s newly formed Left Platform faction, which has been officially recognised for the duration of the pre-conference discussion period. The motion frets: “At the last two national committee meetings of the SWP a majority of the CC who spoke argued that the SWP should be prepared in the future to debate with members of the BNP in the media after Nick Griffin appears on Question time on October 22, thus abandoning the ‘no platform’ position.” Not only that, but a majority of the NC had spoken in favour of this heresy.

On the contrary, “the election of two BNP MEPs and the change in policy by the BBC does not mark a significant enough shift in the balance of forces between the left and the BNP to justify abandoning ‘no platform’.” Here is a curious logic indeed – it is fine for the SWP to abandon ‘no platform’ once the establishment does.

“The principle at stake here,” the comrades argue, “is that the BNP should not be regarded as a legitimate bourgeois party.” But why should this be treated as a “principle”? In times of severe social crisis the bourgeoisie can turn to fascism to retrench its rule – thus instantly rendering the fascists ‘legitimate bourgeois politicians’. In fact leading establishment figures could switch to the fascists or attempt to transform what the SWP currently regards as ‘legitimate bourgeois parties’ into fascist organisations. To insist on a hard and fast distinction here is to introduce one where none really exists – social democracy differs vastly from fascism, but both are expressions of rule considered “legitimate” by the bourgeoisie at different times.

This motion was overwhelmingly defeated at party council, which approved a rival motion from the CC. However, the latter motion did not contradict Rees’s at all in terms of substance, reiterating that SWP members in UAF “will refuse to appear on a panel with Nick Griffin”. The SWP “will redouble our efforts to win the case for no platform for the BNP in the media and build the UAF campaign of protests and pickets to challenge the BBC’s decision”. Nonetheless, we cannot but note that there is wriggle-room in the approved motion, which concentrates on the narrow issue of the BBC, and leaves open the question of whether the SWP may later embark upon a wrenching turn.

John Molyneux

The ‘smoking gun’ for Rees and co was a rather innocuous letter from ‘loyal oppositionist’ John Molyneux published in Socialist Worker - very sensibly headlined ‘“No platform” must not be a fetish’ (June 13). “Yes,” argues comrade Molyneux, “we should campaign against the BBC and other broadcasters giving the Nazi British National Party (BNP) airtime. But when it is clear they are going to appear anyway it is to our advantage that they are confronted by anti-fascists.” An impermissible sell-out for the Reesites – and for the successful party council motion.

IB No1 – alongside such riveting items as ‘Nurturing the roots in Kings Lynn’ – contains a number of items related directly or peripherally to the anti-BNP crusade. One proposes a “change of strategy”, which turns out to be reviving the SWP’s old Anti-Nazi League as a hard faction within UAF – Occam’s razor is never knowingly applied by SWP cadre when it comes to front organisations.

‘Holding the line on “no platform”’ (authored by four London comrades identified as Dean, Paul, Julie and Jim) parallels the Rees party council motion. It is highly confused. For example, it states that “BNP support contains a strong irrational element”, and so “argument is a less effective weapon against fascism than force”. The “Nazis” cannot be defeated in rational debate because they are “deceptive liars, distorting and exploiting the real issues …” As everyone knows, the poor, ignorant masses are always taken in by irrational lies and are never persuaded by lucid argument exposing those lies for what they are.

The comrades warn that agreeing to debate with Griffin on national TV or radio would “undermine” ‘no platform’ locally: “Why shouldn’t our student union host a debate with the BNP? Martin Smith/Weyman Bennett appears on TV with them.” But then, just a few paragraphs later, they write: “Locally, though, we do have significant positions that may involve tactical decisions about whether to appear on platforms with the BNP, when they also have prominent roles as councillors, in tenants associations, etc. To refuse in such circumstances might amount to sacrificing a key role in a campaign for the sake of holding a line on the BNP that could be detrimental to the wider campaign.” Exactly.

This contradiction demonstrates that there are those in the ranks of the SWP who are not completely stupid. Some are actually showing signs of trying to think. There may be a time when the principle of ‘no platform’ might have to be reconsidered, they say: if, for example, “the BNP has achieved a level of legitimacy comparable to the French or Italian fascists. We would then have to re-evaluate our stance in the light of a different balance of forces.”

But not quite yet … at least nationally. The comrades attempt to rebuff a point made by comrade Molyneux in his Socialist Worker letter. He pointed out that Antonio Gramsci had been prepared to debate with Benito Mussolini in the Italian parliament. The comrades respond: “There is no comparison with the position Gramsci found himself in under Mussolini in the 1920s and the political landscape of Britain in 2009. The working class is not defeated and our comrades are not being assassinated by fascist hit squads.”

So now that the BNP is not a serious threat to the workers’ movement, being in the same room as a member is a mortal sin; but when it becomes one, it’s time to start debating? Such, apparently, is the logical consequence of defending an idiotic policy.

The wooden spoon for the whole bulletin, however, undoubtedly goes to one Ben from south London, who relates at length his experience building yet another SWP front – Defend Council Housing – from scratch in his area. It is for the most part a tale of patient, low-level activism come good, although one wishes always for a little more political ambition from such cadres to marry to their masochistic desire for grunt-work.

One anecdote stands out, however – one of the first people interested in his campaign turned out to be “on the leaked membership list of the BNP”. When he discovered this (“it pays to Google everyone who approaches you in these campaigns,” writes Ben in a footnote – “If I hadn’t found out about his membership until later, it could’ve become a damaging issue for the DCH group”), he pinned him down and “popped the question”: “… he was candid with me. He said he had been a member previously, and agreed with them on everything except the racism.” Naturally, of course, he was immediately excommunicated from the campaign. A final footnote reveals that he was later elected chair of the local tenants’ association.

In the 1930s and 40s, the ‘official’ Communist Party had to confront the far more threatening presence of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. They often did fight the fascists in the streets, most famously at Cable Street; yet where the CPGB was strong, it was able to perform exactly the kind of community activism to which Defend Council Housing aspires (and the BNP has been so adept at using in recent years). Party activists would make an effort to draw BUF supporters into communist-led rent strikes – not a few tore up their BUF cards on the spot.

Conversely, Ben in south London effectively cut himself off from a seemingly talented and well rooted community activist on the basis that he had once been a member of a nowadays very diffuse-at-the-edges far-right organisation. The SWP’s pathological aversion to engaging with the BNP’s supporters – never mind for a moment properly hardened fascists – not only reduces its politics to ultra-shrill self-parody, not only entirely disarms it before the bourgeoisie, but even serves to sabotage the low-level activism among ‘real people’ it so venerates.

Comrades should learn the lessons – denying the far right a platform is a tactic, which may be appropriate under certain circumstances. In other circumstances, as the comrades are starting to realise, debating with the BNP might be more effective. The SWP should drop this “fetish” once and for all.

Form strike committees, build strong picket lines

Today it is the jobs and conditions of postal workers that is on the line, writes Jim Moody. But if New Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems have their way, it will be all of us on the chopping block tomorrow

Backed to the hilt by the state, Royal Mail’s aim is to crush the postal workers’ strike and destroy their union. This has become ever clearer during the last fortnight. So, as the first two days of national strike action begin, rank and file workers are faced with the challenge of how to fight for their jobs and save their union from annihilation.

With 120,000 Communication Workers Union members having had the opportunity to vote for strike action, the massive 76% in favour is decisive. A resounding success for those in the union who have hammered away in the localities, building the strike movement piecemeal. Certainly that was the only way that the union’s leadership would counternance holding a ballot for national action. Far from becoming dissipated or dispirited by the time it has taken for the leadership to get its act together, militancy has grown by leaps and bounds at the ground level.

By now we all know how vile the management of Royal Mail is. Exposed by Newsnight a week ago, Royal Mail’s secret document Dispute: strategic overview clearly lays down management’s intention of continuing to implement a policy of undermining the CWU’s role in labour relations. Even going so far as to consider the possibility of removing it as the recognised trade union. If union bureaucrats do not play ball – and at present the membership won’t let them – then Royal Mail plans to institute a “programme of reducing relationship with union.”

As a first stage to derecognition, the document advocates taking away union representatives’ current rights to carry out their duties during work time (‘facility time’). In addition the provision of meeting spaces for the CWU in local offices will be withdrawn. Royal Mail has also made it clear that it will carry through plans that will decimate the workforce and increase the work burden of those who remain employed, all “with or without union engagement”.

Royal Mail has provocatively cancelled a planned campaign sponsored jointly with the CWU, Ban Bullying Week. As the CWU says, it has done this just when management bullying and harassment are causing more and more problems in the workplace. One of many examples followed the introduction of computerised Geo-Route plotting of postal walks and drives: when it failed to live up to the hype, it was the man or woman on the ground who got blamed – despite the many warnings from the union that the system was unworkable.

There is no doubt whatsoever that Royal Mail is more than happy to see its customers suffer through strikes. It estimates that this will undermine its employees’ stand against cuts, by eroding public support. So they will be beaten back to work in defeat – or so senior managers imagine. As Royal Mail’s hitherto secret document makes clear, “demonstration of commercial impact of dispute – strikes make things worse – the more we can demonstrate this to our people, the better.” In effect Royal Mail is saying that the more business it loses, the better.

Readers will know that Royal Mail wants to recruit 30,000 scabs. Ostensibly they are being brought in to deal with the backlog that the series of local one-day strikes has resulted in, though it is arguable whether this is legal under industrial relations legislation. The scabs are to be used after Royal Mail refused to allow postal workers to do overtime work: CWU members could not possibly be allowed to ‘benefit’ from their strike action by receiving a meagre time and a third in overtime to clear the backlog.

Equally bellicose has been unelected business minister Lord Mandelson. He has clearly expressed the Labour government’s position: Royal Mail has to be ‘modernised’ at the expense of jobs and conditions. So there is no point looking upon the government as some kind of ally, despite the CWU contributing handsomely to the Labour Party’s coffers over many years. True, there is a wide body of support for the CWU coming from backbenchers, including in the form of early day motion 2035. Nevertheless it is hardly surprising that many CWU members are incandescent with rage over a Labour government which is in effect egging on a management attempt to break their union.

Royal Mail might have offered to take part in arbitration to avoid the strikes this week. But that was simply a publicity stunt: its conditions were that the CWU roll over, call off the strikes and begin negotiating away jobs and working conditions. Rightly the CWU has rejected this out of hand. Royal Mail has simply refused to go for arbitration in all but name. It wants confrontation. However, why should workers be forced to accept what Acas decrees is reasonable? It is not exactly a surprise that such establishment bodies tend to favour … the establishment – in the guise of a compromise settlement.

Despite Royal Mail manoeuvring and clear intentions to break the union, Billy Hayes, CWU general secretary, seems to be banking on Acas. He insists that the CWU “remains available for talks”. However, he says, any third party involvement,  needs to be on “an entirely transparent basis” with a “joint intention of reaching an agreement” (www.cwu.org).

The problem with all this is that it leaves rank and file postal workers around the country as passive onlookers. There is also the danger of a rotten sell-out. So strike committees need to be set up, giving the rank and file its own input into the aims, running and termination of the dispute. Local strikers will push forward new, energetic and popular leaders and they obviously need to lead local CWU organisations for the duration of what looks set to be a long and bitter struggle. Local strike committees are especially needed when faced by a strikebreaking force of 30,000 scabs. They are equivalent to a quarter of the CWU membership. There should be no cooperation with such casuals in between strikes, and strong picket lines should be imposed on strike days.

The CWU and CWU strike committees would also be well advised to learn the lessons of the 1980s miners’ and printers’ strikes and organise hit squads to persuade strike breakers not to scab. Obviously such bodies do not organise themselves and certainly the idea of them needs first of all to be popularised.

CWU militants are aware that the union leadership is, even at this stage, looking for a cosy compromise rather than winning the fight against the imposition of speed-ups and job losses. For Hayes and co what matters above all is that management is imposing, not consulting. Of course, rank and file members are right to insist that management must negotiate with their elected representatives. But they must remain vigilant against what is an inevitable tendency of union bureaucrats to settle for a less bad deal when their members are under attack.

Of course, most postal workers have taken part in local strikes precisely because they damned well do not want any more job losses. Somewhere around 50,000 have gone already in the last two years. Enough, they say, is enough. It is true that for the ordinary CWU member every day out on strike means a day without pay. Not that postal workers are well paid in the first place. But if Royal Mail, New Labour and the Tories have their way, they will be even more poorly off in the future. These workers have known for months that they have to make a firm stand. There can be no more acceptance of vicious attacks lying down.

Collections for the postal workers at workplaces and elsewhere are important. But more is needed. Supporters must be encouraged to join picket lines outside sorting offices and distribution depots. PCS members at job centres must not help recruit scabs for Royal Mail, and student groups and student unions should launch a campaign to stop their members from taking temporary postal work while the dispute lasts. Public sector workers and their unions should also be brought into active engagement with the postal workers. That means delegations, resolutions and above all a refusal to cross picket lines or in any way strike break. Joint days of action would be a real boost too. The attack on the postal workers is a precursor for what all three main political parties intend to do. Cuts, cuts, cuts. Pension holes, alleged overmanning, etc, will all be used to break other unions, push down wages and force through speed-ups.

The state machine is already preparing for combat. According to one report, “The Association of Chief Police Officers … said that it was closely monitoring the situation and had issued guidance to forces on dealing with large-scale strike action. Each police force is assessing and reviewing the implications for public disorder that might arise from industrial action” (The Guardian October 17).

It is up to the rest of the working class to give solidarity to the postal workers. But in order to make this really effective we must generalise this dispute and give it a political form and content. We must challenge Royal Mail and its right to manage; we must challenge New Labour and the Tories and their cuts programme; we must organise our own combat party with a programme that can link our day-to-day struggles with the perspective of a new society that replaces the capitalist imperative of profit with the communist principle of production for the common good and distribution according to need.

Who’s afraid of Nick Griffin?

No-platforming is not a principle but one of many tactics. As a strategy it has failed miserably, says Eddie Ford

By the time you read this article, the chances are that the world has not come to a sudden end. Which, if you had believed the hysterical outpourings of some with regard to Nick Griffin – the “Nazi” British National Party’s ‘fuhrer’ – and his scheduled appearance on this week’s BBC Question time programme, would probably come as a bit of a surprise. Of course, the most hysterical voices ringing the alarm about the fascist doomsday pencilled in for Thursday October 22 have emitted from the left, most notably in the shape of the Socialist Workers Party and its current favourite popular front, Unite Against Fascism.

Hence, on the dreadful day itself, the UAF supported an all-day picket outside the BBC centre at White City – a follow-on from the previous day’s ‘Questioning Question time’ rally in Conway Hall, central London. The UAF is, of course, backed by a roll call of the ‘anti-fascist’ great and good – union and religious leaders, plus leftish establishment politicians (not so leftish in the case of Peter Hain).

The UAF poster for the October 22 demonstration declares, “No plug for Nazi Nick – keep QT Nazi-free”. In this similar vein of liberal outrage, UAF’s website boasts about the “anger” that is “building up” against the BBC’s “disgraceful” decision to invite “convicted holocaust denier” into the hallowed Question time studio. Naturally, it quotes the UAF’s chair, Ken Livingstone, who fulminates about how the “public do not pay licence fees to have them abused by the BBC to help people spread hatred and intolerance” – and, warns Livingstone, if the BBC “continues” to allow BNP members to appear on Question time, it will “share responsibility for the crimes against minorities which will follow”.¹

So, barring divine intervention or maybe a ‘pitch invasion’ by enraged UAF supporters, Nick Griffin – whose very words can corrupt the nation, or so we are led to believe – is to speak alongside the Conservative Muslim peer, baroness Sayeeda Warsi; Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesperson, Chris Huhne; US-born black woman and critic, Bonnie Greer, and, of course, Labour’s very own minister of justice, Jack Straw.

In other words, all thoroughly acceptable figures for the establishment, as is the norm, of course, for the BBC’s ‘flagship’ (ie, dull as ditchwater) current affairs show – just like its BBC radio four sister programme, the equally soporific Any questions? Indeed, compared to his speak-by-numbers opponents, Griffin will almost come across as an edgy, free-thinking, radical – seeing how there will be no militant socialist or leftwinger on the panel. Yet the fact of the matter is that her majesty’s very loyal government in the shape of Straw shares many of Griffin’s obnoxious views on immigration – kick out the ‘illegals’, for instance. No room in the inn, and all that sort of ‘common sense’ reactionary crap spewed out every day by the popular press. But, of course, Griffin has no liberal anti-racist baggage to hulk around, so has the advantage of appearing more upfront, consistent and ‘honest’ than his ministerial co-panellist.

Naturally, there have been noisy protests against the besmirching of that once proud British institution, Question time - even doubts raised as to the moral probity of the BBC itself for inviting Griffin onto the programme. Perhaps even to the very legality of Griffin’s appearance, following last week’s attempt by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission to seek a court injunction against the BNP – on the grounds that the organisation was breaking the Race Relations Act by restricting membership to “indigenous Caucasian” people (such as those deemed part of the “Anglo-Saxon folk community”, the “Celtic Scottish folk community”, the “Scots-Northern Irish folk community”, the “Anglo-Saxon-Norse folk community”, etc). In turn, Griffin promptly agreed to use “all reasonable endeavours” to persuade the BNP to amend its constitution so it no longer discriminates on grounds of race or religion, in accordance with clause four of the Equality Act. The BNP had no choice but to comply – not entirely without reason, Griffin accused the commission of “trying to bankrupt” it.

But, whatever the exact case, these legalistic shenanigans were enough for the reptilian elitist, Peter Hain – official anti-racist and “anti-fascist veteran”, according to the love-struck UAF – to discharge a thunderous letter to the BBC’s director general, Mark Thompson, maintaining that the BNP by its very own admission was currently an “unlawful body”. In which case, Hain sternly told Thompson, it “would be perverse of you to maintain that they are just like any other democratically elected party”, and that therefore the BBC should “rescind” the invitation to Griffin until the BNP passed “a basic threshold of legality”. Failing that, spluttered Hain, Thompson’s approach can only be seen as “unreasonable, irrational and unlawful”.

In response, the BBC failed to blink under Hain’s righteous offensive – the corporation, says it is obliged to treat all parties and individuals with “due impartiality”. Hence at the beginning of the week, BBC spokesperson Ric Bailey (and Question time’s executive editor until 2006), told Radio Five Live listeners – with impeccable logic, it has to be said – that if there was a general election tomorrow, then the BNP could stand. So what, went on Bailey, that there is a court case pending against the BNP – the government is always up before various courts about something or other. Does that make the UK government or the Labour Party an “illegal body”?

Furthermore, and crucially, Bailey cited the precedent of the United Kingdom Independence Party and the Greens. Ever since they won representation at a national level they have appeared every now and then on Question time - so, Bailey stated, putting a BNP member on the panel would just be a “continuation of the approach which recognises that the level of electoral support is a relevant factor in making these judgements”. In fact, he pointed out, in the European elections 6% of all voters – nearly one million people – voted for the BNP, and the party also has more than 50 local councillors. That fact cannot be ignored or wished away, declared Bailey, nor can the BBC “apply different standards to different parties because of their particular policies” – which would be a flagrant breach of the BBC charter. Indeed, he concluded, if Griffin’s invitation was rescinded, as Hain wanted, then the BNP could easily have taken the BBC to the high court – and almost certainly won.

However, Hain’s almost aristocratic sentiments were echoed by an editorial in The Guardian - and enthusiastically quoted by UAF, of course – which pontificated about how the BNP is not a “normal party” and that the BBC should not be “allowing this mob such a spotlight”. Rather, the BNP on Question time is the “wrong party on the wrong programme”. In fact, fumed The Guardian, by placing Griffin on a panel with “established politicians”, the naive BBC is granting him a “spurious legitimacy” – this “dangerously slick” Cambridge graduate could be made to look like an “ordinary politician”, one “perfectly deserving of a cross on a ballot paper”.²

Frankly, communists must treat the arguments put forward by Hain and The Guardian – and brainlessly parroted by  UAF – with the proper contempt they deserve. Yes, of course, the BBC is part and parcel of the establishment, and in no way could be described as a progressive institution. In reality its “due impartiality” ultimately helps to serve and maintain the capitalist status quo, constantly recycling the same old stale, mainstream viewpoints and opinions. Yes, of course, the BNP is an odious organisation and the left should never miss an opportunity to confront and destroy the repellent ideas promulgated by someone like Nick Griffin.

Clearly the whole political approach, and methodology, adopted by UAF/SWP is disastrously self-defeating – if not positively suicidal. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. By no yardstick can the SWP be viewed as a “normal party”, no matter how much it pretends to be one. Does not Socialist Worker inform its (possibly duped) readers every week that “the present system cannot be patched up” and that “the structures of the parliament, army, police and judiciary cannot be taken over and used by the working people” – and presumably that includes the BBC as well? Therefore should the SWP “mob” also be denied access to a programme like Question time on the premise that it is an ‘anti-democratic body’ which seeks the abolition of her majesty’s lawfully constituted government, including the much beloved BBC?

Yet quite hypocritically, and with monumental dishonesty, the latest issue of Socialist Worker declares that those who “defend” Griffin’s appearance on Question time “need to learn from history”. Oh really? Thus Chris Bambery claims that in the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s the Nazis were “allowed to pose as respectable parliamentarians and given a free run in the media, with liberal and leftwing opponents debating them” – but instead, he argues, the Nazis were “clear that they were using democracy in order to destroy all democracy”. Despite that though, writes Bambery sorrowfully, the leaders of Germany’s Social Democratic Party – apparently “the equivalent of the Labour Party in Britain today” – stupidly implored their supporters to “only oppose the fascists by ‘legal’, constitutional means” and not use ‘direct action’ against the Nazis (like “attempting to break up” their meetings and so on). Bambery concludes that Hitler’s eventual victory “shows we cannot trust big business or the liberal elite to fight the Nazis”, and that we cannot “allow the Nazis to gain respectability” – which will happen if “we fail to mobilise in opposition to them” (October 24). Like, we are meant to deduce, the UAF’s ‘No plugs for Nazi Nick’ demonstration/rally on October 22 in London.

Is this the very same SWP whose UAF comrades have called upon the “liberal elite” in the form of the BBC to banish Nick Griffin from Question time – and has repeatedly called upon the bourgeois state to use every “constitutional means” at its disposal to ban BNP events, along with demonstrations organised by the English Defence League? Or the very same SWP which is very happily part of the mother of all popular fronts in order to take on the “Nazi” BNP-EDL menace – and which now seems to include general Sir Richard Dannatt, former chief of the general staff and soon to be Conservative defence adviser in the House of Lords? Brandishing his anti-BNP credentials, Dannatt, it should be noted, is an evangelical Christian and self-confessed Islamophobe – who has told the Daily Mail that “the Islamist threat” within British society needs to be countered, so as to stop the country’s “moral compass” from “spinning” into a “spiritual vacuum”.³

But none of this prevented the Morning Star, which too, of course, thinks that Griffin should not be given a “platform” on Question time, from plastering all over its front-page – “Brass bites back at BNP army plot”, almost joyfully telling us that “top army figures” generals Dannatt and Sir Mike Jackson “presented a united front against fascism in Britain” by penning a “contempt-filled” open letter “denouncing the BNP, as new allegations emerged that the party has built influence at the heart of the military” (October 20). Yes, we are witnessing what the SWP would doubtless call a “united front of a special type” – an ‘anti-fascist alliance’ which stretches from rightwing army generals all the way to the SWP’s central committee. In effect that means the SWP has constituted itself the leftwing of the bourgeois establishment, albeit its extreme left.

So who’s afraid of Nick Griffin and the BNP then? Well, it looks like the SWP, UAF and Morning Star are – very, very, afraid. We communists, however, are not afraid. Indeed, so confident is the CPGB as to the power, correctness and popularity of its politics and programme, we would readily accept an invitation from the ‘impartial’ BBC to appear on Question time - even with likes of Nick Griffin there – in order to advocate democracy and socialism and expose the capitalist system in general and the British state in particular. Bring it on!

Notes

1. www.uaf.org.uk
2. The Guardian October 15.
3. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dannatt