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Anarchists recognise that the idea of 'revolutionary' left-wing politics is a contradiction in terms. 'Left-wing' ideologies are exactly that - a set of beliefs on the left-end of a spectrum of ideas about the 'best way' to run the capitalist system and state. All the left groups jostling for position in the political market place, whether they are loyal to New Labour or independent from it, are not promoting revolutionary challenges to capitalism, but alternative versions of the same miserable set of oppressive and exploitative social relationships that we are struggling to overthrow.
The election of the first Labour government in nearly twenty years quickly proved to be a hollow victory for the peripheral forces of the British left - a political current which had invested great hopes in the arrival of Blair in Downing Street. None of the left's predictions about what ought be happening over half way through the first term of a New Labour government have come to pass.
The scattered remnants of the left inside New Labour - which pledged they would call off their unofficial ceasefire and unleash fierce internal opposition to the austerity and authoritarianism of the Blair leadership - are nowhere in sight. Demoralised, inchoate and lacking strategy or credibility, the New Labour party machine has faced no serious threats to its absolute authority from within. The left around New Labour, but in its orbit, which insisted that political opposition would rise up within Labour's ranks, and substantial layers of its activists break away leftwards, now acknowledges that the plan is on permanent hold.
The left outside New Labour, which saw in the remaking of Old Labour an unprecedented opportunity for the creation of new expressions of the old 'party' form, has been cruelly disappointed. For all their 'refoundations', 'declarations' and 'proclamations' of new beginnings, none have made significant headway.
What remains of the self-proclaimed 'revolutionary' left has become increasingly introspective, inactive, and self-doubting as a result of this catalogue of failure and slide. The crumbling of the left has created something of a political vacuum, and in that void lies both opportunity and danger for those committed to genuinely anti-capitalist politics.
Three facts are crucial. First, contrary to their claims, these groups are not the organised expression of revolutionary ideas, but of capitalist ones. Second, these diverse groups share a common set of characteristics far more important than the secondary questions that divide them. Third, and most importantly, encouraging lasting and effective working class resistance to the many offensives of the ruling class requires us to break free of the constraints of 'left-wing' capitalist politics and to mark out a truly independent political existence.
The Socialist Labour Party
The coterie of supporters that rallied behind National Union of Mineworkers' (NUM) president Arthur Scargill when the new Socialist Labour Party (SLP) was launched in the spring of 1996 were adamant that the new party would 'break the mould' of British left politics, and reclaim the 'socialist project' now set aside by New Labour. The SLP's founders insisted it would sweep the decks of the existing left outside Labour, regrouping all behind its banner. The SLP was to be the rallying cry for the left in the trade unions, and a bulwark against the rise of credit card unionism.
In the four years since its launch the SLP has come nowhere near achieving any of these goals. There were just over 60 SLP candidates at the 1997 general election - a fraction of the blanket coverage Scargill had publicly committed the party to. The results were the humiliation predicted by everyone except the SLP. Scargill insisted that the risible national tally of votes was some kind of spectacular success. The campaign blew apart the SLP's hollow claim that to be a credible left-wing challenge to New Labour, on its right flank, and the trotskyist diaspora, on its left. Since then its election results have followed the same pattern. The party's combined vote in elections to the Scottish Parliament was just under 52,000, and around 10,700 in the poll for the Welsh Assembly. The SLP vote in the European Parliamentary elections averaged a 0.87% share. In the May 2000 London Assembly elections it finished up with a 0.82% share - coming behind the single-issue left slate the Campaign Against Tube Privatisation (a number of whose leaders are themselves SLP defectors) and with half of the, itself negligible, 1.63% total of the London Socialist Alliance.
The SLP has not built any kind of local government, or significant trade union, base. It activist core is tiny, its membership figures reliant on passive, isolated, postal members. The harsh internal party regime has repulsed important layers of activists and quickened growing numerical losses. Layers of activists have also been torn from the ranks in a pitiless administrative offensive, as Scargill has hunted down dissidents and 'entrist' moles from other organisations.
The founding leadership group of the party has fragmented, as the Scargill autocracy has turned on its former allies one by one. The fate of the previously-loyal party vice-president Sikorski was sealed in November 1998 when a secret critique of the party that he had written was made public. As well as criticising Scargill's leadership methods, the letter detailed the extent of the party's decline that was being hidden from the membership. It revealed: 'the fact is that there has been a serious loss of members, not just in constituencies or concentrated solely in one or two regions, but also in the trade unions.' With the withdrawal of the Scargill controlled block vote at party conference, Sikorski was ousted just months later. His successor lasted only a few weeks in the post before Scargill moved to sack and expel him.
The refusal to countenance any kind of alliance politics, together with the austere disciplinary culture that defines the operation of the party, has now sealed the reputation of the SLP. Scargill has effectively seen off the entrist raiders he does not want inside the organisation, but has made few inroads within the old labour movement from which he's so eager to recruit. Increasingly Scargill's officers and henchmen are drawn from the ranks of die-hard stalinists. The compound damage inflicted on the party by the now relentless cycle of electoral humiliation is likely to worsen. The immediate prospects for the SLP are bleak in the extreme.
The Socialist Party
The Socialist Party - formerly one of the front-running leftist organisations in Britain - is now is in serious and sharp decline. Its national organisation has been reduced to a shadow of its former self, the product both of splits and defections from within its ranks, and the collapse of the party's 'political perspectives' that has further encouraged internal dissent. Indications are that party membership has slumped from the low thousands towards the hundreds.
The slide in the party's ability to put up council and parliamentary candidates in is all the more telling because of the priority that the Socialist Party always used to give to electoral politics. The Socialist Party could only muster a slate of 19 candidates at the general election, who together won a total of just under 10,000 votes nationally, a third of which came in a single seat. The party's pretension to be the 'real' party of organised labour stood painfully exposed. The SP did not contest elections to the Scottish Parliament, while its five candidates in the Welsh Assembly poll won just over 10,000 votes between them. In the European elections the SP stood no candidates of its own, but backed Dave Nellist's stand for the Socialist Alliance in the West Midlands, where he won just over 7,300. The SP continue to contest occasional council seats, but exists as an impoverished electoral force at present.
The Socialist Party has now rid itself of most of the trappings that defined its identity as a dour marxist monolith for the decades it existed as the Militant Tendency. Militant waged a long-term 'entrist' struggle within Old Labour, hoping to wrest control of the party from the right-wing leadership caste, or to split the party asunder. But as the 1980s progressed, the Tendency squandered its scant resources and overplayed its influence within the Labour Party in a retreat that turned into a rout. Battered by the attacks of the Labour leadership, implicated by a fond attachment to the state capitalist regimes of Eastern European, and marginalised in the labour movement the Tendency was forced to start over.
The Socialist Party has tried to recruit activists from the new social and political struggles it has been forced to turn to beyond the horizons of trade unionism. In doing so it has been prepared to relax its strict democratic-centralist methods that its bosses recognised were certain to repel activists from these movements. But the process of regeneration has proved unstable and difficult for the leadership to control.
On Merseyside, the old power-base of the Tendency, the Socialist Party has broken apart. Members of the Regional Committee who questioned the strategies of the national party leadership were expelled for their acts of defiance, as the Taaffe leadership began to 'purge' its own 'enemy within'. Breakaways and group defections were also reported in Manchester, Nottingham, London and elsewhere. The best efforts of the leadership could not prevent the biggest single blow to befall the party - the breakaway of its entire Scottish section, which then fused with other groups to form the new Scottish Socialist Party. The increasingly beleaguered Taaffe leadership is struggling even to manage the process of decline.
The SP appears to be paying a high price for loosening the binds of 'democratic centralism'. Yet the leadership's commitment to its new 'fluid' methods of organisation seems as shallow as it concern with the new political movements. The Socialist Party may now be outside Labour and stuck ignored on the fringes of the trade union movement, but it remains besotted by both. The party's decision to engage with the various Socialist Alliance projects now operating is more a reflection of the leadership's recognition of the Socialist Party's own weakness than evidence of a commitment to a new way of working. Alongside the organisational decline, a vacuum is opening up in the heart of the party's 'programme' - the old economist determinism and go-it-alone electoralism discredited, with no tangible 'marxist' alternative to take their place. All the indications are that the downward spiral of the Socialist Party has not yet hit rock-bottom.
Socialist Workers Party
The SWP remains the left organisation least affected by the political tumult and dislocation that has impacted so strongly on the left and labour movements around it in the last decade. The death of SWP leader and patriarch Tony Cliff in April 2000 is unlikely to destabilise the organisation or see it lurch in new directions. The SWP has evaded the kind of identity crisis that has engulfed the Socialist Party, weathered the transient challenge of the SLP, and still retains the largest membership claim on the left, though it will have shared the contraction of members common across the party-left spectrum. Its party bosses still believe that a 'window of opportunity' has opened up on New Labour's left side, through which the SWP may soon advance. In the last few years the SWP's political programme has been turned upside down twice, as it has struggled to make this happen by becoming ever more 'appealing' to potential recruits.
At the general election, the SWP backed New Labour, urging a vote for Blair. Though the SWP's propaganda insisted that a New Labour administration would quickly be revealed as little different from its Tory predecessor, the party celebrated the Blair victory as heralding a turnaround in the fortunes of the left. For the SWP's theorists that victory was the product of a 'class vote' cast by millions of class conscious workers now expecting a New Labour government to deliver. As New Labour austerity and authoritarianism began to bite, the SWP expressed its 'shock' and 'disbelief', insisting, against all the evidence, that 'we didn't vote for this', and calling on the party that introduced the attacks to lead the fight back against them. With the party's typical mixture of gall and denial, the SWP announced in the Spring of 2000 that the time 'had come' to 'break with New Labour' and that Labour was now unrecogniseable as an agency of 'the left'.
Aware of the growth of left electoral challenges to New Labour, the SWP leadership then decided that, for the first time since the late 1970s, it would put up its own candidates at election time. The party's election posture has remained as conflicted as ever: it has urged support for New Labour and at the same time backed various challenges to it. The party stood five candidates in elections to the Scottish Parliament (winning just over 2700 votes combined) and was part of the United Socialists slate for the Welsh Assembly, were it provided four out of nine candidates, all of whom won only a few hundred votes each. The SWP was set to participate in the Socialist Alliances slates in London and the North West for the EP elections only to withdraw following disagreements amongst its leadership, accelerating the collapse of both coalitions. A tactical reappraisal led the SWP to engage with the London Socialist Alliance electoral campaign for the 2000 Assembly Elections, and to include its own candidates, notably Paul Foot and Mark Steel, on the LSA ticket. The clear disappointment of the LSA's electoral performance - eclipsed by independent and far-right parties and nowhere near to challenging the Green Party for the 'top up' Assembly seats may lead the party to reconsider its decision. The SWP is perfectly capable not only of mending its irrevocable 'break' with New Labour, but of denying that it ever even considered parting company from it.
The party is ticking over at present, waiting for an upsurge in trade union led workplace unrest that it can intervene in through the usual bureaucratic channels. It has been pushing its 'Action Programme' through trade union branches, and organising lobbies of the trade union bureaucracy. The party attempted its usual trick of trying to swamp the recent Longbridge demonstrations with its own placards. The SWP toys with the politics of the new protest movements, but so far only as an effort to pull individual militants from the new wave of activists into the committee room politics of trade union routinism.
Socialist Alliances
Repeated efforts have been made in the last decades to weld together 'socialist alliances' out of the existing loose fragments of the far left, to build a more credible political coalition of forces.
During 1996 a number of such alliances were once again set up in different cities around the country in the hope of drawing together left-wing groups, political parties and activist campaigns, better able to pool resources and co-ordinate joint local activity. The willingness of both the Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party to now involve themselves in alliance work with other forces was seen by its supporters as giving the project vital additional leverage. Less than three years on, however, the tensions inherent in the socialist alliance initiative have been exposed, and the project has faltered and frayed. Only in London has the Socialist Alliance project developed a minimal level of coherence and an ability to mobilise.
Three factors seem to have been important. First, this coming together of forces has been the product not out of a sense of left-wing optimism and opportunity, but one of pessimism and uncertainty. Second, the parties and agencies involved have had different sets of expectations about the role of the alliances and their political priorities. Often they have seized up as the novelty of the coalition has given way to the stark reality of conflicting politics. Third, the alliances have lacked a clear campaigning focus that might have sustained a distracting 'unity in action'. As a result, electoral politics have come to dominate the work of the alliances, pushing out activists opposed to such work, and opening up divisions between the leftists that remain. Poor electoral performances then corrode the 'logic' of the electoral alliance strategy.
Only the United Socialist list survived to contest the Welsh Assembly elections. After months of wrangling, the network of Socialist Alliance slates for the EU elections collapsed in disagreement, leaving the field open to a collection of maverick and independent 'alternative left' slates. The Socialist Alliance and a lone Independent Labour candidate both contested the West Midlands constituency, while the Alternative Labour List, headed by the deselected Labour MEP Ken Coates, put up candidates in two other regions. That these concerted efforts at alliance building should end up in such disarray is symptomatic of the state that this part of the left has got it self into.
Scottish Socialist Party
The twin referendums in favour of a new Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, under a system of proportional representation and with devolved powers, was seen - especially by supporters of the Scottish Socialist Alliance (SSA) - as opening up new opportunities for electoral work by the nationalist-left. The transformation of the SSA into the Scottish Socialist Party in February 1999 was intended to make it possible to win a left bloc in the new Parliament.
The largest single group in the SSA had always been Scottish Militant Labour (SML), part of the Socialist Party. The launch of the SSP was a declaration of independence by SML, a breakaway from which the Socialist Party has yet to recover. There is no doubt that SML has carried its support base, centred around Glasgow, with it into the Scottish Socialist Party. The SSP's programme is a mixture of old style leftist prescriptions mixed up with populist nationalist sentiment.
Tommy Sheridan won the SSP's single seat in elections to the Scottish Parliament in May 1999 - a regional top-up seat reflecting a combined party-list vote in the region of 7.25%. In the Assembly elections it was beaten outside of this base by the SLP, but this situation was reversed in elections to the European Parliament, with the SSP winning just under 40,000 votes. The SSP's support is localised in West Central Scotland, where it is a small but tangible political force. The party has little organised presence beyond this through which it might break out to challenge New Labour and the SNP nationally.
The reality of leftism
The series of intense struggles that erupted right across the 1980s and after often (though not always) ended in defeat, despite the heroism and determination of many tens of thousands of working class militants. Together with the decline of traditional smoke-stack industries, and the political influence of the unions that 'represented' workers in these sectors, this led to the demoralisation of the left in the British labour movement. Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the end of the state capitalist systems across eastern Europe (that so many of these groups regarded as 'socialist'), the sense of political malaise on the left deepened. It was the political rethink that these experiences triggered that has led the Socialist Party to remodel itself, to Scargill's launch of Socialist Labour, and to the numerous declarations of 'independence' and 'renewal' that have become common left currency. The weakness of all these projects is testament to the depth of the general political slump from which no force on the left will easily escape.
Waiting for disenchantment and frustration with New Labour to grow, the bulk of the left is currently stuck in political stasis. This makes it all the more important that vital issues around the future development of the class struggle are not obscured by a faction fight within the bureaucracy of the official labour movement and its left allies as class conflicts erupt once again.
This politically volatile time is simultaneously a period of risk and of opportunity. In the battles that are to come in the months and years ahead uncompromising, militant revolutionary politics will be indispensable. An important step in asserting our political independence and cranking up our combativity is learning to reject capitalist ideas and agencies in their left wing guises as much as in any other.