Campaign for a New Workers Party Declaration
- Thread starter Nigel Irritable
- Start date
Squatticus
for an armed populace
Groucho said:
Hmmm... anyone else spotted what all of those 5 sentences have in common?
EDIT: Yes, Ratan, apparently
Groucho said:
Then perhaps you would care to explain the attempts by the leadership to limit democratic practice at this years conference? I refer to attempts by the leadership to restrict the number of motions from branches, the fact that observers are to be denied speaking rights, and poor attempt to hide such shenanigans by altering the rules when the above were exposed.
And where exactly is this 'strong and growing support within the trade unions' of which you speak?
How many union branches have affiliated to RESPECT since its launch?
And, if the SWP is a growing organisation, which doesn't seem to be the case from what I've read and heard, then you won't mind providing a reasonably impartial and verifiable figure for current membership. And, of whatever membership figure you may or may not provide, how many members are active and actually doing something, as opposed to being mere paper members?
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
Groucho said:
Please Groucho, save it for the children. Respect is entirely controlled by a cabal at the top. In a formal sense there isn't even a proper branch structure or mechanism for those branches which do exist to influence national policy or actions other than being allowed two motions a year to conference. And of course even if there was a formal structure, it would remain dominated by the tightly whipped apparatchiks of the SWP.
Groucho said:
Perhaps you would care to outline the nature and extent of this support for the audience?
Groucho said:
Growing so fast that its paper membership claim has gone from 8,000 to 3,400 in a few years. Long may it continue to prosper like that.
Groucho said:
And that's where we get to the meat of the matter. You aren't interested in the question of working class political representation one way or another, just in trying to ensure that your populist mess has no potential rivals.
Pilgrim said:
if respect had actually managed to file their 2004 account with the electoral commission (due date 30/6/05 - still no sight of them yet), they would contain respect's membership from which a good enough guess at swp's could be made, however for some reason respect seem to think they are above the formalties required of the electoral system in this area
Squatticus said:Well, well, Nige, you seemed to have rattled a few cages, which you must be finding quite encouraging...
Actually I wouldn't normally bother, but I do find it a little frustrating that decent Socialists such as those in the SP continue to be determined to isolate themselves. I always felt that the SWP and Militant (as was) should have joined forces.
Plus I'm also a little intrigued. In the General Election this year the SP took a step towards organising with other people - principally the Alliance for Workers Liberty (sign of desperation methinks) but have now jetisoned their former electoral allies in order to launch a renewed call for a mass workers party on their tod. Mention of the Red Green socialist unity coalition can now only be found on the AWL site allongside their articles opposing withdrawal of troops from Iraq. The AWL of course hate the SP with a venom second only to their hatred of the SWP....
That's what makes it absurd. If you want to do a deal with other groups and form a compromise party, talk to them, but one party launching a campaign for a new party seems to me to be inherently contradictory.Nigel Irritable said:
If you want to form an alliance with other groups, talk to them.
If you think your party does not have politics that are attractive to the masses, change them.
But a party launching a campaign for a new party is just bonkers to me.
Of course, I do realise that it is merely yet another trot leadership trying to use a praticular marketing device to bamboozle more people into becoming their pawns under false pretences.
Loved the way that all the signatories were so revealing about their affiliations too. Nice 'n honest.
Squatticus
for an armed populace
Groucho said:
does 'decent socialists' also include Workers Power, in your opinion?
oisleep said:
I must confess to being surprised that RESPECT have been allowed to get away with this for so long. Either they haven't sorted out the relevent paperwork yet, or they are stonewalling the Electoral Commission for some reason.
The first option suggests incompetence on the part of those running RESPECT.
The second suggests deliberate and wilful obstruction, though we can only guess at the reasons if this is so.
Either way, it doesn't make RESPECT look too good, I wouldn't have thought.
Still, they are getting on for being six months overdue.
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
Groucho said:
I appreciate your concern, but I'm sure that in turn you can appreciate that we don't quite equate not joining Respect with isolating ourselves.
gurrier said:
The declaration was launched by the Socialist Party and says so, at a Socialist Party event. I think that's pretty clear without adding twenty something "and Socialist Party" tags to the signatories names.
gurrier said:
Actually that's quite interesting because you've hit on quite a big theoretical issue there for Trotskyists, or rather a set of theoretical issues - how are mass political organisation created, would a mass political organisation with weaker politics be a step forward, how should smaller groups interact with mass organisations. I suppose that they are probably big issues for Anarchists too, but whatever theories your organisations about this kind of stuff have been developed in relative isolation from our ideas.
To briefly address each of the points I mentioned (so briefly that I'm doing actual violence to these answers):
A) The Socialist Party thinks that real mass political organisations are created by the working class in struggle, rather than just by small groups of activists growing. That doesn't mean that existing activists have no role to play, just that it is sectarian for us to seek to "build" our way to a mass organisation (not to mention futile).
B) We think that it would be a big step forward for a mass working class political party to exist, even if it was dominated by reformist or centrist or just plain confused politics. It would provide both a focus and a means for working class struggle. The caveat to that is that a revolutionary group wouldn't dissolve itself into the broader party but would instead seek to influence it and to win its members over to revolutionary politics.
C) We think that in most circumstance revolutionaries should do what we can to help such mass organisations into existence and when they do actually exist, work with and within them.
Nigel Irritable said:
I agree with A) and C) when taken together with no qualifications. I agree with B). However, it would necessitate, if taken seriously, compromise. For one thing revolutionaries would have to avoid voting down reformists at e.g. early founding meetings in order to avoid imposing a revolutionary agenda in advance on those we want to work with, in the way that some critics of Respect have attacked the SWP for NOT doing.
Apologies for not being convinced that there is a match between SP publicised theory and practice, but I don't see any evidence of the SP succesfully working with people beyond your ranks since walking out of the SA (after losing control). The red green alliance with the AWL I suspect is seen as a bit of a mistake, but hardly counts as uniting with serious wider forces does it?
JoePolitix
Gone
Groucho said:
The Socialist Green Unity Coalition (SGUC) was a half-backed non-aggression (and often not so non-aggressive!) pact between a collection of socialist sects and individuals united by little more than mutual hostility to the SWP.
The so-called coalition stood 27 candidates with no joint election manifesto and under their own names. They all got dismal results. The SP, who stood the bulk of the candidates hardly (if indeed at all) made any reference to their SGUC partners on their website or in their literature. Quell surprise.
Subscribers to the UK Left Network discussion list may remember that in the run up to the election the coalition’s candidate for Brighton Pavilion, Tony Greenstein, openly declared that he was opposed to the election campaign of the SGUP candidate for Nottingham East, AWLer Paul Radcliff. Radcliff lashed out at Greenstein in due course, though at least he had the courtesy to wait until after the election.
Only a few days before the election, the leader of the Democratic Socialist Alliance (a ill cobbled together coalition within a ill cobbled together coalition), John Pearson, savagely attacked the SGUC and summed up his attitude to the coalition thus: "miserable miserable miserable".
With unity like this who needs division?
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
That's a serious question, although part of it stems from my own drastic oversimplification. I didn't mean that one particular struggle will lead to a mass organisation, although I suppose that it could happen. I meant the general experience of collective struggle. Put it this way - general levels of working class struggle are higher now in Britain than they have been in some time, but they are still if you take a longer view at or near a low ebb. Without a rise in social struggle no mass organisation will come into being, one of the many reasons why we haven't just declared a new party.
I think what has happened recently in Germany is a useful pointer. If I can oversimplify drastically again, the WASG and the success of the Left Party came out of serious strike waves and a massive protest movement over the welfare state. Without all that, the ever rightward moving SPD might still have triggered a move amongst trade unionists to set up a new party but it could very easily have been stillborn.
I think what has happened recently in Germany is a useful pointer. If I can oversimplify drastically again, the WASG and the success of the Left Party came out of serious strike waves and a massive protest movement over the welfare state. Without all that, the ever rightward moving SPD might still have triggered a move amongst trade unionists to set up a new party but it could very easily have been stillborn.
JoePolitix said:
I know. It has been cited as a concrete example of the SP seriously working with others in a way they say they will in order to try to build the foundations of what could become a 'mass workers party.' I remain doubtful if the will is really there. I think the call is simply a propoganda statement aimed at winning recruits. I suspect that the SP realise that there is no current prospect of founding anything on the left electorally that could compete with Respect.
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
And I think that like most sectarians you wildly overestimate both the current importance of your organisation and the degree to which it is central to the plans of others. It wasn't so long ago that a couple of SWP leaders were astonishing the crowd at Socialism 2001 with their claims that the Socialist Alliance had established itself as the conduit through which left wing opposition to Blair would flow in an electoral sense. That was farcical then and I think your view of Respect's significance now is almost equally demented.
Pilgrim said:
they asked for an extension (to the already generous 6 month period) which allowed them up till Aug 30 to file accounts for 2004, the electoral commission on their website stated that all accounts received are put up on their site within the month of receiving them, so far there are still no accounts for respect there
if they can't keep track of the finances of their own organsiation how are they to be trusted with anything more widespread
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
All the best threads on uk p&p are lefty bunfights.
Nigel Irritable said:
You are right that struggle is (very) low. This years strike figures are much lower than last years. There has been a flurry of disputes just recently but the first six months of this year indicated the lowest strike levels on record. This year could end up having the lowest ever recorded strike days lost. Last year there was an upward blip assisted by PCS in the DWP and the one day CS wide strike. However, the number of individual disputes was the lowest on record.
This of course has to influence the way that revolutionaries operate.
However, it is only part of the picture. Earlier this year workers across the public sector voted for strikes that would have led to the biggest general strike since 1926. The battle was not put off because workers were not prepared to fight, but because union leaders feared confrontation.
In the DWP the executive put off a ballot for action over jobs despite clear evidence that workers would back a fight (the ballot is now to run in the weeks before Xmas)
In the Gate Gourmet dispute workers across BA showed willingness to strike unofficially in support, but were convinced into going back by union leaders who feared a fight.
Again and again workers are let down by their union leaders and the lack of confidence that allows the union leaders to stall a fight.
Against this the political unrest amongst workers is high, and on most issues most workers are to the left of the establishment line. Hence a recent and significant increase in numbers for most left organisations (though we are obviously not talking 1,000s with the possible exception of Respect). Building political oppsition is far more lucrative now than for many years.
oisleep said:
True.
I never had any confidence in RESPECT to start with. I was a Green when RESPECT were founded, and hearing the outright lies the RESPECT leadership were spreading about the Greens was enough to cause me to avoid RESPECT like the plague.
And while I am an AFer now, I'd be more likely to vote Green (if I had to vote) than I ever would RESPECT.
RESPECT is just a disaster waiting to happen, IMHO.
It isn't a question of IF RESPECT collapses amid a tide of sectarianism, backbiting and acrimony (religious and/or political). It has become a question of WHEN.
Although, to be fair, it has lasted longer than many people thought it would.
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