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The Socialist Alliance?

Udo Erasmus said:
do you not think that the disunity of small left groups is an obstacle to such?
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Yes of course but you would have to adress the likes of the SWp on that point

If you remember the SP was one of the founding organisations of the initial SAs - and remained central to that project for the first four years. As it has in other unity projects - like the growth of the SSP from Scottish Militant Labour and the poll tax campaign in Scotland. We believe in unity - but that has to be on a principled basis.

Udo Erasmus said:
I would also think that the French approach is right, any new formation would have to be explicitly anti-capitalist & genuinely democratic.
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Yep, huge step forward - each country has its specific histories - It is slightly different in Germany, Italy and Brazil for instance - but that general approach to building new left forces - definately. Rebuilding wider left movements that re-connect socialist ideas with the needs/wants of working people - met them where they are at.

I should add - naturally I still recognise what I see as the need for my own clear platform (my party) - then people know where we stand and what we have in common with other individuals and groupings. I do not see any contradiction between that and the building of the wider movement we are one part of. If I saw my parties interests clashing with wider working class interests I would leave that party - it would be failing in its tasks and no longer fit for purpose (as a vechile for distillation of ideas necessary for that wider movement not for the grouping over that wider movement). Our history - in Liverpool, in the poll tax and in the trade unions - particularly the recent disputes means I am still happy with my groups role at the moment.

In britain they are at a different place therefore the support for the No2EU electoral platform - recognising the need to break the trade unions from labour, build an independant working class voice and through this cut across divisive crap from the right - carefully - as achieved by the Lindsey strike leaders, turning that movement in a positive direction. They took what actually existed on the ground and turned it in a pro-working class direction. They did not stand aside.
 
No2EU is not an initiative of the RMT. It was cooked up by some stalinists on the exec (in alliance with a clapped out stalinist sect) in an underhand manner with no consultation of the members. It also explicitly calls for immigration controls and attacks EU immigrants. It's programme is saturated in nationalism. The SP have uncritically thrown their lots with this unprincipled stitch-up. No2EU will go nowhere and result in nothing because its programme doesn't connect in anyway with working class people. Any votes it gets will probably be on the basis of voters assuming that this is a UKIP type outfit.

The SP lost a democratic vote and stormed out of the Socialist Alliance in a tizzy, meaning that Alliance pretty much died as a consequence. Their approach has constantly been one of fear of that which they cannot dominate. So instead of building broad based working class resistance, you have a series of front-organisations like the youth/student organisation - ISR, the unemployed movement that only involves the SP - Youth against Jobs, instead of throwing themselves into building the Anti-Nazi League, the SP/Militant set up another front group that involved only . . them.
 
I definately think the Socialist Party's proposal for how to grow the Alliance, was far more exciting, and imaginative than their confusing though principled dogs dinner of a proposal on structure, if I remember correctly they explicitly said at the time (and so did McLaren in his proposal) that the Alliance would need to be open to affiliation from resident's and tenant's groups, union branches, and local campaigns, it was about formalising the principal method by which the Alliance had grown before the SWP joined. The idea behind the SP's proposals wasn't to give tiny trot sectlets like the CPGB undue power but to win affiliations from genuine working class organisations and give them a say in the running. While the SWP's proposal was about formalising the SA as a simple electoral front, and something that could be appealing to Labour lefts - rather than going for the thousands of working class people already working outside Labour they wanted the diminishing rump inside - encouraged by some admitted successes such as Newark Labour defecting enmasse to the SA, and of course Liz (where's she now?)Davies.

I don't think it's fair to accuse the SWP or SP of clashing because of egos, I think they actually had genuine political differences at the time, yes even the SWP.
 
Udo Erasmus said:
The SP lost a democratic vote and stormed out of the Socialist Alliance in a tizzy, meaning that Alliance pretty much died as a consequence.
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We shouldn't exaggerate the democratic nature of the 2001 SA conference, it was an open members meeting essentially there were no delegates, you could just turn up and register on the door, even join the SA on the door if you had to.

I don't think the meeting was flooded or anything, but it was badly organised and not as democratic as it should have been with branch delegates.
 
dennisr said:
Yep, huge step forward - each country has its specific histories - It is slightly different in Germany, Italy and Brazil for instance - but that general approach to building new left forces - definately. Rebuilding wider left movements that re-connect socialist ideas with the needs/wants of working people - met them where they are at.
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We are in agreement on the principled basis (albeit you forgetting principles of democracy, socialism and internationalism in jumping into bed with No2EU), it is clear that the far left has a stronger hand in France where trotsyist politicians are household names and electorally the combined vote of the far left has been 10% often.

Objectively, I think the possibilities for a socialist left in Britain are going to be stronger in this period with movement such as occupations and sit-ins and the question of class being posed in a sharper way than during the period of the Iraq War, this means an alliance can be more principled as it can arise out of grassroots class struggle.

However, I think we need safeguards to stop a repetition of the debacle of things like Respect which I would argue are a profoundly open democratic culture within any new formation rather than backroom maneuverings and domineering by trotskyist groups & a clear commitment to a rupture with capitalism, clear demarcations between a new formation, and things like the workers wage, commitment to open borders etc. A new formation would need to develop things like its own literature, discussion forums, public meetings where politics was hammered out openly and thrashed out

An anti-capitalist organisation of 20-30,000 members is not an impossibility in the next 5 years in Britain.
 
Udo Erasmus said:
An anti-capitalist organisation of 20-30,000 members is not an impossibility in the next 5 years in Britain.
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No chance. Seriously there is no evidence for this.

I do think that it might be possible (if the left, and anarchists take up the challange) to start to lay the foundations of a broadly progressive and militant working class fight back, if people who want that are engaging in their local communities, and in their workplaces and union branches, and attempting to draw these together - not with some abstract revolutionary theory, but by building concrete links between groups in struggle. I think there are tendencies emerging which provide some encouragement, as well as old hands like the IWCA, and Haringey Solidairty Group, and the Socialist Party, there's London Coalition Against Poverty, Liberty and Solidarity, and smaller initiatives like LeftLuggage blog and The Commune, and of course the RMT and individual union branches which are willing to not subsume their politics but to learn from mistakes, enter into dialogue with people from other traditions - and most importantly listen to what working class people are actually saying are our needs.

This is all promising, but I think the SA at it's brief high point offered the opportunity to do this a bit earlier, and I can't help but wonder where we'd be now if it had continued.
 
Udo Erasmus said:
http://www.no2eu.com/workersrights.html - admittedly a somewhat bizarre, rambling, unclear formulation
+ numerous reports of No2EU meetings where the CPB who run it have apparently explicitly called for immigration controls and made it clear that this is what No2EU stands for.
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This seems fairly clear:

The recent protests at Lindsey, supported by workers across Britain, were not against foreign workers or xenophobic. These workers were simply defending the fundamental right to work under union agreements – a right not given by EU directives or treaties.​

I'll just have to take your word for the 'numerous reports'.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice
 
Rod Sleeves said:
I don't think it's fair to accuse the SWP or SP of clashing because of egos, I think they actually had genuine political differences at the time, yes even the SWP.
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quite. i am surprised to see Dennis having to resort to an argument that it was all about 'structure' - what about the actual politics?

In practise, what difference would an SP-like structure have made to the SA? Not that much, imo. It would NOT have stopped the SWP walking away to form Respect, the groups that make up the current Socialist Alliance would still be the ones in the continued SA, it would have made absolutely no difference.

And the fact that the SWP also walked off in no way lets you off the hook for doing the same thing - you are ignoring one rather significant factor, as if nothing outside the world of 'structures' makes any difference. the external world changed. There was, you probably recall, a quite big war, one which could have helped changed the SA from a very very small lefty grouping into a not insignificant leftie grouping, with real support from all sorts of local organisations. Problem was ALL the trot groups simply buggerred off and did there own thing in the STWC at the time, and put the SA onto the back-burner. The SP would undoubtedly have done the same thing at the time. Off the back of the war came another opportunity for some left retrenchment, potentially involving a significant labour MP making a break to the left and trying to do so organsiationally as well as just personally - something the SP supported in vague principal, tho (rightly) rejected when the details came out. To be honest tho, its policies were overwhelmingly no worse than those of No2E.

What could have been different? Would the SP staying have made a big difference? In the end, probably not. Maybe you would have decided to help keep the SA going after the SWP left, tho I suspect you'd have written it off as having had its day and being a 'tarnished brand.' Maybe you could have used your experience of electoral campaigning to stop some of the embarassing candidatures that were nothing more than publicity stunts. Respect showed that actually even the SWP can listen to reason when they see there is something in it for them, and they are happy to make as many compromises as you are - it's just a question of who those compromises are made with. had there been a significant base of people within the SA who had been involved in simple, practical, union, campaign, and community campaigning then the organisation might well have survived the walkout of its largest component(s). Sadly, the SP's walking out put a significant block on that possibility coming about.

Cos ultimately, the failure of the SA wasn't about such apolitical matters as 'egos' or 'structures' it was about failing to meet the challenges of changing political times, and about the failure to meaningfully engage with the massive anti-war current and turn it into a fighting political force.
 
Udo Erasmus said:
http://www.no2eu.com/workersrights.html - admittedly a somewhat bizarre, rambling, unclear formulation
+ numerous reports of No2EU meetings where the CPB who run it have apparently explicitly called for immigration controls and made it clear that this is what No2EU stands for.
Click to expand...

what individual CPB members might or might not have said is nothing like the same as saying it is an explicit No2EU policy. And there is no such explicitness in the page you link to either.
 
belboid said:
Cos ultimately, the failure of the SA wasn't about such apolitical matters as 'egos' or 'structures' it was about failing to meet the challenges of changing political times, and about the failure to meaningfully engage with the massive anti-war current and turn it into a fighting political force.
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the two are very much related. I was in Preston and involved with the STWC, where the SWP first made a decisive turn to a one-sided unprincipled top-down lash up with the local muslim community leaders, first as "Socialist Alliance against the war" but this was the model that led the way with Respect (the SP had left by this stage).

[I distinctly remember an SAatw meeting with Lavallette, Rees, Yvonne Ridley (saying how wonderful the Taliban had been to hear and what a beuatiful religion they had) and an imam - it was miles from the centre of town, barely advertised except through friday prayers at the mosque, operated a strict gender segregation in the audience, had prayers to allah by way of introduction, and a young Iraqu girl felt she had to apologise for being dressed in "western" clothes and make up - such was the mood of the meeting]

There was a distinct turn away from the idea this was a socialist alliance - to the "united front of a special kind" ie. an alliance with 'socialists" ie. SWP in it alongside other liberals, religious groups and minorities. The structure allowed the SWP to abandon the project of a Socialist Alliance. The SP had the foresight to see the danger of putting that kind of structure in place.
 
First I look at what is missing from British politics. Then I look at what people suggest to fill the gaps. So far I don't see a match up. Until that time I don't expect anything to make a lot of difference.

There are plenty of left of centre ideologically led groups. Simply merging several of them adds nothing new and pretty much inevitably leads to something smaller than the sum of its parts. What we don't have is a grass roots based party or a genuinely democratic party. So in my view that's where it has to start.

Were I to try to start a movement to fill the gap on the left of British politics I'd start from setting a commitment to internal party democracy and open debate, and a very few fairly broad political principles. I'd also suggest that NO existing groups should be encouraged to join initially. It should start from people operating as individuals within a democratic structure. The factions will form soon enough, no point giving factionalism a head start.
 
articul8 said:
the two are very much related. I was in Preston and involved with the STWC, where the SWP first made a decisive turn to a one-sided unprincipled top-down lash up with the local muslim community leaders, first as "Socialist Alliance against the war" but this was the model that led the way with Respect (the SP had left by this stage).

[I distinctly remember an SAatw meeting with Lavallette, Rees, Yvonne Ridley (saying how wonderful the Taliban had been to hear and what a beuatiful religion they had) and an imam - it was miles from the centre of town, barely advertised except through friday prayers at the mosque, operated a strict gender segregation in the audience, had prayers to allah by way of introduction, and a young Iraqu girl felt she had to apologise for being dressed in "western" clothes and make up - such was the mood of the meeting]

There was a distinct turn away from the idea this was a socialist alliance - to the "united front of a special kind" ie. an alliance with 'socialists" ie. SWP in it alongside other liberals, religious groups and minorities. The structure allowed the SWP to abandon the project of a Socialist Alliance. The SP had the foresight to see the danger of putting that kind of structure in place.
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what ever structure the SA had, the SWP could have done exactly those things if they wanted to. It's an utter misnomer to say they couldn't have.
 
They could have, of course, but in doing so they wouldn't necessarily have managed to drag the SA down into the shit along with them, or put the wider project on hold in favour of the new "united front".
 
Of course they could have. 'Preston SA' would still have voted to support such a much, so the meeting could be held by 'Preston SA', and, as I'm sure you noticed, the large majority of Preston SA DID go along with it, and followed Lavalette into Respect.

The 'structures' argument is all but irrelevant
 
well the argument about structures was itself a result of trying to hold together a group of disparate sects and inviduals in the absence of any level of mass support
 
belboid said:
you don't remember correctly. The SA was actually bigger after the SP walked away. Recruited more members, won more votes, won its only seat.
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This actually isn't true. The Socialist Alliance's largest formal membership was in late 2001, it went down consistently from there and from a little way into 2002 on local branches started shutting rapidly - Lambeth for instance went from three Socialist Alliances in late 2001, to one that didn't really function at the end of 2002. By the time the Respect debacle was even being discussed in the background, the Socialist Alliance was already a barely operative SWP front.

It is also untrue to say, as you do in a later post, that "the majority" of Socialist Alliance independents preferred the SWP's constitution to that proposed by the Socialist Party. The actual voting numbers from the 2001 conference show that very few independents voted for either constitution. They overwhelmingly voted instead for a federal option put forward by Pete McLaren. This was the option that the Socialist Party gave it's second preference votes to and would, like any of the proposals other than an unamended version of the one put forward by the SWP, would have kept us in the Socialist Alliance.

The SWP were mounting a hostile takeover, plain and simple. Either, the Socialist Alliance would continue as a federal organisation, with rights for minority strands of opinion and an orientation towards groups of workers in struggle, or it would become an SWP front. Unfortunately a few desperate halfwits (notably the ISG and the handful of tame independents the SWP was then cultivating*) were so desperate to keep the SWP happy that they confused a takeover with steps towards the kind of unified party they craved.

The SWP's takeover wasn't just to be opposed on organisational and democratic grounds - although those are important - but also on political grounds. Under SWP influence the SA had already started to take sectarian actions - like insisting on standing against the Campaign Against Tube Privatisation and on standing an SA candidate against a Hackney Council shopstewards candidate.

This wasn't simply SWP control-freakery, but also represented a quite insane political perspective that they were putting forward at the time that the SA had established itself as the conduit through which opposition to New Labour would flow. Bullying groups of workers to join or get out of the way was to become part of the SA's m.o. and when the SWP got impatient and pissed off to form Respect, that organisation behaved in a similar manner. That happened on a small scale as when they tried to force some tenant activists in Southwark into joining if they didn't want a Respect candidate standing against them and it happened on a much larger scale when the then unified Respect told Bob Crow to piss off when he mooted standing RMT candidate in the London elections.

This quite misunderstands how a genuine workers alternative will be built. It won't happen as a result of the small forces of the left placing premade structures in front of workers and then trying to herd them through. It will be created by workers themselves, moving into struggle. The left has a role to play, in putting forward socialist arguments and arguments for a political alternative and even in taking various initiatives that might help speed the process along, but we can't mistake ourselves and our small organisations for the working class as a whole. The argument about structures was a reflection of these entirely different conceptions of the way forward, with the SWP on one side and the Socialist Party on the other.

* Should Marquesee, Wrack, Davies, Thornett or any of the other "independents" and ISG types then allied with the SWP be reading this, let me take the opportunity to say once again... We fucking told you so.
 
handful of tame independents the SWP was then cultivating
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sadly it wasn't just the people you mention that were lambasted in such a manner, there were many others as well (the 'flotsam and jetsam' as the CPGB called us), and it ws just such an attitude that made many think 'fuck you, you're just as bad' about the SP.

Your recollection re membership figures is also wrong, yes it went down when the SP left, as you would expect. But it rose again (the not massively) in the next couple of years. I am sure those areas where the SP dominated saw a significant fall in activity, and in bracnhes, but, again, of course they would do when the main organisation pulls out!

At least you make an attempt at politicising the structure debate, tho not a succesful one. Under whatever structures were agreed, Hackney SA would have been fully entitled to stand its own candidates against the Tube Workers. that mistake is down to wider political failures not structural ones. Had, say, Lambeth SA, still with an SP presence, said 'we are going to fully support the CATP and not stand candidates under our own name' it would even have been possible to show which was the better strategy, with simple and straight forward facts, figures, and votes to back the argument up.

The SP's Crystal Ball however meant that that was never properly tested.
 
Udo Erasmus said:
No2EU is not an initiative of the RMT. It was cooked up by some stalinists on the exec (in alliance with a clapped out stalinist sect) in an underhand manner with no consultation of the members. It also explicitly calls for immigration controls and attacks EU immigrants. It's programme is saturated in nationalism. The SP have uncritically thrown their lots with this unprincipled stitch-up. No2EU will go nowhere and result in nothing because its programme doesn't connect in anyway with working class people. Any votes it gets will probably be on the basis of voters assuming that this is a UKIP type outfit.

The SP lost a democratic vote and stormed out of the Socialist Alliance in a tizzy, meaning that Alliance pretty much died as a consequence. Their approach has constantly been one of fear of that which they cannot dominate. So instead of building broad based working class resistance, you have a series of front-organisations like the youth/student organisation - ISR, the unemployed movement that only involves the SP - Youth against Jobs, instead of throwing themselves into building the Anti-Nazi League, the SP/Militant set up another front group that involved only . . them.
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You can take Udo out of the SWP but it'll take a lot longer to take the SWP out of Udo.

This was a diatribe. You are not interested in the questions raised. I am not going to play the stupid game of answering one lie after another with a political idiot. You think you are making political points but in reality you expose precisely the 'ego' politics you were decrying above. You are just another idiot who does fuck all.

Do show me where these "calls for immigration controls and attacks EU immigrants" are - show me given you are such an expert on the matter (read it somewhere did you??)
 
Udo Erasmus said:
However, I think we need safeguards to stop a repetition of the debacle of things like Respect which I would argue are a profoundly open democratic culture within any new formation rather than backroom maneuverings and domineering by trotskyist groups & a clear commitment to a rupture with capitalism, clear demarcations between a new formation, and things like the workers wage, commitment to open borders etc. A new formation would need to develop things like its own literature, discussion forums, public meetings where politics was hammered out openly and thrashed out
Click to expand...

What safeguards like the ones abandoned by many in the SA?

I just don't understand how you can one min come out with vicious slander and the next expect me to engage with points that are in practice a repeat of what I have said throughout the thread.

I am mightly pissed off about you 'racist' slander

Come back when you've grown up a bit or at least treat people as they try and treat you
 
belboid said:
Cos ultimately, the failure of the SA wasn't about such apolitical matters as 'egos' or 'structures' it was about failing to meet the challenges of changing political times, and about the failure to meaningfully engage with the massive anti-war current and turn it into a fighting political force.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't argue that this is 'just about structures' beyond pointing out that the SP - which others claim helped to cause the problem by leaving were not the ones that opened the SAs up to the resulting abuse of the organisation. Some of those pointing the finger should look closer at their own roles. Yes, we do have fundamental political differences - in outlook, in appraoch, in out view of our relationship to the wider working class.

I agree with your point about the Iraq war changing the landscape. We also had discussions with Galloway - we found the potential 'alliance' there wanting. BUT before the Iraq war the situation was that this was going to be turned into an SWP plaything to be switched on and off at will. As it was.

We had nothing to gain being in that structure - we could not see any movement coming out of that that was bigger than a meeting of paper sellers. We moved back to the 1-2s of local work because we could not see the SAs developing - new forces would not be welcomed - those community and tu campaigners we all talk about - they would either have to join the dominant SWP view or leave disollusioned.

Lets remember - it only took a year before the SAs were closed down on the vote of the SWP in effect. I that proves us right - I'm not crowing about it, I think it was a another setback. In the meantime we pick ourselves up and move forward to more efective work.

The role the SWP played with Respect in the wake of the war was - frankly, worse. A completely wasted opportunity.
 
dennisr said:
Lets remember - it only took a year before the SAs were closed down on the vote of the SWP in effect. I that proves us right
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but it wasn't only a year. Fer sure the SA's were a lot quieter as all the other groups did their own thing (as you would have, as the federalist structure would have just as easilly accomodated), but it was longer than that before the SA was shut down.

(all your other points i think we've done before, and almost to death)
 
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