Papers: Weekly Worker: GallowsPapers: Weekly Worker: Gallows
Click above to turn pageMy first letter to the Weekly Worker, sent shortly before the historic million plus anti-war demonstration of February 15th 2003, and carried in the issue they sold on the day. My basic argument for left unity, and the thing I most wanted to say on the left. Everything else I was to write for the Worker was simply a footnote to this idea: in fact, I spent the next year and a half either failing to say it better, or getting distracted from saying it at all.
The original letter was perhaps twice as long, and the unprinted half waded into the ludicrous detail of the CPGB/AWL dispute. This was perhaps the only occasion on which I approved of the editor's cut: I was usually extremely precious about my prose. The title, "Gallows", was typical of the Worker's Private Eye-ish fondness for cryptic letter headings. I probably lost most readers to the letter immediately after my own, published under the title "Fellating".
I also sent a copy of this letter to the AWL's paper Solidarity. They didn't publish it at all. In fact, throughout my membership of the CPGB I was regarded (sometimes extremely suspiciously) as an AWL sympathiser - by everyone except the AWL. Despite several attempts, I never did succeed in getting a single word printed in Solidarity.
Click here to download Weekly Worker issue 467.
I have followed the discussions between the Alliance for Workers' Liberty and the Communist Party of Great Britain with a mixture of amusement and sadness. You may have heard the old saying that five socialists locked in a room together will form four parties and an entrist faction. I wish I could call it a slander, but it undoubtedly reflects an important truth about our movement.
Of course, it was always thus: why focus on this dispute in particular, when fragmentation has been such a common feature of our history? My particular feelings arise from my own background. Though politically active in my teens, I am a little ashamed to say that my commitment to a just society later found expression in merely delivering a few Labour leaflets and voting at election time. Even this small effort died when Blair dumped clause four.
It has taken the threat of a cynical war to awaken me from this complacency and disaffection. Aware that merely supporting an anti-war movement without also committing myself to political action aimed at opposing the causes of war would be an empty gesture, I decided it was time to rejoin a socialist organisation.
Unlike some, I suspect that there are still many sincere and conscious socialists within the Labour Party. To dismiss them, along with the leadership of the party, is to underestimate the enormous historical importance of the Labour Party, and the depth and solidity of its links with the working class. However, I could not subscribe to the party's programme or canvas support for it.
On the other hand, I worried about joining one of the many other parties on the left, simply because they didn't always manage to achieve quite the same passion in opposing capitalism as they did in denouncing each other. Complex and difficult areas of specific policy, about which any two sincere socialists working from the same basic principles might nevertheless honestly disagree, were presented as fundamental divisions. Comrade A would argue not merely that comrade B was wrong in his approach to, say, the problems faced by Israelis and Palestinians, but that comrade B's approach demonstrated that he was pro-imperialist, or Stalinist, or anti-semitic.
What must surely be painfully obvious to many of us is that the issues dividing our movement are so complicated that many working people with an instinctive understanding of the nature of our society and its injustices would have to undertake a considerable study of both history and political theory before they could even understand the issue dividing one party from another, let alone decide their own view. (I do not mean to patronise here: my own head is sometimes left spinning when I read the various accounts of factional dispute.) They are therefore faced with a serious obstacle to overcome before they can even begin to contribute to worthwhile political action, even if they can overcome the feeling that the multiplicity of small, socialist parties reduces them all to irrelevance.
This does not mean that I think either theory or history unimportant, nor that I think comrades should not discuss the application of socialist principles to the solving of particular problems for humanity. However, I do think that these debates should take place within a single organisation which recognises the common ground on which these discussions are based. Such an organisation would provide a clear alternative to Labour - both to disaffected comrades still within that party, and to the most politically conscious working people outside it.
I do not believe that such an organisation would be without principle. Indeed, I think it a higher application of principle and discipline to recognise the fraternity of those with whom we disagree over policy but whom we recognise as comrades in the overthrow of the foundation of our society of the private ownership of the means of production and the interests of a small, manipulative and oppressive ruling class. When socialists talk, they take much common ground for granted, and focus on what divides them. This is natural: a continual restatement of the 'socialist ABC' would be sterile. However, we should not allow this to lead us to forget that the 'socialist ABC' underlying both sides of the argument is, in itself, the basis of our whole movement. It matters more to defend our basic principles against those trying to fool working people into war or racism than it does to demonstrate the purest revolutionary credentials of any particular faction.
I believe the Socialist Alliance represents a recognition of that basic common principle. I was extremely sorry that the Socialist Party left the alliance and that many other parties, notably the Socialist Labour Party, never joined. This is particularly so, as much suspicion of the alliance seems to stem from a dislike of the role played within it by the Socialist Workers Party rather than any really fundamental difference in politics. I would appeal to comrades outside the alliance to support it once again.
I would also applaud the continued membership and support of the alliance by the AWL and CPGB. I have been impressed by the willingness of both organisations to grant space to each other and to other comrades outside their parties to express their views within their publications. I also note that both organisations have acknowledged that much of the debate between them has been constructive, and that there has been a certain convergence of their policies as a result. Here is real political principle in action.
It is for this reason that the increasingly acrimonious debate between the parties is so depressing. I confess, some of its wilder flights have raised a laugh: but it's gallows humour. We are fiddling while Rome, or rather the world, burns.
There seem to be two areas of dispute: one is policy, and the other a bizarrely drawn out row about the withdrawal of an invitation to comrade Matgamna of the AWL to speak to a meeting on 'Marxism and religion' in Leeds in September of last year.
The policy disputes are too complex to go into at the tail end of a letter, but I would say two things about them. Firstly, I do not believe that, when examined free from some of the invective and fanciful extrapolations into suspected motives, they are so fundamental as to undermine either party's status as a socialist organisation and therefore deserving of fraternal respect and cooperation. Secondly, I strongly suspect that they would not have become as prominent or heated had the parties not slipped down the slope of allowing a foolish confusion about a speaking engagement to turn into a major dispute.
Manny Neira
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