Papers: Weekly Worker: Democracy PlatformPapers: Weekly Worker: Democracy Platform
Click above to turn pageThe event complained of in this letter was a genuine shock to me on two fronts.
Firstly, it heralded the CPGB's change in course. Clearly, it had been decided that the group's focus should now be on Respect, and the old Socialist Alliance was irrelevant. Indeed, what the letter doesn't say is that John's nominal grounds for walking out of the DPSA were so absurd that it even crossed my mind that he had attended the meeting looking for grounds to withdraw, or had at least leapt at the opportunity when it presented itself.
Secondly, and more importantly, though, it demonstrated that the group's leaders felt they could make policy on the hoof. His walkout was not urgent: he could have raised his objection personally, and then proposed withdrawal to meeting of our members. I was not the only comrade who complained.
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As a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, I was dismayed to learn that John Bridge led a walkout by our contingent to the recent meeting of the Democracy Platform of the Socialist Alliance.
He gave the reason that the group decided to allow non-Socialist Alliance members to vote, and by doing so became an independent political organisation rather than a platform within the SA. As it happens, I think this is daft. The DPSA was formed precisely to oppose the anti-democratic, anti-socialist trajectory that the SA was being dragged into by the Socialist Workers Party. It aimed to defend the politics of People before profit, to campaign for democracy within the SA and to campaign for the creation of a new workers' party. Some of those who left the SA did so precisely because they were unhappy with the SWP's leadership, and were therefore natural allies of the platform. The DPSA should have organised all of those who supported its aims, including those who felt forced out of the SA by precisely the drift they were opposing.
However, this is not my main concern. Even if comrade Bridge was correct in opposing the opening up of the platform, he was wrong to walk out on losing the vote. Even if the platform had qualitatively changed its nature, it remained a united front of socialist organisations still committed to a democratic, partyist perspective that the CPGB has long supported. Indeed, throughout its sponsorship of the DPSA, our group has also been a member of the M3 committee, a group which brought together most of the same forces, but which was never tied to SA membership. The M3 included a number of groups and individuals who had met first on May 3 to organise support for democratic and partyist resolutions at the 2003 SA conference. It is true that the CPGB later argued that the M3 should wind itself up and concentrate on the DPSA, but it did not withdraw from membership on the 'principle' that it could not support a group which did not stipulate SA membership as a precondition of involvement.
Indeed, on this point comrade Bridge's move seems singularly perverse. I have long argued that the CPGB should be playing an active part in building a campaign for a new workers' party, and cooperating with other groups to do so: but the party has instead adopted a passive 'wait and see' approach to political developments. It was therefore left to Steve Freeman of the tiny Revolutionary Democratic Group to cohere the M3, and make strenuous and indeed heroic efforts not only to navigate a way through the political differences of its main sponsors, the CPGB and the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, but to involve others, such as Workers Power and the Socialist Party. The project was doomed by the lukewarm approach which united the CPGB and the AWL even when nothing else did, and the perspective that the M3 was, in any case, reduced to irrelevance by the DPSA. However, at precisely the point when the DPSA was taking on the wider, united front perspective of the M3, the CPGB walked out. Having described arguments over the SA as "haggling over a corpse", it seems bizarre that we should suddenly attach absolute importance to the DPSA being purely a limb of that corpse.
Personally, I think that we are right to critically engage with Respect: the SWP remains the largest national revolutionary group, and Respect will win some support, given the absence of a genuinely socialist working class voice. I am also pleased that we have again begun addressing the issue of work in the Labour Party, which retains the affiliation of most trade unions and many individual socialists. But I remain convinced that we must work too with those who were or are supporters of the SA: the AWL, Workers Power, the Socialist Party, and those individual SA activists who remain committed to the project of building a new workers' party based not around the petty sectarian ideology of an individual group, but the objective interests of the working class (and, through them, humanity) and the method of genuine, democratic centralism.
Manny Neira
Surrey