Respect: take your pick

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I didn't go to either the 'official' Respect conference or the 'Respect Renewal' rally on Saturday. Nor did most members of Respect. Even on the highest estimates of the numbers attending, there were no more than 600 or so shared between the two events, with Andrew Murray of the Stop the War Coalition, Sami Ramadani of Iraqi Democrats Against the War and Derek Wall of the Green Party among a small group of hardy souls who attended both.

Cheerleaders for each side nonetheless regarded the turnouts as triumphs for their respective groupings. The Socialist Unity blog, for example, saw the Respect Renewal gathering as a 'huge success . . . with a truly representative cross section, young and old, men and women, black and white and Asian, Muslim and christian [the blogger's choice on which words to capitalise, by the way] and those of no faith, socialists from different traditions.' There was, apparently, 'a general mood of optimism, and also a realism about the tasks ahead, and the need to reach out and make new friendships, and alliances.'

There's another rash of 'ra-ra-ra' triumphalism about Respect Renewal on the Mac Uaid blog, as well as a report, of sorts, on the Respect conference.

Lenin's Tomb, meanwhile, is a pillar of optimism from the other side. Lenin saw Respect as 'very alive' and produced detailed accounts of a range of conference speakers to prove it, including Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the PCS union. Serwotka managed to attend two other left-wing gatherings in London that same day, those of the Labour Representation Committee and the Socialist Party, but boycotted Respect Renewal on the gorunds that George Galloway and friends are 'witch-hunting socialists'.

There are further detailed reports, on both the Respect conference and the Renewal rally, on the Socialist Worker website, but by now I expect you've lost whatever revolutionary fire was in your belly and could do with some light relief. Whatever you do, don't start reading the comments on these blogs or you'll lose the will to live. Not so much how many angels can dance on a pinhead as how many people the Bishopsgate Institute is permitted to accommodate in 'theatre-style seating'.

Mark Steel, the SWP and Respect

One of my abiding memories of radical left activism in the UK came at the fag end of the 1984-85 miners' strike. It was a bitterly cold February morning - even London was snowbound - and I'd joined a mass picket of a coal-fuelled power station.

The strike was beginning to fray at the edges; even previously solid pits were seeing the first trickle of strikers back to work. Men who had given their all, exhausted all they'd got, physically and emotionally, were being driven to think the unthinkable.

We knew in our hearts that the strike was close to being broken. The coal stocks at the power stations had remained dispiritingly high. Electricity supplies had continued uninterrupted. If we couldn't shut down a single power station, or bring about a single power cut, even during the worst cold snap of the winter, what hope would there be with the onset of spring?

And then I heard the NUM leader, Arthur Scargill, and the leader of the Labour left, Tony Benn, rallying the troops. One last heave was the gist of their message. The coal stocks were about to run out, they said explicity. The coal board and the government was on the verge of defeat. Two weeks later it was all over: there wasn't even enough strength left in the movement to negotiate the terms of our surrender.

Now I'm sure Scargill and Benn didn't see their rallying cries as dishonest, but that is certainly what they were. And I've felt ever since that one of the major failings of the left, in Britain and worldwide, has been its failure to acknowledge the scale of the defeats it has suffered over the past few decades. Those defeats have been both tactical and strategic, practical and intellectual. And few people who have remained true to any kind of alternative socialist vision of society have been honest enough to admit as much.

It doesn't really matter whether this is self-deception or outright lies. Until the left has the intellectual honesty to face up to the scale of its many defeats and failings, it doesn't have a hope in hell of moving beyond them.

From time to time, I come across people who define themselves as being of the left who have the personal and political honesty to confront these issues. Among others, I've found the Red Pepper bloggers Pennyred and Probablyblonde to be a breath of fresh air in this respect. And now, too, I can add the Socialist Workers Party stalwart, author and comedian Mark Steel to my list. The following is how he opens a commentary for the SWP internal bulletin about, among much else, the current split in Respect. It's such a refreshing read that I've posted the whole commentary on the Red Pepper forum.

Ah, the British left - what do we do to ourselves?

When I joined the SWP in 1978 I was instantly impressed by so many aspects of its ideas and methods. But one of the most decisive sides to its character was its honesty. We were proud of what we could achieve and what we could influence, but wary of the exaggerations. In particular, Tony Cliff exhibited an almost impudent scepticism towards any stories that appeared too glorious to be true. But one result of this outlook was that every success reported, no matter how apparently tiny, was genuine and a source of enormous pride.

How desperately we need a return to that honesty today. For by whatever criteria you wish to use, our party has shrunk to a shadow of the size it was even a few years ago. In many areas where the SWP once represented a chaotic pump of activity that connected with all that was vibrant, energetic and rebellious in the city, now the meetings are tiny, bereft of anyone under forty and attended out of duty. Not many years ago, in most towns you were never far from a line of hastily slapped-up Socialist Worker posters, so they were almost an accepted part of any city centre, and there must be people who supposed the council was obliged to ensure they stayed up, on grounds of maintaining local heritage. But you'd have to conduct a diligent search now to find anything of the sort ...

Full article

Is the left psychologically flawed?

This week’s edition of Socialist Worker contains several articles, a column by Alex Callinicos and an editorial about the crisis in Respect. As you might expect, the SWP puts it down to an ‘underlying left-right political split’, with George Galloway and company cast in the role of the Mensheviks (‘patronage politics aimed at electing a few big names’) to the SWP’s Bolsheviks ‘true to [Respect’s] original vision as a radical left-wing party with appeal across the working class’.

If only it was so simple …

Alex Callinicos is at least right in his assessment that ‘what has been happening in Respect is very far from being unique’. As he points out, ‘Right across Europe the radical left is in crisis.’ He might have added that, right across the world, and throughout political history, the radical left has rarely been out of crisis.

There is something endemic to left politics about this state of permanent upheaval. Divisions often coalesce around particular individuals (George Galloway in Respect and Tommy Sheridan in the Scottish Socialists are only the latest in a long line in both the UK and internationally), while those on either side insist on the importance of key principles and politics.

But it’s hard to escape the feeling that when something is repeated so often and in so many different circumstances, both historically and geographically, something else is going on. Part of the explanation, no doubt, is to do with the impotence of opposition (though the left has never been noted for its unity when in positions of power). And the SWP is right in identifying a common theme in what’s happening to the radical left Europe-wide that boils down to the old left dichotomy between revolution and reform – or, less grandly, as it applies today, between a focus on extra-parliamentary activity or electoral politics.

But I can’t help feeling that there’s a more emotional, or psychological, explanation underlying so much of this sort of thing. Is the left psychologically flawed? No more so than any other current in human thought and behaviour, in my opinion – but then that’s not saying much, is it?

Praise George Galloway and pass the samosas

Nick Cohen, in a fit of literal-mindedness, has accused me of being too literal-minded to get the joke about his ‘Bring Back Blair’ Facebook group. But if you really want a laugh at the expense of literal-mindedness, you should pop over to Harry’s Place, where Dave Dudley, ‘Editor, Leninist Vanguard, writing in a personal capacity’, has set the cat among the literal pigeons with his ‘Defend Respect’ posting.

The piece is an obvious spoof. Well you’d have thought so:

‘I am aware that some of our comrades in Leninist Vanguard have been alarmed by George [Galloway]’s recent derogatory comments about ‘Leninists’ in Respect but I can assure you, having spoken personally with George about this, he was not referring to any of us. I quote: ‘No, don’t worry about it Dave, you’re a good lad.’ In fact George bought me a samosa as we walked back from the Tower Hamlets branch meeting – a clear signal that the alliance we have forged remains strong.’

This is in addition to the references to the ‘Zionist SWP’ ‘gyrating at Israeli jazz festivals’, homosexuality as a ‘bourgeois deviation’ and Respect ‘taking on and defeating New Labour across its heartlands, bringing millions on to the streets to oppose imperialism [and] forging deep and lasting links between class conscious workers and the massed ranks of Celebrity Big Brother viewers.’

But the legions of the literal-minded have leapt in from left, right and centre to protest at the ‘odious views’ expressed. There’s someone pointing out that Lenin was ‘as big a murderer as Hitler and Stalin’. There’s a complaint about allowing Dave Dudley to ‘spout totalitarian rubbish’. There’s even a Zionist defence of the SWP in there, which is surely a first, as well as what must be the worst excuse for missing a joke that has ever been made: ‘In my defence, I didn’t actually read the post.’

The best bits are when those commenting don’t spot the parodies of the parody. ‘Whether he exists or not is a diversion from the key question: why is the contemptible Dave Dudley given a platform here to air his odious views, whether he has any or not?’ says one poster. ‘I was wondering that myself,’ replies another. ‘I’ve not really been following this particular story but what's all this shit doing on your blog, exactly?’

Praise George Galloway and pass the samosas.

'Nuff Respect

History repeats itself, as Marx almost said, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. With the 90th anniversary of the Russian revolution almost upon us, what used to be the tragedy of the left’s propensity for splitting has long since descended into the most predictable of farces.

Hot on the heels of the Tommygate sex libel reducing the Scottish Socialist Party to an embittered laughing stock, the SSP’s southern cousins in Respect are repeating the trick. This time it’s the Socialist Workers Party versus George Galloway (who knows a bit about sex libels himself, if you check the archives) that’s defining the battle lines.

Like all those historical splits on the left, the main parties to the argument will claim that there’s some deep and irreconcilable political principle that’s driving the divisions (the SWP likes to see it as a ‘witch-hunt of socialists’). But it’s difficult from the outside to see it as anything more than the latest example of the terminal failure of a certain category of leftist ever to find sufficient common ground to do anything without the ruthlessness of a Lenin to make it happen.

The left blogosphere is stuffed full with what passes for debate, if you’ve the time to follow it in detail. One of the more illuminating discussions, as is often the case, can be found on the Socialist Unity blog – a name, incidentally, that passes further into the realm of wishful thinking with every new comment that is added. Try Jerry Hicks’ letter of resignation from the SWP, for example, for a cogent explanation of his take on events (which has attracted 200 or so comments, at the time of writing).

Harry’s Place enjoys its usual schadenfraude at the expense of Respect, the SWP, George Galloway and his Muslim allies (killing at least four sitting ducks with one stone there). A hat-tip to Harry, too, for this link to Ray Grange and the late Joe Strummer discussing revolution and the SWP (plus the Clash playing an Anti-Nazi League rally) back in the late 1970s:



The Clash in Rudeboy

Harry’s Place also has what could well be my favourite comment of all offering background to the Respect split. Written by ‘Simon B’, it’s referring to Alan Thornett, a veteran leftist of the revolutionary Trotskyist persuasion who’s lined up with Galloway’s faction – for now:

I'm not an AWL member, but an ex-member, I'm also too young to have first hand experience of Thornett in the same group (the WSL as it then was). But briefly this is the history as I understand it.

Thornett led an opposition in the WRP in the 1970s and when expelled started his own group, the WSL, which went on to merge with the I-CL (led by among others the current leaders of the AWL).

I do know that the split was partly about the Falklands war when Thornett supported the military junta and what is now the AWL opposed both sides, but also that Thornett thought that everyone else should defer to him because he and his mates were the 'proper workers' and the rest were all posh.

Aside from this being untrue - Sean Matganma, for example, was a docker before becoming a full-time activist - it is also a ridiculous way of operating.

There was a pamphlet about the debates and the split with Thornett called 'The Worker Leader Against Marxism' which detailed all this. I've no idea where my copy is and it is sadly not online.

Thornett merged with what was left of the IMG and formed the ISG, which was, and still is, the British section of the USFI. The ISG consists of, I'd generously guess, about 50 people, and until now has been the SWP's good cop in Respect. They are now assuming the role of Galloway's court jesters.

By the way, anyone bemused by all the acronyms I mentioned should just count themselves lucky that they don't know what they mean and get on with their life.