Workers Power: While socialists and anti-imperialists must continue to demand the immediate. total and unconditional with- drawal of all Israeli forces from the territories occupied in 1967, we should not delude ourselves or others that this in itself is the solution of the conflict. It is no more than a necessary condition in which a solution can be reached. Such a solution must include implementation of practi- cal measures to enable Palestinians to realise their right to return; dismantlement of the discriminatory Zionist struc- ture of the state of Israel, and abolition of all racist legisla- tion; and massive international aid to assist in the rebuild- • a New Road to Nowhere Should revolutionaries be arguing for the full revolutionary programme in this period? Alan Thornett looks at Workers Power's call for the Fifth International in the context of the crisis of New Labour. Following the mass anti-war movement against war in Iraq, revolutionary socialists are living through a period of the greatest opportunities for many years, probably since the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Blairites are in their biggest crisis since coming to office. There is now an urgent need for unity amongst the left to step up the process of building broad political parties which can fill the gap which has opened to the left of social democracy. This urgent need, however, does not mean that the various left organisations automatically draw the same conclu- sions. Far from it. In fact we have seen different groups moving in various directions. As these opportunities have opened up, so has the debate. The Socialist Alliance has rightly responded by calling issuo_001 autumn, 2003 Socialist_Outlook ing of the shattered Palestinian economy: society and infrastructure. Such a future state would be secular. giving equal rights for all religious. ethnic and linguistic minorit! communities. Neither a one-state nor a two-state approach is sufficiert ir itself. Regimes are more important than borders. The are- lition of Zionist institutions is the issue. The read tacie. which becomes ever clearer, is between colonials?. and liberation, between socialism and barbarism. for wider unity on the left and has launched a campaign for a realignment of the left around next year's elections. It seems an obvious move in the circumstances, but not everyone agrees. The Communist Party of Britain (CPB), for example, having initially responded favourably to such a proposal have pulled back, following the decision of the trade union left at the Campaign Group conference to campaign to reclaim Labour. The Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL) have moved partly in the same direction. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP), whilst strongly supporting Social- ist Alliance policy seem to have decided, controversially, to exert more control inside the Alliance and to act against officers at national and local level who did not support the new policy. The result was the packing of the Birmingham Alliance AGM followed by a clash at the July National Council of the Alliance over it. The National Council was marred by a sectarian over-reaction by some of the organi- sations and independents. A Pre-revolutionary Situation? But the most dramatic shift has been that by Workers Power (WP). It drew the conclusion that we were (and are) on the verge of a worldwide pre-revolutionary situ- ation, and the time has therefore come to junk the whole approach of building broad parties. Such a position had obvious implications for Workers Power's role inside the Socialist Alliance, which does not, at this stage, have a full revolutionary programme, and is precisely designed to bring together both revolutionary socialists and those who
•1 O Socialist_Outlook autumn, 2003 issue_001 have not yet drawn such conclusions. Workers Power resigned from the True to this logic, Alliance at the July National Council. Unfortunately it was not an honest resignation. Instead of pointing out that their position was now incompatible with the basic idea of the Alliance, Mark Hoskisson presented it as the outcome of the Birmingham events and the defeat of the Workers Power resolution on those events. It was nothing of the sort. Their resolution argued that the Alliance was about to form a cross-class alliance, via a peace and justice campaign, with non-socialist and non-working class forces Alliance. The resolution implied that they would leave the Alliance if it was voted down, and that is exactly what happened. The resolution defeated, Workers Power members promptly distributed a pre-prepared leaflet justifying the resignation. It said nothing about Birmingham and the other debates at the National Council but a lot about how only a full revolutionary programme fits the bill in today's conditions. It repeated the allegations that the Alliance was about to become a popular front. This is completely dis- honest. Nothing of the sort has ever been proposed inside the Alliance. This leftist turn of Workers Power is not new but the completion of a previous logic. In fact Workers Power have held an ambiguous position inside the Alliance, on the nature of its programme, for a long time. They have argued that the Alliance should have a full revolutionary exactly when but have been ambiguous on programme this should be adopted. They had been prepared to be in a minority on this along with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Now they have decided to end the ambiguity and say that it must have a full revolutionary programme immediately or it is irrelevant. Their resignation leaflet berates the SWP, AWL and the International Socialist Group (ISG) for falling to support VIEWPOINT SUMMER 2003 INTERNATIONAL SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE CAPETAL Fourth nternational such a position. It says: Their objection is simple. How can we attract mass forces from the reformist Labour Party if we adopt a revolutionary policy? Should we not reach a more limited agreement first? This argument, which sounds so realistic at first sight, is in fact a council of despair. It assumes that mass forces cannot be won from reform to a revolutionary policy. Every attempt to make headway by presenting a halfway house programme to the working class has ended up strengthening reformism. Workers Power, May, 2003 Nor is it just the Socialist Alliance it rubbishes on this basis. It says the following about the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), 'The SSP is seen by some as the model we should adopt. But it is marred by fundamentally the same opportunist approach. It presents a reformist programme to the workers, holding out the illusion that socialism can be built through a majority in the Scottish Parliament.' This is a sectarian slur on the SSP. It does not have a reformist programme at all. It has a class struggle, action programme incorporating all the main demands of a socialist programme - short of the revolutionary overturn. That is as it should be. Like the Alliance, if it were to adopt a full revolutionary programme it would reduce itself down to its revolutionary components, and that would be the end of it. Broad Socialist Parties The point of such formations today is that they can be broad socialist parties with the revolutionaries organ- ised within them. They can unite the revolutionaries with broader forces and increase their influence. This is exactly what the SSP with the International Socialist Movement (ISM) and others within it has been able to do. To den- igrate this achievement is to miss the whole point of the period we are in and how revolutionaries can relate to it. International Viewpoint Monthly review of news and analysis from the Fourth International The summer issue includes the documents of 15th World Congress 10 issues by airmail only £30 (UK). First time subscribers £22.50 - 25% discount. For all non-UK subscription rates contact: [email protected] Cheques made payable to International Veiwpoint PO Box 112, Manchester M12 5DW, UK
Arguing that a party like the SSP should adopt a full rev- olutionary programme is a task for the day when the vast bulk of the party can be won to such a perspective, not when it would simply divide and force out those who do not yet agree with this programme. It is clear that we are not at this point today. In fact today the conditions for building broad formations like the SA and the SSP are maturing rapidly. We are not (unfortunately) approaching a pre-revolutionary situation, but rather an intensified crisis of social democracy, in the shape of New Labour. and a deepening crisis of labour representation. The need therefore is precisely for broad parties, which can contain both revolutionaries (individual and organised) and non-revolutionaries. Fifth International The other element of Workers Power's ultra left turn is their bizarre call for a Fifth International, again presented as a response to an imminent pre-revolutionary situation. This call was made at the recent conference of the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (LRCI) of which Workers Power is the dominant organisation. With delegates from five countries and a total membership of a couple of hundred the LRCI changed its name to Com- mittee for the Fifth International. In the May edition of Workers Power it produced a declaration: 'Forward to the formation of a Fifth International - a new global party of social revolution'. 'This is no mere dream. The anti-capitalist It goes on, workers have done it four times before. We can do it again. If we learn from the past, we can build on the successes of the first four Internationals, avoid the errors that led to their defeat, and build a Fifth International to organise our global victory'. But the first four workers' internationals represented key developments or turning points in world politics, not a 'good idea' by a couple of hundred people scattered across the globe who have lost touch with reality. The First International of 1868-1874, the International Working Men's (sic) Association, was an attempt by Marx and Engels to define and internationalise the independent interests of the working class. The Second International emerged out of the development of mass social democratic parties in Europe and their need to act at an international level. The Third International came out of the betrayal of the Second International on the outbreak of the First World War and the victorious October revolution in the Russia. It was seen as the general staff of the international working class. The Fourth International was founded after the destruction of the October revolution and the bureaucratisa- tion of the Russian party by Stalinism. It was launched with the authority of Trotsky as a central leader of the Bolshevik revolution and the main opponent to the rise of Stalinism. The Workers Power call is a classic sectarian proposal. It means, as far as they are concerned, that all the other organ- isations in the world who adhere in one way or another to the Trotskyist tradition are politically dead: they have degenerated into centrism, vascillating between reform and issue_001 autumn, 2003 Socialist_Outlook revolution. The only revolutionary forces left on the planet are in Workers Power and its handful of small groups in other countries. A bleak prospect indeed. They rubbish all others who regard themselves as a part of the Trotskyist tradition, including the Fourth International/ United Secretariat of the Fourth International (FI/USFI) and the Socialist Workers Party/International Social- ist Tendency (SWP/IST). Workers Power put it this way: 'These vestiges of the Fourth International follow a policy which in the history of the movement has been called centrist. These organisations are revolutionary in words but prove unable to chart a consistent revolutionary course independent of the bureaucratic apparatuses' They are profoundly wrong. It is true that Trotskyism strug- gled to survive in its early years. It was faced with a for- midable task after the Second World War with Stalinism holding state power over a third of the globe, and social democracy growing out of the post-war boom on the basis of welfarism and the mixed economy. But it did carry forward the message of revolutionary Marxism and pre- served it in an organised form. This was a major contribu- tion despite the ongoing disunity of the movement. Today, in the first part of the 21st century, with the Soviet Union gone and Stalinism in the West in a state of terminal decline Trotskyism is faced with big new opportunities. This was clear by the end of the 1990s as the far left began to take the ground previously occupied by Stalinism and left social democracy. In France last year openly Trotsky- ist parties won three million votes, eclipsing the French CP in the presidential elections. Already French Trotsky- ists had won five seats in the European Parliament. At the same time, it should be noted, the comrades of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR - French section of the Fourth International), have begun a debate with other forces on constructing a broad socialist alternative. It is true that the revolutionary movement still suffers from the splits and divisions fostered in the past. But this is beginning to change as well. Discussions between the FI and the IST, the LCR and the SWP, would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Many of the key issues around which the Trotskyist organisations have divided over the past sixty or seventy years have lost much of their rele- The debate over whether the Stalinist states were deformed and degenerated workers states or state capitalist forma- tions, is now more or less of historical interest. Support for entry into the Labour Party, which split the main Trot- skyist forces for decades, is at present in decline on the far left. These factors alone have objectively opened the door to the unification of the movement. This means it is time to seek to bring the disparate forces in the Trotskyist tradition together to confront today's new opportunities, not to call for a Fifth International. This new turn of WP is a path into the wilderness. At a time of big opportunities in the post-war situation through building broad socialist alliances to tackle the acute crisis of political representation faced by the working class, WP have chosen isolation and political irrelevance. They should think again.