New debates, new invitations at Marxism 2001
Alan Thornett was among the guest speakers invited to participate at this year’s Marxism event, organised by the SWP. These are his impressions from the sessions he attended.
The major themes of Marxism 2001 were the future of the Socialist Alliance and the Scottish Socialist party and the anti-globalisation movement. The slogan was "A New Movement, a New Left".
It is not new for independent socialists and campaigners to be asked to address sessions of Marxism, of course, but invitations to members of other far-left organisations are not so common.
This time speakers from other revolutionary organisations were invited to the event. While these were mainly from the Fourth International, in particular the LCR from France, it is a good step in the right direction.
On the theme of the future of the left there were a number of sessions that extended the current debate on both the Alliance and the SSP in the post election situation. A strand of this was whether the Alliance in England should follow the SSP in Scotland and become a party rather than an alliance – which implies a looser and more informal structure.
The first such discussion was Socialists After the Election with Liz Davies and John Rees. Liz Davies argued that there is not only a need to restructure the Alliance but to ensure it is democratic – including the right of local alliances to select their candidates and take decisions relating to standing in elections. She said that the Alliance did need to become a party, but on the other hand it was in many ways already a party.
John Rees stressed that it is necessary, even crucial, to consolidate the Alliance and renovate its structures, but that it should remain an Alliance and not become a party. What was needed, he argued, was a structure which could accommodate both revolutionaries and those who did not consider themselves revolutionaries and in particular be accessible to people breaking from Labour to the left.
The ISG thinks that the Alliance should eventually develop into a party, and that the SWP are wrong to think that this will cut us off from those breaking from Labour. But we absolutely agree that revolutionaries need to have a strategic orientation to this layer, which is far broader than the existing supporters of the Socialist Alliance.
The theme of renovating and rebuilding the left was taken onto the European level on Saturday evening with a session titled The Future of the Revolutionary Left, with Alain Krivine and Chris Harman.
Harman opened with a contribution which, it has to be said, was overwhelmingly about the history of the revolutionary left rather than its future.
It ranged over the 20th century, touching on debates around issues of reform and revolution, and polemicising against the guerrillism of the 1970s, including what he presumably saw as the line of the Fourth International at the time.
Only in his last few sentences did he touch on contemporary politics ,and then only in general terms and in the context of the need for a revolutionary party … i.e. the SWP.
Krivine on the other hand took up concretely the recomposition of the anti-capitalist left across Europe, putting it in the context of the fall of the Berlin wall (and the collapse of some of the Western CPs) and the adoption of the neo-liberal agenda by European Social Democracy.
He argued that this has opened up wide space to the left of social democracy across Europe, which has put on the agenda the building of broad anti-capitalist parties in a number of European countries. The revolutionary left has a major responsibility to relate to this process and build on it.
As examples, Krivine pointed to the Left Block in Portugal, Rifondazioni Comunista in Italy, the United Left in Spain, the Red Green Alliance in Denmark, the ODPE in Turkey, and important new developments in Greece, the Socialist Alliance in England and Wales and the SSP in Scotland.
He referred to the success of the LCR/LO slate in France in the European elections, the strength of the far-left vote in the local elections, and the possibility that the far-left may well out-poll the Communist Party in the presidential contest next year.
He stressed that within these broader regroupments, which are taking place, we have to take up the issue of the unity of the revolutionaries themselves. The new links that are being forged, for example between the LCR and the SWP, and the SWP and the ISG, are important in that process.
These themes were taken up in the discussion. A speaker from the SWP group in Canada said that new levels of unity were being forged in Canada around the anti-capitalist movement which includes far left currents which have simply been rivals in the past – the SWP grouping and people from the FI for example.
He argued that this should be developed further. "You have to know the old debates from the past, but the basis for unity today is on the politics of today", he said.
A speaker from the International Socialist Movement, the majority platform in the Scottish Socialist Party stressed that the upsurge of struggle across the globe has resulted in new opportunities and new support for new parties of the left. It is an opportunity that should not be missed.
Another leading SWP member, Alex Callincos intervened with a contribution that could only be seen as sharply at odds with Chris Harman. He said:
"The LCR and the SWP are two of the organisations which have emerged from the downturn more or less intact. Now the very methods we used to survive during the downturn become obstacles when we are moving onto new levels of struggle.
"This is why this is a challenging time for us, because we have to shed all kinds of past habits which were useful but now are an obstacle and we have to give up outdated disputes.
"I agree completely with Alain that historically important the argument of the interpretation of Stalinism was it would be ridiculous to say that this can be the reason for having separate revolutionary organisations today.
"We need to move forward in a new era in which we no longer have to compete directly with the Stalinists as we did in the past and indeed we are in a period of regroupment – both with the SA and the SSP.
"We also need on an international scale to explore the extent to which we can work together. But it is also important to understand that we as revolutionary organisations, the LCR and the SWP, all of us, face a very real challenge; we are confronted with a new anti-capitalist movement that is producing a new left.
"We have to prove that the revolutionary socialist tradition is relevant to that movement – which is not automatic".
Chris Harman, however, made no concessions to this in his reply to the discussion. He returned again to the old debates. He distorted what Krivine had said, accusing him of calling for the building of a series of electoral alliances across Europe, which he thought would be wrong. Of unity between the FI and the IST he stressed only the problems and the need for clarity to avoid splits and a return to "the Life of Brian".
It has to be said, however, that this was not the general tenor of Marxism 2001 on these issues. Overall the mood was one of far left unity and the stress was on the building of the Socialist Alliance in Britain.
John Rees in the session on "Where Now for the Socialist Alliance" could hardly have been more insistent on this, arguing that the building of the Alliance was of ‘strategic importance’. He made it absolutely clear that there is no equivocation in the SWP’s commitment to building the Alliance.
These discussions were however placed in a strange framework. The SWP argue that there was a downturn in the class struggle from the middle of the 1970s, and an up turn at the end of the 1990s.
In fact the level of strike struggles was more or less equal at the beginning and end of the 1970s, and 1978 was the highest since the general strike. There is also an over-estimation of the radicalisation of recent years (crucially important as it is) particularly in Britain where it is presented as more or less a return to the early 1970s.
In fact in Britain we remain at historically low levels of strikes despite the important recent rise in some industries and the extremely important development of the anti-capitalist movement which is a qualitative and ongoing development world-wide.
In Britain, however, developments are still limited to some extent by the low level of strike struggles. The contrast with France, for example, is obvious where sharply rising levels of class struggle since the mid-1990s have intersected with the anti-capitalist sentiment of the anti-globalisation movement and created big social movements like ATTAC.
These debates were reflected in the impressive session called Witnesses Against Globalisation. It was an inspiring and mobilising session but the analysis from the SWP (IST) speakers was over the top in their analysis – almost suggesting imminent revolutionary breakthroughs.
Boris Kagarlitsky projected the same super-optimistic view he often does. He was strong, however, on the defence of the Gothenburg demonstrators (as were the other speakers) pointing to the violence of the state and saying that the state forces "put us in a position where it is impossible to be peaceful".
There was, however, virtually no mention of environmental issues in the whole session. This is a problem, given the role of environmental activists in the anti-globalisation movement and the fact that the neo-liberal globalised agenda is not just privatising and deregulating but also wrecking the planet in the process.
In fact the whole question of the environment was a very low profile subject in Marxism 2001 as a whole with only one session out of the 200 sessions and workshops at the event specifically on the environment.
This of course reflects the weakness of the left as a whole and not just the SWP. But given the gigantic problem now posed by global warming and environmental destruction it is a priority the whole of the left has to come to terms with.
Another omission was the whole question of European integration and enlargement and the question of the single currency. There was not a single workshop on any aspect of the EU as such. This despite the stress on the importance of recent mobilisations at Nice and Gothenburg which were at EU summits dealing with the future shape and development of the EU as the central vehicle for the neo-liberal project in Europe.
Overall, however, Marxism 2001 was an impressive event involving large numbers of socialist and activists beyond the ranks of the SWP and making an important contribution on its central themes of building the Socialist Alliance, reshaping the left, and building and mobilising the anti-capitalist movement.