Note that I have decided to stay in the Scottish Socialist Party rather than switching my main allegiance to Solidarity (in contrast to what I said in my last message).

 

The following is a letter I wrote at the weekend, which will hopefully be published in this week's Weekly Worker, as a further contribution to the debate in that newspaper on proportional representation versus soviets. They consistently get over 20,000 unique visitors on the web per week. Quite a few articles in it have taken up issues I have raised, but last week's article by Nick Rogers (which was the one featured on their front page) is the only one so far to give me a mention. [John Pearson's letter, that appeared in my previous letter, did too. If you haven't read that letter and my previous two contributions, you can find them at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/manchesterism/message/258.]

 

Best wishes,

    Steve.

 

 

Nick Rogers (Weekly Worker, January 25) appears to have retracted somewhat his earlier opposition (Weekly Worker, November 23) to hierarchies of committees (known as ‘soviets’ in the USSR) which he had pointed out are “eminently open to bureaucratisation”. I welcomed that point in my letters (Weekly Worker, December 14 and January 11), in which I argued for proportional representation (PR) using Single Transferable Vote (STV) as the electoral system used to choose representatives in government. Nick appears to be having difficulty reconciling his membership of Marxist organisations (the CPGB and Campaign for a Marxist Party) with his earlier arguments against a key tenet of Marxism.

 

Nick argued in his recent article that “any transformation of society led by the working class” would bring about many committees that would be centralised “with lower-level committees sending delegates to higher-level bodies”. He failed to explain how this would be replaced by his preferred option of “direct accountability of delegates and representatives at all levels to the mass of the working class (in their capacity as electors)”. He also failed to explain how the right to recall high-level delegates would be exercised; it would clearly be impracticable to organise meetings of entire constituencies to recall MPs, unless of course only a small proportion of electors are interested, which doesn’t fit in with the idea of mass participation in politics that underlies most Marxists’ conceptions of socialism (and mine).

 

Nick rejected PR due to its incompatibility with the right of recall. However, in my first letter I proposed a method for the recall of an entire government: “triggered by a petition signed by a fairly large proportion of the population”. Such a petition would be much more likely to arouse the interest of electors than trying to recall an individual representative, since the latter would have little effect unless the same measure was being carried out in many other places at about the same time.

 

Nick advocated the alternative vote (AV) electoral system “in which preferences are transferred until one candidate enjoys a majority of votes”, which is sometimes wrongly described as a form of PR. After the last general election, some Labour Party figures expressed an interest in adopting AV for Westminster . It was actually estimated that Labour would have an even larger majority if that electoral system had been used! AV introduces a massive bias towards ‘middle of the road’ parties or candidates since they are most likely to receive transfers. The chances of a socialist government being voted out of office would be high under AV, especially with the disillusionment that many working and middle class people would experience when they recognise that the electoral system is unfair.

 

Like most Marxists, Nick argued for the working class to take power. He failed to address the question of how much say the many middle class people who exist nowadays would have under his conception of socialism. I argue for a society under which everybody is in power, irrespective of class. My solution is a middle way (arguably the only middle way) between capitalism and a Marxist form of socialism, and would thus be more likely to be chosen by a majority of the electorate and retain the support of the electorate under elections by STV in a socialist society.

 

I reject the Marxist notion that socialism cannot be implemented due to elections in a capitalist parliament. In most of Latin America , people and parties calling themselves ‘socialist’ have come to power in recent years. Socialism has not yet been implemented in any of those countries, but that is more due to the lack of clear and correct politics than any innate lack of ability for a genuine socialist party to come to power electorally. I support extra-parliamentary activity such as the general strike movement in Bolivia led by Evo Morales that played a large role in his subsequent election as president with an unprecedented vote of over 50%, followed by his supporters also receiving over 50% in that country’s parliament. I do not argue simply for the use of capitalist parliaments by the working class – the big business parties are unlikely to concede STV (or indeed any form of PR) for Westminster without a big extra-parliamentary struggle, so it could be up to socialists to change the electoral system ourselves when in power. Nor do I think that nationalised companies should be run solely by leaders appointed by the government; I support some degree of fairly non-hierarchical workers’ control of industry.

 

I believe that I have come up with a coherent set of ideas to solve the conundrum of how socialists can take power across the globe. There is, of course, no point in having correct ideas if you cannot persuade political parties or members of such parties to adopt them. I have therefore set up the Foundation for PR-based Socialism as a virtual organisation with a website (www.PRsocialism.org) and discussion forum (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PRsocialism). I envisage it being quite a conspiratorial organisation but one with a public face, and the forum has a publicly viewable archive of past messages. I would like it to remain solely in hyperspace, with polls on the forum being used to settle disputes. I am planning to produce an initial newsletter to use in the Scottish parliamentary election campaign.

 

The Foundation will be non-party political although I am a member of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP); I envisage there being members in both the SSP and Solidarity (with it adopting a neutral attitude towards the dispute between these two parties bearing in mind that there is very little difference in their politics) and even in the Labour Party (which could help the struggle for a fairer electoral system or perhaps help engineer a split) and Scottish National Party (to encourage Scottish independence because socialism would be easier to achieve in a capitalist independent Scotland than in the UK as a whole or prepare for the inevitable split in that party after independence is achieved).

 

Steve Wallis ( Glasgow ).