[I include below a short review that I've included in a Foundation for
Proportional Representation-based Socialism newsletter (number 6), for
distribution at Marxism 2009 (starting tomorrow, organised by the SWP). I've put
a letter on reconciling PR with Marxism, included later in this email, on the
back. The newsletter can be downloaded in Micro$oft Word or PDF format from
http://www.PRsocialism.org.]

 
An extended version of this review of "Socialism and left unity: a critique of
the Socialist Workers Party" by Peter Taaffe (the general secretary of the
Socialist Party of England and Wales), reviewed by Steve Wallis, will appear in
the first edition of DSA Voice, the bulletin of the Democratic Socialist
Alliance (www.sademocracy.org.uk). The extended review will take into account
views expressed at the SWP's Marxism 2009 event, at which this newsletter will
be distributed.

The most striking thing about this critique is the mutual loathing between the
Socialist Party (SP) and the SWP. The book is filled with snippets of ammunition
against the SWP on this issue and that, which are presumably designed to be used
by SP members to try to win over or demoralise members of the SWP.  In the
preface (page v), Taaffe quotes Leon Trotsky as saying in a letter "Without the
smallest exaggeration one can confirm that from 1923 (for Britain especially
from 1925) had the Comintern not existed, we would have today in Britain an
incomparably more important revolutionary party" and adds "Unfortunately, on a
smaller scale, the same conclusion can be drawn from the role of the SWP in the
1990s and since."

Taaffe alleges (page 2): "In every collaboration they have been involved in, it
is a question of 'rule or ruin' - they must exercise a dominating influence, not
through political argument but organisationally, or they would seek to undermine
or bypass those organisations if they do not get their way." The book contains a
number of examples where this has been the case, including the demise of the
Socialist Alliance and the Respect split, but it is rather an exaggeration.

I have found in Manchester that SWP members tend to be committed and
non-sectarian, while the SP nowadays avoids getting involved in joint campaigns
and only sends along its most committed members (cadres) on demonstrations,
presumably because its newer members and contacts would instantly notice how
much bigger the SWP is and quite possibly defect. This is a big problem for the
SP, and a major motivation for setting up a large number of front organisations,
some with more democratic legitimacy than others, with the main aim being
recruitment to their own party rather than furthering the struggle and trying to
achieve victories. I was a member of the SP from 1990-98 (through its transition
from the Militant Tendency and Militant Labour) and I noticed a shift of
emphasis from winning struggles to recruitment, aping the approach of the SWP.
Perhaps Taaffe was hoping that this book would inoculate members against the SWP
and lessen this problem. He cheekily
starts the introduction (page 1) by saying the SP and SWP "are the two largest
organisations on the 'Marxist left' in Britain", implying that the SP is bigger!

The biggest weakness of the book is that it concentrates so much on ways in
which the SWP has allegedly been sectarian towards the SP that it fails to point
out the biggest 'mistakes' of the SWP (which are in my view sometimes 
deliberate ones by infiltrators on the side of big business). For example, (on
page 23) Taaffe criticises the organisers of the two million-strong anti-war
demo in London for denying the SP's Youth Against the War front a speaker,
ignoring the main reason it failed to stop the war in my opinion - that the SWP
and Stop the War Coalition mainly argued on grounds of pacifism and no weapons
of mass destruction, not mentioning oil (as the SP and I did at the time
independently). [I now think that the divide-and-rule strategy of US
imperialism, perhaps changing under Obama, was more to blame.]

It is clear that uniting the SWP and the SP in a new formation won't be easy,
never mind the two Respect splinters, unless it is a loose federation (at first
anyway). The SP ridiculously left the Socialist Alliance due to not having a
veto (and never built it seriously so the SWP didn't stay dominant) and refused
to join Respect for the same reason. A democratic revolutionary socialist party,
calling for both proportional representation (PR) and "participatory democracy",
should be part of the federation. Adding PR to Marxist forms of democracy would
make it popular!


The following is a letter Steve Wallis submitted to the Weekly Worker, the
newspaper of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB: www.cpgb.org.uk), for
publication in the 2 July issue. The letter this responds to was a reply to an
article in favour of proportional representation by the CPGB’s Mike Macnair,
which appeared in the 4 June issue.

John Robinson ("Kill them", Letters, 25 June) said that Lenin argued that "the
fundamental principles of communism" are "soviet power and the dictatorship of
the proletariat", with the latter phrase meaning rule just by the working class.
Lenin did indeed call for "all power to the soviets" when he returned from exile
to Russia in 1917 contradicting the position of his party (the Bolsheviks) in
calling for a Constituent Assembly, and he played a key role in persuading the
party to abolish the Assembly after they lost the elections to it following the
October revolution. Rather than basing our positions on what Lenin said, after
which there have been 90 years of world capitalism, surely it is time to
reassess, and it is good that the CPGB is doing that and has adopted something I
have been plugging for a while, including in letters to this paper -
proportional representation (PR).

The CPGB is not the only Marxist party to adopt PR - two Socialist Party
editorials (The Socialist, 14 May and 28 May) and the Socialist Workers Party's
(SWP's) Alex Callinicos (Socialist Worker, 6 June) have done so, and I have
heard that the Morning Star's Communist Party of Britain supports the single
transferable vote (STV) form of PR.

STV is the fairest form of PR because it avoids the need for tactical voting and
allows voters to choose between candidates of the same party rather than giving
enormous power to party machines (in constructing party lists for the recent
European elections for example). STV is used in the Republic of Ireland, and
transfers enabled the Socialist Party's Joe Higgins to win one of the three
Dublin Euro seats; the same system enabled that party and the People Before
Profit Alliance (involving the SWP) to win some council seats on the same day.
STV would not be as conducive to the fortunes of the British National Party
(BNP) since they would receive few transfers and there would no longer be a
dilemma of who to vote for to keep that party out. The leading Labour
politicians including Gordon Brown who are plugging alternative vote (AV), which
requires a candidate to get 50% after transfers, arguing for it on the basis of
keeping the BNP out, are trying to con
us into accepting a very unproportional system that would massively favour the
mainstream parties (and would have given Labour an even bigger landslide in
1997).

John complains about the prospect of "all members of the capitalist class and
their counterrevolutionary hangers-on each (having) a vote equal to that of
revolutionary workers". What's he worried about? Either there's so few of them
that they can easily be out-voted or there's so many of them that a revolution
is not practicable at that time and attempting an insurrection would be doomed
to almost certain failure. He argues that "the capitalist class will, as at
present, have total control of newspapers and the mass media". He is wrong -
what about the role of the left press including the Weekly Worker and the
internet? He is also confusing a pre-revolutionary situation (in which those who
control the mass media may try to exclude left-wing voices) with the situation
after a revolution in which the masses coming to power can control the media
irrespective of whether a "dictatorship of the proletariat" is established (but
doing so suggests that
dictatorship would try to keep dissenting voices completely out of the media
leading to the opposite problem - giving parties access to the media according
to their level of support would be preferable). Although John says that "the
task of communists is not to hold polite conversations with fascists" but "to
shoot them", I suspect he considers that the same fate should await anybody who
objects to all power being in the hands of the working class.
 
I will attend the SWP's upcoming event Marxism 2009, and call for a democratic
revolutionary socialist party, which stands for proportional representation and
what is sometimes called "participatory democracy" (involving some degree of
workers' control: soviets), in contrast to the wishy-washy "half-way houses" (as
you have called them in your paper) - broad formations like Respect, the
Scottish Socialist Party, Solidarity and No2EU that blur divisions between
revolution and reform. Such broad formations were in my view a good idea before
the current economic crisis, but it would have been better if revolutionaries
within such parties had put forward their views more rather than such parties
almost entirely putting forward reformist lowest common denominator politics.
However, now that capitalism is self-destructing and with the mainstream parties
set to all stand for massive public spending cuts and/or tax rises at the next
general election, we need to
point out the need for a sudden thorough change of society, whether or not we
use the word "revolution". A reply to the SWP's open letter to the left by
Michael Rosen (Socialist Worker, 20 June) suggests "a federation or umbrella" of
cooperating groups/parties that don't stand against each other as the way
forward, and this is probably the best that can be achieved in the short term
bearing in mind the hostility and sectarianism between different left groups in
Britain. It would be a crying shame if such a federation was constructed and
none of its participants put forward such a revolutionary programme, to
determine which sort of party is most effective in practice.
 

--
Steve Wallis (Manchester, England)
Preferred email address: revolutionarysocialiststeve@...
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My socialist website: http://www.socialiststeve.me.uk [Indian mirror:
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Founder, Ethical Capitalism Network: http://www.ethicalcapitalism.net
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