An explosive row over allegations of rape made against a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party has triggered bitter divisions in the largest of the far left parties in Britain and speculation about a potential split. Whatever criticisms others on the left have about the SWP, its interventions and its organisational methods, no one can take pleasure in the prospect of further fragmentation of the radical left when so many yearn for a coherent and effective socialist alternative to a discredited economic and political establishment.

The issue of sexual violence and how the matter has been handled by the SWP leadership – serious as it is – has in turn ignited far wider discontent among party members. What started as a purely internal dispute has now gone public and viral. It has exposed serious questions about the internal life of the party; its system of ‘democratic centralism’, the unrealistic hype which infuses much of the SWP’s propaganda, its sectarianism and resentment among many members about being treated as voiceless and ultimately dispensable foot soldiers.

The problems which beset the SWP are by no means unique on the far left. The recent story of the ‘Leninist’ far left, not only in Britain but internationally, has become too often a sad litany of millenarian expectations, followed by disillusionment, the exhaustion of activists, internal splits and political impotence. The largest left political grouping in Britain is today made up of former members of the SWP and similar organisations.

That said, some of the finest socialists and militants are still to be found among members of parties like the SWP and the Socialist Party (SP). Without them, opposition to the vicious onslaught on the living standards and rights of working people unleashed as a result of the present economic crisis would have been even weaker and less effective than it has been.

The real issue is whether political organisations of the kind which emerged from the revolutionary currents generated by the Russian revolution, a century ago, have any future in their present form. We live in a period when the left has to fight back against the rampant right wing offensive and at the same time seek to understand the profound changes which have taken place in society and come to terms with what they mean for the theory and the practice of the left.

One obvious question is whether the era of proletarian socialism which began about 150 years ago, generated by the industrial revolution, is passing. Not only has the organised labour movement shrunk in size and influence, the Labour Party seems to have become utterly disconnected from its original base. But the era of the revolutionary socialist currents, inspired by the Bolshevik tradition, has also passed.

Democratic centralism

A key issue for those in the SWP opposed to the leadership and seeking a wholesale reform of the party is the leadership’s insistence on an ultra-centralist form of ‘democratic centralism’. This, critics believe, has reinforced a self-perpetuating clique in control of the SWP apparatus and increasingly out of touch with the outside world.

Although Lenin’s name is regularly invoked in support of democratic centralism, it meant many very different things at stages in the history of the Bolsheviks. Arguably essential to the Bolsheviks very survival in the run up to the Russian revolution, under Stalin it became the rubric for dictatorship and the destruction of the party’s revolutionary base.

Democratic centralism has most often been justified as being necessary to lead the working class to the conquest of state power and/or to survive in conditions of illegality and repression. Neither of these conditions remotely applies in this country today and has not done so for a very long time. Little wonder so many rank and file party SWP members feel stifled by the curbs on dissent imposed by a self serving ‘leadership’.

The late Tony Cliff – the charismatic leader of SR, the IS and the SWP – adopted one of Lenin’s different views on democratic centralism, having originally advocated the libertarian model favoured by the great German revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg. He stressed the danger of ‘substitutionism’ described by Luxemburg: the tendency for the party to substitute itself for the class, the leadership for the party and finally an individual for the leadership.

The IS was better able to relate to the social upheavals in the late 1960s and early 1970s precisely because it had earlier dumped a great deal of the catechism of the so-called ‘orthodox’ Trotskyists and had a better understanding both of the seeming stability of western capitalism and the class realities of the ‘actually existing socialism’ of the Stalinist dictatorships.

The limited but important base that the IS established among militant workers in the late 1960s and early 1970s also acted as a brake on the more frenetic ‘stick bending’ (political exaggeration) by over ambitious IS leaders seeking to short cut the long hard road to mass influence.

This may be why Cliff eventually instigated a purge in the mid-1970s which saw and expulsion and departure of so many IS shop stewards and other militants. His task was facilitated by an already centralising tendency of the system of democratic centralism which had been introduced into IS during the heightened political atmosphere triggered by the revolutionary development in France in 1968.

Class consciousness

Of course class still exists. Indeed class inequality, exploitation and injustice have become more not less grotesque in recent years. But class consciousness – what Marx described as ‘a class FOR itself not just a class IN itself’ – has declined dramatically. This has led to the virtual disappearance of much of the popular collectivist and co-operative self help culture expressed in a myriad of working class educational, cultural and other organisations built over 100 years of struggle.

The industrial working class is still growing in parts of Asia and Latin America but it is now a marginal force in the older capitalist economies in Europe and North America. Of course our trade unions still exist – mainly in an increasingly besieged public sector – and play a vital role in resisting the ever more aggressive demands of a deeply reactionary Tory government. But nonetheless the world has changed dramatically in the past 40 years and in ways that require new responses from the left.

Perhaps the least significant of these changes has been to render some of the distinguishing ideas of the original Socialist Review and International Socialists as no longer relevant. The concept of the ‘Permanent Arms Economy’ (PAE) was not originated in IS but was much developed by Cliff and Michael Kidron, the Marxist economist and first editor of International Socialism magazine.

Kidron later said that while the theory contained important ‘insights’ it did not succeed fully in explaining development in post war capitalism. The theory of State Capitalism – which analysed the dynamic driving the economies of the Stalinist states – was eventually rendered obsolete by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite economies.

These ideas initially helped give socialists confidence to resist the pressure from the Communist Party and some ‘orthodox Trotskyists’ to see defensible features of a ‘workers’ state’ in the Soviet system – including, for some, even the Russian H-bomb! The PAE was also an antidote to the tendency by some on the far left to see capitalist collapse constantly around the corner.

Doctrinal mummification

The IS had some impressive intellectual resources which could have been harnessed to develop the organisation’s understanding of the developments in global capitalism which exploded. But the original analyses got doctrinally mummified by the SWP as timelessly valid and this attitude became a break on the development of new ‘revisionist’ ideas of the kind which had initially inspired SR and the early IS.

I have always regretted the collective reluctance of the far left (not just the SWP) to explore the potential of what in the 1970s were described as ‘workers’ plans for alternative production’ which were developed by some rank and file workplace-based militants. They would not by themselves have defeated the Thatcherite onslaught on the organised trade union movement and the wholesale destruction of jobs and communities but they would have helped the labour movement build more powerful alliances with civil society and community organisations.

These were also years when feminism began to exercise a growing influence on socialists and the left’s lack of awareness of the specific problems of patriarchy and gender discrimination. This added to the internal ferment inside IS and led to the departure of a large number of the socialist feminist cadres.

It has to be faced that the left has more questions to ask at present than it has ready made answers to give. But the picture is by no means uniformly bleak. The economic crisis has undermined the political self-confidence of the ruling class. The right is fissured by a growing challenge from the populist far right. Some of the traditional social distinctions which divided working people (such as between white collar and blue collar workers) are disappearing. With the dramatic fall in the living standards of even skilled and professional workers, new forms of collective class awareness may now be emerging.

New forms of civil society activism are emerging. Many are marked by a strong, innate, internationalism. New forms of cooperative, not-for-profit associations and enterprises are emerging. Important gains for human rights have been codified in law although still widely ignored by state powers with ambitions for global hegemony. The green movement has injected the essential concept of sustainability into the debate about the economy which gives important leverage for those advocating a change in the capitalist system itself.

There is a remarkable awareness among young people that democracy needs to take more accountable and tangible forms than mere parliamentarism, as instanced by the Occupy movement. Interestingly a new YouGov poll shows a 64 per cent to 35 per cent majority among 18 to 34 year olds for remaining in the EU and fighting for a trans-national democracy to help shape global solutions for global problems.

Above all we can also learn from the struggle taking place now in the teeth of the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s about how new, pluralist forms of democratic organisation are emerging on the radical left. One obvious example is Syriza in Greece. Whatever the outcome of the internal struggle in the SWP, there is every reason for trying to build such a pluralist radical socialist left here.

I joined the Green Party ten years ago as I believed that it had something new and radical to say in British politics. I was also a founder member of Green Left, which was formed in 2006, and I helped draft the Headcorn Declaration, the group’s mission statement. One of my aims in doing so was to ensure that there was a radical left faction in the party constantly pushing it in a progressive direction – and providing a counterbalance to those in the party for whom pragmatism and ‘lifestyle environmentalism’ were the driving forces.

As an Irish person with strong links with some of the founding members of the Irish Green Party, I watched in horror as pragmatism and party centralisation led to both the entry of that party into a right wing coalition government and the resignation of many of those radical members in disgust. I wrote a critical article about this in 2009 entitled ‘The Rise and Fall of the Irish Greens’, which also predicted their eventual drubbing at the hands of the Irish people in the general election of 2011.

Many in the Green Party of England & Wales (GPEW) watched the story of the Irish Greens with horror, but were also convinced that it would never happen here, because the GPEW was one of the most left wing Green parties in Europe. 

But there was always a strong group at the centre of the Green Party, and supported by many of its councillors, who regarded Green Left as too left wing and whose vision was to replace the Lib Dems as the main centre party. The entry of the Lib Dems into government in 2010 strengthened the hand of this group.

The battle lines became obvious over the issue of local government budgets and cuts at the GPEW conference in spring 2011. At that point the Greens had not yet taken control of Brighton, but it was clearly on the mind of the party leadership.

An amendment was put to an anti-cuts policy motion by Green Left and some of the Young Greens. It called for local Green councils to fight the cuts and to defy the government by setting an illegal ‘needs budget’. Councillors were dragooned by the leadership to speak against it and finally it was defeated by just 3 votes.

For many of us this was the writing on the wall and a sign that should the Greens take Brighton, they would implement the cuts. It led to a real fall in morale among many of us on the left of the party.

In May 2011, only three months after the conference, the Greens took Brighton. Almost immediately the debate about the cuts budget began. Green Left organised many internal discussions on the issue and agreed to send a delegation to Brighton to argue the point with the Brighton Green councillors – this was only a few weeks before the budget deadline.

For me it was too little and too late – although I supported the initiative. I was pessimistic about the outcome and was proved right. I drew parallels with the story of the Irish Greens and referred to this in a speech I gave at a meeting of the London regional party in January. I quoted the comments of the new Irish Green Party chair, Roderic O’Gorman, following the defeat of the party in 2011 and the loss of all its parliamentary seats: ‘We became part of the political consensus. Our voters did not want us to be part of that consensus.’

Painfully aware of the impact of any cuts budget in Brighton on the national party’s reputation and on its relationship with the wider anti-cuts movement, as well as the new political movements such as Occupy, I supported a motion calling for a last minute debate with a Green councillor from Brighton on the budget there. The motion fell and the majority abstained, prepared to accept any decision reached by the Brighton councillors.

It was now clear to me that the iceberg was fast approaching the SS Green Brighton, with its consequent impact on the reputation of the Green Party nationally. The collision happened when the cuts budget was passed at the end of February. However, the budget passed was even worse than predicted and was the Labour-Tory version, which the Greens swallowed whole in order to remain in office.

A few days later at the party’s national conference, despite vigorous objections from Green Left, the party voted to support the Brighton decision. Pragmatism had defeated principle, realpolitik triumphed over radicalism.

I resigned on the same day. I saw no indication that those of us opposed to the decision would be able to remain radical opponents of the cuts agenda while our own elected members had sold the pass. I was always determined not to end up as a member of a small internal opposition in a political party which had moved away from its core principles, as happened in the Labour Party post-Blair. Some Green Left members have remained in the party, while others have joined Socialist Resistance or Respect. I have remained as an independent anti-cuts and anti-war activist.

It is certainly true that it was not only the cuts agenda in Brighton which led to my resignation, although that was the major issue. I also found a lack of honesty and consistency in the way that those leading the party were treating both its employees and its activists. This came to a head in the autumn of last year at the party conference in Sheffield. A highly respected and hard working party member, who held the post of head of media relations, was treated appallingly by the party leadership.

This included disciplinary action taken against him while he was ill, no proper consultation with staff and members, and a complete ignoring the of the party’s radical policies on workers rights and trade union support – using the services of a human resources consultant to undermine his position. As a trade unionist and campaigner for workers rights and social justice, I found it intolerable. Myself and other members, many from the Green Party Trade Union Group and Green Left, put a motion to the conference condemning the actions of the executive. Every effort was made by the party leadership to force the motion off the agenda. But despite their efforts, the motion was passed by a significant majority and the executive censured.

This did not go down well with the party’s leadership. Comments were made about the party’s activists and we were referred to in pretty damning terms. The conference decision was also pretty much ignored and the staff member in question was made redundant and forced to sign an agreement (which I was advised was probably illegal) that he could not stand for any office in the party for one year, so worried was the leadership about his popularity and the possibility of him upsetting the apple cart. All of this indicated a worrying hubris at the head of the party and a willingness to ignore the concerns of activists and members.

I believe that the Brighton situation is further evidence of this, with many at the head of the party arguing hysterically at the recent conference for tribalist support for the councillors and condemning criticism as disloyalty.

It does have to be said here that Caroline Lucas did not support the Brighton budgetary decision and said so openly at a fringe meeting at the party conference. I am certain that this indicates her concern at the apparent contradiction between her support for Occupy and calls for a radical anti-cuts politics, and the decision of the council in her own backyard.

When I resigned from the party, one prominent Green told me that I had too many principles. The disconnect in modern British and European politics is rather that there are too few principles. The real battle now underway is whether we can give politics new life and new meaning and to reconnect the millions in this country who no longer vote, and have given up on electoral politics completely, with the political process.

The Greens presented themselves as a party to the left of Labour (not too difficult one would have thought). Their policies are radical and many are worth supporting. But as with the situation in Ireland, consistency and veracity are called for. It is not enough to parrot truisms about being unable to challenge the status quo, no matter how urgent it is to do so. How can the Greens seriously challenge the corporate sector, the global corporations, climate change in the Arctic and the prospect of resource wars and famines, if they fall down at the first puff of wind from Eric Pickles and the Department for Communities and Local Government?

Vision requires courage, and courage requires mounting a challenge. On both, the Greens have been found sadly wanting.

This article is partly a response to a debate on the decisions of the Green-led council in Brighton, published in the latest issue of Red Pepper.

If ever there were a need for a strong, radical government of the left in Wales, it is now. Despite  Plaid’s success in delivering and winning a referendum on law-making powers for the National Assembly last year, Wales is still bearing the brunt of savage cuts to public services and already-meagre benefits, all being carried out by a government the people of Wales didn’t vote for.

Labour has a minority government in the Welsh Assembly. It fought last year’s Assembly election on a claim that it would ‘stand up for Wales’. As the SNP government in Scotland stands up for its people and fights Cameron’s attempts to deny them self-determination, Labour in Wales is happy to simply sit and wait, hoping for another Labour government in London that will solve their problems, rather than set out a vision for Wales. Labour in Wales are a party happier with Tory rule than home rule. When its masters in London support the cuts, ‘Welsh Labour’ remains silent.

There is a clear need  for a strong, socialist alternative to the Tory/Labour cuts agenda in Wales. Plaid Cymru is in a great position to provide that alternative. Plaid Cymru can and should speak for those who face a daily struggle to make ends meet, such as those who face a choice between heating their home and putting food on the table. The majority in Wales who reject the cuts agenda deserve a voice. In the longer term, we must tackle the root problems in Welsh society and seek to transform our nation, not simply manage it, as the British parties have done.

After a disappointing election result last year and an internal review, Plaid Cymru now has an opportunity to reinvigorate itself. Members will soon elect a new leader. I have decided to put my name forward.

Our party has much of which it can be proud, including standing firm against Trident and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, delivering more devolved powers for Wales and providing an  alternative to the privatisation agenda.

However, we still have much to do. I believe the time has now come to build the case for independence – not for its own sake, but in order to break the cycle of poverty and a weak economy which has left our nation as one of the poorest parts of Western Europe. In the current economic climate, this need is clearer than ever.

Plaid Cymru is the only party that seeks independence for Wales. We know that there is a powerful economic argument for it, but we have not always communicated that case effectively. Only Plaid Cymru works to see Wales break out of its poverty and develop the inherent skills of our people in order to thrive and achieve our true potential. That ambition sets us distinctly apart from the British parties. I believe in our people, and am determined to offer leadership which fosters a sense of national confidence and ambition that is a precursor to renewed prosperity.

The next step towards independence means placing Wales in a better position economically. In the short term, we must insist on financial fairness; in the long term, we need to put in place a robust economic infrastructure that can shelter us from future economic storms.

Models from across the world show that we can create a thriving decentralised economy that is inherently Welsh, serving our people rather than the market; an economy in which co-operative and green ventures can thrive creating jobs for local people; an economy in which we can foster the enterprise of small businesses, community organisations and our workforce. Most importantly, a social economy that will distribute wealth fairly and combat crippling inequality. Devolving power and prosperity to our local communities is essential to ensuring true social justice.

There has never been a better time for progressives in Wales to be in Plaid Cymru. For those who believe in economic justice, ecological resilience, true democracy, a bilingual Wales and independence, Plaid Cymru should be your home. By standing for the leadership I hope to lead and inspire a chorus of thousands of voices articulating a vision for our country. A vision of our Welsh nation speaking out confidently for our unique values, as an independent country, playing a constructive role in a family of nations across Europe and the world.

For more than three decades socialists and others on the radical left have had to swim against a powerful and long-lasting political tide. Throughout the older capitalist economies, but nowhere more so than in Britain, they have had to come to terms with defeats for the organised labour movement, lower living standards, mass unemployment, wholesale de-industrialisation and the destruction of vibrant local communities.
Of course the picture has not been entirely bleak. Feminists and anti-racists have had significant successes in overcoming ancient gender and ethnic prejudices, the green movement has pushed fundamental issues of sustainable development into the heart of political discourse, human rights reformers have helped shape law – domestic and international – in ways that have weakened dictators everywhere.
But even as world capitalism is gripped by the most profound crisis since the 1930s, the political influence of the left remains fragmented and diminished. Social democratic parties find themselves in opposition almost everywhere in Europe. Far from this leading to increased support for the far left, revolutionary groups appear stagnant and gripped by one variety or another of sectarianism.
The obvious question is ‘Why?’ The publication of Ian Birchall’s massive biography of Tony Cliff – the charismatic leader of the International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party, still the largest and most successful of the far-left organisations in Britain – throws some light on some of the problems.
A veteran supporter of Cliff, Birchall’s account of the life of this extraordinary man and his extraordinary commitment to the socialist cause is well written. In judging his strengths and weaknesses, Birchall is reasonably balanced. The story of Cliff and the SWP contains various lessons – some positive but also many negative – for socialists today.
Radicalised and stateless
Cliff’s life can be told very simply. Born in British-ruled Palestine in 1917, Ygael Gluckstein was the son of an immigrant Zionist family. He only adopted the nom-de-plume of Tony Cliff when he came to Britain after the second world war. Radicalised as a teenager, he rejected Zionism and gravitated, via left socialist organisations, to a tiny group of Jewish and Arab Trotskyists in Palestine during the 1930s.
Having been imprisoned by the British, Cliff arrived in Britain in 1947 with his lifelong partner Chanie Rosenberg. Given residency rights thanks to her British passport, Cliff remained stateless all his life. He soon joined the Revolutionary Communist Party – the British section of the Trotskyist Fourth International – and spent the rest of his life as a revolutionary socialist. He died, as he lived, with almost complete indifference to wealth or social advancement.
To get a real appreciation of the impact Cliff could make, Birchall rightly says it was best to hear him speak. He had few equals as an orator – in spite of (sometimes because of) his fractured English. ‘It is time for comrades to pull their socks seriously,’ I once heard him solemnly declare. But it was as an innovative thinker and as a Marxist willing to revise and rethink some hallowed orthodoxies of the revolutionary left that he really made his mark. Birchall rightly stresses the importance of the post-war years, after the disintegration of the RCP, for Cliff’s intellectual development.
Two things became clear to him at that time. Revolutionary socialists had to accept that capitalism was not on the point of collapse but had begun a potentially long period of expansion. He explained this in terms of the vast role of arms expenditure (the ‘permanent arms economy’) in acting to stabilise the system at least temporarily.
The second was that the totalitarian monstrosities masquerading as ‘socialism’ in Stalin’s Russia and its satellite states were in reality a new form of exploitative class society, which he understood as a form of state capitalism. Neither approach was totally original, but in a stream of books and other writing Cliff sought to integrate his insights into Marx’s own way of thinking about capital.
From Luxemburg to Lenin
In the early 1960s Cliff emphasised the more libertarian approach to party building of the great German revolutionary socialist, Rosa Luxemburg. He wrote that she ‘had a much earlier and clearer view of the role of the labour bureaucracy than Lenin or Trotsky.’
This approach was important in recruiting members from a new generation of young socialists, CND and peace activists. By the late 1960s, a tiny club of a few dozen members (Socialist Review) had grown into an organisation of thousands (the International Socialists). Disgusted by the first Wilson-led Labour government’s support for the US war in Vietnam, IS supporters left the Labour Party in droves. After the May événements in France in 1968, however, Cliff began to revert to a more Leninist concept of a democratic centralist party.
As British capitalism encountered its first serious problems after the post-war boom, the IS began to recruit important groups of trade unionists in engineering, the docks, the steel industry and the coal mines. Birchall rightly stresses the importance of other socialist intellectuals who contributed to the development of the IS at that time. They included the economist Michael Kidron, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, psychologist Peter Sedgwick, historian Ray Challinor and an impressive cohort of working-class intellectuals such as Jim Higgins, Duncan Hallas and Geoff Carlsson. During the last major upsurge in working-class industrial and political militancy, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the IS organisation expanded to a membership of several thousand, had a paper (Socialist Worker) that at its peak sold tens of thousands each week, and had a modest but growing implantation among shop stewards and other active trade unionists.
The changed political mood that followed the election of the 1974 Labour government triggered a series of disputes, first about how to react to the new situation and then over the relationship between the party and sympathetic trade union rank-and-file bodies. Finally, divisions emerged over abuses of internal party democracy. Cliff’s earlier emphasis on the ‘need to learn from workers, not merely to seek to teach’ was replaced by an increasing insistence that the party knew best.
It all led to a bitter split within the IS, the expulsion and resignation of hundreds of members (including dozens of key shop steward militants) and the subsequent proclamation of the Socialist Workers Party by Cliff and his supporters. I was one of those who parted company with Cliff. A deepening sectarianism in his politics over the next 30 years generated a small army of ex-members.
Cliff, like all of us, was a flawed individual. Personally warm and with an infectious sense of humour rare among revolutionary leaders, he was ruthless in conducting polemics against those who disagreed with him. Longstanding comrades were abandoned without hesitation. The SWP reacted to the weakening of the working-class movement with ever more frenetic campaigns and abrupt and often contradictory tactical switches. Birchall suggests this was a price worth paying for the survival of the SWP.
Birchall acknowledges the process by which Cliff’s creative ‘revisionism’ gave way to a more sterile orthodoxy in later years and notes Cliff’s frequently disastrous handling of human relations. He even accepts that the nature and character of the socialist goals that seemed so obvious in the past are now less clear and predicts that it may not be easy to recognise ‘the Old Red Mole’ when it eventually resurfaces.
New questions
Neither Cliff, nor those who broke with him, fully understood the economic and social transformation taking place around us. Class, of course, remains a reality today. But there has been a significant erosion of class consciousness (what Marx called ‘a class for itself’, not just ‘a class in itself’) and the loss of many working-class social, cultural and educational organisations and traditions.
There are new questions to be asked. Is the fragmentation of class now being mediated by new awareness of community, of sustainable development and other forms of human solidarity? This was something detected by the late Michael Kidron in his last, unfinished, magnum opus, but now much in need of development.
Birchall’s biography does not recognise that the future of the political party as an organisational form is open to question, nor that the Leninist version of ‘democratic centralism’ is now profoundly anachronistic. Lenin never envisaged a democratic centralist party having to survive for decades without a revolutionary opportunity. Cliff himself once declared during the 1970s that if the party did not succeed it would have to be re-invented.
In the decades after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, socialists and other radicals in Britain and elsewhere in Europe also had to face a bewildering series of economic and social changes. The demise of the old artisan economy and the rise of industrial mass production brought with it a steady decline in the influence of the radical and insurrectionary Jacobin and Chartist politics that had spearheaded the revolutionary challenge to the old semi-feudal order.
We face comparable challenges today. However, breaks with the past are rarely total in history. A new generation of socialists, libertarians, greens, trade unionists and social activists now confront a familiar challenge – how to forge the emerging centres of opposition to a crisis-ridden capitalism and a feral ruling class into a politically coherent force for change.
Trotskyists sometimes speak of the need for ‘transitional programmes’ on the way to socialism. But the need today is for a more comprehensive transitional politics. Serious anti-capitalist politics in response to the crisis of globalisation calls for new forms of supra-national democracy, just as national democracy was central to radical change in the 19th century.
Ian Birchall’s account of the life of a man who influenced tens of thousands of socialists – including many who have moved beyond and away from the model of the SWP – should stimulate others to address these issues. But as Tony Cliff always insisted: ‘Revolutionary socialist politics has to be a politics of hope to be truly revolutionary.’
Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time, by Ian Birchall, is published by Bookmarks. www.bookmarksbookshop.co.uk

Downfall: the Tommy Sheridan story by Alan McCombes is published by Birlinn.

The King’s Heath neighbourhood streets scheduled for today’s outing are mixed: roughly half white, half Asian – Sikh, Hindu and Muslim. She switches neatly between Urdu and English, depending on who comes to the door, but each time her message remains more-or-less the same. She grew up in a house around the corner and so there are a handful of shared school-day anecdotes. But she is surprised at the wider and warm recognition she is getting, with many more people interrupting her doorstep introduction with, ‘Oh yes, I know you; I’ve seen you on Question Time.’

Yaqoob sums up people’s impressions of Respect, the party she has represented as a Birmingham councillor since 2006, as ‘up until recently: George Galloway, Muslims, war’. Ger Francis, her campaign manager, agrees: ‘Everyone knows we’re anti-war, what they don’t know are the other things we support.’ Other than troops out, the policy priorities on today’s leaflets are investment not cuts, a green new deal and anti-racism. Francis explains the major challenge as overcoming people’s misconception of Respect as the party of the Muslim community, a misconception that excludes 84 per cent of Birmingham’s population. The strategy is simply to explain what they stand for.

This is exactly what Yaqoob is doing on the doorsteps (‘We’re against cutting public services – it wasn’t us who caused the recession, it was the bankers, but they’re the ones getting the bonuses!’) and it seems to be working well. One young white man we bump into becomes an instant on-the-street convert: ‘I want a bit of change. I’ll do that, I’ll vote for you, love. Pleasure to meet you!’

Yaqoob’s doorstep sell includes the Green Party endorsement (the Greens stepped down in this constituency to back her), which she hopes will ‘reinforce our progressive message and reassure voters, stop them putting us in a box’.

The Respect canvassers are also making certain they talk about local concerns. Mohammad Ishtiaq, a local councillor, explains: ‘Last time we spoke too much about international issues and got slammed for not talking enough about local issues, so now we’re trying to get the balance of local/global.’ At the top of the leaflets is a declaration against cuts in council jobs and services, to be paid for by a small council tax increase for the richest. The fight to save Sparkhill baths in Springfield ward is going down well – and so too is Yaqoob’s impromptu anti-litter petition after residents of the street we are doorstepping complain about rubbish from the new takeaways.

At the canvassers’ meeting afterwards the volunteers relay their, mostly positive, feedback. Eugene Egan signed up as a volunteer after seeing Yaqoob on the television. ‘I thought she’d done brilliant; this is someone who can change things,’ he says.

‘My mother didn’t like it, because she’s narrow minded,’ he adds, laughing. He is clearly excited to be part of the action. He reports to the room warm response to Yaqoob ‘mostly from what I’d call the white Christian type people’. This aligns with the experience of a young Asian activist who exclaims, ‘The white people were nicer to us than the Asians!’

The other patterns that surprise the canvassers are the almost absolute absence of people professing other party ties, but at the same time voters’ ‘repoliticisation’ – their eagerness to engage with and talk about the issues.

They plan to step up the canvassing; the goal is to knock on every door in the constituency. Yaqoob ‘doesn’t like how other parties in the constituency have operated, leaving out white working class communities that then don’t get heard’. Nor does she have time for the cynicism of politicians who assume the white working class is racist. Her experience, she says, is one of being warmly received by people who ‘just want to be listened to, to know somebody cares’.

Reaching beyond the muesli eaters

Some 200 miles south, Brighton Pavilion, with its bohemian culture and penchant for the alternative, is an obvious choice for Caroline Lucas’s parliamentary bid. A specially commissioned ICM poll in December gave her Green Party an eight-point lead over the Tories and ten over Labour. And when I visit for their weekly action day a couple of months later, the volunteers are quite giddily excited with possibility, chirpily recounting the positive feedback they’ve been getting from voters.

A more recent, controversial poll told a different story, putting the Greens in third place, so unhatched chickens certainly shouldn’t be counted. But there’s a real chance, if the election campaign goes well, that Lucas could be Britain’s first Green MP.

Paul Steedman, a councillor for Brighton’s Queen’s Park ward and the Greens’ general election campaign manager, is keen to emphasise what he calls the ‘Brighton factor’: a sense of independence, a desire to try something fresh and exciting, wanting to be the first. The key to success, though, will be reaching out beyond Brighton’s centre – all quirky, independent shops and middle-class muesli eaters – and mobilising working class support.

Steedman doesn’t see a barrier here. He says the party has shown that it can get support from all sections of society (it now has 13 councillors in Brighton and Hove) once people see that it isn’t just interested in abstract issues, such as peace and the environment, but is ‘delivering real things to real people’.

Lewisham Deptford doesn’t have its equivalent of Steedman’s ‘Brighton factor’ and its demographics are vastly different: it’s a lot more working class, a lot less white. Still, the Greens began to make inroads here by mobilising ‘the white middle-class Guardian readers in the conservation areas,’ as parliamentary candidate Darren Johnson puts it. It took five years for him to become the first Green councillor in the borough and begin to amass support among working class and ethnic minority voters.

‘I’m not from a middle-class Guardian reading household,’ Johnson tells me. ‘I joined the party aged 20 and as a working class boy it was a culture shock. I was intimidated by these well-spoken posh people with very big beards.’

With this in mind, he is meticulous about avoiding ‘high-falutin language and the jargon that has grown up around the green movement’. He’ll often cross words out in drafts of local party literature to make sure it is ‘accessible to everyone – not everyone has had the benefit of university education’. The ‘Green New Deal’ is one phrase he found had ‘no resonance, was just jargonistic waffle. Instead, I’ll explain what it actually means, the types of jobs it would create: plumbers, engineers, care workers.’

As well as jobs, the Greens in Lewisham and in Brighton have been prioritising opposition to public spending cuts and NHS privatisation. They’ve also been demonstrating their social and economic policy credentials on the local level, having helped secure a living wage for everyone employed through Lewisham Council and convince its mayor to overturn some £1.8 million cuts in services for the elderly and disabled.

The response has been positive, sometimes surprisingly so. Johnson tells of Dean Walton, his partner and fellow councillor, remarking of the canvass cards: ‘Was there a mistake filling in the forms? It says all these people on the estates are putting up “Vote Green” posters!’ And as I follow him canvassing council estate blocks in his Brockley ward, we encounter regular and new supporters. One black woman is very pleased to meet him, announcing ‘I always vote Green,’ while a young Muslim mother listens to the manifesto priorities and replies, ‘My auntie votes for you, I’ll definitely do it!’

The simple practice of knocking on doors is key. The Greens have been maximising communication with the Lewisham electorate: sending out regular newsletters and attending all sorts of meetings. They are regulars at tenants’ meetings and later in the evening Johnson is off to a Latin American community event.

In terms of breadth of representation, the Greens have certainly come a long way since Johnson joined, some two decades ago. But they still have some way to go. Johnson concedes that this is especially the case with their members and volunteers, who don’t yet reflect Lewisham’s demography, but he is pleased that they will be fielding ethnic minority candidates in winnable council seats at the local elections on 6 May.

Ultimately, whether the Greens make a breakthrough on polling day will probably come down to the same factor as with Salma Yaqoob and Respect. As one of the residents of Brockley’s Syringa House estate put it, ‘I’ll think about it but I’m Labour born and bred, and it’s hard to kick the habit.’

‘It is important to share the positive things,’ he told us. ‘The successes in fighting the system.’ And Norway has had a lot of them.

Ah, well, you might think, that’s Scandinavia. Of course they’ve got a left-wing utopia. But Wahl made Norway a decade ago sound eerily similar to Britain today. The trade union movement was depoliticised. The Labour government was shifting ever-further to the right under a Tony Blair-style leader. Norway’s Labour Party (or ‘Arbeiderpartiet’) was forcing through telecoms privatisation and health marketisation – and, worse, public opinion seemed to be on their side. In polls, most people surveyed were either in favour of privatisation or would at least tolerate it. Something drastic had to be done.

The Campaign for the Welfare State started in 1999 as an alliance of six trade unions. One year later, it had 15 unions, plus students’ and women’s groups and others also affiliated. In a country of only four and a half million people, the campaign represented a million of them.

The campaign decided to contact local councils and ask them to sign three-year contracts promising that there would be no privatisation. In return, the unions pledged to modernise public services themselves, without any loss of jobs. Some left-wing councils signed up, and that was that: they had their pilot project.

After the three years were up, surveys found that both users and workers were more satisfied with the public services, and even that the local economy had improved. ‘It was a win-win-win situation,’ says Wahl, ‘It proved that privatisation is just ideological.’

Then, in 2003, came Trondheim. In Trondheim’s local election, the union branches developed their own 19-demand policy platform and put it to the political parties, promising to campaign for any party that supported it. They then used their resources not to donate to the parties, but to put out huge amounts of publicity listing the supportive parties and asking their members to vote for one of them. The result was that left-wing parties got 60 per cent of the vote in the election, and were able to form a coalition to implement the unions’ demands.

Public services like old people’s homes, refuse collection and school maintenance had already been privatised in Trondheim – but the new council took them back. Trondheim became an inspiration to the entire Norwegian left.

In 2005, Norway’s version of the TUC decided to take a leaf out of their book. This time 54 demands were sent to all the parties, and their answers publicised. It was the biggest issue of the election, and the result was to sweep away the right-wing government and force Labour into a coalition with the Socialist Left Party (Sosialistisk Venstreparti). From there it was goodbye privatisation, so long anti-union laws – and hello to increased public spending.

‘Not all their policies are perfection – but there is no privatisation. That would now be impossible in Norway.’

Wahl went to the trouble of setting out his campaign strategy in four easy steps:

1. Polarise the political discussion (don’t let them get away with blaming ‘globalisation’).
2. Develop trade unions as independent, political organisations.
3. Create new, untraditional alliances.
4. Put forward concrete alternatives to privatisation.

But he did add two warnings. First, it has taken the campaign in Norway a decade to get to where it is today – there are no shortcuts. And second, proportional representation is pretty much a precondition for getting left-wingers elected. ‘There is no way of making progress unless we change the electoral system,’ one contributor pointed out. ‘That is why there is a left in Scotland and Wales but not here – they have a different system.’

So if we can’t have a revolution, can we at least have proportional representation? It’s not that much to ask, really.

They had a point. As ever, I had to sit through hours and hours of the same old cliches to get to the interesting bits (one contributor suggested taking a tip from Just a Minute by banning hesitation, deviation or repetition – if only). As ever, people got up and flogged their pet issues to death with no regard for the topic of the meeting (vegetarianism, fiat currency, Palestine … it all gets dragged up at random). And, as ever, people made about ten ‘last points’ after the chair had told them to shut up.

Robin Sivapalan of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty praised the anarchists he had worked with while campaigning against immigration controls, and said we should learn from their methods: ‘They get things done. They show agreement and dissent collectively.’ Most socialists write consensus methods off as ‘that stupid hand-waving thing’, but consensus is a serious framework for organising practical action. In other words: it works.

If we’re talking about building the broadest possible left forums, then we should note that every socialist who spoke about working with anarchists agreed that their meetings are far more advanced and effective than ours. They have clearly set out ways to encourage participation, make plans, keep records and work through conflicts – much better than just getting a bunch of people in a room and giving them two minutes each to harangue the audience. Putting a proper structure in place moves a meeting away from being a never-ending debate and towards becoming a useful organising forum.

As things stand, we are too often obsessed with gazing at our own navels, refusing to set to do anything until we’ve checked and critiqued it for ideological purity (and damn, arguing about whether a campaign is ‘cross-class’ or not is dull). Concrete proposals are given far lower priority than discussion. Facilitation isn’t taken seriously enough (although the convention is better in this respect than most lefty get-togethers). Speakers preach to the converted when they could be building real networks and proposing united action – the decisions about dates and methods are left to party offices or individual whim rather than collective self-organisation.

Centralist methods can certainly build big demonstrations – you just ring your members up and tell them where to be and when – but they also tend to breed unhealthy organisations that fall into a rut and stop being open to new ideas. A member of Socialist Resistance caused controversy today when he proposed ‘treating sectarians like scabs’, meaning that anyone who didn’t go along with majority decisions would be vilified and abused. I can understand why frustrated activists might feel that way – but, if you ask me, we really need to look for better ways of working.

And his prediction proved accurate: Diana Raby of Respect went ahead and tried to propose an amendment. ‘We aren’t taking amendments, comrade,’ the chair told her. ‘Then I’ll read out the text of the amendment I would have put,’ she replied, to applause.

She wanted to insert a call for the creation of ‘a viable electoral alternative, to the left of New Labour’ that would stand candidates in the next general election (a move that would force McDonnell to either drop his support for the convention or break with Labour, because of Labour’s rules on support for opposition parties).

‘Enough of elections already!’ a heckler shouted – and I couldn’t help but agree.

Many of the groups present at the convention are keen to set up a new electoral party (the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party, Workers’ Power and remnants of the Socialist Alliance were the most vocal about it), and they’re not afraid to badger McDonnell and the left union leaders about it endlessly. It’s as if they think there’s some great shortage of political parties and coalitions – as if the years since the dawn of New Labour weren’t littered with the corpses of the Socialist Labour Party, Socialist Alliance, Respect and the rest. They seem to think that all we need to do is to get the Labour left and a few unions on board and all our electoral problems will be solved.

After a speaker told Matt Wrack of the Fire Brigades Union that if he believed in a new party he should ‘put his name to it and do something about it’, Wrack spelled out his objection: ‘There have been too many false starts and I don’t want to see another. It’s not as straightforward as union leaders putting their name to something.’

One of the signs of madness is that you do the same thing over and over again but expect a different result – and setting up yet another socialist(ish) party to stand in elections would fall right into that trap. Much as I’d support this hypothetical Union Party if it did somehow come into being, I wouldn’t want to see the Convention of the Left hijacked to that end. The statement as written contains a far more worthwhile proposal that hasn’t already been tried a dozen times: to set up local left forums across the country.

Bill Jefferies, moving the statement, said: ‘We want to create an open forum where people are free to express their opinions and ideas. We’ve moved away from the top table telling people the line.’

These forums would be open to the broadest left possible – from the Labour left and the Greens all the way to Marxists and anarchists – to allow people from all the different traditions to work together and link up their campaigns. They could do everything from coordinating strikes to giving grass-roots activists the chance to share their stories and tactics. Some contributors pointed to similar local initiatives that have already had some success, such as the Cardiff Radical Socialist Forum, while others drew inspiration from the united strikes on 24 April that saw teachers, lecturers and civil servants take to the streets together.

I think the local left forums idea is one that has to be given a chance, without being loaded down with the expense and heartbreak of fighting unwinnable election campaigns – and in the end, the room seemed to agree with that sentiment. Remarkably, the statement of intent passed near-unanimously, with no-one voting against and only three abstentions. There also appeared to be consensus that we should try to unify the many disparate ‘ten-point charters’ the left has produced over the past few months into one, and organise a united campaign on the increases in fuel prices as autumn turns into winter.

A speaker from Huddersfield put it this way: ‘I’ve come to this today and I feel it’s different. There’s no platform, no central committee. The power I feel here today is the power of ordinary people.’

As John McDonnell said: ‘There’s real potential, but we’ve been here before. Let’s not fuck it up again.’

You can read the convention’s statement of intent at http://www.redpepper.org.uk/Convention-of-the-left-statement