International Worker No 238, Saturday, August 16, 1997 The evolution of the Socialist Workers Party Crude apologists for the labour and trade union bureaucracy By Chris Marsden For years the Socialist Workers Party has drawn into its ranks students and workers, mainly in local government, critical of the right wing leadership of the Labour Party and the trade unions. It has specialised in combining a verbal revolutionism with a glorification of rank and file trade union militancy aimed at pressurising the bureaucracy into fighting for reforms. In the 1980s it grew to be the largest of the middle class radical groups, despite its self-professed scepticism in any possibility of constructing an independent Marxist leadership. The SWP even elaborated what it termed the "theory of the downturn" in working class militancy which, after the defeat of the 1984 miners' strike, became the defining point of all its work. They claimed that the task of revolutionaries was to "start where workers are" and, by encouraging them to be more militant, and increasing their confidence so that eventually they would take the next step towards adopting a socialist programme. Their leader, Tony Cliff, said that reformist-minded workers agreed with 40 or 50% of what the SWP stands for and the experience of the class struggle should be used to convince them of the rest. What this translated to in practice was a crude apologia for the union leaders and the Labour Party. The only problem with the unions, according to the SWP, was that the leaders were too privileged and cut off from their members. This made them susceptible to the pressure of the bosses because they had no confidence in the ability to "fight back". The task therefore was to work with union "militants", which the SWP identified as 20,000 shop stewards ó minor union bureaucrats ó to put pressure on the union leaders and give them some backbone. In his book, Socialists in the Trade Unions, SWP theoretician Alex Callinicos even declares that, "The shop stewards in Britain are a classic example of rank and file organisations." (p28) The SWP never took part in elections, claiming that Parliament was not the real arena of struggle and that socialism came from below, not above. This ostensible radicalism covered over the SWP's loyal support for the Labour Party, to whom it gave the exclusive right to the vote of working people. The SWP were not averse to criticising this or that aspect of the Labour Party's programme and leadership and opposed the party's rightward course. But they never tired of explaining that Labour is the party of the trade unions, the "basic organisation of the working class", and could be forced to defend the working class. As Tony Blair led Labour into a complete repudiation of its old reformist programme, the SWP mounted campaigns around slogans such as "Keep Clause IV" and "Maintain the union link". When National Union of Mineworkers President Arthur Scargill set up the Socialist Labour Party in November 1995 in response to Labour's junking of its commitment to common ownership, the SWP intervened in every SLP meeting to criticise his reformism, but only in order to call for continued support for Labour. During the General Election they did eventually call for a vote for the "socialist candidate" of your choice in areas where the SLP or Militant's Socialist Party (SP) were standing, in response to pressure from their own members and supporters. However, this was only an appendix to an energetic campaign to get Labour into office, around the call, "Vote Labour, but don't trust Blair". SWP's pro-Labour gyrations On the surface, the SWP's annual Marxism í97 should have been an occasion for triumphalism. With Labour in government for the first time in 18 years and the SLP and SP failing to make a major breakthrough in the elections, it seemed on the surface that their line had been vindicated. The opposite was the case. The SWP met in the midst of a deep crisis, having to justify its continued support for Labour to sections of its own membership troubled by the rightward lurch of both the Labour Party and the trade unions. There are growing divisions in the SWP. In their theoretical journal, Socialist Review, there have been a number of articles making a veiled call for the SWP to recognise the growing hostility towards Blair and the possibility of this leading to the formation of a new party. Using historical analogies with the 1930s, they advocate developing a closer working relationship with the SLP and even participation in the Socialist Party-led Socialist Alliances with other radicals and Stalinists. On the eve of Marxism í97 the SWP lost 10 members of their Belgian affiliate, Socialisme Internationale, to Militant Links, which is part of the Socialist Party's Committee for a Workers International. Given the former Militant Tendency's 35 year strategy of deep entryism into the social democratic parties, there is no small irony in the fact that this defection was sparked by opposition to the SWP's insistence that their Belgian section pursue its own entrist tactic in the Parti Socialiste, the Belgian equivalent of the Labour Party. The SWP's co-thinkers in France and Germany have already adopted this policy. The SWP's response has been to step up its apologetics for Labour and to move ever further to the right. In the May 17 issue of Socialist Worker, they fantasise about the Queen's Speech they would have liked Labour to deliver and in the process ditch any pretence of advocating a revolutionary perspective. In order to appear reasonable to left sections of the trade union and Labour bureaucracy, they only call for Income Tax on top earners to be restored to the 60% figure levied under Margaret Thatcher until 1988! On the more decisive question of taxation on big business itself and public ownership of major industries, they meekly request that, "Any privatised company which makes profits over the average rate for British industry will pay 70% on those additional profits." The level of any increase in taxation on industry is left diplomatically vague. Similarly the agenda of Marxism í97 was focused on attempts to convince the SWP membership and supporters that Labour was still the mass reformist party of the working class. In his lecture, "Is Labour still a working class party?", Martin Smith answered in the affirmative. There is a mass of statistical evidence confirming that millions of workers abstained in the General Election, producing a record low post-war turnout, and that Blair's majority was largely due to a switch to Labour by three million former Tory voters. Smith, however, maintained that the vast mass of workers still supported Labour and those that did not were demoralised. "82% of the people thought this was a good budget and we cannot isolate ourselves from them", he insisted. John Rees revealingly told his audience for the lecture, "Blairism: Is it reformism without reforms?" that life was easier under the Tories: "Everything the government said, we were against. Under Labour it is different. The Labour Party, and our reason for voting for it in the General Election was, that it isn't a second edition of the Tory party. We have always defended it as a capitalist workers' party." He went on to reassure everyone that a small minority of Labour's policies are "genuine reforms"! The SWP's line on the unions is no different. The unions have presided over two decades of betrayals and marched step for step with Blair in adopting an openly pro-business agenda. Yet the June 14 Socialist Worker says of Labour's election: "It's payback time, Let's rebuild our unions". Endorsing the TUC's New Unionism campaign they explain, "IT's not just Socialist Worker that is pushing this message. So are the union leaders". The New Unionism message of the TUC is that the unions must act as an appendage of management in partnership with the employers and New Labour. In the words of TUC General Secretary John Monks, "Just as the Cold War is over, so is the class war." This is the main reason why workers have turned away from the unions in droves, leaving membership at a 60 year low of 6.8 million from a high of 12 million. In their capacity as the TUC's propaganda unit, however, the SWP claims that the "unions are more popular than ever": "In fact the rate of decline has fallen sharply ó from 3% a year in 1989 to just 1% last year. This suggests the trend is towards a resurgence of the unions." A privileged strata How is it that a tendency which once specialised in calling for a rank and file rebellion against the union leaders and paraded itself as the most stringent opponents of the Labour Party has come to be their most loyal defenders? The answer lies in its political line and the social position of the petty-bourgeois strata that makes up the ranks of the SWP. As the International Socialists, the Cliff group was formed in 1951 from a break with the Fourth International, the world Trotskyist movement. Cliff and his followers drew the most sceptical conclusions from the expansion of Stalinist control over Eastern Europe and the restabilisation of post-war capitalism. It convinced them that Trotsky's perspective of world socialist revolution had failed. The Stalinist bureaucracy constituted a new exploitative class within a new form of state capitalist society, while imperialism had found ways of averting its own crisis. The best that could be achieved was to encourage protest movements primarily amongst students and intellectuals because, they argued, the working class had been bought off by welfare state reforms and higher wages. The turn to rank and fileism took place in the 1970s, in response to the militant struggles against the Heath Tory government. The radicalised students of the IS/SWP viewed these struggles as a means of winning political and economic concessions within capitalism ó from which they would of course be the main beneficiaries ó and not from the standpoint of mobilising workers for the overthrow of the profit system. In the last two decades, with the collapse of the Stalinist Communist Party and the absence of a consistent revolutionary opposition due to the degeneration of the old Workers Revolutionary Party, the SWP was able to secure leading union positions at branch level. To give an indication of this, in the Socialist Worker's May 1 edition, upwards of 75 trade union branches, shop stewards committees and trades councils send greetings to the party in paid advertisements ó this for a party with a self-professed membership of 10,000 and an active membership of less than half that. Bereft of a revolutionary perspective, this has led to the integration of a large part of the SWP cadre into the trade union bureaucracy with all the associated privileges. This is what lies behind the apparent paradox of why, as Labour and the unions have progressively abandoned any defence of the working class, the SWP has ditched its rank-and-file rhetoric and becomes ever more strident in its support for the official organisations. The SWP's leadership is drawn from a relatively privileged social strata of academics, local government personnel and skilled workers. These are the very forces to which New Labour pitches its message and the social layer that is mainly organised in trade unions. Hence their vociferous support for the pro-Labour/pro-union bureaucracy line in the party. Revealingly the June 14 Socialist Worker boasts that, "Unionised workers earn 10% more on average than those in non-union workplaces". For them maintaining a slight and declining differential for the usually more skilled 25% of workers justifies the union's presiding over the impoverishment of the class as a whole. As New Labour and the trade unions carry out the destruction of jobs and social conditions, the real anti-working class basis of the SWP's defence of the bureaucracy is becoming ever clearer. This will not only produce splits and defections from their own organisation, but will discredit them forever in the eyes of workers and youth everywhere. Their present troubles are only a foretaste of this.

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