Red herrings and applesauce

national | miscellaneous | news report Monday September 02, 2002 14:36 by Freddie Cliff

A different reply to the SWP 'Open Letter to the Left'

The International Socialists reply to the recent SWP letter on a left campaign against Nice. The article was sent to me by email and I don't think that it is on the web so I reproduce it in full below.

Recently the Socialist Workers Party has issued a call for left unity in Ireland. Two fascinating articles have appeared in the party press, written by two of the party’s more thoughtful members, which deal with the subject in some detail. In issue 6 of Resistance Richard Boyd Barrett concludes an analysis of the Dáil election results with a call for an electoral alliance of the left. And in issue 180 of Socialist Worker we find an “Open Letter to the Left” by Simon Basketter calling for a united socialist campaign against the Nice treaty. Both articles have their pitfalls and are littered with red herrings, some of which are picked up on below. But the general thrust is towards a welcome openness.

Some people on the left have raised the question of whether the SWP is sincere, or whether it is just getting its denunciation in first. This is a good question, and it would be interesting to see the SWP leadership’s reaction if the Socialist Party ever did agree to ally with them. But, as Lenin once observed, nobody has yet invented a sincerometer. What is basic is the political content and it is that which we will look at here. Mind you, when Richard Boyd Barrett calls for an “end to petty squabbling and sniping”, one wonders if he has shared this wisdom with his own members. Some SWP comrades spend a great deal of time in vitriolic denunciations of everyone else on the left and then bleat about “sectarianism” when anyone answers back. Poor sensitive souls.

We will also largely leave aside the organisational issue. Many activists who have been in joint campaigns with the SWP are understandably suspicious, and this has even led to ridiculous demands for the exclusion of the SWP from various campaigns. Nonsense. The SWP is a legitimate part of the left and has to be accepted as such. The way to settle differences on the left should be rational argument, not bureaucratic exclusion.

And now let’s get to the meat of the argument.

Fascism
Both documents raise the spectre of the alleged rise of fascism across Europe. This is little more than a scare tactic – if the left doesn’t unite immediately then the boogie man will get us. Just in case we don’t get the point, Resistance carries a photo of Le Pen to show us what is in store.

In the first place, it is debatable whether the large – and worrying – votes for far-right populist parties actually does represent a fascist threat à la the 1930s. In Italy, for instance, the Alleanza Nazionale has been in the government for several years, but not even the SWP would seriously argue that Italy is now a fascist state. If it was, they wouldn’t be traipsing off to Florence for the European Social Forum.

With the possible exception of the Grey Wolves in Turkey, the new parties of the populist far right are not straight fascist organisations on the Hitler or Mussolini model. Their challenge is an electoral one rather than a campaign of street violence. In many ways, in fact, the protest votes they are tapping into represent the flip side of the anti-globalisation movement. This means they have to be fought primarily on a political-ideological level. Which is not to say that Richard and Simon could not benefit from reading Trotsky on Germany and finding out what a united front actually is.

The notion that the far right is on the verge of a political breakthrough in Ireland is even more dubious. If we look at the results of far-right candidates in the Dáil election rather than panicking every time their spokesmen appear on the TV, we get a sense of how marginal they really are. Consider for a moment the possibility of Áine Ní Chonaill being elected Taoiseach. It’s even less plausible than Richard Boyd Barrett becoming Taoiseach.

This is not to say that the far right couldn’t grow in the future and that it doesn’t have to be fought. But again, the main priority has to be the ideological struggle against racism and practical struggles against racial discrimination. And that means in the first instance targeting the Fianna Fáil and PD politicians who are the main conduit for racism in Irish politics.

The elections
Richard’s analysis of the election results, while it contains much that is sensible, also contains a fair amount of pure applesauce. This stems directly from his desire to prove that there are massive openings for the left. The claim in the post-election Socialist Worker that there was a 25% “anti-establishment” vote is another example. To reach the 25% figure SW apparently includes not only the Greens, Sinn Féin and the small hard-left parties, but also Ruairí Quinn’s wretched Labour Party and any rag tag and bobtail independents they can find.

Richard correctly argues that there has been a long-term decline in working-class support for Fianna Fáil, and it is true that despite modest gains the FF vote remains at a historically low level. But while FF’s hold over the working class may be slipping it is not gone by a long way. The FF share of the vote in Dublin was only barely below that in the rest of the country. The populism of Bertie Ahern still finds a ready audience. This can be challenged, especially as the boom ends and the government attacks the working class. However, we cannot complacently assume that the working class has broken decisively with FF or will automatically do so. After all, the Progressive Democrats provide Bertie with a perfect set of fall guys.

The main feature of the election was of course the slaughter of the Blueshirts. The collapse of Fine Gael was the electorate’s verdict on an opposition that didn’t oppose. Clearly there are long-term changes under way in anti-FF politics, but just what the outcome will be is an open question. FG no longer represent a credible alternative government and have been all but wiped out in Dublin. Their rural strongholds, on the other hand, are unlikely to fall in the forseeable future. FG will be blotting the political landscape for some time to come.

Now we come to the “left”. Labour, which is in no sense leftist but an out-and-out pro-capitalist party these days, lost some support in the estates, gained some in the suburbs and stayed put overall. The main story was the surge in support for the Greens and particularly Sinn Féin. Richard rightly sees that at least in the minds of Green and SF voters this was a vote for the left. He also sees that there is a contradiction between the leftism of SF/Green activists and supporters and the ideology of their parties. This was manifested especially in the debate within Sinn Féin about the possibility of entering coalition, which the Belfast leadership was prepared to contemplate but the Southern members and the left-wing Dublin organisation in particular saw would be electoral suicide. These contradictions are things that socialists could work on. Sadly, Richard’s strategy seems to boil down to hoping that SF and the Greens will go into government soon and expose themselves.

The question then arises of what the hard left can do. With the exception of the Socialist Party’s two high-profile candidates – Joe Higgins, who held his seat in Dublin West, and Clare Daly who narrowly missed out in Dublin North – the votes for the hard left were modest to say the least. Even if, as Richard advocates, the SP, SWP and Workers Party joined forces, they would still be a long way from presenting a serious electoral alternative. If the left is to become an alternative at the polls there is a very long slog ahead.

The Socialist Party have a good understanding of this. It would be very easy to ridicule the SP for their practice of “socialism in one constituency”, but it works for them. Joe and Clare poll well because they are hard working, have a high constituency profile and are not seen as professional machine politicians. The same could be said of Martin Ferris, Seán Crowe and Aengus Ó Snodaigh, or of Tony Gregory, Seamus Healy and Finian McGrath. And you could make much the same point about Jackie Healy Rae and Mildred Fox, who are nobody’s idea of socialists.

For Richard, the weakness of the left is mainly down to its division into squabbling sects. There may be some truth in that, but the division of the left is not the main problem by any means. Firstly, the left is small. Even the biggest organisation, the Socialist Party, is small in absolute terms. The left is weak on the ground. The Greens and republicans have more members, more resources and a far higher media profile, making them a more attractive first stop for a protest vote. Independents, notably those campaigning around health issues, tend to have serious local roots that the small socialist groups can only dream of. Finally, it must be asked whether the SWP was wise to run what was virtually a single-issue campaign around the bin tax, when it was obvious that health was the main issue for the working class. Unity of the left may help, but it would not be any kind of panacea.

Global justice
The “Open Letter” on the Nice referendum is a similar mix of sensible analysis and conclusions which do not necessarily follow from that analysis. Simon articulates the socialist case for a No vote quite well, and effectively disposes of the racist arguments of the far right, even if he does tend to hype up the danger from these pretty marginal elements.

Simon then argues that there are three features of the present period which point to the need for left unity. First is Bush’s continued war drive which of course has to be opposed. Second is the employers’ offensive across Europe which has been strengthened by the election of right-wing governments in France and the Netherlands and the possibility of Edmund Stoiber coming to power in Germany. Workers obviously need to resist the coming attacks and indeed have already begun to do so.

The third feature is the development of the global justice movement. Simon’s analysis here is problematic because he has to repeat a lot of arrant nonsense about the forward march of “anti-capitalism”. It is not clear, as he alleges, that “the anti-capitalist movement has continued to grow after September 11th”. Since 9/11 the movement has been distinctly patchy, something the SWP refuses to admit. Take the mass demonstrations at the Barcelona summit, hailed in SW as “500,000 march against capital and war”. Apart from some inflation of the numbers, you would not have gathered from the SW report that the largest contingent of demonstrators at Barcelona were the Catalan nationalists. If socialists are to intervene effectively in the new social movements they have to have a rational understanding of what these movements are and what they are not. Indulging in fantasies about a revolutionary mass movement is not productive, and is downright absurd in Ireland where the “anti-capitalist” movement is almost entirely confined to the small milieu of socialists and anarchists.

Simon does, however, recognise one problem on the horizon. “As it grows,” he says, “the movement will also embrace more reformist elements.” This tends to exaggerate the level of consciousness the movement had in the past. The glue holding the global justice movement together has always been the NGOs, philanthropic foundations and charities – and whoever heard of a revolutionary charity? Simon concludes that the revolutionary left has to get its act together and take the ideological battle to the reformists. Absolutely correct! Although he might have the good grace to offer an apology to those of us whom the SWP leadership denounced as “sectarians” for making precisely that point. After all, none of us advocated the lunatic policy followed by Simon’s comrades in Greece, who refuse to participate in the “reformist” global justice campaigns run by the trade unions and Communist Party, preferring to have a solo “anti-capitalist” front consisting of themselves and nobody else.

What kind of unity?
It is worth pointing out that, while the general sentiment for unity on the left is a healthy thing, unity is not an object in itself. One unites for something concrete. To place unity above principle is called opportunism in our movement. The SWP articles, while they come under the rubric of “left unity”, are in fact talking about different things.

Simon’s “Open Letter” is calling for temporary unity around a specific issue, namely the Nice treaty. He argues that the possibility of four different socialist campaigns on Nice is ridiculous. And so it is. And of course it would be better if the different socialist tendencies could form a united campaign. But it isn’t the end of the world. The combined weight of the far left in Ireland is much less than that of the Greens or republicans, who will certainly be running their own party campaigns. Indeed, given the weakness of the left, all this talk about broad campaigns is a bit grandiose.

The other kind of unity discussed is broader political unity, which is a whole different kettle of fish. Simon in fact confuses the two in writing about France, where he mixes up the specific struggle against Le Pen with electoral pacts on the far left. The two are connected, but are not the same thing. It seems that France is dragged in mainly to compare the SWP’s opponents to the “sectarian” Lutte Ouvrière’s refusal to form a pact with the LCR. Well, there are worse people to be compared to. It is interesting that Simon does not mention the LCR’s politically criminal advice to vote for Chirac. Presumably their cosy relationship with the British SWP puts them beyond criticism.

Simon favourably mentions the Scottish Socialist Party and the Italian Rifondazione Comunista as examples of the left “getting its act together”. Much could be said, positive and negative, about those formations and Simon is right to argue that they do not provide a blueprint for left unity in Ireland. To get a sense of the unity the SWP favours, we shall return to Richard’s article.

Richard argues that what is needed is a unified electoral bloc of the SWP, the Socialist Party and the Workers Party. Charitably, he also includes the “smaller groupings” (hitherto known in the SWP as the “sectarian left”). He correctly sees that an electoral bloc would have to be a long-term project and that it could not confine itself to elections but would have to take a lead in day-to-day struggles.

So far so good. Whether Richard can actually get this bloc together is another matter. The Socialist Party are doing quite well at the polls, and might justifiably ask what they would gain from an alliance with the SWP. Their method of patient spadework in the constituencies would probably not mesh too well with the SWP’s weakness for fly-by-night campaigns. The unreconstructed Stalinists in the Workers Party are probably none too keen to ally themselves with the “Trots”. And if a united bloc was confined to the SWP and some of the small groups, wouldn’t that be just repeating the experience of the ill-fated Socialist Alliance?

And that’s without even considering the most important issue of all, the political content of a socialist bloc. To take the most obvious example, how would the SWP and the Socialist Party reach an agreed policy on Northern Ireland? Or would their candidates agree to differ? That might be a tenable strategy in the South, but not if the bloc operated in the North. If the bloc extended to the trade unions, would the SP’s Broad Left strategy be compatible with the rank-and-file approach of the SWP? These are not issues that can simply be glossed over.

If the SWP is seriously committed to lowering the temperature on the left and helping socialists to talk in a rational atmosphere, that is a highly positive step. The different tendencies on the left should indeed try to identify areas where they can agree and cooperate. And where we disagree, we should be open about our differences. There is a difference between argument and squabbling. The free exchange of ideas is the only way for the left to go forward.