Socialist Resistance

Socialist Resistance statement on the banking crisis.

The banking crisis which became apparent in August 2007 has got dramatically worse in the last two weeks. This is for three reasons. Firstly, the slump in the housing market – not just in the USA but also in a number of European countries, including Britain – has turned out to be worse than expected, leaving the banks with more bad debts than originally thought. Secondly, there has been a crisis of confidence amongst the banks themselves so that they have stopped lending to one another. Thirdly, the stock market has also panicked so that bank shares have slumped drastically.

The banks need to raise cash to cover their loan losses but they cannot do so by borrowing because no-one will lend to them. Neither can they raise funds by issuing shares because the market will not subscribe to new issues. If unchecked this situation will mean that at best they will have to cut back their lending drastically. Bank regulation is based on so-called `capital adequacy rules’ which state that a certain percentage of loans have to be covered by paid up equity capital. If that capital shrinks in value loans have to decline as well. At worst, if a major bank cannot cover its own loan repayments it could go bankrupt.

The crisis of confidence has worsened sharply since the US government decided to allow Lehman Brothers to fold. While the rescue of Bear Sterns earlier this year briefly seemed to stabilise the crisis the failure of Lehmans has had the opposite effect.

The response of the British government, following the US, has been to propose a massive injection of capital into the banks. This is planned in two ways. First, a direct injection of cash by buying shares. Second, a government guarantee on all inter-bank lending. The aim is both to strengthen the capital base of the banks and to restore enough confidence to allow them to start borrowing again.

How should socialists respond? First of all it is important to note that the shares which the government intends to buy in the banks were originally planned as `preference’ shares rather than `ordinary’ shares. While preference shares give a formal title of ownership they do not carry voting rights and are normally seen as a form of debt rather than equity (they receive a fixed interest payment rather than a variable dividend). In other words New Labour’s first plan was not to take control of the banks but to lend them taxpayers money and guarantee their loans. Over the last few days there has been talk of moving towards taking ordinary shares, exerting more control and possibly putting government representatives on bank boards. But the government has edged towards this reluctantly and it is still not certain whether they are even going to ensure the minimal control needed to stop the fat cat culture of bank bonuses.

Socialists should call for a completely different response to the crisis. The banks need to be taken into full public ownership under democratic control. But that is only the start of what is needed. A new kind of financial system is required which serves the needs of people rather than profit. That means changing the way banks and other institutions decide on lending and the terms of their loans. But it also means attacking the neo-liberal economic model based on inequality and insecurity which led to the risky loans in the first place.

The following resolution from supporters of Socialist Resistance is being submitted to Respect’s conference.

Conference notes:

1. That we are now in the grip of the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s. That this is the direct result of many years of neoliberalism, market deregulation, wild speculation and corporate and individual greed – as reflected in the obscene city bonuses. Government intervention into such a situation is absolutely essential. But the handing over vast unprotected sums of money to the very people who have caused the problem in the first place, as in the Brown/Darling proposals makes no sense. It was right to nationalise debt ridden and bankrupt financial institutions such as Northern Rock and Bradford and Bingly but it is not the answer the crisis. But control comes with ownership and the precondition for stabilising the financial sector is to bring it into public ownership and under public control – including the Bank of England which was given the right to set interest rates by Gordon Brown in his first days as Chancellor. Democratic control over the economy through Parliament is essential if a further plunge into crisis is to be avoided.
2. That it will be the working class and the poorest in society who will be made to pay the price for this situation though mass unemployment, continued wage freeze, cuts in the standard of living, attacks on the public services, loss of pension rights and house repossessions.

Conference therefore resolves:

1. To campaign for the public ownership of the financial institutions.
2. To support campaigns launched in defence of wages, pensions and jobs. To support the campaign against fuel poverty. To call for a halt repossessions on mortgage defaults and for the requisition of empty housing. To call for a halt to all further privatisations.
3. To call for an immediate programme of house building, free home insulation, and investment in renewable energy to preserve jobs. We call for new and extensive investment in public transport.
4. To organise a series of public rallies around the country to present this alternative.

Take Action Now to Stop War on Iran
U.S. Naval Armada heading towards Iran

Growing threat - Join us in mobilizing to Stop War on Iran! - Appeal from StopWarOnIran.org

As we write, the arrival of new U.S. warships will mark the largest build-up of Naval forces in the Gulf since the 1991 Gulf War.

The aircraft carriers USS Theodore Roosevelt and the USS Ronald Reagan, along with the USS Iwo Jima, an Amphibious Assault Ship are sailing toward the Persian Gulf to reinforce the US strike forces in the region, along with a British Royal Navy carrier battle group and a French nuclear hunter-killer submarine.

This move follows the ominous Operation Brimstone, a massive military exercise involving more than a dozen warships from the US, England, and France in the Atlantic Ocean in preparation for a possible confrontation with Iran.

The USS Roosevelt, which participated in the just-concluded exercise, and the USS Ronald Reagan will join two US naval battle groups in the area: the USS Abraham Lincoln with its Carrier Strike Group Nine ; and the USS Peleliu, and Amphibious Assault Ship with its expeditionary strike group.

Sign the Petition at http://stopwaroniran.org/petition.shtml

A range of international speakers have now been confirmed for Socialist Resistance’s day school on broad left parties on Saturday 28 June. Recent developments in the Workers Party (PT) Brazi, the Italian Rifondazione Comunista and Respect in England and Wales have once again sparked debate about the strategy of building broad anti-capitalist parties and their relationship to the tactics of revolutionaries.

Speakers confirmed include Miguel Reis from the Left Bloc in Portugal as well as speakers from Die Linke in Germany, the Dutch Socialist Party and the LCR in France, currently in the middle of a highly successful campaign to found a new, broad socialist party. Speakers from Britain will include Joseph Healy, from Green Left, and Alan Thornett from Socialist Resistance. The conference starts 10.30am, June 28 at ULU, Malet Street, London.

If you want any of these books, please make out a cheque to Socialist Resistance, and post it to: PO Box 1109 London N4 2UU, with details of your request, including your return address and a phone number.

1) Carre Rouge magazine, No. 2 6€/£5

2) Ecole Emancipe magazine, mai 2008 3€/£2.50

3) Revolution - Olivier Besancenot, 250p, 5,60€/£4.50p

4) Evo Morales et la gauche au pouvoir en Bolivie – Herve Do Alto & Pablo Stefanoni, 120p, 6€/£5

5) 1968 Fins et suites - Krivine et Bensaid, 190p, 12€/£9.50p

6) Mai 68 - Boris Gobille, 120p, 8,50€/£7

7) Les Trotskysmes - Bensaid, 125p, 8€/£6.50p

8} Che Guevara – Lowy et Besancenot, 245p, 14€/£11

9) Slogans et affiches de Mai 68, 230p, 7€/£5.60p

10) Un pur capitalisme - Michel Husson, 250p, 16€/£12.50p

11) Contretemps no. 22 – 1968 un monde en revolte, 190p, 19€/£15

12) Critique Communiste no. 185 – Municipales 12€/£9.50p

13) Critique Communiste no. 186 - Mai 68 -12€/£9.50p

14) La pensee de Trotsky – Mandel, 170p 7€£5.50p

15) Pamphlets at 2€/£1.60p on :

• a) Education
• b) Prostitution
• c) National Front
• d) Local elections 2008 Manifesto
• e) Electricity privatisation

16) Cahiers de Critique Communiste at 7€/£5.60

• a) Marx et l’appropriation sociale
• b) Marxisme et democratie
• c) Marxisme face au capitalisme contemporain
• d) Travail, critique du travail, emancipation
• e) Femmes, genre feminisme
• f) Classe ouvrière, salariat, lutte de classes

17) La France des annees 1968, 900p 30€/£24

18) DVDs 6€/£4.80p

• a) Pierre Frank on The popular front 1936
• b) Jean-Marie Vincent on the German revolution 1918-1923

The World Economy and the Credit Crisis

Andy Kilmister

1. Introduction

The significance of the current turmoil in global financial markets can be seen sharply in the following quote from the article `The rescue of Bear Sterns marks liberalisation’s limit’ by the chief economic commentator of the Financial Times, Martin Wolf, in the March 26 issue of that paper. Wolf, who is no radical, writes

Remember Friday March 14 2008: it was the day the dream of global free-market capitalism died. For three decades we have moved towards market-driven financial systems. By its decision to rescue Bear Sterns, the Federal Reserve, the institution responsible for monetary policy in the US, chief protagonist of free-market capitalism, declared this era over. It showed in deeds its agreement with the remark by Joseph Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, that “I no longer believe in the market’s self-healing power”. Deregulation has reached its limits…..even the recent past is a foreign country.

One of the most important parts of this statement is the reference to `three decades’. The current crisis has been compared to 1929. This is not really helpful as a guide to its significance. Much more useful in my view is to see what is happening as the unravelling of the set of institutional arrangements which have governed global capitalism since around the mid-1980s, which in turn emerged as a response to the breakdown of the long post-war boom a decade earlier. To understand what is happening now we need to go back to this period and to the emergence of this framework.

2. The Crisis of the 1970s and 1980s

Stable capitalist accumulation depends on two crucial conditions. Firstly, it requires the extraction of sufficient profits in the process of production. Secondly, it requires the realisation of those profits through sales on the market. This gives rise to a key contradiction – these two conditions are in conflict with one another. The successful extraction of profits depends on keeping wages down while the realisation of those profits depends on sufficient demand being available which in turn limits the ability of capital to lower wages. This conflict is a central reason for the periodic crises which characterise capitalist growth. It is worth noting here that two of the main Marxist theories of crisis result from adopting a partial view which focuses on just one side of this conflict; under-consumptionism (for example the work of the Monthly Review school in the USA) concentrates on the lack of demand which prevents realisation of profits while the profit-squeeze theory of writers like Andrew Glyn and Bob Sutcliffe focuses on rising labour costs which prevent the generation of profits in production. An adequate theory of crisis has to encompass both perspectives and to take account of the way in which capital can achieve a temporary resolution of the contradiction, which however inevitably stores up new problems for future accumulation.

The temporary resolution underlying the boom of the 1950s and 1960s depended on three main factors. First, state expenditure as a key source of additional demand. Second, the stable international economic environment provided by the `Bretton Woods’ system of fixed exchange rates which allowed for rapid growth of world trade. Third, the development of new consumer goods technologies and markets, notably in areas like the motor industry and consumer electronics (so-called `white’ goods).

For reasons which are still controversial amongst Marxists this boom broke down in the mid 1970s leading to a decade of economic turbulence and two major international recessions, in 1974-75 and 1979-82. However, from the mid-1980s onwards a new framework for accumulation began to take shape, in an unplanned and chaotic way, but embodying a measure of coherence.

3. The Temporary Resolution of this Crisis

This framework had three main components:

· The first was a massive explosion of debt – both household and (to a lesser extent) corporate debt. Debt has played a key role in mitigating the contradiction between the generation and realisation of profits, allowing for expanded demand even though wages have been kept down and a frontal assault on trade unions and organised labour has kept the working class on the defensive. However, there is an obvious contradiction here in that debt has to be repaid eventually and so the conflict between low wages and increased demand is likely to reassert itself with renewed ferocity at that point. Consequently, debt has only been able to play the role which it has because of the other two components listed below.

· The second component of accumulation has been a renewed stability in the international financial system, following on from the wild exchange rate swings of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s which resulted from the end of the Bretton Woods arrangements. This stability has allowed for strong growth in international trade but, more importantly, has underpinned dramatic financial deregulation and increased international investment. The key factor leading to this stability has been the informal but durable relationship between the USA and China (and to a lesser extent other Asian countries) whereby the US deficit has been funded by surplus countries, who have purchased US treasury bills, allowing those surplus countries to maintain the value of the dollar and keep their own currencies low in value, which in turn has underpinned their export drive. Linked with this, and important for both the US and UK, has been a rise in the returns earned by these countries on their investments abroad, which has helped them run large balance of payments deficits without their foreign liabilities escaping out of control.

· The third factor has been two decades of exceptionally low commodity prices. This has been a key factor in allowing central banks in the industrialised world, especially in the UK and USA, to let debt increase and to lower interest rates to boost demand, without worrying too much about inflation. A number of orthodox economists (most recently Brian Henry from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research) have argued that low commodity prices have been more significant in keeping inflation down since the 1980s than either central bank economic management or labour market developments.

It is important to recognise that, owing to the unplanned and chaotic nature of capitalism, this framework did not take root globally at a single point in time, but arose in a more spontaneous way. Notably, the second most important capitalist economy, Japan, followed a trajectory of its own, as a result of the specific characteristics of Japanese capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s, and has stagnated throughout most of the last two decades (though the Japanese trade surplus and Japanese purchases of American assets have been important for the second factor listed above). Western Europe remained unstable for longer than the USA, with a sharp recession in the UK in the late 1980s and 1990s (resulting from the especially sharp crisis of capitalism in the early 1980s in this country associated with the Thatcher government’s economic policies and the consequent weakness of the British economy in the years following) and exchange rate turbulence in the early 1990s across the region (resulting from the strains caused by German unification and the effect of this on German interest rates and on the value of the Deutsche mark). However, from the mid 1990s onwards Europe participated in the general framework outlined above and this provided an important basis for two key successes for the European capitalist class during this period – the absorption of Central and Eastern Europe into the capitalist world economy and the institution of a common currency, the euro. Particular regions continued to experience crises during this period, notably Latin America, South East Asia and Russia but these were successfully localised by capital and did not bring overall global expansion to an end, although the instability of 1997-98 briefly opened up such a possibility.

It is also important to realise that each of the three factors outlined above is integrally linked with the other two in a mutually reinforcing system. The growth of debt requires a low inflation environment and international financial deregulation, which in turn requires exchange rate stability. The export boom in China and elsewhere has depended on debt fuelled demand in the US and other countries. Low commodity prices have resulted in large measure from the process of `globalisation’ and imperialist expansion which has required deregulated debt finance and stable exchange rates.

4. The Current Crisis

The depth of the current crisis for capital arises because all three of the factors listed above have been thrown into question. The build-up of debt is extremely serious in itself, partly because of the size of the debt, partly because of the way in which `securitisation’ has spread it around the system so widely and partly because the amount of bad debt is so uncertain owing to that very securitisation. However, despite the over-valuation of the housing market in the US and other countries, problems in that market on their own would not threaten the system globally were it not for the role of debt in the current pattern of capitalist accumulation more generally. What is dangerous for capital is the conjunction of major problems in the credit markets with renewed exchange rate uncertainty, especially the fall in the value of the dollar (and also a steep decline for both the US and UK in returns on foreign investments) and with what appears to be the end of the era of low commodity prices – shown most clearly by increasing prices for oil and other fuels and for food. The difficulties are shown up most clearly in the key policy weapon which capital has depended on over the last three decades, control over interest rates. The US has cut interest rates sharply to deal with the build-up of bad debt, but such cuts run the risk both of speeding up the decline of the dollar and of raising inflation (which in turn will go up in the US if the dollar falls). In the Financial Times article referred to above Martin Wolf mentions a speech by the former chief IMF economist, Kenneth Rogoff (now at Harvard). Rogoff quoted the poet Robert Frost: `Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice’. For Rogoff, fire here is financial ruin, ice is inflation.

5. Can Capital Resolve the Crisis?

Discussion of the possible outcomes of the crisis runs the risk of being very speculative. However, it is important for socialists to consider some of the arguments now being used by capital which indicate possible resolutions of the crisis which might be attempted. Any attempt at such a resolution will involve some kind of distribution of the costs of the crisis. Clearly capital will try to shift as many of these costs as possible on to labour and its success or failure in doing so will depend on working class resistance both nationally and internationally. Within that general framework, however, there are also likely to be divisions between different fractions of capital (financial and industrial; importers, exporters and foreign investors etc) and also potentially differences between different kinds of workers (for example between homeowners and others).

Some of the key issues that have been raised are the following:

· Demand from China and elsewhere may substitute for US demand: One possible resolution of the crisis might be a slowdown in the US and similar countries and a shift towards internal growth in China and other surplus economies, based on domestic consumption and investment rather than exports. This would clearly be possible in principle in a globally planned economy. It is much harder to achieve in the unplanned, spontaneous world of contemporary capitalism. The attempt to carry out just this kind of shift in Japan from the mid 1980s onwards was a spectacular failure. Important problems here include internal inequalities and class tensions in the Asian economies and, perhaps most importantly, the ecological constraints which are already expressing themselves in higher food and fuel prices.

· The crisis may be just a crisis of liquidity not of solvency: A number of observers argue that the credit crisis results mainly from liquidity problems and panics in the financial markets and that the amount of `genuinely’ bad debt is still quite limited. In addition corporate profits in the non-financial sector remain high. This latter point is probably the most optimistic element for capital in the current situation. However, this argument neglects the extent to which non-financial profits have been dependent on a degree of debt-based consumption which now looks unsustainable. It also neglects the fact that if inflation does become more of a problem the low interest rates of recent years may not persist much longer.

· Commodity price rises may mainly be caused by speculation: There does seem to be a strong element of speculation in recent oil and raw materials price rises (with speculators fleeing from the dollar). To the extent that such speculation unwinds capital will have more room for manoeuvre. But the seriousness of the ecological crisis and the relatively long-term nature of recent price rises seem to indicate that speculation is only playing a minor role here. Also, any attempt to base future world economic growth on increased domestic growth in China and other Asian countries is likely to cause even larger commodity price increases.

· A fall in the dollar and sterling will raise US and British exports: It has been argued that exchange rate changes will restore balance to the world economy and that already US exports are rising as the dollar falls. Again, there is some truth to this. But reliance on this mechanism is very risky for capital because of (a) the substantial losses it would involve for countries like China which have purchased US dollar assets in recent years (b) the inflationary impact of such falls on the British and American economies (c) the possibility of renewed exchange rate turbulence of the kind seen in the 1970s and 1980s and (d) the fact that even balanced growth resulting from such exchange rate changes is likely to be at a much lower level than what we have seen in recent years.

· New surplus economies may emerge as saviours of the international financial system: This relates to the growth of so-called `sovereign wealth funds’, such as those run by China, Russia and other oil and natural resource exporters. But such funds are not immune to capitalist crisis in general – many of them have already lost significant amounts of money propping up US banks in recent weeks. There are also some important political tensions involved in their investment activities abroad.

· A better structure of regulation can solve the problem: One strand of thought in recent discussions sees an improvement in the regulatory structures of capitalism as key to solving the crisis. Martin Wolf in the article quoted above is an example of this. However, this is controversial; other analysts have strongly opposed responding to the crisis through increased regulation (see for example the article in the Financial Times by John Gapper the day after Wolf’s piece). There are a number of problems. Technological change and internationalisation have made financial regulations increasingly easy for banks and other institutions to bypass. Even if effective, such regulation really only deals with the financial aspects of the crisis, not with the problems of global payments imbalances or rising inflation. In addition, the ideological difficulties of reversing, even if only partially, two decades of neo-liberal attacks on any attempts to limit market imperatives, cannot be underestimated.

All of the above means that any attempt to resolve this crisis, at least in the short-run is fraught with dangers for capital – and consequently, the crisis opens up significant opportunities for socialists.

By blaming individuals, the ruling class aims to greenwash their intrinsically environmentally destructive economic and social system. We have borrowed this article from the indispensable Climate and Capitalism site.

(A talk to the Climate Change Social Change Conference held in Sydney from April 11 to 13. Thanks to Inhabitable Earth for the text. The subheads were added by Climate and Capitalism.)

by Terry Townsend,
Managing Editor, Links

I’m sure everybody here is aware of the basic facts of global warming and the likely consequences if rapid and serious action is not taken. There is virtually unanimous agreement among scientists and activists, and increasingly among millions of ordinary people, about the degree of the problem and the time frame we have to make fundamental changes to address it.

The main “solutions” being offered by the capitalist class, its politicians and the corporate-dominated mass media — and endorsed by some key peak environmental organizations — are consciously designed to shift the responsibility for, and the major costs of, addressing global warming away from the most polluting corporations and to preserve the basic structure and mechanisms of Western capitalist economies. They are also designed to delay the necessary political, economic and social changes for as long as possible, and to keep them to the minimum that are compatible (in their assessment) with both the survival of capitalist society and ameliorating the worst of climate change.

This is why major-party politicians and the corporate media — and again unfortunately some peak environment groups – do not place serious demands on big business, but endorse — even celebrate — big business’ preferred measures of emissions trading, “green” taxes, carbon offsetting projects in the Third World and capitalism-friendly publicly subsidized techno-fixes such as so-called clean coal and agro-fuels.

These false “solutions” are not only inadequate, they are counterproductive. However, since other speakers and workshops will be focusing on those, I’ll concentrate on another of the establishment’s favoured — and ultimately also counterproductive — “solution” — one that is intertwined with the others. The push for all individuals to voluntarily consume a little less, and “buy green” whenever they can. That the answer to global warming is for all of “us” — consumers, workers, residents, pensioners — to voluntarily change our wasteful behaviour.

Despite its benign aura of commonsense advice, this is a massive ideological campaign to drive home to “us” that it is ordinary working people who are ultimately to blame for climate change, and that it is “us who must pay for its solution. It is part of the ruling class’ overall offensive to shift the blame and cost of addressing global warming away from itself and its intrinsically environmentally destructive economic and social system.

As one commentator aptly noted in the usually system-friendly Grist e-zine “every time an activist or politician hectors the public to voluntarily reach for a new [fluro] bulb or spend extra on a Prius, Exxon Mobil heaves a big sigh of relief,” because it diverts people’s attention from what is really necessary to address the crisis, and from who is really responsible.

Death by a thousand tips

Another radical commentator, George Marshall, has described this ideological offensive as “death [by] a thousand tips.” He is referring to the literally tens of thousands of newspaper articles and web pages that, after having outlined the severe crisis we face and the sharply diminishing time society has to respond, direct the reader to a snappy, upbeat sidebar or list entitled “10 easy tips to save the planet” or some variation thereof. The same sort of lists have been the core of government-sponsored campaigns across the globe, including Australia.

Standard items include “change your light globes,” “turn off unnecessary lights,” “don’t leave your appliances on stand-by,” “adjust your thermostats,” recycle, compost, drive a fuel-efficient car, or drive less. Yet extremely rarely do these helpful hints mention political action, let alone make concrete demands on governments or business. On the odd occasion they do, it is vague and tokenistic – and tacked onto the end of the list.

Of course, there is a place for action by individuals, and it should not be discouraged. It does make sense in terms of saving energy and water, reducing waste and saving money. Educating and facilitating such behaviour on a mass scale is a significant part of what is needed to halt global warming. But such suggestions should not be counterposed to, or used to drown out calls for, the urgent need for mass political action to force the necessary cuts to emission demanded by the science. And they should not be cynically presented, as they are by the corporate media and capitalist politicians, as the way to save the planet.

In Britain, the government spent £22 million on a “Do your bit” campaign and had to admit that it produced no measurable change in personal habits. A poll in 2007 indicated that this campaign had miseducated people, with more than 40% saying that recycling household waste — which would result in a relatively small reduction of emissions — was the most important thing they could do. Only 10% nominated the far more effective regular use of public transport.

That £22 million would have been better spent to organize a movement to demand an end to the massive and wasteful packaging and advertising industries, or the mass expansion of public transport.

In Ireland, faced with greenhouse gas emissions that have increased 25% since 1990, the government’s response was to launch a multimillion euro “The Power on One” campaign, which provides — yes, you guessed it — “10 top tips” to “make a difference.” Among the revolutionary actions suggested were: don’t overfill your kettle, but fill your dishwasher before use, and unplug your mobile phone charger.

As George Marshall quips, all “that sounds much nicer than curtailing road building or industrial growth. They are not called `easy tips’ for nothing.”

On October 15, the UN Environment Program organised a “Blog Action Day” in which some 15,000 blog sites offered more “tips” to web surfers, from the inevitable changing light globes to one of Copyblogger.com’s “tiny actions [that] can save the world”: quit your job requiring a long commute and start up a home-based business! Copyblogger’s not alone in making “tips” that are simply beyond the means of most debt-strapped working people in these days of widespread “mortgage stress” and rising interest rates. Common “tips” include buying more expensive hybrid cars and building architect-designed “carbon neutral” houses.

Blaming working people

All such campaigns are premised on blaming working people for global warming. But as Dave Holmes, a veteran Australian socialist, points out in the latest Green Left Weekly, what real choice to do the mass of ordinary people have:

“the source of our current crisis is quite specific: it is the operations of modern capitalism. The drive for profits by the giant corporations has been relentless and has been pursued in complete disregard of any impact on the environment.

“The fundamental conditions under which we live — how we generate our power, how we get around, how our food is grown, etc. — are not decided by us but rather by the big corporations that control society’s means of production. Without the rule of corporate capital we could set in place radically different and ecologically sustainable arrangements.

“For example, the cars which most of us use are a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions…The favouring of private motor vehicles over public transport hasn’t come about because we are innately a society of petrol-heads but is a consequence of the deliberate policies of a succession of capitalist governments loyally protecting the interests of their big business masters. The auto industry and its associated sectors make up a very large part of each national capitalist economy.”

However well intentioned, appeals to people to change their individual habits bring trivial results when measured against the problem, and if not coupled to the much more urgent task of politically mobilizing to demand serious government action to immediately reduce and rapidly halt greenhouse gas emissions, it derails mass concern about global warming from taking a political road.

The Earth Hour Greenwash

It also sells the damaging lie that “clean,” “green,” “natural” and “organic” commodities are the answer, when they are fundamentally no better for the planet than any other over-produced commodities under capitalism. It plays into the hands of the mega-financed “Greenwashing” by corporations and governments of an unsustainable economic system.

If anything sums up this sort of operation, it was the massively publicized “Earth Hour” on March 29. The brainchild in 2007 of the World Wildlife Fund, Fairfax newspapers and the Leo Burnett advertising agency, Earth Hour declares on its website: “Created to take a stand against the greatest threat our planet has ever faced, Earth Hour uses the simple action of turning off the lights for one hour to deliver a powerful message about the need for action on global warming.” But you will search in vain for any demands for political action, just boilerplate “tips.” It states:

“Earth Hour is the highlight of a major campaign to encourage businesses, communities and individuals to take the simple steps needed to cut their emissions on an ongoing basis. It is about simple changes that will collectively make a difference — from businesses turning off their lights when their offices are empty to households turning off appliances rather than leaving them on standby.”

There was more of the same in the 40-page, full-colour Earth Hour Magazine that was distributed “free” (free that is if you don’t consider the small forest and who knows how many tonnes of CO2 that were expended in its production and distribution) with the approximate 211,000 copies of the Sydney Morning Herald on March 17. Only one article, by Tim Flannery, made any serious attempt to point out the vested interests that need to be tackled and raised the issues of inadequate public transport, stopping new coal plants and setting adequate emission-reduction targets by 2050.

But his contribution was buried under an avalanche of yet more regurgitated “tips,” feel-good stories and gumph such as this:

“Many governments and communities have already made big changes to reduce emissions. The use of solar and wind power is on the increase. Other renewable energy sources are being investigated. Millions of dollars are being spent exploring ways to bury carbon dioxide or to produce cleaner coal. But more needs to be done and politicians need to be brave enough to make tough decisions. If those politicians know that a couple of million people in their homeland have joined Earth Hour, they can be confident that the people will support the hard decisions and will applaud leaders who have the will to act.”

Don’t expect Fairfax to support “hard decisions” that impact on the big end of town, though. “Hard decisions” is code for making you and me pay higher bills.

The supplement was festooned with full-page ads by electricity suppliers such as EnergyAustralia, Integral Energy and Country Energy — the ones that hawk all that coal power — car companies such as Toyota, Fiat and Hyundai (Volvo waited for 8-page post-Earth Hour “Souvenir edition” Sydney Morning Herald), and even Cascade beer (100% Carbon Offset!).

Corporate and government “greenwashing” was the central goal of the pre-hour hullabaloo. For all the talk of millions of Australians taking part, almost the sole yardstick of the night’s success was on corporate office blocks and huge neon advertising signs in the CBD switching off. The participation of major publicly owned landmarks is really what made the impact. Which begs the question, why aren’t all these lights and signs switched off every night?

Fossil fuel giant AGL loaned the giant WWF-logoed hot air balloon, which sailed over several capital cities beforehand, producing an estimated 378 kilograms of CO2 an hour. That’s the same AGL that is a shareholder in Victoria’s largest brown coal mine. Richard Branson gave his grin of approval, ever keen to “offset” the impact of his fleet of 38 747s. BP — the world’s third largest global energy company — also promised to turn off all its “non-essential lighting.” Let’s not mention that BP was named one of the “ten worst corporations” in both 2001 and 2005 based on its environmental and human rights records. Or that it is busy trying to mine the ultra-polluting tar sands oil in Canada.

McDonald’s turned off it Golden Arches for an hour nationally! So the literally millions on tonnes of useless packaging produced by this lot, not to mention the clearing of Amazonian rainforest for beef for Maccas, is forgiven. Not surprisingly, Channel Nine’s support did not extend to urging people to switch of the tellie or to refusing to air the ads of CO2 polluters. Behind the scenes, advertising industry magazine Campaign Brief in league with the SMH offered an incentive to copywriters who “demonstrate the most effective and/or inspirational way to leverage Earth Hour 2008” — two return trips to Cannes in France!

And last but certainly not least, the eco-friendly Department of Defence signed up to participate in Earth Hour. Federal Labor defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon announced: “Defence takes its obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions seriously and will have over 1330 buildings across Australia participating in Earth Hour.” The minister of war also reported that the department had launched the Combat Climate Change initiative (clever pun) to provide information and “tips” to defence staff in the “workplace” and home to reduce energy use. Here’s a “tip” Joel: get all troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and end all support for those wars for US imperialist control of energy sources.

In the end, despite the hype and PR, the results were hardly impressive. In the hour, electricity consumption across whole city and the Illawarra dropped just 2-3%, while in the CBD it was just over 8%. Nationwide figures put the drop at 3.6%. Based on a survey of 3000, WWF claimed 59% of Sydneysiders took part — a figure that doesn’t gel with the marginal power drop, if simply turning off lights is the way forward.

Anyway, it seems that the WWF and Fairfax were not going to let their advertisers down and were going to declare the night a success whatever the result. The Online Fairfax-owned Brisbane Times reported that “Brisbane made history this evening with the city’s first official Earth Hour going off without a hitch. Kellie Caught, of Earth Hour organiser World Wildlife Fund, said she was thrilled with the response.” Only problem was, this was published on March 28, 26 hours before Earth Hour had even taken place!

The last word on Earth Hour should go to Jimmy Yan, a member of the Glen Waverley Secondary College Eco-Committee, whose excellent critique was carried on the committee’s blog:

“Earth Hour rests on the assumption that the environmental movement can make any real progress without looking at the deeper social and political institutions and systems within our society that cause our environmental problems, one of them being a system that seeks to accumulate as much profit as possible for the sake of more accumulation and more competition irrespective of the human, environmental and social cost. Our environmental problems become another commodity that is bought and sold on the market …

“Ultimately, events like Earth Hour … rest on the idea that we can trust and work with those responsible for environmental destruction without holding them accountable for their crimes and the assumption that ordinary people are too stupid and naive to go beyond just turning off their lights for one hour.”

Mass movement needed

We have to convince millions of people and build a mass movement for emission-reductions that genuinely address the real problem. For Australia, that’s at least 90% by 2030 — not Labor’s anaemic 60% by 2050. A movement that demands that governments impose far-reaching measures that force giant industrial polluters to rapidly and massively slash their emissions, at the risk of massive fines. And if they refuse, they should be nationalized and run in the interests of the workers and consumers.

All public subsidies and tax concessions for the giant fossil fuel industries and resource corporations — which amount to billions — should be redirected to research the development of publicly owned renewable energy sources. We could help ordinary people implement individual actions, by supplying free or at a massive subsidy to all households solar waters heaters and water tanks. There should be a massive reorganization of society to move away from private-car-based transportation to free and frequent mass public transport, and, redesign our cities to put people’s homes close to work and shops.

We need to think about ways of linking these wider demands with our more immediate campaigns, for example as we fight to stop the Tasmanian pulp mill, oppose power privatization, end coal and uranium mining, and to stop the building of new freeways and toll roads, we have to also convince people that the workings of capitalism itself is both responsible for the crisis and also the main obstacle to its solution.

The real source of the problem

Through struggles for immediate and broader demands, masses of people can come to understand that the source of the problem lies with capitalism itself.

The scientific analysis of capitalism first made by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, illustrates how, despite the assertions of many environmental movement theorists over the years, Marxism not only provides essential insights into the fundamental cause of the environmental crisis ,but also offers a political guide to its solution.

Capitalism’s fundamentally anti-ecological trait is captured by Marx’s analysis of the working of capitalism. Capitalists buy or produce commodities only in order to sell them for a profit, and then buy or produce yet more to sell more again. There is no end to the process. Competition between capitalists ensures that each one must continue to increase their production of commodities and continue to expand in order to survive. Production tends to expand exponentially until interrupted by crises (depressions and wars) and it is this dynamic at the very core of capitalism that places enormous, unsustainable pressure on the environment.

Capitalism is a system that pursues growth for its own sake, whatever the consequences. This is why all schemes based on the hope of a no-growth, slow-growth or a sustainable-growth forms of capitalism are pipe dreams. As too are strategies based on a critical mass of individual consumers deciding to go “green” in order to reform the system.

People are not “consumers” by nature. A multi-billion-dollar capitalist industry called advertising constantly plays with our minds to convince us that happiness comes only through buying more and more “stuff,” to keep up with endless wasteful fads, fashions, upgrades, new models and built-in obsolescence. The desire for destructive and/or pointless goods is manufactured along with them. In 2008, an estimated $750 billion will be spent on corporate advertising and public relations in the US alone. In Australia, such spending is now well in excess of $12 billion a year.

Many in the environmental movement argue that with the right mix of taxes, incentives and regulations, everybody could be winners. Big business would have cheaper, more efficient production techniques, and therefore be more profitable, and consumers would have more environment-friendly products and energy sources.

In a rational society, such innovations would lower the overall environmental impact of production. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a rational society. Any energy and money savings made through efficiency are used to make and sell more commodities, cheaper than their competitors.

Capitalism approaches technology — in the production process or in the final product — in the same way as it does everything else. What will generate the most profits? Whether it is efficient, clean, safe, environmentally benign or rational has little to do with it. The technologies that could tackle global warming have long existed. Even though research into them has been massively underfunded, renewable energy sources are today competitive with coal and nuclear power (if the negative social and environmental costs are factored in). Public transport systems have been around since the late 1800s.

Fundamental to capitalism’s development has been its power to shift the cost of its ecological and social vandalism onto society as whole. More profits can accrue if the big capitalists don’t have to bother themselves with the elimination, neutralization or recycling of industrial wastes. It’s much cheaper to pour toxic waste into the air or the nearest river. Rather than pay for the real costs of production, society as a whole subsidizes corporate profit-making by cleaning up some of the mess or suffering the environmental and/or health costs. Or the whole messy business can simply be exported to the Third World.

It is becoming abundantly clear that the Earth cannot sustain this system’s plundering and poisoning without the humanity sooner or later experiencing a complete ecological catastrophe.

To have any chance of preventing this, within the 10- to 30-year window that we have in relation to global warming, humanity must take conscious, rational control of its interactions with the planet and its ecological processes, in ways that capitalism is inherently incapable of doing.

April 17, 2008

By the Socialist Resistance steering comittee

What kind of left for the 21st century?

Since the beginning of the decade important steps have been made in rebuilding the left internationally, following the working class defeats of the ‘80s and ‘90s and the negative impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Starting with the demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation conference in Seattle at the end of 1999, an important global justice movement emerged, which fed directly into the building of a massive anti-war movement that internationally dwarfed the anti-Vietnam war movement in the 1960s. These processes breathed fresh life into the left, as could be seen already at the Florence European Social Movement in 2002 where the presence of the Rifondazione Comunista and the tendencies of the far left was everywhere. In addition, the massive rebirth of the left and socialism in Latin America has fuelled these processes.

However unlike the regrowth and redefinition of the left symbolised by the years 1956 and 1968, in the first decade of the 21st century things were much more difficult objectively, with the working class mainly on the defensive. Multiple debates on orientation and strategy have started to sweep the international left, leading to a reconfiguration of the socialist movement in several countries.

Positive aspects of this process include historic events in Venezuela and Bolivia (with all their problems), the emergence of Die Linke – the Left party – in Germany, the Left Bloc in Portugal and indeed new left formations in many countries.

In other countries the left redefinitions have been decidedly mixed. For example the Sinistra Critica (Critical Left) went out of the Communist Refoundation in Italy, over the fundamental question of the latter’s support for Italian participation in the Afghanistan war and neoliveral domestic policies. In Brazil a militant minority walked out of the Workers Party (PT) to found the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), over the central question of the Lula government’s application of a neoliberal policy which made a mockery of the name of the party. This splits, for sure, represented a political clarification and an attempt to rescue and defend principled class struggle politics. But the evolution of the majority in both the PT and Communist Refoundation are of course massive defeats for the left.

So, in many countries debates are opening up about what kind of left we need in the 21st century. This is of course normal; each successive stage of the international class struggle, especially after world historic events of the type we have seen after 25 years of neoliberalism, poses the issue of socialist organisation anew. It is absurd to imagine that it is possible to take off the shelf wholesale texts written in Russia in 1902 or even 1917, and apply them in an unmediated way in 2007. Even less credible is the idea of taking the form of revolutionary organisation and politics appropriate for Minneapolis in 1934(1) and simply attempting to extrapolate it in a situation where revolutionary politics has been transformed by central new issues (of gender and the environment in particular); where the working class itself has been transformed in terms of its cultural level, geographical distribution and political and trade union organisation; and where the experience of mass social movements and the balance sheet of Stalinism (and social democracy) has radically reaffirmed the centrality of self-organisation and democracy at the heart of the revolutionary project.

As we shall discuss in more details below, it is now obvious that the models of political organisation and habits of engagement with the rest of the left, adopted by some self-proclaimed Trotskyist organisations (like Gerry Healy’s SLL-WRP) were strongly pressurised by third period Stalinism and organisational methods and assumptions inherited from the Stalinised Comintern. No section of British Trotskyism was entirely unaffected by this pressure.

Against this background the split in Respect might not seem too unusual. But there is something special about it, considered on an international level. While there were no principled questions of politics involved (as there were in Italy and Brazil), nevertheless the main revolutionary organisation involved, the SWP, managed to alienate almost the totality of others forces within the movement. This is a spectacularly unfavourable result for a revolutionary organisation and one that cannot be explained by the myth of an anti-socialist “witch-hunt”. Something much more fundamental in politics is involved.

Revolutionary Socialism and ‘broad left parties’

As noted above, the experience of building broad left parties internationally has been decidedly mixed; in some cases they have slid to the right and ended up supporting neoliberal governments. For some on the revolutionary left, what we might call the ‘clean hands and spotless banner’ tendency, this shows that attempts at political recomposition are a waste of time. Far better to just build your organisation, sell your paper, hold your meetings, criticise everyone else and maintain your own spotless banner. But underlying this simplistic approach is actually a deeply spontaneist conception of the revolutionary process. This generally takes the form of the idea that “under the pressure of events”, and after the revolutionary party has been “built”, the revolutionary party will finally link up with big sections of the working class. With this comforting idea under our belts we can be happy to be a very small (but well organised) minority and be sanguine about the strength of the right and indeed the far right.

In our view this simplistic “build the party” option is no longer operable; indeed it is irresponsible because it inevitably leaves the national political arena the exclusive terrain of the right. In the era of neoliberalism, without a mass base for revolutionary politics but with a huge base for militant opposition to the right, it seems to us self-evident the left has to get together, to organise its forces, to win new forces away from the social-liberal centre left, to contest elections and to raise the voice of an alternative in national politics. This is what has been so important about Die Linke, the Left Bloc, the Danish Red-Green Alliance and many others.

This was the importance of the Workers Party in Brazil and the Communist Refoundation in Italy at their height: that they articulated a significant national voice against neoliberalism that would have been impossible for the small forces of the revolutionary left.

More than that: the very existence of these forces, at various stages, had an important impact on mass mobilisations and struggles – as for example Communist Refoundation did on mobilising the anti-war movement and the struggle against pension reform in Italy. The existence of a mass political alternative raises people’s horizons, remoralises them, brings socialism back onto political agendas, erects an obstacle to the domination of political discourses by different brands of neoliberalism and promotes the struggle. It also acts as a clearing house of political ideas in which the revolutionaries put their positions.

So with a broad left formation in existence everyone is a winner – not! No broad
left formation has been problem free. For revolutionaries these are usually coalitions with forces to their political right. They are generally centres of permanent political debate and disagreement, and they pose major questions of political functioning for revolutionary forces, especially those used to a strong propaganda routine. They inevitably involve compromises and difficult judgements about where to draw political divides.

What an orientation towards political regroupment of the left does not involve is a fetishisation of a particular political structure, or the idea that broad left parties are the new form of revolutionary party, or the notion that these parties will necessarily last for decades. For us they are interim and transitional forms of organisation (but see the qualification of this below). Our goal remains that of building revolutionary parties. It’s just that, as against the ‘clean hands and spotless banner’ tendency, we have a major disagreement about what revolutionary parties, in the 21st century, will look like – and how to build them.

The functioning of revolutionaries in broad left parties

Broad left parties (or alliances) are not united fronts around specific questions, but political blocs. For them to develop and keep their unity, they have to function according to basic democratic rules. However this cannot be reduced to the simplistic notion that there are votes and the majority rules. This leaves out of account the anomalies and anti-democratic practices which the existence of organised revolutionary currents can give rise to if they operate in a factional way. On this we would advance the following general guidelines:

• Inside broad left formations there has to be a real, autonomous political life in which people who are not members of an organised current can have confidence that decisions are not being made behind their backs in a disciplined caucus that will impose its views – they have to be confident that their contribution can affect political debates.
• This means that no revolutionary current can have the ‘disciplined Phalanx’ concept of operation. Except in the case of the degeneration of a broad left current (as in Brazil) we are not doing entry work or fighting a bureaucratic leadership. This means in most debates, most of the time, members of political currents should have the right to express their own viewpoint irrespective of the majority view in their own current. If this doesn’t happen the real balance of opinion is obscured and democracy negated. Evidently this shouldn’t be the case on decisive questions of the interest of the working class and oppressed – like sending troops to Afghanistan. But if there are differences on issues like that, then membership of a revolutionary current is put in question. One can also imagine vital strategic and sometimes important tactical questions on which a democratic centralist organisation might want its members all to vote the same way. But these should be exceptional circumstances and not the norm. In practice, of course, on most questions most of the time members of revolutionary tendencies would tend to have similar positions.
• Revolutionary tendencies should avoid like the plague attempts to use their organisational weight to impose decisions against everyone else. That’s a disastrous mode of operation in which democracy is a fake. If a revolutionary tendency can’t win its opinions in open and democratic debate, unless it involves fundamental questions of the interest of the working class and oppressed, compromises and concessions have to be made. Democracy is a fake if a revolutionary current says ‘debate is OK, and we’ll pack meetings to ensure we win it’.
• Revolutionaries – individuals and currents – have to demonstrate their commitment and loyalty to the broad left formation of which they are a part. That means prioritising the activities and press of the broad formation itself. Half in, half out, doesn’t work.
• We should put no a priori limits on the evolution of a broad left formation. Its evolution will be determined by how it responds to the major questions in the fight against imperialism and neoliberal capitalism, not by putting a 1930s label on it (like ‘centrism’).
• The example of the PSoL in Brazil shows it is perfectly possible to function as a broad socialist party with several organised militant socialist currents within it. The precondition of giving organised currents the right to operate within a broad party is that they do not circumvent the rights of the members who are not members of organised currents.

The SWP’s ‘democratic centralism’ – national and international

Readers will note that the above series of considerations is exactly how the SWP did not function in Respect. It is a commonplace that those who function in factional and bureaucratic ways in the broader movement generally operate tin pot regimes at home. There are strong reasons for thinking that the version of ‘democratic centralism’ operated by the SWP is undemocratic. This is not just a matter of rules and the constitution, but there are problems there as well.

• Decision-making in the SWP is concentrated in an extremely small group of people. The SWP Central Committee is around12 people, a very small number given the size of the organisation. Effective decision making is concentrated in three or four people within that.
• Political minorities are denied access to the CC. At the January 2006 conference of the SWP long-time SWP member John Molyneaux put forward a position criticising the line of the leadership, but his candidacy for the CC was rejected because it would “add nothing” to CC discussions.
• Tendencies and factions can only exist during pre-conference periods. This effectively makes them extremely difficult to organise. In any case, political debates and issues are not confined the SWP leadership’s internal timetable.
• There is no real internal bulletin and little internal political discussion outside of pre-conference period. Real discussion is concentrated at the top.
• As the expulsions of Nick Wrack, Rob Hoveman and Kevin Ovenden show, the disciplinary procedure is arbitrary and can be effected by the CC with no due process or hearing in which the accused can put their case.

In his contribution to the SWP’s pre-conference bulletin John Molyneaux said:

“…the nature of the problem can most clearly be seen if we look at the outcome of all these meetings, councils, conferences, elections, etc. The fact is that in the last 15 years perhaps longer) there has not been a single substantial issue on which the CC has been defeated at a conference or party council or NC. Indeed I don’t think that in this period there has ever been even a serious challenge or a close vote. On the contrary, the overwhelming majority of conference or council sessions have ended with the virtually unanimous endorsement of whatever is proposed by the leadership. Similarly, in this period there has never been a contested election for the CC: ie, not one comrade has ever been proposed or proposed themselves for the CC other than those nominated by the CC themselves. It is worth emphasising that such a state of affairs is a long way from the norm in the history of the socialist movement. It was not the norm in the Bolshevik Party or the Communist International. before its Stalinisation. It was not the norm at any point in the Trotskyist tradition under Trotsky.”

John Molyneaux put all this down to the nature of the period and the low level of the class struggle in the 1980s and 1990s. It is from obvious that this is true. Its root cause is the conception of ‘democratic’ centralism that the SWP have.

We could note at this point that the SWP’s internal regime is the polar opposite of that of a similarly sized, but much more influential, organisation, the LCR in France, where the organisation of minorities and their incorporation in the leadership is normal. In fact the SWP’s supporters in France have gone into the LCR and form a…permanent faction, Socialism Par en Bas (SPEB) that would of course be banned inside the SWP itself!

Equally the functioning of the international tendency that the SWP dominates – the IST – is dominated by a notion of ‘international democratic centralism’ in which the SWP takes upon itself the right to boss other ‘sections’ around, down to the smallest, detailed tactic. This, unsurprisingly, results in splits with any organisation that develops an autonomous leadership with a minimum of self-respect. So for example the SWP split on no principled basis at all with its Greek and US sections in 2003 – expulsions that were carried out by the Central Committee of the SWP, and only confirmed as an afterthought by a hastily-summoned meeting of the IST.

There is an irony in all this. Up until the late 1960s the International Socialists – precursor organisation of the SWP – maintained a sharp critique of ‘orthodox Trotskyism’, not least in regard to its organisational methods. IS members tended to see Leninism as being, at least in part, ‘responsible’ for Stalinism, and instead counterposed ‘Luxemburgism’ against ‘toy Bolshevism’. After the May-June events in France, Tony Cliff adopted Leninism and wrote a three-volume biography of Lenin to justify this. The irony consists in the fact that the version of Leninism that Cliff adopted became, over time, clearly marked by the bowdlerised version of Leninism that the IS originally rejected.

Opposed conceptions of the left

There is a false conception of the configuration of the workers movement and the left, a misreading of ideas from the 1930s, that is common in some sections of the Trotskyist movement. This ‘map’ sees basically the working class and its trade unions, the reformists (Stalinists), various forms of ‘centrism’ (tendencies which vacillate between reform and revolution) and the revolutionary marxists – with maybe the anarchists as a complicating factor. On the basis of this kind of map, Trotsky could say in 1938 “There is no revolutionary tendency worthy of the name on the face of the earth outside the Fourth International (ie the revolutionary marxists - ed)”.

If this idea was ever operable, it is certainly not today. The forms of the emergence of mass anti-capitalism and rejection of Stalinism and social democracy has thrown up a cacophony of social movements and social justice organisations, as well as a huge array of militant left political forces internationally. This poses new and complex tasks of organising and cohering the anti-capitalist left. And this cannot be done by building a small international current that regards itself as the unique depository of Marxist truth and regards itself as capable of giving the correct answer on every question, in every part of the planet (in one of its most caricatured forms, by publishing a paper that looks suspiciously like Socialist Worker and aping every tactical turn of the British SWP).

The self definition of the Fourth International and Socialist Resistance is very different to that. We have our own ideas and political traditions, some of which we see as essential. But we want to help refound the left, together with others, incorporating the decisive lessons of feminism and environmentalism, in a dialogue with other anti-capitalists and militant leftists. One that doesn’t start by assuming that we are correct about everything, all-knowing and have nothing to learn, especially from crucial new revolutionary experiences like the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela.

Today the ‘thin red line of Bolshevism’ conception of revolutionary politics doesn’t work. This idea often prioritises formal programmatic agreement, sometimes on arcane or secondary questions, above the realities of organisation and class struggle on the ground. And it systematically leads to artificially counterposing yourself to every other force on the left.

Against this template, the SWP is Neanderthal, a particular variant of the dogmatic-sectarian propagandist tradition that has been so dominant in Britain since the early 20th century. It is time that its members demanded a rethink.

Postscript: ‘Leninism’

In his interview on Leninism in International Viewpoint, Daniel Bensaid points out that the word itself emerged only after the death of Lenin, as part of a campaign to brutally ‘Bolshevise’ the parties of the Comintern – ie subordinate them to the Soviet leadership.

For us the name, the word, is unimportant. What is important is to incorporate what is relevant today in the thinking of great socialist thinkers like Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Gramsci. Lenin was far from being a dogmatist on organisational forms; from him we retain major aspects of his theoretical conquests on imperialism and national self-determination, the self-organisation of the working class, the notions of revolutionary crisis and strategy, and his critique of the bureaucracy in the workers movement and social democratic reformism.

All these great thinkers were prepared to change their forms of organisation to suit the circumstances; the unity of revolutionary tendencies is not guaranteed by organisational forms, but by programme and a shared vision of the revolutionary process. Thus we reject the idea that by our ideas about left regroupment we are ‘abandoning Leninism’, any more than we are abandoning Trotskyism or what is relevant in the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg. What we are abandoning, indeed have long abandoned, is the template method that sees Leninism as a distinct set of unvarying organisational forms.

We repeat: some of these organisational forms, including a monopoly of decision-making by a tiny central group with special privileges (often of secret information and un-minuted discussion) – came from a beleaguered Trotskyist movement, that inherited many of its organisational forms wholesale from the Stalinised Communist International. You can’t understand the Healy movement without the Communist Party of Great Britain or the French ‘Lambertists’ without the immense pressure of the French Communist Party. The brutal ‘Leninism’ of the Communist Parties and the importation of aspects of its practices into the dogmatic-sectarian Trotskyist organisations we do indeed repudiate.

(1)This is a reference to the American Socialist Workers Party, which played a central role in the Teamster Rebellion in Minneapolis in 1934. The US SWP led by James P. Cannon had a massive impact on British Trotskyism, not least through Cannon’s organisational textbooks The Struggle for a Proletarian Party and History of American Trotskyism.