[Marxism] SWP and Respect -- a central issue is the nationalquestion

[Joaquin Bustelo]

Replying to my talking about the movements of oppressed people of color as
being "national" in character, Lenin's Tomb replies: 

"This makes no sense either.  They are not part of a 'national' movement,
and your insistence that they are reflects a certain distance from the
situation - lunar-style." 

I could say that LT's reply surprised me, but then I'd be lying. Nothing
I've seen or read suggests to me that the English SWP or their estranged
cothinkers on these shores, the ISO, have even a hint of a suspicion that
they don't have a clue about the national question, much less having studied
and seriously thought it through. 

Thus you can read the reams of material that the ISO has put out around
immigration, like the many articles they wrote about the upsurge a year and
a half ago, and you will be hard-pressed to find a reflection that this was
a movement of the Latino community as a community, much less any serious
analysis of what that reality meant.

So if the ISO couldn’t see it when there were millions of us spics out there
boycotting and demonstrating, it's hardly a shock that Lenin's Tomb is so
completely blind that he fails to see that when people of color who are
Muslims are reacting in a certain way, and in an entirely distinct way than
other folks, that what he's seeing is a phenomenon from the political domain
of national questions.

As for the rest of LT's reply, what I see is this same blindness over and
over. One example, in reply to my saying that in some areas, Muslims had
taken ownership of Respect.

"This is nonsense.  Muslim communities didn't take exclusive ownership of
Respect, and that isn't what's driving this dispute.  A few of George
Galloway's allies have packed meetings by signing up dozens of members at
concessionary rates on the door in order to win key votes, that much is
true."

First, I did not say that they had taken "exclusive" ownership, and I think
this misinterpretation is typical of the back and forth between LT and me.
What I was talking about is that they came to view it as their own, THEIR
political representation. This was shown by the voting and reports of the
mobilizations around it, like the celebrations of certain victories.

LT then says that Galloway and friends "packed meetings by signing up dozens
of members at the door at concessionary rates." The ability to do that, is,
I think, testimony to the fact that at least in those specific localities,
Respect, and not abstractly Respect but Respect as symbolized by Galloway
and presumably other leading people, has a mass base, so much so that they
can turn out dozens of previously uninvolved people, get them to pay at
least some dues in communities where I suspect money is not in abundance,
and follow the lead of these established Respect leaders that the community
looks to at the meeting.

Despite having said this, later in his answer LT says, "We have precisely
addressed this in terms of social forces, but we have not made your mistake
of awarding the fruits of social mobilisation to George Galloway and his
supporters.  The latter didn't produce the former, and the former don't
exclusively or even largely support the latter."

I'm not awarding anything to anybody. I'm looking at evidence like that
Galloway is an MP largely on the basis of the votes of people from these
communities, as are a number of others in lower positions. And then there's
LT's testimony about the ability of Galloway and friends to recruit dozens
of people from these communities on the spot to "pack" meetings (rather than
being able to mobilize them from the established membership of a highly
structured and disciplined political cadre). 

Why you would want to sharply counterpose yourself to, and cut yourself off
from, this promising beginnings of a mass base for an independent political
party in Britain is beyond me. EVEN IF the SWP were right about the issues,
pushing things to a break seems to be a sectarian blunder of some magnitude.
You are in the very early days, the very earliest days of a mass break from
the bourgeois parties, where one can speak in these terms ("mass break")
only in a few areas. This movement has as yet very little experience, its
leadership is largely people who came to prominence in other arenas, and so
the tactic is to have a split NOW?

*  *  *

I can understand the SWP's chagrin, for the success of a project the viewed
as their own --Respect-- seemed to backfire. 

To the extent Respect develops a mass base, the relationship of forces
inside it deteriorates from the SWP's point of view. Their influence
decreases, their representation is reduced. This whole dispute was set off
by Galloway's proposal to elect a national organizer who would serve
alongside the SWP'er who is national secretary. This was, I suspect, a
reflection of the changing relationship of forces in Respect. 

What can I say? The SWP is an ideological propaganda league that, by its
very nature, can't become a mass party. 

Marx and Engels faced a similar quandary, albeit in a different situation in
1848, when a revolution broke out in Germany, but they decided to dissolve
their organization because it was unsuitable for the kind of mass movement
that had now been unleashed. The situation in Britain isn't analogous to the
one Marx and Engels faced, but I think their approach to the organization
question -- that an organization serves to carry out concrete political
tasks and when those are done, or superseded, the organization is best
dissolved -- is one that is entirely applicable.

The SWP hews to a different conception --that of the indispensable vanguard
party that is built around a correct program, most of the time by individual
recruitment, but not to the exclusion of the rare fusion, split or entry. I
do not believe this is a Marxist approach: it is not based on the logic, the
evolution, of actual social forces as they clash with other forces in
society, but rather on a reified ideological description of that clash, and
I would add an abstract, incomplete and incorrect description of that clash
-- and NECESSARILY so, for the clash of social forces in Britain is, as of
yet, still quite muted. 

It is said that this is based on the example of Lenin and the Bolsheviks but
the actual development of what became the Bolshevik Party in Russia was
entirely different. It wasn't an attempt to set up an ideologically pure
party but rather to organize the class political movement that already
existed and develop it further. It became differentiated from, and
eventually split with, both reformist and sectarian currents by disputes
that arose from actual political events. And the actual split with the
Mensheviks on the ground, in the actual local units in Russia, was not
completed until after the February 1917 Revolution and the adoption by the
Bolsheviks of the political line of the April theses. And in that final
sorting out, a wing of the people the Bolsheviks had previously considered
Mensheviks wound up with the Bolsheviks, and in their leadership. 

There's been no similar sorting out of trends and currents in Britain over a
period of 10 or 15 years of intense class and political struggle. Instead,
what we see is static groupings based on fine ideological distinctions that
exercise such rigid discipline to straightjacket minorities that differences
are not containable. 

So one of the first things the SWP did when this dispute broke out was to
expel some people who were on Galloway's staff, and refused to quit those
positions when the SWP leadership ordered them to do so. 

But of course they had been there with the approval of the very same SWP
leadership, which means the SWP leadership had been taking responsibility
for the political course followed by Galloway. 

So what are we to say about a leadership that in July was willing to accept
political responsibility for Galloway's course, and did not have the
political insight to realize he was really an enemy of the people in
disguise, and would become so OPENLY in August? And that did such a poor job
in selecting cadre for assignments and in educating and clarifying issues
that when push came to shove, it turned out that the SWP didn't have people
in Galloway's camp, it was Galloway who had people in the SWP camp?

And then there's this complication: By the SWP's account, this was all set
off by a vicious, red-baiting, purge-the-SWP campaign that Galloway himself
personally initiated. How sound is this appreciation given that Galloway did
not even bother to purge the SWP'ers on his staff? Either Galloway's course
was quite difference than how the SWP leadership perceived it, or he was so
supremely confident of the SWP leadership's inability to convince even its
own disciplined, Leninist cadre on his staff that he decided nothing needed
to be done about it. 

Any way you slice it, by the sorts of standards and motivations that
self-styled Leninist "democratic centralist" organizations cite to justify
their structures, methods, and discipline, what we've seen is hardly an
inspiring demonstration of their efficacy. 

*  *  *

These are, of course, secondary matters that I indulge in here because I
think the political issues are as clear as I can make them, since I am not
in a position to provide the sort of highly detailed specifics that would be
necessary to take the political side of the discussion further. I don't mean
they're perfectly clear, just that additional clarity would have to come
from someone in much closer contact with the situation. I've given my
impression from afar, and the points raised by Lenin's Tomb and others have
tended to re-enforce rather than weaken my impression. But I can't take it
further.

LT insists that what's involved on Galloway's side is just old Labour-style
electoralism: to probe this further you'd need the sort of detail that LT
doesn't offer and I'm not in a position to provide. But perhaps one more
point can be profitably made about that.

He describes them as "Tammany Hall" tactics, referring to the political
machine that dominated New York City politics from the mid-1800s until
--arguably-- after WWII, though actually Tammany Hall itself was founded in
the 1780's.

I do not know what LT means by this, "Tammany Hall tactics," as he hasn't
explained it with any specificity. 

But from the mid-1800's, and for a century or nearly so, what made Tammany
Hall so powerful is that it consciously and systematically based itself on
the immigrant communities, and instead of trying to drive them out of
political and social life, and marginalize them, it consciously and
systematically sought to draw them in. It also provided (some) help to
struggling immigrants, putting in a good word for them when they got in
trouble with the landlord or the law, organizing them to become citizens
(and vote for Tammany Hall candidates, of course), etc. etc. etc.

I do not think it is possible for an organization to root itself deeply in
communities of persecuted immigrants and not be looked to by people in the
community to play this role of serving as ombudsman and organizing mutual
aid, helping people find jobs, and so on. To this extent, I think there is
something to be learned from the Tammany Hall history. One hopes, in the
case of Left groups, that they will do so without the endemic corruption,
kickbacks and shakedowns of Tammany Hall, of course. But we should remember
that some of the disdain we've absorbed towards "Tammany Hall" and "Big City
machine politics" is in reality silk stocking, old money Republican
hostility to the more populist Democrats and especially their base. 

But this idea that community members look to you to serve as ombudsman,
provide advice, organize mutual aid, and so on, that's been the experience
of successful Latino groups in the United States, like CASA in LA in the
late 1960s and 1970s and we very much see the same thing in the work that
our immigrant rights organization in Atlanta does. Some decry and resist
this as "social service" and not "political" work, but the conclusion we
have come to here (the core group that's been involved for a long time) is
that we can't really do the latter without getting involved in the former.
And, yes, there is a tension there, but it is one imposed on us by the
reality of our community, and by government attacks.

I would not be surprised to learn that Galloway's office, as an MP, winds up
doing a certain amount of this stuff. I know locally, it was one of the
things that Cynthia McKinney's office did, and did well, serving as an
ombudsman's office, especially for the Black community, but she also went
out of her way to offer the same sort of representation to Latinos, even
opening a satellite district office in the neighborhood with the largest
concentration of Latinos. 

Joaquín