Lessons From The Anti War Movement, Labour Party, Socialism in Scotland....

national | miscellaneous | press release Thursday July 03, 2003 00:55 by James - Socialist Alternative

New Catalyst Out Now.

The latest issue of Socialist Alternative's Free news sheet is on the streets now (demos, books upstairs, the hidden book and record store, it will oon also be avilible as a PDF frrom our site, which is due to be updated very shortly. The articles appearing are availible below, feel free to reproduce them as you will.

All previous Catalyst issue are avilible for download at
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THE FORWARD MARCH OF LABOUR?


According to a recent poll, Labour are now the main opposition party, having overtaken Fine Gael. This has provoked much excitement in certain quarters. Before rushing to praise the genius of Pat Rabbitte, we should first give credit where it’s due. Since the retirement of Garrett Fitzgerald more than a decade ago, Fine Gael have been led by a succession of mediocrities ever further along the road to oblivion. Totally devoid of ideas or inspiration, they must have a good claim to be the most useless, irrelevant political organisation in the western hemisphere. After losing most of their leading members in last year’s electoral wipe-out, Fine Gael had no option but to hire a few stale cadavers from the Royal College of Surgeons, which were then brought to life by a second-rate magician they found in the Yellow Pages. The most photogenic of these corpses is called “Enda” and can reportedly bore a man to death at thirty paces. If you can imagine the video for “Thriller” with music by Joe Dolan, that’s Fine Gael’s front bench.
Anyway, Rabbitte has managed the awesome task of out-performing this drab bunch of fools. The relevant question is, should anyone care? Should the prospect of a Labour-led government have us all quivering with anticipation? Well, to be blunt, no. The 2002 election wasn’t just a disaster for Fine Gael; it also discredited the strategy of the Blairite faction which has dominated the party without any challenge since Dick Spring defeated the Labour left in the eighties. 1992 saw the highest ever share of the vote for Labour. Rather than take the difficult but ultimately rewarding path of aiming to replace the conservative parties as the dominant force in Irish politics, which would have meant a spell in opposition, Spring entered a coalition with Fianna Fail. One tax amnesty later, he paired up with Fine Gael. There was no significant opposition from within the party to either move. In 1997, Labour were deservedly punished for their cynicism and lost half their seats.
Ruari Quinn then spent five years imitating Tony Blair. That the success of the British Labour Party might have owed more to hatred of the Tories than to any enthusiasm for Blair was never even considered. Along the way, Democratic Left were absorbed into Labour. Although DL’s activists might have been generally to the left of Labour, its leading figures fitted comfortably into the party’s establishment. Last year’s election put Quinn’s strategy to the test; it failed. Although Fine Gael had the decency to collapse, years of moderation and respectability did Labour no good; they didn’t win a single extra seat. To their left, Sinn Fein, the Greens and independent socialists all made gains. There was a minor revolution in Irish politics, but the Labour party was completely by-passed. Any fool could now see that a new approach was called for.
Or so you’d think. In fact, while many if not most of the Labour members who voted for Rabbitte expected nothing less, he’s offered more of the same as the solution to all problems. At the recent party conference, Rabbitte urged Labour to focus on winning middle-class support; the implication being that under Quinn’s leadership there had been too much focus on the council estates and not enough on the suburbs; an interesting notion, to say the least. Rabbitte has been heard to bemoan the fact that electoral abstentionism is unusually high within Labour’s “natural constituency”, the urban working class. This is, of course, a mysterious phenomenon, totally unrelated to, say, the behaviour of the Labour party over the last decade. Why Labour has the right to consider workers its natural constituency, when Sinn Fein or the Socialist Party put far more effort into organising in working-class areas, is never explained.
In terms of policy, a watered-down Thatcherism is all that can be expected. In his conference speech, Rabbitte insisted that it doesn’t matter whether services are provided by the public or the private sector. Since he can hardly have felt the need to calm fears that Labour wants to nationalise the financial sector, this can only mean that Rabbitte has cast his eye on Tony Blair’s infatuation with the privatisation of public services, and likes the idea. “Social partnership” remains a sacred cow, at however high a price for organised labour. While the odd mention will be made of the Swedish model, Labour and its comrades in the Socialist International abandoned social democracy a long time ago. Rabbitte even objected to a clause in the new party constitution describing Labour as a “democratic socialist” party.
Labour certainly has no ambition to challenge the sway of neo-liberal dogma over political discourse; while Sinn Fein and the far left parties are all capable of producing a regular newspaper, the Labour party is content to rely on a private media dominated by Rupert Murdoch and Tony O’Reilly to pass on its message to the voters. If they had any serious reforming ambitions, they would certainly rule out coalition with a Fine Gael party shorn of its liberal wing, let alone Fianna Fail; this Rabbitte has pointedly refused to do. And needless to say, Labour will remain an electoral machine, not a campaigning organisation.
If all sorts of contingencies fall into place at the right time, the next election may well turn Rabbitte into the first Labour Taoiseach. If so, we can expect little more than a repeat of the experience of the centre-left across Europe in recent years: cowardice, deceit and failure.


A NEW LEFT IN SCOTLAND


Thatcher’s inane slogan “There Is No Alternative!” has been adopted by politicians in the Blairite mould to bully their critics into silence. Blair repeats insistently the mantra: you can either have me, or the Tories. Anything else is utopian. Opinion polls showing popular support for policies well to the left of anything Blair would contemplate (the re-nationalisation of the railways, for example) have long since demonstrated this view to be false. But it’s only recently that political organisations willing to challenge the Third Way have made an impact.
Last year’s presidential campaign in France was a missed opportunity. The combined vote of candidates to the left of Lionel Jospin was almost as high as the vote for the National Front; had there been a joint candidate of the hard left, Chirac could have been challenged by a radical socialist in the second round, not a fascist, and deprived of his artificially high majority. But the recent Scottish Assembly elections led to a major breakthrough for the Scottish Socialist party, with 6 MSPs elected; this is the strongest vote for a party to the left of Labour in decades.
The SSP began in the late eighties as Scottish Militant Labour, a group of activists expelled from the Labour party for involvement in the anti-poll tax campaign. This struggle defeated the tax, a victory for the hard left which helped finish off Thatcher - more than Labour’s conservative leadership could manage. They then set up the Scottish Socialist Alliance, leading to the formation of the SSP, which contains the vast majority of active socialists in Scotland. Tommy Sheridan was elected as its first MSP in the last Assembly elections; he became one of Scotland’s best-known politicians, introducing an act which led to the abolition of warrant sales (one of the most unpopular forms of punitive legislation used against working-class people), and another act to establish free school meals for all children (malnutrition is a serious problem in deprived council estates in Glasgow). Although its conservative critics deride the SSP as loony and utopian, it has in fact developed many practical policies which could be implemented overnight if the political will existed, while retaining the ultimate goal of a democratic socialist republic. This is why it’s been successful - and why the establishment regards it as such a threat.
After the local elections held simultaneously in England led to a relatively minor advance for the British National Party, there was a huge fuss in the media. Teams of reporters descended on Burnley, where 5 BNP candidates were elected; BNP voters and activists were interviewed. Its leader Nick Griffin was ubiquitous. Nobody was willing to ask the awkward question: how much have mainstream journalists and politicians aided the extreme right with their endless, lying propaganda about the “asylum threat”? But at any rate, it was agreed that the BNP were successful because democratic parties had neglected poor, working-class areas in favour of the well-heeled electorate. The SSP had been kind enough to provide a perfect example of how a democratic, anti-racist party can appeal to a disaffected working-class audience. Only the incurably naive could be surprised by the reaction: deafening silence. There were no teams of reporters descending on Glasgow to meet SSP voters.
One of the few exceptions to the media black-out was an article in the Guardian, which praised the SSP in a condescending manner, but urged them to abandon their ghastly Marxist shibboleths and concentrate on goals that are “modest and just”. In fact, the radical left has always supported such goals; after all, what were Karl Marx’s demands in the Communist Manifesto for the abolition of child labour and free primary education but “modest and just”? The real question is whether achieving those aims is obstructed by a long-term vision of transforming society or if, on the contrary, that vision is necessary to achieve even limited objectives. All the evidence supports the latter view. The Labour party abandoned Clause 4, which committed it to public ownership of the means of production, when Blair became leader. Far from allowing it to concentrate on practical reforms, this was the cue for Labour to abandon any idea of social reform, however modest.
The SSP, along with their co-thinkers in formations such as Rifondazione Communista in Italy and the Left Bloc in Portugal, are entering uncharted waters; it’s been decades since the far left had a serious electoral presence in Europe. The pressure to conform will become intense as more progress is made. But it’s better to accept this danger, while taking all steps possible to avoid it, than to remain in sectarian isolation, like so many far-left groups more concerned with theoretical purity than practical activism. So far the development of the SSP has been very encouraging. While it shouldn’t be regarded as a model that can be applied to Ireland without any modifications, the Irish left should still take it as a challenge to pose a real alternative to Thatcherism, something neither Labour, nor Sinn Fein, nor the Greens can be relied upon to do.


LESSONS FROM THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT
February 15th was without any question the most impressive demonstration Ireland has seen since the aftermath of Bloody Sunday. Yet the government went ahead with its support for the American war effort, and now, according to a poll in the Irish Times, 52% of the electorate think it was the right decision. Now, the same percentage of those polled also believed that allowing the US military to use Shannon did not affect Irish neutrality; evidently the capacity for self-delusion and the denial of reality is not reserved for Bertie Ahern alone. So in that sense the poll should be taken with a pinch of salt. Nevertheless, it shows that the political victory of the anti-war movement wasn’t as clear-cut as we might have believed in February. The plain fact is, despite bringing 100,000 people onto the streets, we weren’t able to stop the government’s craven support for Bush. We have to ask ourselves why.
First of all, one thing became clear as the campaign progressed: it wasn’t possible to take a determined stand against war without questioning Ireland’s political and economic subordination to American capitalism. The message from the establishment was clear: whatever the formal position might be, we are Washington’s ally (“gimp” would be a less flattering but more accurate term). When they say jump, we say how high. We were constantly reminded of the great debt we owe to the United States: everything from computer factories to receptions at the White House. The only way to deal with this claim was to tackle it head on. It may be nice for Bertie and his minions to have a shin-dig in Washington every March, but it’s hardly a matter of life and death to the Irish people. It may flatter the national ego to believe that George Bush considers peace in the North worthy of his attention; but if we can’t reach a peaceful settlement without the aid of that fool, we don’t deserve to.
Most of all, the question of multinational investment had to be dealt with. Mary Harney, who puports to understand what the word “capitalism” means, spoke as if American corporations were a sort of trans-national version of the St Vincent De Paul. We needed to hammer home the argument that foreign companies are not here out of the goodness of their hearts. They come to Ireland because it’s profitable. Hibernophile sentimentality is neither here nor there. If they can find somewhere else as attractive as Ireland with lower production costs, off they’ll go. One final point needed to be made: Fianna Fail and the PDs align themselves with the Bush administration out of choice, rather than necessity. It wasn’t the prospect of losing investment that they feared (or even losing the opportunity to get rat-arsed in the White House and shame the republican tradition they claim to represent by acting like gormless leprechauns in front of the whole world); it was the thought of losing the admiration of American conservatives whose occasional words of praise allow Charlie McCreevy and Mary Harney to preserve the fantasy that they are figures of great international significance, not grubby trolls. Needless to say, this is a point that can only be made from the left. So opposition to war and opposition to neoliberalism are two sides of the same coin. Since the link between the two issues was handily made by our opponents, the main thing now is to show that neoliberalism is a bad thing and build practical opposition to it, especially in the unions: otherwise the anti-war movement will be hamstrung in future.
Anyway, despite the strength of Thatcherite ideology, we were able to win majority support in February and organise the biggest demonstration for decades. This wasn’t enough to shift a government committed to supporting the Bush administration, for reasons outlined above. So we needed more. What was forthcoming from the political tendencies represented in the anti-war movement? Well, Pat Rabbitte, Trevor Sargent and Gerry Adams had a simple answer. If the government ignored our demo, we should keep our anger warm for the next four years, then vote them into government. In the meantime we should ... well, scratch ourselves, I suppose. There’s no point getting angsty about this useless behaviour. Rabbitte, Sargent and Adams are conventional parliamentary politicians with no concept of extra-parliamentary action. Rabbitte was heard to whine about the leading role played by Trotskyists in the Irish Anti-War Movement (IAWM); it never occurred to him that this might not be the case if his own organisation shifted its arse now and then and did some proper work.
More serious was the failure of the hard left to offer any other strategy. The Socialist Party and the SWP had opposed direct action at Shannon before February on the grounds that it was “premature”; the immediate task was to build the “broadest possible movement”. This argument had a certain plausibility, even if it was mixed with feeble claims that activists involved in the Grassroots Network against War (GNAW) were “elitist” and “undemocratic”; it also ignored the fact that direct action at Shannon had been what forced it onto the political agenda for the first time. But after February 15th, it was clear that the “broadest possible movement” had already been built. We couldn’t have asked for a bigger demonstration, but the government went ahead. So what did the Leninist groups propose we do? March some more. Several more demonstrations were held in Dublin, attracting a diminishing crowd of demoralised protesters. No doubt this is the most convenient way for them to recruit new members and sell their paper; but it made damn-all contribution to stopping the war.
The only group to offer a serious way forward were the GNAW. Their demonstration at Shannon on March 1st had the potential to cause real trouble for the government. Unlike earlier actions at the airport, March 1st was conceived as a mass protest, but with a sting in the tail; GNAW rejected the false dichotomy between “mass” and “direct” action. It offered a constructive outlet for all the protesters frustrated by the arrogance of the government, its refusal to listen to the popular will. Unfortunately, the GNAW had no real public platform to explain what they were doing, so were vulnerable to scaremongering by the conservative media. The only people who could have challenged this and made the case for non-violent direct action as a legitimate form of protest were the IAWM; after February 15th, they had a serious media profile and the opportunity to argue for the necessity of a more radical approach.
This is what you might have expected from self-professed revolutionaries. Instead, rather than alienate their friends in the ICTU bureaucracy and the reformist parties, they hung the GNAW out to dry. The IAWM organised its own march in Shannon, well away from the GNAW. Richard Boyd Barrett, Joe Higgins and others made dismissive remarks in public about the activists willing to challenge the state by storming the fence. So much for their radical pretensions. You didn’t have to be a revolutionary to support direct action at Shannon; Labour Youth offered their backing, after all. But you certainly couldn’t oppose it while making that claim.
Of course, direct action is not the be-all and end-all of radical tactics. Strike action by the workers at Shannon would have been even better. But there’s something dodgy about expecting other people to take action without being prepared to do anything yourself. There were a few cases of working-class action against the war effort across Europe. This is certainly the ideal tactic. But if we want to achieve something like that in Ireland, first of all we have to rehabilitate the idea of militant working-class action for the sake of workers themselves, never mind anything more ambitious. Which just points us back to the need for grassroots opposition to Thatcherite policies.
The Bush administration being what it is, we can expect another war before too long. In the meantime, every serious activist should be studying the experience of the last campaign and digesting its lessons. Defiance in defeat is all very well, but we need to start winning these things.