Links No 23
128pp, $8
Available at Resistance centres or on-line at <http://www.dsp.org.au/links>.
REVIEW BY BEN COURTICE
The latest issue of Links magazine presents a very focused collection of articles discussing "challenges in uniting the left".
It features articles by members of the International Socialist Movement (ISM), which is a tendency within the Scottish Socialist Party; the Democratic Socialist Party in Australia, an affiliate to the Socialist Alliance; and the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, which also works within the SSP, as well as participating in the English and Welsh Socialist Alliances.
Each organisation brings a different history to bear in the discussion. A collection of documents from the DSP outlines its attitude to regroupment and the Australian Socialist Alliance. A debate between members of the ISM and the SWP is conducted through five articles.
An axis of debate is socialists' characterisation of the ALP and the British Labour Party.
The ISM's Murray Smith argues that since the post-war economic boom ended in the 1970s, capitalism can not afford to grant reforms any more, and hence pro-capitalist reformist parties like Labour stopped granting reforms. Thus far the SWP's John Rees agreed.
Rees, however, argues that the links between Labour and the working class have been "stretched, but not broken". Smith argues that workers no longer look to Labour for reforms, and that Labour has undergone a "fundamental change" of nature.
Historically, the positions of the SWP and the ISM have been closer to each other than to that of the DSP's John Percy. The DSP holds that, reforms or no reforms, Labour was never more than a liberal capitalist party, existing to "systematically dupe" the workers (in the famous words of Lenin).
But in the practical implications of the latest arguments, it seems that despite different emphases, the perspectives of the DSP and ISM have converged.
Underlying this debate are different analyses of reformist politics. Smith suggests that those who "predict that Marxists in the SSP will be overwhelmed by reformist currents .... do not understand the material roots of reformism within the working class."
Much of Smith's argument seems to be based on his belief that in periods of relative prosperity, capitalists could afford reforms, allowing the Labour Party (and by implication, capitalism) to win support based on reforms that it implemented.
This argument is an implicit application of Lenin's concept of the labour aristocracy: that a section of the working class is won to identify with the ruling class by virtue of material benefits. This concept is controversial, and the SWP is probably the best-known opponent of its use. SWP leader Alex Callinicos, while warning of the persistence of reformism, presents an alternative analysis for its decline.
The strangeness of historically different analyses leading organisations to similar conclusions occurs again in a secondary point of discussion: What form of organisation for socialists?
Smith argues at length that it is no longer useful for socialists to organise in the traditional far-left parties. It is now, he claims, "possible to build parties which are perhaps less 'revolutionary' than the traditional far-left groups but which are capable of attracting workers abandoned by reformism and of winning them to radical, socialist, class-struggle politics because the basis for stable reformist politics is eroding".
Rees, on the other hand, argues for retaining the SWP as it is, and conducting work with those who are "breaking from reformism", or previous Labour supporters, in less-permanent "united fronts".
Percy once again lines up with Smith on this issue. Yet much of Percy's article is spent arguing for the virtues of a Leninist party.
The DSP has a very different view of Leninism than the stultifying orthodoxy created by Stalin (and often perpetuated by both Stalinists and Trotskyists). Percy spends most of his article arguing for the DSP's flexible adaptation of Lenin's ideas to current conditions.
It is unclear whether Smith's and Percy's longer term views are identical. The DSP hopes the Socialist Alliance will evolve into a new and larger revolutionary party; Smith argues for a "strategically non-
delineated" party in which Marxists can organise as a distinct current.
But for all the possible differences, the practical similarities of their proposals weigh more than the theoretical divergence. It seems that different, even potentially opposed, analyses and historical practice are converging in a powerful new trend.
There are those who find these sorts of debates between rival Marxist groups as tedious as medieval debates about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. However, the old historical arguments are presented here in a refreshing manner, because they are based on real developments in the class struggle.
But if anyone still doesn't want to read the debate, there remains a selling point or two in the magazine. Francois Duval provides an account of the roller-coaster ride of the French left providing a Latin parallel to the above debates, but in a situation of heightened class struggle.
And lastly reason enough on its own to buy this edition Ben Reid provides an account of the "participatory budget" experience of the Brazilian Workers Party state government in Rio Grande do Sul.
This tactic of the mass Workers Party is often talked of, yet poorly understood by much of the First World left. Reid charts the process of involving ordinary people in government decision making, and offers some analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the process.
This final article also provides a taster for the complex challenges that socialists may soon face in countries like France and Scotland and hopefully elsewhere as well as their organisations continue to grow.
From Green Left Weekly, July 2, 2003.
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