BY PHIL HEARSE
LONDON — On January 28-29, 2500 workers at South West Trains, which daily brings 250,000 commuters to Central London, struck over pay and against the demotion of local union leader Greg Tucker.
Over the same two-day period, nearly 40,000 workers in the Employment Service and the Benefits Agency took industrial action over the abolition of protective screens, in an area that has seen numerous physical attacks on staff.
Briefed by government press officers, the right-wing press has launched a propaganda barrage against these and other workers, accusing their leaders of being part of a "Red plot" and particularly targeting the Socialist Alliance as being behind the wave of industrial militancy.
Favourite whipping boys have been Socialist Alliance supporter Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) and Bob Crow, who is widely expected to win the current election for general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT). Serwotka supports the Socialist Alliance and Bob Crow, a former member of Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party, has spoken on Socialist Alliance platforms.
Also in the frame is Greg Tucker, who stood as a Socialist Alliance candidate in the general election, and is a leading member of the Fourth International's British affiliate.
The hard-right Daily Mail says the Socialist Alliance is "an umbrella organisation of disparate extremist groups that has taken over from old Labour as the authentic voice of the far left".
According to Mail journalist Leo McKinstry, "Socialism was meant to have been consigned to the dustbin of history. The collapse of the Berlin wall and the triumph of market forces towards the end of the last century appeared to sound the death knell of this once powerful ideology... Yet today in Britain, the far left is on the march again ... and this creed appears to be enjoying a revival."
Not to be outdone, Rupert Murdoch's Times devoted four pages over two days to the new militancy and the far left, including a lengthy and politically illiterate description of the Socialist Alliance's "Leninist" tactics. The same paper accused the Socialist Alliance of controlling the Stop the War Coalition and the anti-corporate group Globalise Resistance.
These attacks will help the Socialist Alliance to become better known, but they are exaggerated both in their description of the new industrial militancy and their assessment of the Socialist Alliance's union influence.
Britain's labour movement is seeing the emergence of a very limited wave of industrial militancy, mainly in the public services and linked with privatisation. Overall the movement has only very partially recovered from the crushing defeats of the 1980s and '90s.
Defensive struggles
The South West Trains and Employment Service/Benefits Agency struggles are defensive fights. South West Trains is owned by Brian Souter, a notorious right-wing bigot, union buster and homophobe. Souter spent £1 million of his own money in Scotland, unsuccessfully campaigning for the retention of the homophobic Section 28 local government law. He wants to smash the RMT in his company, and the company is widely reported to be gearing up for an across-the-board sacking of union members and the mass recruitment of non-union labour.
Behind the Employment Service/Benefits Agency strikes is the forthcoming merger of the two bodies, widely expected to lead to privatisation.
The third service in which there has been a wave of strike action in the last two years is the Post Office, which is being crushed by market deregulation. Proposals to open up letter delivery to free competition next year will lead to tens of thousands of redundancies.
Against this background, the Socialist Alliance is staging a major trade union conference in March, which will focus on the use of unions' political funds.
Traditionally union members have paid a "political levy" to the Labour Party. Although individual members can opt out of this arrangement, few do, especially as any directly political campaigning by unions now has to come from the political fund. But increasing numbers of rank-and-file members are questioning why the unions are major financial sponsors of the government party which is hell-bent on attacking public services and trade unions.
At its 2001 conference the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) passed a resolution enabling local branches to use political funds to support political parties other than Labour. The same issue is now likely to be posed in a series of public service unions at this year's conferences.
Despite its position in some public service unions, the position of the British socialist left has been mainly strengthened through the global justice and anti-war movements.
In common with other European countries, the question of whether the movement against corporate globalisation would collapse after the September 11 terror attacks in the United States has been decisively answered in Britain. While the Blair government is the most craven and prostrate ally of the US in its "war on terrorism", public opinion has been sharply divided, with the left being joined by broad sections of progressive liberal opinion in opposing the war.
The 80,000-strong November 21 demonstration against the Afghan war was the biggest anti-war mobilisation in Britain since the Vietnam War. Among the demonstrators were many trade union and student contingents.
As a sign of the balance of opinion, the Daily Mirror, which sells more than 2 million copies, gave John Pilger several major anti-war articles and a poster front page which declared "This War is a Fraud".
The more serious liberal papers — the Guardian, the Independent and the Sunday Observer — have carried repeated denunciations of the US war drive from authors like Robert Fisk, Paul Foot, John Pilger, Edward Said, Natasha Walter, Tariq Ali and Madeleine Bunting. Among the most outspoken has been the Guardian's opinion and comment editor Seamus Milne, whose columns have been widely denounced in the US press.
New political space
At the December 1 Socialist Alliance conference, Tariq Ali pointed out that the new anti-war movement had been built in record time. Moreover, the politics of the anti-war movement has moved on a lot in the last 20 years.
Since the collapse of the Communist Party and the crushing of the Labour left around Tony Benn, a new political space has opened up which the militant socialist left is trying to fill. For example, the key organisers of the broad-based Stop the War Coalition are the far left in general and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in particular. The same forces dominate Globalise Resistance, which has brushed aside the late-1990s attempt by the Reclaim the Streets anarchists to take control of the anti-corporate globalisation movement.
This new situation for the socialist left has generated a wide-ranging strategic debate within the Socialist Alliance. While the alliance made a good electoral start in the 2000 London elections, and in the seats where it stood in the 2001 general election, it faces major problems of orientation.
These arise mainly from its status as an alliance, and can be simply summed up like this: to be successful in elections and to become a recognised force nationally, the alliance needs continuous activities and to broaden its social base and arenas of intervention. And that means acting more and more like a united political party.
However, in the aftermath of the May 2001 general election the alliance disappeared in many localities, as activists reverted to activity in the framework of their own left groups, or through union and campaign bodies.
An additional problem is that the Socialist Alliance is well adapted for elections and local activities, but generally lacks the ability to take major national initiatives which could broaden its social base.
The December 1 Socialist Alliance conference illustrated this conundrum. Although successful in establishing the alliance as a national individual membership organisation with stable leadership structures, the conference had very few young people in attendance and a small proportion of women.
However, on the very evening before the conference, a London Globalise Resistance meeting with Italian Communist Party of Refoundation leader Fausto Bertinotti had mobilised around 600 people, mostly young and with a very high proportion of women. Almost none were at the Socialist Alliance conference the next day.
A large number of the alliance's activists favour the organisation eventually becoming a broad-based socialist party on the model of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP). However, this is resisted by the dominant organisation within the alliance, the SWP. For the SWP, the issue of building a broad-based socialist party which can pose a mass alternative to Labour is a non-issue — for the simple reason that they think they can do it themselves. This is a blinkered and unrealistic view. Scotland shows this vividly.
By building a broad-based party, the SSP has attracted a big majority of members who are not, and have never been, members of any pre-existing revolutionary socialist group. So successful has this tactic been, the SWP have been forced to drop their opposition to this "rightist" and "liquidationist" project, and send their Scottish members into the SSP.
Through the transformation the Scottish Socialist Alliance into a political party, the Marxist leadership group around Alan McCombes and Tommy Sheridan have succeeded in creating a nationally recognised political force, which is beginning to address the key strategic question of solving the crisis of political representation of the working class. Only if it follows this Scottish road can the Socialist Alliance maximise its potential and build a powerful alternative to Labour.
From Green Left Weekly, February 13, 2002.
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