London - part 1

I've had a very exciting week-and-a-bit, so I've fallen a bit behind on writing anything here. London dramatically exceeded my expectations, and my head is still spinning from some of the discussions I had and the things I've seen and heard, but I'm going to try to get a little of it written down.

As I've mentioned before the main reason I went to London was to attend the Socialist Workers' Party (UK)'s Marxism 2007. I had some idea what to expect from listening to recordings from years past and from associated literature from the SWP and the International Socialist Tendency (which have been a staple part of my political diet for many years), but I think I'd picked so much negativity from various sources that I didn't really expect the event to be quite as fantastic as it was.

What I did expect was a lot of talks which were quite interesting in their own right. In particular I was happy to see a number of very good talks on Africa (including one on imperialism in Africa by Charlie Kimber and one on Nkrumah's political legacy by Mani Tanoh of the Ghanaian International Socialists). It seems (and I think this is increasingly accepted) that Africa is likely to keep getting more important over the next few years both as a focus of inter-imperialist rivalries and as a source of resistance, and besides learning more it was particularly heartening to hear about some of the exciting developments in the workers' movements in various countries.

This is not to say that there weren't a few disappointments in the talks and discussions, though the SWP was mostly not at fault. I suspect that the talk by Slawoj Žižek was a bit similar from the comments I heard about it afterward, and also because he's always a bit like that.The worst talk I attended was by the USFI's Michael Löwy on Walter Benjamin. Besides his talk being rather dull, Löwy's main point seemed to be importance of revolutionaries encouraging a general sense of impending disaster, which seems to me to be exactly the wrong lesson from the time Benjamin was living in. Just like the main result of these politics in the '30s was the popular front, the main result today (at least in the US) seems to a desperate attachment to liberalism and reformism. The various SWP cadres in the audience were very complimentary, perhaps out of politeness, but who knows?

This is of course a problem I'm very familiar with, and another one was a hair-trigger response to anything smacking of islamophobia. I should say that I absolutely agree that this is one of the biggest problems facing antiwar movements and the left generally, and I'm very glad that the SWP is pushing hard on this front. However when admittedly reactionary ideas like these are so widespread even among people who are very actively involved in the movement, it's important to differentiate between people who are spreading and taking advantage of these ideas for nefarious ends and honest leftists who are simply being misled. As important as it is to denounce the former, it's even more important to give a positive lead to the latter. One of the speakers at this meeting was Ghassan Makarem, who has an excellent short piece on the same theme here.A good example was in a meeting (introduced by two excellent talks) on the LGBT movement in the middle east where a young Gay British activist from the Stop the War Coalition said, more or less, that no matter what he'd rather live in the UK where he 'has rights' than in the middle east where he 'wouldn't'. Of course that's based on an oversimplification of the situation in both Britain and the Middle East (as the speakers had done a good job explaining), but besides pointing this out politely the best thing to do is to explain that that attitude is a big problem for people who are trying to improve the situation in both regions. Unfortunately it seems to me that the comrades who tried to reply to him didn't do that very well, and it seems like part of the problem could have been an assumption that he was not just honestly confused/mistaken/misinformed. All else aside, I think a too-aggressive response to such a situation gives an impression of a lack of real confidence in the ideas being put out.

I should say, of course, that these problems are nowhere as severe as what I'm used to. I may even be exaggerating because of having been a bit oversensitized by me previous experience. I also hope I'm not giving anyone the impression that all of the discussions had one or another of these problems. It was refreshing, for example, to see Billy Hayes of the CWU (postal workers' union) speak in one session, and then hear John Rees in the next session call him out for opposing united strike action with other public sector unions.

Although I was generally very impressed with the insights the folks I was talking to had about the state of the US left, it did seem to me that except for possibly Molyneux all of the people I was talking to had a very distorted understanding of the ISO, Left Turn, and the processes that left the IST without an organized presence in the US.So far this is more or less what I expected. What really surprised me was getting an impression of the work the SWP in Britain and its sister groups in other countries (especially Germany) are doing, which along with some conversations I had with Chris Nineham (also more briefly with John Molyneux, Alex Callinicos, Lindsey German, and John Rees) and with comrades from the Canadian IS really helped me figure out some of the things that have been bouncing around in my head about the American left. This is something I'll be coming back to very soon, along with the results of some conversations I had with some other americans who came to the conference.

I, probably like a lot of socialists in the US, had a totally distorted picture of what the SWP is doing, particularly in the RESPECT coalition. The impression you get by reading the reports easily available on the internet is basically of a shabby attention-grabbing front group, which only gets votes by pandering to muslim communalism. To be sure some of the things George Galloway has done have been pretty unhelpful and it does seem to be true that (to a small extent) Muslim RESPECT candidates get higher votes than non-Muslim ones when both run in the same areas (if you want to go through the raw numbers, you can find some here). It may be that there have been tensions within RESPECT between the SWP and some more conservative elements in the coalition, as some have claimed.

The overall impression I got, though, is very different. Firstly, even at an SWP event you can see that the SWP is more than just SWP + Muslims + George Galloway. I think that with the SWP taking the lead RESPECT has been shifting form a two-issue group (war and islamophobia) to a more general militant antineoliberal formation. They have made a very serious turn in the last year or two towards building a connection to trade union militants (through the Organizing for Fighting Unions initiative, which has already attracted an imitation by the English CWI section) and fights against privatization of housing and medical services. This is going to be a long struggle, but in last year's local elections RESPECT was able to begin to go beyond what the Socialist Alliance was able to achieve both in non-Muslim immigrant communities and also in almost all-white areas in the British equivalent of the Rust Belt.

It's important not to see this as a 180º turn. My impression of the typical RESPECT local councilor is a socialist, leftist, or community activist (very often a young woman, it should be noted) who is also either a practicing Muslim or from a Muslim background; a good example was a councilor from Tower Hamlets, an older Bangladeshi woman, who made a comment at a meeting on the shape of the working class to the effect of "Insh'Allah (God willing), the working class around the world will unite to fight for justice". Even if a lot of these people got involved around civil rights issues or the war, it's not a big stretch for them or the people who voted for them to talk about public housing, pay cuts, etc.

The point is that RESPECT is being built up as an organization which is really part of the movements against war and neoliberalism in Britain, and gives a place to develop an overall set of political ideas and strategies. In more elevated terms, RESPECT is taking a first step out of what Stanley Aronowitz (in an otherwise largely incomprehensible book) calls "the Postmodern Left": the combination of a collection of single-issue movements with political organizations which oscillate between being loose collections of activists or which work inside the movements without really being part of them. It seems like there is a strong chance that Die Linke in Germany is headed in this direction from a very different starting point, and from what I have heard the LCR in France has just recently decided to move in a similar direction, and there is also reason to be hopeful about P-SoL in Brazil, although I think they have more problems than many people realize.

A digression but hardly an unimportant one: I have been led to understand that Rifondazione Comunista in Italy has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. The sizable Trotskyist minority, mainly organized in AMR-Progetto Comunista and Sinsitra Critica, will probably have entirely left the party very soon, and the leadership under Bertinotti is steering clear of mass mobilizations and the anti-war movement and planning on a merger with the other post-Stalinist parties in Italy.This is not the first time something like this has happened, even recently. Rifondazione Comunista in Italy and the PT in Brazil certainly looked like this at one point but were lured away by the supposed virtues of "respectability" and being thought worthy to govern or be part of a coalition government. The Scottish Socialist Party seemed also to have substantial prospects, but then fall apart because of (depending on who you listen to) either personality conflicts, a fear of being part of movements it didn't control, or being blindsided by left-leaning Scottish nationalism.

What seems to set the IST apart in all this is a broad and deep historical understanding, which manages to integrate most of the experience of the socialist movement in the 20th century, and at least makes it possible to understand the process that is going on in these "new left parties" and the pitfalls in them. This doesn't mean that the efforts they are involved in are fated to be successful, but it does give them a fighting chance of coming out having accomplished something, and ready to take on bigger challenges in the future.

As I've said I think there is a lot in all this to learn from in the US; but that's something I'll have to come back to later.