SWP's turn to the class

SECTION 2: UNITED FRONTS AND PARTY DEMOCRACY

The first half of this section will explain some of the difficulties with democracy and leadership in united fronts. The second half will suggest partial solutions. We start with a basic contradiction. A revolutionary party will wither if it is not part of the class struggle. But a united front means an alliance with reformist full-timers at the top, and reformist workers at the base. And a revolutionary party that is not part of mass reformist action will never know how to be part of mass revolutionary action. So there are always two dangers for revolutionaries in united fronts – sectarian isolation and reformist accommodation.

The pull to the right bears most strongly on the leaders of united fronts. We know this from trade union work. There CC members try to advise senior union comrades – not an easy process. But in the last few years we have had experience of comrades, and CC members, in leading positions in united fronts. What follows is based on our experiences in Stop the War, Respect, Globalise Resistance, the European Social Forum and the Campaign Against Climate Change. Our problems have been most acute in Respect, but similar difficulties arise in all united fronts.

There is also a pull to the right on leaders of local campaigns. When a comrade chairs or is a speaker at a local Stop the War meeting, they don’t sell the paper publicly. They are usually the most radical speaker, but they don’t give the same talk as at an SWP meeting. And they spend a lot of energy trying to hold a broad coalition together.

The pressures are much stronger if you are in the national leadership of a campaign. Then you deal directly with the other leaders, usually full-timers in unions, NGOs or political parties. When compromises must be made, you make them. Some of them are a bit dirty, and all of them feel necessary. Some of the full-timers you work with act in deeply undemocratic ways, and the pressure to collude with this is intense.

The pressure is stronger if you also speak as the public face of the campaign. Then you deliver a reformist speech over and over again. What you say begins to limit what you can think. The pressures are still stronger working with NGOs than in unions, because the money does not come from workers. They are strongest of all in electoral politics.

Moreover, an effective leader of a united front needs friendships with other leaders and a loyalty to the cause beyond your loyalty to the SWP. Without that friendship and loyalty, no one will trust you, especially in a crisis. And you have to be responsible to both the discipline of the SWP and the discipline of the campaign. But leading comrades in united fronts, if they are any good, will pull the other comrades in the campaign to the right. These pressures get worse once a CC member becomes a leader in a united front. They are under the same pressure from the right. But now comrades are much more likely to follow their lead in meetings. Where they don’t, the CC member is tempted to instruct them. And it is more difficult for the rest of the CC to control them.

These pressures are worse again where two or three CC members are leading in one united front, or one member leads in two campaigns. They are worse yet when the united front is successful, and what it does really matters in the world. Sometimes neither the rest of the CC nor the members can control them.

So it’s tempting to say CC members should not take on leading roles in united fronts, just as they do not do so in unions. But this ignores the other half of the contradiction. The party can also be pulled too far left and become isolated. Think of an organisation led by people who did not want to lead the struggle. What sort of organisation would such pure keepers of the flame build? How would they learn? More important, the dangers and mess of a united front are worst at the top. For revolutionaries the rewards, and the joy, are at the base. Comrades look to leading CC members as models for what a revolutionary should do. If CC members abstain from united fronts, in each town the party will prize intellect and purity over struggle.

So the tension is real, and permanent. We must always try to control that tension. There is no one size fits all formula, but here are suggestions: We should be careful of having two CC members in one united front, and extra careful when they are both part of the public speakers for the campaign. We should usually split forces, so one CC member is the public face, and the other an organiser. This means pushing ‘lay’ comrades as leading figures. That means moving beyond the idea that all the real leaders of the party will be on the CC, and that the CC members should necessarily be the speakers in big meetings.

CC members in united fronts should see coordinating the SWP intervention as a central job. They must talk, face to face, each week, to the comrades who work for united fronts. This includes comrades in ‘office jobs’, which are politically difficult. All comrades need to understand that we don’t take on jobs in united fronts without agreement of the CC, just as we don’t take on union jobs without discussion and support.

The most important control, however, is a strong caucus in each united front. Serious tensions between the CC and leading members, or within the CC, cannot be resolved at the top level. For that, you need democracy. A regional caucus cannot provide democratic control of a national leadership. A caucus must be national. This is expensive, and time consuming. But the problems over Respect, for instance, would have surfaced much earlier this way. Once comrades from different areas got together, their increasing concerns would have echoed each other. Pooled fares and a strong, elected, caucus executive between meetings, with conference calls, can help. The caucus should also vote routinely, at each meeting. That makes votes more likely when there is real disagreement. But what happens if the CC ‘line’ loses the vote? That’s not a disaster, it’s the point. The CC member can decide to bend, or argue more. Sometimes the CC as a whole will decide to overrule the caucus and insist. But that vote is also a warning light for CC and the national committee that maybe something is going wrong here, and should be more widely debated.

Our best industrial fractions (a union caucus) already work in this way. They manage to discipline our national union figures in a way the CC could not do by themselves. We need to dump the idea that a CC member who loses a vote has failed. They have not. They have learned. This needs to be seen as a normal part of discussion and democracy. Within a united front, at every level, we also need to make sure that we only win votes by persuading people. So party members must be at most a quarter or a third of any united front committee. This means, locally and nationally, that we will sometimes lose important votes in a united front. If this never happens, you are probably moving to the right, or controlling the vote by bureaucratic means, or both.

Losing a few votes, and having a strong caucus, also allows us to put forward a specifically revolutionary alternative within a united front. Too often we find ourselves as the best people at holding together a broad coalition. That is essential, but can’t be all we do. Finally, the most important thing of all is to understand that the mass struggle for reform carries both the pressure to reformism and the possibility of revolution. This tension is both healthy and dangerous. It plays itself out between individuals in any serious revolutionary party. That’s not anybody’s fault. We cannot deal with it without wide and deep democracy.

In fairness alzo, your understanding of trot parties is extremely juvenile.