Archive for the ‘Parti Socialiste’ Category
France, I Year of François Hollande, 150,000 March for Alternative Left Policies.
In Paris on Sunday up to 150,000 demonstrators marched for a VIth Republic», and against “l’austérité et la finance”.
This was their way of marking one year of Socialist Party led-government and the election of President Hollande.
At the appeal of the Front de Gauche leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon many came to bring a “new broom” to French policies with real brooms, of all kinds.
This morning on French Radio stations supporters of the governing Parti Socialiste expressed their disdain for the sometimes colourful language used by their left critics.
But it was noted that François Holllande,elected with 51,6% of the vote Holland today gets only 25% backing in Opinion Polls.
Below are some reasons for this:
France: Unemployment Up.
Hollande stands accused of failing to offer a serious alternative to financial austerity that would change these figures.
Is there another way out?
At the Paris March Pierre Laurent Communist Party), Eva Joly (left Wing Greens) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon (Parti de gauche) argued for new radical left policies (Here).
As the first speaker said,
Nous sommes tous Grecs, Espagnols, Italiens, Irlandais, Portugais, Chypriotes et notre ennemi c’est la finance. La finance dehors, l’humain d’abord !
We are all Greeks. Spaniards, Italians, Irish, Portuguese and Cypriots. Our enemy is finance. Out with Finance! Put Humanity first!“
Before Thatcher: the Movement for Workers’ Control.
The 1970s and the Movement for Workers’ Control.
“Trade unions have historically bargained for better terms for the sale of labour power; they have not been able to challenge the existence of the labour market itself. Today, however, the relation between ‘political’ and ‘economic’ struggle have changed.”
Perry Anderson. The Limits and Possibilities of in: The Incompatibles. Trade Union Militancy and the Consensus. 1967.
Perry Anderson was writing about incomes policies. Attempts to impose, or reach by union consent, agreements about pay levels would be made by successive governments, Conservative or Labour, right until Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979. That is, pay disputes became political because the Cabinet and the State were involved.
These, as is well-known, featured prominently during the decade. The unions’ efforts to defend and increase their members salaries, from the late ‘sixties ‘wage drift’ to the need to adjust to inflation, led to countless disputes. Some on the left thought that the resulting “profit squeeze” of the period was a sign of growing working class strength. Other held them responsible for the country’s (relative) decline.
There is a library of literature on this subject. But Anderson could equally have referred to the way in which the authority of British capitalism was challenged from the inside. That is through demands and efforts to make real workers’ power within companies. This movement had an influential and coherent voice. The Institute for Workers’ Control was formed in 1968, with the support of Hugh Scanlon of the Engineering union (AEU) and Jack Jones of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (T & G). It was influential (though never dominant) within the Labour Party and the wider left. The Institute’s conferences debated a broad range of proposals to introduce industrial democracy Above all, management’s right to manage was disputed.
In the wake of Thatcher’s death her supporters have shouted loudly about the role of the unions in the 1970s. They state that organised labour had undue influence over the Wilson and Callaghan Cabinets (1974 – 1979), that they pressured them to shore up unprofitable industries, that they stifled enterprise. It was common to talk about “corporatism”, the way in which efforts were made to draw unions, employers and the state together formally through bodies such as the National Enterprise Board (NEB).
The media has given ample publicity to those who claim that Thatcher freed them from union backed State regulation. That an open market enabled them to succeed. That they took responsibility for their own fate and succeeded. Everybody should be like me – look at my wad ! – is the boast.
Perhaps instead of pointing to the delusions of those who think so highly of their own talents, or to the victims of the same market process, we should consider the forward-looking ideas of the 1970s left. Indeed, with their grass-roots democratic hopes, it might be better to look at this not so distant past, before going further back to the 1945 Labour Government.
An Offensive Movement.
The Institute for Workers’ Control was not a defensive but an offensive movement. It asked the simple question: if democracy is such a good thing for politics, why is it not the rule at work? If individual responsibility is to forced down people’s throats (as is now happening again under ‘welfare reform’), what is wrong with people taking responsibility for the companies that employ them? Marx described the way in which in the market we are ‘free’, the “very Eden of the innate rights of man”? But at the same time, within production, factory, office or shop, there is a sign “No admittance except on business.” (Page 280. Capital Vol. 1. Penguin Edition). In this respect have we not gone beyond the 19th century?
Workers’ Control. Another World is Possible. Ken Coates. (2003) offers valuable material from the Institute for Workers’ Control (which dissolved in the 1980s). Ken Coates article, Democracy and Workers’ Control (published in Towards Socialism. Eds. Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn. 1965) describes the “antithetical natures of private property and democracy”. He criticised ‘paternalistic Fabianism”, that is the nationalised industries run by civil servants. Read the rest of this entry »
Owen Jones, the SWP and Networks.
End of an Era for SWP?
Owen Jones, the SWP and Networks.
The SWP is “imploding”. The fall out from the Martin Smith affair, and perceived hostility to women’s rights has been devastating. “Activists are reported to be in open rebellion at their autocratic leadership, or are simply deserting en masse,” writes Owen Jones in the Independent. This, he continues, is of importance to the whole left. Not only has the SWP been behind political movements, such as the Stop the War Coalition’s giant marches against the Iraq war, but that many, “thousands” have passed through its ranks over the years, “only to end up burnt out and demoralised”.
Intellectuals such as China Mièville and Richard Seymour, and grass-roots activists, are now publicly challenging their party’s leadership. It would seem that the days of the SWP as Britain’s largest “Leninist sect” are drawing to an end.
There are some similarities with the late 1970s dissolution of European far-left groups. The much more intensely “revolutionary” French Gauche Prolétarienne (GP) wound itself up in 1973. Tales of arbitrary central rule, the domineering ways of Benny Lévy, bullying and personal traumas emerged later, which resemble some of the stories emerging from the SWP. The Italian Lotta Continua (LC) broke up by the late 1970s over the avant-garde role of any ‘party’, and issues of personal politics and feminism.
But these groups were ideologically fluid. Their ideas were part of a world of unsettled alignments and doubts, fuelled by the changes in mid-1970s China and the horrors of Cambodia, or, in Italy, with the emerging ‘armed struggle’, about the nature of ‘revolution’ and Marxism.
Supporters and opponents in the SWP by contrast look to the ‘IS tradition’ that held them together for decades. Solidarity and the Weekly Worker report a continuing battle by opponents of the Central Committee’s “bureaucratic centralism”. Their objections are framed within a common set of assumptions.
There are other differences. Britain is, to say the least, is also not a natural home for ‘revolutionaries’. Yassamine Mather in the Weekly Worker describes the dedication and stringent organisation of the Iranian left in the wake of the Khomeini Islamist take-over and the contrast with the SWP’s centrally directed, but less welded together membership. Those familiar with the Continental European left, where violent clashes with the state and mass movements on a scale unknown in the United Kingdom are not unknown even today, find the SWP’s ‘revolutionary’ claims, for all of the legacy on the 1980s miners’ strike, hard to swallow.
Bolshevisation.
Owen Jones observes, rightly, that the ‘Leninism’ of the SWP is “obsessed with replicating a revolution that took places in a semi-feudal country nearly a century ago”. Yet the SWP emerged from the post-1968 events, not the foundation of the Third International. That is, like the Gauche Prolétarienne and LC, and the whole “new vanguard” (as the International Secretariat of the Fourth International called it), they were shaped by mass strikes and student movements, dividing the left, and without any clear central leadership, that did not resemble 1917. Close to the GP André Glucksman argued in 1968 that there was not a Bolshevik” model for the “party”, in the widest sense, of the revolutionary left to adopt (Stratégie et revolution en France 1968. 1968). The forerunner of the SWP, the International Socialists, was of a similar mind.
It was only during the 1970s that a wide section of the post-68 European left began to ‘Bolshevise’. Tony Cliff’s biography of Lenin is said to mark a key moment in this process. It was resisted by important a section of the old IS, who broke away as the SWP was founded in 1976. Lars T. Lih, has argued that for Lenin the proletariat was ready for Marxism, that there would be no division between teachers and taught, and that socialism and the working class would ‘merge’ (Lenin. 2011) For the IS there was always a distrust of “substitutionism”, that the party would suddenly announce that it was the unique bearer of Marxist truth. Critics (including former members) of the new SWP were not slow to say that this was exactly what it was doing.
The SWP theoretical view of the ‘party’ resembles that out forward by the Fourth International’s (FI) Ernest Mandel, that it “proves its right to exist only through it connection to the real class struggle and by its capacity to transform potentially revolutionary class consciousness into actual revolutionary class consciousness of broad layers of workers.”(The Leninist Theory of Organisation 1975) The party is linked to these conflicts and interests by a wide network of activists, through listening to people’s grievances, to discussions, through participation in self-organised revolts. In Leninist terms the party then organises during a revolutionary situation, or “dual power”, to conquer power and ‘smash’ the existing bourgeois state.
Sometimes the SWP’s role as a ‘Leninist organisation’ can almost seem to disappear. You would be hard pressed to find any reference to the Party in SWP leader Alex Callinicos’ Anti-Capitalist Manifesto (2003). Callinicos addresses the ‘anti-capitalist movement’ (which he prefers to alter-globalisation and other expressions). He offers a defence of the critique of capitalism based on justice, efficiency democracy and sustainability and a “transitional programme’ to pave the way for a democratically planned socialist economy, without mentioning the Party’s role. The “revolutionary process” he outlines, that might lead to this end, does not even include the words ‘dual power’.
Bureaucratic Centralism.
The SWP can tolerate a wide range of theoretical diversity, as Callinicos’ often brilliant writing illustrates. But rather than waste time looking for references to the party in the writings of SWP intellectuals (which would include Chris Harman, John Rees’ appropriation of Lukács, and many others) it is their practice that is most relevant. The SWP operates what it would no doubt call “revolutionary centralism” Barry Biddulph goes back to the pre-1914 Marxist left to find the origins of what is widely called, rather differently, ‘bureaucratic centralism”. (2) He asserts, correctly in our opinion, that ‘democratic centralism’ is always centralist never democratic. Certainly the SWP does not prove the contrary. Their organisation if marked by the following: the Central Committee’s (CC) debates are not revealed to the members, only its decisions are, the CC is elected at the annual conference by the ‘slate’ system (similar to the old Communist Party of Great Britain’s ‘panel system’), which offers delegates a list of candidates which cannot be a amended, all party members are bound by the decisions of the CC, internal party factions, or groupings, are only permitted, within defined limits, during the run up to the conference, members can be expelled for breaking these conditions. This ensures “unity in action”, or more accurately, “doing what you’re told.”
Ernest Mandel’s model of democratic two-way party process between members and leaders left the way open for party ‘factions’. This has been the practice in the Fourth International he was part of. It may be compared to the French Parti Socialiste, which is made up of a permanent, and shifting, set of tendencies, or ‘courants’ whose views are put to the party conference and form the basis of a proportionally elected leadership. In the FI aligned International Marxist Group, which also underwent 1970s ‘Bolshevisation’, this was the norm. It remains the case in the French Nouveau parti anticapitaliste (NPA). The NPA has been criticised by the SWP for this democratic system. ‘Permanent factions’ Callinicos has frequently observed, waste party energy, and turn it inwards.
Factions can also lead to splits – as the NPA has recently experienced. Nevertheless it could be argued that it was the inability of the NPA to adapt flexibly to the new conditions – the formation of the Front de gauche (FdG) which its former tendencies have joined up with – that casts doubt even on this more open ‘Leninist’ model. The French FI hearkened back to their Trotskyist origins and simply refused to join up with the FdG “reformists”.
However, factions, tendencies and other aspects of permanent democratic debate have roots in the nature of politics, particularly important for the left. The left works within ‘stasis’, that is the upsetting of existing political arrangements. It is a means to break up the consensus – today around neo-liberalism – and, as Owen Jones notes, the “crisis” of capitalism.
Jacques Rancière argues that it is only through “dissensus” (Dissensus 2010). This has many aspects but one is relevant to this debate, “Political struggle proper is therefore not a matter of rational debate between multiple interests; it is above all, a struggle to have one’s voice heard and oneself recognised as a legitimate partner in debate.” Denying members of a political party this “right to be heard” as a partner, is to “police” them, to make them less than equal. It is dissensus which enables new issues to be raised, to make a party a place where people do not just exchange their experiences while the carry out orders, but somewhere where people come out with new ideas, ‘outside the box’. Bureaucratic centralism is not just bad practice; it is an attempt to wipe out politics itself.
The SWP operates on the assumption that people radicalised ‘by the struggle’ will turn towards it. Its own activity with other groups, unions, campaigns, political parties, is directed on this basis. Its vehicles are no secret. Vargas Llosa once described Trotskyists in South America as all about standing around selling papers. Apart from Socialist Worker the SWP organises meetings, preferably large public ones. It’s what they do. They then recruit, and if people get sucked in they can enjoy the life of a party run by bureaucratic centralism. And have their activities on Facebook overseen.
The End of an Era?
The SWP since the 1970s has been one of the factors that has prevented the British left from offering a coherent challenge to capitalism. Beginning from the late 1970s, when it tried to impose the Anti Nazi League over a network of local anti-racist and anti-fascist groups, it participated in another network, the Socialist Movement, (the Chesterfield Conference) with the intention of ‘exposing’ the ‘left reformists’ of the Labour left. It joined in, but can hardly be said to have shaped the strategies (never put into effect) that emerged, which combined democratic reforms, green policies, and a pan-European version of the 1970s Alternative Economic Programme.
After that it was back to the usual round of campaigns, frenetically taken up, and then dropped, opposing. The most successful were on international issues, the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia and the first Gulf War. Following the electoral successes of French Trotskyists in the 1990s and the emergence of the Scottish Socialist party, the SWP looked more favourably on ‘electoralism’. It came to dominated the late 1990s electoral front, the Socialist Alliance, operated without regard for democratic norms inside it, and then dumped it in favour of a hook-up with George Galloway in the communalist Respect. An attempt to capitalise on the successes of the Stop the War Coalition’s marches was the foundation. The SWP then left Respect (No doubt largely because large egos couldn’t stand Galloway’s even bigger one) , got rid of its most Islamophile ‘anti-imperialist’ wing around Lindsey German and John Rees, and, cutting a long story short, is now trying to split the anti-cuts movement with the…Unite the Resistance campaign.
SWP campaigns work in a cycle. There is intense effort made to build then – or to take over existing bodies – there are meetings, demonstrations, and, they hope recruitment. A hysteria takes hold. Then they largely disappear, or are shunted aside for future use. This is somes called the ‘united front as tactic’. Each intervention has left casualties in the party and outside of it. Once they have secured support the SWP goes on its way without bothering too much about what anybody else thinks. This leaves casualties, or, more often, just distrust and indifference to the next all-important mobilisation. People are wary of co-operating not just with the sellers of Socialist Worker but with other activists, divided against each other in each successive wave of ‘unity’ and then, ‘dis-unity’.
The SWP, like all political parties, treats people as instruments, means to an end, not ends in themselves. It is distinguished from most political bodies nevertheless by the degree to which it does this, casting people aside – expelling them if they are members – and acquiring a cadre prepared to carry out this with ‘Bolshevik ‘ ruthlessness. Towards those they don’t have a direct grip on they can be alternatively charming, glacial or hectoring. The threat of violence is not unknown.
Owen notes that the failings of the SWP are not unique. Nor is its lack of success. Members of his family have participated in previous ‘party-building’ attempts.
Is, as he argues, the Labour Party offers a way of connecting with the working class and ordinary people? There are doubts on this. Labour is a professionalised party, with links to voters that are pretty obvious, as we have ballots to show them, and ties to trade unions which are less secure. There are strong arguments to be involved in the Party, though its internal structure offer little way of influencing policy in depth. . The serious left does not want to be an “echo chamber” – talking to itself alone, as Luke Akehurst argues. In the meantime we are not likely to stop criticising the Labour Party, not least because it fails to live up to being even a social democratic party.
If it is so far from being a socialist organisation what do we do? New left parties seem, as Owen says, to be a non-starter. Jones argues that the left, labour and non-labour, should get together in networks. Toby Young in the Daily Telegraph ironically states that Jones want to “his fellow travellers to form a new political movement – a sort of non-sexist version of the Socialist Workers’ Party.” It is indeed tempting to be ironical about the SWP but I doubt if even Young laughs much when we have an effect, in anti-cuts groups, or in trade unions. Because, as Owen knows, we already have our networks, established by a degree of trust and respect, including his own umbrella group, the Labour Representation Committee (of which I am a card member). These are ‘broad networks’ dealing with bread and butter politics.
The ‘Bolshevisation’ of the 1970s was followed by successive waves of activists leaving parties like the SWP, or fragmenting, as happened with the IMG, into a variety of small tendencies. A majority of the erstwhile ‘far-left’ operates in flexible networks and journals, like Chartist, the Commune, and Labour Briefing, or small Marxist groups like the Weekly Worker or the Alliance for Workers Liberty. Red Pepper, the descendent of the Socialist Movement, offers reports on networking campaigns, most recently on the Indignados and the small American movement, Occupy Wall Street. Although we may differ on many things a democratic commitment perhaps marks us off from the SWP. It would not be too much to say that this is reinforced by the possibilities offered by the new information technologies, technologies which appear to drive the SWP to distraction.
Owen concludes, “The era of the SWP and its kind is over; a new movement is waiting to be born.” Perhaps we should be thinking of organising something like the May Day Manifesto, the Beyond the Fragments conference, or the Socialist Movement. This will be hard, there is a lot to overcome. But please, this time, SWP Central Committee – stay away!
(1) “Revolutionary centralism is a harsh, imperative and exacting principle. It often takes the guise of absolute ruthlessness in its relation to individual members, to whole groups of former associates. It is not without significance that the words ‘irreconcilable’ and ‘relentless’ are among Lenin’s favourites. It is only the most impassioned, revolutionary striving for a definite end – a striving that is utterly free from anything base or personal – that can justify such a personal ruthlessness.” Page 167 My Life. Leon Trotsky. An Attempt at an Autobiography. Penguin 1975.
Barry Biddulp states, “Democratic Centralism is not democratic; leaders decide on how much democracy there should be, depending on their interpretation of the circumstances. The concept has been compatible with authoritarian personalities and top down undemocratic parties. Simon wants to fill an undemocratic form with a democratic content, but the usual undemocratic content was demonstrated recently in a scandal in the British SWP. The content is tied to the form of a small central leadership mimicking the centralization of state decision-making. A post capitalist society can only be established by the self emancipation of the working class, not a handful of leaders invoking the values of so-called democratic centralism and substituting for the class.
Update: This post, from the dissident SWP site Interrnational Socialism (Hat-Tip Shiraz) , about how the ‘party’ cadres moan about people writing on the Internet is worth looking at for amusement value alone.
Crisis in French Government over Steel Plant Closures at Florange.
France’s steel producers are on the brink. Opposition to a deal over the Loraine Steel Plant, at Florange, threatens to undermine the unity of the French Socialist-led Government.
The Minister leading the negotiations over the future of Florange, Arnaud Montebourg, is a leading figure of the Parti Socialiste (PS) left wing. he advocates ”la démondialisation” (anti-globaliser) and re-industrialisation. He has expressed the view that the company that ran the furnaces, – Steelmaker Mittal, which acquired France’s Arcelor in 2006, is no longer wanted in the country – after years of broken promises . This feeling is widely shared by the firm’s workers.
In charge of the Industry Ministry as ‘ministre du Redressement productif’, Arnaud Montebourg , threatened to ‘temporally’ nationalise the site. When this was dropped this weekend he was on the point of resigning.
There has been a persistent campaign to denigrate Montebourg.
This began from Manuel Valls, of the right-wing of the PS (and admirer of Tony Blair) and now Interior Minister. From the Employers’ association, the MEEDF, Laurence Parisot, has criticised his “muscular” and “interventionist” policies. The EU’s Commerce Commissioner, Karel de Gucht, has attacked his ‘protectionism’.
In some ways this is reminiscent of the opposition Tony Benn faced when he was Secretary of State for Industry in 1974.
There are both similarities and important differences. Benn was described as a supporter of Eastern European style socialism. He was not linked, at the time, to the main demands of the trade unions. Benn ended up marginalised in the Cabinet.
Jean-Marc Ayrault’s government’s take on the Steel crisis faces resistance from grass-roots workers. They have no faith in the agreement, and are intensely suspicious of Lakshmi Mittal. Attempts by the reformist CFDT union federation have been sided-stepped by the present plan, to their great anger and accusations of “betrayal”. The radical left-led CGT federation’s opposition remains a stumbling block for the government. They do not believe that Florange has been ‘saved’.
Crucially there is a political voice to express their demands. The Front de Gauche is not part of the Socialist government. It is free to criticise its decisions. Already the leader of the French Communist Party (PCF) Pierre Laurent, says that they “Le PCF comprend la colère des salariés et élus locaux devant cette démission de la puissance publique” – they understand the anger of the employees and local political figures at this failure to use the public authoritires’ powers – to resolve the situation.
At the moment Montebourg remains at his post.
The reverberations from the Florange could create a deep political crisis. President’s Hollande’s ’social democratic’ turn, that is adopting ‘market realism’, looks threatened by union discontent.
ArcelorMittal, France end feud on steel plant
ArcelorMittal and the French government have struck a deal under which nationalisation of the Lakshmi Mittal-owned Florange Steel Plant has been ruled out in lieu of the company’s commitment to make fresh investment of 180 million euros and not to lay off any worker.
Also, the company will not shut down two blast furnaces at the Florange facility which will retain about 650 workers whose jobs were under threat.
The world’s largest steelmaker, owned by the India-born tycoon, has 2,700 employees at the entire plant situated in the North-Eastern part of the country.
The deal was announced by French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault on Friday when the deadline for ArcelorMittal to find buyers for the two blast furnaces expired
More, in French:
“Florence était un dossier politiquement explosif. A tel point que l’avenir des derniers hauts fourneaux de Lorraine a failli faire éclater le gouvernement
De sources concordantes, Arnaud Montebourg a menacé François Hollande de démissionner, lors de leur entretien de samedi matin à l’Elysée. La veille au soir, le ministre du Redressement productif avait été sèchement désavoué par le Premier ministre, Jean-Marc Ayrault, sur son projet de «nationalisation temporaire» de Florange.
See le Monde and Libération
