Counterfire and the Coalition of Resistance: a critical analysis.

Is this the Way Forward?

Counterfire, the Coalition of Resistance and John Rees.

“At last, when the Duchess saw that no patterns would do her any good in the framing of her world; she resolved to make a world of her own invention, and this world was composed of sensitive and rational self-moving matter; indeed, it was composed only of the rational, which is the subtlest and purest degree of matter..”

(The Blazing World Margaret Cavendish. 1666)

The Coalition of Resistance (CoR) is holding a conference on the 27th of November. It was set up to “organise a broad movement of active resistance to the Con-Dem government’s budget intentions.” In view of the Cabinet’s massive reductions in state spending its task now is to “Oppose cuts and privatisation in our workplaces, community and welfare services”. Its role in making opposition effective is to “Support the development of a national co-ordinating coalition of resistance.” Apart from a list of left-wing signatures, it has received support from the Communist Party of Britain’s ‘People’s Charter’.Already there has been controversy about this “co-ordination”. Some on the left support different initiatives, such as the National Shop Stewards’ Network, others are relucant to commit to such a “cordination” outside the official labour movement.

Exactly what the Coalition of Resistance (CoR) owes to a small network called Counterfire is a matter of conjecture. Clearly the group hosts the CoR’s site. Counterfire’s best-known figures are John Rees, late of the Socialist Workers Party, and currently still influential, and his partner, another ex-SWPer, Lindsey German, in the Stop the War Coalition (StWC). The reasons for their departure from the SWP are of some interest to the inner Leftist Trainspotter, but largely personality and tactically based, have only a limited relevance here. The SWP’s present activity, with the Right to Work campaign, has its own difficulties. In this case, the Counterfire network is small, which has led, it is said, a few small left groups to feel that they can work with the CoR with interference. What is more important, however,  is regardless of their strength, is these leaders’ political practice, from the Socialist Alliance to the StWC, and their present stand.

From United Fronts to Coalitions.

John Rees has recently written of the importance of political “experience” in “the struggle itself.” Equally significant is “theoretical experience.” (1) As any visitor to the Counterfire site can see it is full of reports, of varying quality, on international and British “mobilisations” and mass movements. For Rees, an enduring issue is that any large-scale protest (whether industrial or social) shows “uneven consciousness in the working class movement”. Workers have a “dual consciousness”, both of being “of subordination”, which creates a sense of acceptance of capitalism, and a good feeling that they “have the right to control” their work The two meet in ‘reformism “a particular amalgam of good sense and common sense” To deal with this he defended the view that this means that the left should build the united front “to maximise the unity of the working class in struggle, and at the same time give revolutionaries and reformists the chance to discuss their wider differences.” Yet it must be based on “separation on matters of principle such as reform and revolution. We cannot properly determine those immediate issues on which we can unite unless we also properly, and organisationally, separate over matters of principle.” (2)

This model could be extended far. So far that an umbrella body, the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), now  with the Muslim Initiative, explicitly formed on a religious basis, could be considered a partner in such a front. Critics of the SWP’s alliance, with political Islamicists were dismissed. At the time Rees offered no analysis of the politics or class basis of the MAB’s Islamism. It was a simpler issue. The left, we were informed, defends “ the right of religious observance.” Muslims were “under attack by the government and the right wing.” So, “this was always the basis of co-operation between the left and Muslims in the anti-war movement.” (3). The overriding aim of the initiative took precedence. As he now says,

“At the point where revolutionaries took the step of initiating the Stop the War Coalition in 2001, we undertook an analysis something like this. We had already understood the nature of the new imperialism from theoretical work at the end of the Cold War, during the First Gulf War, and during the war in the Balkans. We understood the contradiction between expansive US military power and its relative economic decline. We judged, from preceding experience in the anti-globalisation movement, that there would be a mood to resist and that the left might not be divided in the way it had been in the Cold War.” (4)

Rees claims, then, that the left determined the political direction of the StWC. “We” grasped the “subjective” element in politics and organised the “mood to resist”. The words ‘united front’ have all but evaporated. Instead we had another approach, which led (see below) to the formation of Respect. That is one based on access to “workers’ consciousness”. This method was not only applied to wage-labours. In 2003 he noted that amongst Muslims, “Some of these have been radicalised by the war, and by the effect on them of racism bolstered by the war and government policy. This has made them open to working with and being influenced by the left.” (5) The alliances of the StWC and the left within it, was therefore not a matter of confronting people’s contradictory opinions, but to get a hold on “radicalised” forces – primarily Muslims.

Rees, with this ‘movementist’ approach, offered no analysis of the diverse ‘Muslim’ political forces, (different Muslim communities, the role of Mosques, or types of Islamism). Ideological issues are largely reduced to disputes about believers’ attitude to sexual politics. There is no discussion of the role of secular left parties such as the Awami League and the Pakistani Labour Party, and their opposition to the central element of a broad variety of Islamic politics, the institution of some form of Sharia. Rees, like the SWP generally, did not show the slightest acquaintance with the reality of the municipal politics in which different groups of a Muslim background had a presence. Accusations from their critics, of “communalism” (that is, the perfectly ordinary practice of councillors to pursue the interests of their ‘own’ community), which would come to haunt them, were dismissed as prejudice. The StWC had “worked” with a diverse set of individuals and organisations, so the ‘left’ would cooperate with one of them, ‘Muslims’, more widely.

How does this relate to the United Front? It would be hard to place the cross-class protests – wholly justified – against the Invasion of Iraq within the framework of Trotsky’s version of the concept. A glance can see the limits of this, always present, reference. Trotsky’s writings on the topic were largely produced within the conditions of Hitler’s rise to power, and the failure of the Stalinist Comintern to unite with other forces to oppose National Socialism. But they have wider application. This was not a ‘tactic’ but a longer-term strategy. The “contradictory consciousness” of workers exists in solid political forms, which are through the existence of distinct parties within the workers’ movement, social democratic, left socialist, and communist. The communists, Trotsky argued, should support common action, to show to the masses and rival left parties and reformist trade unions, “their readiness in action to wage battle in common with them for aims, no matter how modest, so long as they lie on the road of the historical development of the proletariat”. This would “hasten the revolutionary development of the class”. On the way the strategy would show that this fight is undermined by the “conscious sabotage of the leaders of the Social Democracy.” (6) Rees historical examples of united fronts have been much broader, from the trade unions to the soviets during the Russian Revolution. They included the Socialist Alliance; an electoral grouping of left-wing parties In effect his definition of a united front is simply ‘unity in action’ between political and social movements with different ideas. That is a tactic: once a movement gets going the deeper forces of ‘radicalisation’ can always overwhelm the differences between “contradictory” groups. (7)

Many people who participated in the Socialist Alliance (SA) would agree that it was certainly a ‘united front of a special type’. No movement appeared to sweep supporters in the SWP’s direction. In the attempt to steer it they rode roughshod over their allies. The SWP (with Rees playing a significant role) unceremoniously dissolved the SA after a couple of years. They formed the Respect Coalition, without much ado. The lure of ‘radicalised Muslims’ was clearly significant in this move, the initiative was designed to appeal to this constituency’s continued opposition to the occupation of Iraq, and a belief that their hostility to American power converged with ‘anti-imperialism’. George Galloway got elected as a M.P. Council seats were won, above all in London’s East End.

The SWP proved that it was out of its depth/ The failure to grasp the nature of municipal politics – patent in Tower Hamlets – was soon apparent as Respect councillors, quarrelled, split and joined other parties. The public image of the party was even more ‘special’, when its most visible leader, George Galloway, is best remembered for making a spectacle of himself on Big Brother. Contrary to half-remembered reading of his writings Trotsky was by no means free of sectarian venom. Social Democratic leaders “agencies of the class enemy” and called for social democracy to be “destroyed”. (8) One hesitates to imagine what he would have thought of Galloway’s cavorting. How leftist critics regarded the eventual departure of the SWP from Respect, and the attempts to keep Galloway and Respect alive, are easier to find, in abundance, on the Web.

After the StWC, and despite Respect, left politics have drifted towards an endless series of “coalitions”. This use of the expression does not refer to normal British or European usage, where coalition normally means an agreement between different political parties to form a government and share out Ministries. It is of American political origin, which implies a broad combination of diverse organisations to further a broad list of policies. That is, in line with US pluralism, a coalition in this sense is an alliance to lobby, to put pressure on government. For any socialist to take on this approach it signals that the united front, with all the baggage of the working class and the historical movement towards socialism, has, at best, second place. This may work in the United States, where politics is centred on lobbies for different causes. But British politics are fixed around another dialectic, between parties and Cabinets, and, exceptionally, the power of industrial and class based community action to take the levers of power for themselves. Giving priority instead to the ‘coalition’ strategy has effects. The pressure-group origins tell: the StWC has remained stuck in agitation for the withdrawal of the ‘Allies’ from Iraq and Afghanistan. Its decline lies in the impasse it found itself when in 2002, with all its mass force, it had little effect on government policy; a weakness it has never come to terms with.

Theory and Party.

What then of theoretical experience? In The Algebra of Revolution Rees described Marxism as “theoretical generalisation based on the historical experience of the working class, and therefore a theory of society as whole rather than merely the history of the oppressed.” There is much in this book on the early writings of the Hungarian Marxist Georges Lukács, his theory of commodity fetishism the ‘totality’ and the theory of truth. Gramsci is cited as a reference for Rees’ approach to “contradictory consciousness” and the way in which one might ‘sift’ through people’s views to find and encourage radical elements. With an element of pragmatism he adds that Marxism’s superior explanatory strength is not derived from access to absolute truth. Nevertheless, honed by experience, it is a condition of “entering the chain of historical forces as an effective power.” (9)

This implies political conclusions. Rees indicated a version of Marxism, which has a very definite (and problematic) standpoint on how the working class develops from its present-day ‘contradictory consciousness’. That is, his concept of how ‘revolutionary consciousness’ can develop out of working class experience of class struggle, and how a ‘revolutionary party’ can make the “leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom”. “A revolutionary organisation remains the indispensable tool for overcoming the unevenness in working-class consciousness, maximising the effectively of working-class struggles, recalling the lessons of past victories and defeats, and educating and leading workers in struggle.” (10)

More recently this is somewhat diluted. We have the statement that “The activity of a revolutionary organisation forms part of a chain of events taking place over time. The revolutionary minority never controls the whole chain, because it is composed of economic factors, the actions of other political organisations, the consciousness and combativity of the working class, and many other elements that are either wholly or partially independent of the influence of the organised minority.” This string of homilies could apply to any political organisation whatsoever. To this Rees thoughtfully adds, “A network of revolutionaries can have a crucial effect on the course of events.” (11) Few would doubt that the status of Counterfire as a network has some influence on this choice of words.

Counterfire and the Coalition of Resistance.

It is apparent from this account that many on the left have serious reservations, to put it no lower, about Counterfire. For it to play a leading role in the Coalition of Resistance is deeply problematic. John Rees is unlikely to be alone amongst its supporters in believing that they are entrusted with the “indispensable tools” to bring opponents of the cuts to their “revolutionary consciousness”. This would not be problem, if we rephrased the claim in more modest terms: to convert others to their way of thinking.

But the difficulty lies deeper. Counterfire has two central gaps in its approach.

The first lies in its failure to analyse the specific nature of the political changes underway in Western societies. That is the changeover from a Welfare state, which guarantees a level of social rights to a national population, to a “market state”, which promotes the interests of global capital and replaces social claims with measures to make citizens ‘compete’ on the international market. There are financial pressures at work here, and a whole structure of government debt and financial pressures behind this. But programmes of outsourcing public provision, restoring traditional hierarchies through the ‘big society’ have their own momentum. The Liberal-Tory cuts are not, then, the direct result of the operation of commodity fetishism or alienation, but a conscious political strategy to adapt the British system of governance to this template.

Secondly, if Counterfire recognises the economic forces operating, its theoretical tools always push them to the bland strategy of ‘resistance’. It does not come to terms with the specificity of the political. The cuts cannot effectively be fought by a strategy of mobilising opposition alone, in the hope that at some point people’s ‘contradictory consciousness’ will unravel and they will be propelled into revolutionary activism. Obviously ‘reformists’ will be less than pleased to hear that they are simply dupes of capitalism. In fact we the one thing we need now is a real ‘reformist strategy’, that is, a way of making things better now for ordinary people. The market state needs to be opposed by a serious minimum programme that sets targets to reach, defending, democratising and extending public services and rights. If this seems abstract, it at least sets the course towards a fuller programme of reform which specialists in the area, notably the local state, can develop. The maximum social programme can only be built on the success of these objectives, not through a spiral towards a ‘movement’ without clear goals.

Counterfire’s two failings have a common source, Lenin as read through Lukács. Rees writes on that we need to grasp “the laws of historical development; to detect the part in the whole and the whole in the part; to find in historical necessity the moment of activity and in activity the connection with historical necessity.” This approach means that in every “concrete analysis of the concrete situation” one can trace the operation of an inexorable dialectic. Rees has something in common with John Holloway’s views in Crack Capitalism (2010), that capitalism produces an endless series of ‘cracks’ in which revolutionary sparks fly. The major difference is while Holloway is only too glad to let every sparkle shed its own light, Rees considers that it is the task of the Revolutionary Party/Network to gather them up. It is a kind of filter that collects together all the rational elements of revolt, binds them together, and hurls them against capitalism. The specificity of the political is obscured, and we are left wondering why people continue to give such derisory votes for UK left-wing parties. (13)

1. ) John Rees (Extracts) Strategy and Tactics: how the left can organise to transform society. Counterfire’s Site). 2010.
2. John Rees. The Broad Party, the Revolutionary Party and the United Front. John Rees. International Socialism. 97. 2002. John Rees. Socialism in the 21st Century. International Socialism 100. 2003.
3. John Rees 2003 op cit.
4. Rees 2010. Op cit.
5. John Rees. 2003 op cit.
6. Page 182 –3 The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. Leon Trotsky. Pathfinder 1972.
7. John Rees 2002 op cit.
8. Pages 207 and 208. Struggle Against Fascism op cit.
9. Page 237 The Algebra of Revolution. The Dialectics and the Classical Marxist Tradition. John Rees. Routledge 1998. Of note is also Rees intransigent Leninism. See: In Defence of October. International Socialism. 52. 1991. For him the entire Bolsheviks’ repressive actions were the result of “force of circumstances”. How convenient ‘circumstances’ are; they can justify anything. This analysis still stands if one believes Rees’ references to Lenin in Counterfire, where he cites Lukács “Leninism represents a hitherto unprecedented degree of concrete, unschematic, unmechanistic, purely praxis-oriented thought. To preserve this is the task of the Leninist.”

(10) Page 302 Rees. 1998.

(11) Rees 2010.

(12) Rees 2010.

(13) Crack Capitalism. John Holloway. Pluto 2010.