Socialist Workers Party: international perspectives

6. … More generally in Europe the problem has been one of how and whether the revolutionary left should relate to new political formations that, if they are to succeed, must embrace substantial numbers of refugees from social democracy. In some cases, the behaviour of the far left has been sectarian to the point of caricature. In Germany, for example, the local affiliate of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) has used the participation of one wing of the new left, the ex-Stalinist PDS, in social-liberal state governments to try to kill off the new party at birth. Our comrades in Linksruck have, while condemning the PDS’s serving in these coalition governments, successfully fought alongside ex-social democrats in the WASG to give the new left the space it needs to develop and grow.

The dominant faction in the SSP never succeeded in breaking with the sectarianism it too had learned in the CWI. Shunning the anti-war movement and the G8 protests, it used the pretext of a News of the World-manufactured sex scandal to remove the party’s most popular figure, Tommy Sheridan, and has worked obsessively to destroy him, apparently unaware that they are sawing off the branch on which they too – and indeed the entire radical left in Scotland – are sitting …

7. Behind all these cases is the same false polarity – either Bertinotti’s opportunism or revolutionary purism, either the movement or the party, either a broad party or a narrow revolutionary organization. The entire strategy the SWP has pursued since Seattle has involved a refusal of these fake choices. Challenging social liberalism means building broad political formations that do not prejudge the issue of reform and revolution. Only on this basis will it be possible to build parties of the radical left that can win large numbers of workers previously loyal to the mainstream reformist parties. This means, moreover, that these new formations cannot succumb to the temptation to turn their backs on social democracy. On the contrary, they have to maintain an orientation on the social liberal parties in order to attract more of their supporters. Hence Respect, in initiating the Fighting Unions Conference on 11 November, has made a special effort to draw in and work with Labour Party supporters.

But at the same time revolutionary socialists, in building these new formations, should not liquidate their own distinct politics and organizations … Revolutionary Marxists have not just to maintain their traditions and organizations, but should be seeking to win new adherents and influence. But the only place to do this is in the wider united fronts – for example, the Stop the War Coalition, but also Respect and new left formations like it in other countries. It is on this basis, for example, that the SWP in Scotland is working Sheridan and his supporters to build Solidarity as a genuinely non-sectarian radical left movement rather than an SSP Mark 2.

The false choice between opportunism and sectarianism that runs through current debates on the revolutionary left internationally serves to remove the creative tension between a Marxist core seeking to drive the movements forward and the broader and looser formations through which activists from many different traditions can learn to work together to build political alternatives to neo-liberalism. But it is only through that tension, that dialectic of party and movement, that any real breakthrough to mass revolutionary parties can come.