(en) Britain, AFED Organise! #82 - Crisis on the left, crisis within the British anarchist movement

We look at the accelerating decay of the British traditional left and turn a critical eye 
on British anarchism. ---- When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and then the Soviet Union 
imploded in 1991, we in what was then the Anarchist Communist Federation (we changed our 
name to the Anarchist Federation in 1999) predicted the collapse of Communist Parties in 
the West and a related crisis in what we called the ?little brother ? of official 
Communism, the Trotskyist movement. But the Communist Parties in Portugal and Greece still 
remain mass parties and still have some reactionary influence in sabotaging the 
independent struggle of the working class there. ---- Well, the process took a little bit 
longer than we at first envisaged and is still in process. Here in Britain in the early 
1990s, the Communist Party shattered into old time Stalinist wings (The Communist Party of 
Britain(CPB) and the New Communist Party), whilst the Eurocommunist wing quickly 
disappeared off the face of the earth, with some of its personnel ending up as advisers of 
the Labour Party leaders Kinnock and Blair.

The CPB still wields some influence via their input into the daily newspaper the Morning 
Star, but like the other fragments it is an aging and shrinking organisation with little 
recruitment from new generations. The Communist Party?s large influence in the trade 
unions, especially within their bureaucracies, has declined with the decline of the trade 
unions themselves, especially with the decimation of heavy industry (engineers, miners, 
steelworkers etc.).

As to the Trotskyist movement, perhaps we should have taken more note of the crisis that 
had already happened within a fairly large Trotskyist formation, the Workers Revolutionary 
Party, in 1985-6. For years its leader Gerry Healy, with the other leading lights within 
it turning a blind eye, was able to sexually abuse and rape many of its young female 
members. At the same time he and the WRP entered into pacts with the regimes in Libya and 
Syria. In return for support in their daily paper, the WRP received funds from these 
regimes, a lot of which Healy funnelled into his own bank accounts. He and others in the 
WRP provided information on leftist opponents to the Syrian regimes, with the result that 
some of them were captured and died agonising deaths at the hands of Assad?s butchers. The 
whole story of Healy?s systematic rape of young WRPers did not come to light until it was 
used in a faction fight within the leadership. In the process the WRP broke into a dozen 
different grouplets, many of which are now moribund or live a half-life.

Trot, Trot Trotsky Goodbye!

We had originally thought that British Trotskyism would implode as a result of the 
collapse of Stalinism and indeed of the whole idea of welfarism, the Welfare State no 
longer being possible with the new demands of evolving capitalism. Certainly the 
Trotskyist movement has had a parasitic relationship with the Labour Party, either when 
organising ?entrist? groups within it, or whilst organising outside it like the Socialist 
Workers Party, having a position of ?critical ? support for Labour ?Left? MPs, 
particularly with the phenomenon of Bennism and with ?left? trade union bureaucrats. 
Practically all of these groups with a few exceptions call for a ?critical ? vote for 
Labour at the time of elections, and the whole history of Trotskyism in Britain is very 
much characterised by an orientation towards what they call the ?labour movement?, in 
reality the Labour Party and the trade union bureaucracy.

What the WRP crisis should have taught us was that the Leninist concept of organisation, 
with its hierarchy of cadre leadership, can lead on to a fear of the rank and file 
membership and a willingness to keep it in the dark, the growth of a self-seeking 
bureaucratic caste, increasing authoritarianism, and the developing belief that one?s 
group is the one true party representing the working class. This leads onto the 
manufacture of a particular atmosphere inside that group, where the leadership bodies 
maintain a mutual solidarity against the membership, and where abuses by one of this group 
can either be ignored or covered up. This is not to say that every Trotskyist group has 
the problems that the WRP, and more recently the SWP, has experienced. Neither does it 
mean that similar scenarios have not happened within the British anarchist movement. What 
it means is that the structure of these groups facilitates the cover-up of abuses by a 
leading member. The attitude of the SWP leaders was to close ranks and deny any abuses. 
Further to this it is worth bearing in mind the comments of Rebecca Winter in her Silent 
No Longer: Confronting Sexual Violence in The Left : ?The lack of internal democracy 
within the SWP certainly hindered the efforts of those seeking change within the 
organisation, but informal social processes influenced by misogynist ideas about sexual 
violence can be just as destructive to the lives of sexual violence survivors.?

Freefall

The SWP is now in freefall. It constituted the largest group on the Left. It had already 
had disastrous splits after its experiments in constructing an electoral alliance with the 
ex-Labour MP George Galloway, Respect, and through this and its work in a front it more or 
less controlled, the Stop The War Coalition, it went into alliance with reactionary 
Islamists. Galloway is an extremely astute operator and he used the SWP for his own 
objectives, discarding them when they were no longer useful. Someone had to be blamed for 
the Galloway fiasco and the equally disastrous alliance with Islamist reaction. As a 
result the SWP leaders Lyndsey German and John Rees were sacrificed and now lead another 
formation, Counterfire, which shows no signs of growing and appears to be in decline 
itself. The more recent splits after the sexual abuse show little signs of learning very 
much, with a continuing liking for getting into bed with Islamists. Meanwhile they harp 
back to the ?IS tradition?, that is the early days when International Socialism (IS) was 
the precursor of the SWP. The IS is portrayed as having a libertarian outlook, when 
nothing could have been further from the truth. The only reason it was fairly open in 
those days- and that is all relative- was because it was so small and had to operate as an 
apparently open organisation.

As to the second largest Trotskyist group the Socialist Party, it too is experiencing 
internal problems. It operated an entrist grouping within the Labour Party, the Militant 
Tendency, and had a fairly large membership. However after it was expelled from Labour in 
1991 the majority formed the Socialist Party, losing a lot of its membership it had had 
whilst in the Labour Party. It too is now experiencing internal difficulties. None of the 
other much smaller Trotskyist groups in Britain are faring well, with many shrinking or 
suffering splits themselves. None of these smaller groups appears to be able to recruit 
and these groups are all shrinking with an aging membership.

There seems to be a hope among anarchists that these splits would mean that some of them 
would move in a libertarian direction. This hope is based on the development of the 
expelled members of the Socialist Labour League, the precursor of the WRP, who formed the 
Solidarity group in 1960 and DID move very decisively in a libertarian socialist 
direction. However only a few individuals from these splits with the recent SWP crisis 
seem to be doing this, with the fragments- the International Socialist Network, 
Revolutionary Socialism for the 21st Century, Revolutionary Socialists- remaining firmly 
within the Leninist camp (The Commune, a previous split from the small Trotskyist group 
Alliance for Workers? Liberty, showed some signs of being inspired by the ideas of 
Solidarity to a certain extent, but its initial promise proved short lived and it now 
exists only as a one-man internet presence) . Indeed the ISN is now in a process with 
other ailing Trotskyist groups ?Anticapitalist Initiative, Socialist Resistance, and 
Workers Power- to constitute a larger grouping, whilst at the same time orienting towards 
the various initiatives to build what in practice is a movement modelled on Bennism, The 
People?s Assemblies, which are supported by both Stalinist and Trotskyist groupings, and 
Left Unity , which is an attempt to create an Old Labour style machine uniting reformists 
with Trotskyists.

Stale

The People?s Assembly movement involves Labour Party members like Owen Jones- who one 
might feel has a desire to be a future leader of that Party- and wants to be a group that 
exerts pressure on the Labour Party from the left in the same way that UKIP pressures the 
Conservatives from the right. Alongside these staunch supporters of the Old Labour vision 
are the Counterfire group which hopes to manipulate this movement the way its leading 
lights controlled The Stop The War Coalition, the dregs of Bennism , left trade union 
bureaucrats and assorted other Stalinists and Trotskyists. NO lessons appear to have been 
learnt, and the duplication of old and discredited forms of organisation and politics are 
perpetuated.

As Phil Dickens noted on his blog: The nature of leftist politics in the UK at present and 
the monopoly of resources and influence such organisations hold means that this is a 
necessity in order to stage such a large meeting and get the crowds in. But it also helps 
to guarantee that this new project will be just as stale and formulaic as the last one. 
http://libcom.org/blog/extra-cynical-look-peoples-assembly-13062013

As to Left Unity and its attempt to create a new party, the stresses and strains between 
the different factions that make it up are already making it dead in the water. The 
Trotskyist groups are already swarming in to what they see as a fertile recruiting ground 
and three different platforms have already been up within it. It in all likelihood will go 
the same way as a previous and similar attempt, the Socialist Alliance, (1992-2005) which 
imploded for the same reasons. This was a left electoral alliance that was rift by 
struggles between the SWP, the Socialist Party, and other Trot groups. Eventually the 
majority of what was left of it was led into the Respect coalition of Galloway by the SWP.

It seems likely that this decline and decay of the traditional left looks like it will 
continue. Whilst we shed no tears about this, one would think that the vacuum that is 
being formed could be filled by those who advocate revolutionary libertarian ideas like 
self-organisation, direct action and anti-electoralism, and that the anarchist and 
libertarian left would be up to this. Unfortunately this is not the case.