Over the last decade the neo-liberal policies of social democracy and the collapse of Stalinism have opened up a political space for the left. But can revolutionary organizations simply step forward to occupy this space? If not, how do revolutionaries work to exploit opportunities without falling into opportunism? Greg Tucker examines how a range of experiences are now providing some answers, as the idea of a broad pluralist recomposition, breaking with sectarianism and bringing together currents and organizations with long divergent programmes and practices is being developed across Europe.

Only a few years ago an overwhelming majority of EU countries had social democratic parties in government. This majority was naturally reflected in potential control of the main European Union institutions. But were these majorities used to attempt to positively transform society, in even the most basic of ways? No! What we have seen instead is a refusal to defend working people, an embracing of capitalist globalisation, a pushing forward of a neo-liberal agenda of privatisation, cuts in social provision and imperialist wars. In this regard Tony Blair is no exception. The Labour government may have been more extreme in its alliances with the right in Europe and America, but where it has led other social democrats across Europe have followed.

Although the leaderships of the trade union movements across Europe made no attempt to stop this offensive, defensive battles did not totally disappear. New social movements have developed over the last few years, a new generation fighting for global justice. And this in turn has stimulated the beginnings of a trade union fightback with general strikes in Italy and Spain and last year in France and Austria, as well as sectoral strikes in Germany, often in response to recession and the effects of the EU Stability Pact. And now a stronger resistance is developing. The unprecedented anti-war movement has deepened the radicalisation among young people and had a major impact on society as a whole. A space can be said to have opened up to the left. The question is what will occupy it?

Firstly, it has to be noted that it is not automatic that the left will gain from the social-liberal policies of the former social democracy. Social democracy has been replaced by conservatives in government, and across Europe the introduction of xenophobic policies, ‘Fortress Europe’ and ‘anti-terrorist’ demonisation of minorities has unleashed a growth of the far right, including the entry of neo-nazi parties into governments in several countries.

Within social democracy itself, no left current has been able to break out of the straitjacket set by party discipline – imposed or self-defined. Rather than see the growth of serious internal oppositions the norm has been a fall in party membership and mass abstentions at the polls.

At the same time, the demise of Stalinism has had a contradictory effect. Whilst the terrible example of ‘actually existing socialism’ as practiced in the Soviet bloc is no longer present, freeing us from a real obstacle in peoples’ consciousness, the majority of the Communist Parties have learnt nothing from this process and have continued their march to the right. Only a handful of CPs, or fractions from within the CPs have drawn more positive lessons.

So can existing revolutionary organisations simply step into the breach? The most positive example, perhaps, is in France. Firstly the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR)-Lutte Ouvriere (LO) bloc, of two openly revolutionary groups, was able to win five seats in the European Parliament in 1995, and then the two organisations gained between them 10% of the vote in the 2002 Presidential elections. Subsequently the LCR, French section of the Fourth International, has been able to grow significantly after presenting themselves as an alternative to the right wing PCF, playing a significant role in the anti-Le Pen movement, in the anti-capitalist movement and in last year’s trade union upsurge, But even they would admit that their role is limited.

Despite a real radicalisation and a new development of anti-capitalist consciousness among young people, this has not been translated into the automatic growth of revolutionary currents. In Britain, even with two million anti-war demonstrators on the streets no revolutionary organisation has grown significantly. Instead, we have to look to the growth of broad, new anti-capitalist parties as the basis for taking the left forward.

New Broad Parties in Europe

The last decade has seen the emergence of a series of new broad formations. Some like the Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC) of Italy, have mainly come from a CP tradition. The PRC has adopted a pluralist practice, shaking off the worst of its Stalinist origins, allowing far left currents to work freely inside a united party. In a series of crucial tests it was able to leave behind a parliamentarian wing that saw its future in governmental alliance with the former communists of the PDS and at the same time turn towards the post-Genoa, anti-capitalist youth movement.

In the Spanish state Espacio Alternativo is made up of different currents although a majority are members and ex-members of the United Left (Izquierda Unida, dominated by the Spanish CP) where in both of these new parties supporters of the Fourth International play a significant role.

Other formations have a more evenly balanced basis growing out of formal blocs between two or three parties. The Portuguese Left Bloc has integrated the UDP (‘Marxist-Leninist’, of Maoist and pro-Albanian origin), which is the largest current, the PSR (Portuguese section of the Fourth International) and a small but very significant grouping originating from the Portuguese CP. Basing itself on campaigns which flow directly out of the class struggle the Left Bloc has rapidly grown in strength, with a majority of its members independent of the founding groups.

Similarly the Danish Red-Green Alliance started with Communist, left socialist and Fourth Internationalist components but has developed a real identity of its own. Its handful of MPs, first elected in 1994, are able to give support and inspiration to extra-parliamentary movements and actions.

And, of course, in the Scottish Socialist Party we have another clear model. With a revolutionary core at its inception it has been able to grow in influence so that it is a serious part of the Scottish political landscape, both with its MSPs and in its consistent intervention into the class struggle. The debate inside the RMT to allow its Scottish Region to affiliate to the SSP is testament to the fact that the Party is seen as a truly broad organisation, not the personal fiefdom of any particular current.

In France, the LCR-LO bloc has always been seen as a temporary electoral arrangement. Whilst the LCR want a deeper collaboration, LO has only entered into a pact out of necessity. This has been compounded over the last year as LO have stood aside from the anti-capitalist movement, playing virtually no role, for instance, at the European Social Forum in Paris in November 2003. To answer this deficit the LCR have now launched a year-long campaign to set up a broad new anti-capitalist party in France based on an anti-capitalist action programme. (see here)

In England, of course, we have had the Socialist Alliance. Whilst we have argued that the Alliance should develop party forms in the way that the SSP and the other groups across Europe have been able to, this has not happened. On the one hand this is a function of the particular British ‘first-past-the-post’ parliamentary system. It is undoubtedly the case that the SSP was given a significant boost by the election of Tommy Sheridan to the Scottish Parliament under proportional representation. A similar story can be told in all the countries mentioned above where representation at local, national or European level has been achieved, even though the votes in some cases were not significantly higher than those obtained by the Socialist Alliance.

On the other hand there were more specific political problems caused by the narrow political basis of the Socialist Alliance and also the political choices made by the major participants, in particular the withdrawal by the Socialist Party and the reluctance of the Socialist Workers Party to invest in the Alliance any role which could be seen as an obstacle to their own immediate interests. The question now left open is whether the discussions around the Galloway/RESPECT project can lead to the formation of a broader party of the left.

Learning Lessons

We can draw some lessons from this European-wide experience. It is clear that there is a significant time lag between social activity and political commitment. The new forces of the anti-capitalist movement are suspicious of the existing left and reluctant to commit themselves totally. At the same time no one party of the revolutionary left has all the answers. We are not going to build mass revolutionary parties capable of transforming society through one-by-one recruitment. Neither are these mass parties going to be merely larger versions of some existing group. As other articles in this issue argue, the mass revolutionary party of the future is going to be a heterogeneous pluralist democracy. Building broad, multi-current parties today will be a valuable exercise in preparing the sort of revolutionary party we need.

Building such broad parties cannot be done unless we are serious about developing a non-sectarian, collaborative approach. Our task cannot merely be to build the biggest revolutionary fraction within a broader party. We have to start out with the object of winning the party as a whole to the sort of politics we believe is necessary. This will not be achieved by ultimatums, insisting on ‘revolutionary policies’ at all times, but rather by adopting an action programme [1] which can take the struggle forward and which, through a consistent intervention to educate through joint action, will shape political development by reference to the actual tasks facing us.

To do this does not mean abandoning our current revolutionary organisation. We cannot expect a new broad party to develop automatically, without a serious internal debate with a well-defined intervention by conscious Marxists. But it does mean that existing groups need to renounce any hegemonic pretence. The far left has to learn a new way of operating, one which does not involve denouncing everyone else because they have not seen the light and equally has the humility to accept that they are not the only revolutionary force involved.

The growth of these new political forces will not be based on ideological clarification in the abstract, but on being immersed in the social movements and in struggle. That is how we will sink real roots in society and be able to speak to and for the mass of working people, the oppressed and youth.

The events of 2003 - general strikes across Europe, the phenomenal anti-war movement - show what is possible. We now have to take up the task of building broad parties seriously, firstly by turning these formations out to the anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation movement. The PRC in Italy has shown how that can be done, turning to the social movements without trying to force hegemony or manipulate the movement but being the best builders of these movements. Secondly, we have to promote the emergence of fighting trade unionism, as we saw in France last summer. Thirdly, we need to develop a political framework within which these new activists can find a voice and develop their ideas.

Whilst we will build new parties from outside the traditional social democratic left, we cannot ignore the existing mass parties. Part of the tasks of the new broad parties is to be able to take initiatives and promote united front approaches towards these old parties. Reclaiming Labour is not possible, but we cannot write it off. Neither can we expect others to be the ones setting in train united front campaigns for us then to join. Part of the process of building a confident new leadership for our class will be through our new formation engaging and building its own campaigning relationship to the mass movement.

It is this context that we can turn to electoral work – not as an end in itself, but as part of this social engagement. An electoral front has its uses in promoting its participants, but as with the experience of the LCR-LO pact, it is bound to be limited unless you can use electoral activity consistently to promote and build common action beyond the confines of the election period. And that means electoral campaigns that encourage democratic participation, promote serious social struggle and educate people in the process. Rather than satisfying the careers of a few or the petty aspirations of this or that participant in the electoral bloc, we want to build a movement capable of political leadership.

We can, of course, add that this approach cannot be restricted to one country at a time. As well as building new formations in every country it is vital that we build a common platform across Europe, able to intervene in the Europe-wide social movement. The framework offered by the European Social Forum is thus of great importance. The attempt to build the Conference of the European Anti-Capitalist Left over the last few years has also made modest progress. Bringing together the broad parties mentioned above as well as other forces from across Europe, it has tried to make concrete the slogan: A different Europe is possible, but a different European Left is necessary. In particular it aims to provide a framework for intervention into the European elections this year. Whilst the basis for a common slate is complicated by EU electoral rules and by political problems caused by the links some organisations retain with the old Communist Parties, nevertheless there is a clear need to use the elections in June to put the anti-democratic, reactionary and regressive EU Constitution into the spotlight and make a stand against the EU’s neo-liberal programme.

Greg Tucker is a leading activist member of the Rail, Maritime Transport trade union.

NOTES

[1] An action programme is neither a minimum programme, nor a full revolutionary programme. Instead it takes the key issues of the day, such as opposition to imperialist war, to privatisations and to immigration and asylum legislation, and develops demands which can take forward the consciousness of the working class and the oppressed – traditionally called ‘transitional demands’.

The Fourth International set out how it saw its role in the process of rebuilding the left at its World Congress in February 2003: Extracts from ‘Role and tasks of the Fourth International’, Resolution of the 15th World Congress February 2003

Our goal is to form proletarian parties that:

are anti-capitalist, internationalist, ecologist and feminist;
are deeply attached to the social question and steadfastly put forth the immediate demands and social aspirations of the world of labour;
express workers’ militancy, women’s desire for emancipation, the youth revolt and international solidarity, and take up the fight against all forms of injustice;
base their strategy on the extra-parliamentary struggle and the self-activity and self-organization of the proletariat and the oppressed; and
take a clear stand for expropriation of capital and (democratic, self-managed) socialism.

The struggle for such parties will go through a series of stages, tactics and organisational forms, specific to each country. Such an anti-capitalist recomposition must pursue a key objective from the outset: creating an effective, visible polarisation between it and all the forces loyal to social neo-liberalism (social democracy, post- Stalinism, ecologists, populists) in order to accelerate their crisis and give it a positive outcome.

This requires:

the presence of significant political forces, in which revolutionary Marxist currents collaborate with important or emblematic currents or representatives who are breaking with reformist parties without necessarily arriving at revolutionary Marxist positions;
a respectful but close relationship with the social movement, where the recomposed organisation puts forward the movement’s demands and actions;
a formation recognized as representing something real in society, breaking the monopoly of parties loyal to social-neo-liberalism, thanks to the presence of elected representatives in assemblies on the local, regional national and (possibly) international (European) level elected by universal suffrage;
a pluralist functioning that goes beyond simple internal democracy in a way that fosters both convergence and discussion, allowing for the functioning of a revolutionary Marxist current as an accepted part of a broader whole.

The experience of the last ten years shows that the non-sectarian, revolutionary left can play a key role in holding the line and keeping to a simultaneously radical and unitary orientation of this kind, combining extra-parliamentary action and electoral representation. In order to attain this goal, it has to follow a complex course made up of various stages and detours that enable it to accumulate forces, clarify the stakes step by step, re-activate militant milieus and patiently build links with the social movement.

...the crucial conclusion that flows from our experience is that, more than ever before, recomposition will depend on the growth of a strong, independent pole of attraction and an external relationship of forces that can attract and organize such sympathies.

Only the revolutionary left is currently in a position to take the initiative for anti-capitalist recomposition and keep it on course with a radical, pluralist, socially rooted project with a mass character. But this implies a deep, well-thought-out rejection of sectarianism in practice. It also means that rapprochements inside the revolutionary left can only be envisaged in the framework and through the common experience of this anti-capitalist recomposition.

SO/02 - Winter 2003

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