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Newsletter of the Revolutionary Platforms of the Scottish Socialist Party, Respect and the Democratic Socialist Alliance |
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This is a slightly improved version of the first edition of the newsletter that I distributed at the Glasgow May Day demonstration on Sunday the 7th of May. Note that I have only handed out the front page of this two page newsletter to some people.
The first edition of this newsletter is entirely written by me; contact me (details above) if you want to submit articles for further editions. I also strongly recommend you to check out the websites and contribute to the discussion forums. Maybe I can inspire some of you to do something to help change the world…
Many anti-capitalist demonstrations have taken place in recent years. These are often called “anti-globalisation” protests by the media, but it is big business and the governments and institutions which support global capitalism that we oppose, and globalisation of culture should be welcomed. I took these photos in Genoa in 2001.
The G8 is composed of the world’s seven richest countries plus Russia. The 2006 G8 summit is in St Petersburg, Russia, between the 15 th and 17 th of July, and there will be another in Germany in the summer of 2007.
The main theme of the 2005 Gleneagles summit was making poverty history, due to pressure from below including a large rally in London addressed by Nelson Mandela rather than the goodwill of New Labour politicians. Indeed, Western leaders try to impose strings such as privatisation as conditions for aid or reducing debt.
I first put out a call for a worldwide general strike (with workers and students leaving their workplaces, schools, colleges and universities to attend demonstrations around the world) for the time of that summit, publicised via leaflets, the internet and my band Galaxia (see below). However, given the short timescale and reluctance of activists in Britain to support the call because they were planning to go to Gleneagles, it didn’t take off last year. Nevertheless, G8 summits are the best opportunity for coordinated strike action with the capability of threatening the domination of the world by a small number of multinationals. Such action would inspire working class people around the world to fight back, and give the impoverished masses in the so-called third world hope that there is a way out of the nightmare of famines, deaths from preventable diseases and civil wars. It would also point to a solution to poverty and other problems caused by capitalism in the West, via a world socialist revolution.
If it is only a symbolic strike on one day of the summit that would be great, but if this call for a worldwide general strike gets taken up in a big way then the whole capitalist system could be under threat. If workers such as air traffic controllers go on strike beforehand, then it may be possible to prevent some of the world leaders from travelling to St Petersburg. If it continues, strikes could become indefinite general strikes in some countries, with the working class taking over production and distribution of goods and potentially coming to power.
I am a good singer and have been planning a band for some time. I originally set up Galaxia in Manchester just before last year’s summit, recording “Do They Know It’s G8 Time?” (my lyrics to Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”) and my song “The Revolution Starts Now!”
I am looking for band members in the Glasgow area. Hopefully we can get going quickly enough to publicise the call for a worldwide general strike at this year’s G8 summit. We won’t live on more than a worker’s wage, and will democratically decide how to spend any other proceeds.
To download tracks or for more information, go to: www.galaxiamusic.org.
On the face of it, members of Respect (the Unity Coalition) can feel very satisfied with their results in the English local elections on the 4th of May. They won 12 seats in Tower Hamlets (which includes the Bethnal Green & Bow constituency in which George Galloway was elected for Respect in the general election), 3 in Newham and 1 in Birmingham (where Salma Yaqoob, leader of Birmingham Stop the War Coalition, received 55% of the vote).
However, Respect has tended to portray itself as “a party for Muslims”, and talks about representing “the whole community” on leaflets. Respect does not even attempt to portray itself as an organisation of the working class; indeed, Muslim businessmen are welcomed with open arms into Respect. Socialism is hardly ever mentioned – at most the word is mentioned without explanation on leaflets as one of the things Respect stands for.
Respect’s election results (shown in full on the Respect website: www.respectcoalition.org) have highlighted the problem of specifically targeting Muslims – every single Respect councillor elected on the 4th of May (and indeed ever) is Asian! In every single ward where more than one Respect candidate was put up for election (the case in London including Tower Hamlets and Newham wards with three elected per seat and elections every four years) and where some of them had Asian names, the Asians received higher votes than their non-Asian compatriots.
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) has been the dominant force politically and numerically within Respect. It is they who have ensured that Respect’s policies have been watered down (or limited the policies that are mentioned) in order to avoid alienating a previously largely phantom Muslim right wing. Of course the new councillors are not all right wing; indeed Salma Yaqoob is a left-wing force for good within Respect. However, the likelihood is that the majority of the new councillors are indeed right wing and will prove to be a liability. This is illustrated by the recent history of defections to and from Respect. Some of Respect’s councillors are careerists – and some are deliberate agents of big business who have infiltrated Respect in order to ensure that it betrays the working class.
None of the new councillors are in the SWP. Indeed (as far as I know) only one Respect councillor is in the SWP – Michael Lavalette in Preston, and he was elected for Labour, Independent Labour and finally the Socialist Alliance.
The SWP’s best hope of getting a new councillor lay with Respect National Secretary John Rees. He was chosen by the Tower Hamlets selection panel as a candidate for what was regarded as Respect’s strongest ward – Whitechapel. However, a large group of Bengalis turned up to the Respect meeting expected to rubber-stamp the panel’s decision, and demanded a Bengali candidate in that ward and that Rees be transferred to a different ward. The Bengalis lost the vote but a subsequent defection of two Respect candidate to the Liberal Democrats, with one of them ending up contesting Whitechapel for that party caused Rees to be put forward for Bethnal Green South instead. Rees received over 900 votes, coming sixth in that ward and third amongst the Respect candidates.
SWP members will be envious of the election successes of the Socialist Party (SP) on the 4th of May (1 in Coventry, 2 in Lewisham and 1 in Huddersfield – the latter as an anti-hospital closures candidate and the others under the SP’s electoral name: Socialist Alternative) bringing their total number of councillors to 7. Hopefully, many of the genuine SWP members will get involved in the SP-led Campaign for a New Workers’ Party (www.cnwp.org.uk), and that campaign will swiftly move towards the formation of a new mass party of the working class in England and Wales without waiting for trade union bureaucrats to abandon Labour. The new party should be organised like the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), as a broad socialist party with the right for members to form open and officially recognised platforms. Unfortunately, the SP has put forward the suggestion that the party should be organised in a “federal” way, with the right for minorities to veto majority decisions. It was the lack of such a federal structure that caused the SP to abandon the Socialist Alliance (SA), letting the SWP destroy it, and subsequently fail to join Respect. Because the SP was and still is considerably smaller than the SWP, they argued that the SWP would retain a stranglehold over the SA. However, if the SP had stayed and ensured that the SA had appealed to new layers, as happened in Scotland, then the SWP would not have kept a majority for long.
I have set up, initially in cyberspace, Revolutionary Platforms of the SSP, Respect and the Democratic Socialist Alliance (a small but important organisation in England I helped form out of the old Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform). In my opinion, these are the nuclei of new organisations capable of uniting genuine revolutionary socialists with different views and from different traditions within broad socialist parties..
The SSP has a number of different platforms, mainly Marxist ones, with small disagreements and based on historically distinct organisations. Unfortunately, the International Socialist Movement (ISM), formerly Scottish Militant Labour (which took the initiative to launch the SSP and its predecessor, the Scottish Socialist Alliance), recently voted to dissolve itself. Nick McKerrill, who in the ISM’s Frontline magazine had previously proposed a “Marxist platform” put forward the dissolution resolution (see www.redflag.org.uk). With Marxist ideas being re-evaluated, the distinction should be whether you are a revolutionary and therefore advocate sudden change or whether you are a reformist and advocate gradual change through a series of reforms, which is somehow supposed to lead to a socialist society despite the fact that reforms granted during a boom are taken back during a slump.
Click to go to the discussion forum so you can debate issues in this newsletter