Split in RESPECT: anyone know details?

[muriel_volestrangler]

From a Comment is Free posting, it seems Respect is breaking in 2 - one part controls the website, while the other controls the head office (and the locks :evilgrin: ).

Galloway appears to be in the Respect Renewal faction, while the other is mainly the SWP.

[non sociopath skin]

1. Little surprise there.

It was always a pretty uneasy coalition. And, in my experience, the SWP find it almost impossible to make common cause with anyone.

An accident waiting to happen.

The Skin

[Anarcho-Socialist]

2. An ideological split

between the Trotskyist SWP faction and the Galloway-Tower Hamlets faction. Basically the SWP grassroots felt disquiet about the SWP frequently giving in on issues such as GLBT rights, feminism, and income redistribution to the social conservative Tower Hamlets wing of RESPECT associated with George Galloway.

There have been long-standing disagreements between the SWP and the Galloway-Tower Hamlets faction regarding candidate selection. Obviously the SWP preferred its own members be given candidate selection, but the latter preferred a base of middle-class Asian Muslim businessmen and "community leaders" that would play well electorally in certain constituencies. This situation antagonised class warriors within the SWP who felt they shouldn't be another "party of the bourgeoisie" but a working class party of labour. John Rees and Lindsey German had until recently been willing to sacrifice large amounts of traditional socialist and social liberal positions for the sake of the popular front, but SWP grassroots pressure caused this process to end.

There was an attempt by Galloway and his allies to gain majority control of RESPECT from the SWP, but this wasn't able to happen due to SWPers being the main grassroots force in the party. The split first became public when George Galloway posted a letter online criticising the SWP and demanding a change in RESPECT's national committee in which Galloway's allies would outnumber SWPers. The SWP responded with an online letter of its own, but both sides agreed a tenuous ceasefire until their recent conference.

So then RESPECT has unravelled. SWP did not get its new party of mass labour which would replace New Labour as the party of the working class, and Galloway wasn't able to continue RESPECT as his personal vanity project. The large ideological divide between the SWP and Galloway's social conservative Muslim powerbase, and the realisation of SWP grassroots and leadership that they had already had compromised a tremendous amount of their goals, caused the split.

[T_i_B]

3. I have a question

Is anyone else breaking off with the SWP?

I know that before RESPECT there was the Socialist Alliance, a loose collection of far left groups who got together at elections. Mainly it was the SWP but there were others such as the Communist Party of Great Britain and occasionally the Socialist Party involved as well (who spent most of their time slagging off the SWP).

I don't think that anyone who has any experience of the far left can be in anyway suprised by this. The far left is inherently sectarian and as such a party such as RESPECT, which relied heavily on its ties with Muslim groups was never going to hold together for too long.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

4. You're correct

The far-left feels like it just needs thirty or so different Trotskyist parties, each claiming to be the one theoretically correct party.

You're right about the Socialist Alliance, but last time it was the SWP who walked away from that to start their RESPECT project.

At the moment the Socialist Party are trying to start their own popular front party called the Campaign for a New Workers' Party, and the CPGB-PCC (not to be confused with the original defunct CPGB) have their own version of this called the Campaign for a Marxist Party.

[CJCRANE]

5. Excuse me. Are you the Judean People's Front?

Fuck off! We're the People's Front of Judea

;)

[Anarcho-Socialist]

6. The Monty Python critique of the state of British revolutionary socialism

is as applicable now as it was thirty years ago.

[fedsron2us]

7. And earlier.

These splits date all the way back to the First International

http://preview.tinyurl.com/29cbym

BTW in this instance my sympathies with the Trots and I am pleased that the SWP grass roots were not prepared to sell out their principles just for a taste of power. This must rank as a first in recent British politics.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

8. I agree with that

Whereas I feel the SWP were to blame for collapsing the Socialist Alliance, the SWP are in the right this time around.

[fedsron2us]

9. Strange to say but socialist ideas

may be in for a bit of a revival over the next decade particularly as western capitalism appears to be teetering on the edge of a massive financial crisis brought on by 25 years of unrestrained greed and plunder. In particular I think the left might find that they start winning ground by concentrating on economic issues and advocating simple social justice rather than by trying to campaign around a rag bag of supposedly 'liberal' social issues as though these were somehow synonymous with socialism. For all their faults I think the fact that the SWP grass roots were not prepared to allow their leadership to sell out their principles to the advocates of theocracy quite encouraging.

[T_i_B]

10. Given the current political climate...

...I would have to seriously doubt that. Even here on the left the emphasis is very much on lifestyle issues rather then economics and looking beyond the left it's neo-liberal economic theory that pretty much dominates.

Nobody is making the case for socialist economics anymore and I can't see that changing anytime soon.

[fedsron2us]

11. The present is not necessarily a great predictor for the future

as all those people who bought into the US housing market in 2005 have been finding out. The high water mark for the intellectual influence of the left in the western world was during the Great Depression of the 1930s. If the current credit crisis unravels in a similar manner to that of the 1930s then there are going to be a lot of losers who are going to be more than a tad disenchanted with the economic status quo. One thing is for sure the current neo-liberal political/economic shibboleths are starting to look a touch wobbly. At the moment the sad thing is that the most powerful intellectual critiques to the current orthodoxy are coming from right wing social conservatives not the left. I think socialist economic thinking will have a revival though maybe not in the precise forms seen in the past (e.g. nationalisation of the means of production). Instead I think attention will focus on the failings of the current statist/corporatist model epitomized by countries such as the UK where big business has become more and more intertwined in the day to day running of the government. One common feature I have noted about this structure is that the former reciprocal relationships between those controlling economic enterprises and those who provide the capital and labour is breaking down. This can be seen most clearly in areas such as pensions and share holding where there is a tendency for both the state and corporations to attempt to wriggle out of their long term obligations. An economic model which is based on capital extraction from the masses of the value of their labour and savings via taxation, pensions, unit trusts etc but that offers nothing in return has about as much as a long term future as Louis XVI Bourbon monarchy in 18th Century France.

[LeftishBrit]

12. Galloway seems to be the leftie version of Killjoy-Slick

If he was in a party of one, which he almost is by now, he would find a way of splitting that!

That being said, I'm surprised it lasted that long. The SWP never sticks long with anyone; and conventional middle-class socially conservative community leaders aren't the obviously ideal partners for a far-left party, and don't suddenly become so just because they're pillars of their mosque instead of their church.