I include below a short review that I've included in a Foundation for Proportional Representation-based Socialism newsletter (number 6), for distribution at Marxism 2009 (starting tomorrow, organised by the SWP). I've put a letter on reconciling PR with Marxism, as sent recently in a separate email, on the back. The newsletter can be downloaded in Micro$oft Word or PDF format from http://www.PRsocialism.org.

 

 

 

The most striking thing about this critique is the mutual loathing between the Socialist Party (SP) and the SWP. The book is filled with snippets of ammunition against the SWP on this issue and that, which are presumably designed to be used by SP members to try to win over or demoralise members of the SWP.  In the preface (page v), Taaffe quotes Leon Trotsky as saying in a letter "Without the smallest exaggeration one can confirm that from 1923 (for Britain especially from 1925) had the Comintern not existed, we would have today in Britain an incomparably more important revolutionary party" and adds "Unfortunately, on a smaller scale, the same conclusion can be drawn from the role of the SWP in the 1990s and since."

 

Taaffe alleges (page 2): "In every collaboration they have been involved in, it is a question of 'rule or ruin' - they must exercise a dominating influence, not through political argument but organisationally, or they would seek to undermine or bypass those organisations if they do not get their way." The book contains a number of examples where this has been the case, including the demise of the Socialist Alliance and the Respect split, but it is rather an exaggeration.

 

I have found in Manchester that SWP members tend to be committed and non-sectarian, while the SP nowadays avoids getting involved in joint campaigns and only sends along its most committed members (cadres) on demonstrations, presumably because its newer members and contacts would instantly notice how much bigger the SWP is and quite possibly defect. This is a big problem for the SP, and a major motivation for setting up a large number of front organisations, some with more democratic legitimacy than others, with the main aim being recruitment to their own party rather than furthering the struggle and trying to achieve victories. I was a member of the SP from 1990-98 (through its transition from the Militant Tendency and Militant Labour) and I noticed a shift of emphasis from winning struggles to recruitment, aping the approach of the SWP. Perhaps Taaffe was hoping that this book would inoculate members against the SWP and lessen this problem. He cheekily starts the introduction (page 1) by saying the SP and SWP "are the two largest organisations on the 'Marxist left' in Britain", implying that the SP is bigger!

 

The biggest weakness of the book is that it concentrates so much on ways in which the SWP has allegedly been sectarian towards the SP that it fails to point out the biggest 'mistakes' of the SWP (which are in my view sometimes  deliberate ones by infiltrators on the side of big business). For example, (on page 23) Taaffe criticises the organisers of the two million-strong anti-war demo in London for denying the SP's Youth Against the War front a speaker, ignoring the main reason it failed to stop the war in my opinion - that the SWP and Stop the War Coalition mainly argued on grounds of pacifism and no weapons of mass destruction, not mentioning oil (as the SP and I did at the time independently). [I now think that the divide-and-rule strategy of US imperialism, perhaps changing under Obama, was more to blame.]

 

It is clear that uniting the SWP and the SP in a new formation won't be easy, never mind the two Respect splinters, unless it is a loose federation (at first anyway). The SP ridiculously left the Socialist Alliance due to not having a veto (and never built it seriously so the SWP didn't stay dominant) and refused to join Respect for the same reason. A democratic revolutionary socialist party, calling for both proportional representation (PR) and "participatory democracy", should be part of the federation. Adding PR to Marxist forms of democracy would make it popular!