Socialism Today Issue 254 Dec-Jan 2021/2022

The conclusions to be drawn from the Glasgow-hosted twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties UN climate summit (COP26) that closed on November 13 should be clear for climate campaigners. They are certainly not new.

Once again representatives of the world’s most powerful capitalist nation states – and the formally ‘non-market economies’ in World Trade Organisation (WTO) terms also present – were unable to overcome their competing economic and political interests to avert the prospect of future catastrophic climate change.

Nicholas Stern, author of the authoritative 2006 UK government commissioned report, at the time famously called climate change the result of “the greatest market failure the world has seen” – a failure, in other words, of capitalism. Nothing that transpired in Glasgow contradicts that now well-established assessment.

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JUDY BEISHON reviews a detailed account of how claims of anti-Semitism were used as cover by Labour’s pro-capitalist right-wing to destabilise Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, which spotlights the campaign against the left-wing former MP Chris Williamson.

Labour, the anti-Semitism crisis, and the destroying of an MP

By Lee Garratt

Published by Thinkwell Books, 2021, £11-99

The removal of Chris Williamson and Jeremy Corbyn from the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), and Rebecca Long-Bailey from the front bench, was in each case based on accusations of anti-Semitism, or on comments on accusations of anti-Semitism. There was no actual evidence of anti-Semitism in their cases and they all made clear that it should have no place in the labour movement. However, that issue had become a battering ram of the Labour Party right wing against the Corbyn-led left and its prime method for removing certain individuals from positions of influence.

Lee Garratt’s book documents well the deliberate smearing of those prominent Labour lefts and many others – such as former MP and London mayor Ken Livingstone – who were targeted on similar grounds.

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Pablo Iglesias, one of the founders of Podemos and its most prominent representative, announced his resignation from politics earlier this year – the tenth anniversary of the movement of the indignados which gave birth to the new party. ROSS SAUNDERS looks back at the formation of Podemos, its development, and the mistakes of its leaders which have put its future in jeopardy.

Ten years ago the revolt of the indignados (the ‘outraged’) erupted in Spain as a protest against brutal austerity. The government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and the misnamed Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), loyal to the interests of the capitalists who backed him, demanded that ordinary working class people pay the bill for the economic crisis which convulsed the Spanish state and the rest of the world in 2007-08. 

While Spanish banks received huge no-strings-attached bailouts, Zapatero held wages down and savagely cut back public services, pensions and welfare. Jobs were slaughtered and new attacks were launched on trade union rights in order to obstruct the efforts of workers to fight back.

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The USSR was officially dissolved thirty years ago in 1991. CLARE DOYLE, who was working in Russia at the time on behalf of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), looks back at an historic moment.

On 25 December1991 a sombre Mikhail Gorbachev appeared on television screens across eleven time zones announcing that the vast federation known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was dissolved. Long before this date, it had been unravelling and the fate of Gorbachev, its president and the secretary of the ruling ‘Communist’ Party, had been sealed.

This Christmas speech marked the end of the ‘Soviet Union’; it was by no means ‘the end of history’, as one infamous political scientist – Francis Fukuyama – argued, maintaining there was now no alternative to capitalism. And yet today the idea of socialism is becoming more and more popular amongst young people and ever more urgent in the fight against the destruction of the world’s people and resources.

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This month marks twenty years since the Socialist Alliance conference, on 1 December 2001, which brought the organisation under the complete domination and control of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). This effectively ended an initiative that had previously had the potential to play an important role in bringing together different socialist organisations, trade unionists, community campaigners, and activists from the then emergent anti-capitalist movement, as a ‘staging post’ towards a mass alternative to Tony Blair’s New Labour government, a new workers’ party.

With the issue of how to organise an inclusive pre-formation on the road to a new mass party once again to the fore, following the defeat of Corbynism within the framework of Sir Keir Starmer’s revived Blairite Labour, we are reprinting two articles on the experience of the Socialist Alliance.

The first article, written by HANNAH SELL and published in The Socialist No.231, 23 November 2001, is a preview of the issues at stake at the December 2001 conference, which had been called to agree a new constitution for the Socialist Alliance. The second, on page 27, by CLIVE HEEMSKERK, is abridged from a feature in Socialism Today No.79, November 2003, written as the SWP were winding down the Socialist Alliance after its failure to develop against the backdrop of the mass anti-war movement and the tremors rocking the Blair government.

Twenty years on, the contrast is stark between the ‘majority-takes-all’ approach which the SWP imposed on the Socialist Alliance and which sealed its demise, and the democratic federal structure of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), within which the Socialist Party has played a key role but which has been providing an inclusive framework for an electoral collaboration of different forces for over ten years now.

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From Socialism Today No.79, November 2003

“Those on the left who have pinned their hopes on founding a new socialist party”, wrote the veteran Labour left-winger Tony Benn on the eve of Labour’s Bournemouth conference, “should note that the Socialist Alliance candidate only received 366 votes in Brent East and Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party (SLP) was only able to get 111 votes, which does not promise well for that strategy”. (Morning Star, 26 September 2003)

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