Transitional demands and the workers' government
AWL: Transitional demands have the following characteristics :1. they aim to give a lead to the mass movement; 2. they aim to link the struggles of today to the socialist future; 3. they encourage working-class self-organisation; 4. they assert working class needs against the logic of the market and the needs of the capitalists.
SWP: Our demands should catch the mood.
AWL: Yes, if we can. But we need to do more than echo militancy; and sometimes revolutionaries should go against dominant moods, even moods dominant among militant workers. We should not reduce our political role to agitation around strikes and local campaigns, plus socialist propaganda. We need to develop political demands that connect today's concerns with socialism.
Incidentally 'free education/ tax the rich' is a good example. This is not a trick, is it? 'Free education' is not just: 'give students a bit more money'. We are asserting that education is a basic right and should be provided irrespective of cost to the capitalists. It is an assertion of a basic socialist idea. It is a political demand, a general demand which aims to focus the movement on government policy. It is a bridge from the struggles of today, to the future.
SWP: Free education is a good demand. We should demand it and explain the only way to win it is to build a socialist alternative.
AWL: That's true. But only the organised working class can achieve socialism. We need a strategy to rebuild working class confidence and help the class assert its independence. The question workers will quite reasonably ask is: free education and a re-built health service, free trade unions and full employment are not going to be delivered by Blair - so by whom? We must fight for a workers' government. Only a government based on the
organisations of the working class, accountable to the working class, and fighting in the interests of the working class, will do these things.
SWP: What do you mean? A government of Bill Morris and John Edmonds? That's no good. We must build a socialist alternative.
AWL: Quite so. But you are missing the point! Look at the current situation - Blair dominates the LP, his project is to push the unions out of politics and make Labour into a British version of the US Democrats. Blair aims to set back British politics a hundred years, before the creation of the LP as a voice for the unions. This part of Blair's project must be resisted, too.
The union leaders are helping him - even on the question of the anti-union laws! In this situation we must reassert certain basics: the need for the unions to assert themselves, the need for working class political independence, the need for a working-class political party, the need for a government based on and responsive to the working class.
We don't just argue ideas which may attract a militant minority - we argue ideas which can equip that militant minority to offer a line of march to the whole labour movement, starting from where we are now. We fight to redirect, transform and broaden out the existing labour movement, not just to build our own little "socialist alternative" alongside it.
We want to educate wide layers of labour movement activists to see these ideas as central, and to apply these ideas in their political lives. If workers accept the need for a workers' government - a government of a Labour Party purged of the Blair leadership and made accountable to the working class, or of a new mass workers' party formed by the trade unions who have fought through the battle with Blair to a split - then they will resist Blair's drive to disenfranchise the unions. The fight for a workers' government can help regroup activists who want the unions neither to tail behind a Labour Party they have no control over, nor to drift off into non-political "business unionism".
The revolutionary party
AWL: The SWP should debate with us.
SWP: Your organisation is small and irrelevant.
AWL: If we are irrelevant why are you junior partners on our joint-left slate in NUS?
SWP: What's the point in being in such a tiny group?
AWL: None of the revolutionary left groups have any great mass, including the SWP. It is true we're smaller - but 'what's the point in being in such a small group?' is the same as asking 'what's the point in being right?' The SWP should debate openly with the rest of the left and allow its own members to openly discuss.
SWP: You should join the SWP.
AWL: We favour revolutionary unity. But you ban us from your public meetings. Our members have even been attacked at your events! The obstacle to unity is your regime and hostility to openness and democracy.
SWP: The key issue is building the party. In order to win socialism we need to build the SWP.
AWL: We agree about the need for a revolutionary party. However we believe: 1. What the party says and does is central! You have stripped party building of politics! 2. The SWP's method of party building is wrong. The mass party will be built out of struggle in the mass movement, or it will not be built at all; 3. For nearly 20 years you have abandoned systematic work in the working class in favour of self-publicity campaigns. You have no systematic work in manual trade unions, no workplace bulletins. We do such work.
