For those interested in the British SWP’s latest thinking on “Where the
radical left is going“, I would refer you to Alex Callinicos’s article
in the latest “International Socialism”. This 8600 word treatise can
best be described as a restatement of this tendency’s peculiar
understanding of the “united front” as applied to electoral politics
that I have taken up before. Leaving aside Callinicos’s by now familiar
defense of his party’s approach to such matters, there is some
interesting reportage on the problems of the European radical left-most
particularly the sad story of the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista
(PRC) in Italy:
In the past couple of years the fortunes of the radical left have
diverged sharply. The most important case on the negative side was
provided by the PRC itself. The party of Genoa and Florence moved from
2004 onwards sharply to the right, denouncing the resistance to the
Anglo-American occupation of Iraq as fascist and joining the centre-left
coalition government of Romano Prodi that held office briefly in 2006-8.
PRC deputies and senators voted for Prodi’s neoliberal economic
programme, and for the participation of Italian troops in the occupation
of Afghanistan and in the United Nations “peacekeeping” mission to
Lebanon. In April 2007 the PRC leadership expelled a far-left senator,
Franco Turigliatto, for voting against government foreign policy.
Despite the PRC’s participation in a new “Rainbow” formation with other
elements on the left of the governing coalition, it was punished in the
general elections of April 2008 for its association with a disastrous
government. Amid a crushing victory for the right under Silvio
Berlusconi, the Rainbow won only 3.1 percent of the vote, compared to
5.8 percent for the PRC alone two years earlier, and lost all its
parliamentary seats. Bertinotti, unceremoniously deprived of the
presidency of the Chamber of Deputies to which he had been elevated
under Prodi, announced his retirement from politics.
Callinicos has a rather schematic understand of political parties that
borders on a kind of political tripartite version of Dante.
Corresponding to Inferno are the bourgeois parties, including New Labour.
The lowest circle of hell is reserved for the likes of the Republican
Party in the U.S., while on the higher circles might be a social
democratic party that was on some kind of leftist binge, like British
Labour right after WWII.
Moving ahead to purgatory, you have these in-between formations like
Refundazione, the Scottish Labour Party, Respect in Great Britain (until
the SWP jumped ship), the Socialist Alliance in Australia, et al. These
purgatories have devils who have escaped from hell like George Galloway
and angels like Lindsay German. The approach of the SWP is to develop a
united front between the devils (or reformists, to use Marxist jargon)
and the angels (revolutionary socialists). Those who are neither angels
nor devils are invited-one supposes-to observe the mayhem from the
peanut galleries.
But for those who have been saved by our Lord God Karl Marx, there is
the heaven of Revolutionary Socialism, which includes both the British
SWP and other groups that they generously put on their own level, such
as the French Trotskyist LCR who have embarked on a project to build a
new purgatory type party. To make sure that the party does not slide
back into hell, the French Trotskyists have insisted that the party be
against capitalism and not just neoliberalism. Apparently making this
distinction is essential to saving your soul.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/10/15/in-response-to-alex-callinicos/
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