SWP TO BLAME FOR
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Utter failure to Stop the War
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Utter failure to Stop Nick Griffin
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Utter failure to Stop Swine Flu
by Comrade Cardigan
Any appraisal of the Stop the War Coalition has to start with recognising the achievement of maintaining a single issue campaign with a diverse group of backers for several years.
This week’s London protest about the war in Afghanistan was rather small, but it was big enough to do the job – to get anti-war spokespeople on the TV and radio; and the STWC remains implacable in its opposition to the War on Terror, and has thus established the parameters for the anti-war argument.
But the question remains of whether we have drifted into what seems to be a long term military commitment to Afghanistan, without there existing a mass anti-war movement.
There are a number of things to be considered about the Afghan war, and perhaps the military commitment is not as open-ended as it apprears.
Despite noises about the military mission being the long term stabilisation of the country, a more politically expedient deadline is to establish sufficient stability over the next few months to have national elections that would give some domestic legitimacy to a government in Kabul – which would be a necessary precondition for any Western military withdrawal. The other route of establishing such legitamacy would be a regionally brokered peace process, involving the neighbouring countries as well as Afghan actors; but without NATO. Even though this latter option would be more likely to be effective, and less violent, it is politically unacceptable to the USA.
Secondly the British Army was defeated in Iraq; most damagingly, both their strategic and tactical approach were seen to be ineffective in the eyes of their American allies. An achievable, relatively short term campaign that they can call a victory is important for both the internal morale of the British Army, and also to re-establish their credibility as a military ally for the USA.
In a sense therefore the escalation of the British military effort in Afghanistan has come without a political debate about its purpose, but this is perhaps not unconscious “mission-creep”, so much as an opportunist escalation as a preliminary part of an exit-strategy.
However, the absence of an open political debate about the war aims has also meant there have been few opportunities for the anti-war movement to respond to. And the Stop the War movement is not sufficiently vibrant for us to impose our own agenda.
How did that come about? The campaign in the lead up to the war on Iraq was extremely vibrant, and we should not overlook the important contribution of mainstream political forces, like the Daily Mirror, and the fact that the success of the movement dragged into its wake people like the Lib Dems.
In a non-prejorative way, the Stop the War Coalition should be described as a popular front, mobilising the broadest range of national, popular opinion for specific objectives. But the nature of the campaign was often misunderstood, and in particular the SWP who played the leading role, overestimated the degree to which opposition to the war implied any wider political radicalism.
There were two strategic mistakes that flowed from the SWP’s misunderstanding of the movement, one of which was that after the massive 15th February demonstration that has been credibly estimated as around two million strong, the next big emphasis was placed on what would happen if war broke out; whereas both the nature of the campaign, and the dynamic towards war should have focussed much more on the parliamentary process. (a third mistake was to assume that the expected radicalism would allow the SWP to bypass the Socialist Alliance, which was sidelined, and never recovered)
The broad but politically shallow nature of the anti-war campaign’s support meant that it was likely to dissipate once British troops started fighting, but its very breadth meant that more pressure could have been brought to bear on wavering MPs. In particular, had we concentrated our preparedness for direct action not to be triggered once war broke out, but to be triggered once parliament voted for war, this would have had two advantages. The scale of the direct action would have been reported more in the mainstream press as it would not have been overshadowed by the news of the bombing; and the focus on the MP’s voting would have put more pressure on individual constituency MPs. There needed to be much more extensive and sustained focus on the lobbying of individual Labour MPs during this period.
In Swindon, we were having a STW meeting on the night of the parliamentary vote, and one guy Kelvin, who had been a leader of the Farmers for Justice fuel protesters, was furious with us that there was no mass demonstration outside parliament while the vote was taking place. In hindsight he was right.
The second mistake that flowed from overestimating the radicalism of the anti-war movement was to operate as if the far left was the natural leadership of the campaign, and that the campaign would continue to attract people moving towards the left.
At STWC conference, the AWL have consistently supported HOPI.
In our local SA group, there were about 15 people, with maximmum attendence at meetings in 2003 at around 30 – but of that 15 or 30, perhaps only 3 or 4 were national members of the SA.
When we stod in electioons we usually got about 20 people helping.
So it is plausible that there were several thousands identifying or in some way active the SA
The structure of the SA’s national bodies gave too much infleunce to the micro-sects, and the memebrship in many of the local groups was often more left social democratic.
It should have been possible to minimise the infleunce of the sects without losing the bulk of sensible activists. But it needed a more tactful and patient strategy.
I have read, for example, GDH Cole’s “the People’s Front”, and I have read Dimitrov’s discussion of the need for Popular Frints, no where do thet argue for the movement to subordinate itself to an imperial power – so this is simply not true:
“The popular front strategy was not defined on the basis of the composition of platforms. It was defined on the basis of a movement subordinating its interests to the interests of an imperial power. ”
What you are doing is puttnig fowardr a Trotskyite spin on what you think a popular front leads to, not what a popular front actually is.
