Anti-War Demos Give Marxists a New Lease of Life
ArKLyte
By Philip Johnston
London Telegraph
March 24, 2003
Marginalised and ignored, the 14 years since the fall of the Berlin
Wall have been a wretched time for the hard-Left in Britain. After
reaching its high water mark with the miners' strike and the attempted
Militant infiltration of Labour in the 1980s, the success of Tony
Blair rendered the Left a harmless relic of a bygone age. So
harmless, in fact, that MI5 wound up its counter-subversion section
that for 40 years had kept tabs on an array of Communists, Trotskyites
and Maoists.
But the Marxist Left has been given a new lease of life by opposition
to the conflict in Iraq. The Stop the War coalition, which is behind
the wave of anti-war protests - including today's London march - is a
predominantly hard-Left organisation chaired by a leading member of
the Communist Party of Britain. It also comprises senior figures from
the Socialist Alliance, a Marxist umbrella organisation that includes
groups such as the Socialist Workers Party and the Alliance for
Workers Liberty.
Suddenly, the Left is fronting a campaign that ostensibly has support
across the political spectrum, unlike the minority issues with which
it is normally associated. The coalition's leaders maintain it is a
broadly-based political movement but it was the logos of the Left that
were prominent on the banners that accompanied the march in London
last month, in which an estimated one million people participated. The
Left also dominates its steering committee.
The chairman of the coalition is Andrew Murray, who is described as a
communications officer for the rail drivers' union, Aslef. Murray is
also a member of the political committee of the Communist Party of
Britain - http://www.communist-party.org.uk/ not to be confused with
the Communist Party of Great Britain from which it split in one of the
many schisms that has characterised Left politics down the years.
Murray's organisation is the rump of the old Communist Party and is
linked to the Morning Star newspaper for which he writes. In a report
to the CPB's executive committee on March 15, he said the diplomatic
clash over Iraq "shows the deep fractures in the bourgeoisie over
British imperialism's specific role in world politics."
Murray is also aware of the anti-war movement's potential for boosting
the Left. "It has the greatest political potential of any I have
encountered . . . It is rooted on the Left [but] it reaches out into
the Liberal Democrats in a serious way and even into the ranks of the
Conservatives." He told the executive: "We need now to entrench the
party in the mass anti-war movement at every level." Although the CPB
is not affiliated to the Socialist Alliance - which is a Trotskyite
organisation - they have joined forces on the Stop the War coalition.
http://www.stopwar.org.uk/
Several leading supporters of the Socialist Alliance are on the
steering committee. They include Tariq Ali, the veteran Left
campaigner and writer; Mike Marqusee, a former editor of Labour Left
Briefing; Louise Christian, a prominent civil rights lawyer; Suresh
Grover, of the National Civil Rights Movement; Roger Bannister, of the
public sector union Unison; and John Rees, of the Socialist Workers'
Party.
The aims of the alliance are to create "a popular socialist republic,
based on democratic common ownership and democratic control of the key
sectors of the economy."
But even an umbrella group is not immune from factionalism. The
far-Left Socialist Party - the former Militant Tendency - withdrew
from the alliance last year in protest at the dominance of the
Socialist Workers' Party. The Left retains a predilection for
division that was brilliantly parodied in Monty Python's Life of Brian
with the Judean People's Front and their deadly enemies, the People's
Front of Judea, who hated each other more than they disliked the
Romans. However, they are all together again to oppose the war and
remain united by a commitment to Marxist thought and practice, a
contempt for the Blair government and a belief in world revolution.
[ed: polls of British voters show both Conservatives and Labourites
supporting Blair on the war; opposition comes from the far left and
from the Liberal Democrats, who have been out of power since 1922.
http://www.libdems.org.uk/]
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"Ah yes, we must mollify angry fanatics who seek our destruction
because otherwise .. they might get mad and seek our destruction."
- Ann Coulter 9/26/2002