THE DECISION of the Socialist Workers Party conference was, I understand, to stand only around 15 candidates in the general election and retreat on the possibility of standing a large national slate — possibly in alliance with Socialist Unity.
The political logic behind this shift was of the most narrow factional kind — the SWP had discovered that it couldn't dominate the far left on the electoral terrain, so it simply retreated. As Bob Pennington pointed out in Socialist Challenge (20 July), this decision means that there will be no television time, no big political campaign by the far left; worse, the Workers Revolutionary Party with 60 candidates can claim to be the left alternative in British politics.
However, reports from various parts of the country suggest that a whole number of SWP branches, even in large centres like Birmingham, are deciding not to stand candidates at all. Instead they will concentrate during the election period on activity around the Anti Nazi League.
Now of course anti-fascist work during the elections is valuable and entirely commendable. However, for a party which claims to be revolutionary, to concentrate its activity during this election on anti-Nazism and nothing else is entirely inadequate.
During this election all the central questions which divide society politically will be posed. Centrally, for revolutionaries, this means a fight to expose the betrayals of the Labour bureaucrats and present the revolutionary programme to solve the crisis.
For the SWP, however, things are much simpler. Since there is a developing radicalisation around the ANL and they can make some recruits, they will do ANL work. It is absolutely typical of the SWP's lack of strategic grasp and narrow party-building instincts (which haven't been at all diminished by their turn to the ANL) that they are progressively adopting this orientation.
Socialist Unity activists will of course be present in the ANL campaign around the election, not least on the carnival which has been proposed for 24 September in London. But these same activists need to be developing a political fight now, to explain that during the election anti-Nazism is not enough, to win ANL supporters to the fight for a socialist alternative.
PHIL HEARSE [Birmingham]