"Intellectually and politically immodest": The IST "co-ordination" responds to Socialist Worker - New Zealand

7 December 2007 Dear Comrades, We are circulating several messages that have been sent by groups affiliated to the IS Tendency to the SWP (Britain) concerning the crisis in Respect. One of these is the second statement on the subject from the central committee of Socialist Worker-New Zealand. The first was sent to the SWP with the request that it be circulated, not only to the IST Tendency, but to all members of the SWP. The second went further, addressing itself also to delegates at the Respect conference but also to participants in the breakaway ‘Respect Renewal’ rally. We wish to express very strong reservations about the intervention of the New Zealand comrades in the crisis in Respect: We think that the comrades are wrong in the methods that they have used. Not only do their statements reflect a basic lack of solidarity with the SWP when it was facing a determined attempt to crush or split it, but they are completely wanting in intellectual and political modesty. On what basis do their claim the right to offer detailed tactical advice about a complex and fast-moving crisis on the other side of the world? Fundamental to the IS tradition as it was first developed by Tony Cliff is an emphasis on remaining firmly grounded in one’s own immediate reality and a disdain for the orthodox Trotskyist propensity to issue grandiose global statements. The comrades justify their interventions on the grounds that they are engaging in important debates, but it seems to us that they are falling into a sectarian conception of debate, in which exchanges in the blogosphore [sic] substitute for serious discussion grounded in common practice. We also believe that the comrades are wrong on the political substance of the crisis. Their first statement endorses the attacks on the SWP made by the Galloway faction inside Respect, criticizes the expulsion of three SWP members for their role in organizing this faction, accuses the SWP leadership of seeking to dominate Respect and engaging in ‘factionalist brinkmanship’, and endorses the efforts by Galloway and his allies to prevent the Respect conference from taking place – efforts that, when unsuccessful, were followed by this group’s splitting Respect. While we shall not repeat the comrades’ error of engaging in detailed tactical judgements at long distance, we believe they have failed to understand that basic dynamics of the crisis, which was a struggle between left and right, driven in the first instance by the insistence of Galloway and his faction to give priority to electoral considerations – and hence the consolidation of alliances with Muslim notables – over the project of Respect as a broad and pluralistic coalition of the radical left, and, more basically, by this group’s pessimism about the prospects of building such a coalition in the mainstream of the British working-class movement. This crisis does not in any way invalidate the perspective of building broad formations of the radical left in Britain or anywhere else, but it does underline the importance of revolutionary socialists continuing to maintain and build their organizations within these broader formations. We urge comrades in New Zealand seriously consider to the points we are raising regarding their method of operation as it is not only corrosive of relations of solidarity within the Tendency; more importantly this method cannot hope to produce greater clarity on questions that are so obviously complex and whose implications are so enormous. In comradeship, The Coordination of the International Socialist Tendency