Walter Scott- Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field
To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night
the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.
William Shakespeare's Hamlet (1601), Act 1, sc. 3, l 58
Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!
William Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1' (1597), Act 5, sc.
4, l [148]
“Tell me anyway – Maybe I can find the truth by comparing
the lies.”
— Leon Trotsky
"The New Left Party: Seize the Time" is the title
of a pamphlet by Charlie Kimber and Tomáš Tengely-Evans,
published by the Socialist Worker. This new left party is called Your party,
but no matter how the writers from the SWP dress it up, it is nothing but a
Labour Party mark 2 and a political trap for the working class that is moving
significantly to the left.
The reality is that “Your Party” is a "pseudo-left"
and reformist project that will ultimately lead to "betrayal and
defeat" for the working class. One indicator among many of that political trap
is that the orthodox Trotskyists from the World Socialist website (WSWS) were
explicitly barred from attending Your Party's founding conference, which it
condemned as an act of "targeted political exclusion" and "bureaucratic
censorship".
The founding of the party signals the "dead-end
pseudo-reformist politics" that seek to work within the existing
capitalist system rather than overthrow it. It deserves its title as a
"Labour Party Mark 2".
The WSWS criticised Your Party's "policy
statement" as a collection of "sound bites committing the party to
nothing". It stresses that genuine socialism requires the "conscious
revolutionary mobilisation of the working class to overthrow the capitalist
state and establish workers' power", which Your Party avoids. The WSWS contends that Your Party's leaders,
including Corbyn and Sultana, will eventually "betray and defeat" the
working class, similar to other "pseudo-left" figures like Bernie
Sanders or Yanis Varoufakis.
Despite Kimber et al saying that the lessons from other
attempts across Europe to form a series of new left parties must be learnt, the
reality is that the SWP supported these attempts, dressing them up as socialist
organisations that would lead a struggle against capitalism. They did nothing
of the sort, and like Your Party, they are and were a political trap for the
working class. The most recent of these traps is the SWP’s promotion of Zohran
Mamdani. The SWP said of Mamdani’s campaign, “An insurgent vision that breaks
with the status quo can be popular. That’s the lesson of Zohran Mamdani’s
victory in New York. And it’s a lesson that Your Party could learn here in
Britain.”
As the WSWS writes, “The experience of the past decade is
replete with examples of parties and individuals whose claims to represent a
radical break with the political establishment were shipwrecked on the
realities of capitalist rule. In Greece, the Coalition of the Radical Left
(Syriza) came to power in 2015, promising to end austerity, only to impose the
most brutal social cuts at the dictates of the banks and the European Union. In
Germany, Die Linke (Left Party) has participated in state governments that
deport refugees and enforce austerity. In Britain, the Corbyn movement within
the Labour Party capitulated to the right-wing establishment, paving the way
for the return of open reaction. In class terms, these tendencies express not
the interests of the working class but those of the upper-middle class—a
privileged social layer seeking not a fundamental restructuring of society but
a more comfortable position for themselves.”[1]
It has become pretty clear from the founding conference what
type of organisation Your Party will be. What Pseudo Lefts were allowed into
the hall were treated like dirt. As Laura Tiernan from the WSWS reports, “The
SWP’s Samira Ali was physically removed from the conference venue by security
guards who confirmed they were acting on the orders of Corbyn’s former chief of
staff, Karie Murphy. The SWP’s Stand Up to Racism stall was dismantled. If this
is how YP’s leadership treats loyal critics like the SWP, how would they
respond in government to striking workers or to mass popular opposition to
austerity and war?”
Mark Serwotka
The right-wing trajectory of Your Party was further
expressed by a former ally of the Socialist Workers Party, Mark Serwotka. Serwotka
is a leading member of Your Party. The SWP trumpeted Serwotka as a new breed of
left-wing union leader leading a struggle against capitalism and Labourism.
Despite Serwotka's reputation as a left-wing, militant union
leader, the reality is a little different. Serwotka and the PCS leadership have
been "stifling action" and have failed to mount a serious challenge
to government austerity measures and pay restraints. Serwotka has been
incorporated into the Establishment, and pseudo-left groups such as the
Socialist Alliance and Respect and the SWP give him a left cover and serve as a
"safety valve" to contain working-class anger.
Serwotka writing in the Stalinist Morning Star wrote “We are
not building a vanguard party — if we are not going to be the Labour party mark
two, we’re not going to be the SWP or Socialist Party mark two either! We need
to win the loyalty of millions, so we must emphasise a politics and campaigns
that unite around people’s pressing material concerns, not the left’s
factional, sectarian priorities. We cannot insist on ideological purity within
our ranks — tolerance and acceptance of a variety of political views on the
left is essential, including opinions about gender and sex, and a two-state
solution.”[2]
The SWP and
Trotskyism
While it is clear that the SWP has devoted considerable
resources to the Your Party reformist bandwagon, it still maintains a
Pseudo-Left usage of Marxists such as Leon Trotsky, Karl Marx, and Vladimir
Lenin. They use these Marxists as a "calling card" to recruit
members, particularly students, while ensuring that this nominal association
never conflicts with its reformist objectives and certainly never advocates for
genuine revolutionary change.
The use of a quote from the US Trotskyist leader James P Cannon
is another calling card. This one is a little bizarre because Cannon and his
party were once Trotskyists, and that is not the SWP’s political heritage. The
SWP quote Cannon saying “that in every faction fight there is a reason—and then
a real reason. Using Google's AI mode, I was unable to track down this quote. I
just used an old-fashioned approach, and it comes up as this article- Factional
Struggle and Party Leadership.[3]It
is hoped that when The World Socialist Website launch its own Socialism AI, it
will be easier to find quotes such as the one above.
The speciality of the SWP is airbrushing key historical
figures, like Trotsky, from their events, such as the "Marxism"
festivals, to avoid serious political discussion. Tony Cliff was the
ideological founder of the SWP, and his organisation rejected every basic tenet
of Trotskyism; however, this did not stop it from using elements of Trotsky’s
perspective or analysis to suit its own political objectives. Throughout his
life, Cliff sought to associate the SWP with Leon Trotsky as a historical
figure. But in reality, it opposed Trotsky’s analysis of the Stalinist
bureaucracy and denied the viability of the Fourth International that Trotsky
founded in 1938. Trotskyism was “a cul-de-sac”, Cliff wrote, while “Trotskyists
suffered from the psychological need to believe in miracles.
Your Party is a political trap,
and the SWP is complicit in this trap. The urgent task is to resolve the crisis
of working-class leadership and to build a genuine mass socialist party that
unites workers worldwide and completes the epoch of world socialist revolution
that began in 1917.
[1]
The political and class issues in Mamdani’s victory in New York City-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/11/06/ygfl-n06.html
[2]
A new left party is born — but can it break with old habits morningstaronline.co.uk/article/new-left-party-born-can-it-break-old-habits
[3]
www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1953/facstrug.htm
