30.10.1997

Not our concern?

Around the left

It is a truism of our movement that we must have answers for all of the problems confronting humanity as a whole. In order to become a ruling class we need to study and master every aspect of society. As Lenin trenchantly put it in What is to be done?, “To bring political knowledge to the workers the [communists] must go among all classes of the population, must dispatch units of their army in all directions”.

Unfortunately, this obvious truth seems to have escaped some - if not most - of the revolutionary left. They almost seem to think that the bourgeoisie has a ‘natural’ monopoly over certain key issues - and that we should respect this by restricting ourselves to only those matters which fall within the ‘proper’ remit of the workers’ movement.

One group which appears to share this perspective is the Spartacist League. Even though there is nothing it likes better than launching vitriolic attacks on the “fake revolutionary left”, there is a distinctly economistic underbelly to its revolutionary verbiage. This comes across clearly in its coverage of the Diana Spencer phenomenon.

Thus we read in Workers Vanguard, its bi-weekly US publication:

“From the standpoint of the working class, the death of the ‘Princess of Wales’ was not a tragedy; special interest in the affairs of royalty, which places the life of an aristocrat above that of her chauffeur, betrays something of an servile instinct. The archaic institution of the monarchy should long ago have been consigned to the dustbin of history” (October 3).

Communists, says the SL, should not take a “special interest” in the conflicts and crises afflicting the British monarchy - even if they do have profound implications for the current constitutional arrangement of the UK state.  As it is “archaic” and belongs in the “dustbin”, why bother to analyse it in detail? I wonder what else communists should not take a “special interest” in?

In its usual inimitable style, the SL takes a less than generous approach to the left’s response to Diana’s violent death:

“The fake revolutionary left, ever in Labour’s tow, was swept along, nominal disclaimers to the contrary notwithstanding. Diana Spencer may have been the girl from the 10,000 acres next door, but for the centrist Workers Power group, ‘Her depression, bulimia, suicide attempts and ultimately divorce provided a glitzy microcosm of the plight of millions of less wealthy women’ (Workers Power September 1997). That (and more) said, Workers Power assured its reader that it would ‘not be joining in the wave of national mourning’ and even vowed to ‘do everything’ to get the monarchy ‘scrapped forever’ - everything, that is, but oppose Blair’s Labour Party at election time.”

The WP group, according to Workers Vanguard, is guilty of some heinous - but undefined - crime by writing those words. Socialist Worker’s relatively innocent comments about how we are seeing “an attempt to rehabilitate the battered institutions of the royal family” (September 6) are also enough for Workers Vanguard to condemn the Socialist Workers Party for being “firmly embedded in the syphilitic chains of Labourism”. 

Guilty of even greater crimes though is the CPGB:

“In the same vein, but even more nauseating, was the so-called Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), a small group which formerly published The Leninist. The CPGB’s Weekly Worker (September 4) carried a front page eulogy by chief spokesman Jack Conrad. While allowing that ‘even a bourgeois republic is preferable to the anti-democratic monarchy’, Conrad outdid even Blair himself in his treacly musings for the ‘troublesome princess’ who ‘represented a soul in a soulless world’; ‘Her brief 36 years epitomise the struggle and fate of the 20th century personality who had by chance and/or design been iconised and thus commodified and sold by the uncontrollable, all pervasive power of capital’.”

It goes on to make the blatantly false claim: “Not surprisingly, both Workers Power and the CPGB studiously managed to avoid any reference to Blair’s role in propping up the monarchy.”

Naturally the Spartacist League - unlike the WP group, the “syphilitic” SWP or the “nauseating” CPGB - has seen through Blair’s schemes: “What is needed is a sweeping social revolution culminating with the workers in power, opening a new line of historical development.”

The poor souls obviously think they are being original ... in fact they simply reveal their stupidity.

Don Preston