30.11.1995

Left gives SLP initiative the cold shoulder

IT IS undeniable to anybody with even a toehold in the left or trade unions that Scargill’s document, Future strategy for the left, has ignited discussions up and down the country on what sort of party the working class needs.

This is an extremely positive development for communists as well as for radicals of any sort, as Hillary Wainwright of the Socialist Movement, writing in New Statesman and Society (November 24), recognises. Hundreds of activists have rung the NUM offices for information and are raising the question locally in Labour Party and union meetings.

Militant (November 24) reports one of these meetings in Deptford. Dennis Skinner appealed for Labour Party members to “stay in and not give up”, but at least a dozen wanted information on a new Socialist Labour Party.

Socialist Forums initiated in Scotland around discussions for a Scottish parliament are beginning to spread south of the border. Militant Labour, one of the main movers in these forums, reported debates around the SLP in Nottinghamshire Socialist Forum. Whatever develops from this, it must be obvious that communists should be in the thick of this debate, leading it where possible. I would suggest that our organisation moves with energy in setting up Socialist Forums to ensure that communist politics are not left out in the cold in these discussions.

This brings me to Bob Smith and his ‘Fools rush in’ article (Weekly Worker 119). Firstly the title fails to reflect the reality of the situation. Unfortunately many left groups, like Bob Smith, are taking a decidedly negative view of the suggestion. Others expose their intrinsic Labourism, economism and sectarianism through their trepidation. They prefer to cling to their own narrow schema than to look positively for all ways to intervene in a real movement of the class. But as Hillary Wainwright points out, “The refusal of many Labour socialists seriously to discuss the long-term proposals of and conditions for a new party will seal their own subordination.”

Of course Hillary is not looking for a communist party, but communists are. So for communists to seal themselves off from this debate and ludicrously just “wish them well”, as Bob Smith suggests, would be criminal and a classic example of the sectarianism Bob so often claims to abhor.

Bob has pre-ordained how the Communist Party will be reforged: ie, through lots of little groups calling themselves Marxist-Leninist (nobody else need apply) coming together to get as near the truth as they can before actually testing it out in practice. When somebody ordains that we are agreed enough to launch ourselves into the politics of the mass, then and only then will we do so.

But Bob Smith is not alone. Workers Liberty, journal of Socialist Organiser/Alliance for Workers Liberty, has its own mechanical formula born out of years of entryism in the Labour Party, which has now become a principle, if not a lifeline. Given the economic decline of capitalism and attacks on the working class, it says, “The revival of mass socialist movement is therefore inevitable” (Workers Liberty, November).

The fact that working class discontent could be channelled in a rightwing direction, given the absence of a positive left alternative, does not seem to occur to this group. Therefore it dismisses Scargill’s call: “It is the job of Marxists to remain within the Labour Party where the major fault lines in British politics will develop.” Those who do not do so are merely “sectarian deserters”.

Though we can perhaps agree with many of its criticisms of Scargill’s document itself, we are not in the inevitability or mechanical school of politics. We actually believe that communist and revolutionary arguments and organisation can make a difference.

Workers Press has for a number of months now been agitating for a new socialist party, but one, it seems, purely on its terms. It also has little faith in the real project which has captured the imagination of large swathes of militants, because “Scargill holds clearly reformist views”. However it at least welcomes the discussion and had previously organised a conference on ‘The need for a new socialist party’ on February 24 1996 - something that revolutionaries need to be intervening in vigorously.

It is odd that Workers Press, Workers Liberty and Bob Smith write off Scargill’s SLP initiative before it has even begun, and invest so much power in the views of one man, whatever his proud history. “I do not see how the cut and thrust of a left reformist party will catalyse the process” of communist rapprochement, says Bob. How is it that he has already decided that it will be a left reformist party?

Disdain also comes, perhaps not surprisingly, from the more openly Labourite groups. Left Labour Briefing, reporting the Socialist Campaign Group meeting at which Scargill put his proposal, tells him: “Socialists should remain within the Labour Party and fight for socialist policies.”

That is still its project, however unconvincing it now increasingly sounds to workers both in the Labour Party and outside, both organised and unorganised. But disgracefully it also allows Ken Livingstone to grace the pages of its journal with a conspiratorial diatribe against the left.

He concludes:

“My guess is that if Arthur had been serious and had pushed on with this project, the Tory Party would have given him a million pounds to get it off the ground because it could take just enough votes from Labour to give the Tories a chance. I’ll bet Stella Rimmington went to work on it immediately.”

Labour MP Alan Simpson also writes in Left Labour Briefing. For him “defeating the Tories” is obviously by far the most important task. He wants a “clear, coherent left alternative” - but in the Labour Party

“In the debate about these choices it may, then, be appropriate to talk of ‘defining moments’; but let us do so around well defined alternatives: rebuild within the party, rather than in tattered fragments which flap about outside it.”

It is precisely this project of fighting for and campaigning for a vote for Blair and his New Labour that disables the left.

From the blatant Left Labour Briefing, to the more vacillating variety of entryist groups, to Socialist Worker - which thinks a socialist alternative is a good idea, but still votes Labour to “kick the Tories out”. From this also springs the redefining of the much thrown around term, “sectarianism”, which - as we have seen - Workers Liberty employs to mean anybody not in the Labour Party.

Mark Seddon, editor of Tribune, demands that Labour Party members stay in and “fight our corner”. Liz Davies is not perturbed by her deselection as parliamentary candidate, nor, it seems, her belief that if a Labour government fails it will be followed by an extreme rightwing, xenophobic Tory one. Therefore ... you’ve guessed it: “Put Tony Blair to the test.” What a catastrophic and hopeless choice to confine the working class to.

The Morning Star has also been forced into the debate, rather against its will, it seems. Tony Chater announces that “All those that we say are on the broad left have in common an understanding that the Labour Party is the mass working class party and has to be won for the policies of the left if there is to be advance to socialism in Britain” (November 18). This it will put forward at ‘The choices for Labour’ conference, organised by the Campaign to Defend the Welfare State and the Full Employment Forum on December 2. Another arena which revolutionaries should not miss.

Others on the left have welcomed the debate, but none are ‘rushing in’. Many think this is the wrong time to actually launch an SLP. I agree that May 1996 would be the wrong time.

At the moment many activists and trade unionists are enthused with the idea. But the vast majority of workers, though frustrated and angry at the Labour Party and politicians in general, still grasp to the hope that Labour cannot be worse than the Tories. In this vein many look set to vote Labour at the next general election with a certain enthusiasm. This is not because they have any great illusions in Labour, but because they have such little belief in themselves as an alternative.

If there is a Labour government this mood could change rapidly. The discontent now channelled into ‘getting the Tories out’ must explode. This is when a left alternative could really reach the mass. If there is no alternative it could as easily, as Liz Davies points out, go in a rightwing direction. That is why discussions around a left party must be taken seriously now. We must fight for it to have a communist programme and revolutionary perspectives. Not to do this, to sit on the sidelines, is to condemn a potential mass movement to reformism.

Nevertheless, reading some of the left, you have to wonder if for them there will ever be a right time to launch. Socialist Outlook’s editorial is headed, ‘Wrong formula, wrong time’. It agrees we need a “qualitatively different kind of party and programme”, but complains that “Scargill’s claim that there is no hope whatever for a revival or successful struggle by the left in the Labour Party appears also to echo the views of prominent members of the Communist Party of Britain - who have never been in the Labour Party - and Militant Labour.” It continues: “The new party threatens to divert from the fight to organise the left at the base of the unions, and from the necessary challenge to Blair inside the Labour Party itself.”

Here it confines the working class to the same role as does the Socialist Workers Party: “A Socialist Labour Party will soon face a choice. In words it is possible to talk about combining serious interventions in elections with struggle outside the Commons. In practice the two pull in opposite directions.” Their socialist party “must have clear socialist politics and one that must be based on struggle, not elections.”

Like the Menshevik attitude to the Duma in Russia the SWP is determined to deny the working class a political role and displays its economism in brilliant technicolour. Against the Mensheviks’ proposal to enter an electoral bloc with the Cadets between 1906 and 1907 Lenin said - as quoted in In the enemy camp by Jack Conrad - our “main task is to develop the class consciousness and independent class organisation of the proletariat”. Therefore “class independence throughout the election and Duma campaigns is our most important general task” (VI Lenin CW Vol 11, 1977, p279).

The working class can only come to victory by fusing revolutionary programme with the mass, by fusing political and democratic demands and struggle with economic struggle. By trying to separate them off you can only condemn the class to a slave class - which may at times be a better paid slave class, and at others not.

The very fact that discussions around the SLP have initiated such debate indicates its potential. Let us not be confined to economism, Labourism or sectarianism. The real, but obscured definition of sectarianism is failure to fuse revolutionary programme with mass movement. It is not sectarian to have a revolutionary programme and fight for it.

We must agitate now for such a party to be launched after the next general election, not before it. Above all, though we may enter these debates as a minority amongst social democrats or centrists, it is our communist duty to fight for any working class organisation to be around a revolutionary programme. This fight can and must be carried out while joining with the mass in fighting for reforms. If we can win the mass to fight in a revolutionary way, we can win not only temporary victories but working class rule.

Unlike our own Bob Smith from the CPGB faction - For a Permanent Party Polemic Committee - the Provisional Central Committee’s concept of rapprochement, of reforging the Communist Party of Great Britain, has never been one of trying to get lots of different groups to agree, but of uniting the mass around a programme that can lead them to victory. That is why the draft programme we recently produced is written around the needs of the working class, not the prejudices of this or that group. If these debates become real that programme can be forged in practice. Communists must ensure that it is. Those who issue statements from the sidelines will be lost to history.

Lee-Anne Bates