08.02.1996

Scottish socialist alliance: Building a revolutionary party

Saturday’s Scottish Socialist Alliance meeting is Glasgow is an important political event. The meeting will be presented with proposals from the organisation’s Steering Group designed to deepen and extend the unity of the SSA’s constituent elements. Scargill’s initiative on the Socialist Labour Party has pushed important forces on the left in England and Wales into seriously discussing the key question of building an alternative to Blair’s ‘new’ Labour. In Scotland, however, organisations like Scottish Militant Labour, the Socialist Movement, Liberation (left wing of the Scottish National Party) and others had already established a common front. At the meeting on Saturday, comrades - including from the Communist Party of Great Britain - will move towards even closer unity in a common organisation. This is a very welcome development and the CPGB sends its best wishes to the conference for a successful and positive discussion. On the eve of Saturday’s important debate, Mary Ward - leading member of the Communist Party in Scotland - gave us her views on the way forward.

We are looking forward to a very constructive day. The moves towards greater left organisational unity in Scotland are well in advance of what’s happening in the rest of the country. This meeting can be an important milestone in the creation of a real working class alternative to Blair’s Labour and all the other establishment parties.

OK, that’s on the positive side. But there are also important political criticisms to be made. We must make sure that what we organise is not simply an organisational split from Labour: we need a split from Labourism as a political ideology. Or put another way - is the SSA going to be a reformist organisation or a revolutionary one?

We think the motion from the Steering Group wrongly makes some fundamental concessions to Labour; it has lingering illusions in the Labour Party as a progressive vehicle for change. I think this is because comrades have not yet fully broken from the outlook of reformism, a political trend that has been represented in Britain by the Labour Party since the early part of this century.

I spent many years in the Labour Party and rose quite high in its bureaucratic hierarchy in Scotland. I became a revolutionary and joined the Communist Party through the Timex fight. I started to see socialism as something that springs from the real struggles of the workers themselves, not from a vote in any parliament or out of Labour Party committee room intrigue.

I learned that the difference between being a revolutionary and being a reformist - even a left one as I was - is not a nuance or ‘detail’. Rosa Luxemburg put it the most eloquently in the debates in the German party between the revolutionary and the reformist wings in the early part of this century: the reformist road and the revolutionary road are not different paths to the same ends. A reformist - however sincere - ends up with different goals to a revolutionary.

Unfortunately, Rosa and her comrades won the debate, then lost the revolution. In fact, it was precisely the people she had been debating with - including the left reformists as well as the rightists - who ended up viciously defending the capitalist order in Germany against her and the communists.

Our position on the Steering Group’s proposals are not designed to foist a revolutionary programme on the new organisation before the debate has been won. We don’t expect for a moment the majority of comrades attending Saturday’s meeting to agree with the Communist Party’s world view by the end of the day. If this was our criteria for judging the conference, then we would be nothing more than sectarians, useless to the working class.

What we do think is important is that a marker is laid down for the future. We need to build a revolutionary party and we need to start to build it now.

The first step must be to draw a clearer line of demarcation between us and Labour. We must as an organisation say that Labour is unequivocally against the working class. We are out to replace them as the leading political force in the workers’ movement.

So this is why the SSA must not fudge the question of standing against Labour in elections. The SG motion states that we should not stand against “candidates in other parties with a clear socialist record”. It’s a safe assumption that the comrades are talking about left Labour MPs.

But left reformists of this type do not have “clear socialist records”.  Whatever their rhetoric, they are members of a party that has attacked and will attack the working class, a party that supports the British state and has run capitalism just as ferociously as the Tories - the Labour Party.

In fact, it is their posture on the left that makes them dangerous. The likes of Skinner can play a role of tying the working class to ‘their’ party. The great significance of the SSA in Scotland and the Socialist Labour Party initiative in the rest of the country is that comrades who consider themselves leftists, socialists and revolutionaries have made a break with Labour. And this break has been made despite the siren calls of those who have used their “clear socialist records” to denounce us, to try to make sure we all stay loyal to Labour.

These people might be worthy of limited support if they were prepared to stand on some sort of platform of working class defence, if they were prepared to fight for what the working class needs rather than what Tony Blair or any other capitalist politician is prepared to offer. If they won’t even do this, then what type of ‘socialism’ do they believe in?

Another area of opposition to the motion before us on Saturday underlines the need for the unity of the working class in its fight against the unified British state. This is our common enemy, this is what we must organise to overthrow. We believe that the new organisation in Scotland should be an autonomous component of an all-Britain working class party, with a common leadership, structure and programme.

Why totally subordinate our perspectives to a Scottish parliament? It would not be a panacea for the working class in Scotland. If such a body did exist, it would be essential to use it as a platform for propaganda around a revolutionary programme. Ultimately however, the task of socialists would be to overthrow it - working class rule won’t come through a parliament in Westminster or in Edinburgh.

I know that some comrades will criticise the Communist Party for being utopian, for fighting for something that it is impossible to achieve. But then I agree with Tommy Sheridan - we need a centralised revolutionary Party to fight the state. Where I think Tommy - and the rest of the ML comrades - have it wrong is when are we going to fight for this?

Tommy says in a “revolutionary situation” (see Weekly Worker 126). I think by then it would be too late. History shows us that in fact things become chaos in the tumult of a revolutionary situation. Unless a centralised democratic party has been forged beforehand, there is no chance in the ‘rapids of revolution’, as MacLean put it.

The example I think we have to bear in mind comes again from Germany and its revolution of 1918-19. The revolutionary socialists had not fought for a centralised revolutionary party in the previous period: the German party was only formed when the revolution was actually in retreat. By then, it was too late. The revolution was murdered; leaders of the working class like Luxemburg and Liebknecht were cut down.

In the Communist Party we think that there is no distinct ‘stage’ we have to pass through before we should fight for such a party.

It’s never too early to prepare for a war. This is what our working class needs: therefore it is what we as working class politicians have to fight for.