22.02.1996

Fighting spirit

Party notes

The forthcoming Party school and aggregate mark an important stage in the development of our organisation’s work around the SLP. The SLP is without question the most significant political development in Britain in at least a generation.

Our organisation has made errors as it has attempted to orientate to this movement. Still, our mistakes have not been serious and have been corrected relatively quickly and painlessly.

However an important debate still looms. What should communists do during this period of the formation of the SLP? Is the situation still characterised by fluidity, or is the SLP already an anti-democratic, social democratised fait accompli?

The Party school will not just look at the SLP in the here and now, but attempt to set the discussion in a historical context. The morning session will discuss aspects of the history of social democracy and the tactics of revolutionaries towards it. An important example, which will no doubt be cited, is that of the sectarian impatience of the Social Democratic Federation - which stormed out of the proto-Labour Party when it refused to accept the SDF’s programmatic ultimatums.

In this context comrades have been encouraged to read a useful article by Trotsky from 1932, reproduced in the October 1995 issue of Workers Liberty, journal of the Labour-loyal Alliance for Workers Liberty. In it Trotsky discusses with great insight the prospect of the creation of a ‘Labour Party’ in the United States and the role revolutionaries should play.

The key tactical question in his article is posed thus: “Must we join that Labour Party or remain outside?”

Trotsky underlines: “This is not a question of principle but of circumstances and possibilities.” What he pinpoints is the question of timing:

“It is evident that the possibility of participating in a Labour Party movement and of utilising it would be greater in its period of inception: that is, in the period when the party is not a party but an amorphous political mass movement. That we must participate in it at that time with the greatest energy is without question; not to help form a Labour Party that will exclude us and fight against us, but to push the progressive elements of the movement more and more to the left by our activity and propaganda” (My emphasis).

This useful article also underlines a vital point for our organisation, a point we have occasionally lost sight of in the initial struggle for a new workers’ party. We are fighting for a reforged communist party through our work with the SLP, not a left social democratic organisation with the facility of affiliation for communists.

As Trotsky says,

“The parallel struggle for another party inevitably produces ... a dualism and turns [our cadre] onto the road of opportunism. We must educate our cadres to believe in the invincibility of the communist idea and in the future of the communist party.”

It will be precisely this confidence and fighting spirit which will enthuse our struggle around the SLP and the formation of a new workers’ party in this country.

Mark Fischer
National Organiser