29.02.1996

A conduit to party

Party notes

Our decision on the Socialist Labour Party (see page 3) is a vital step forward for our organisation. The SLP and the impetus generated around it represents the most important political opportunity for pro-communist party forces in at least a generation.

Some comrades have expressed the fear that our orientation to the SLP will cut us off from important political trends we have started to work with more closely in the Socialist Alliances, in particular Militant Labour. On the contrary, it will give this work a far sharper cutting edge.

We are not in favour of unity for unity’s sake. We have made it clear that we enter the field arguing for a reforged communist party, a revolutionary vanguard organisation of our class. The Socialist Alliances are useful forums both to argue this case and to take forward the type of principled joint work that can help resolve differences in practice.

However, they retain real limitations precisely because of their nature as alliances. Alliances are conjunctural agreements and common fronts between organisations that retain strictly separate organisational structures.

In contrast, our comrades argue the case for a unified revolutionary party, with a single leadership, structure and political line. Such a party would allow factions and organised trends, but would fight in a disciplined and unified way on agreed actions. In other words, we are for a combat party of the class, structured around a revolutionary programme and the revolutionary action that flows from it.

Of course, others have a different view. In particular, Militant Labour - precisely because it believes that ‘socialism’ can be won through parliament - operates with a fundamentally different understanding of party organisation. It has advocated as models for the structure of the SLP political formations such as the United Left (Spain) or the Communist Refoundation (Italy). Essentially however, these are electoral blocs rather than parties in the Leninist sense.

Thus, ML is probably more ‘satisfied’ with the format of the Socialist Alliance network around the country than we are. It probably views this structure as a way forward in the longer term rather than simply a transitional form. This is an example of ML’s left reformism, an organisational expression of its ideological deviation from Marxism.

We must fight for the Socialist Alliances to be conduits to the party. We must agitate for the SA forces we work with to join and build the Socialist Labour Party as revolutionaries. This will focus the debate away from programmatic questions in the abstract, or the next series of general solidarity meetings, and onto the question of what sort of party we need - a disciplined Bolshevik organisation, or a ‘broad church’-style social democratic organisation with different affiliated organisations? In other words, are we for revolution or reform?

Thus, we are not counterposing work in the SAs to work in the SLP. Yet SLP work is on a qualitatively higher level precisely because it is party work. This is the level to which we must agitate for others in the SAs to rise.

And it must be emphasised that this perspective is all the stronger because it is a positive party orientation we present to these forces. We are out to build and strengthen the SLP, not to smash it up for our own narrow advantage. A new political organisation involving a movement of workers is in the process of formation: communists and revolutionaries will merge with this movement to ensure that it becomes the genuine combat party our class so desperately needs.

National Organiser