29.02.1996

Communists and the Socialist Labour Party

Should partisans of the working class shape the SLP or attack it from the sidelines?

Everything produces its opposite reaction. That applies not only in nature but politics too. Capitalist accumulation produces the working class, Marx produces Weber, revolution produces counterrevolution, the collapse of ‘official communism’ produces rapprochement between genuine communists. Now Blairism has produced the Socialist Labour Party.

There can be no denying the importance of the SLP. Arthur Scargill, its founder, is in spite of the decimation of the NUM still one of the leading and most influential personalities in the British labour movement. Not since the early 1920s has such a worker-king broken from the Labour Party and moved to the left. Besides taking a number of middle ranking NUM functionaries with him, Scargill has secured over half the RMT executive for the SLP.

Far more significantly from our point of view, thousands of political activists and trade union militants have begun to come together under the banner of the SLP (greater numbers still have gravitated to the Socialist Alliances - in particular in Scotland - and await the call). Our friend Dave Douglass reported the immediate response on the ground to the news of the SLP launch: “Saturday night around the pubs of Doncaster the discussion among young and old, quite ordinary non-politicos, was all about Arthur’s initiative,” he told our readers (Weekly Worker 118). Though in the main it organisationally involves at the moment only a thin layer of politicos - ie, advanced workers who can be convinced and won by propaganda - we have unfolding before us a movement of the class itself.

For the first time in a generation a stratum of the working class has turned its back on the Labour Party as a vehicle for social change and is grappling with the infinitely more promising task of building a viable alternative. Bennism has been seen to fail. The Labour left is marginalised, divided and hopeless. Blair’s party is, as Scargill argues, “indistinguishable” from the Liberal Democrats (Future strategy for the left November 1995). Evidently another politics is needed and is being sought out.

There is little or no chance of the SLP gaining a mass following in the short term. Ordinary “non-politicos” will express a certain sympathy. But they are unlikely to flood in. After the next general election, however, it could be another matter entirely. In the midst of the trials and tribulations of a viciously anti-working class Blair government there exists the possibility of the SLP becoming the focus of combative resistance and thereby gaining a wide popular base. Such a development would, to say the least, be welcome for those who “have no interest separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole”.

What sort of political formation is the SLP? There are countless answers to this question. Most reveal somewhat more about the subject than the object. True to form, Ken Livingstone cynically attacks the SLP as a creature of MI5. “I’ll bet Stella Rimmington went to work on it immediately,” says this red baiter - he made similar accusations on BBC TV concerning our candidates in the April 1992 general election (see J Conrad In the enemy camp London 1993, p70). Other advocates of the Blair road - Workers Liberty, Socialist Action, Labour Briefing, Tribune, etc - also assess the SLP purely in terms of the danger it poses to Labour. It might steal just enough votes in crucial marginal seats to rob this self-proclaimed pro-market party of its prize.

Not surprisingly such craven concern for Blair’s ambition has triggered splits. Doing the bidding of the Hicks-Rosser clique, the Morning Star’s political wing, the Communist Party of Britain, agreed at its last congress to oppose the SLP. Subsequently it has undergone a steady membership leakage - including Bob Crow, RMT assistant secretary, and till recently seated on the CPB’s executive. The Trotskyite Socialist Outlook has experienced a devastating series of defections to the SLP and must now be on its last legs. One can easily predict other sects will likewise fragment in the near future.

Nervous leaders of the Socialist Workers Party obviously fear that the SLP stands to the left of them in practice. The SLP has already proved its willingness in Hemsworth to challenge the Labour Party in its lair - the ballot box. The SWP will not do that. Apparently it would be a “disaster” for the SWP not to support Labour at the next election (Pre-Conference Bulletin 1995 p10). Hence, along with a range of other ‘Vote Labour, but ...’ opportunists, the SWP tries to downplay the SLP as a mere electoral machine: ie, a left reformist party (Workers Power, the Workers Revolutionary Party and Workers International League play the same tune).

At the prompting of Socialist Worker, SWPers pose hard. The electoral fight, they say, is only for soft reformists. Revolutionary action for them is in the workplace. Such anarcho-economism ignores the necessity of communists in Britain doing what the Bolsheviks successfully did in Russia, and engage on every front, including elections, in order to elevate the struggle of the workers from the trade union to the political (which means the working class championing the rights of all sections of the oppressed against the state).

Yet the fact of the matter is that the SLP is completely fluid. It is in the process of formation - May 1 is the suggested launch date. At present the SLP is not a party, but an amorphous movement which aims to be a party. Yes, Scargill has proposed a monstrously bureaucratic constitution which would ban and proscribe tendencies and factions and establish a Bonapartist internal regime. Yes, Scargill and most of the SLP steering committee are left reformist. Nevertheless the SLP will at the end of the day be made by its membership; the majority of whom are probably well to the left and will be open to serious revolutionary ideas. If they decide to be passive, if all they want is a Labour Party mark II, if they allow themselves to be dazzled by a Scargill personality cult or intimidated by threats, then the SLP will prove stillborn or will become one more barrier to those who really want socialism.

On the other hand those in the Socialist Alliances, Militant Labour, SWP, etc, can reinforce the left majority in the SLP and make it an overwhelming force and an irresistible body of opinion. We communists are of the decided view that all partisans of the working class should join the SLP. Not, it should be emphasised, in order to get some more accommodating Labourite party nor some intermediate revolutionary-reformist alliance. To overthrow the capitalist state, to bring about the rule of the working class, a democratic centralist party organised on the basis of a revolutionary programme is required. That must be undeviatingly argued and worked for.

No one should enter the SLP with notions of a carrying out an ideological raid. Going in with 150 members and coming out six months later with 175 would not advance the working class by one inch. Neither would it serve the interests of our great cause if all that was aimed for was an SLP constitution that allowed for affiliation, or autonomy for Scotland and Wales. What is needed is not some British version of the United Left in Spain or Communist Refoundation in Italy. Our class needs a Communist Party - that is what we must singlemindedly fight for.

Jack Conrad