29.02.1996

Workers Press Conference

Communist press

What do we do with the call by Workers Press for a ‘new Socialist Party’?  Well the first thing for a communist to do is to respond. But what is it that we are responding to?  In Workers Press No 488 the front page carries an advertisement for a conference entitled ‘Crisis in the labour movement - the need for a new socialist party’. This call raises a lot more questions than it answers.

Is it a call to revamp the Workers Revolutionary Party around Workers Press? Is it a call to set up a new revolutionary party in opposition to Scargill’s SLP? Are they calling for a revolutionary party capable of leading a fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat, or is it to be a left reformist party? The advertisement itself seems to suggest the conference will not be centrally concerned with the question of party, but rather to discuss the validity or otherwise of a long list of political demands.

Inside, Geoff Pilling from the editorial board of Workers Press argues that the Liverpool dockers’ strike represents “the working class reconstructing its international organisation and consciousness”. Pilling adds, “Because of the sheer depth of the crisis the most oppressed sections of the working class were being propelled into struggle.” He concludes, “We must have the confidence to place our paper into the hands of these forces ... a paper that could help them organise their common struggles.”

In a separate article, Charlie Pottings writes: “Workers Press readers’ groups could be set up across the country.” These groups could eventually get involved in correspondence and distribution: “This would be a real basis for a new party. It wouldn’t be a matter of just the left groups coming together.”  Comrade Pottings was against “the way leftwing political groups assumed that the way forward was for the working class to come behind the vanguard party because it consisted of people who had read the books.” Okay, we’re getting the idea now.

And regards the SLP, Pilling adds:

“Workers Press had welcomed the SLP in that it had broadened the discussions we had already started on a new socialist party. Where Workers Press did criticise Scargill was in his ambition to go back to the old Labour Party.” 

The conference is on March 16 at Conway Hall.

Julian Jake