07.03.1996

Join the fight!

National meeting

The first all-Britain membership meeting of the Socialist Labour Party in London’s Conway Hall last Saturday saw new members signing up hand over fist on the door to play their part in the initial policy debates in the lead-up to the party’s official launch on May 1 and its policy making launch conference on Saturday May 4.

Over 300 members from all parts of Britain (the SLP organising committee evidently does not intend to recruit in Northern Ireland - because the Labour Party doesn’t!) divided into 20 or so working groups of their choice to freely thrash out the policies they would like to see the party adopt. Discussion was confined to the group meetings and no decisions were taken by the meeting as a whole - policies will be adopted on May 4 - but the militancy and socialist aspirations of this initial batch of members were clearly reflected in the reports presented by the biggest of the groups.

The SLP is to be, according to the ‘international’ working group, anti-capitalist and therefore anti-imperialist, and part of the international socialist movement. It will withdraw Britain from all imperialist organisations, including the United Nations, World Bank, IMF, Nato, European Union and so on, while fighting for a United Socialist States of all Europe. It will withdraw all British troops from overseas, including Northern Ireland, and will carry through unilateral nuclear disarmament. It will campaign against all immigration controls and will organise refugees into SLP membership - contrary to the unpopular ‘one-year residence’ restriction in the coordinating committee’s proposed constitution.

The working group on Ireland declared its support for the national liberation struggle and defended the right of the people of Ireland to fight for their national self-determination in any way they see fit - there must be no SLP condemnation of IRA bombings. The SLP must organise an effective mass campaign in the British working class for the withdrawal of British troops and the release of all prisoners.

The SLP’s constitution itself, as proposed by the organisation’s coordinating committee after two years of secret deliberations in the Great Northern Hotel, London, came under heavy fire from one of the largest working groups - despite the committee’s intention that the matter should not be discussed. The proposed constitution was described as a “leaders’ paradise” which divided the membership into seven different power bases so that “the majority will be unable to express its view”.

The exclusion of non-trade union members will prevent the mass recruitment of unemployed members in deprived areas, and the rights of expelled or disciplined individuals are no better than under the infamous Labour Party constitution.

Worst of all, just as the agenda for Saturday’s meeting was never put to the meeting itself for approval or amendment, so it is planned that the proposed constitution be imposed upon the May 4 launch conference with neither a debate nor a vote. No amendments and no alternatives will be permitted, if the unelected committee of those who know best gets its way (Amending the constitution is scheduled for the 1997 conference, but this process will itself be conducted under the imposed bureaucratic constitution).

Of course, the loyalty of the newly recruited membership to the founders of the organisation who had the guts to make the break out of the Labour Party prison is likely to lead them to accept the constitution handed down, despite its obvious defects. But communist revolutionaries know very well the kind of party needed to organise the leading section of our class into a fist capable of smashing capitalism and building socialism and communism - a democratic centralist party with a revolutionary programme based on the needs of the class and the scientific theory of Marxism. It would be a gross neglect of communist duty not to fight from the very beginning for this conception.

The imposition of the bureaucratic monster of a constitution which is being proposed must be fought in the May 4 conference. From this very first conference, the members, not the founders, must control the organisation. The struggle for democracy inside the SLP will determine whether it can be forged into a genuine combat party of the working class, or whether it becomes ossified as the party of a section of the trade union bureaucracy.

The founding steering committee, no doubt with the best of intentions, is trying to exercise bureaucratic control to protect its infant organisation from revolutionaries. To the extent that it succeeds, it will stifle the creativity and energy of the flow of newly inspired recruits. Only if the organisation ceases to be the private property of the founders, however honourable, can it become the democratic property of the working class and all the oppressed.

There must be no bureaucratic ban from membership of those comrades who belong to other organisations, revolutionary or otherwise. Forcing recruits to tear up their old membership cards and break their past links is to waste many an opportunity. Comrades should be arguing hard within their old organisations to bring their old comrades with them into the SLP. Scargill himself should not have resigned from Labour but used his expulsion process as a platform to argue the case for the SLP openly.

All over Britain members are signing up, branches are being formed. The organisers are appealing for new members, new branches, the organisation of local SLP meetings. March 29 has been set as a deadline for the submission of policy resolutions for the May 4 conference. These must include alternative proposals which forestall the imposition of the bureaucratic constitution - conference must be sovereign - as well as the key demands of a revolutionary programme.

Now is the time to get into the melting pot and fight for the party our class desperately needs.

Ian Farrell