21.03.1996

Labour movement in crisis

Over a hundred turned up last Saturday for the Workers Revolutionary Party (Workers Press) conference, ‘Crisis in the Labour Movement’. The WRP has been discussing ‘the need for a new socialist party’ for the last couple of years and up to recently premised its formation around ‘Workers Aid for Bosnia’.

Now, however, with its involvement in the Liverpool dockers’ strike and formation of a London support group, it is the dockers, strike which the WRP believes lays the basis for the new party.

Cliff Slaughter, a leading member of the organisation, spoke from the platform and hailed the dockers’ strike as the most important struggle since the miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85. It is, to him, more important than the formation of the SLP and the socialist alliances and provides the basis through the support groups to build a party “bottom up”.

Besides disagreeing with the comparison with the miners’ strike, I believe that Cliff Slaughter has got a number of things wrong. Instead of arguing for the need for political solutions to strikes such as the dockers’, he poses the strike as the answer in itself.

The resolution put by the WRP through the dockers was to “participate in the main struggle of the day, building a network of support committees for the dockers; this network can be the basis of permanent working class organisation” and can then go on to become the new socialist party.

Besides having a stageist view of building a party, this schema puts the economic struggle before the political. It tails spontaneity. The problem has not been the lack of militancy, openness and internationalism in the many militant strikes lost in Britain in recent years. It has been the lack of a party. A party must come first, not premised on another strike, no matter how militant. And it must be built top down.

The conference itself was democratic and open and I was able to put a resolution calling on the participants to join the SLP to engage in the fight for a revolutionary party rather than go off on another trajectory.

I emphasised the importance of the move which Scargill’s break from the Labour Party represents and the impact it is already having on advanced workers. Although I lost the vote, quite a number of WRP members told me afterwards that they agreed with me on the SLP. This can be evidenced in the letters page of their paper.

The SLP is having an impact on every leftwing organisation in Britain and is impossible to ignore. Instead of launching something else, the left should bring the dockers and their militancy into the SLP where they can fight for the formation of a revolutionary party with other advanced workers.

Despite my criticisms I believe it is very positive that the WRP is opening up this discussion on party. They are recognising in their own way the need for regroupment on the revolutionary left and the necessity to end the era of sects and sectarianism. Their contribution to the discussion on rapprochement which we, the RDG, Open Polemic and others are involved in would be very valuable. I call on them to enter this debate.

Anne Murphy