28.03.1996

Strange bedfellows

Communist press

The advent of the SLP is turning up some interesting bedfellows. Consider these snippets from a left publication:

“Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, based on his idea of ‘Marxist philosophy’, might be riddled with contradictions and ambiguity, but it nevertheless represents a defining shift in class consciousness. What is certain is that the struggle for communist understanding will ignore at its peril this decisive shift in the contradictory development of British working class history. The SLP’s start has been an honest enough struggle, and it is in that fight for the development of real class consciousness that lies an opportunity for Leninist science to play a dynamic role of either transforming the SLP into a party of a new type, or else pushing its centrist contradictions to destruction and clearing capitalism’s last ideological barrier out of the way on the road to revolution.”

All this talk about ‘transforming the SLP into a party of a new type’ surely must be from our very own CPGB. But no, some other Marxist circle has the very same idea. Let’s read on.

“The changes and potential for liquidationist thinking are well understood by Leninist science. With that clear, communists should meanwhile take the SLP at its word that it stands for building a mass party guided by Marxist philosophy for the abolition of capitalism, and for the building of a socialist international.”  Warning against liquidationism, while at the same time urging communists not to stand on the sidelines, must surely be a passage lifted out of a Weekly Worker editorial. Wrong again. The above words come from none other than the International Leninist Workers Party. So now it seems that the ILWP and the Leninists of the CPGB both entertain the possibility of turning the SLP into a democratic centralist communist party. All looks set for a lasting alliance of ‘Leninist’ forces in the SLP.

One small problem however. The national organiser of the CPGB told its readers that the Weekly Worker must become “the paper of the revolutionary elements of the SLP.” But the ILWP tells us that in order to build Leninism in the SLP we must ‘spread’ their Economic and Philosophic Science Review. Whatever the possibilities for communists inherent in the SLP formation, one thing seems clear: the Marxist-Leninist forces in this country are still deeply divided and sectarian in their approach to each other.

Julian Jake