02.05.1996

Makers or spectators?

Around the left

Some people never learn. Or perhaps, it would be more accurate to say, some people refuse to learn. This brings us naturally to Socialist Worker, which has a consistent history of ignoring any political development that might alert its readers to the unnerving fact that the SWP and the Labour Party are not the only ‘anti-Tory’ organisations in Britain.

The latest issue carries on this proud tradition, declaring: “We hope that in the local elections on May 2 the Conservatives get the biggest hammering possible. That means voting Labour” (April 27). No other options, of course. In the world according to Socialist Worker there is no place for Militant Labour, CPGB, SLP, Socialist Alliances etc.

The same issue carries on another Socialist Worker tradition: taking an illogicality to its utmost logical extreme. After being told we should be “voting Labour”, it goes on to inform us that “we need the political argument that trusting Labour will spell disaster”. So, the SWP will call upon the workers to vote Labour - and then tell them what a disastrous choice they have made. Leadership, SWP-style. The mind boggles thinking about the contortions Socialist Worker will have to go through at the general election, when the Socialist Labour Party (presumably) enters the fray.

Workers Liberty takes a similar isolationist stand, but from deep within the bowels of the Labour Party. Studiously ignoring the existence of the SLP, and anybody else for that matter, it recommends that “Socialists in the Labour Party ... should be pushing now for people to get involved in the Network of the Socialist Campaign Group and [fight] for the concept of collective democratic decision-making” (April 1996). Ever loyal to their peaceful parliamentary-road-to-socialism schema, we are reassured that “socialists inside the Labour Party will have a pivotal role to play” in the struggle against the next Blair government. The Labour-centric Workers Liberty just cannot imagine socialism unless it is first preceded by a Labour government being pushed ‘to the left’ by “socialists” inside the pro-imperialist beast. No wonder they take a dim view of the SLP.

The comrades from ML take a healthier attitude. An SLP meeting in Swansea on April 19, attended by Arthur Scargill and Bob Crow, was described in Militant as a “refreshing one for many who had never heard the socialist case being put so forcefully” (April 26). More poignantly, their monthly theoretical journal, Socialism Today, recognises that the “character of the SLP is not fixed at this early stage” (April 1996). A far cry from the do-nothing fatalists, who believe that the SLP is predestined to become a monstrously bureaucratic reformist organisation - ie, a barrier to socialism.

It is regrettable, then, that ML still continues to adopt a somewhat passive attitude to the SLP, remaining firmly entrenched in the Socialist Alliances, which are perceived as an “alternative model of a broad and inclusive socialist organisation” (Ibid). Yes, comrades, but the SA’s are intrinsically limited in scope - loose coalitions, in essence - while the potential of the Socialist Labour Party is immensely greater. We are makers of history, not spectators.

Don Preston