07.05.1996

Significant silences

Around the left

There is a school of academic thought which argues that if you truly want to understand any text, you have to hunt for the ‘epistemological gaps’ or ‘significant silences’ - read between the lines, if you like. If you look through the left press this week you realise that there is definitely something in this.

This weekend saw the founding conference of the Socialist Labour Party, the most profound political event since the formation of the CPGB in 1920. Yet, quite incredibly, you would search in vain through Socialist Worker, Militant or Workers Press for a single reference to this momentous occasion. Instead, we are informed by Socialist Worker that it is “not merely for kicking the Tories out and voting Labour. We are for building a genuine socialist party” (my italics, May 4). Militant, helpfully, tells us that the “wheels are falling off Major’s government”, and urges us to “Now finish them off” (May 3). Combining innocence with myopia, Workers Press courageously declares that the “time is ripe for the building of a new party that can really defend and represent the interests of the working class” (May 4).

The SLP is, in many ways, the new litmus test for the revolutionary left. Your orientation towards it virtually defines whether you are a serious revolutionary organisation or not. Regrettably, the Trotskyist Workers Power fails the test miserably, even if it does actually recognise the SLP’s existence. It solemnly states that the “SLP is not therevolutionaryalternative the working class needs” ... and then lectures us on the vital importance of voting for Labour, as “Putting Blair into office will help to break millions of his working class supporters from their illusions” (May).

What “illusions” might these be? Socialist ones, perhaps? As one journal correctly points out, New Labour “marks a radical break from ‘Labourism’ both in its left (Tribunite-Bennite) form and in its right (Crosland) form ... It is almost indistinguishable from the pro-European, ‘one nation’ faction of the Tories”. Full marks then to Trotskyist International (January-April), the publication of the League For a Revolutionary Communist International - but not to its British section, the Workers Power group.

Given the urgent tasks and new conditions now confronting us, fresh thinking is required from all of us on the revolutionary left.

Don Preston