23.05.1996

Militant Labour on the Fisc

More hypocrisy from the SLP ‘doorkeepers’

In the past week, we have been sent a number of new documents concerning the Fourth International Supporters Caucus, the secret faction that operates at the leadership level of the Socialist Labour Party. This faction includes Pat Sikorski, Carolyne Sikorski, Brian Heron and Roland Wood.

Members of this inner circle are the most vociferous in the pursuit of those they accuse of supporting - or even sympathising with - other organisations. Thus they have been instrumental in creating an atmosphere of brooding mistrust and suspicion that hangs over some SLP branches.

Confronted at the recent SLP conference, leading members of the Fisc simply denied the existence of their organisation. Indeed, Brian Heron got quite annoyed about it.

He told me personally that the Fisc had never existed. Indeed, the whole thing was a product of the “mischievous” imagination of the Weekly Worker and Mark Fischer in particular. We were - he suggested - simply “lying”.

This was all very confusing, of course. Other people at the conference admitted to being members of the Fisc, but that they had certain reservations about what their factional partners were up to.

It will be interesting to hear how the ‘Fisc does not exist’ wing of the faction responds to the document below. This report is authored by three leading members of Militant Labour. It comes from an internal document produced for the ML organisation in February of this year, part of which has been sent to our organisation during the last week. And it is quite explicit.

There is a secret faction in the SLP called the Fourth International Supporters Caucus. SLP leaders such as Brian Heron most certainly are involved in it. It is pursuing its own narrow factional games in the SLP and attempting to purge and drive out other political tendencies.

Or perhaps these leading members of Militant Labour are also “lying”? We would be interested to feature the views of leading supporters of the Fourth International Supporters Caucus - Brian Heron, Pat Sikorski, Carolyne Sikorski and Roland Wood.

The report is prefaced with a short summary of the origins and current position of the Fisc.

Mark Fischer

Introductory notes by Militant Labour

The group working closely with Scargill (Brian Heron, Pat Sikorski, etc) argue that there should be no groups within the SLP. In fact, this No-Group Group has a name: the Fourth International Supporters Caucus ...

... This group split from the British section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, the International Socialist Group/Socialist Outlook, in 1992. The reason given by Pat Sikorski was the criticisms made of Scargill by the ISG during the pit closure crisis. Sikorski and others argued that the overriding priority was solidarity with the NUM and with Scargill in particular, rejecting any possibility of criticising Scargill’s tactics (for instance, inviting the CBI to speak on trade union platforms, his failure to name a day for a 24-hour general strike or day of action).

Subsequently, Brian Heron, Pat Sikorski (an executive member of the RMT), Carolyne Sikorski and others formed the core of the small Unshackle the Unions campaign. Later, they at some point formed the Corresponding Society. This was revealed by one of their members, Roland Wood, at the recent international executive of the USFI held in Amsterdam ... In the same breath, however, Roland announced that the Corresponding Society had been dissolved in favour of the FI Supporters Caucus.

This group had, in effect, been recognised as a ‘sympathising group’ by the USFI leadership, who have been extremely critical of the ISG/SO’s policy of Labour Party-entryism in Britain. USFI leaders strongly supported an intervention in SLP, which they initially hoped would develop on similar lines to the Refondazione Communista (RC) in Italy or the United Left (IU) in Spain. However, on the basis of the Amsterdam discussion, in which we fully participated, USFI leaders (notably Francois Vercammen, S Jaber and Livio Maitan) severely criticised the Caucus’s acceptance of Scargill’s extremely undemocratic SLP constitution. Jaber went as far to say, “If we were in Britain we would be doing the same as Militant Labour [in relation to SLP].”

Report of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International Executive Committee

Amsterdam January 28-February 1 1996

Between January 28 to February 1, three representatives of the Committee for a Workers International ... attended the IEC of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. This followed the attendance of USFI representatives at the IEC of the CWI as well as one representative ... at the recent congress of the British section.

The invitations to attend the international meetings and national congresses of the CWI flows on our part from the stated position of the International Secretariat on the need to explore all the possibilities for ‘revolutionary regroupment’ internationally in this period ... We have recognised for some time that the changed situation internationally - the collapse of Stalinism and the rapid evolution to the right of the leaders of the social democratic and ex-Stalinist parties - has necessitated a re-evaluation by all organisations claiming to be Marxist, including our own.

We believe that we have been successful in politically re-arming the members of the CWI and its national sections, which has allowed us to face up, with confidence, to the new world situation. At the same time we believe it would be sectarian not to take up the various invitations made to us, both orally and written from the various Trotskyist organisations internationally. How else would it be possible to establish whether or not it was possible for a revolutionary regroupment to take place other than through contact, discussions, attending each other’s meetings, etc? At the same time we have made it clear, and it needs to be re-emphasised here, that we are not interested in a kind of ‘shotgun marriage’, a quick fusion, between our organisation and the other international Trotskyist currents. An attempt to find a shortcut would blow up in our face and result in disaster. History shows that fusions not based upon a principled agreement and an honest approach can result in two groups fracturing into ten or more at a later stage.

In our approach towards the discussions with the USFI ... this has not been the approach of the IS. It was in the spirit of further clarifying our respective political positions and whether or not there was a basis for continuing discussions that we attended the USFI IEC meeting in Amsterdam.

The first item on the agenda was a closed session, which we did not attend. The invitation to us was debated, we believe quite heatedly. The second session was a report and discussion on France. The next day there was a report and discussion on Europe and a short organisational item on the issue of ‘debt’ - the USFI’s G7 campaign. The day after this there were discussions on the issue of ex-Yugoslavia, with particular reference to the Dayton accords which lasted roughly until four o’clock in the afternoon. This was then followed by a discussion on Britain, in which we participated and which we comment on below ...

[The discussion] on Britain [was] to say the least very lively. Four introductions were given in this discussion! The first was by the majority of the Socialist Outlook in Britain, introduced by [deleted]. She reiterated the position of the present majority in SO that entryism remained as a viable tactic for the British Labour Party, that there was still a lot of mileage for the left within the Labour Party and that the SLP represented a “diversion” for the left both within the Labour Party and on the industrial field!

[Deleted] then spoke for the minority within SO (which until relatively recently was the majority, but had been displaced by what he described as a “rotten bloc”). He conceded that he now accepted that entryism was at an end; nothing much could now be gained from the left within the Labour Party but the launch of the SLP was “premature”.

We then had a contribution from a representative of the Brian Heron/Pat Sikorski wing of the Socialist Labour Party. They submitted a document to the meeting from the “Fourth International Supporters Caucus” [see Weekly Worker April 11]. This came out of the “Corresponding Society”. We learned of the existence of this organisation and the “Fourth International Supporters Caucus” only when we arrived at the meeting. We quipped that rather than being a “corresponding society”, it was more like a “secret society”. In fact, it took its name from the (more effective) secret society which operated in the late eighteenth century. The existence of this organisation is important, particularly in the light of the implicit denunciation of groups within the SLP, particularly by Pat Sikorski who has specifically opposed the idea of federation. Brian Heron went along with Scargill’s opposition to federation (while privately claiming he agreed with this idea). Their representative was Roland Wood, who to be generous, made very little impression on this meeting.

It would be fair to say that the presentation of our position, with some qualifications by the main USFI speakers, was agreed to by the meeting. Our case for the formation of a new mass socialist party was accepted, as was our opposition to the lame excuses put forward by the official left, and repeated in this meeting, that “the time was not yet right”. Our position on the need for an inclusive, not an exclusive, new party, and the idea of federation was readily agreed to. Indeed, it was incomprehensible to most speakers in the discussion that, given the fact that the ex-Stalinist parties of Spain accepted the idea of federation (the IU) or the right to organise, for instance in parties such as the RC in Italy, yet Scargill was not prepared to tolerate the involvement of Militant Labour. We pointed out, as we have done in the latest issue of our theoretical journal in Britain (Socialism Today), that those who back Scargill are themselves organised, in “Unshackle the Unions”.

The explanation of our position on the need for socialist alliances, as well as still maintaining a friendly attitude to the members of the SLP, emphasised the principled but broad non-sectarian position accepted by our organisation in Britain. Commenting on the narrow approach of Scargill, one comrade from France described the SLP as a “virtual party”. Roland Wood, incredibly, in his contribution, claimed that within the SLP the attitude would be to “let a thousand flowers bloom”. There was much merriment when we answered by saying that “two flowers”, that is two comrades in East London, had been trampled underfoot by Brian Heron, Roland Wood’s compatriot. They had been asked to leave an SLP meeting only days before. There was incredulity from many, including Maitan who occupies an important position at the national level of the RC (Communist Refoundation), at the narrow, quasi-Stalinist approach of Scargill towards the method of organising the party. The idea that statutes were imposed without discussion, (which did not take place in the case of the RC), Livio objected to.

Other comrades from the “minorities” in France quite wrongly argued that a new party, such as the SLP, could not take place unless there were “big social movements”. Both we and others answered this argument by showing that it was the accumulated experience of the last 15-20 years of the British working class and the recent sharp movement towards the right of the Labour leadership which had prepared the ground for the emergence of the SLP ...

... The main spokespersons for the USFI, comrade Francois Vercammen and comrade Jaber agreed fundamentally with the position advanced by us, in opposition to the two representatives of the majority and minority in SO.