06.06.1996

SLP: what’s possible, what’s not ...

Party notes

The blank incomprehension with which some comrades on the left greet the Communist Party’s Summer Offensive campaign is very politically instructive. Scargill can’t work it out. Other comrades reckon it is simply “a lie”.

What is being expressed is the fundamental difference between the communist method and that of reformism. Put another way, a revolutionary fights for what is necessary; a reformist fights for what is possible.

Revolutionary method should not be confused with wild voluntarism, of course. Within any given historical conjuncture, the revolutionary party and the class it represents must soberly take stock of the balance of forces before every clash. We are Marxist-Leninists, not Marxist Lemmingists.

Taking stock, developing our theoretical understanding of the world, is an active process however, not one of passive contemplation. Theory developed in an abstract, one-sided way is doomed to be not simply formal and mechanical, but actually wrong. As Lenin writes, “The representation of movement by means of thought always makes coarse, kills - and not only by means of thought, but also by sense perception, and not only movement but every concept” (Collected works Vol 38, pp259-60). What distinguishes dialectical thinking therefore is not necessarily a closer approximation of reality at any one given moment, but the recognition of “the contradiction. The interruption of gradualness. The unity (identity) of Being and not-Being” (Ibid, p284). In other words, the imminence of the dialectical leap, the creation of something qualitatively new.

Thus, dialectical thinking is activated at every point by the fight to minimise abstraction, to approach living reality. The Communist Party has approached the formation of the Socialist Labour Party as a living process, one in which the final result was not a forgone conclusion. We have been and are an active element in the development of this political phenomenon; we are the conscious section of the movement which fights for what is historically necessary - a reforged Communist Party.

The fact that the SLP is now taking shape as a left social democratic organisation in no way means it was “wrong” to fight for it to be a revolutionary organisation during its birth, when it did not have a definite political physiognomy. Formally, comrades we have worked with on the left of the SLP agree. Yet the difference between the practice of the CPGB and these elements illustrates in truth that they do not.

Day to day, they have tended to display rigid, undialectical thinking - an approach that sees every process as predetermined, as a finished category. In contrast, the Marxist method is to see all phenomenon as “permeated with movement” (J Conrad, Problems of communist organisation, p19).

Thus our comrades on the SLP left have seen the SLP as an established left social democratic organisation from its inception. Consequently, some have attempted the old-fashioned (and discredited) Trotskyist tactic of ‘deep entry’. Others have essentially translated into the new party their experience in the trade union movement of operating against large, powerful and historically established bureaucracies.

Of course, these weaknesses have been expressed as tendencies: comrades are sincere in their desire for a genuinely revolutionary party, however they conceive of it.

Clearly, a new stage has now been reached in the development of the SLP. Yes, the situation remains fluid, but it is no longer molten. The organisation is taking on definite features, a visage shaped by the failure of the left to make the new political organisation a Communist Party. In these latest circumstances, the left must not be tempted to impose on this living process a new set of rigid preconceptions.

Its key task must be to start to cohere itself - organisationally and politically - and orientate itself towards the fight for what is historically necessary - a reforged, mass Communist Party. This is the fight which will create the ‘room’ in the SLP for revolutionaries to organise, develop and grow.

Mark Fischer