20.06.1996
Fisc splits over ‘British road’
The Fourth International Supporters Caucus is a highly secret faction, well ensconced in the topmost positions in the SLP. Not content with fronting the anti-communist witch hunt, Fisc decided to provide the apologetic theory necessary to justify Scargill and his draft constitution. For those within Fisc who retain a commitment to revolutionary politics this was a reformist step too far
Tiny, exclusive and closed though it is, the Fourth International Supporters Caucus exercises enormous influence. Three members, comrades Carolyn Sikorski, Pat Sikorski and Brian Heron, sit on the Socialist Labour Party’s general purposes committee. Fisc achieved this elevated and privileged position not because of the charisma of its representatives nor its political platform. Fisc is a secret faction with a secret factional agenda. Fisc hides its views as much as its members conceal their true affiliations.
Fisc’s power results from its strategic desire and tactical ability to work its people into positions from where they can serve, flatter and ingratiate themselves with “leaders who support the class struggle” (internal 1993 ISG document signed by Jamieson, Smith, DeJesus and Pablo). It has been as kow-towing courtiers within the labour and trade union bureaucracy that Fisc manoeuvres and advances itself.
There has been a high price to pay. Starting off as committed and sincere revolutionaries, Fisc developed a strategy which necessitated remorseless and undiscriminating accommodation to the reformist politics of “class struggle leaders” - Benn and Scargill were singled out. Because of its vulgar evolutionism and Nietzschean reliance on ‘great men’ to make history, Fisc willingly paid up. Power over power is the Fisc criterion for evaluating everything. Two instances are usefully cited as illustrations.
One - Back in January 1993 when talk of a general strike was in the air, Carolyn Sikorski partially succeeded in wrecking the Sheffield conference of the National Miners’ Support Network. Doing Scargill’s bidding, she tried to impose a tame rally on the 500 delegates. This was despite the expressed wishes of the organisers - there was a vote on it, 18-2. Promised “a chance to meet and discuss tactics and plan activities”, the conference was instead expected to passively listen to and slavishly applaud an endless series of pre-packaged platform speeches. Only rebellion from the floor, led by CPGB comrades, prevented total farce. With the help of the majority faction of Socialist Outlook a partial climbdown was forced upon what was then its wayward and undemocratic minority faction.
Two - Subordinating everything to becoming an appendage of the “class struggle leaders”, Fisc’s attitude towards the SLP was determined from the outset. After a brief toying with inclusive models Scargill decided to ban communists and other organised leftwingers. The SLP has to be readied not for revolution but the imagined trade union bureaucracy. In Scargill’s mind a trade union split from New Labour is inevitable. For Scargill to gain what Blair will lose, old Labour must be re-invented. The trade union bureaucracy will only join what they know and can control. If Blair’s New Labour is an SDP mark II, Scargill’s SLP is to be a Labour Party mark II.
Therefore the Scargill draft Constitution/rule book for the federal SLP contains, almost word for word, the same anti-communist statutes that Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden and Arthur Henderson notoriously introduced in the mid-1920s. If it remains unchallenged, affiliation bids by Militant Labour or the Communist Party of Great Britain will simply be ruled out of order. Because the draft has been imposed as law, individual communists are already formally ineligible for SLP membership.
Being in both the CPGB and the SLP is said to create impossibly divided loyalties. ‘You can’t play for two teams,’ it is stupidly argued. As is well known, Paul Gascoigne plays for Glasgow Rangers and England; and of course comrade Scargill ‘plays’ for the SLP and the NUM, while comrade Pat Sikorski ‘plays’ for the United Sectariat of the Fourth International. What of communists? In November 1922 the CPGB’s Shapurji Saklatvala was elected Labour MP for Battersea North. Did his supposedly ‘divided loyalties’ damage the working class? Not in my opinion. Comrade Sak was a brilliant tribune of the people.
In private comrade Heron reportedly disagrees with the bans and proscriptions on political groups. Indeed he reassuringly says the day is not far off when Fisc itself will come out as an open tendency. Fine words. But his actions are more eloquent.
The first meeting of the SLP’s National Executive Committee on May 18 agreed to press ahead with what has so far been a rather restrained and limited anti-communist witch hunt. I have been told that Scargill exercises a moderating hand. That it was Fisc which wanted to oversee civil war and the political cleansing of the SLP. Whether or not that is the case, there can be no denying the leading role Fisc has taken in barring ‘suspect’ individuals from membership - from the May 4 conference and in attempting to force others out.
Strains were bound to develop within Fisc between the ‘realist’ wing that is prepared to sacrifice every working class principle and those internationalists who retain a deep commitment to what they understand as Marxism. The overwhelming majority of the United Secretariat does after all favour something like Italy’s Communist Refoundation as a model of regroupment. Communist Refoundation permits organised tendencies, along with their different and often rival publications - incidentally its London branch was shown the door when it made enquiries about affiliation to the SLP.
Unease amongst the internationalists must have grown at the SLP’s founding conference on May 4. It was Fisc’s Trevor Wongsam who moved the resolution which contained support for immigration controls. He quite rightly speculated that an SLP Britain with its pledge of a 30-hour week, equal rights for all, universal housing provision and greatly enhanced trade union power might be flooded - presuming that this national utopia can actually be delivered. Strangely the poor and huddled masses of Bangla Desh, Nigeria and India were not mentioned. I somehow doubt that will be the case on the doorsteps during an election. No, comrade Wong-sam claims he only wants immigration controls to prevent the entry of fascists!
Heron backed the resolution and pursued the same dishonest line of reasoning. Playing to the gallery, he painted a weird picture of an SLP Britain as the preferred bolt-hole of fleeing “white South Africans”. It is they who must be discriminated against - a classic case of inverted racism.
In his national socialist eagerness to find an excuse for preventing the free movement of people Heron surely violates the spirit and letter of the Scargill Constitution/rule book. It clearly states that “all ethnic groupings” must be “treated equally with other people” and the law must be used to “prohibit” any discrimination against black, or Asian or any ethnic groups” (clause 4, subsection 11). By the way, would Heron have kept out white South African communists like David Kitson, Brian Bunting and Joe Slovo? Or would that only apply to SLP membership?
The unease caused by the May 4 conference display of chauvinism and opportunism turned into disgust when the witch hunt was put into effect and Fisc’s own comrades became the most aggressive and infamous red baiters around the country. Fisc to all intents and purposes is now known as the McCarthyite faction of the SLP.
However the last straw for the Fisc internationalists appears to be a short article by comrade Heron in the journal Capital and class (no59)- he can freely write wherever he chooses, unlike the regime Fisc would impose on other SLP members. Presumably it circulated in draft or pre-publication form within Fisc and its immediate circle. It caused a storm and in no time a split.
Comrade Heron’s ‘The birth of Socialist Labour’ makes interesting reading. It shows just how far Fisc has travelled since its days as a faction of the International Socialist Group (Socialist Outlook’s name in the United Secretariat of the Fourth International). What was centrism has become reformism.
I intend to put together a fully worked out critique for the Weekly Worker. In the meantime some very brief initial remarks will have to suffice.
Essentially Heron has produced an apologia for Scargill and Scargillism - quite logically given Fisc’s general line of march. We can present the main conclusions of his article under three separate, though obviously linked, headings - history, programme, structure.
History: Heron feels compelled to rewrite the history of the working class movement in Britain so that it vindicates and enhances comrade Scargill as a personality. When Scargill was fighting to retain the Fabian clause four Labour was salvageable as a party of socialism. When he decided to leave, it has become irreformable. History is made to neatly fit the SLP and Scargill’s subjective whim.
Heron is a skilful opportunist politician, so naturally every formulation contains a get-out. Nevertheless the salient points are easily discernible. Labour was a form of “rudimentary” working class political independence (Capital and class No59 p139). Though the moment might have already happened, Labour under Blair can at the very least be seen as “preparing to cast off from its class moorings” (Ibid p140).
The case is overstated. Labour is not about to break its links with the working class, neither as atomised voters nor trade unionists. The block votes remain in the breast pockets of the bureaucracy. Trade union money is vital for sponsored MPs and the day to day running of the party.
What has changed is the pretentions of Labourism. Gone are the socialistic claims it gave itself in 1918 to fend off the Bolshevik contagion. Mass support for any kind of socialist project has dwindled to the point where honesty is the best policy. Labour was never a socialist party. Only now it is no longer advantageous to pretend to be. That is the significance of the rewording of clause four. Labour has ‘modernised’ in order to return to its pre-1918 liberal origins.
Programme: Heron says that the old CPGB’s British road to socialism is dead because of Blairism. But only to proclaim the new SLP British road. He praises the BRS as “immensely powerful” (Ibid p140). “This document,” he enthusiastically writes, “has been underrated by the left, especially the ‘new’ left for decades.” “It is a coherent and attractive argument, not least because it is the only argument for socialism in Britain which is based on any actual experience” (Ibid). Its “attraction” for Heron rests not only on the “experience of the most radical government we have had in Britain this century, the 45-48 [sic] Labour government.” It appears to him to emerge “with the least friction from the unitary nature of the British labour movement, and its single, mass party.” The “obvious corollary,” concludes Heron of the British road, “is that “efforts to build socialism outside its framework are doomed to exist in a political wasteland” (Ibid p141). Fisc has become blind to revolution on the British road!
Against the British road and its parliamentarianism “appeals to dual power and British soviets ... always looked puny”. Compared with the “robust realities of the actually existing movement of the working class, its tremendous record of fighting for parliamentary representation and its ‘division of labour’ between the unitary ‘industrial and political wings' ”, the perspectives of the revolutionary left are dismissed by Heron as “remote abstraction” (Ibid). No wonder some elements in Fisc felt they had no choice but to split.
It should be emphasised that the Leninists of the CPGB always took the British road to socialism seriously. The most comprehensive and rigorous critique of the BRS must be Jack Conrad’s book, Which road? He shows in no uncertain terms that the so-called practicality of the BRS, compared with the so-called abstractions of soviets are philistine lies. Leave aside the Paris Commune, Russia’s soviet, Germany’s räte, Chile’s cordones and Iran’s shoras, etc, fierce class struggle in Britain had produced its now non-parliamentary answers - councils of action in 1920 and 1926, miners’ support groups in 1984-5. The comrade devastatingly proves that BRS is only practical for those not aiming at socialism, but reformed capitalism. In terms of charting a “practical road to socialism” the BRS is a “non-starter” (J Conrad Which road?, London 1991, p116). During a non-revolutionary situation, Conrad says the BRS only results in a “reformist whimper, like the Socialist Party/Communist Party government brought together by Mitterand when he first came to presidential office in France”. But in a revolutionary situation, “such a programme results in bloody counter-revolutionary terror, as witnessed in Chile in 1973” (Ibid).
Structure: Heron says that the SLP has a specific ‘Britishness’ in terms of its structure. He is right but wants to make light of it, claiming that “technicalities are not the most important thing” (Capital and class No59 p143). Yet surely structure is no mere technicality. Federal parties, made up of lightweight constituency branches and mighty affiliated trade unions, cannot serve the working class as a revolutionary general staff. A party in which a Bill Morris casts one million conference votes cannot seriously be relied on to lay plans for revolutionary insurrection. Such a political formation will only reflect the average consciousness of the working class. There is no possibility of it acting as the vanguard.
Form and content have a close and mutually determining relationship. On the one hand those genuinely committed to revolution and the programme of international communism need a vehicle suited to the task - that is a democratic centralist party. On the other those whose vision is limited to national reform using the existing state machine only require a labour party. The Scargill draft Constitution/rule book flows from a new, though unwritten, British road to socialism in which the SLP substitutes for New Labour. The virtue of Heron’s article is that it makes all this abundantly clear.
SL Kenning