27.06.1996

New found optimism

Around the left

The latest issue of Trotskyist International (June-September), publication of the League for a Revolutionary Communist International, is worth examining in some detail. It describes the SLP’s formation as a “significant event in the life of the British labour movement”, going on to label the SLP a “truly national organisation”.

True enough. Yet these positive comments are a far cry from some of the statements which have been emitted from the LRCI’s British section, Workers Power. The latter has dismissed the SLP on previous occasions as a “reformist sect” and urged workers to remain within the mass ‘reformist’ Labour Party. At the founding conference of the SLP in May, Workers Power constructively told us that the “SLP is not the revolutionary alternative the working class needs” even condemning Scargill’s “walkout” from the Labour Party, as it “effectively told workers to abandon the struggle to preserve the trade union link” (May).

This almost seems like ancient history now. The new ‘upbeat’ Trotskyist International appears to have shredded the passive fatalism of its British offshoot and now believes in getting stuck right in. After pointing to the “left reformist” nature of the SLP’s ‘programme’, it correctly states: “But revolutionary Marxists would be mistaken to conclude that the weakness of the party’s programme absolves them from a struggle for the hearts and minds of the SLP’s membership and a continuing battle around the character of the SLP itself”. This is something the Weekly Worker has persistently argued: we are makers of our own history, not blind victims of its ‘iron laws’.

Trotskyist International also appears to breaking from its inflexible ‘Vote Labour, and nothing else’ position. Well, it does not actually say ‘vote Labour’, which must be an improvement. Indeed, filled with hope for the future, it foresees that a “release of pent-up frustration among large sections of trade unionists at some stage during a Blair administration could find the SLP well-placed to grow dramatically”. Good grief - so the SLP is not predestined to evolve into a “reformist sect”.

All this poses the “need to continue the fight to change the SLP’s constitution so that existing leftwing organisations, including Workers Power (Britain), can have the right to affiliate and carry on such arguments and action from within the party”.

Let us hope that the LRCI will soon whip its British section into line.

Don Preston