18.07.1996

Melting into air

Party notes

The latest issue of Workers Press (July 13) - paper of the Workers Revolutionary Party - announces the effective dissolution of the organisation this October. In a front page article, Cliff Slaughter writes that a “new political organisation of Marxists who will fight together to move towards a new party of the working class” will then be founded.  A recent national WRP conference passed an important resolution that underlines, with the formation of this new grouping, “the WRP will ... cease to exist as a separate organisation”.

I have often written about the dangers of liquidation facing revolutionaries during this period. Notwithstanding this, the WRP’s move could be a positive one. It is at least a recognition that the period is one of political fluidity, where organisational lines of demarcation that previously appeared fixed have ‘melted into air’. Correctly Slaughter underlines this new initiative is a party project when he states the “need for the most advanced workers in each section of the class and its movement to come together in a new party”.

The WRP have come a long way. Under the leadership of their corrupt and lecherous little potentate, Gerry Healy, they were once the embodiment of bigoted sectarianism. Since his political eclipse and the organisation’s dramatic fragmentation, the vestiges of the WRP have tried to put this behind them. But whether this new initiative - provisionally called ‘Marxists for a new party’ - is a genuine attempt to break from this rotten tradition remains to be seen. Slaughter suggests that “the collapse of Stalinism and the intensification of capitalism’s worldwide crisis means that the Trotskyists must break out of their isolation and propaganda-group existence imposed on Marxists for so long”.

The initiates of the WRP and its internal organisation apparently “have proved this can be done”, and concretely their activity around Bosnia is cited.

Frankly, this is pretty desperate stuff. Leaving aside the many political criticisms we have of this work, the suggestion that it has anything more than an exemplary character, that somehow it represents something qualitatively different to the myriad other campaigns the left in this country involves itself in, is simply nonsense.

The WRP’s orientation to the fight of the Liverpool dockers has been similarly overblown and bombastic. Of course, this is a brave fight by a group of dedicated trade unionists. But this strike - and the tiny number of small support groups that have sprung up around it - are not the ready-made basis for a new party of the class. Like the Timex dispute before it, the strike has many positive features, not least the willingness of the strikers to take their fight to workers in other countries. In our view however, the WRP is blurring important distinctions between the consciousness generated by a militant industrial struggle and that of a revolutionary party and the organisational forms attendant on that consciousness.

In this context, the WRP’s aloof attitude to the Socialist Labour Party is also quite wrong. Here is also a section of militant workers defined not by their involvement in a particular dispute, but by their conscious break from Labour. Apart from a few individual members, the WRP has not positively engaged with the SLP, a phenomenon which by definition is on a qualitatively higher level than the Liverpool dockers’ strike. 

The WRP’s openness is to be commended, as is their declaration that Workers Press’ columns will be “completely open to discussion on this initiative for a new party”. The Communist Party will take part energetically in this important debate.

Mark Fischer
national organiser