25.07.1996

Wind Power?

Party notes

The Workers Power group is organising a four day Summer School from Thursday, July 25 in London. The event - optimistically titled ‘A world to win’ - comes at a difficult time for this Trotskyist organisation.

There have been times - most importantly during the Miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85 - when our political positions have run in close parallel. WPers have been comradely opponents in the movement and the quality of their press is a refreshing change from the standard offerings of the British left. However, the current problems of the group reflect intractable problems.

WP has lost relatively important sections of their International, League for a Revolutionary Communist International. Parts of this dissident diaspora have now grouped in the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International. More disappointing for WP leaders has been the stalling of fusion negotiations with the larger PTS Argentina (see article in this issue). Given the inordinate importance WP attaches to what are quite tenuous international amalgamations, these splits and unrequited courtships must be very frustrating.

WP’s real problems begin at home, however. Its ‘market niche’ has been as the ‘hard but sensible’ strand of the Trotskyist milieu - ‘ultra-left’ if you are in the Alliance for Workers Liberty, ‘centrist’ if you’re in the Spartacist League. Its ‘Achilles heel’ - as with most Trotskyists in Britain - has been attachment to Labour. The advent of the Socialist Labour Party has thus thrown WP’s ‘tidy’ world view into theoretical disorder and caused some membership loss to the new organisation.

This is hardly surprising. WP has been an example of crystallised confusion on the SLP, the most important political development in the British workers’ movement in at least a generation.

Replying to a letter in the June issue of their paper, WP explains that even as a “fighting propaganda group”, its tactics “must relate to the mass of the working class who ... hold some faith in Blair’s ‘New Labour’”. Thus, as the SLP “is not about the stand on a revolutionary programme” and it has “not yet [ie, it remains a possibility - MF] attracted a mass base of support within the organised working class”, WP opposes it.

Here we have a section of advanced workers, headed by a union leader who personifies the most militant traditions of class struggle in post-World War II Britain - breaking from Labour and being impelled to the left. this small section is defining itself as the most advanced layer of the working class in practice.

Yet in the name of the backward mass, who will vote for Blair with no socialist illusions whatsoever - they have no notion of what socialism is - WP opposes the establishment of Socialist Labour and continues to advocate support for Blair’s party!

Such a position is clearly unstable, as shown by WP’s uncomfortable shifting from left to right foot on the question. Clare Heath in Workers Power 197 decided that the SLP is “just the kind of party we don’t need”, a “confusing obstacle”. WP 200 sees Richard Brenner admitting that this definitive assessment was “premature” and in his report of the SLP founding conference (Workers Power 201) announces in his best Churchillian tones that “the struggle for the political soul of the Socialist Labour Party has only just begun”.

WP makes clear that this is a contest - a “continuing battle around the character of the SLP itself” (GR McColl, Trotskyist International No20) - that it will in effect abstain from. It is laughable to advise revolutionaries in the SLP to “fight to change the SLP’s constitution” (ibid) to allow “leftwing organisations, including WP (Britain) [to] have the right to affiliate”.

Should they perhaps give you a ring when its all in place for you, comrades? In one breath you announce the struggle has “only just begun”, then in effect you announce that WP will be engaged only at the end, when allowed to affiliate.

WP’s self-designation as a “fighting propaganda group” is evidently a little overblown: a passive propaganda group certainly, but revolutionaries in the SLP still wait for some evidence of any effective ‘fight’ from you, comrades.

Mark Fischer
national organiser