01.08.1996

Loony labels

Around the left

Sometimes the revolutionary left can be its own worst enemy. The bourgeoisie and its media love to pin all manner of derogatory labels on revolutionaries and communists, common ones being “dinosaurs”, “fanatics”, “mad” - or the catch-all expression, the “loony left”.

All lies, of course. Then again, some of the statements which come from the left are not always exactly 100% rational in content. We all know that Vanessa Redgrave of the Workers Revolutionary Party once appeared on TV excitedly declaring that the day after the Labour Party is elected, concentration camps will be set up. She got a very low vote, astonishing enough.

The latest issue of Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!, paper of the Revolutionary Communist Group, has a touch of the Redgrave about it. Hence, its editorial is headlined: “New Labour’s Manifesto: the road to social fascism” (August/September). To be frank, such a statement borders dangerously on the ‘loony’ and makes the left - well, the RCG anyway - look like a joke. Blair’s Labour Party, and ‘Blairism’, may be many things, but one thing it is not is “fascist”.

Ironically, the FRFI editorial actually goes on to outline a relatively accurate description of new Labour. The Labour draft manifesto “confirms the oppressive conservatism of new Labour, its dedication to the defence of the status quo” and, quoting the words of a bourgeois commentator, “Instead of Harold Wilson’s mixture of economic intervention and social liberalism, we will have economic liberalism and social authoritarianism”. True, but hardly a commitment to “social fascism”.

International Worker, publication of the International Communist Party,also contains some fairly ludicrous statements. This comes out in its sectarian attitude to the Socialist Labour Party, the launch of which is described as a “cynical attempt by the most conscious representative of the bureaucracy to prevent the development of an independent political movement in the working class” (July 13, my italics). Blinded by sectarianism, the ICP fails to see that the advent of the SLP is precisely the first stirrings of the “independent political movement in the working class” it desires so much.

Instead, International Worker tells the working class that they should “join the ICP in the fight to build a new party pledged to socialism”. This is ‘party ideology’ of the worst sort, as opposed to healthy ‘party-ism’.

All leftwing groups and publications should dump the bad habits of the past and always seek to look outwards, not inwards.

Don Preston