01.08.1996
SLP - a key debate
Workers Power
The recent education event of the Workers Power Group - ‘A world to win’ - brought together a total of 150 people over four days to debate some of the key issues facing the workers’ movement, with a core of 90 to 100 comrades attending consistently throughout
The school was generally conducted in a fraternal and comradely spirit, with opponents of Workers Power generally allowed to intervene in debates. Comrades from other organisations have complained of exclusions, but our experience was different. The restrictions on discussion flowed from the format, rather than any design on the part of the event’s organisers. Despite the quite high degree of participation in the discussions, the structure of ‘A world to win’ tended to produce fairly pedestrian meetings.
This is a problem that our own organisation has had both in its weekly London seminars and its annual cadre schools. Debate which starts with 40-minute openings, largely comprised of empirical information, followed by brief interventions from the floor, rarely cuts to the core of any question.
Workers Power’s self-designation, a “fighting propaganda group”, is a recognition of the stage it believes revolutionaries are still at in the fight to build a genuine revolutionary Communist Party. The overwhelming bulk of its written output therefore is aimed at advanced workers, those elements in the movement that can be convinced by propaganda.
Thus, I think there were too many sessions along the lines of ‘Can racism ever be beaten?’, or ‘Drugs and youth: a moral scare or a lost generation?’ - titles not likely to produce controversy, given the nature of the audience.
This is not to belittle the contribution of the comrades giving these sessions - they were well informed and competently delivered. But was the event staged as a mini-version of the Socialist Workers Party’s ‘Marxism’, or a school genuinely attempting to delineate ‘Marxism for the new millennium’?
Workers Power identifies a totally different stage of development to the SWP - an organisation which postures as “the smallest mass party in the world” - and this should have had more expression in the structure of the event.
The most telling confirmation of this came when Workers Power debated with a leading member of Socialist Labour on ‘Should socialists unite in Scargill’s SLP?’ - unfortunately this was the only organised debate with political opponents throughout the entire four days.
This discussion brought the whole event to life and was attended by practically the entire school, despite another session on Ireland running concurrently.
The speaker, other SLPers and Communist Party supporters from the audience adequately highlighted the contradictions in WP’s position on the SLP, illustrating how they have shifted from welcoming it, then writing it off as finished, to now having a passively ‘positive’ attitude, telling comrades fighting in the organisation that the battle is “just beginning” and how they should struggle for a constitution which allows WP to affiliate. As one SLP comrade remarked: “Thanks a lot, Workers Power”.
The response of leading WPers was pretty lame. First, that the SLP must be judged “programmatically” and from this point of view revolutionaries should have a hostile attitude to it. Second, that WP’s line has not changed. “Reality has changed,” suggested one central committee member. Third, there seemed to be the suggestion that WP was too prominent an organisation, that the SLP tops would “go ballistic” if they thought this organisation was coming in - a pretty unconvincing argument, even for the most partisan member. Fourth - in a similar unrealistic vein - that WP is “intervening” in the organisation through the production of its propaganda, the influence that this was exercising over its ex-members who had joined (a number of whom spoke in the meeting) and the many others who were “avidly” reading Workers Power every month. Fifth, that joining the SLP would entail “liquidating” their organisation and their paper, something that was simply wrong, given what the SLP represented.
Obviously, this is a contradictory clot of argumentation, probably reflecting different strands of dispute within WP itself.
Clearly, Marxists do not simply judge such formations as the SLP “programmatically”. This would be pristine sectarianism, judging a real movement of the class according to the programme of WP ... and finding it wanting. There are those in the SLP who advocate that left organisations liquidate in order to join, but this is not the position of all of the left, as WP well knows. After all, the bulk of WP’s written material on the SLP is gleaned from reports in the Weekly Worker, paper of an organisation that has not liquidated itself in order to positively engage with the new organisation.
WP have admitted themselves - albeit in a mealy-mouthed fashion - that they have been wrong, or “premature” in some of their positions on the SLP. Their defensiveness when others point out this self-evident fact is therefore quite telling.
It illustrates what an important question the SLP is. Frankly, it is idiotic to counterpose SLP work to the other “forums” WP intervene in - trade unions, youth work, anti-racist campaigns and so on. The SLP is a political development, a split from Labour of a thin layer of advanced workers to the left. Those who cannot recognise - apart from in words - the significance of this are not much use to the class.
The organisers of ‘A world to win’ are to be congratulated for staging a useful event. WPers were open to argument and discussion, illustrated by the good trade we did at the Party stall (nearly £70 taken). The debate on the SLP in particular should now be an ongoing and open one between comrades.
Mark Fischer
Press release of the Revolutionary Platform of the Socialist Labour Party
Box 28, 136-138 Kingsland High Street, London E8 2NS
The Revolutionary Platform of the Socialist Labour Party recently held its founding conference. SLP members from around the country met for two days to debate and amend the Platform on which two SLP members stood for election to the National Executive Committee at the SLP’s founding conference on May 4.
Revolutionary Platform participants debated and passed a number of resolutions on joint work in the SLP. These included resolutions on the general election, publications, the SLP constitution, MPs’ pay and our position on Europe. A coordinating committee was also elected.
All participants recognised the importance of winning the SLP as an open, democratic organisation of the working class.