29.08.1996

How to lose friends

Around the left

Last week in this column we reported on the Workers Revolutionary Party’s decision to liquidate itself and its call for a “new socialist party”. Whatever reservations we may have about the exact reasons for this abrupt change, we particularly welcomed the fact that Workers Press is openly calling for responses - ie, articles and letters - to its initiative. We also urged all revolutionaries to use the pages of Workers Press in order to facilitate this debate.

The International Communist Partyhas responded to this debate, albeit in the pages of its publication, International Worker (well, you cannot expect miracles straightaway). However, its reply to the WRP could hardly be defined as ‘constructive’. Indeed, it is a textbook study in knee-jerk sectarianism and how not to conduct the process of communist regroupment/rapprochement.

IW gloats that the WRP has “finally ended its last tenuous historical links with Trotskyism” (July 27). Not a good start. It goes on to indulge in some truimphalist ‘we told you so’ polemic, telling us how “in front of several hundred revisionists and anti-Trotskyists of all stripes, [Cliff] Slaughter publicly called into question the historical foundations of the International Committee [of the Fourth International]”. How terrible of him. This crime against humanity occurred on November 26 1985, at the Friends’ Hall in London. Sectarians obviously have very long memories.

The comrades in the WRP who sympathised with Slaughter’s heresy are labelled the “unstable petty-bourgeois”. The WRP’s call for a new socialist party is dismissed in a similar vein: “The name ‘Marxists for a New Party’ has been chosen because it is such a loose formulation it can accommodate every reactionary political tendency from Stalinists to bourgeois nationalists”. Once again, not exactly a positive position from the ‘doom and gloom’ merchants of the ICP.

IW concludes by threatening to “carry a series of articles in future issues tracing the WRP’s decay”. The comrades in the ICP seem well versed in JV Stalin’s Guide to gratuitous political invective.

The WRP is not the only enemy of ‘Trotskyism’, ICP-style. The Scottish Socialist Alliance is summarily described as “an unprincipled amalgam comprising SML [Scottish Militant Labour], Scottish nationalists, the discredited Communist Party of Scotland, together with a handful of middle class protest organisations, such as anti-motorway campaigners. Its main campaigning goal is for the creation of a Scottish parliament.” So there you are.

Instead of spending all day reading the collected works of David North, perhaps the ICP comrades would be better advised to study How to win friends and influence people.

Don Preston