29.08.1996

No Party shortcuts

Linda Addison views the prospects for the WRP’s ‘new socialist party’

Much of the left has noted a period of fluidity opening up in our movement. This has taken the positive form of a recognition of the need to reorganise ourselves and forge the independent working class Party that is so lacking.

This recognition implicitly contains a critical analysis of the past concepts of Party and class, democratic centralism and programme. The striving toward Party and the attempts to break down the sectarianism of the past have engaged the left in debates and practical work around regroupment and rapprochement in many different forums, not least in the Socialist Labour Party. However, the failures of the past run deep - self-criticism, open debate and the ability to shed sectarianism are still lacking.

This is evidenced both in the process of the SLP’s formation and the reaction to it. The present leadership of the SLP is witch hunting members of other organisations and barring members from debating with other leftwing groups. It seems that the development of its programme for liberation does not involve the class, but rather will be worked out in secret and handed down to the class. As a project for socialism it is doomed to failure.

But rather than acting as revolutionary Marxists - whose task it is to actively engage in the world to bring consciousness to spontaneous movements and develop them positively - many groups have reacted as mere critics. Socialist Worker, Workers Liberty, Socialist Outlook, Workers Power, Fight Racism Fight Imperialism and Workers Press are all examples of leftwing publications which have criticised the SLP, but refused to actively influence a movement which represents a section of the class breaking from the Labour Party. Unfortunately this is rooted in the sectarianism of the past in which organisations have been more concerned to keep their own ideology frozen than to let it transform scientifically under the heat of real living struggles.

Militant Labour has been a partial exception. It battled its way into the initial discussions around the SLP but deserted that particular field when its proposals for a federal-type party were rejected. However, ML has attempted to open up the question of organisation through the Socialist Alliances in which, in Scotland as well as England and Wales, it has played a leading role.

Nevertheless, as is reported in this week’s paper, it also has a conspiratorial attitude to the formation of a new party. The discussion in its ranks on democratic centralism is seen as an internal private affair and as such its call for a new socialist party is in danger of being little more than an opportunist name change.

Thus the need for organisation, for Party, is announced, but it is not fought for theoretically and practically.

We get glimmers of a similar process inside the Workers Revolutionary Party (Workers Press). As we have reported in previous issues the WRP is in the process of dissolving itself to form a “transitional” grouping towards a new socialist party. This idea began to form on the basis of the ‘Workers Aid for Bosnia’ campaign but has now resurfaced around the Liverpool dockers dispute. Again what we see is an understanding of the need to break out of sectarianism, but without a Partyist approach.

What is most interesting about this process is the debate which seems to be emerging within the ranks of the WRP. Workers Press has taken the positive step of opening up its pages to a discussion on the formation of a new socialist party. However, it has limited letters to 400-500 words. But reading between the lines of letters so far published, it is obvious that a much more fundamental debate is taking place internally. Given that the organisation is proposing to dissolve itself, you would hardly expect anything else. Given also that this is taking place in the context of the formation of the Socialist Labour Party, and perhaps in opposition to it, this is hardly going to be a rubber stamp operation.

There is some indication of the discussions taking place both within the WRP and amongst other individuals in a report of the steering committee meeting that followed the WRP’s March 16 ‘Crisis in the Labour Movement’ conference (see Weekly Worker March 21).

Cliff Slaughter of the WRP opened the debate at this meeting, saying that: “There are many questions” (All quotes are from the steering committee report of August 5). This is of course an obvious truth, but it is still not clear how the new ‘transitional organisation’ aims to answer these questions. Slaughter says that: “It must be based on Marxism and the development of Marxism today”; and that: “The dockers’ leadership is a vanguard with an internationalist perspective.”

This seems to be the rather tenuous theme of the majority of the WRP. The heroic and militant struggle of the dockers is conflated with Marxist science and revolutionary programme. International solidarity is conflated with communist internationalism. This is a theme taken up by others in the discussion. Chris Knight of Left Labour Briefing says, “We are not saying, ‘Join us’. We are saying we want to join you - we want to join workers in struggle.” He continues: “The dockers have organised the greatest support for internationalism in history.” Hassan of the Iranian Workers Association adds: “We are not the vanguard: we are part of the struggle, because the workers have got a vanguard.”

It is far from clear what he means, but the idea behind all this is that the job of Marxism is to staff and build picket lines and demonstrations. This would be a disastrous road for the WRP to take. The task of communist organisation is to forge working class struggle into a programme for the liberation of all humanity. Nobody would deny the huge achievements of international solidarity that the dockers have made, but to suggest that this means the working class as a whole is breaking from bourgeois ideology and raising itself to the tasks of a ruling class is wishful thinking and not the work of Marxists.

Kevin Hargreaves asks: “If we don’t put Marxism to the fore, then what’s the difference between this initiative and the Socialist Labour Party?”  Just asserting the need for Marxism does not make us Marxists. This requires the unity of theory and practice through rigorous open debate and theoretical clarification around the highest achievements of the class as a whole.

In some ways there does seem little difference between the WRP’s project and that of the SLP, except that the SLP was born of a real movement of a section of the class which thus has the potential, if infused with revolutionary consciousness, to mobilise the class as a whole. The WRP, not happy with the evident shortcomings of the SLP leadership, is trying to manufacture a movement which does not exist, on top of which it plans to build a “new socialist party”. This question obviously has not passed WRP members by, but neither has it seen the full light of day in Workers Press. Revolutionaries in the SLP can bring it out into the open by taking part in the debate.

At the meeting the debate over the name of the new group only helped to emphasise the confusion surrounding the exact form the new group would take. Geoff Pilling amongst others did not want ‘Marxist’ in the name, as the grouping needed to be broader than that. He preferred “Movement Towards Socialism”. Dot Gibson answered the debate by saying that: “The name and form will come to us in the course of our discussions with others and particularly in the work for the conference, and we should ask the dockers what they think about this.” WRP members must be concerned about where exactly the leadership of their organisation is taking them.

At the end of the discussion Cliff Slaughter was particularly concerned to douse any notion of regoupment that some had raised in the discussion. After restating the need for “the party of the working class to be based on Marxism”, he finished by saying: “We were against regroupment of existing ‘Trotskyist’ groups as a method of reconstruction - it is not just a question of defining what the various groups agree on and what they disagree on and coming to some decision for regroupment out of that. The founding conference of Workers International stated that there can be no reconstruction of the International except in and through the reconstruction of the internationalism of the working class.” Contempt for organised revolutionaries and sectarian schemas to bypass the hard task of forging communist unity is not the sole property of the SLP leadership, it seems.

The fact that the question of Partyism, regroupment and rapprochement is infusing the left at the moment is undoubtedly a positive development. But there are no short cuts to building working class organisation. What is urgent now is open and honest debate, involving all revolutionaries. This is a question for the whole of the class, not the property of self-proclaimed leaders.