19.09.1996

The SLP: a party of ‘recomposition’?

Party notes

The core of the Fourth International Supporters Caucus - the small, clandestine faction in the leadership of the Socialist Labour Party - is now obviously a tiny clique composed of Pat and Carolyn Sikorski and Brian Heron. The evolution of this group has distanced it dramatically from its erstwhile comrades in Socialist Outlook/International Socialist Group.

Interestingly, Fisc also has a certain periphery in the SLP - more or less distant - composed of a small number of comrades from the same political background of United Secretariat Trotskyism and formally committed to the same strategic perspectives as the ‘inner sanctum’. Yet in reality, elements of this periphery are becoming increasingly uneasy about the bureaucratic practice of the Fisc/SLP mandarins and their anti-red witch hunting. 

Internationally, this strand of Trotskyism is committed to a ‘recomposition’, the coming together of different strands within the workers’ movement into mass formations which, while not committed to a revolutionary programme - or anything like it, allow wide-ranging internal democracy and the room for revolutionary forces to organise. The United Secretariat of the Fourth International - the body with which Fisc formally still bears some sort of tenuous relations - regards such developments as Communist Refoundation in Italy and United Left in Spain as vital moments in the reconstitution of the international workers’ movement. In Britain specifically, the USFI has looked to the SLP as the manifestation of this progressive international phenomenon.

Unsurprisingly therefore, there are real tensions within the British supporters of the USFI in the SLP. One section - which at the moment has no open political expression and is increasingly frustrated - remains committed to the perspective of the SLP as a party of ‘refoundation’, with the right for platforms and factions to openly present their views and organise to win a majority within the party. While we have many disagreements with this strand, we believe that they have a certain responsibility to fight the other section of USFI SLPers - the witch hunter generals.

The most developed defence of the SLP as a ‘party of refoundation’ thesis has come thus far from Brian Heron. So far, it has gone unanswered by the elements of the Fisc periphery opposed to the hounding of other political tendencies within the new party.

In his Capital and Class article (No59, Summer 1996), Heron is at pains to emphasise that the SLP’s “specific ‘Britishness’ is what links it irrevocably to similar experiments of ‘refoundation’ throughout Europe” (p143). Elsewhere, Heron points out, “Other routes [have been] chosen according to the configuration of the local political forces.”

However, this is secondary - “The point is refoundation” (Ibid). Of course, Heron’s parameters of what constitutes a ‘specifically British’ tradition never leave the boundaries of left social democracy. Throughout his piece, he manipulates the history of the workers’ movement in this country to fit his thesis that the natural, ‘organic’ structures of our movement are social democratic - a ‘bureaucratic reflection’ of the partial achievements of class independence during the period 1880-1920. Revolutionary episodes, such as the formation of the Communist Party in 1920, were therefore episodic conjunctures, growths “gouged” out of the main body of the movement, which - separated from its host body - then died lingering deaths, or “dwindled”, as Heron wistfully puts it (p142). Such unnatural surgical experiments expressed nothing very important; working class political independence - such as it was - continued to find its partial bureaucratic expression exclusively through the medium of the Labour Party.

This is rubbish, of course. In order to justify this Labourcentric view of the world, Heron must in effect ignore the history of our class in the 20th century. The formation of the Communist Party in 1920 represented the highest political/organisational achievement of the proletariat in this country ever. It dwarfs the formation of the union movement, the TUC or Labour. It represented the conscious fusion of an advanced layer of the working class itself, united on the basis of the highest theory available, the theory that had guided the working class to state power in the USSR - Bolshevism.

Despite the fact that it was numerically small, the CPGB exercised leadership over whole swathes of the class, numbered in millions at times. The history of the working class and its struggles in the 20th century - good, bad and indifferent - is largely the history of the leadership of this Party.

The fact that Heron can babble on for more than 3,000 words on the central theme of the “class independence” of the proletariat of the British Isles and barely mention this organisation illustrates the extent to which he has become an organic social democrat, not simply a pretend one for the sake of his game of Pabloite charades.

This attitude to the strands of revolutionary heritage in the history of the movement is important, however. Heron relegates the real revolutionary traditions of our class to historical accidents: these came out of “international conjunctures” which dug “small, radical currents out of the mainstream of the British labour movement” (p142). Thus, they really have no legitimate place in a genuine party of ‘recomposition’ of the working class of Britain. The revolutionary left - both in its manifestation today and historically - has been “puny”, committed to “remote abstractions, compared with the robust realities of the movement”.

The only strand therefore that has legitimate representation in the ranks of the new party is that of left social democracy, the political reflection of the ‘reality’ of the workers’ movement with its “unitary nature ... and its single mass party” - that is, Labour. Everything else is alien to the movement and has no place in the SLP.

Heron goes to great lengths to prove this, even though he does not have the guts to state it openly. Thus - in an odd way - he reassures his comrades internationally and in Britain that the SLP is a ‘party of refoundation’ because of its lack of democracy and anti-communist strictures, not despite them: “The technicalities are not the most important thing,” he informs us (p143).

The nature of the new party is not a technical question. We urge comrades in the SLP committed to democracy - whatever their political antecedents - to take up the struggle against those trying to lumber our movement with a Labour Party mark II.

Mark Fischer
national organiser