17.10.1996

Trash can Sinatras

Party notes

Party comrades have been amused by the Workers Power Group’s feeble jibe against the Weekly Worker - our paper is, I am told, the “dustbin” of the left. By implication, this casts Workers Power in rather a sad light, of course. It has subsisted almost exclusively on the scraps out of this “dustbin” for its coverage of developments in the Socialist Labour Party - isn’t it amazing what some people ‘throw away’, comrades?

This insult expresses something more than polemical spite, however. Festering at the centre of it is a certain prissy, proprietorial sensibility; the idea that somehow the open publication of the details of differences within a left organisation is rather ‘distasteful’. The gentlefolk of the British revolutionary left thus cultivate for themselves a brand of Victorian hypocrisy: they affect aversion to ‘scandal’, but despite themselves they can’t help reading all about it.

And like the Victorians, it is clear that the left’s touchiness on this subject hides a rich repertoire of personal vices. Almost all the important organisations on the revolutionary left - apart from the punch-drunk serfs who form the pulverised ranks of the Socialist Workers Party - contain important theoretical differences. The Workers Power leadership itself, for instance, is cleaved by a fundamental division on the nature of the Soviet Union and the ‘workers states’ of Eastern Europe. It treats the debate as a conspiracy, a personal depravity it would prefer others not to know about.

This explains why so many sections of the left take a certain pleasure when our paper ‘outs’ others - but simultaneously have to deprecate our work in case we start writing about them. These comrades thus both deplore the “dustbin” role of the Weekly Worker and at the same time learn and are politically engaged despite themselves.

Thus, I have even heard the Weekly Worker’s exposé of the existence of the Fourth International Supporters Caucus, its bureaucratic minuet with Scargill in the SLP and its antecedents in the Brit-Trot brand of United Secretariat politics described - incredibly - as “gossip”.

We continue Lenin’s approach. This was characterised throughout his political career by a merciless openness, even at the expense of taunts from the enemies of communism. As he puts it, the temporary ‘embarrassment’ of openness is more alleviated by the knowledge that it is only through it that a genuine party of the class can be built:

“No, gentlemen ‘judges’, we do not envy you your formal right to rejoice at the sharp struggle and splits within the ranks of Social-Democracy.  No doubt, there is much in this struggle that is to be deplored.  Without a doubt, there is much in these splits that is disastrous to the cause of socialism.  Nevertheless, not for a single minute would we care to barter this heavy truth for your ‘light’ lie.  Our Party’s serious illness is the growing pains of a massParty. For there can be no mass Party, no Party of a class, without full clarity of essential shadings, without an open struggle between various tendencies, without informing the massesas to which leaders and which organisations of the Party are pursuing this or that line.  Without this, a Party worthy of the name cannot be built, and we are buildingit” (Collected Works Vol 13, p159).

Roll on the day when the work of the British revolutionary left is motivated by such a Partyist esprit de corps and we break the narrow, sterile sect mentality that continues to cripple our movement.

Honesty in politics is a product of strength; hypocrisy the result of weakness.

Mark Fischer
national organiser