24.10.1996

Continuity

Party notes

Party organisations and comrades must make sober judgments as we come to draw up our plans for the coming year, soon to be codified in the document Perspectives ’97.

There is quite a lot of foolish talk from some sections of the revolutionary left about the nature of the present political juncture. Workers Power leaders assure their members that we are enjoying a “revolutionary period”, although - strangely - it has opened in a “counterrevolutionary” way. Militant Labour still has not revised its earlier assessment of the present decade as “the red 90s”, although they have not so far proved very fruitful for it. Given the ‘expansive’ nature of the period, Socialist Workers Party members are being enjoined to “recruit, recruit, recruit” (especially as the leadership is trying to tart up membership statistics, with the annual conference approaching in November) - and still the net result will be a marginal loss of people, activists tell us.

Our Party has characterised the present interval as a period of reaction of a special type. Although the organisations of the working class remain by and large intact, there is a deep ideological retrogression. The working class as an independent political factor, even as expressed in a refracted form through the bureaucratised agencies of social democracy or the parties of official communism, has disappeared. Those small glimmers of light - such as the Socialist Labour Party - are also in their way products of this defeat.

The opening up of the revolutionary left to debate is also a result of the failure of its perspectives, although it is to be welcomed and brings us real opportunities. We must underline however that we are not dealing with some brashly confident layer of society, initiating an exchange, assured of its own ideas and relevance. Hardly. Important sections of the left are not simply objectively marginalised, but politically fragile. No one should look at an organisation like Militant Labour and sanguinely assume that it will still be around in five years’ time. Bigger, more rooted organisations than this one have gone ‘pop’ in the past: ML is going through a potentially very dangerous period.

Currently heading the liquidationist pack are the leaders of the Workers Revolutionary Party, a layer that seems to regard its job as chivvying its membership over the precipice. Yet other organisations also contain huge, potentially lethal contradictions within themselves. The SWP for example is at the moment more or less a closed book to us. We do have a small audience for our paper and our ideas in its ranks, but we are probably as far from knowing what is really happening on the inside as the average SWP member. Rather a long way, in other words.

Despite this, from a number of different sources around the country, we have been given reports of the stresses of the period on this important organisation. The fixed idiot grins on the faces of the rank and file required by the leadership are beginning to grow a little sick. In particular, the support for Labour in the next election is troubling many and sections of the apparatus are beginning to anticipate objections. Although nothing of interest yet surfaces in the internal bulletin, this perhaps explains why the organisation’s annual conference in November has been extended by a day.

We are not detached observers of all of this, of course. There are disintegrative pressures which bear down on our Party also. We shall remain flexible, but we certainly should not draw up Perspectives ’97 in the anticipation of a dramatic breakthrough in the next 12 months. Continuity must be an essential motif of our plans for the coming year and should loom large in the minds of all cadre.

Mark Fischer
national organiser