24.10.1996

WRP’s second wish

Liquidation is never a pretty sight. Followers of the Workers Revolutionary Party (Workers Press) and its nose dive into the melting pot of liquidation cannot have failed to notice the rather odd little editorial column, ‘For a new paper’, in last week’s Workers Press (October 19).

Having dropped founder/guru Gerry Healy, having dropped is insistence that Britain was gripped by a permanent revolutionary situation, having dropped at least nine-tenths of its membership in at least a dozen splits, the central committee of the Workers Revolutionary Party seems intent on dropping out ... or at least dropping out of any pretence of serious politics. Frankly, after idolising the reactionary pro-imperialist government in Sarajevo, that comes as no surprise.

If we dig beneath the jubilatory rhetoric of the column, a rather more sorry story can be uncovered. Cliff Slaughter, it seems, is holding the wheel for the liquidation juggernaut, which, judging from their intervention in the last ‘Crisis in the Labour Movement’ steering committee meeting (see Weekly Worker August 29), is being fuelled by Dot Gibson and Geoff Pilling.

The column reports a successful meeting to discuss a new newspaper for a ‘new movement’. Readers will remember that this abstract ‘new movement’ consists of the WRP ceasing to exist and joining with “workers and youth” to form a ‘new socialist party’ (all quotes from Workers Press column October 19).

‘For a new paper’ congratulates the 50 people who turned up for the meeting at two days’ notice in the middle of the afternoon. It then veers off to talk about the demonstration and mass picket in which Liverpool dockers were joined by Reclaim the Future activists in September. At the end of the column, as if incidentally, we are told:

“It was therefore only natural that, at the October 10 meeting, we [my emphasis] initiated a discussion on a paper for the new movement. It is in this context that we discuss the future of Workers Press.”

Thus WRP members are informed of a hastily arranged meeting held in the middle of the afternoon which discussed the liquidation of their paper for them.

The WRP’s congress in July had decided that the “WRP would ... cease to exist and would put its resources, including Workers Press, into this transitional organisation.” From here it was only a small hop for Pilling and Gibson to liquidate the paper altogether. The collapse of Workers Press was always a logical corollary to dismantling a centralised organisation into a loose alliance of activists who collectively want to wish a new party into existence.

Nevertheless the positive advocacy of such a course no doubt has its effect on WRP members. There is a significant section at the centre of the organisation not happy with the direction they are being taken. As a result some members called for a national aggregate before the ‘Unite the struggles’ conference so the membership could actually discuss together prior to an event which will crown the WRP’s liquidation. The winding-up conference, ‘Unite the struggles! Crisis in the labour movement - the need for a new socialist party’, is being held on November 23 and is open to anyone (£7 employed, £1 unemployed).

A few individuals have raised their criticisms in the paper and have been arguing for WRP members to join the Socialist Labour Party. Most of those calling for a membership aggregate however have to date remained largely silent.

An aggregate has been conceded, but this is a dangerous silence, since sections of the leadership seem hellbent on finally destroying any effectiveness the WRP once had, aggregate or not. Cliff Slaughter has tried to respond to the rumblings of discontent by suggesting that the WRP should exist as a fraction of the new organisation. But those charting the course of liquidation are not interested in halfway houses since they have already been energetic in promising the dissolution of the WRP.

Perhaps this is why the next meeting to discuss the paper was scheduled for Thursday October 24 (five days after it was advertised in Workers Press) at 2.30pm. Meanwhile, a WRP central committee meeting on October 13, it is announced,

“gave its full agreement to the decision: that all those in the fight against state oppression, for workers’ rights and with a belief that we must reclaim the future today should come together to act on the decision that a new newspaper be launched for this fight”.

It must be a little disconcerting to have the future of the paper you have struggled to build for years being discussed amongst who knows who, in cosy afternoon chats in London. It must be even more disconcerting to have these cosy chats subsequently backed by your central committee.

The WRP leadership has been hopelessly tailing two very militant and imaginative campaigns. It has taken this so far that it has completely lost any ability to judge real, potentially mass movements of our class towards Party. Having wished for a new party, it is now wishing for a new paper.

The WRP is clearly in difficulties - theoretically, organisationally and financially. But to imagine that liquidation can turn this situation around can only be born out of desperation or disillusionment, not from scientific analysis.

Unfortunately the dockers and environmentalists do not represent an upsurge in class struggle, but rather isolated heroic fighters in a period of working class retreat. Jimmy Nolan, chair of the Liverpool dockers’ shops stewards committee, noted this in his letter to the Weekly Worker last week. Having failed to win solidarity action at home, the dispute has dragged on, relying on international support.

It should be noted that Jimmy Nolan has joined the SLP - at the moment a much more promising prospect for militants than the abstract ‘crisis movement’ of the WRP. The pages of Workers Press are full of self-deluding attacks on those WRPers and supporters of the SLP’s Revolutionary Platform who advocate that all partisans of the working class should join Socialist Labour.

There is however what might be called a significant silence. Though the WRP leadership and its improbable allies - like Labour Briefing’s Chris Knight - fawn before the Liverpool dockers, none of them have dared challenge, let alone oppose Jimmy Nolan, over his decision to take out an SLP card.

In circumstances of working class retreat disorganising is the worst thing revolutionaries can do. Now is the time to correct past mistakes and develop the theoretical and practical revolutionary organisation, the Party that can turn the tide of working class defeat. Building new sects is not the answer to the sectarianism of the past.

As we have argued in this paper, the SLP is one important site for this process of Partyism. It is important because a section of the class has broken from the Labour Party to build its own organisation.

The liquidation leaders have already arranged for an ex-SLP member to speak against those in the WRP who have seen rather more potential in the real, albeit fragile, movement around the SLP than in the WRP’s pet project. The speaker recently resigned from that organisation because of the imposition of the draft constitution.

It is true that the SLP leadership at the moment is trying to build a bureaucratic, social democratic monolith. But large sections of the membership want the new party to be democratic: they want it to be theirs, not the property of another sectarian clique. In the struggle for democracy in the SLP there is the struggle for a revolutionary party. Only through democratic centralist organisation can the class win its struggle for democracy, for working class power. This is the struggle that revolutionaries must wage now amongst all sections of our class.

To do this we must be organised at the highest level. Liquidating organisation - whether into broad campaigns or the still embryonic and amorphous SLP - will not further this task.

Lee-Anne Bates