31.10.1996

Fingering the IBT?

Party notes

Roy Bull’s letter in this week’s paper raises an issue that needs some comment. In my article (‘Wretched’, Weekly Worker October 10) responding to the International Bolshevik Tendency’s despicable attacks on the Communist Party, did I “turn stool pigeon” and “fink” on the IBT to the SLP leadership?

The charge is so ludicrous as to be almost beneath comment. However, as Trotsky notes, a lie is halfway round the world before truth has got its boots on. So let me take the opportunity to stamp on this particular nasty specimen before it gathers momentum.

On one level, the charge is quite surreal. We were replying to an especially clumsy article in the IBT journal 1917, written in the authoritative manner of an ‘insider’ about the intimate life of the SLP.

Well, perhaps a judicious reading of the Weekly Worker might provide this type of information you think, dear reader. Perhaps it would, but certainly not produce the statement that the “internal life of the SLP is on the whole quite open and democratic” (1917, No18 - undated). To our knowledge, nothing published anywhere on the revolutionary left - let alone in the pages of the Weekly Worker - would lead an organisation to conclude this unless it was the assessment of one of its own (particularly rightwing) “supporters”. 1917 comments that its “supporters” in Britain wound up their British organisation and entered the SLP. Even were this true, the inescapable conclusion is that they remain supporters of the International Bolshevik Tendency, an organisation with tiny sections on an least three continents that we know about and a leadership centred in the United States. If one believes that the people at the top of the SLP are all inborn clods, perhaps they might have missed this implication. However, its a long shot.

Next, it must be underlined that we have named no individual IBTer. This is in stark contrast to the Fourth International Supporters Caucus, of course. We have not only named people in this underground SLP faction; we have traced antecedents and quoted from internal documents produced by these people when they were in other organisations. Despite the fact that we have ‘outed’ Pat and Carolyn Sikorski, Brian Heron and others, we have reiterated in practically every article on their dastardly deeds in the party that we would unconditionally defend them against any threat of expulsion and campaign vigorously for all other sections of the left to do the same. So, are we witch hunting the witch hunters? Are we attempting to turn the tables and get these people expelled? Only an idiot would suggest this.

In fact, we have not even named all the members - past and present - of Fisc that we know of and have spoken to. This faction has undergone an evolution that has seen some elements fall away from it, repelled by the witch hunts and the contempt for democracy evidenced by its leaders. So while we damned the organisation as an organisation to hell and back, we have had a discriminating attitude to its individual members and would even be prepared to defend the chief witch hunters if the regime they have been instrumental in creating to exterminate us was ever turned on them.

Similarly, we attacked the IBT as an organisation for the pernicious role they are playing in the left of the SLP. Whatever the individual merits of these comrades, the group has been poisonous. It has opposed - without exception - every single attempt of the left of the SLP to organise itself and take steps forward. When the left has ignored IBT advice, this sect reluctantly trailed along, only to oppose the next forward move, then the next one.

Okay, so these individuals are playing a negative role. Why attack them as an organisation? Why not phrase the relevant section in our article along the lines of ‘Some people in the left of the SLP say that ...’

This would be pussy-footing around the main issue here - the IBT’s noxious campaign for all organisations on the British revolutionary left to self-destruct and to creep into Scargill’s party as individuals. Individuals can talk all sorts of crap, but as an organisation the IBT is playing the role of the left cover for the SLP witch hunters, who are also demanding that everything apart from themselves liquidate. As an organisation their hypocrisy is qualitatively the same as that of the Fisc, another ‘non-organisation’ organisation, imperiously demanding that everything apart from themselves cease to exist. Thus, the IBT deserves the same brand of treatment, despite the fact that it comes from different traditions and still constitutes part of the SLP left.

If any IBTer began to consciously aid the witch hunt against others in the left, we would name them as individuals without a moment’s hesitation. (Such a scenario is not impossible, I would suggest. I have sat over pints with IBTers and listened incredulously while they told me that the prohibitive SLP constitution is “understandable” for the early days of the SLP. All politics have a developmental logic).

We refuse to accept that an organisation which secretly remains an organisation while campaigning for the effective extermination of the entire revolutionary left apart from itself is immune to criticism because of its own - lying - self-designation as “liquidated”.

We have tried to engage the IBT on many occasions, as my original article made clear. Also, it is worthwhile informing readers that on two occasions before we published this piece we E-mailed this organisation both in this country and internationally (and there is no question of the international group no longer existing), urgently requesting the IBT’s advice on how to refer to the British section and its “supporters” (their designation). We received no response to either communication and are yet to hear anything from the IBT.

Comrade Bull’s letter is profoundly foolish, but it at least has the merit of making explicit what some of us only whisper in the ranks of the SLP left. Once again, we challenged the IBT - on whatever continent - to go into print to defend the miserable polemical charges against our organisation in its original article and now to substantiate any charges of witch hunting it thinks us guilty of. While comrade Bull has the value of being a prolific writer, he makes a pretty unhappy attorney for an orthodox Trotskyist group - don’t you think, comrade?

Mark Fischer
national organiser