31.10.1996

Shiny schemas

Around the left

The Socialist Labour Party continues to be the big, ‘$64,000 question’ on the left. In the future we can guarantee that the SLP will loom larger and larger on the horizons of the revolutionary left.

For most on the left the formation the SLP was a damned inconvenience. Why? For the simple reason that Arthur Scargill’s courageous decision to split from Labour interferes with their shiny schemas and grand revolutionary ‘masterplans’. A classic example of this can be found in Socialism Today, the monthly journal of Militant Labour.

Comrade Peter Taaffe enthuses about revolutionaries in the near future “rehabilitating socialist consciousness on a mass scale” and stressing how they should be “calling for a mass party of the working class, based on socialist policies, to be prepared” (October). However, when the comrade approaches the SLP he shakes his head and announces: “A small, sectarian SLP has now unfortunately complicated the position in the short term” (my emphasis). Quite how a leftwing split from Labour, amongst the advanced layer of the class, has “complicated” or set back the struggle for a “mass party of the working class” is not explained. Whatever the case, “Militant Labour stands for the formation of such a party” - as long as it is not the SLP.

Workers News, bi-monthly paper of the Workers International League, has a similar attitude. Comrade Barry Murphy, in a piece called ‘What should revolutionaries do today?’, informs us that the one thing revolutionaries should not be doing is joining the SLP. For WIL, to do so would be an “avoidance of the struggle against the existing bureaucratic leaders of the working class ... It lets the leadership off the hook, and abandons the rank and file”. Instead, we should “use all our powers of persuasion to get left bureaucrats to lead struggles” (October/November).

The International Communist Party, in its paper International Worker, also has no time for the SLP. It denounces the SLP’s newspaper, Socialist News, for providing a “new fig leaf for the labour and Stalinist bureaucracy” and declares that a new mass party “cannot be built from the rotting remains of the old discredited political parties and trade union organisations” (October 5). Amusingly, the ICP looks at the SLP and the Socialist Alliances and thinks that “there is nothing preventing these two organisations merging at some stage”.

Even Socialist Review, published by the Socialist Workers Party, is forced to say something about the SLP - even if it cannot bear to utter its name openly. Thus, it states:

“To split from the Labour Party and join a party which continues to put the emphasis on fighting elections is to gain no advantage. It is to swap a smaller version for a larger version of the same thing” (October).

Not to treat the SLP seriously is not to treat politics seriously.

Don Preston