07.11.1996

In the wilderness

Workers Power is to be congratulated for organising a well attended debate last week on ‘Labour and the union links’ at Conway Hall in London. Crucially discussion centred on the orientation towards the Socialist Labour Party.

Workers Power is in the unenviable and curiously sedentary position of advocating ‘critical’ support for both the Labour Party and the SLP without actually being in (just around) either of them. As several of its speakers made clear, the reasons for this are ‘simple’. Labour is still the party that the mass of the working class have illusions in.

The SLP is in a period of oscillation between the iron grip of bureaucratic control and the opposition emerging from advanced workers. As such, and after early mistakes overestimating the bureaucratic leadership, WP is now able to offer ‘critical’ support to those militant workers fighting within the SLP. All of this simple lack of engagement is divorced entirely from WP’s avowed intention to be a revolutionary propaganda combat organisation.

One WP member said that it would be pointless to take heed of CPGB enjoinders to join the SLP because (pointing to a table groaning with literature) that would mean liquidation of its project and all its publications. As Mark Fischer amply proved - waving a copy of the Weekly Worker at the comrade - this need not be so.

Cut off, removed from the admittedly frustrating, but politically necessary process of struggle within the SLP, WP is prey to all manner of demons and neuroses, all of which are reflections of a stasis at the heart of its organisation. Revolutionary debate, culture and practice have to be infused with flexibility and movement. Forgetting this leads one either into the common sense, no nonsense approach of Labour Briefing with their ‘All you need is the Labour Party’ refrain; or that of Workers Power, a group fast approaching the wilderness years.

Paul Hart