21.11.1996

And so, farewell ...

WRP liquidates

On Saturday November 23, the Workers Revolutionary Party (Workers Press) “will cease to exist” and its remnants will “join with others to form a transitional organisation for the new socialist party so urgently needed by the working class” (Workers Press November 16).

On the same day, the first issue of an “exiting new paper will be on sale”. So ‘exciting’ is the prospect of this new publication, the WRP is actually suspending Workers Press to throw its resources into the new project. Frankly, it is all a little vague - the lead article in this “last issue of Workers Press” asks itself,

“What will it be called? What masthead design will be chosen? Have all the promised articles come in? How did Tom manage his first try at layouts?”

The WR.P’s ‘excited’ hopping up and down convinces no one, least of all its own membership, we suspect. What is actually happening is the low-level liquidation of a revolutionary organisation and the consequent scattering of its comrades to the winds. Only sectarians would gloat at this. Thousands of working people and dedicated comrades have given money, commitment and time to what they mistakenly thought this organisation embodied - the fight for working class revolution.

Thus, the sad fate of the WRP is a result both of the general period of reaction we all operate in and of its own, chequered history as a strand of post-World War II Trotskyism.

While it shared a common heritage with most other Trotskyist organisations, the WRP’s direct antecedents date to 1956. Then, with the Communist Party in turmoil over events in Hungary, leading British Trotskyite Gerry Healy was tempted out of his subterranean existence in the Labour Party. ‘The Club’ - his imaginatively named organisation - was reorientated and a new paper, The Newsletter, was launched (although not as an open Trotskyist publication). It won a couple of hundred disaffected CPers and on this basis the Socialist Labour League was formed in 1957. Most of these ex-communists were lost over the following years, although key members of today’s WRP (Workers Press) originate from this time.

The SLL became the WRP in 1973, as Healy’s political ambitions grew. Fantasy visions of imminent revolution and military coup were used to keep members sleeping with their boots on and stumping up large amounts of money. However, at length the real world was bound to intervene.

The Miners’ Great Strike of 1984/85 popped the bubble of those like the WRP that claimed to be the party. Shortly after the defeat of the strike, the WR.P ‘imploded’, as one left group put it. Amid a storm of accusations about sordid abuses of power by Healy and his coterie, the organisation shattered.

The elements that cohered around Workers Press at one time were the most healthy to come out of the whole sorry mess. As we wrote in an open letter to the organisation in 1986, “From being the most inward looking sectarian organisation on the British left, developments subsequent to the Healy group’s expulsion ... opened up some of the most fluid debate in the workers’ movement” (The Leninist July 12 1986). Yet it failed to make a fundamental break either with the paradigm of Trotskyism or with its particularly degenerate variant of it. Tom Kemp - one of the organisation’s central leaders - wrote that “Despite the degeneration of Healy and his clique there was no other organisation in Britain which preserved the continuity of the Marxist movement” (Workers Press April 19 1986).

Thus, the split resolved nothing fundamental. In many ways, the WRP (Workers Press) simply adopted a form of ‘flip side’ Healyism. From being a deeply sectarian organisation, prone to denouncing large sections of the rest of the left as being either paid agents of Moscow or of MI5, WRPers became ‘non-sectarian’ to the point of being painful. They became inveterate ‘campaign-chasers’. Charlie Pottins’ ‘Inside left’ column in the latest Workers Press (rather sadly tiled ‘au revoir’; ‘goodbye’ is rather more apt, we suggest), puts it thus:

“After 1985 [and the expulsion of Healy - IM], exposed to new experiences and the unfamiliar issues, to which Healy’s abstract ‘philosophy’ provided no guide, some comrades, even as they plunged into activity, felt vulnerable.”

This is the essential point. The WRP dumped Healy, but without expiating the theoretical root of the problem. In the absence of his catastrophic political framework, Workers Press floundered willy-nilly from one issue to another, shedding members and leaking energy with every tum. Its final collapse into oblivion has a melancholy inevitability about it.

To chivvy the WRP over the precipice, the central leadership of the organisation has employed more or less the same type of grandiose and overblown hyperbole that was once characteristic of Healy and his gang. Thus, according to Cliff Slaughter, the fact that “a good number of organisations” fighting single issue campaigns on “environmental and democratic rights questions combined to form Reclaim the future” is of “incalculable significance” (Workers Press November 16). Similarly, the fight of the Liverpool dockers has been lauded not simply as an important industrial dispute, but as a harbinger of the future of working class struggle in form and political content. The leadership has in this way confused important aspects of the consciousness generated in spontaneous struggles with that of revolutionary communism. This is the rotten methodology behind Slaughter’s warning against the approach of the “sectarian groups”, composed of “‘Intervening’, ‘politicising’ and so on” (ibid).

Not an awful lot changes. In the Miners’ Great Strike, the WRP under Healy took an uncritical attitude to the Labourite leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers (apart from the ones in the CPGB), combining this with blood-curdling pronouncements that “A return to work would be a catastrophic defeat for the working class and render fascism inevitable” (News Line October 30 1985).

Frankly, Slaughter does it with rather less panache.

From the reports we have received about the faction battle in the WRP against this liquidation, the organisation has few life signs. After calling for a national aggregate (attended by about 35 members), the comrades occupying what could be called the ‘middle ground’ limply put up no opposition to the liquidationist leadership.

Only two comrades, who have been correctly arguing for WRP members to join the SLP, spoke against the leadership line. They proposed joint resolutions with the ‘middling sorts’, but this group had no positive proposals. In practice, they were drifting with the leadership while moaning over the orientation.

An equivocal proposal was put that the WRP should not liquidate, but maintain a paper and organisation inside this new amorphous grouping. However, this was a hollow compromise, as it was not intended to stand in contradiction to submerging the organisation into a loose alliance of individuals around campaigns such as ‘Reclaim the future’.

Finally, it was agreed to have another meeting. As this will not actually take place until after the conference which plans to officially wind the organisation up, its deliberations are likely to have an air of ‘abstraction’ about them. It will all be over bar some (muted) shouting.

There is a minority of comrades in the WRP who wish to continue the fight for revolutionary politics ... and have the energy to take it up. These are the comrades now with the heaviest responsibilities in the fight for a genuine party of our class.

Ian Mahoney