21.11.1996

Three waves

Party Notes

The Weekly Worker is characterised by openness on all political matters. While this has entailed a price, we believe that it is actually the key strength of our organisation. The strength it bestows on us is not some detached moral superiority, or a saintly feeling of otherworldly virtue. It is actually an intensely practical approach, particularly in relation to the struggle in and around the Socialist Labour Party.

For instance, take recruitment - one of the key questions our organisation will be discussing in formulating its Perspectives ’97 document over the next few weeks. The right wing of the SLP has put forward the idea that the Communist Party has mobilised “three waves” of its supporters to fight for democracy and revolutionary politics in the SLP. They may or may not be correct, but this misses the point.

As an open political organisation with a paper characterised by its honesty, we recruit uninterruptedly both in the SLP and outside it. New sympathisers, supporters and informal ‘stringers’ for the Weekly Worker appear out of thin air and - as a result of our organisation’s candour about the nature of the fight it is involved in - as partisans of the Party’s approach. “Three waves” is therefore a little conservative, comrade witch hunters.

Our position as an independent political organisation also helps explain many of the tensions between comrades in the SLP who support the approach of our Party and those who have adopted a ‘heads-down’, deep entryist strategy. For these comrades, formal membership of the SLP is everything. Their party card is the only thing standing between them and the ‘wilderness’. The Weekly Worker’s openness is therefore viewed as a provocation, almost as if we are responsible for stoking up the witch hunt by reporting the shenanigans of the right wing.

These tensions may increase over the coming period. The witch hunt in the SLP seems to have been ratcheted up a notch or two over the past few weeks. A series of attacks by the Fourth International Supporters Caucus have been reported from around the country as the right attempts to purge the revolutionaries.

Of course, our organisation will pay a price. In the short term we will probably pay the heaviest. Comrades who are accused of supporting or even sympathising with the Weekly Worker are going to be targeted for the bureaucratic guillotine. However, the ‘wilderness’ does not beckon either for these individual comrades or our organisation as a whole.

At its core, the significance of the SLP is that it is a manifestation of the Party project, the fight for a revolutionary organisation organic to the class. It has brought together a layer of workers breaking from Labour and revolutionaries from a wide variety of political backgrounds. Many of these comrades have said previously - and even in clumsy moments still do - that they “could never be in the same organisation” as each other. The project of a genuine Party of the class - the chink of light offered by the SLP- has brought them together in practice. This is a vital lesson for the whole left

The Communist Party and its leadership, the Provisional Central Committee, believes that the key weakness of the revolutionary left is precisely its lack of understanding of Party. We urge those comrades in and around the SLP to join us in the fight for this key link. An understanding of this basic task will set in context all our work around the SLP and will ensure that the engagement of revolutionaries with this process will be a constant one, whatever the membership status of this or that individual.

Mark Fischer
national organiser