28.11.1996

Fight the liquidation of the ICP

Edited statement by the Trotskyist Unity Group and Scottish Trotskyist Unity Group (external Leninist faction of the ICFI)

The transformation of the Australian Socialist Labour League and the British International Communist Party (ICP) into the Socialist Equality Party represents the political capitulation of the International Committee of the Fourth International to the example set by the American Workers League when it became the Socialist Equality Party.

The US SEP uses the mythical imagery of the American Revolution (see International Worker no 223, November 2) in order to portray history not as the class struggle but rather as a transhistorical or timeless struggle for equality. Hence, because the bourgeoisie has failed to realise this original moral quest for equality this principle has to be taken up by the working class in the struggle for socialism. However, this emphasis upon inequality is used to justify an ethical appeal to the working class. We can see this in the statement of the British SEP:

“Our party appeals to the humanitarian ideals and egalitarian traditions of the working class: the principle of solidarity with all workers in struggle, the readiness to fight for the common good, the confidence in a better future and determination to make it a reality” (International Worker No 224 November 16).

This ethical appeal adapts to the spontaneous alienated consciousness of the proletariat in a situation of the crisis of capitalism. Following the example of the US SEP, the British SEP describes capitalist society in terms of the distribution of wealth from poor to rich, and the structures of class oppression are held to express privilege and wealth which are blamed for inequality, rather than the extraction of abstract surplus labour from the proletariat.

So contemporary history becomes the timeless quest for equality, and on this idealist basis the necessity of class struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat is glossed over. Instead, there is an ambiguous call for a democratically controlled economy in order to realise the humanitarian ideals of the proletariat.

The statement formally acknowledges the international role of transnational corporations as the structural basis of exploitation, but this is eclectically connected to an analysis which moralises about the selfish individualism of the bourgeoisie and its betrayal of the principle of equality as the content of exploitation. This expresses a retreat into utopian socialism and away from the scientific socialism by the British SEP, the International Committee of the Fourth International and the US SEP.

The statement formally acknowledges that there is no parliamentary road to socialism and outlines the counterrevolutionary and nationalist role of the Labour Party, but it makes no mention of the need for revolutionary struggle by the proletariat and instead calls for a democratically organised workers’ government. The demands of the British SEP for full employment, improved living standards, decent housing, high quality education and comprehensive childcare represent the explicit codification of the collapse of the old ICP into left reformism. For the demands are linked to a cautious and ambiguous evolutionary call for the workers’ government to “strive to extend the democratic control of the working class over the economy”. As with Militant Labour, nationalisation and planning are equated with socialism, and the struggle to overthrow capitalism is thereby repudiated.

The previous strong emphasis upon proletarian internationalism is now reduced to a moral appeal to extend socialist equality worldwide. This call is actually connected to a nationalist-orientated British road to socialism, in which the democratic workers’ government will carry out a socialist foreign policy.

In terms of the British ICP we can locate the Gulf War, Ireland, the bureaucratic liquidation of the Glasgow branch, the poll tax, and the absence of democratic centralism as being key elements in their opportunist and nationalist degeneration. In order to return to and build upon the international tradition of the ICFI between 1985 and 1987 in its struggle versus the advanced nationalist degeneration of the Workers Revolutionary Party, it is necessary for the ICFI to repudiate the programme and perspectives of the various SEPs.

The TUG offers a united front to all those within the ICFI who want to struggle against this opportunism, and to this end the TUG and the Scottish TUG has now decided to become the external Leninist faction of the ICFI in order to facilitate this necessary political struggle.

It is no coincidence that both the majority of the WRP and the newly created British SEP are liquidating at this moment. This is because they are adapting to the political confusion which exists within the working class in the onset of counterrevolutionary developments in the recent period. These include the longstanding character of the Tory government and the demise of Stalinism and its replacement by bourgeois regimes.

This rejection of scientific practice is also a rejection of a dialectical philosophical approach and its role in analysing political practice. In this instance the WRP majority and the British SEP seem unable to comprehend why their previous revolutionary theory has been transformed into its opposite of a most rapid descent into the opportunism of anti-scientific ethical socialism.

The TUG international conference has come to the conclusion that the present period is characterised by splits, fissures and liquidationism, which poses the need for scientific socialism to rebuild the Fourth International.