05.12.1996

Opportunist short cut

The following is the speech Phil Walden of the Trotskyist Unity Group made at the November 23 conference organised by the WRP

The history of the Socialist Labour League-Workers Revolutionary Party tradition stretches back half a century. The leaders, in their better moments, were clear that dialectical logic was a necessary component of the struggle for socialism. But the leadership of the WRP is now telling the working class they no longer believe in dialectics.

To abandon dialectics is to abandon the struggle for socialism. The leadership of the WRP has done this in favour of activist and opportunist short cuts. These short cuts are anti-Marxist. They are a rejection of the role of philosophy in challenging the illusions that the working class has in the system.

Back in the early 1970s the leaders of the WRP had a respectable conception of spontaneism and its pitfalls, even if the WRP sometimes ceded leadership to spontaneism in its practice. Back then, members of the WRP were allowed to utter the truth that trade union struggle does not equal revolutionary struggle. There was even the beginning of an important analysis to elaborate the Marxist truth about trade union spontaneism.

This truth was that trade union spontaneism has the effect of separating manual labour from intellectual labour. This is why it becomes anti-intellectual. So it was once upon a time recognised by the WRP that the development of consciousness is a struggle - a struggle because when we first enter Marxism we are dominated by spontaneous consciousness.

Before and during 1974 the WRP had a struggle against the trade unionist legal Marxism that split from it in that year. Trade unionist legal Marxism is a form of Marxism that can never become revolutionary Marxism.

It was correctly argued by the WRP at that time that pessimism results precisely when revolutionary Marxists have thought it was not a contradictory struggle to win people to our politics. In contrast the trade union legal Marxists did not even recognise this contradictoriness. They, to this day, simply assume that workers will follow their rationality. But now we find the WRP is proud to transform itself into the Workers Socialist League mark II and to embrace the very same trade union legal Marxism against which it struggled in the 1970s.

If there are some in the WRP who want to maintain the WRP, they should do this by re-examining its whole history. But the TUG does not support the opposition in the WRP in terms of their orientation to the Socialist Labour Party. The SLP is a rightwing form of reformism.

The TUG is concerned that the revolutionary past of the WRP be reclaimed. But the WRP has evaluated the 1985 split in a moralistic way. This moralism has become a justification to accommodate to spontaneity. The post-1985 WRP could have worked through its own history in order to learn theoretical lessons. Instead it has substituted every form of accommodation of spontaneous consciousness in place of carrying out its theoretical tasks.

On specific errors of the post-1985 WRP. Firstly, they say that the demise of Stalinism means that the present period is revolutionary. This does not recognise the reality of the massive ideological disorientation of the working class in a period that is counter-revolutionary and in which the task is to save the lessons of Marxism and its revolutionary thought from liquidation.

Secondly, the WRP does not know what to say about the Labour Party. The TUG says it is a bourgeois party. The WRP does not have anything coherent to say about the Labour Party. Thirdly, the majority in the WRP have tried to ignore the SLP. This is perhaps because they have the idealist view that if they do not look at it, it will of its own accord rid us of its rightwing reformist presence.

The WRP is not simply the property of the people in it. It is not something they can discard like an old pair of shoes. The WRP is part of the heritage that must be recovered. This heritage is needed for today’s fight to create a revolutionary party. It is a heritage which cannot be recovered without philosophical reflection. The TUG has been developing this case for five years, not only in relation to this organisation. But it is in the last 20 years that dialectical materialism, the old philosophy of Marxism, has been definitely superseded by the development of dialectical critical realism.