12.12.1996

Gutter journalism?

Party notes

The critical letter from Peter Smithy in the last issue of the Weekly Worker needs a reply. Many comrades who know Peter were surprised at the tone of parts of this letter, in particular his suggestion that certain journalistic excesses in the November 7 and November 21 issues of the paper represented a “descent into the gutter of sectarianism”.

Peter is a leading union militant and a close sympathiser of our Party. His comments deserve serious attention. Whilst I do not think they are in any sense accurate, they certainly reflect a wider sensibility on the left in Britain.

Concretely, comrade Smithy defends the ‘honour’ of one Roy Bull, SLP member and editor of the Economic and Philosophical Science Review. Bull had been mentioned in passing in a small article by SL Kenning in the Weekly Worker (November 21), an aside that Peter suggested implied “the comrade was involved in some kind of financial corruption, or at least questions his integrity as a communist” (Weekly Worker December 5).

Obviously, things have moved on since Peter wrote those words. Bull and his cohorts have turned scab (see the John Pearson letter, page 4). Peter’s observation that the ‘comrades’ of the EPSR “have conducted themselves in a comradely manner even after fierce argument” no longer applies, therefore. I will be writing an article for next week’s paper that does rather more than question Mr Bull’s “integrity as a communist”, I’m afraid.

But Peter’s complaints have a wider imputation. He suggests that our comments on the calibre of the allies of the witch hunters in the Socialist Labour Party - “embittered failures, would-be sadists and sectarian misfits” (Weekly Worker November 7) - are not “acceptable”, especially when applied to “SLP member Tony Goss and the Stalin Society”. In subsequent conversation with Peter and other Communist Party supporters in his area, it was suggested that this amounts to little more than “personal abuse”.

The pages of this paper contain all sorts of different writing styles and idiosyncrasies. Unlike other papers on the left, the editorial team of the Weekly Worker quite correctly does not graft onto the individual authors a sanitised, mono-tempo house style. Naturally, some comrades express themselves in more florid language than others, but this is really not the point.

Writing on the mode of expression in the Party newspaper, Lenin asked:

“Since when has an angry tone against what is bad, harmful, untrue ... harmed a ... newspaper? On the contrary, colleagues, really and truly on the contrary. To write without ‘anger’ of what is harmful means to write boringly” (Collected works Vol 35, p47).

In 1907 Lenin’s ‘angry’ tone roused the Menshevik against him. He was charged with going too far in his polemical attacks on them and was summoned before a Party ‘court’ to account for his ‘excesses’. He countered that “it was necessary to carry confusion into their ranks; it was necessary to arouse among the masses hatred, aversion and contempt for these people ...” (Collected works Vol 12, p425).

Nothing in the criticisms of the thug, Tony Goss, or the eccentric sectarians of the Stalin Society has been non-political. They have not been lambasted for the shape of their nose, their orgiastic private lives or their taste in clothes. They have been pounded because of what they have said and done in the field of politics, even when these actions have had a ‘personal’ edge to them (in the case of Tony Goss, duffing up members of his party he disagreed with, or using his position in the movement for corrupt, individual advantage). I am at a loss to understand how this can be called “personal abuse”.

Comrades have also suggested that the sharp tone of the Weekly Worker can provoke regrettable responses from those it attacks. In this context Roy Bull’s desertion to the ranks of the witch hunters can be cited.

In fact this is precisely the purpose of polemic in the pages of the paper. The articles in the Party press are there to provoke response. If we write a paper that can be read with dull equanimity by people - like the scab, Bull, and his sad band of acolytes - who are already on the slippery, opportunist slope (and I know Peter agrees about the orientation of the EPSR group), then we are producing a dead newspaper.

Bull’s hysterical response to an oblique (and mildly expressed) aside in a single small article in this paper indicates not that “personal abuse” was being heaped upon him. It is a telling illustration of how easily an opportunist leftist, already determined on a course of accommodation with the SLP apparatus, can collapse into rightist scabbing. If the cutting tone of the Weekly Worker has helped make this foul, degenerative process a shorter rather than longer one, then we should regard this as a service to the movement as a whole.

Mark Fischer
national organiser