06.02.1997

Sterile sectarianism

In the Weekly Worker of January 16, Tom Ball and I replied to a frail polemic from Andrew Gastos of the Spartacist League/Britain (Weekly Worker January 9). We showed how the SL/B’s main charge against our Party - that we placed the demand on the National Union of Mineworkers for a ballot in the 1984/85 strike - was a scurrilous piece of fabrication. We revealed how this organisation cynically manipulated quotes in order to bolster this weak claim and concluded that given its palpable feebleness, this polemic was “intended to convince its own people” and no one else particularly.

Characteristically, this ponderously bureaucratic little sect has not yet replied. This probably reflects the excruciatingly slow lumbering of the group’s internal life, but also a certain political reticence on their behalf. As Tom and I noted in our original letter, going into print in the Weekly Worker actually poses the “uncomfortable task to SL/B of actually having to substantiate its lying accusations through proof rather than repetition”. Whether the fragile polemical edifice the SL/B works to create in the minds of its membership would survive a robust polemical exchange in the pages of this paper is debatable.

Gastos’ foolish letter also makes a number of other claims about our politics that we need to briefly reply to. In particular, he attempts to substantiate a claim made in the Workers Hammer - the drab paper of the SL/B - that we “refuse to oppose the anti-working class Maastricht Treaty, and are part of the Militant-led Socialist Alliance, which is committed to electing a Blair government” (November/December 1996). These crimes of ours are paraded as part of the evidence to back the wacky assessment that the Communist Party actually stands “to the right” of Scargill and other elements of the NUM leadership on a number of key issues.

First, on Europe. Gastos is forced to concede that the Weekly Worker of November 2l last year spelled out our “total opposition to the Maastricht Treaty (any version)”. But he then cites an article from The Leninist of November 1991 which states that “we communists in Britain do not take a pro or anti position on what exact course the United Kingdom government takes as regards European integration”.

The two statements are hardly in contradiction, of course.

While communists should fight all anti-working class legislation (Maastricht included), we recognise that the moves to greater European integration are the expressions of a process that is objectively progressive from the point of view of world history, even if under the direction of the imperialist bourgeoisie it takes complex, contradictory and oppressive forms.

This dual approach is only ‘opportunist’ viewed from the perspective of a sterile dogmatist.

Then, there is the claim that the Socialist Alliances up and down the country are “committed to electing a Blair government” (Workers Hammer November/December 1996). Gastos clearly feels himself on very shaky ground when it comes to proving this one and cannot actually cite one example of such a ‘commitment’. Instead, he dredges up a quote from the Scottish Socialist Alliance founding document which sets the aim to “maximise the anti-Tory vote”. This, Gastos absurdly suggests, “seems pretty transparent to us”.

So, when it again comes to proving its case with what its opponents have actually written, the SL/B flounders, blusters and is forced to infer. Comrades, we would like you to tell us - where exactly have either SSA or the Alliances in the rest of the country “committed” themselves to the election of a Blair government? Please name the document. Put up or shut up, in other words.

Flummoxed for a quote to back up his argument, Gastos is reduced to simply throwing mud. Thus he tells us that - even if he is at a loss to actually substantiate what his organisation has written - he doesn’t like us anyway as we are “happy to co-exist with [Militant Labour] that sponsors Billy Hutchinson, a known loyalist death squad member”.

On one level, this is a little hard to stomach. While our organisation has a proud record of active solidarity with the heroic struggle of Irish republicans, the Spartacist League treacherously equates what it calls “orange and green terror” in the north of Ireland. To be sniped at by an organisation that ostensibly sees little objective difference between Mr Hutchinson and an IRA volunteer is rather sick, therefore.

However, the idea that our organisation has been “happy” with ML’s rotten record on Ireland is a nonsense, as any regular reader of the paper could tell you. But the SL/B should be more explicit. Should ML be actively boycotted for its line on Ireland? Should other groups refuse to countenance any form of joint work with them? Does its reactionary courtship of figures like Hutchinson actually place it outside the workers’ movement, an organisation that it is impossible for any principled working class organisation to touch?

Perhaps in the odd little world that the SL/B inhabits this may sound like Leninist politics. In fact, the rest of us recognise it as sterile sectarianism - a form of opportunism that the SL/B and its parent organisation in the United States have become synonymous with.

Mark Fischer