27.02.1997

Thumping people

Party notes

Readers will not be too shocked to learn that at the Socialist Labour Party’s London election rally on February 25 Tony Goss tried to thump people.

He started off with me, but quickly let it be known that several members of his own party would do just as well. I always think there is something vaguely comic about most fights - very few blows ever actually get exchanged and people look incredibly undignified. That said, the firm intervention of comrades from the SLP and Workers Power prevented a semi-farcical situation turning nastier and I am grateful for their help.

There are a number of more serious points to be made about this silly incident, however.

First, on the atmosphere in the SLP itself. Tony Goss was only one of three SLP rightwingers who behaved threateningly to me on the night. We wrote some time ago that the witch hunt in the SLP calls forth its own shabby cadre, misfits whose modus operandi is threats, abuse and intimidation. Clearly, as the cull in the organisation gathers pace, these elements feel increasingly confident about throwing their weight around.

It has little consequence for us, of course. We might have the inconvenience of having a few of our comrades physically attacked, but on a serious level that is neither here nor there. We are an experienced group, with an open weekly newspaper, that intervenes on a swathe of important political questions. Tony Goss and his chums can posture as much as they like; they can never silence this organisation.

The worry should surely be for SLPers themselves, particularly those on the left. They can be gagged, of course. We have reported that the practice of autocratic diktat is growing in the party. Combine this with a Tony Goss let loose to discipline the ranks in his own inimitable fashion, and a not particularly edifying picture is conjured up.

This underlines the urgency of left unity in the face of the threat. At the moment, the left seems unable to cohere and is facing the onslaught from the right fractured and semi-at war with itself. This is a recipe for disaster, comrades.

Then there is a broader point that needs to be made about violence in the workers’ movement. Of course, we are not pacifists. After all, we intend to meet the force of the bourgeoisie with our own working class violence, up to and including civil war. Yet it should be a principle that political disputes and disagreements in our own ranks - no matter how passionately contested - are settled without violence.

It was a measure of the cultural degradation of the Bolshevik Party under Stalin that oppositionalists and leftists started to be subjected to crude threats, abuse and physical attack. Deutscher describes Trotsky’s last challenge to the Stalinised central committee in 1927:

“They shut their ears to his arguments ... table inkpots, heavy volumes and a glass were flung at Trotsky’s head while he spoke ... There was no end to the threats, jibes and curses, which made this assembly look like a meeting of damned souls” (The prophet unarmed Oxford 1989, pp366-7). At every level crude intimidation and violence displaced the incisive political discourse once characteristic of Lenin’s Party.

Thus, in contrast to what one SLP rightwinger assured me on the night, physical threats to your political opponents are not the natural expression of a proletarian political idiom - “just the way working class politicians go about things”, I was informed. On the contrary, it is its diametric opposite. It expresses a moral, cultural and political bankruptcy.

It should have no place in our movement and those - like Goss - whose putrid politics cannot articulate themselves in any other way should be outside our ranks also.

Mark Fischer
national organiser