06.03.1997

Infantile malady

Around the left

International Worker, fortnightly publication of the Socialist Equality Party, formerly the International Communist Party, has a record of unforgivable sectarianism of the worst sort. The most recent manifestation of this infantile malady was its decision to contest the Barnsley East by-election, with its candidate Julie Hyland standing against the Socialist Labour Party candidate, Ken Capstick. However, I would not join Workers Hammer, publication of the maniac Spartacist League, in classifying the activities of the ICP/SEP as “sinister”.

International Worker’s article (February 22) on ‘Sikorski’s resignation and the character of the SLP’ is a frankly stupid and ill-informed stab at our organisation. The Communist Party is labelled (boringly enough) as “former Stalinists” and as an “entryist group in the SLP”. Quoting the Weekly Worker that behind Sikorski’s resignation “lies the choice between class politics and trade union politics”, International Worker makes the extraordinary claim that it is actually the CPGB which

“totally identify the one with the other ... The ex-radicals and ex-Stalinists [ie, the CPGB - DP] oppose workers making a reckoning of their historical experiences with Labourism, reformism and trade unionism, in order to deliver them to the tender mercies of the bureaucracy.”

This must be a case of what Freudian psychologists call ‘displacement’. In reality of course it is the SEP which “totally identifies one with the other”, by its leftist insistence that any sort of trade union work must be by definition an act of class (collaborative) politics, on the grounds that all trade unions are “bastions of the state and sworn enemies of the working class” (ibid).

No wonder the SEP is so unpopular among certain sections of the working class ...

Don Preston