10.04.1997

Spartville city limits

Party notes

The latest issue of Workers Hammer - bi-monthly paper of the Spartacist League/Britain - underlines just how politically frail this group has become. It also illustrates some rather more general points about the project of party building and the evolution of sects.

Comrades will recall a recent sharp polemical exchange between our two organisations over a number of questions - most notably the SL/B’s claim that our organisation campaigned on “the demand that the NUM organise a strike ballot” during the miners’ Great Strike of 1984/85 (Andrew Gastos for the SL/B Weekly Worker January 9).

Of course, we replied promptly to this claptrap. We challenged the SL/B to “cite one single leaflet, article or statement” where this “demand” appeared (Mark Fischer and Tom Ball letter Weekly Worker January 16). Further, we showed how the SL/B had cynically manipulated quotes by omission, deliberately cutting short selections from our press where we went on to actually denounce as “treacherous” the notion of “calling for ... and campaigning for” a ballot (ibid).

This issue of Workers Hammer effectively concedes defeat. It does not even mention this polemic, still less attempt to take up our challenge. We trust that this is the last we shall see of this dirty little lie in the pages of your press, comrades.

It does not end there, however. We made the point that such feeble and manifestly untrue polemics are naturally extremely hard to defend when contested. However, their purpose is not primarily to convince us, or even a wider political audience. Polemical intervention in ‘Spartville’ is not designed to intersect with, learn from and change reality at all. The first objective of such forays must be to preserve intact the Sparts’ dogma and the cadre structure that serves it.

Thus, while the SL/B has wisely thought better of pursing this ‘ballot’ nonsense, it continues to reiterate the central accusation that this snide polemical jibe was meant to provide hard evidence for - that our organisation and others influential on the left of the SLP “constitute a rightwing opposition to Scargill” (Workers Hammer April/May).

On one level, it is hard to take such an accusation seriously. Even the SL/B - conspicuous by its almost uncritical support for Scargill in 1984/85 - concedes“the SLP’s reformism” (ibid). The SL/B would recognise that organisations like ours stand - even if only formally in its view - for revolution, soviet rule and communism. The ‘proof’ it offered of our actual rightism were things like ... well, er... the ballot. Oh dear, comrades ...

Despite itself, the SL/B is thus undergoing a certain political development. Its sterile repetition of a lifeless creed during a relatively quiet period is one thing; today, the political scene is characterised by fluidity. In these circumstances, the positions of the Sparts - a belief system that feels little compunction to “substantiate its lying accusations through proof rather than repetition” (Weekly Worker January 10) - evolve spontaneously.

Thus, comrades report that witch hunting NEC members in the SLP have actually attempted to utilise this Spart-originated ‘ballot’ rubbish against the Communist Party. More significantly, I am not aware of one single statement by the SL/B which denounces the witch hunt in the SLP or its undemocratic constitution. Indeed, seen through the prism of Spart dogma, the process now underway in the SLP entails elements on the left of the party, representing “the most advanced layer of the proletariat” (Workers Hammer February/March 1996), purging a right wing, characterised by its sellout positions on key issues such as the miners’ Great Strike. While the SL/B has been coy enough not to explicitly back the witch hunt yet, its methodology clearly pulls in this direction.

This is dangerous territory for the SL/B. If it completes such an evolution, it will have some strange partners - the Stalin Society and Roy Bull’s creepy band of Tiananmen Square massacre fans around the Economic Philosophic and Science Review, to name just two of the more colourful.

Given what we have called the “ponderously bureaucratic” and “excruciatingly slow lumbering” of this group’s internal political life, the earliest we can now expect a new attack will be in its May/June issue - assuming it feels politically confident enough by then to venture into print, of course. That is, some four months after the original article from the SL/B.

Yet, in its way, this painfully slow pace provides a protective shield to the SL/B. Working at such a polemical pace, it is impossible to do much more than simply reiterate positions, rather than provide proof, clarification and justification. This is why we offered a robust polemical exchange in the pages of this more frequent and influential paper - a clash, given the SL/B’s evident political fragility, we speculated would probably “be the death of it” (Weekly Worker January 16).

Clearly, the SL/B thought so too.

Mark Fischer
national organiser