15.05.1997

Sectarians to the core

Workers Power talks tough, tells fibs

Post-election, the Workers Power group is busily compounding all the errors it made during the course of the campaign. The May issue of its paper digs itself deeper into the hole of pro-Labour sectarianism. Worse, it consciously seeks to mislead its readership and members about its intervention in the recent election, particularly its support for Terry Burns, the Socialist Labour Party’s candidate in Cardiff Central.

Central to WPs perspectives is a projected ‘crisis of expectations’ inevitably precipitated by Labour’s victory, especially with its overwhelming parliamentary majority. Thus it dismisses the performances of the Socialist Party and the SLP on May 1 - “both parties did abysmally,” we are snootily told - by an organisation that has never itself stood a candidate in the 23 years of its very modest existence (Workers Power May 1997 - all quotes from this issue unless otherwise indicated).

Instead, WP prides itself on being with what it calls “the mass” - in this instance, the millions of atomised individuals, the majority of whom were sociologically working class, who voted Labour. As leading WP member Mark Harrison put it - ineptly for one who no doubt claims to be a ‘Leninist’ “We’re not interested in the small number of advanced workers in [the SP and SLP]; we want to be with the mass” (WP post-election rally, Sunday May 11).

We dealt with this politically illiterate gaffe in last week’s paper (see ‘Party Notes: On compromise and tactics’). Only in physics is ‘mass’ an inert lump. In working class politics, the term ‘masses’ refers to that section of the people or class that has been drawn into action or movement. Thus it is an elastic category; it becomes broader and more all-encompassing to the degree that historical events gain in strength and depth.

In a quiet period, mass action can involve only very small numbers of people. As the revolution matures, it must necessarily swell until it becomes the “majority, and not simply a majority of the workers alone, but the majority of all the exploited” (VI Lenin Collected Works Volume 32, p475).

The sectarian dismissal of the “tiny” SP and SLP by the genuinely tiny and widely uninfluential WP is a reflection of its own self-delusion that it is strategically placed to benefit from the looming gargantuan ‘crisis of expectations’ that Labour’s election will precipitate. And this - WP leaders breathlessly assure their members - will happen “sooner rather than later - in [the] first year of office rather than [the] third” (WP perspectives document WP December 1996).

Yet try as you might, it is hard to cite hard evidence of the raw material for an explosion in the form that WP predicts. Indeed, WP itself can only dredge up historical instances where Labour has been used to “demobilise working class militancy” - specifically 1945 and 1974. So much for the notion that Labour cannot trounce the Tories without automatically “raising the hopes and confidence of the working class”.

But what about the election of Labour in today’s conditions? Doesn’t this indicate a rising tide of proletarian revolt?

In fact, in May’s issue of WP, Socialist Labour Party member Terry Burns, the only candidate supported by WP in the election, gave a far more realistic assessment when he noted from his campaigning work a real

“... apathy towards the Labour Party programme - or rather the lack of it. There was no enthusiasm amongst people to vote for the Labour Party, it was more a case of voting against the Tories.”

Like much of the pro-Labour left, WP is wedded to a thoroughly undialectical, stageist view of the development of the class. It thus makes the amazing claim that the Labour Party “is different to a Tory government in one important respect. Because the Labour Party remains a party based on the organised working class, the trade unions, Labour governments are vulnerable to working class pressure. That is why workers place demands on Labour that they wouldn’t dream of placing on the Tories.”

This illustrates the stark contrast between the Trotskyist ‘transitional’ method and Leninist minimum demands. We raise what is necessary for the defence of working class living standards and democratic rights, whatever capitalist government has a majority. The Trotskyist method inexorably leads to a Labour government viewed as a necessary transitional ‘stage’ in the development of working class consciousness.

“These parties [the SLP and SP] are tiny and did not represent any mass break from Labour. They could only be judged and endorsed on the basis of their programmes. Both the SLP and the SP advance left reformist programmes, which is why we did not call for a vote for them.

“There was one exception in the SLP, where the Cardiff Central branch stood on a revolutionary platform and gained over five percent of the vote. Workers Power gave it political and practical support in the campaign.”

First, the idea that the significance of the SLP (or the SP, for that matter) should be judged by its relative size is politically cretinous and even contradicts what WP itself was saying about this new formation last year. In the June/September 1996 issue of Trotskyist International, its theoretical journal, it wrote that “the very fact of a split, no matter how small, that includes a section of the militant vanguard, is of immense importance to revolutionaries”. So what, apart from WP’s sectarian appetites, has changed in the intervening period?

Secondly, WP has deliberately avoided telling the truth about its intervention around the campaign of Cardiff SLP. The Weekly Worker interviewed Terry Burns - the candidate of the branch- last week (May 8) and he made clear that the WP-lauded ‘revolutionary platform’ adopted by the branch had only a very limited circulation. In fact, every household in the constituency had the national SLP manifesto delivered to it, a left reformist policy statement. The platform touted by WP had a minuscule circulation - just 200 copies, we are told by the branch.

WP refers obliquely to this embarrassing fact when it wheedles that “a revolutionary programme is certainly no disadvantage in an election and can have powerful, if limited, propaganda value in the fight for socialist ideas” (my emphasis). Thus it fails to tell its readers the truth of the campaign in Cardiff. Its sectarian manoeuvring dictates it must dress it up as something other than it was.

WPs interview with Terry Burns characteristically avoids any contentious issues or questions that Terry Burns would be highly critical of WP about. Comrade Burns refers to the ‘revolutionary platform’ of Cardiff Central and - while he is not explicit - he suggests that its real strength was that branch members were galvanised by it and

“could go out with enthusiasm ... The fact that the ideas in the programme were revolutionary was important ... to those who came out and supported us, like members of Workers Power or those who did work behind the scenes. Whether they were important to the electorate I don’t know” (my emphasis).

Terry explicitly condemned WP’s position on the election in the interview we conducted with him in the Weekly Worker (May 8). He states that the position of WP- “calling for a vote for me, but not for Scargill in Newport” - was “totally untenable”.

He goes on:

“How WP could put a fag paper between [us] when we were standing on the same manifesto, and decide they would vote for one and not the other I don’t know” (Weekly Worker May 8, my emphasis).

The answer is made explicit in the current issue of WP.This little sect’s whole attitude to the SLP - and to the workers’ movement in general for that matter - is dictated by its own requirements as an organisation. Despite its protestations to the contrary, from the very beginning WP’s perspectives have been defined by its need to cohere itself as a sect, nothing else.

Thus in this issue of WP we have the edifying sight of Kirstie Paton - branch secretary of the voided Vauxhall branch and supporter of Socialist Labour Action (an SLP faction “in political sympathy with Workers Power”, as she coyly puts it) - in effect calling for people not to join ‘her’ party: “... if Scargill continues to purge the party of good socialists it won’t be a party worth joining,” she tells WP readers.

Clearly WP feels it has salvaged all it can from the SLP. It is now on a sectarian wrecking project for this important break from Labour - crudely illustrated by its attempts to foster artificial splits and divisions around Cardiff Central’s election campaign. WPs only remaining aim is to damage the SLP, in pursuit of its own narrow interests ... and those of Labour, of course.

Mark Fischer