05.06.1997

Opening up the post-election debate

Mark Fischer comments on Socialist Party’s internal discussion document, see ‘The 1997 general election and perspectives for Marxism’

We are grateful to the comrade in the Socialist Party who sent us this internal assessment [See article 'The 1997 general election and perspectives for Marxism' in this issue'] of the May general election by the party’s leadership. She cites the words of her campaigns organiser Hannah Sell, interviewed in the May 8 issue of the Weekly Worker. Hannah boldly states that “internal disputes in general should be openly discussed” and even offered our readers “if you want to find out more [specifically about the debate around the SP’s name change], you’re more than welcome to get hold of our internal documents”.

Our unofficial ‘stringer’ writes that she believes this document - which has all the hallmarks of having originated from Taaffe himself - will be of interest “to many on the left given our [the Socialist Party’s - MF] central position in the opposition to Blair”. She is certainly right and we hope that both she and other comrades in the Socialist Party take our criticisms as they are intended - as fraternal attempts to correct what we perceive as mistakes by an important working class organisation.

Politics and the working class

First, the narrowness of the analysis is quite breath-taking. The document claims a limited remit for itself - apparently fuller perspectives are to be produced for the organisation’s national conference. However its makeshift character does not excuse the fact that it does not even briefly examine the two key issues that have provoked such controversy in the ranks of the establishment parties and which contain potential for mass action - the constitutional position of Scotland and Wales and European integration.

This is not accidental, of course. It reflects the SP’s reformist sectionalism. In Peter Taaffe’s dull article on his organisation’s perspectives for 1997 (Militant January 10) - presumably not a hastily thrown together piece - Scotland and Wales were again not mentioned. Instead, much like this internal statement, the cited examples of the combustible material stored up in British society are all narrow and ‘economic’.

This cramped vision expresses SP’s opportunist method. The ‘Scottish question’ becomes an issue for the ‘Scottish organisation’ - Scottish Militant Labour. This internal document claims that it refrains from commenting on Scotland “because of the material produced by Scottish comrades which will be circulated”. Yet this sectionalist approach is rooted in the programme and practice of the organisation. The Scottish question is a key democratic question for the proletariat of the rest of the country, crucially that of the majority nationality, the English.

Its absence from SP’s perspectives confirms a rotten methodology that has already seen powerful centrifugal forces begin to operate on the organisation, threatening to tear it apart. The granting of ‘autonomy’ to SML - in reality an organisational schism - was justified by Taaffe because of “the growth of a clear and distinct national consciousness” (Members Bulletin 16, p6). In reality it was a timid capitulation to the growing nationalist pressures operating on SML. Apply this brand of reasoning to the workers movement as a whole and you have a recipe for meltdown.

Bourgeois Labour

The statement compounds the organisation’s confusion on the nature of the Labour Party. SP now simply characterises Labour as a “bourgeois” party and we are told in this document that “this government is a bourgeois government”.

This leaves a number of questions unanswered, of course. What Labour government has been anything other than ‘bourgeois’? When, where and how did Labour cease to be a workers’ party of any sort and make this dramatic transformation? Similarly, SP leaders now posit this metamorphosis as an international phenomenon. We are told that in Europe and around the world, “Blair’s apparent success has sped the process of bourgeoisification of the workers’ traditional parties as their leaders seek to emulate him”. In April’s Socialism Today, Taaffe blandly informs readers that “as with the Labour Party in Britain [the Australian Labor Party] has now become a bourgeois party” (p23).

Of course, like every category established by the science of Marxism, that of a ‘bourgeois workers party’ should be permeated with movement and change. In this formulation, Lenin was expressing a real contradiction, one presented by the complexities of constantly moving reality itself. It was inimical to his dialectical method that this particular definition should become a fixed category, an unchanging phenomenon - no such thing exists in reality, despite the methodology of much of the left of this country who refuse to countenance even the idea of a fundamental change in the nature of the Labour Party. As Jack Conrad puts it, “we only establish such categories in order to break them up” (Problems of communist organisation p19).

Certainly, a thorough dissection of the category of ‘bourgeois workers party’ is called for. Such an examination - or perhaps autopsy - would scrutinise the changing relation between the two sides of the definition, how they have interacted with each other, the dialectical relationship between its form and essence. This would be a useful - and possibly long overdue - investigation.

Of course, we get none of this from the SP leadership. Labour’s transformation is simply proclaimed, not proved. This adds to the suspicion that what prompts this redefinition is SP’s organisational relationship to Labour, not an attempt to understand reality. For decades, the SP’s forerunner organisation - the Militant Tendency - buried itself in the Labour Party, denouncing everything outside its host organism as “sects” or “outside the labour movement”. In order to justify this opportunist burrowing, it invented a ‘socialist’ pedigree for Labour that it never had - an outrageous piece of opportunism.

Through a variety of un-theorised responses to developments in Labour, the organisation now finds itself outside the party and even competing with it for the votes of workers. The designation of Labour has far more to do with SP’s current needs as an organisation than a result of serious analysis of the real world. The other word for that is sectarianism, of course.

Also, this internal document simply glosses over the SP’s highly ambiguous stance on voting Labour during the general election - a party it characterises as thoroughly bourgeois.

In Scotland, SML called unambiguously for a Labour vote and even - by heavy implication - for the Scottish National Party where it was “the main opposition to the Tories” (Scottish Socialist Voice March 21). In stark contrast, in England leading SP members such as Dave Nellist told us that “I can’t put my hand on my heart and with clear conscience advise people to vote for the Labour Party ... we’re not going to advocate that workers vote Labour” (Weekly Worker March 27). In fact, the official line of the organisation was for a boldly expressed fudge. SP wrote that “we want to see a massive defeat of the Tory party”, but will “warn what will happen under a Labour government” (Editorial, Socialism Today March 1997). Even more limply it observed that “many working class people will vote Blair as the only ‘realistic’ alternative ... But [we] cannot endorse the policies of New Labour ...” (Editorial, The Socialist March 21).

We observed at the time that these telling ambiguities spoke more about the SP’s real position on Labour than its ‘hard’ posturing. Both the SP - and Arthur Scargill, of course - have had to seek some fundamental, irreversible shift in the very nature of the Labour Party to justify their independent existence. The eclipse of the left of the party is equated with the demise of the working class soul of the party. The danger is that a ‘reinvention’ of a Labour left - something it would be foolish to discount as impossible - would totally disorientate these forces. As I wrote in the lead-up to the election, “for both Scargill and the SP/SML, hard talk on Labour still unfortunately conceals a very mushy, reformist core” (Weekly Worker April 3).

Confirmation of this assessment comes in this document. Writing about the supposed huge expectations that greet this new government (see below), SP suggest is would be “wrong” to “crudely, and impatiently, go against the mood of ‘give them time’ ... We cannot speak in the kind of hostile tone with which we approached Thatcher and Major”. Instead, SP’s work must be framed “in terms of pressurising the government to take action in favour of the working class”.

Thus the leadership suggests positioning the organisation as a ginger group on the left flank of Labour - almost like old times, it could be argued.

Expectations in Labour

The statement’s flimsy logic really begins to unravel when it offers us its particular version of the ‘crisis of expectations’ thesis that mesmerizes so much of the left. Paragraph 22 of the document is actually quite amusing in its attempts to justify this notion.

It starts with a local green grocer telling an SPer - in triumph or terror, it isn’t made clear - “Blair can do anything now”. We move on to “workers” (what workers, how many, where?) who were “sceptical”, being whisked up by “the mass” who also “now thought everything was possible”. Simultaneously, we have a “layer of more advanced, thinking workers” who - despite the elemental tidal force of the masses - remain sceptical and are “somewhat apprehensive”. The paragraph eventually calms itself towards the end and “the mass” have become rather less demanding. Now, rather than “everything” (see above) it simply believes that the government be “given some time’ to see what it can do”.

Which more or less covers all the bases, of course.

The Socialist Labour Party

The SP leadership’s complacency is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than when it talks of the SLP and the two organisations’ relative performances in the May election. It comforts members that the SLP’s better polls were due to its national TV broadcast and Scargill himself, an “easily recognised national figure”.

This tells us nothing. David Icke was an “easily recognised national figure” also - but unlike Scargill and the small layer of workers he has attracted into the SLP, he did not have an organic relationship to the crisis of Labourism, however. This is the real significance of the SLP, its electoral standing and its future prospects. It is not a ground on which the SP can compete, no matter how hard it works in local campaigns and at ‘building the party’.

It was precisely this primary relationship that the Militant Tendency tried to invent for itself when it was embedded in Labour. As Peter Taaffe put it, “Marxism” (whose contemporary manifestation was his organisation, of course) “has always been ... an important part ... of the Labour Party right from its inception” (Militant: What we stand for p29). What this represented - apart from a crude and easily disprovable falsehood - was an attempt by the leaders of Militant to present their tendency as organic to the party instead of a product of an entryist tactic decided on as late as 1949 (see Jack Conrad’s Which Road? pp201-231).

Comrades, Scargill doesn’t have to pretend. That is the strength of the SLP project and that is what makes the document’s definitive judgment that “there is no possibility of [it] becoming a mass force” so profoundly foolish.

Building the party

The Executive Committee ends with the observation that the “major gauge of our success in this election” was “whether we significantly built the party” and a call for a new ‘boldness’ in recruiting.

So comrades, were you successful or not? Nowhere does this statement - meant for members of the SP, remember - actually “gauge” the numbers, calibre or types of recruits the party made. All that is included is a vague reference to the fact that the organisation has been “strengthened in numbers, in confidence and ... élan”. This smacks of making sympathetic cooing noises at the membership, many of whom we know were disappointed by the party’s relative showing.

Finally, the exhortation that the SP must start to “act like a party” should sound warning bells amongst the activists. Essentially, what the leadership seems to be calling for is a dilution of the organisation, the institutionalization of a large non-active membership layer. Thus special measures are called for to service members who do not attend regular meetings, including bulletins and “specially prepared posters, leaflets etc”.

SP activists should resist such a development and the creation of an “apparatus” based on it. Such a structure will sound depressingly familiar to many from a Communist Party background. Under the opportunist leadership of the Party, real members spent much of their time ministering to the needs of a large deadwood phantom membership, many of whom did no more than pay a tiny annual sub fee. This maintained both the fiction of a large organisation and, crucially for the leadership, swamped the activists in the Party - who always tend to be left-leaning - in an inert rightwing sea. This listless mass could be manipulated to gerrymander congresses, to split oppositionist branches and to generally ensure that the leadership kept its dead hand firmly around the throat of the Party.

Comrades in the SP must not repeat history on an even lower level.

Mark Fischer