12.06.1997

Campaigning against unity

Party notes

The latest issue of the Socialist Labour Party Marxist Bulletin underlines the congenital sectarianism of this small group.

The journal itself has little intrinsic political worth. It includes badly argued, shallow polemics on questions such as Ireland, Europe and the Labour Party. Its politics appear frozen in aspic in that they do not develop and round out in the course of a live polemic. Given the limited remit the journal gives itself as a strictly ‘internal’ SLP bulletin, this is impossible. Instead, we have lame, sub-Spartacist politics with the froth mopped off. If the comrades are sincere that their intention is to “fight for changes in the party’s policies and structures” (p12), such an amateurish intervention shows they really are kidding themselves.

Of course, the problem is that these comrades are not sincere.

The nine-person editorial of the Marxist Bulletin all share exactly the same political antecedents in the esoteric fringe of Trotskyite politics. To their credit, these comrades recognised the importance of the Socialist Labour Party initiative and quickly applied to join. To their shame however, they hypocritically claimed to have ‘dissolved’ their organisation and publicly called for every other organisation on the British left to do the same - a scandalous concession to Scargill’s bureaucratic regime.

In fact, as we have conclusively shown in previous issues of this paper, the comrades were being a tad less than honest in this. The fact that they now turn up as the editorial board of a journal peddling exactly the same politics, repeating exactly the same arguments and citing exactly the same historical precedents as when they were ‘undissolved’ is intriguing in this context.

Moreover, while this group cynically attempts to draw a line of demarcation between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ journals of the SLP left (see below), where were the elections to Marxist Bulletin editorial board? What Marxists from other political trends were approached to be involved? Who else can attend its board meetings? Will there be conferences of the MB that can decide its orientation, it policies and limits?

In this context, the Bulletin complains amusingly that Socialist Labour Action did not print an article on the Labour Party submitted to it by an MB supporter. That is because this Workers Power-sympathising section of the SLP has its own narrow little sectarian project, comrades. Just like you.

Thus, we see parallels with the hypocrisy of religion. In public, we have to suffer MB’s protestations of pious abstinence and the denunciation of others. In private, it is sinning as badly as the rest of us.

Thus, its core polemical point - the distinction between ‘outside’ campaigns in the SLP and its own legitimate ‘internal’ work - is an act of monumentally crass duplicity, given its continued sect organisational framework - including its international links, as clumsily admitted by one MBer.

MB supporters’ work on the left of the SLP since joining has had a twofold character. First, to cohere a grouping narrowly based on their particular programmatic shibboleths. Second - as admitted by one comrade in a moment of beery candour - to avoid at all costs being in a bloc with any comrades influenced by or ‘tainted’ by association with the Communist Party.

I will not waste too much time here on the comrades’ search for “programmatic clarification” as they pompously dub it. Like other similar sectarians, this grouping does not seek ‘clarification’ and - crucially - re-elaboration in open polemic with other revolutionaries in the movement. Instead, this small clot presumes a revealed biblical truth as its private monopoly. Being a semi-religion, it is impervious to either substantiation or disproof. As a pristine example of this methodology, I cite my recent polemical exchange with the Spartacist League/Britain. Having been systematically proved through extensive quotation to have been telling lies, the SL/B simply repeats its accusations as if nothing had happened. Probably in its world, nothing has.

The second orientation of MB supporters is far more damaging to the campaign for democracy in the SLP. So far, this crew has taken the initiative to split the opposition to the witch-hunts at last three times. Whatever justifications it has put forward for this, the actual reason has been this group’s genuine fear of working in a broad front where ideas supported by the Weekly Worker - such as the need for political openness - have some measure of authority.

Thus we have Alan Gibson - a leading MB supporter - circulating the Reading statement (see Simon Harvey in this issue), touting this as an “internal campaign to democratise the SLP” (his emphasis) and calling on all members to “reject the Campaign for a Democratic SLP and any other external campaigns which can only harm our party” (June 7 letter to Vauxhall SLP members and SLP NEC).

The criteria the comrades have for what constitutes ‘internal’/‘external’ speaks volumes about their origins in the sterile world of leftist sects. Despite the fact that MB pooh-poohs any notion that what it calls for in the SLP is a “democratic centralist regime”, it transposes a key distortion of its understanding of ‘democratic centralism’ onto the new party.

Opposing the CDSLP’s adopted position for an open journal, MB concedes that given the nature of the party, debates “internal” to the SLP will - like spilt milk, presumably - “spread to the wider workers movement” (MB p12). However, the key question apparently is who owns the discussion, who has the right to participate in it. Counterposed to the positions of what I presume to be the majority of the CDSLP who believe they belong to the whole class, MB supporters “say that an organisation ... has the right, indeed the necessity to its own internal life” (ibid).

Thus, MB supporters suggest that the mere fact of proposing an open journal represents a “split trajectory”. Criticism of the party has been “eagerly leapt on” by organisations opposed to our party” (pp12-13). It even - grotesquely - suggests that public exposure of the crass violations of democracy that are all too frequent in the SLP is somehow “violating the democratic rights of other SLPers” (pl2).

I hardly need to cite many examples from the history of the revolutionary workers’ movement or from the practice of Lenin himself to counter such a stupid claim. One will do. There is his preface to his open work One step forward, two steps back - a book that went into the painful detail of a party congress, discussing not simply policy splits, voting statistics and the political cleavage of the Iskra majority, but even the tone of debate and the reaction to Plekhanov’s bad jokes. Lenin wrote this:

“One more word to the opponents [of communism]. They gloat and grimace over our disputes; they will, of course, try to pick isolated passages from my pamphlet, which deals with the failings and shortcomings of our party, and use them for their own ends. The Russian [communists] are already steeled enough in battle not to be perturbed by these pinpricks and to continue, in spite of them, their work of self-criticism and ruthless exposure of their own shortcomings ...” (VI Lenin Collected Works Vol 7, p206, Moscow 1977).

Comrades, even within the ranks of contemporary social democracy, an open journal - albeit critical of the leadership of the party - is not considered a de facto split. Is Tribune on a “split trajectory” from the Labour Party? Does its form mean that it “is in danger of losing its context, that of overall support to the party as a whole” (p12)? Tribune and the Labour Party? Are you serious?

Naturally, the course and duration of a debate has definite parameters - whether these are set by a party leadership or an editorial board. To my knowledge, no one on the left of the SLP proposes some interminable, semi-anarchist literary free-for-all. To that extent, it is ‘owned’ by such a body. But comrades, our debate is composed of the search for objective truth rather than the repetition of stale programmatic nostrums.

And who “owns” truth do you suppose comrades, if not the working class?

Comrades of the SLP left should decisively reject the narrow sectarian methods of the Marxist Bulletin, palpably a trend with nothing else on its mind other than its own self-survival.

Mark Fischer
national organiser