17.07.1997
Capitulating to the witch hunt
John Stone of the Liaision Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International replies to Dave Craig’s assessment of the balance of forces in the Socialist Labour Party
In last week’s Weekly Worker (July 10) comrade Craig of the Revolutionary Democratic Group (faction of the Socialist Workers Party) wrote an article in which he describes the ex-RDG comrades, not as a part of the SLP left, but of its centre, along with members of the Fourth International Supporters Caucus. He also failed to explain why his fellow-thinkers did not participate in the Campaign for a Democratic Socialist Labour Party. In this article we will examine how this “centre” is failing in the struggle against the witch hunts and is moving in the direction of leading Fiscites Brian Heron and Patrick Sikorski.
For comrade Craig, “The banning of the June 12 rank and file democracy conference is a significant event in the short life of the SLP.” This “has obvious parallels with a coup d’état”. For him, “Scargill’s coup is a move against the party and its constitution.” Internal democracy “has been replaced by a dictatorship of the NEC”.
Craig asserts that the public organisation of this event was completely justified. Nevertheless, despite all of these conclusions, he fails to explain why he did not take action consistent with them and stand against the attacks. When there is a coup, the revolutionary method of defence is to mobilise and unite all the opposition against it.
However, Craig’s method is to adapt and conciliate to it and to hide. His fellow-thinkers turned away in fear from the CDSLP conference and headed for the safety of a burger restaurant. More than 30 SLP members decided to challenge Scargill’s anti-constitutional banning. SLP parliamentary election candidates, including Terry Burns (who obtained more votes than Scargill) and Ian Driver (who, despite the expulsion of the local branch, obtained twice the votes of Sikorski), attended the meeting. Despite his bravado, Scargill was afraid.
Before expelling SLP candidates and the SLP’s only London’s councillor, Scargill must be concerned how this action could damage his image and the entire SLP project.
Supporters of the Marxist Bulletin adopted a more consistent opportunist attitude than Craig. They denounced the meeting as an anti-SLP lash-up. They hoped to show the SLP witch hunters that they are not as bad as the rest and offered their services to the bureaucracy by denouncing the majority of the opposition as anti-party. Sooner or later, Scargill will pay them back with a kick up the backside.
All the ‘moderate’ oppositionists who either denounced the CDSLP as “anti-party” or simply decided to boycott the meeting out of extreme caution (or pure and simple cowardice) helped the bureaucracy in its attempts to frighten and divide the left. Craig’s faint-heartedness is nothing new.
When Barry Biddulph was voided, Vauxhall was advised to accept it in order not to provoke the leadership. When the Vauxhall SLP branch was voided, it was advised to sacrifice one or two radicals and rejoin the party according to the bureaucracy’s rules. When Tony Goss assaulted the CPGB’s national organiser, the attacked and the injured were placed in the same camp by some ‘oppositionists’ who called for no severe sanctions against him. Today Craig recognises that everything about the CDSLP was correct, but he thinks the faint-hearts were right not to risk their skin. How on earth can SLP democrats coordinate their actions if some of them will be intimidated every time and end up sabotaging meetings because of it?
The witch hunters not only want to split the dissidents, but also to press some of them to become more moderate and adapted to the bureaucracy. Craig’s co-thinkers are among those who are moving to the right. Of course, our friend Craig is not like the supporters of the Economic and Philosphic Science Review, who, after helping to found the Revolutionary Platform, sold their souls and became active witch hunters. He is continuing to defend internal democracy, but he is trying to be part of the moderate centre led by the SLP former general secretary.
Moving to the right, Craig said that the SLP has three wings: the right wing, including Scargill and everybody who wants a left Labour party; the left - “those who want the SLP to become a new communist party”; and the centre, which is based on ex-SWPers (like the ex-RDG) and Fisc, who “are those who see the future of the SLP as a communist-Labour party or, using the Italian analogy, a Rifundazione Comunista (RC) or a Marxist-Labour party”.
Craig openly confessed that he is against a communist party in any sense. What he wants is a halfway house. He wants a left reformist party (like the Italian RC). The RC is a bourgeois workers’ party. Its programme is in favour of the preservation of Italian capitalism, the army, police, big business and multinationals. It wants a more protectionist capitalist state with less attacks on the welfare state. It supports the ruling bourgeois coalition.
The Italian RC, the French CP and the Spanish United Left have nothing to do with Marxism or communism. Revolutionaries should intervene in such parties on condition that they do not hide or renounce their politics, and openly counter-pose a transitional anti-capitalist programme to the bourgeois reformist programmes that lead such working class-based parties.
The comrades from the SLP left, especially the ones that read the Weekly Worker, should not have any illusions in the RDG. The RDG is not in favour of fighting for a communist party, inside or outside the SLP. They are in favour of building a British version of a bourgeois workers’ RC. Craig is quite happy to say that his centre grouping “rejects the idea of a Trotskyist programme”. In fact, this label has always been used by all reformists to discredit any Marxist or Leninist platform. He does not describe himself as Leninist.
Further, he is proposing a kind of party (left reformist), a kind of revolution (bourgeois republican) and a kind of programme (social democratic programme for a national state capitalism) which is antagonistic to Leninism. Craig’s “centre grouping” proposes better words “like ‘democratic programme’, a ‘new British road to socialism’, ‘minimum programme’ or ‘republican programme’”.
The ‘British road to socialism’ is a classical national-reformist way to fight against socialism. Even using the label “old” or “new” (like Blair’s New Labour) this strategy rejects international socialist revolution and proposes a national way to transform the imperialist United Kingdom into a democratic capitalist republic with a more substantial welfare state. The RDG’s ‘minimum’ or ‘republican’ programme was always a programme of reforming British capitalism. In previous articles we showed how the RDG rejects socialist revolution in any place of the world (even in the super-advanced USA).
For the RDG the only revolution which is valid is a bourgeois democratic one. At the beginning of this century the Mensheviks advocated a bourgeois revolution as the first stage against backward tsardom while in western Europe they advocated a socialist revolution. Craig is more rightwing than the Mensheviks because he argues that even in the most imperialist countries (after more than 80 years of tremendous industrialisation and technological development) there are no conditions for an anti-capitalist revolution.
Stalin was for ‘socialism in one country’ while the RDG is against building socialism in any country and for a national state capitalism in a new British republic. The RDG strategy is for a left republican government: ie, a popular front government (like in Spain 1936-39) which is based on an alliance between the workers’ organisations and the republican bosses - who never open the way for democracy but help reaction demobilise and disarm the proletariat.
Preparing a bloc with Heron and Sikorski, Craig wrote:
“Whilst logically the ex-Fiscites and the ex-SWPers are in the centre, they entered the SLP stage from opposite ends, the former involving themselves in the witch hunt and the latter opposing it. As yet there is no centre bloc.”
However, Craig is suggesting the constitution of such a bloc. That would mean that Fisc should became less intolerant to the opposition, while Craig’s “ex-SWPers” should drop all links with the voided comrades and adapt more to the witch hunts. Craig, in fact, is trying to do as much as he can to be a person who is not involved in the witch hunts but who is willing to conciliate with it. For Craig the SLP left is already defeated and “it is possible that the struggle will now take on more the character of a struggle between the centre and the right”.
He is advising the left to liquidate itself and to dissolve itself inside the Heron-Sikorski “centre” camp. For Craig the left was defeated only because Scargill banned the CDSLP meeting. However, no new sanctions have been imposed on any comrade that participated in that conference. Even in the case where the NEC had expelled all of them, that in itself would not be the same as a defeat. Expelled members could have some impact on the party through open publications and actions.
Craig presents a very fatalistic and self-defeated image of the SLP left which is based on complete misrepresentations. For Craig the SLP
“left or communist wing comprised of assorted Stalinists, Trotskyists and state capitalists (ie, ex-SWPers). The Stalinists were represented by the EPSR, ex-members of the Communist Party of Britain, ex-CPGB and later the Indian Workers Association. The Trotskyists were represented by those such as Fisc, those later associating themselves with the Marxist Bulletin, Socialist Labour Action and ex-members of the Workers Revolutionary Party.”
This is completely wrong. He is putting into the left camp people who are more rightwing and keener witch hunters than Scargill. The EPSR initially was around the Revolutionary Platform, but its homophobia, its support of Stalinist massacres like Tienanmen Square and its aim of building a Stalinist party put it into the extreme witch hunt camp. The members of the Stalin Society, ex-CPB and the IWA never opposed the witch hunts and in fact supported them. They never criticised the bourgeois reformist content of Scargill’s programme. On the contrary, they wanted a less radical party and to transform the SLP into a highly bureaucratic and rightwing machine capable of filling the old CP space.
It is an insult to the comrades influenced by the CPGB to be put in the same category as the “Stalinists” with the EPSR and the open supporters of Stalin or Brezhnev. They, despite all the critiques that we can make of their “minimum programme”, were always one of the pillars of the left and the pro-democracy opposition. No other current was more witch-hunted than they. Fisc was never part of the left. They imposed the official line and many expulsions. In his analysis of the SLP Trotskyists, Craig ignores very significant oppositionist comrades who are Trotskyists and come from other traditions. In his distorted way of presenting reality, Craig said that today the left in the SLP is reduced to the “Trotskyists gathered around the Marxist Bulletin and Socialist Labour Action.”
Very important left currents, from the Revolutionary Platform to Socialist Perspectives, and in oppositionist branches from Cardiff to Brent East and Vauxhall, are excluded from his list. He gives great importance to the Marxist Bulletin and SLA. In previous articles we have shown how SLA committed hara kiri, that they are not interested in being inside the party any more and that they have no significant influence amongst the left. After not recruiting a single soul in the SLP, they are openly advocating a rupture and their re-integration into a group which describes the SLP as a “counterrevolutionary sect on the fringes of the workers’ movement”.
The Marxist Bulletin is much more influential. However, they refuse to be part of the left. They boycotted all attempts for a left opposition (Revolutionary Platform, Left Network and the CDSLP). Even more, they denounced the most advanced SLP internal united front for democracy as an anti-party conspiracy. Their policies are a mixture of sectarianism and opportunism. On Ireland they are to the right of the SLP programme because they oppose Irish unification. They don’t think that the SLP is a left reformist party because for them it is a sort of anti-capitalist vehicle. They don’t think that Scargill and the NEC are on the right because they believe that they are much better than revolutionaries who advocated a critical vote for Labour.
The Marxist Bulletin is against any united front of the left or the democrats against the witch hunters. They are prepared to adapt to it, to accept voiding instructions and even to attack democratic gatherings as anti-party plots. Craig said that the left was divided not by programme but around the ‘internal’ or ‘external’ question. As genuine revolutionary Trotskyists argued, inside the SLP this is a false debate.
The voided comrades have no other way of fighting than by using public, extra-official channels. The left in the party are those who, despite all their differences, are against witch hunts and reformism. They need to create a serious pole of attraction. The CDSLP must broaden itself and try to make a united front with other groupings in Manchester, Coventry, Reading, Swindon and other areas.
For Craig all the ex-SWPers are part of the moderate centre. This is another distortion. Many SLPers who were purged from the SWP openly rejects Craig’s “post-Menshevik” ideas and are for a united left opposition to the right and the “centre”. The Marxist Bulletin and people like Craig want to became moderate and inoffensive creatures so they could survive in the middle of an increasingly bureaucrat-ised and rightward moving party. In summary, Craig is trying to demoralise the left. He says, ‘You are defeated’ and that the only way forward is to form a bloc with a section of the NEC that voided tens of SLPers and two branches, and voted for the banning of the CDSLP conference.
The Weekly Worker is becoming one of the most important forums for SLP oppositionists. Yet Craig ended his article with the following:
“The Weekly Worker will now have to decide who to support. It seems it will back any external faction that emerges from the defeated Trotskyist left. Will it back the remnants of Trotskyism, such as the internal left, or switch its support to the centre, or oppose the SLP project all together? These are the decisions that the Weekly Worker needs to consider.”
Craig is calling for the second alternative. He is asking the Weekly Worker to renounce its aim of fighting inside and outside the SLP to reforge a communist party and for adopting the strategy of building a new left reformist and programmatically bourgeois British Rifund-azione. He is also asking the Weekly Worker to forget all its campaigns against Fisc, to try to adapt to it and to build a moderate centre around its de facto leadership.
In summary, he is asking the Weekly Worker to become a sort of Socialist News of the former general secretary’s supposed faction. Many good voided comrades, who were being accused of being friends of the CPGB, should forget all their misfortunes and capitulate to the leaders who expelled them. Their struggle and sacrifice was a mistake.
It is very doubtful that the CPGB would operate such a U-turn. It would entirely destroy its own project and it would discredit all its strategy for communist regroup-ment. Many comrades inside the Weekly Worker have complained very much about the RDG. Some articles have criticised the fact that the RDG is an organisation of one man which does not produce its own publication, that it is over-represented in the Weekly Worker, or that a group which calls itself a public “faction of the SWP” does not intervene in ‘Marxism’ or in SWP internal life.
However, these are not very crucial criticisms. Despite its almost non-existence, the RDG has a strong ideological influence inside the CPGB. With the aim of trying to recruit Craig for the CPGB, the group has made many concessions to him. The Weekly Worker never finds room for most of the articles that we send, while Craig’s articles are constantly filling the paper. The CPGB has adapted to the RDG minimum programme for a federal republic. It is one thing to support democratic and anti-monarchist demands and another to advocate the replacement of the United Kingdom by a capitalist federal republic like the one in Germany or the USA.
Craig is consistent: he does not need a communist party but a left-reformist party, in which communists have to dissolve and be part of the moderate centre. Despite all its concessions, Craig will never join the CPGB. On the contrary, he is pressing the CPGB to commit political suicide and dissolve itself in to a bloc with and behind the former SLP general secretary.
There is no defeated left inside the SLP. The Weekly Worker must continue fighting against the right and the centre of the SLP and for a united left opposition. In fact, if the Weekly Worker needs to make a shift, it is towards genuine Leninism.
The backward evolution of Craig and his adaptation to the witch hunters show the extreme limitations of any minimum programme and “communist-Labour party” projects. The SLP left needs an anti-capitalist programme and to build a solid and combative campaign for internal democracy.