17.07.1997

Kirstie Paton’s DNA

Workers Power’s particular brand of ‘Leninist’ discipline leads it into the arms of Tony Blair - without a single voice of opposition

According to Kirstie Paton (Workers Power July/August), the rapprochement call initiated by this organisation amounts to little more than an attempt at “constructing a loose socialist grouping”. As the Socialist Labour Party’s Simon Harvey commented in last week’s paper, this is “either deliberate dishonesty ... or rank stupidity” (Weekly Worker July 10), but I think neither option really explains it.

Kirstie’s inability to understand the notion of rapprochement around the project for a party of the working class is actually an involuntary reflex. It is lodged in her political DNA structure as the supporter of a tendency in the Socialist Labour Party “in political sympathy” with the Workers Power sect (ibid). As evidence that this myopia is a problem generalised throughout the sectarian left, I cite the similar charges against rapprochement made by the sub-Spartacist group, the International Bolshevik Tendency.

Writing in its obscure 1917 journal it colourfully describes the Communist Party as a “shifting agglomeration of centrist groupuscules, Stalinist fragments, refugees from Cliffism and various other bits of political flotsam” (1917 No18 undated, p31). The skeletal frame for this odd composite creature - our IBT comrades tell us - is the opportunist formula of ‘freedom of discussion, unity of action’, a slogan

“lifted from the early years of the Bolsheviks, when they were in a common party with the Mensheviks. In practice it means that every disparate fragment can say whatever it wants, whenever it wants” (ibid).

Of course, both these groups are fully aware of the levels of discipline and activity that are taken as Party norms in our organisation. I venture to suggest they compare favourably - at least - with what passes for ‘Bolshevism’ in either of these two groups or any other on the revolutionary left. It has been made explicit time and time again that the call for rapprochement does not imply any “watering down of our Leninist politics or principles” (Jack Conrad, ‘Party, non-ideology and faction’ Weekly Worker December 15 1994).

What we have called for is unity on the basis of Partyism, a situation which would imply that “as long as factions are loyal to the Party and the Party principle, as long as all members of the Party, irrespective of faction, diligently and fully carry out agreed assignments and fulfil all their financial obligations”, their different viewpoints could actually grow together. Such a Party regime would facilitate “the merger, the fusion of factions and the conversion of factional centres into centres that are only those of shade or trend” (Ibid).

This process would not be one of the obscuring of differences, but rather the heightening of the struggle between different political tendencies. The practical experience of the Open Polemic group, which joined our ranks as a faction, should really underline the fact that there is nothing “loose” in our approach to communist unity. We wrote that OP’s subsequent desertion of the Party was

“precipitated by the disciplined communist practice of our organisation, set at a pace by the Party majority that OPers - used to the rather more dozy tempo of ‘official communism’ - found too painful” (Weekly Worker November 28 1996).

Clearly, the ‘looseness’ that Kirstie Paton or the IBT sectarians believe they can see in our practice relates not to our levels of work or Party discipline. No, these comrades believe our political openness to be indicative of indiscipline.

Kirsty illustrates this in her Workers Power piece when she rubbishes the decision of the June conference of the Campaign for a Democratic Socialist Labour Party to launch an open publication to debate issues of the broader workers’ movement, as well as the campaign against bureaucratic abuses in the SLP. This apparently is a waste of time, as the

“supporters [of the CDSLP] come from many political traditions and none. They have little agreement on the issues facing the ‘broader workers’ movement’.

“There are any number of publications inside and outside of the SLP which will publish their views. Why start another one?” (WP July/August).

In other words, Kirstie continues to advocate the exclusive, narrow sectarianism that is a hallmark of the organisation she is in political sympathy with and which she presumably equates with ‘Leninist discipline’. Perhaps it may be a little churlish to point this out, comrade Paton, but your other CDSLPers are ostensibly members of the same party as you. Why on earth should it be counterproductive to fight to overcome what you perceive as these comrades’ wrong ideas in a common open publication? One of the strengths of the SLP was that it started to overcome the isolation of working class cadre from each other - it anticipated a genuine party project, in other words.

The idea that Paton’s sterile narrowness has anything to do with the practice of Lenin and the Bolsheviks - at any stage of their political development - is impossible to defend. Interestingly, neither the IBT nor the Workers Power group have ever seriously tried to do so. The logic of such an attempt would lead the likes of comrade Paton to describe Lenin’s party as a “loose socialist grouping” of course.

And that, presumably, would be a little embarrassing.

Mark Fischer