14.08.1997

Heil Tommy?

Party notes

Scottish Militant Labour clearly has a problem. The attack on members of the Communist Party at the National Council of the Scottish Socialist Alliance (see Mary Ward’s report, page 3) was of course a particularly crude attempt to drive a wedge between ‘London’ and the Party’s Scottish section - in other words, yet another expression of SML’s evolving nationalist project.

That much is obvious. Yet the exquisitely ham-fisted way SML chose to pursue this ignoble aim also tells us a lot about it.

First, the point needs to be made that Jack Conrad’s pamphlet is a highly polemical piece of work. In the course of polemic between revolutionaries, highly charged formulations are often used. Things are defined in the most stark, angular type of ways. And quite right too.

This is precisely because the purpose of polemic is exemplary. It is meant to jolt people to stop, make them take notice and think. It is not designed to lullaby them to sleep with soft phrases. Politics is a serious affair and those who set out to mislead the working class - whatever their subjective intentions - are guilty of inflicting great harm on the fight for socialism.

Thus, summoned before a Party ‘court’ to answer charges that his polemical invective was too much, Lenin replied:

“By my sharp and discourteous attacks on the Mensheviks ... I actually succeeded in causing that section of the proletariat which trusts and follows the Mensheviks to waver. That was my aim. That was my duty ... because, after the split it was necessary ... to rout the ranks of the Mensheviks, who were leading the proletariat in the footsteps of the Cadets; it was necessary to carry confusion into their ranks ...” (VI Lenin Collected works Vol 12, pp425-6).

Now the formulation ‘national socialist’ clearly has had some sort of effect on SML. Good. That is its intention. If SML now were to respond politically, rather than as bruised prima donnas, the fight for working class political clarity - the essential struggle - might perhaps be enhanced.

For this reason if for no other, the phrase ‘national socialist’ would be a good one. However, despite the stated reservations of some comrades who seem to regard it as evidence of Jack’s polemical froth, it is actually quite a precise and tidy phrase; it captures neatly SML’s essentially national reformist road to what it calls ‘socialism’. SML’s position is sadly akin to those tendencies in our Party who supported the old British road to socialism programme - and look where those sad wretches ended up.

What it does not do - despite the disingenuous protestations of SML - is imply that SML holds that world history is the contention between higher and lower races, that as an organisation it is in the vanguard against the conscious plot of ‘cosmopolitan’ elements to mongrelise humanity and reduce it to khaki-coloured lumpanised dolts, or that Tommy Sheridan takes his holidays in the Tyrol, resplendent in feathered cap and lederhosen, gently humming the Horst Wessel song as he gambols in the hills.

Hopefully, comrades are no longer confused on this point.

One last point, a key one. I think it is important to reiterate the point made by the Party’s Scottish Committee. There are a variety of views in our Party about the use of the phrase ‘national socialist’ in Jack’s pamphlet. It is not a policy of our organisation (even if it were, comrades would still have the right to express dissent outside of specific actions). Unlike SML, our culture allows any comrade who feels strongly about it to ‘disassociate’ themselves publicly from it in print, through polemic and argument. Our comrades certainly do not need the thoughtful prompting of SML to do this.

In stark contrast, SML - who split 50/50 for example on support for Scotland Forward - does not debate its differences openly. Now, we find its leadership seems to have quietly dropped its orientation to SF and surreptitiously adopted the position of its defeated minority who could not stomach involvement in that disgusting nationalist swamp. Yet where has this been discussed or argued over?

The Party’s Scottish Committee is thus quite correct. Rather than making dismally unsuccessful attempts to split our organisation along national lines, perhaps the efforts of SML would be better employed in actually taking up the cudgels openly against our Party - in print, comrades.

Come on, SML. Why not answer the cutting political criticisms in comrade Conrad’s pamphlet rather than affect mock outrage about some of his more fruity use of language?

Mark Fischer
national organiser