04.09.1997

SML ambiguities

Party notes

The extracts from the Scottish Militant Labour document which we publish on page 7 of this issue will be of interest to many in the workers’ movement. In many ways the Scottish Socialist Alliance is in advance of unity developments in other parts of Britain. Despite the fact that Scargill’s political initiative has a party form and therefore is objectively on a higher level than the SSA, the Socialist Labour Party does not have anything like the same strength in depth of cadre, experience in the class struggle or roots in local working class communities. This important political initiative in Scotland has started to take on features of a party formation and is extremely heartening for comrades in the movement committed to overcoming sectarian divisions.

Problems remain, of course. Over the past few issues of this paper, we have featured comments and criticism from various sections of the SSA - most notably from SML - on the recent pamphlet by comrade Jack Conrad, Blair’ s rigged referendum and Scotland’s right to self-determination. I will not comment again on the whole ‘national socialist’ brouhaha - apart from saying that Tom Delargy’s idea that this political characterisation is “deeply offensive”, while calling SML “national reformist” would somehow be fine with everyone concerned, is a little odd (see Weekly Worker August 28).

I will return to this in future articles, but the controversy underlines that building a lasting unity should not - cannot - be confused with ideological ceasefires.

For us, such polemical exchange between comrades is to be expected, is entirely healthy. Indeed, we would perhaps not couch our criticism in such angular and provocative ways were it not for our proximity to SML - the fact that we work together as bloc partners in the SSA, we respect its record in the class struggle and recognise its potential to be something rather more than simply another sect in dismal orbit around Blair’s Labour Party. We see SML about to disappear over a nationalist cliff. We raise our voices the loudest and most raucously. Does that identify us as your ‘enemy’ and those who diplomatically keep silent as your ‘friend’?

With this in mind, perhaps the most interesting parts of this document are the coyly constructed comments at the end regarding SML’s continuing relationship with the SSA. We have reported the divisions in SML concerning this vital question - lines of demarcation which mirror fracture lines in the Socialist Party in England and Wales.

Ostensibly, the statement from SML’s executive reaffirms its strong commitment to the SSA and to the project of working class political unity the Alliance represents. We welcome the SML leadership’s “long-term strategy geared towards promoting, building and developing the Alliance”. Similarly the comment that “... to a much greater degree than in any other part of Britain [we] are involved in attempting to speed up the struggle for socialism through the establishment of a wider, broader left formation that can act as a magnet for ... sections of the working class and the oppressed” could be taken not just as a reaffirmation of the importance of the SSA, but also an implied criticism of the course plotted by the SP in the rest of the country. It is a well known fact that Peter Taaffe’s perspective for both the SP and SML involves the downplaying of unity initiatives in favour of the narrow fight to build ‘small mass parties’.

Yet these positive comments coexist alongside more ambiguous statements - for instance, there are seemingly innocuous observations such as “... most of the Alliance office-bearers and much of the week-to-week administration is carried out by non-SML members”, or that

“... our organisation spends less time and effort attending Alliance meetings, running the structures of the Alliance, etc than we directed in the past towards the Labour Party, the Labour Party Young Socialists and the Anti-Poll Tax Federation”.

Combined with what has been reported to non-SML members of the Alliance concerning the view of some leaders of SML that the SSA should be effectively sidelined, these passages introduce a worrying lack of clarity. The statement thus tends to have an oddly equivocal nature, giving the impression of being a compromise between two contradictory formulations on the future of SML’s SSA intervention.

SML claims to be “carefully discussing [its] own identity and relationship with the Alliance”. This may or may not be true. The rest of the Alliance - including our own organisation - have no way of telling. Surely, as SML is the hegemonic force within the SSA (it correctly describes itself as the “main political driving force”), this is a debate that needs to be wider than simply the ranks of SML.

A mature and responsible attitude to the movement of which it forms an important but only a component part is one of the surest indicators of whether SML is determined to really break out of the sectarian impasse that currently hampers the entire left.

Mark Fischer
national organiser