11.09.1997

Carving out an audience

Party notes

Bob Pitt’s review of Jack Conrad’s pamphlet, Blair’s rigged referendum and Scotland’s right to self-determination, correctly highlights the differences in method it reveals between our organisation and his own (see this issue, page 4).

Essentially, he seems to imply that while there is nothing politically amiss in the general thrust of the slogans we advance - few people could argue that Blair’s proposals actually do embody the right to self-determination for Scotland - they are unfortunately “maximalist”.

I am intrigued by the idea that our call for a boycott “has walled [us] off from the very people [we] seek to influence” and indeed that Bob finds it “difficult to see how Marxists could get a hearing for their programme without critically advocating a double ‘yes’ in the referendum”.

Not only is this theoretical nonsense, comrade Pitt: it is demonstrably untrue. The opposite is actually the case. Precisely by standing against the stream of bourgeois humbug, we have managed to carve ourselves out an audience.

In truth, it has been those elements of the revolutionary movement in Scotland which have dovetailed with the establishment campaign that have sunk without trace. Comrade Pitt, we are modest about our successes. But let’s be clear - the only revolutionary left organisation or campaign that has made any mark in this period is the Communist Party and the boycott campaign it sponsors. The rest - the breathless ‘yes, yes-ers’ - have been nowhere.

Having meekly accepted the anti-democratic agenda set by the ruling class on this pivotal question, Scottish Militant Labour for example has been more or less silent throughout the campaign. In this week’s by-election in Glasgow’s Pollockshields East Nick Clarke’s report makes clear that the Scottish Socialist Alliance - under the hegemony of SML - has limited its agenda to the fight against “council cuts and council sleaze” (Weekly Worker September 4).

In the midst of the fight around this fundamentally important issue for the Scottish people, SML maintains a vow of silence and gives the establishment exclusive rights to lead the working class. So what sort of audience has SML and the SSA majority won over this crucial period?

Several comrades have objected to our use of the phrase ‘national socialist’ to characterise SML’s politics. In fact, not only does this phrase have a perfectly coherent pedigree in our movement, it has also been instrumental in winning us an audience in SML itself.

We have made it abundantly clear that the expression does not equate SML with Nazis, but it certainly expresses a correct political characterisation in a particularly angular and provocative way.

Politics is about intervention, demarcation and engagement. Thus if SMLer Tom Delargy is correct that ‘national reformism’ would have been perfectly acceptable to him and his comrades, he in fact underlines why it has been proved so correct to use ‘national socialist’. SML - significantly - could have lived quite happily with being called ‘reformists’ (a political category that links it with the murderers of Luxemburg and Liebknecht and the trend in the workers’ movement responsible for drowning workers’ revolutions in blood - why no hysterics over this, I wonder?).

The fact that our perfectly orthodox and correct political characterisation - significantly, despite open offers (see Weekly Worker August 21), SML cannot venture either into print or public debate to counter our charges - has prompted some sort of knee-jerk response from SML is excellent.

Our critics - SML and non-SML alike - tell us that we should have phrased our criticism in a way that SML would have felt happy to ignore, but at least would not have found “deeply offensive” (Gordon Morgan, Weekly Worker September 4). Now, instead of being gently oblivious of what we have written about them, every SMLer knows what the CPGB has said. And far from this producing some uniform reaction of disgust and excommunication, there is pronounced political unevenness. Some SML comrade are keen to talk to us about our criticisms, some grudgingly listen, others are still incapable of communication on any sort of human level, let alone political.

In contrast Peter Taaffe in London has maintained a diplomatic silence. I wonder, who are the real ‘comrades’ of SML?

Mark Fischer
national organiser