25.09.1997

One group, two lines

Internationally, the Socialist Labour Party is not the only grouping to have developed over the past period as, in essence, a bureaucratic party of recomposition to the left of the major bourgeois political parties.

Parties such as Communist Refoundation (RC) in Italy, United Left (IU) in Spain and the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) in Germany are all the result of the defeat of the ‘state’ socialist or Stalinist programme. However, these parties also reflect the defeat of mass parties of the class, parties with widespread hegemonic influence in key sectors, if not bureaucratic state control. The SLP, while exhibiting similar characteristics, maintains essential differences.

While in many respects it represents the outcome of the defeat of the miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85 and, more significantly, its aftershock of 1992, the SLP does not emerge from the same hegemonic position as the continental ‘parties of recomposition’. Partly because of that, it does not display the ‘party’ culture of the other organisations, reflecting more the political personality of its founder-leader, Arthur Scargill. This is one of the SLP’s central weaknesses.

Nevertheless, communists should still understand that the SLP, despite its fundamental flaws, represented and to some extent still represents a break to the left of Labour by a small, but significant section of the advanced layer of our class. To dispute that is to ignore reality. Because of this, it remains an important, but not exclusive, arena in which communists must fight for their programme and organisational perspectives.

Amongst the organisations on the British left, ourselves and the International Bolshevik Tendency (external faction of the Spartacists) were about the only ones who had any real idea of this. However, I believe, due to the fundamentally sectarian nature of the IBT, its intervention in the SLP has adopted a trajectory of an opportunist nature, despite, or perhaps because of, whatever successes it may think it has made.

It is interesting to compare the IBT’s intervention in the SLP with its involvement with another new development in the workers’ movement.

Just over a year ago 1,400 delegates assembled in Cleveland, Ohio to launch the US Labor Party. Given that the United States is almost unique amongst advanced capitalist nations in not having produced a significant social democratic working class party, such a development can only but have major implications for revolutionaries.

This Labor Party is no mere flash in the pan. While it is by no means massive, it does have the support of a significant layer of trade union bureaucrats and activists. It has national trade union affiliations from the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union (OCAW), the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers Union (UE), the United Mineworkers of America (UMWA), the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and, significantly for the IBT (see below), the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU).

The most recent edition of the IBT’s journal, 1917 (No19, March 1997), devotes a number of pages to examining the development of the US Labor Party. Some of it I would agree with. However, where I would maintain a consistent difference is over whether communists should positively engage with the development of the US LP. I would argue that they should.

Where such spontaneous or semi-spontaneous developments occur within our class, our job is not to judge them once and for all by the programme they emerge with, but to engage with such movements in order to win them - or a space within them - for the communist programme and the communist method of organisation. To do otherwise would be to fall into the sectarian folly of the Social Democratic Federation - it walked out at the formation of the British Labour Party when it refused to adopt a programme of socialism.

In all such cases, communists can only make such strategic and tactical decisions based on the concrete. In Britain, the call by Scargill to form the SLP was a development of vital importance which, through his own lack of theory and his collapse back to old bureaucratic methods, has meant its potential strangulation.

In the United States, given its own unique working class history, the call for a party of labour, standing outside the two bourgeois parties, no matter how half-baked, is of vital significance. The fact that it was formed by top union officials, in a period of class atomisation, adds to its own problems, but does not detract from its importance.

The IBT, for reasons I can only guess at, has decided that the US Labor Party is “stillborn”, while on the other hand the SLP remains central, nay, exclusive, to its British activity. So what are the reasons given for the futility of activity in the US LP?

Apparently,

“It is a party which discourages political discussion, which raises no criticisms of the corrupt, anti-communist labor bureaucrats who have driven the unions into the ground, and which signals its intent to continue to support the ‘lesser evil’ Democrats.”

Further, its founding conference

“was run in the heavy-handed manner of a typical union convention. Its organisers where intent on limiting substantive political discussion. During the proceedings, attempts from the floor to introduce ideas different from those of the top table were routinely snuffed.”

Well, excuse me, but the only difference from the above concerning the SLP regards whether or not it contests elections. I agree that this is a significant difference. The fact that a left formation is prepared to take on the Labour Party where it lives - the ballot box - is of great importance. Another difference is the formal call of the SLP for ‘socialism’, which is absent in the US LP. However, Scargill’s version of ‘socialism’ is a million miles from what the IBT envisage, we hope. It is also not reason enough to disengage from a party process emerging from our class.

Yet, given the particular historical weakness of our class to form itself as any political alternative in the United States, the fact that its leadership is breaking from the coat-tails of the fully bourgeois Democrats in a half-hearted manner is not really surprising.

At the same time, the US LP does not emerge against the backdrop of defeats such as those suffered by the European parties. Sure, the same international ideological defeat is present, if not stronger in the US, but there has not been the calamitous effect of mass workers’ parties capitulating and liquidating.

In such a situation, what is the job of communists? To sit back and condemn the whole exercise as folly? I think not. However, that is exactly what the IBT has done.

The openly national socialist stance that the dominant Scargill faction of the SLP has taken, along with its seeming willingness to entertain Stalinites such as Harpal Brar’s shadowy group and Roy Bull’s EPSR, exhibits enough evidence, along with the SLP’s putrid McCarthyism, for the IBT to junk the whole project - if it followed the method they adopted towards the US LP, that is.

So why the difference in approach? I can only guess at that. In the US, the IBT is much closer to its political parent, the Spartacist League. It cannot be seen to capitulate in front of mother. Another reason that I can put forward stems from the fact that one of its leading members, Howard Keilor, though often based in Germany, is a ‘dissident’ member of the Californian Longshoremen’s Union (ILWU). The fact that the ILWU leaders are leading advocates of the present programme and organisation of the US LP may have had a significant impact on the outlook of a small sect like the IBT.

To my mind, both orientations - whether as loyal SLPers or dismissing the US LP - develop from the same self-serving method. The IBT’s only strategy is that of emerging from the SLP with a small group around its ‘one and only true revolutionary’ programme. To this end it is prepared to adopt all manner of opportunist ‘tactics’.

Communists should be positively orienting to the US LP without any illusions as to its programme or the depth of significance it has for the majority of even class conscious workers. At the same time, this should not be their only arena of work. The same applies in Britain. The SLP had the opportunity to be one arena of reforging a really revolutionary class struggle party. Unfortunately, that now appears less and less likely.

However, the SLP still remains an important field for such a struggle, a struggle which is surely the main task facing our class.

Martin Blum