16.10.1997

Party notes

Comrades have become perhaps a little blasé with our characterisation of this period as one of profound political reaction. We identified the ignominious collapse of Eastern Europe and the USSR as a historic defeat for the ideas of socialism and human progress.

Whatever the nature of these regimes, their implosion seemed to remove change from the historical agenda.

We have remarked more than once on the self-satisfied complacency of much of the left faced with these huge events. For the vast majority it has simply been business as usual. Very few have tried to re-interrogate their theory, to take the cataclysmic changes as the starting point for a critical re-evaluation of all that they and others have said about the nature of the regimes in Eastern Europe and the USSR.

Certainly this reappraisal is needed. Whatever the strengths of particular theories, none prove themselves really adequate to understanding events as they unfolded and counterrevolution gathered pace.

Writing in the Weekly Worker (October 2), Richard Brenner of Workers Power illustrates the hopeless opportunist method of the sects that clutter the British left. WP have changed their line on the nature of the overturns in Eastern Europe post-1945. Rather than the result of some honest attempt to reassess what the organisation has thought and written in the past, it is clear that this shift has more to do with the pragmatic requirements of preserving intact WP sect orthodoxy and the cadre that serves it. As a WP dissident group put it,

“If adopted, [this new position] would allow [WP] to explain the relatively peaceful transformation of the state without ‘winding the film of reformism backwards’. If it was already a bourgeois state, it need change only its personnel and not its class nature. [Thus it is] empirically very neat in accounting for the apparently peaceful transfer of power from bureaucracy to bourgeoisie ...” (From ‘Platform of the Proletarian faction, New Zealand’ in Why we broke with the LRCI/WP-Britain leadership, undated).

I venture to suggest that keeping the WP theoretical house ‘neat’ is what really prompts the change in line, not an honest quest for scientific truth.

Comrades have expressed surprise that given this type of palpable failure of the left, its lack of theoretical readiness for this wave of reaction, there have not been more dramatic effects on organisations. In fact over the recent period a number of groups have begun to show the signs of unravelling as their thoroughly false perspectives are exposed by reality.

The Socialist Party’s membership is in decline and circulation of its dull weekly now stands well under 2,000. The Workers Revolutionary Party (Workers Press) has disappeared altogether of course. All the fragments of both ‘official communism’ and Trotskyism look decidedly shaky with declining membership and ageing, increasingly tired cadre. The only organisation that seems to be a partial exception is the Socialist Workers Party, but even this is suffering a net membership loss and is becoming increasingly eccentric in its assessment of the world.

Of particular importance for us in this context is the Socialist Labour Party. Despite its many positive aspects, the SLP is in many ways an alliance of decay and degeneration. The Fourth International Supporters Caucus - an organisation characterised by its conspiratorial approach to politics and a worship of leaders - finds itself in a bloc with the likes of the Stalin Society and supporters of the homophobic Economic and Philosophic Science Review.

The whole project is itself the result of the defeat and marginalisation of the left of the Labour Party. The lily-livered response of much of the left of the party to Scargill’s dictats underlines that for many the SLP is a final desperate chance for relevance - drinking in the ‘last chance saloon’, as some comrades have put it.

It would be extremely foolish of us to believe that our correct characterisation of the period renders us immune to its corrosive effects. This is something we must critically assess during the course of discussions around our perspectives for 1998. Certainly all comrades must become more aware of the pressures bearing in on our organisation and apply themselves to consciously resisting them.

Mark Fischer