16.10.1997

Socialist Labour Party and China

An exchange of letters has taken place in the SLP over an article by ‘Don Hoskins’ in Socialist News (September/October), praising the regime in China (see Weekly Worker September 11). Clearly the SLP is riven with deep ideological contradictions. Perhaps China will result in meltdown

Dear Mike Pearn,

Your letter dated September 15 1997, addressed to the editor of Socialist News has been passed to me.

I do not know if the editor has been able to reply because there has been a bereavement in her family and she is currently out of the country attending the funeral. I am therefore taking this opportunity (even though she may write separately) of replying.

Let me make it absolutely clear that Constituency Socialist Labour Parties are not entitled to pick and choose which copies of Socialist News they should or should not take and/or sell. They have an obligation to adhere to the party’s policies, one of which is to take and sell the newspaper Socialist News.

The party has no policy on China and the article to which you refer makes no suggestion that that is reflective of the party’s position - indeed, one comrade who has been very critical of the article has already been invited to write a response and this will be published in the next issue of the paper with similar prominence to the article referred to in your letter.

I would expect all branches of the party to take every issue of the paper including issue eight.

Yours sincerely

A Scargill
General Secretary
September 23 1997

Dear Mr Scargill

This is in reply to your letter dated September 23 1997. Again, I have been instructed to write by the Cardiff branch of the Socialist Labour Party.

We found the contents of your letter both rude and impertinent. As we wrote earlier, the article was presented in such a fashion as to appear to be party policy. We note that such an impression could only be reinforced by the total lack elsewhere in the paper of the disclaimer as to the party’s lack of responsibility for specific articles.

You remark that a comrade critical of the article has been invited to write a reply. Good, but the article should never have been published in the first place, consisting as it did of obvious lies. Its publication must, to the casual reader seem to imply endorsement by the editorial board. However, we are pleased that the pagers of Socialist News will now see a little debate at last.

You also state that it is party policy that every branch must take and sell Socialist News. Clearly, your imagination has got the better of you as no such policy has ever been made. We would challenge you to produce such a policy if you can.

Cardiff SLP has sold every issue of Socialist News, despite its character as the dullest socialist paper we know of: in itself quite a feat, we must say! However, we have always tried to use the paper in our regular work, regardless of disagreement with specific articles. Sadly, our loyalty has been rewarded with a lying, anti-working class defence of Chinese Stalinism. This has necessitated our publishing our collective views in non party journals; on no account could we allow the radical public to believe that we subscribe to any variety of syphilitic and senile Stalinism.

To close, please permit me a personal comment. Those who will are welcome to stand with Jiang Zemin and the butchers of the Chinese proletariat. For my party I stand with Zheng Chaolin, the heroic Chinese Trotskyist, who having suffered imprisonment under the Guomindang regime, survived 27 years in the Maoist gulag. Heroes such as Zheng will in time lead the Chinese masses to socialism and will smash the bureaucratic state capitalist regime.

Yours for communism and the truth

Mike Pearn
Cardiff Socialist Labour Party
October 6 1997