30.10.1997

Party notes

As reported in last week’s paper, in the immediate aftermath of the Socialist Party’s conference, its small left opposition, grouped around national committee member Phil Hearse, resigned from the organisation (see my report, ‘Cracks begin to open up’ (Weekly Worker October 23).

Now organised as the ‘Socialist Democracy Group’, it has issued a founding statement titled What next for socialists in Britain? (available from the Weekly Worker). In this, the comrades continue to sing the same extremely dubious tune they were warbling inside the SP (see the faction’s statement, ‘Socialist democracy and democratic centralism’ Weekly Worker August 28). Somehow, we are told, the collapse of Stalinism and the profound period of reaction which these comrades concede this ushered in, has produced an “increased sensibility towards democratic functioning ... both among the broad masses and socialist activists”. It is this heightened mass perception of the need for democracy that “poses the need [for all working class organisations] to reassess their internal organisation and (un)democratic practice”.

The comrades went even further in their original faction document referred to above. Here they actually claimed that

“the ‘democracy wave’ has also had a profound effect on the conduct and organisation methods of the contemporary left ... an historic gain, an historic victory for the Marxist critique of Stalinism. And there is no going back.”

A survey of the scene on the left in Britain at the moment, let alone Blair’s Labour Party, underlines that this is a stupidly sanguine assessment, so characteristic of the ‘inevitablist’ school of mechanical Marxism that both Hearse and the SP/Militant organisation itself have sprung from. With the same crude reasoning, the comrades now pose the task of socialists as “the fight for political representation at national and international level of the working class ...” In this fight,

“It is highly unlikely that in the first instance such formations, able to have a real mass appeal, can simply be built around existing revolutionary organisations. Much broader and inclusive formations are needed ... it is fantasy to imagine that even a small section of the popular masses will jump over [this] stage ...”

So, the workers’ movement has gained another micro-sect, the particular shibboleth justifying its separate existence being the assessment that a British version of a ‘party of recomposition’ like the Party of Democratic Socialism in Germany or Spain’s United Left is an inevitable “stage”.

I really do not have the room to comment on this dire perspective at length - suffice to say that I think it yet another expression of the major methodological defect of the revolutionary movement in this country. I really want to briefly comment on the morality of a split like this and in particular on the flighty political technique of comrade Hearse.

It should be axiomatic that to split a serious working class organisation is a grave matter, something to be entered into only after protracted, tenacious and indefatigable struggle. To do anything else is to do a disservice to the struggle of the working class itself.

In its war with the enemy class, the working class has no other weapon available to it other than organisation, the mediating form between proletarian theory and proletarian political practice. Those groups or individuals who lightheartedly add to the chronically fissured nature of the contemporary left do the work of the ruling class for them, whatever their subjective intentions.

Yet there is a recurring theme here with Hearse. When he left his old organisation, Socialist Outlook, he did so without an open or serious struggle to win over his comrades, to reorientate people that he had worked with, who trusted and supported him - let alone comrades in the broader workers’ movement - to what he now believed to be the correct path, towards Militant/SP. Thus it is more than a little rich to now read the comments in the founding statement of these comrades to the effect that “real democracy means the right to put forward differences, to take them into the public domain, to discuss openly and frankly with members of other political currents ...” So where has Phil Hearse truly fought for “real democracy” then? Certainly not in Socialist Outlook or the SP. The man simply resigns, treating what he himself actually dubs “real democracy” with contempt.

We noted that his one merit at the time of his rather pathetic exit from SO was that at least he recognised a serious political current in the workers’ movement and orientated towards it, even if in a highly individualistic way. What has changed in the intervening period, we might ask? Although the SP has undergone organisational decline and there are clearly serious centrifugal forces starting to prise it apart, it remains a serious working organisation with many fine comrades working in its ranks.

If we agree with Lenin that “the political consciousness of the advanced contingent is ... manifest in its ability to organise”, we see that the fractious and semi-paralytic nature of British left organisations is a tangible expression of the ideological crisis gripping vanguard sections of our class. The Socialist Democracy Group adds to the problem - it is not even a partial answer. The seriousness of the project can be gauged by the fact that these comrades have frivolously launched themselves into the political void on the back of a fantasy - there is no ‘party of recomposition’ in Britain and no guarantee that there will be anything like what they envisage.

Clearly the comrades do not take themselves seriously.

Mark Fischer