18.12.1997

Fight on all fronts

A few words are in order concerning the SLP left. These comrades, the SLP Republicans, Democratic Platform, Campaign for a Democratic SLP, Marxist Bulletin and others experienced shifts and changes of mood and fortune at SLP congress.

Recent events experienced by comrades over the past months have led many, particularly those around the Democratic Platform, to express a jump ship mentality. The most childish version of this was those comrades from Cardiff who staged a ‘moralistic’ walk-out on Saturday afternoon - to where, comrades? Where are you going?

If the class was combative, if we were moving forward, the SLP would be swamped by workers who would simply not put up with the bureaucratic shenanigans of the leadership. Alternatively, the SLP would be completely ignored, as workers moved directly towards revolutionary politics.

Unfortunately, apart from the barely existing socialist alliances, the disintegration of the left continues. The SLP is the only vaguely pro-party process broader than a sect which is challenging Labour on some sort of ‘anti-capitalist’ programme. The internal regime is putrid, the hypocrisy of the leadership breathtaking and the toleration and promotion of the EPSR and Stalin Society mind-boggling. But, this is the arse-end of the crisis of Labourism - what else is there?

The temporary unity achieved in the face of the right’s split on the Saturday on congress is what revolutionaries in the SLP need to cohere. Yet it is in danger of evaporating unless it can be cemented around a political project. A front for democracy can still unite these comrades, taking local SLP branches into the socialist alliance network. Revolutionaries must promote this alonside the ongoing process of communist rapprochement.

To leave the SLP in a moralistic huff would be to plumb the depths of sectarianism. It is encumbent on us to stay and struggle for the party we need, and that struggle must engage with the living reality of the British workers’ movement, steeped as it is in nationalism, bureaucratism and Labourism.

This is by no means to suggest the SLP be the sole work for revolutionaries. Last weekend made that patently clear. But there is little else real to engage with. Our class remains passive in the face of Blair, the left of the Labour Party barely whimpers, strikes remain at an all-time low and revolutionary organisations continue their decline.

Despite what we know of Scargill in the SLP, his very name conjures up images of militant unionism amongst millions of workers. When our class stirs into action, comrade Scargill is still relatively well positioned to stand at the head of such activity. It may soon swamp or ignore him, but it is one of the few bridges which exists between the crisis of Labourism and the struggle for a communist party.

There should be no rash, unthinking move away from the SLP. It would only be a retreat into the swamp of the sects or the phantasms of non-existent ‘parties of recompostion’. For many the retreat would lead only to the isolation of private life. Any move from the SLP must be positive, it should be orderly and in the long-term interests of the class as a whole. It must be intrinsically part of the struggle to reforge a Communist Party, a combat party of our class, united in action around a revolutionary programme.

Martin Blum