18.12.1997

For a revolution in the SLP!

Party notes

It is sad irony that sections of the Socialist Labour Party left seem ready to decant from the organisation just as serious fault lines begin the appear in its leadership. These fissures actually provide an important opportunity for the opposition. The fact that so many of them seem determined to opt for the doctrinaire security of the sectarian wilderness is a desertion that must be fought tooth and nail by partisans of our class.

Splits at the top are occasions for the forces of revolution to advance - in society in general or in organisations like the SLP. Lenin - thankfully a rather more astute and gutsy politician - pinpoints one of the key symptoms and preconditions of a revolution as “a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed [can] burst forth”. Of course, comrades will make the facile observation to me that one of the other key criteria does not exist in the SLP - that is, when the ‘oppressed’ “do not want to [be ruled] in the old way” (VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p36).

Indeed, at the moment, the majority of SLP members are still happy and relieved to be ruled over. The standing ovation accorded the miners’ association delegates responsible for wielding the block vote effectively crushing their rights must have saddened many comrades. It sounded like slaves appreciatively rattling their own chains.

This simply underlines what we have identified about the nature of this period as a whole, not the particular calibre of SLP members. We are living through a period of profound defeats, demoralisation and confusion of the forces of the working class. If our class was sweeping forward, self-confident and with a vision of leading society as a whole to a better world, the type of crass, sordid infringements of democracy we saw on display over the weekend simply would not be tolerated. People would have certainly been on their feet, but not for a sycophantic ovation that’s for sure.

Yet this is where we are: this is the truth of the situation progressive forces find themselves in. The comrades who have determined on a split from the SLP should be asked a simple question - ‘Where to, comrades?’

The pre-form of the Socialist Democracy Group for instance told us that a ‘democracy wave’ has swept the world which “has also had a profound effect on the conduct and organisational methods of the contemporary left”. This spontaneous democratic surge

“leads to big political changes, because it delegitimises witch hunting inside the left and labour movement ... there is no going back” (‘Socialist democracy and democratic centralism’ Weekly Worker August 28).

This is quite clearly wishful thinking. The timidity and willingness to be dictated to of much of the SLP membership argues against this self-deluding perspective. And, as Kathrin Becker explained in last week’s paper, far from a new mass formation like the Party of Democratic Socialism in Germany being “open and pluralistic”, as the SDG comrades would claim, in fact “like the SLP ... the PDS is characterised by a bureaucratic internal regime” (Weekly Worker December 11).

So the point is, there are no greener pastures waiting ‘out there’. In fact, the bureaucratic horror of the SLP’s internal regime is a general product of the period we are living through, not simply the individual proclivities of Scargill as a politician. Of course, it has its own peculiar - sometimes very peculiar - aspects. But it, like the PDS, Communist Refoundation in Italy or the United Left in Spain, is a product “of the period of reaction ushered in by the final defeat of the Russian Revolution - an historic setback for the entire working class”.

I believe that certain SLP comrades now agitating for a split display a contempt for politics. Some of the same people have spent literally decades fighting the rightwing bureaucracy in the trade union movement. Yet they display no such stubbornness when it comes to struggling for the health of a political party of the class. (And I reiterate to certain comrades - you had a bloody cheek branding SLPers sympathetic to the politics of the Communist Party as “splitters” or members of a “raiding party”).

The struggle in the trade union movement is essentially the same as that inside the SLP - for workers to take charge of their own organisations as a prelude to taking charge of society. The difference is that the SLP is a political formation and therefore on a qualitatively higher level.

Many comrades were tickled by the creepy contribution of the SLP delegate from Kingston, who talked of how he looked forward to the trade unions running the party (a little ominously as he had just argued for trade union rights in the police - a totally unconscious faux pas, but amusing nevertheless). Of course, the trade unions are not simply undifferentiated workers’ organisations. With the rise of imperialism, we saw the enormous expansion of the functionary layer of these basic working class organisations, the trade union bureaucracy. In essence, this layer is analogous to a merchant class, it lives by retailing a particular commodity - in this case the commodity labour power. It bargains with capital for the best possible price for labour.

Thus, we can see that the material conditions of its existence do not make this layer a natural vehicle for socialism or anything like it. If fact, in this century the dramatically expanded trade union bureaucracy has replaced last century’s labour aristocracy as a one of the main conduits of reformist, pro-capitalist ideology into our class.

This is why communists fight for the rank and file to reclaim the trade unions, to subordinate the trade union apparatus to its own distinct, proletarian interests. We fight to activate the rank and file, to bring every level of the trade union movement under the conscious, democratic supervision and control of the membership.

In this context, what of these phantom 3,000 miners from the north?. Who did they vote for in the last election? Overwhelmingly, it must have been the Labour Party. Yet here they turn up, in the pocket of SLP leader Arthur Scargill, to be deployed as a bureaucratic sledgehammer in the internal battles of a party that stood against Labour.

Clearly, the block vote and the life process of the trade union bureaucracy itself rely on the total passivity of the rank and file, its practical exclusion from the democratic control of its own organisations.

This is why communists call for a political revolution in the trade unions, that all

“officials are paid only the average wage of their members, that they are elected and recallable and that all their negotiations with the bosses be open” (J Conrad Which road? London 1991, p53).

The vast majority of revolutionaries would quite rightly regard the suggestion that we split from the unions because they are dominated by the bureaucracy as heresy - so why are they so schismatic when it come to political organisations of the working class? The SLP remains a key arena to fight for genuine proletarian politics. Any group or individual that walks away from that fight is ceding victory to the witch hunting leadership - just at the time when it is starting to cleave before our eyes.

Mark Fischer
national organiser