18.12.1997

No alternative?

Around the left

A form of leftist impatience is to be found in Socialist Labour Action, the bulletin of ‘former’ Workers Power members. It dramatically begins: “Today’s congress of the SLP is poised to destroy the organisation as a genuine socialist alternative to Tony Blair’s New Labour” (December 13). Of course, nobody could seriously argue that what happened at the congress represented a step towards a “genuine socialist alternative”.

However, SLA’s prediction has more to do with justifying WP’s cut-and-run tactic:

“If this conference proves that the SLP will not tolerate revolutionary socialists in its ranks, then all those within the party who stand for revolutionary socialism will have no alternative but to prepare for independence” (my emphasis).

As Lenin would say, independent from whom - and dependent on what? Workers Power supports Blair’s New Labour as a reflex reaction. Its road to ‘socialism’ is dependent on getting and keeping New Labour in office against the Tories. As to WP’s description of the SLP as a “genuine socialist alternative” to New Labour, it is worth noting that these comrades supported Alan Howarth against Arthur Scargill in May 1997.

SLA seems trapped in a self-fulfilling prophecy, as its conclusion demonstrates:  “Meanwhile, the real alternative to Blair will be built, not by bureaucrats or by left reformist policies, but by class fighters committed to socialism and by a revolutionary programme that answers the present needs of the working class and links them to the necessity of socialist revolution.” But the “real alternative” cannot be built in glorious isolation.

Whatever Socialist Labour Action may think, the SLP - despite all its bureaucratic deformations and ideological eccentricities - still represents something positive, a left alternative and challenge to New Labour. Because of that it still pulls together a wide variety of trade union militants, left activists and progressives. That is why the SLP is important for revolutionaries and communists

Don Preston