26.02.1998

In the sectarian swamp

John Stone of the Liaison Committee for a Revolutionary Communist International looks at the further degeneration of the Workers Power group

The latest issue of Workers Power (February) carries a full-page polemic against the Weekly Worker by Richard Brenner in which the LCMRCI is also attacked.

Workers Power argues that the SLP, all its dissidents and the rest of the left are useless sects isolated from the masses. It rejects any regroupment process and claims that it alone has a revolutionary Marxist programme. In this reply we will examine how, behind all its arrogant self-proclamation, lies an insecure group in the process of leaving behind the healthy tradition inherited from Dave Hughes and increasingly becoming an erratic and intolerant sect.

In relation to the SLP Brenner writes: “If it were a mass organisation, revolutionaries might be obliged to campaign with it. But it is not a mass organisation or anything near to it. Nor is it possible to fight within in for revolutionaries ideas.” If none of that is possible, why did WP send so many experienced cadres into the SLP and why did it try to gain affiliation for its youth organisation?

The real reason why WP can no longer fight for its ideas amongst SLP supporters is that they have been alienated by all its zigzags. WP has, in fact, had the most contradictory characterisations of and policies towards the SLP. In December 1995 it welcomed its imminent establishment and committed itself to fight for a “revolutionary SLP”, but within months it was labelling Scargill’s party a “Stalinist sect”. Yet by June 1996 it was claiming that “the struggle for the political soul of the SLP has only just begun”. Inside the SLP WP supporters were in favour of standing candidates in elections against Labour, while outside it WP called on workers to vote for Blairites against the SLP.

WP says that it could only participate in mass organisations. Its paper carries a permanent column which states that it is “for the building of a revolutionary tendency in the Labour Party”. So why does WP not do any work inside it? WP was absent from the movement amongst Labour’s left and rank and file to stop the nomination of Blair, the abolition of clause four, the attacks on the union link, etc.

Brenner claims that SLP members “have now drawn the conclusion that it is necessary to leave the party and build a consistent alternative to it: Workers Power”. However, no ordinary members at all have left the SLP to join WP. What has happened is that some WP supporters inside the SLP have now decided to make public their WP membership. WP’s entryist adventure finished in disaster.

WP is incapable of any constructive intervention in working class organisations. Its method is to build a ‘pure’ propaganda sect uncontaminated by “people worn down and tired” - ie, the rest of the left. Hence the CPGB is described as a “tiny sect”, while the LCMRCI and the other seven groups who have some influence amongst the SLP left are rubbished as “tiny groups”.

Brenner writes: “Of course it is possible to organise an alternative to the SLP. That is exactly what WP is doing.” To prove it, he claims that WP’s youth organisation is bigger than the SLP’s. The reality is that WP is itself just another “tiny group”. It only sells around 500 papers per month. It is not in the position of being able to influence, led alone lead, any section of the workers’ movement, and does not even have members employed in industry. The SLP is a left reformist party that contests elections and carries some influence in the unions. But WP’s proudest activity is “campaigning against BP in Colombia”. However worthy this might be, it only involved a handful of activists and went unnoticed as far as British or Colombian workers were concerned. LCMRCI supporters in Britain have been involved in far more successful campaigns of solidarity with Bolivia or Peru, but we do not go around boasting about it.

A revolutionary organisation would have reason to take pride if it had roots amongst the industrial unions, the anti-racist movement and the rank and file of the Labour Party or socialist organisations. But that is precisely WP’s biggest weakness.

The reason why WP is unable to make telling interventions in the SLP, Labour or anywhere at all, and why it has to take refuge in a self-comforting mantra (‘We are the only revolutionaries and the rest are tiny sects’) is because it does not trust in its own policies. The twists that we saw over the SLP are characteristic of its line changes in all major areas of policy.

On the national question WP had the most incredible contradictions. In July 1996 Workers Power carried a centre-page article arguing against the majority of Scots who want their own parliament in favour of a centralised British state. It said that an autonomous Scotland would threaten the unity of the UK and therefore its proletariat. This position capitulated to Great British nationalism and explains why in its 22 years of existence WP has proved incapable of recruiting in Scotland.

However, a few months before the 1997 referendum WP realised that its position was untenable and suddenly decided that it would champion Scotland’s autonomy and campaign for a double ‘yes’. But in Wales, it contradictorily maintained its previous position and campaigned against the slightest degree of autonomy.

WP opposes the pro-autonomy movements of the various stateless nations on the European continent and is for centralised states, while in the EU it takes an abstentionist position on the question of the march towards centralisation.

If at home WP adapts to national-centralism, in other parts of the world it adapts to liberalism. It called on imperialism to help bourgeois separatist movements inside the degenerated workers’ states and claimed that the national fragmentation of the semi-colonies could provide a starting point for proletarian revolution - actually, in most cases, it led to fratricide (Liberia, central Africa, etc).

WP maintains its correct defence of the Irish republicans and Iraq against imperialism. However, in new conflicts it appears to take its line from the imperialist media. At the time of two of the most important US attacks of the last few years, WP was against defending Haiti or the Serbs.

On the Basque country WP maintains a complete silence over the massive campaign of persecution against Herri Batasuna (the sister organisation of Sinn Fein). Keith Harvey refuses to defend ETA against the Spanish state and to fight for the unconditional release of its 500 prisoners.

On the question of the political characterisation of the present period WP’s position contains contradictions of a most bizarre kind. If you characterise the world period as revolutionary, that ought to mean that revolutions are imminent in many countries and that it is possible to build mass revolutionary parties. If however you characterise the world situation as counterrevolutionary, your main task is to resist new attacks and to maintain your principles through building strong, albeit small, organisations.

WP upholds these two mutually contradictory characterisations simultaneously! On the one hand the Harveyites could write - à la Pablo/Mandel - that the working class is disappearing in most of the third world, that Latin America had been experiencing a decade of heavy defeats and that it is important to find new social subjects for revolution. On the other hand WP endorsed the Argentinean PTS’s analysis that Latin American and the world is about to undergo mass, pre-revolutionary upheavals.

WP cheered on the capitalist overthrow of Communist Party rule in Eastern Europe, typifying those events as pro-democracy revolutions, yet it also said that they produced historic defeats.

These incompatible contradictions result from the juxtaposition of two different methods. WP began life as a group which claimed that all the former ‘socialist’ countries were state capitalist. After 1980 WP rejected that concept and adhered to orthodox Trotskyism. These are two different ways of analysing the world. The first rejects any defence of the ‘socialist’ states against capitalism and rejoices in their destruction, even at the hands of reaction. The second holds that it is important to defend the degenerate workers’ states against internal and external bourgeois counterrevolution, while at the same time it is crucial to fight for their regeneration through a political revolution. Over recent years WP has moved towards a confused hybrid of these two mutually antagonistic methods.

Today WP seems to have adopted the idea that there is no major difference between a capitalist state and a degenerate workers’ state. Both are characterised as bourgeois states, although one has a ruling bourgeoisie while the other has temporarily displaced it. For WP it is possible to accept that for eight years a workers’ state could be ruled by an anti-communist and openly capitalist regime that put most of the economy in the hands of the private sector (as in most of eastern Europe), or that a workers’ state could be administrated by fascists (like the Bosnian Serbs) or by a capitalist class (as in Albania).

For WP the class nature of the state is not decisive. It saw nothing wrong in siding with internal pro-imperialist counterrevolution against the bureaucracy. In the former USSR WP called for a united front with the capitalist parties to defend the bourgeois parliament in 1991, while in 1992 it labelled Zyuganov’s communist-patriotic bloc “fascist” and refused to defend it against Yeltsin’s repression. Inexplicably WP then called for a vote for Zyuganov against Yeltsin in the presidential elections.

In former Yugoslavia WP was all over the place. When war broke out between Croats and Serbs WP called for the defence of both groups in areas where they were in a majority. It initially condemned the independence of Bosnia and called for the defeat of all sides. In mid-1992 it organised a united front with Greater-Serbia monarchists in Vienna. Later it called for the military victory of the muslims in their bid to reconquer the whole of Bosnia. Some months after it said it would only support the reconquest of the 10 to 20% of Bosnian land in which muslims were in a majority before the conflict.

WP said it would reverse its support for the muslims if they formed a new bloc with Croatia or became supporters of imperialism against the Serbs. When that happened, instead of changing its position, WP refused to defend what it called the Serb ‘workers state’ against imperialism. Even worse, it called on Nato to send arms and men to their anti-Serb local proxies.

WP claims that its main achievement is its programme. However, its consistency of the 1980s is now totally absent. Today its ‘method’ consists in constantly shifting its positions in almost any direction. Such schizophrenic behaviour characterises an organisation which no longer has any confidence in itself or its members. It cannot intervene in the SLP or Labour, or in any regroupment process, because it has nothing serious to propose.

Internal democracy is being restricted. WP members are trained to support their leaders, rather than their policies. A ruling clique around a supreme leader is being developed. Critical members are excluded or eased out of the organisation.

After the August 1997 congress of WP’s international organisation, the League for a Revolutionary Communist International, Don Preston pointed out in the Weekly Worker (September 11 1997) that the group had changed many of its political positions without discussing them in front of the class or even their readers. In a desperate reply Brenner wrote: “Every charge is false. Worse, in his polemic Preston tries to mislead his readers through the time-dishonoured methods of falsification: quote-doctoring, distortion and plain slander” (Weekly Worker October 2 1997).

Brenner did not have the honesty to admit WP’s shifts. Instead, he abused a CPGB comrade Healy-style in the CPGB’s own paper. One can imagine how difficult life must be for any comrade inside WP who dares to call into question any of its U-turns.

In the exchange in the Weekly Worker on the LRCI congress six different articles were published. A healthy organisation would have been proud of the interest shown and encouraged the debate. Yet not a word of it was carried in Workers Power. Instead WP accused the CPGB in its own paper of being anti-democratic, although it has never published any letter from the LCMRCI or any CPGB critique in its own press.

WP’s intervention in the SLP was based around its call to SLP branches to adopt a different programme in opposition to the official one and to publicly attack the entire leadership as counterrevolutionary and Stalinist. This was not the most cleverly conceived way of winning support for revolutionary policies against Scargill. However, WP would never tolerate any such opposition from within its own ranks.

Brenner asked: “Can you name a single example of anyone, ever, being expelled from any LRCI section for expressing disagreement within the organisation with any policy, theory, perspective ... or anything at all? If by ‘past history’ you are referring to the expulsion of José Villa in 1995, as you know he was expelled for publicly denouncing the LRCI at a public meeting ...” (Weekly Worker October 2 1997). In fact, can Brenner name a single example of anyone who ever led a tendency within the LRCI and who still remains in the organisation? The only faction allowed to function is the undeclared, secret one around Harvey himself. It may even be possible that comrades who did not agree with Harvey’s new line on the state are no longer represented on the International Secretariat.

In actual fact Villa had already been expelled when he spoke at the meeting Brenner referred to. When in mid-1995 we were setting up a left opposition in the LRCI, Harvey dismissed the only New Zealand full-timer, suspended our comrades, forbade us to communicate with each other by e-mail, intervened in the New Zealand and Bolivian sections and prevented the attendance at the IEC of his most critical opponent. The comrades were denied the right to defend themselves and to appeal against their expulsion. Meanwhile LRCI members were forbidden to socialise with the ‘deserters’.

In an effort to cover the sun with his finger Brenner lies through his teeth about the size of his organisation: “We have more members in the LRCI now than before the splits” (ibid). The reality is that the LRCI now has fewer members and sections and nobody at all in the third world or the industrial working class. Its 1997 congress had 50% fewer delegates than its previous one (1994). Over the last decade WP has lost two or three times more members than the number remaining within the group.

Today WP attempts to survive through aping the SWP. Its paper intentionally resembles Socialist Worker. It is moving towards the position of claiming to be the party and therefore does not deem it necessary or desirable to engage in discussions with the rest of the left or even with its own dissidents.