26.03.1998

Balance of failure: Two years of Socialist Labour

Martin Blum examines some of the lessons the revolutionary left must learn

Two years ago, comrades were preparing for the founding congress of the Socialist Labour Party. Many were brimming with optimism. A mass workers’ leader - the hero of the miners’ Great Strike, no less - had broken from the Labour Party and was establishing a party which aimed to abolish capitalism. Not only that, the initial hype would have you believe that the SLP was to be the natural home of all socialists, communists, environmental activists, feminists and all progressive opponents of the current system.

There were those on the left from all stables - Labourite, Stalinite and Trotskyist - ready armed with crystal ball, dismissed the entire project as folly, preferring to stick to old formulas. Others positively engaged with and welcomed the process initiated by Arthur Scargill in October 1995 with his ‘Future strategies for the left’ document.

Two years down the track the opportunities which abounded have all but disappeared. The SLP has fallen spectacularly short of its potential. On many, if not all, fronts the organisation has stagnated to the point of virtual collapse. Morale is extremely low. Real membership, despite the claims of the leader, has failed to grow at all, and in many places has haemorrhaged. The SLP has congealed as a Scargillite party. No other adjective - Stalinite, Labourite, syndicalist - is adequate.

But this process has not been even and has certainly not occurred without struggle. So what lessons for the left? What can be garnered for the workers’ movement as a whole? Since the December 97 congress various left groupings and individuals have been attempting to answer such questions. So far, most arguments put forward have been done in a fairly narrow way, more in the manner of self-justification for previously held positions.

Most responses to the SLP’s seeming demise have tended to further reinforce the very sectarianism which its birth promised to overcome. Yet, thankfully, a certain dialogue does exist between disparate forces, precisely due to the SLP experience.

Naturally most of those who opposed the SLP from the outset are now firmly in the ‘I told you so’ camp. These people seem to have some fantastic schema about the way a ‘real’ mass break from Labour will occur. All in one lump, it seems. Bob Pitt, editor of What Next? is certainly among them. Comrade Pitt is fond of portraying himself as the very model of the sensible Marxist. Yet in comrade Pitt’s world, life outside the Labour Party is akin to death. If that is the case, I do not know why he bothers publishing his journal, read and written by those mainly outside the Labour Party.

In a recent article (What Next? No7) he argues: “The SLP leadership’s bureaucratic methods flowed directly from the premature character of the SLP itself, launched as it was in advance of any mass break from the Labour Party”. He argues that given a small organisation to start with, Scargill’s project was bound to be descended upon by the ultra-lefts, “lunatics taking over the asylum” no less. This is nonsense on a number of levels. Firstly, it blames Scargill’s authoritarianism on the revolutionaries, sorry ‘ultra-lefts’, in the SLP who opposed his witch hunt and the Labourite/British road-type project.

This is a fundamentally unscientific approach. Where, then, does comrade Pitt assume Blair’s, or Kinnock’s, or MacDonald’s bureaucratic methods came from? Of course, like them Scargill’s approach flows from his programme, from his vision of ‘socialism’. Something to be delivered by a socialist parliament, rather than workers’ revolutionary self-liberation.

Secondly it defines ‘mass’ simply as a large number. This is not the Leninist understanding of the term. In this context, Lenin defined mass as those elements of the class who were moving towards or are engaged in independent political action. He stated that at certain times this could mean dozens, at other times, millions.

Thirdly, it assumes that a mass break from Labour will be devoid of the bureaucratic deformities of Scargill’s project because ultra-lefts will be swamped by the tens of thousands of ‘ordinary members’. Sensible Bob Pitt types, no doubt. This approach identifies bureaucratism in the workers’ movement as a mere whim of individual leaders, rather than in its objective basis within trade unionism, which, in the final analysis has a material interest in the survival of the wages system.

I do find it odd that in a period when society continues to drift to the right - witness the Countryside Alliance - comrade Pitt’s greatest fear seems to be ultra-leftism. In reality, the main pressure on the revolutionary left continues to be liquidationism of a rightist trajectory. Witness Scottish Militant Labour forming itself as the leftwing of Scottish nationalism.

While Bob Pitt’s ‘I-told-you-so-ism’ around the SLP is of a decidedly Labourite nature, the other variety comes from the self-preservation instincts of sects like the Workers Power group. Its intervention in the SLP was decidedly unstable, shifting from left to right, abstention to involvement, almost exclusively based on the narrow project of rewinning lost supporters. It can now safely inoculate its membership from engaging in the rough and tumble of such politics. The SLP is therefore neatly put away in its fixed-categorical box - Stalinist sect.

So much for the raiders, red-professors and Labourite abstentionists from the SLP project. What about those who constructively engaged? I will not deal here with those who have basically sold themselves to Scargillism: Brian Heron and the Sikorskis’ Fourth International Supporters Caucus, or the rag-bag of Stalinites like Harpal Brar or Royston Bull.

We can identify basically three approaches and reactions by those comrades who ended up engaging with the project. There are those whose basic approach was a narrow recruitment drive around one ossified set of beliefs or another. For example, Marxist Bulletin, akathe International Bolshevik Tendency and Socialist Labour Action aka Workers Power. Another tack was that taken by our own organisation, the Revolutionary Democratic Group, and various individuals. This basically viewed the SLP as a site of struggle for a revolutionary party rather than any sort of short cut.

The third approach came from those who viewed the SLP as the ‘last chance saloon’. A now or never opportunity. This approach largely came from comrades who have had long political careers either inside Labourism or failed sects. The most ‘theorised’ version of this comes from comrades such as Dave Osler and Roland Wood who maintain that some sort of social democratic or centrist regroupment is a necessary predetermined stage between now and a future revolutionary party.

We have pointed out that such formations as the SLP, Rifondazione Comunista or the Party of Democratic Socialism in Germany, rather than representing a positive recomposition, are more parties of ‘decomposition’ of previous perspectives, the detritus of the defeat of ‘official communism’ and the crisis within social democracy. In countries like Italy or Spain, it is not surprising they have a mass character given the historical role of the ‘official communist’ parties there. At the same time such processes should be engaged with and where they are heading in a positive direction, encouraged. This, however, is not to posit them as a necessary stage and artificially create them when life itself has not. Our central strategic aim remains the reforging of a mass, revolutionary democratic Communist Party.

Ian Dudley’s article in What Next? No7 is a narrow self-justification for the Marxist-Bulletin/IBT. According to comrade Dudley, everything was going just hunky-dory for the Marxist Bulletin in the SLP, though they are “not so well known outside the SLP”. In fact, things were going so well for these comrades that they nearly had a comrade elected to SLP vice-president! If everything was going so swimmingly, why leave? Why are you leaving behind that layer of militants you influenced?

More seriously, the most outrageous claim is that the CPGB attempted to finger these comrades, former members and now “co-thinkers” of the International Bolshevik Tendency, to the SLP leadership. This is just not true. On October 10 1996 the Weekly Worker carried a back page article ‘Wretched’ which was a response to an attack on the CPGB in the IBT’s journal 1917 (No18 - undated). That article itself described those who had dissolved the IBT’s public organisation in Britain as “IBT supporters”. These comrades went on to form the Marxist Bulletin. What the CPGB was responding to was a dishonest call by the ‘former IBT members’ for all revolutionary organisations to liquidate themselves in order to join the SLP.

We pointed out at the time that for the IBT paying the price of dissolving was “cheap to the point of being free”. No one had heard of the IBT. Its journal 1917, won a prize amongst strikers during the Timex dispute as being the most obscure leftwing journal discovered on the picket line. Before going ahead and printing the ‘Wretched’ article, we contacted the IBT in New Zealand and America by email. We also contacted their comrades in Britain. How were we meant to refer to them in polemics? No response was forthcoming. Either way, apart from attacking the politics of liquidationism no names were mentioned. Mark Fischer fingered rotten politics and hypocrisy - no more.

Comrade Dudley explains why the Marxist Bulletin has now left the SLP. At the December 1997 Congress the SLP supposedly “crossed the Rubicon and consolidated on a reformist, anti-communist basis”.

During 1996, the IBT actually described the internal life of the SLP as being on the whole “quite open and democratic”. The truth is, the SLP was established on an anti-communist basis. Communists were witch hunted from the beginning of the SLP’s internal life and democracy was severely curtailed by the imposition of the Scargill constitution. The exclusion clauses of Scargill’s constitution, originally designed to keep out Militant Labour, were quickly turned on alleged CPGB supporters.

A central problem to fighting the witch hunt was that many - including the ex-IBT - thought that by distancing themselves from the Weekly Worker, rather than using it as their weapon, they thought they could avoid the purge.

Moreover, for democrats a grouping coming out of the weirdo world of the Spartacist League, now to describe the SLP as a collection of eccentrics not only reminds one of those in glass houses, but to the extent that it is a true description of the SLP it applied from day one.

Nevertheless at the first congress, everything was up for grabs, there was nothing inevitable about how the SLP would end up. Scargill’s ‘constitution’ was presented as a fait accompli. This did not mean it had to be accepted as one. Up until December 1997, there had not been a vote on the constitution.

Of course, the anti-communist witch hunt in the form of voidings initially against those branded CPGB has characterised and shaped the entire political life of the SLP. Comrades who entered the fray with a fundamentally opportunist position, either of a sectarian nature - ie, to come out with a few recruits (the Marxist Bulletin have not even managed this), or of a liquidationist approach adapting to Scargillism (like former Fiscite Martin Wicks now of the breakaway Socialist Perspectives) tried to distance themselves from CPGB supporters.

When comrades did pass motions and at times stuck their necks out in support of those being voided, they acted as if they were doing favours for the victims of the witch hunt. It was not until 1997 that the realisation dawned that the witch hunt was being directed against them too. Just like we always said it would. First they came for the communists...

Rather than start a militant fight in the SLP and in front of the class through the Campaign for a Democratic SLP, as this paper had been urging, comrades ducked-and-dived and after a brief skirmish have now largely decamped to their own exclusive projects. This walking out has largely been based on moral indignation or a narrow perspective of ‘we can’t stand any more’.

There has been no fundamental crackdown on debate in the SLP since Scargill pulled out of the hat a 3,000 block vote at the December congress. In fact, there has been a considerable easing off of the witch hunt against the left. With the SLP in crisis, it is Fisc, Harpal Brar, the Stalin Society, the Bullites and the NUMists who are at each others’ throats. The democrats can anyway be left alone - for now - while Arthur has 3,000 votes in his back pocket.

Marxist Bulletin and Socialist Perspectives’s method of keeping debate internal was self-serving, not about serving the wider interests of the class. That is what formed the basis of their ‘Swindon bloc’. Despite himself therefore Ian Dudley makes a correct point, when he says: “A layer of activists have learned ... the treacherous role of ‘left’ bureaucrats like Scargill and the need to break with their methods and... their politics. For the question of democracy in the SLP was above all a programmatic question”.

We in the CPGB were always aware of and stressed this. However, it is not through the Marxist Bulletin where most learned about Scargill. It was through the pages of the Weekly Worker. Here all breaches of democracy were exposed. And this coverage was not through any narrowly defined motive. Although our circulation has improved, our exposure of the internal shenanigans of the SLP comes from our general method of openness.

We reveal our own internal debates, not through any liberal inclinations, but because communists believe that through an open culture, wrong ideas can be rectified or defeated. This way advanced layers of the class can understand what is true and what is false, who is right and who is wrong. What we apply to ourselves we apply to others, including the SLP.

Where the Marxist Bulletin cut their cloth to suit their narrow aims of winning ones and twos to their ‘correct programme’, we posit the main fight around democracy precisely to win the space for open programmatic debate between all tendencies. What the IBT and Machiavellian operators like Martin Wicks do not seem to have learned is that programmatic debate, internal life and the struggle for socialism must become the conscious property of our class. For instance the Campaign for a Democratic SLP was proposed as an organisation of SLP members but with a public - ie, open profile. It would actively seek to recruit militant democrats into the SLP, rather than more Scargillites. This unfortunately explains why the Marxist Bulletin picketed the founding meeting - urging no support for “this anti-SLP lash up!”. The CDSLP was attacked for not having “a serious approach to changing the structures and practices of the SLP.” It was dismissed as a “call to split and form a new organisation”. How hollow that all rings now. Just who are the splitters?

The SLP is not yet a spent force. Anne Scargill recently polled 17% in a local by-election, beating the Tories and the Liberal Democrats. The SLP could still grow and attract thousands. Scargill’s ‘Reclaim our Rights’ could give him political hegemony in any trade union fight against Blair. Anyone who thinks that militant workers and trade unionists do not join bureaucratic organisations have not been taking notice of the entire history of the 20th century. They are merely projecting their own desires onto reality.