09.04.1998

Drop the dead dogma

Dave Osler replies to Martin Blum’s evaluation of the first two years of the SLP

A mass socialist party, hegemonic over an even larger network of industrial militants. Pulling wildcats in key sectors, organising non-unionised workplaces, and widely held responsible for a dramatic upsurge of coronary thrombosis among law-abiding general secretaries.

Revolutionary elected representatives at all levels, exploiting their positions as tribunes of the oppressed. A newspaper with a six-figure - maybe even seven figure - circulation, daily breaking scandals that rock the establishment. Pro-party intellectuals exerting wide influence in public life. An uncontrollable youth wing, deeply committed to Marxism, rampant promiscuity and sustained drug abuse, but not necessarily in that order.

That is the vision. Now the questions start. How do we get there? Should our new party be a reforged Communist Party or a party of recomposition? What do the two terms mean, anyway? Are they incompatible? Why not a revolutionary socialist tendency inside a larger class struggle leftwing formation?

The remarks on the subject made in comrade Martin Blum’s recent discussion of the Socialist Labour Party (Weekly Worker ‘Balance of failure’ March 26) seriously misrepresent the politics of socialist recomposition. Blum lambasts “those who viewed the SLP as the ‘last chance saloon’. A now or never opportunity. This approach came from comrades who have had long political careers either inside Labourism or failed sects. The most ‘theorised’ version came 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.”

In that immortal expression of Alastair Campbell, “crap”. First, there are no last chance saloons in socialist politics. So long as capitalism exists, there will be class struggle. It will take on different organisational expressions in different countries, times and circumstances, but it will persist until the revolutionary abolition of classes themselves. Doubtless Roland and I will be forced to drink in many more downmarket spit and sawdust boozers before we reach the political equivalent of a bar on a moonlit Caribbean beach serving endless supplies of half-price 10-year-old single malts.

Accordingly, the SLP was not a last chance opportunity, simply a missed opportunity. Think where the far left could be now if the SLP had chosen to go down the road of recomposition. Yet if anything, the tide of opinion for a broad-based party is stronger than two years ago. It now takes in the Socialist Alliances, Socialist Democracy and at least some comrades in the Socialist Party, Socialist Outlook and Socialist Perspectives. Next year’s likely campaigns by two (or possibly more) rebel Labour Euro-MPs also point in this direction. Even the Scargillites might be forced to play ball.

Lastly, I have explicitly rejected all suggestion of historical necessity: “It would be the crudest determinism to suggest that a British party of recomposition is in some sense inevitable or unavoidable. But it remains possible, perhaps likely, and healthy from the standpoint of Marxism informed by praxis”. (‘Recomposition and the British left’ What’s Next? No6).

Blum argues that continental parties of recomposition are in reality parties of decomposition, the product of crises in ‘official communism’ and social democracy. Up to a point, undeniable. It is through just such a process that a British party of recomposition is likely to emerge. Moreover, anyone following recent developments in Izquierda Unida will know that all is not sweetness and light inside such formations.

Yet Blum’s is a woefully one-sided assessment, possibly clouded by residual Stalinist nostalgia for the mass continental CPs of old. From a revolutionary viewpoint, parties of recomposition are politically superior to former communist parties, which despite their mass character, were for the bulk of their existence reduced to acting largely as reformist adjuncts of Kremlin foreign policy.

Their forced turn to multi-tendency democracy has enabled revolutionary socialists - primarily but not exclusively of Trotskyist origin and affiliated to the United Secretariat - to break through their historic isolation from key sections of politicised workers.

All of this takes me to the heart of the argument, which is the profoundly ambiguous nature of the call for a ‘reforged Communist Party’ itself. What meaningful content can it possibly have, if not a party of revolutionary recomposition, in which the bulk of the cadres will come from the Trotskyist tradition? How can it take place outside a wider regroupment of class struggle forces, bringing together reformists, Marxists of all shades, probably anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists, and just possibly even sections of the Old Labour right and the trade union bureaucracy?

The convention in political journalism is to use initial capitals only when referring to specific parties. Yes, in the scientific sense of the term, we need a reforged communist party. But we need a reforged Communist Party like Boris Yeltsin needs another blockbuster hangover tomorrow morning.

Let us remember that the CPGB’s revolutionary period was short and not particularly sweet. A drift towards centrism was evident as early as the general strike of 1926. In Trotsky’s assessment, the parties of the Third International were ‘dead for revolution’ by 1933. Granted, the track record of British Trotskyism has been if anything yet more abysmal. But then, no one is seriously arguing for a reforged Workers Revolutionary Party.

In short, the British far left doesn’t need to reforge anything. We need to create something we have until now never had, namely a sizeable broad church Marxist-centred formation with a serious implantation in the working class.

Let me concede Blum’s contention that I have had a long political career ‘inside Labourism and failed sects’. At least I have learned one or two things from the experience. First, while the Labour Party remains a bourgeois workers’ party, there is now no case for serious entry work.

Second, for most of the last 17 years, I publicly supported the view that the USSR was a degenerated workers’ state, while privately having reached a bureaucratic collectivist position. It was a useful firsthand experience in doublethink. Now the question is settled by history, even if - incredibly enough - some numbskull orthodox Trotskyists still can’t get their heads around the reality of capitalist restoration.

But the rethinking has to be a two-way process. It’s drop the dead dogma time for the entire thinking left. Let today’s CPGB come to terms with its own past, starting with a re-evaluation of the basic questions of Trotskyism versus Stalinism.

I am told that one or two Trotskyists have joined the CPGB before, but were not successfully integrated into the party. Let us have an explanation of why this is so. If the CPGB genuinely seeks to be an inclusive revolutionary organisation - by implication, incorporating many militants from a Trotskyist background - there is clearly a need for political clarity on this point. If only in the name of regroupment or ‘communist rapprochement’, perhaps the not-yet-party’s leading theoreticians could produce a formalised set of theses on Trotskyism, to which the Trotskyist left could then respond, rather than continually attempting to nail the Weekly Worker’s jelly to the ceiling.