23.04.1998
Desperate justification
Around the left
Almost every day produces fresh evidence of the unstable and crisis-ridden nature of the League for a Revolutionary Communist International. Extinction surely beckons. Its British - and hegemonic - section, the Workers Power group, is looking increasingly fragile. Clearly, the stress of living in Tony Blair’s ‘New Britain’ is beginning to tell - at least on the WP’s carefully maintained and well policed dogmas.
Over the weekend of March 21-22, WP (Britain) held its national members’ conference. The aim of the conference, in the words of Workers Power, was to deal
“with a range of issues facing Workers Power - our youth work and the building of Revolution, the independent revolutionary youth movement; our trade union work; plans for campaigns and the major features of the current political situation. The conference was optimistic about our opportunities for growth today, an optimism based on the enormous success of Revolution, which held its founding conference in November last year” (April).
Some readers with a more sceptical disposition might be less than impressed by references to the “enormous success” of Revolution - or indeed the idea of the WP doing any sort of meaningful “work” at all. May 1 general election - no sign of WP candidates. Labour Party conference debates - no sign of WP. Reclaim Our Rights - no sign of WP. SLP congress - no sign of WP.
However, as seasoned WP followers will know, a conference inevitably means … an abrupt line change. This is usually followed by reassurances to the effect that nothing has really changed whatsoever - and how the WP will carry on in exactly the same fashion as before. Whatever happens in the real world, nothing must disturb the WP’s unshakeable pro-Labourism - hence its ingrained sectarianism towards the rest of the left.
The report confesses:
“That the assessment we made at our last conference, before the general election, of developments in the Labour Party, and consequently in the Labour left and the Socialist Labour Party, overestimated the speed with which a conflict between Blair and the trade unions would take place … In fact, [Blair’s] victory margin was massive but for almost a year, basking in the glow of the landslide, he has continued his attacks using the trade union leaders as allies. He is playing on an extensive mood of relief among workers that the Tories have been crushed which, in turn, has produced a large measure of tolerance for New Labour. The union leaders are more than just tolerant. These bureaucrats are doing everything they can to shield Blair” (my emphasis).
Excellent news - perhaps. Surely this can only mean that WP is going to throw off its passive tailism and take a positive orientation towards the SLP, Reclaim Our Rights, the Socialist Alliances and other anti-Labour left developments? After all, it can only make sense to start the fightback now, if what we read above is true.
No such luck, it seems:
“Our belief that major struggles would break out with Labour shortly after the election reinforced our view that the SLP might be the vehicle that would rally disillusioned workers to a ‘socialist alternative’. Clearly this has not happened, a factor that contributed to the SLP’s demise.”
A significant factor in the SLP’s “demise” was the sectarian and dogmatic attitude of most of left, who thought that the SLP was dead on arrival. Whatever we may read in the conference report, WP never took a serious position on the SLP. It veered from the call for a “revolutionary SLP” to writing it off as “Britain’s newest reformist sect”, then back again to support for the “the struggle for the political soul of the SLP” - all within the space of a few months (December 1995 to May 1996). Now it has veered back again, dismissing the SLP as a “tiny Stalinist sect”. (It is always amusing to hear pro-Labour left micro-groups like WP grandiosely writing off the SLP which now claims through Reclaim Our Rights to represent 750,000 trade unionists.)
The “key political conclusions” reached by the conference are, apparently, ones
“that Blair cannot draw comfort from. For although he has enjoyed a honeymoon neither the health of the economy nor the patience of the working class will last forever. The split we predicted lies further in the future than we originally thought. But Blair’s election victory has not removed it, or the class struggles that will provoke it, from the agenda” (my emphasis).
Unfortunately, the “key political conclusions” drawn by the WP conference are a mixture of the asinine and the banal - as usual. For instance, the very first conclusion could have come straight from the lips of any member of the SWP: “The massive Labour victory in May represents a major shift to the left in Britain.” (If anything, you could reasonably argue that while society as a whole has moved to the right, within that shift the establishment has looked to its ‘left’wing.) Everything will be alright in the end, reassures the report. We are told that the Labour left has “a greater sense of confidence and is taking steps towards assuming an identity”, and that it will “become more vociferous and more organised over the next period”. We even get a blast of that old-time orthodox Trotskyist faith again, when the anonymous author prophesies that “Blair’s success ... will increase the possibility of a split in the Labour Party and this is now far more widely acknowledged on the Labour left than it was in the 1970s and early 1980s”. All this smacks of hopeful and rather desperate justification of its April 1997 banner headline call to “vote Labour”.
Thus, during last May’s general election in Newport East, WP actually issued a leaflet which called upon workers to vote for the Labour candidate, ex-ToryMP Alan Howarth, as opposed toan obscure class fighter by the name of ... Arthur Scargill. Still, in the eccentric world WP inhabits, this is probably an example of “fighting for a political alternative to New Labour’s entire policy”, as the conference report claims.
We all know that Trotskyist grouplets like WP have the totally erroneous belief that revolutionaries ought automatically to support and vote for bourgeois workers’ parties like Labour - did not Lenin say so in Leftwing communism and elsewhere? The fact that Lenin was giving concrete advice under specific circumstances does not faze WP. Having said that, at least there is a sort of perverse consistency and ‘logic’ to such an outlook.
But it appears that our headless WP will in the not so distant future not even have that theoretical defence any more, no matter how specious it is. In the conference report, it states that “Blair is leading a rightwing reformist government” (my emphasis) - and one of its “key political conclusions” is that the “Blairite faction’s long-term goal [is] to ... transform Labour into a second bourgeois party on the model of the US Democrats”.
Now, maybe we are wrong, but it would be very pleasing if the revolutionary proletarian thinkers and theoreticians that staff WP could explain why revolutionaries should support a party of the bourgoisie that is openly peeling off its working class veneer and exposing its true historic identity - that really would be worth knowing. Or, when we have PR in Britain, will the “revolutionary communist” WP do a Vanessa Redgrave and advocate a ‘tactical’ vote for the Liberal Democrats in order to keep the Tories out?
We look forward to clarification. But, of course, this is all based on the assumption that WP will remain in the land of the living.
Don Preston