23.04.1998

Pub crawl to socialism

Martin Blum replies to Dave Osler

In his response to my recent comments on the SLP, comrade Dave Osler (‘Drop the dead dogma’ Weekly Worker April 9 1998) offers what he imagines to be an inspiring - and optimistic - vision of the mass working class party of the future. But is it really revolutionary, merely centrist or perhaps left reformist? When it comes to answering fundamental questions facing our movement, comrade Osler woefully fails to reach any satisfactory conclusions. 

In the Weekly Worker (March 26) I asserted that for comrade Osler “some sort of social democratic or centrist regroupment is a necessary predetermined stage between now and a future revolutionary party”. In response, the comrade referred to his article in What Next? (‘Recomposition and the British left’, No6 1998) where he states:

“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.”

So who is saying what here? For all his huff and puff about big times just round the corner, comrade Osler prefers to deal with phantoms and imaginary mass regroupments which tower above the current revolutionary diaspora.

I have no problem whatsoever in intervening in and helping to shape all manner of real progressive developments in the workers’ movement. But what is our reason for nurturing and honing such developments? It is certainly not because we think that in and of themselves they provide ‘the answer’. This surely must be one lesson we learn from the experience of the Socialist Labour Party.

Our organisation posits the main task for the revolutionary left in Britain as the reforging of the Communist Party. In no way is this intended as a substitute for broad political activity. To an extent, I agree here with comrade Osler concerning communist rapprochement when he rhetorically asks: “How can it take place outside a wider regroupment of class struggle forces?” Yet this is not to present the unity of these ‘broader forces’ as some absolute prerequisite for communist unity. It is undoubtedly the case that when there is widespread militant political activity by our class many of the petty or secondary differences among revolutionaries will assume their proper place. Life itself will begin to sort out who is right and who is wrong, what is important and what is not. Splits and walkouts which today so frequently result from minor differences and tantrums will rightly be seen for the childishness they are.

Yet, do we rely on the spontaneity of our class alone to spur us on to communist unity? Comrade Osler seems to regard spontaneity and consciousness as equal parts of an equation. Yes, connected they are. Leninists however emphasise consciousness. For that reason for them the organisation of communists is primary.

But this is not comrade Osler’s method. In fact, he is decidedly opportunist. What are our immediate tasks? Communist rapprochement or broad church ‘recomposition’? While rejecting any accusations of crude determinism, comrade Osler has been banging away about recomposition as the main task of revolutionaries for some time. Two years ago it was the SLP which was then ‘the answer’. That god failed. The new god now seems to be the “small, but perfectly formed” Socialist Democracy Group, as he describes it in the latest issue of Socialist Democracy (April-May 1998). In fact this new grouping is essentially an unprincipled and cowardly split from the Socialist Party, plus quiet decampments from the SLP and Socialist Outlook.

I characterised Dave Osler, Roland Wood and other such ‘clever’ tacticians in Scargill’s SLP as drinkers in the last chance saloon. Comrade Osler argues that “there are no last chance saloons in socialist politics”. He thinks that he will be “forced to drink in many more downmarket spit and sawdust boozers” on his long pub crawl to socialism.

In this context, he correctly sees the SLP as a missed opportunity. But whose missed opportunity? Ours or Scargill’s? His method now, and then, relies on others providing a political framework in which he can comfortably sip on “half-price 10-year-old single malts”. In place of the conscious activity and the disciplined organisation of communists openly struggling for what is necessary, comrade Osler cosied up to the Scargill regime, and when he was finally voided as a by-product of the anti-CPGB witch hunt, he blames the SLP for rejecting ‘recomposition’!

Comrade Osler’s vision of a broad church ‘class struggle party of recomposition’ is decidedly social democratic: hence his admiration of organisations like the PDS in Germany and Communist Refoundation in Italy. Are such formations what we need for victory? Does not history tell us that such halfway houses end up handing over the masses over to counterrevolution? Remember Chile 1973 and the slaughter of thousands of socialist and communist workers.

In his Socialist Democracy article declaring himself a convert to the SDG, comrade Osler casts his mind “back to the early months of the Socialist Labour Party. [He] finally felt part of a socialist organisation with at least the potential to break with the sectarian past of the British left ... How cruelly those hopes were dashed.” Now he has found yet another new home. But is the SDG really “small, but perfectly formed”? Hardly.

The SDG does not really say what it is. Is it Marxist, red-green or a Fourth International discussion group? It certainly rejects Leninism. In its blurb, its purported form of organisation is one in which decisions are based on consensus: “Through discussion we try to reach a consensus on any question.” Logically then, how could such a flabby organisation be perfectly formed? Is comrade Osler himself explicitly repudiating democratic centralism and top-down organisation as necessary for the victory of the working class? It appears so.

Comrade Osler’s method is essentially centrist. He seems prepared to accept any soft compromise. While he desires a ‘broad church, Marxist-centred recomposition’, in practice he will settle for a party dominated by old Labour, reformists, greens or Stalinites - so long as there is a comfortable space for ‘Marxist’ advisers to the men and women of power. In reality, this is just a variation on Fiscism in the SLP. The difference being that Pat Sikorski, Brian Heron and co have slightly stronger stomachs.

The practice of the CPGB is to energetically support all movements of red ‘recomposition’ - that is movements of the working class - be it Socialist Labour or the Socialist Alliances. But we have not entered into such processes unarmed, liquidating ourselves organisationally and programmatically - or even pretending to. Our method is to support such initiatives in so far as they provide a site for communist rapprochement and throw up the raw material necessary for the reforging of a mass Communist Party. Necessarily therefore we fight to retain complete liberty to carry on agitation, propaganda and political activity.

Here is the rub for comrade Osler. Almost as if he has never read a copy of the Weekly Worker, he refers to the “profoundly ambiguous nature of the call for a ‘reforged Communist Party’”.  This is deliberate obtuseness. How often does it need to be spelt out? We see no golden age of British Bolshevism. No period to which we nostalgically hark back. We do not wish to recreate the CPGB of 1920, 1926 or any other date. Rather, we have struggled for and won the banner of the CPGB, which represented the highest concrete manifestation of working class organisation yet achieved in Britain.

Comrade Osler has kindly left the door open. Referring to our approach of communist rapprochement he asks: “What meaningful content can it possibly have, if not as a party of revolutionary recomposition, in which the bulk of cadres will come from the Trotskyist tradition?” At present, with no fresh forces entering the field of communist politics, I have no fundamental disagreement. The only forces on the immediate horizon come from either a Trotskyist or state capitalist theory tradition. The Revolutionary Democratic Group, Socialist Democracy Group, Socialist Perspectives and others are welcome. But, comrade Osler, are we welcome in your supposedly ‘broad church’ projects?

Comrade Osler claims to have learned one or two things from “a long political career inside Labourism and failed sects”. Yet it seems that the method of open ideological struggle is not one of them. The comrade casually writes: “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” (my emphasis). In other words, he has been consciously lying to his comrades and the class as a whole for the past 17 years on one of the most fundamental questions of the 20th century, and then has the nerve to call on us to “come to terms with [our] own past” and come clean on Trotskyism!

Since the foundation of The Leninist, ironically 17 years ago, our current has openly articulated its developing position on all subjects, including the character of the USSR, in front of the class. Comrade Osler - a new convert to openness, it seems - has discarded Leninism for a left-liberal pluralism. For nearly two decades, the comrade has lived with the illusion that the organisational norms practised by Trotskyism were democratic centralist. However, his “first-hand experience in doublethink” (the reality of bureaucratic centralist Trotskyism) has led him to reject Bolshevik democratic centralism.

Finally on Trotskyism. The comrade wants the CPGB to “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”. I have no principled objection to the comrade’s proposal. Yet I do not apologise for not fitting neatly into his inadequate categories. It may be “jelly” to comrade Osler, but pretty damn concrete to me.

Our opinions on Trotsky and Trotskyism are there for all to read. Just take a look at the same edition of our paper in which comrade Osler’s article appears. In reference to our recent school on the USSR in his ‘party notes’ column, our national organiser, Mark Fischer, states: “Trotsky’s provisional categories represent enormously profound attempts by a Marxist of genius to develop an understanding of a unique, totally unprecedented social phenomenon in the very course of its birth and consolidation ... Despite lapses, his thinking on the USSR continued to show flexibility and development” (Weekly Worker April 9). So what about our supposed past? Try the supplement by Jack Conrad, ‘Anti-Cliff: initial remarks on the ideology of state capitalism’ (Weekly Worker December 1993), in which the comrade writes: “Let us repeat our evaluation of Stalin. He was a monster, a terrorist and a butcher. Stalin was a ‘labour dictator’ who represented, not the continuation of Leninism, but the interests of a bureaucracy which siphoned off social wealth and suppressed the remnants of workers’ and Party democracy.” Clear enough?

I personally do not think some attempt at all-encompassing theses on Trotskyism would be very constructive. Given that comrade Osler has just ‘come out’ as a bureaucratic collectivist, it actually seems more appropriate that he undertakes this task and hence comes to terms with his own past. To my mind, he has declared himself a non-Trotskyist. Trotskyism, crudely put, is an ideology built around the defence of the theory of the degenerated workers’ state. That is why I am not a Trotskyist.

Yet, on the united front versus Stalin’s ‘third period’, I am a ‘Trotskyist’. On the fight against fascism in the 1930s, I am a ‘Trotskyist’. In recognising that the revolutionary flame snuffed out by ‘Stalinism’ remained as a dwindling flicker with the Left, then United, then International Opposition, I am a ‘Trotskyist’. But I oppose the formation of the Fourth International. I defend the Leninist tradition of open ideological struggle in the forging of a revolutionary workers’ party against the epigones of Trotsky. In this I am sure this view represents an overwhelming majority of our current membership.

Rather than learning the lessons of a career in Labourism and failed sects himself, comrade Osler wants us to repeat the same mistakes. Some apostatical CPGB theses on Trotskyism will not solve anything. What is at stake here is that comrade Osler, despite all protestations, is in practice opposing the primary task of organising communists in favour of what is fundamentally a liquidationist project of struggling for a ‘broad church recomposition’ dominated by social democracy.