07.05.1998

Fight nationalist poison

Party notes

On Thursday May 8, the Socialist Party is organising a London aggregate to discuss the developing crisis in its relations with Scottish Militant Labour. A representative of the executive committee of SML will present the case for the dissolution of the organisation into a Scottish Socialist Party, explicitly committed to the break-up of the UK state along national lines.

However, if the debate so far between the SML executive committee and the leadership of SP is anything to go by, the exchange could be an extended exercise in avoiding the issue. And the issue is the fight against the infection of nationalism in the workers’ movement. This infection must be rooted out and destroyed by genuine partisans of our class.

Yet the SP EC seems determined to keep any discussion of substantive principle out of its discussions. Indeed, despite the fact that it recognises that what is being posed is “the dissolution of our organisation”, it is pained by the suggestion that it has “declared war” on SML’s proposals. This is an unnecessary “attempt to polarise the debate”, it wheedles (‘In reply to Scottish Executive Committee letter of March 27 1998’ Members Bulletin April 2, p35).

Will the SP leadership never learn? Clearly the organisation is subject to increasingly powerful centrifugal pressures, only one of which is exerted in the direction of Scotland. It is significant for example that the whole issue of the “Scottish turn, part two” was “injected into a debate on finance by Mike Morris from Merseyside”. He did this “in order to reinforce his argument that the financial proposals put forward by the EC” to counteract the organisation’s looming crisis “were going too far towards ‘a highly centralised structure’” (ibid p36).

Also ominous in this context is the contribution to the same Members Bulletin by Roy Davies of Swansea branch. He more or less gives advance warning to the leadership that the crisis they face in Scotland is poised to repeat itself in Wales.

Criticising a recent contribution to the internal document from Hannah Sell - the national activities organiser - comrade Davies outlines the key issues “not addressed” by comrade Sell. Concretely, the comrade from Wales suggests that “the notion of an all-British workers’ party being formed simultaneously in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, given the developments in Scotland and Wales, is questionable to say the least” (p43). The “most likely” scenario for the development of the British political scene apparently is “the emergence of politically dominant nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales that will grow at the expense of New Labour” (ibid). This poses “the question of the break-up of the British state” along national lines, a fracture that is apparently “integral to the development of the British revolution” (ibid).

Comrade Davies carries on - happily oblivious of the full opportunist import of the words he writes - that “these national developments mitigate against the traditional concept we have long held of an all-British road to socialism” (p44). The comrade - quite correctly in my view - points out that “the national question in Wales could be advanced at a much faster rate than in Scotland over the next five to 10 years” (p43). Clearly though, his appetite is to adapt to it, to tail the growth of the same poisonous nationalism that is now rotting SML. He ends his piece with a flurry of sentences that the leadership of SP should take as a threat … if it had the gumption to recognise it.

He assures readers that “these issues that I have raised have been the subject of some discussion in Wales over the past period. They are not something that have arisen from a clear blue sky … the Scottish Socialist Alliance offers the answer” (p44).

It should be blindingly obvious to any political leadership worth its salt that SP faces a challenge to its very existence as an organisation. Most grimly, accommodation to nationalism threatens to split the organisation, to fatally divide Welsh, Scottish and English comrades. How do the SP and its international affiliates - organised in the Committee for a Workers International - respond?

The internal bulletin cited above features contributions from CWI sections in Germany and Sweden expressing “shock” and counselling against “quick decisions” (Germany, pp24-25); “great concern” and “upset” at the “mixing up” of the strategic need to build “a revolutionary party” with “the need for electoral alliances” (Sweden pp25-26. A lone dissident International Executive Committee member of the CWI, Farooq Tariq of Pakistan offers “full support to Scottish comrades in their tactics” (p29).

Positive or negative, all this is pretty irrelevant really. SML is quite clearly on a nationalist course. Therefore, the comments of the international sections of CWI will be only be of passing interest. More telling is the profoundly lame intervention of Peter Taaffe in his ‘Short thesis on the revolutionary party’. Clearly, unless comrades break from the dim, formal and abstract method of this leading comrade, SP faces oblivion.

Characteristically, in the midst of a life-and-death struggle for the very survival of his organisation, he produces a thesis - that actually compounds the problem. Thus, the man writes - clearly with no notion of the nature of the processes that have produced the present dire situation in his organisation - that “SML is an autonomous part of the SP … based upon a clear revolutionary programme, perspectives, strategy and tactics, and a separate revolutionary organisation” (ibid p22).

To be candid, if the SP or SML actually had a “clear revolutionary programme”, then the question of “separate … organisation” would never have arisen. This was a concession to nationalism and should have been killed when it raised its head in the first place.

Yet - despite himself - Taaffe cannot avoid the truth entirely. He writes of what he coyly calls “moods” within the class that have “undoubtedly spilled over at certain stages into the ranks of our organisation”. How the fundamental division in the workers’ movement between reform and revolution has become “blurred in the minds of some comrades”. The political philistine Taaffe may think it a “paradox” that the “flexible approach” of SP towards a “new mass workers’ party” has had a “negative effect” in the ranks of his organisation, “blurring” the distinction between “mass reformist, left reformist or centrist parties and a Marxist party” (p23). However, for Marxists this is quite explicable. SP has a reformist programme that adapts opportunistically to the political milieu it works in - be that Labourism, feminism, black separatism or Scottish/Welsh nationalism.

Without the means to fight, Taaffe - pathetically - is reduced to equating mundane organisational questions with the “revolutionary party”. Quite frankly, it is sad to have this apparatchik write of the need “at all times [to maintain] a separate revolutionary organisation … [which would] meet separately and regularly, preferably on a weekly basis, to discuss the way forward, to collect dues and to recruit to our party” (p24).

This is the world view of a tired, rather apolitical bureaucrat. Genuine revolutionaries in SP must fight the “Scottish turn, part two” at a far more fundamental level - at that of programme and revolutionary principle. An important section of our workers’ movement is embroiled in a battle against the effects of petty nationalism. This section - politically personified in the inept figure of Taaffe - simply does not have the theoretical or programmatic arsenal to fight and win.

Yet win we must. The historical precedents show us what happens if we lose. Roy Davies of Swansea is correct in one sense: there is no ‘British road to socialism’. But then, the comrade should be advised - there certainly is no Welsh or Scottish road to ‘socialism’ either.

Whatever the intentions of these comrades, at the end of that road lies hell, not socialism or anything like it.

Mark Fischer
national organiser