11.06.1998

June aggregate

Party notes

June’s aggregate of the Communist Party considered three items.

First our work in the Socialist Alliances was reviewed at some length. As one Manchester comrade made clear, the Alliances provide a relatively important arena of intervention for our organisation, given the absence of genuinely mass developments in the class itself.

The Socialist Party - one of the major political opponents of any organisation committed to reforging a revolutionary party - has adopted a very distant relationship to the SAs, apart from in Coventry. This is a function of the crisis of fragmentation that is threatening to send their organisation into an oblivion-bound tailspin. Taaffe and the SP’s central apparatus have plumped for a narrow, ‘small mass party’ perspective of self-development. Shortsightedly, they are not keen to see the growth and consolidation of a potential electoral rival, especially one that includes awkward customers such as us.

What else is in the SAs? A pretty motley bunch, really. Nevertheless, the form has potential even if the content is not all we would have wished at the moment. Essentially what we have to bear in mind when we review our work in these bodies are not the day-to-day vicissitudes of tussles with various small groups of refugees from social democracy and mainstream Trotskyism.

No, we must not forget the broader picture. One year plus into the Blair government it is clear that - despite the considerable political skill he has shown in government - the ‘honeymoon’ will not last forever. Developments in the world economy for example could provoke crisis. In the past, we have identified a political space created by the re-invention of Labour as a ‘liberal-labour’ party, a return to its origins. Politics, like nature, abhors such vacuums, and Blair was able to partially fill it as the head of a new government spearheading a package of radical reforms, especially in the sphere of the constitution.

Mass discontent with the Labour government could again tear open this space at the heart of British politics with a vengeance. The question is - what will fill it?

We do not estimate that our organisation - given where it is at the moment - is able to present itself as the answer. Real political life demands alliances, joint platforms and blocs. All such temporary formations we enter are for us subordinate to the central aim - forging a viable revolutionary alternative able to displace the Labour Party as the ‘natural’ party of the working class.

This longer-term aim does not however mean that we will adopt saintly aloofness from the rather more prosaic reality of the SAs as they exist today. We will engage energetically with the groups and individuals they contain, and the meeting reviewed the concrete plans for this. As one comrade emphasised, whatever the nature of our opponents, we are fighting over and over again in different forums the struggle for democracy in the workers’ movement. This is a vital battle for the future.

Criticism was offered of aspects of our method by a comrade from the Revolutionary Democratic Group who participated in the meeting as an observer. In essence he characterised our approach as ‘pool hopping’. Now that the ‘sharks’ in the Socialist Labour Party had driven so much of the left out of that little pond, we were trying to splash around in the SA. The only way to assess the progress being made, he said, was through using the criterion of the fight for programme - where were we now in the fight to make the call for a federal republic a hegemonic demand of the entire workers’ movement?

Responding, a number of comrades emphasised that we do not fetishise any one demand in our programmatic arsenal - no matter how important - and divorce it from our central political task. The ‘thing’ is not the federal republic per se: the thing is whether it is fought for in a revolutionary way. Without a Communist Party, in other words, any aspect of our minimum programme can be pursued. But the thing is to realise it in a revolutionary, not a reformist way. Thus, the key link to be grasped in this period is the Party question and it is our progress in this fight that should be our benchmark.

The meeting went on to adopt a Party security document after a brief, largely technical, discussion and to offer criticisms and suggestions for this year’s Summer Offensive fundraising campaign.

Finally a brief report was given of the organisation of this year’s Communist University. We are looking forward to a week of stimulating debate with a range of left groups and individuals.

Already confirmed as outside speakers are the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, the Revolutionary Democratic Group and the International Bolshevik Tendency, as well as Hillel Ticktin, István Mészáros, Robin Blackburn and Hugh Kerr.

Mark Fischer
national organiser