09.07.1998
Socialist Hypocrisy Group
Party notes
“This Socialist Democracy Group, then. What’s it all about?” muses Dave Osler in Socialist Democracy No3 (April-May 1998).
Good question, Dave. What on earth is the SDG all about? Here is an organisation whose promotion blurb is full of honeyed phrases about the need for ‘openness’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘democracy’. Its founding members split from the Socialist Party denouncing its “gross distortion of the spirit of debate and controversy” which constitutes the essence of democratic centralism (Founding statement Socialist Democracy No1, November 1997).
These comrades pointed to the real fact that “almost all” revolutionary organisations attempt to “drive out oppositions”. Which means that “radical and new ideas” are silenced. This is “abnormal” at any time, but now it has become “impossible in a period when many aspects of the socialist programme have to be rethought”. Contemporary society - overshadowed by the dramatic collapse of Stalinism - has produced an “increased sensibility toward democratic functioning”. Thus, “much broader and inclusive formations are needed” (my emphasis).
Clearly, those elements of the SDG who joined believing this stuff will now have difficulty squaring these “libertarian” statements with the rather squalid practice of the organisation. In fact, there is no little irony that leading SDG supporters have been the moving spirit behind the sordid intriguing in the London Socialist Alliance. In truth, despite the verbal commitments to “openness” and “inclusion” mouthed by this group since its inception, it has pursued a narrow sectarian project, it was formed in an exclusivist sectarian manner and thus - unsurprisingly - it works in an underhand sectarian way.
First, on its formation. The SDG’s core comrades constituted a short-lived faction in the Socialist Party. However, far from a principled struggle to win this important organisation to their point of view, the comrades split casually, in the light-minded and prissy manner that they seem to believe marks their sect out as ‘fresh’, ‘young’ (?) and ‘interesting’.
As I commented on their exit at the time, “It should be axiomatic that to split a serious working class organisation is a grave matter, something to be entered into only after protracted, tenacious and indefatigable struggle” (‘Party Notes’ Weekly Worker October 30 1997). The frivolous manner of the exit from the SP underlined that this was essentially a petty, personal project of the disparate individuals involved, not a venture in the interests of the class. This estimation was confirmed in the editorial of the very first issue of SD, where there was no honest settling of accounts, no balance sheet of the (minimal) struggle in the SP. Readers were simply presented with yet another immaculately conceived micro-sect of the British left, organised around a particular theoretical shibboleth that justified its separate existence.
Thus, while the founding conference of the SDG on January 31 officially advertised itself as “open to anyone who agrees with the need for the construction of a broad, pluralistic socialist party” (my emphasis SD No 2, January-February 1998, p9), the truth was rather different. The SDG is committed to excluding the CPGB from the LSA … after the communists what other “absolutist” comrades will be next?
It is at the level of its theory, however, that we have to explain the SDG’s hostility to communist revolutionaries.
Socialist Democracy No2 (January-February 1998) writes of “ultra-left organisations like the CPGB, Workers Power, Workers Action, etc”. These very different organisations apparently all “fill their journals with irrelevant sectariana”.
This aversion to honest political debate flows from one of the few political perspectives that binds SDG comrades together. This seems to be their agreement that the task of the day is “the fight for political representation at national and international level of the working class”. The nature of this political representation is determined already. It is a “fantasy to imagine that even a section of the popular masses” will go to revolutionary groups. There is an inescapable “stage” that it is impossible to “jump over” of “much broader and inclusive (!) formations” (SDG What next for socialists in Britain? - cited in Weekly Worker October 30 1997). But inclusive of whom exactly, comrades?
In the formulations of the group, the nature of the organisation it envisages is left deliberately vague. Yet it is clear that the SDG - as a ‘revolutionary’ organisation - is actually agitating for a social democratic grouping, with themselves as a tolerated Marxist minority - a “stage” of going “through the complex process of refounding the socialist left and its Marxist wing” (cited in Weekly Worker November 20 1997).
The wellspring of the SDG’s opposition to communists in the Socialist Alliances is thus revealed. Its mechanical perspective of the inevitable, unavoidable ‘recomposition’ of left social democracy is rejected by the CPGB. Thus, in the true spirit of this type of politics, elements in the SDG’s ranks wish to exclude the communists from the preconceived opportunist framework it is attempting to impose on reality. The logic of this rotten perspective spontaneously produces the type of insidious, deceitful methods the comrades have displayed in the London Socialist Alliance. Not surprisingly SDG and the anti-communist witch hunters in the Fourth International Supporters Caucus are closely related. Indeed they could be called twins. They not only share the same origins and international affiliations, but the same method. In fact several SDG comrades were only a short time ago members of Fisc.
Opportunist politics shrivel up quick in the light of day. It is this that explains the delicious irony that Duncan Chapple can blithely write in one paragraph (see p6) that the LSA needs “clear, free, open and participatory discussion to clarify the alliances goals” and in another suggest that it “must ... select and control those who are within the alliance on the basis of what they bring to it” - communists need not apply, we presume.
The SDG and its close chum - History (with a capital ‘H’, of course) - have already decided what the “goals of the alliance” are to be. Those who think otherwise and have a coherent alternative vision are to be excluded.
Honest SDGers who find this objectionable and who are actually committed to the revolutionary openness ostensibly espoused by their group should approach the Communist Party. Our organisation is the most consistent champion of democracy in the workers’ movement. Comrades who join our genuinely inclusive project will never be faced with the suppression of their views or with the demand that they change their perspectives - on ‘recomposition’ or anything else.
We insist only that they break with the rotten hypocritical practice of the SDG - that they fight for their politics openly, honestly and with revolutionary candour.
Mark Fischer
national organiser