16.07.1998

Suspicion

Party notes

The letter from comrade Jim Higgins in last week’s paper is welcome. The comrade is the ex-industrial organiser of the International Socialists - the forerunners of today’s Socialist Workers Party. Last year, he published a very readable (although politically selective) book on the origins of the SWP (More years for the locust - reviewed in Weekly Worker August 21 1997).

However, the political weaknesses that Jim revealed in his book are summed up neatly in his letter. Too many passages of More years for the locust read like the tired cynicism of an old and disillusioned revolutionary - “Life goes on ... and we must keep trying,” he limply tells us. Trying what exactly, the comrade tends to leave a little vague, apart from vacuous references to “new forms, new forces and new ideas that accord with the world in which we live” (p133). For example, democratic centralism is now an “inappropriate Russian organisational form” (p131). In the same spirit, he castigates the method of the “hucksters [who] root about in the Collected Works looking for apposite quotes to add class to some sordid manoeuvre” (p128).

Thus last week’s letter takes me to task for a ‘hucksterish’ tendency of mine to “embroider ... articles with quotes [to] bolster a sagging argument by reference to infallible writ”. Specifically, the comrade offers me a little “friendly criticism” for an “inaccurate and inappropriate” use of a Lenin quote against Bogdanov and the Vpered group. I will concede him a small inaccuracy. Bogdanov had indeed long left the Vpered group by the time of Lenin’s stern words. But I’m afraid this slip does nothing to weaken my essential argument, and Jim’s other remarks perhaps underline that the real difference between us is not over quote-juggling polemics of the past, but the tasks of revolutionaries in the contemporary world.

Firstly, it is a shame that comrade Higgins fails to mention the content of the polemic. Should there be an automatic ‘right of reply’ in the pages of our organisation’s press - yes or no?

We are not - despite the ill-intentioned jibes of some - a clearing house ‘discussion journal’ for any trend that fancies it in the workers’ movement. Comrade Higgins and many others find the Weekly Worker a “useful source of information”. Yet this is a by-product of the central purpose of the paper. Ours is the publication of a communist collective that has been cohered over decades of work around a Partyist project. The use of this word is liable to bring some (Jim included?) out in a rash, but I make no apologies for it. The essential thrust of the ‘Party notes’ column (July 2) that Jim takes exception to is that everything that appears in the pages of this paper is assessed politically according to how it advances that fundamental work, and it is in this context that the precedent of Lenin is cited.

Jim really digs himself into a hole when he comes to comment directly on this instructive historical incident. He essentially alibies left liquidationism when he writes that liquidationism was simply a “Menshevik heresy” and all that Bogdanov and the Vperedists wanted to do was cease “work in the Duma and the trade unions and other legal working class organisations in favour of an underground party”. In fact, Lenin was conducting a war against

“both varieties of liquidationism - liquidationism on the right and liquidationism on the left. The liquidators on the right say that no illegal [party] is needed ... [For] the liquidators on the left ... legal avenues of Party work do not exist” (VI Lenin CW Vol 15, pp432-433).

Thus, in contrast to comrade Higgins’ narrow definition, liquidationism can manifest itself in a variety of different political forms. The comrades from Dundee who recently left our organisation manifested a rightist and especially petty, low-level variety of the species. We have delayed the publication of their letters because we felt that it would have done them no good as politicians. I believe we were correct to judge these letters not by the criteria of some inviolate ‘right to reply’, but politically. We prepared a substantial reply to the comrades in an attempt to drag them back from the swamp into which they were wading. From recent tetchy exchanges, it appears this sober and mature approach has not succeeded, not least due to the intemperate intervention of some other comrades (who have used the question of non-publication for polemical purposes). The time is right to draw a line under this petty dispute (so things can be taken to a higher, more serious, level). In other words, it is probably correct to publish; it was certainly not two months ago.

Jim’s point about the need to “allay all suspicions” surrounding the non-appearance of these letters is worth a quick comment in closing. Dave Craig - another ex-SWP member with vivid memories of that sect’s bureaucratic internal regime - is again featured in this issue of the paper as attorney for backwardness. Comrade Craig recently claimed that the delayed publication of the Dundee letters (copies of which have been circulated to all Communist Party members as well as to RDG comrades and others), blows a “big hole in the policy of ‘openness’” (Weekly Worker May 28). I believe that the strength of such “suspicions” are inversely proportionate to the distance from our organisation - the lower the level of real involvement, the more ‘suspicious’ a comrade may be. The answer - comrade Craig, Higgins and others - is to draw closer and consciously identify yourself with the Partyist project.

Mark Fischer
national organiser