05.11.1998
Taaffe culls opposition
SP faces oblivion as Liverpool rebels
The crisis of the Socialist Party in England and Wales has deepened dramatically with the news that the entire regional committee in Liverpool and their supporters have has been suspended for their refusal to sign a seven-point ‘loyalty’ pledge put to them by Peter Taaffe. The overwhelming majority of members in the area have declared their solidarity with their local leaders and one source estimates that there are now up to 50 members suspended locally, leaving a tiny rump of loyalists around Roger Bannister.
This cull genuinely seems to have come as a shock to many, emphasising just what a panicky, damage-limitation move it has been from the London leadership. The fact that Liverpool was once the jewel in the Militant/SP crown, the area where it sank roots into a section of the class, underlines just how seriously Taaffe is taking any challenge to the integrity of his organisation in the aftermath of the Scottish split.
Speaking to some of the dissenters, I was told that despite the formal ‘niceties’ of the situation, in effect these suspensions are being widely viewed as expulsions. As one of the leading SPers on Merseyside told me, “That word has not been used … yet”.
Disasters seem to be queuing round the corner to descend on the SP. This internal purge comes in the aftermath of the expulsion of the entire Pakistan section of the Committee for a Workers International, the Pakistan Labour Party. We have reported already (Weekly Worker October 15) that the Australian Democratic Socialist Party has been eyeing the Pakistani organisation hopefully, given its increasingly critical stance within comrade Taaffe’s ‘international’.
Of course, the PLP comrades were also the main international backers of the nationalist self-liquidation of Scottish Militant Labour (Weekly Worker May 7), although it seems that ‘Scotland’ has been a banner of convenience for any manifestation of dissent rather than a real alternative for malcontents against Taaffe. The PLP has also shown solidarity - and possibly, an organisational link-up - with the small ultra-economistic group expelled from SP’s fraternal organisation in the United States, Labour Militant (see Weekly Worker October 16 1997). Taaffe’s organisation seems doomed to disintegration internationally as well as domestically.
It is hard to tell where this blood-letting will end. Taaffe - true to his petty bureaucrat nature - seems to have embarked on a damage-limitation exercises in the form of administrative amputation to solve political problems. This is part of a developing pattern and sets a very dangerous precedent for the future. The path of bureaucratic exclusion will solve none of the organisation’s problems, which we have repeatedly shown stem from its fundamental programmatic weaknesses.
Militant/SP once boasted that - unlike the “sects” - it was cohesive and not prone to splits or expulsions. Over the last period however, these have become par for the course as it fails to adapt to life outside the committee-room politics of Labourism. Comrade Taaffe’s “small mass party” faces extinction - Ted Grant must be feeling smug. The resort to administrative fiat and excommunication is characteristic of a leadership incapable of politically preventing descent into the abyss.
Where will be next? As we have shown, the forces tearing the organisation apart are generalised pressures engendered by the politics of the group as a whole. Taaffe and his leadership team have proved themselves singularly incapable of fighting these problems on the basis of principle. Thus, when a huge concession was made to Scottish nationalism with the granting of ‘autonomy’ to SML because of “the growth of a clear and distinct national consciousness” (Members Bulletin No16, March 18 1996), even Taaffe appeared dimly aware that generalising such an approach spelt death for his organisation. The SP’s internal bulletin underlined that a ‘Scottish turn’ everywhere would “lead to the dissipation and eventual break-up of what is at the moment a successful democratic centralist organisation [ie, the SP]” (see Weekly Worker February 26 1998).
The Members Bulletin of April 2 this year featured an example of the problem. Roy Davies from Swansea presented the result of “discussions in Wales over the past period”. The “Scottish Socialist Alliance offers the answer,” he starkly told readers (Weekly Worker May 7). This should have been a pretty bleak warning to the national SP leadership - assuming it had the gumption to recognise nationalism.
Throughout the developing crisis the key delusion of Taaffe and the leadership has been the idea that the strength of the organisation lies in the fact that it is “based on a clear revolutionary programme, perspectives, strategy and tactics” (P Taaffe ‘Short thesis on the revolutionary party’ Members Bulletin No16). In fact, rather than revolution, Militant/SP has been committed for decades to a reformist strategy for winning socialism, largely indistinguishable from Labour leftists and the opportunists of the Communist Party in the 1970s and 80s.
Taaffe - writing in the organisation’s only remotely ‘programmatic’ document in June 1990 (Militant: What we stand for) - envisaged what he chose to call ‘socialism’ arriving “through an enabling bill in parliament”. The activity of the masses is a secondary question, as then leading member Rob Sewell made clear when he underlined that “a socialist Britain can be accomplished through parliament backed by the mobilised power of the labour movement outside” ( my emphasis - Militant International Review No33, autumn 1986, p9).
This reformist approach accounts for the Scottish debacle and the subsequent splits and divisions. Despite himself Taaffe has been unable to avoid this truth, even if he has been blissfully unaware of the fact that he is pointing to it. He has written of how the division between reform and revolution had become “blurred in the minds of some comrades”. As a political philistine Taaffe may well actually think it a “paradox” that the “flexible approach” of the SP had a “negative effect” in the ranks, “blurring” the distinction between “mass reformist, left reformist or centrist parties and a Marxist Party” (Members Bulletin April 2 1998).
As we have consistently pointed out, there is no paradox. SP is a reformist organisation that adapts opportunistically to the political milieu it works in - be that Labourism, feminism, black separatism or Scottish/Welsh nationalism.
Without the programmatic means to fight, Taaffe has been reduced to equating the question of the ‘revolutionary party’ with crude organisational norms like ‘weekly meetings’, ‘collecting dues’ and ‘recruitment’. Thus when alien political pressures appear in the ranks, they actually appear to have the merit of political coherence or vision compared to the sad grey perspectives of the aparatchik Taaffe. He has displayed the spontaneous reflex of a hack - to defend the machine, disregarding what that structure is actually for, whether it is actually fighting for revolution or not.
In Liverpool it appears that we have another example of the “blurring” of the lines the SP leadership has hopelessly attempted to draw around itself as a ‘revolutionary’ organisation. The politics of the dissidents have been described to me as a modern version of the eclectic, reformist amalgam that was the ‘Beyond the Fragments’ grouping in the 1970s.
Political lines are yet to crystalise, but the Liverpool grouping appears to be essentially a rightist one. It seems to be questioning the need - or at least, the ‘appropriateness’ - of party organisation ‘during this period’. Instead, the comrades believe that the need is for “broad networks” of activists and thus have been accused of “liquidating the party project” by the leadership. They are even described as “questioning Trotskyism”, although this may be another way of saying they have fallen out with Taaffe, of course.
Given the apparent rightist trajectory of the Liverpool comrades, some may be tempted to offer ‘critical support’ to Taaffe. This would be a mistake. It is precisely the method of this man - learnt from his theoretical mentor, Grant - that has created the crisis. Without a radical break from this method - despite its formal espousal of the need for a ‘revolutionary party’ against attacks from the right - there can be no positive resolution.
Warning of this Liverpool turn was given months ago. Significantly, 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’” (Members Bulletin April 2 1998).
As we commented at the time, “only one” of the centrifugal forces pulling the organisation apart was exerted in the direction of Scotland (Weekly Worker May 7). In fact, everything you see in the SP underlines the potential for more splits or expulsions - all going in a myriad of different directions. We predicted that “it can only be a matter of time before the ‘Scottish disease’ mutates and infects other component parts of the SP” (Weekly Worker February 26). It gives us no pleasure to be proved right so quickly.
We certainly support the call of the Liverpool comrades for open discussion and debate of the questions raised by their defiance of the leadership. Remarkably, despite the huge problems that have beset the organisation this year, its dishonest method of polemic-by-inference continues in the CWI International Secretariat’s draft resolution on ‘World relations’ for its conference in November.
In this both the Scottish and Pakistanis are argued with indirectly. First, against SML, the document states it is “unlikely” that Britain will see “a major defection of the left from the Labour Party, either in Scotland or in the rest of Britain in the next period” (Members Bulletin ‘Seventh world congress’ Document 1, October 1998, p13). Then - in an obscure jab at the PLP (and perhaps, also the Liverpool comrades?) - it underlines that “we cannot fill the vacuum which exists at the present time” (p14).
The crisis that is now tearing its way through the SP is - whatever Taaffe suggests - one involving issues of political principle of profound importance to the entire movement. The movement as a whole should therefore have the chance to debate, clarify and learn lessons from the struggle.
Mark Fischer