12.11.1998
Discontent and despair
Simon Harvey of the SLP
The rumblings of discontent at the top of the Socialist Labour Party have been exposed thanks to the Weekly Worker. Pat Sikorski, the SLP’s vice-president has penned a secret letter criticising our very own general secretary (see p8).
Comrade Sikorski, whose soft-Trotskyite Fourth International Supporters Caucus (Fisc) constitutes one of the most important SLP factions, has a problem. Fisc has theorised the importance of tailing trade union leaders emerging from militant struggles - they are supposedly the key to a new mass organisation of the working class. And of course Arthur Scargill is viewed as such a figure in Britain. As comrade Sikorski writes, “The reputation of AS, as one of the very few labour leaders who have refused to bend the knee in the last decades, has been central to our progress and remains central to our future.”
However, the SLP general secretary’s single-minded intransigence, even from Sikorski’s point of view, has its negative side - to put it mildly. There is no guarantee that this would-be labour dictator will take ‘his’ party in the direction Sikorski has in mind. At first Scargill looked to Fisc (primarily Pat Sikorski, Carolyn Sikorski and Brian Heron) to provide him with theoretical cover. This was certainly the case in the run-up to and immediately after the SLP’s 1996 launch. However, over the recent period he has been just as likely to turn to comrade Harpal Brar (of the Indian Workers Association, Stalin Society and Communist Workers Association). Scargill pulled a 3,000 block vote (wielded by the North West, Cheshire and Cumbria Miners Association) out of his hat at the December 1997 SLP congress to ensure comrade Brar was elected onto the national executive.
The NUM president’s vision of a British national socialism is one where a ‘great leader’ (no prizes for guessing who will wear the crown) delivers working class emancipation from on high. Fisc still hopes to catch a free ride on Scargill’s coat tails. But, unfortunately for Sikorski and co, he trusts nothing, trusts no one he cannot control himself. That rules out just about every initiative - whether it be for internal party organisation or political action. Nothing happens unless Arthur has sanctioned it. And when he gets sidetracked - as occurred recently when he and SLP president Frank Cave were targeted by the charity commissioners for their running of two miners’ trusts - everything can grind to a halt. The little matter of Socialist Labour’s 3rd Congress slipped the general secretary’s mind and he neglected to circulate the relevant documentation to branches in accordance with the constitution. Which is why the full congress was “postponed” for a year and we have instead this weekend’s special congress.
No wonder the likes of comrade Sikorski are unhappy. While of course “explaining problems by reference to comrades’ weaknesses and faults just creates all the old demoralisation, factionalism and cynicism so familiar on the traditional left”, nevertheless the problems must be “recognised and addressed, openly and honestly”. And the main problem, to use Sikorski’s coded criticism of Scargill’s monocracy, is that “the party is both over-centralised and wrongly centralised”. He goes on: “Our main public asset, AS, is forced to spend enormous amounts of time and energy on the nitty gritty of internal party work” (my emphasis). Comrade Scargill is “forced” to do no such thing - except by his disdain and mistrust of those around him.
Comrade Sikorski proposes that the day-to-day running of the SLP should be taken over by a secretariat, which would, among other things, “prepare conferences” - ie, make sure they happen. He writes: “This would prevent virtual paralysis if our leading officers are drawn into the struggles, including legal battles, which their positions in the trade union movement inevitably throw up.”
The depth of the crisis facing the SLP is matched only by the poverty of comrade Sikorski’s ‘solutions’. Apart from establishing a “secretariat”, which he hopes would act as a counterbalance to Scargill’s megalomania, he makes two other proposals. Firstly, in order to reverse the “serious loss of members, not just in constituencies or concentrated solely in one or two regions, but also in key trade unions”, he calls for a reduction in membership subscriptions. Being an SLP member might be a worthless experience for many, but at least it would be cheap. Comrade Sikorski’s patronising vision of Socialist Labour as a “mass membership party of the poor” is indeed pitiable.
Surely we need a party which workers would be proud to be in, for which they would willingly make all manner of sacrifices. While such a party would champion the rights of the oppressed, of the dispossessed, its backbone could only be provided by those who select themselves. History has shown that it is class consciousness that decides whether or not people decide to join this or that leftwing organisation, not dues fixed at bargain basement levels. In other words it is the head not the purse that counts.
Secondly, comrade Sikorski calls for an improvement in the SLP’s “national communication”, which, he says, is “poor and intermittent at best”. Quite true. But this is to be rectified by the distribution to branches of “edited versions of the political reports, which the NEC now takes”. Socialist News, whose name comrade Sikorski cannot bring himself to utter (Fisc was originally against the idea of any SLP paper) and which he refers to only as “the newspaper”, cannot “both fulfil the role of an internal communicator and reach out to new readers at the same time”. Why not? Are the pearls of wisdom emanating from the NEC suitable only for experienced party activists? The idea that workers will be able to form a ruling class without needing to grasp the most advanced ideas, without understanding every detail of organisation, strategy and tactics, is bizarre. But, as with Scargill, Sikorski’s vision of socialism is not one of working class self-liberation.
Sikorski tries to put an optimistic gloss on the SLP’s ‘achievements’. Rather than stating accurately that a small layer of militants and union bureaucrats were initially attracted to the SLP, he claims that our party’s membership represents “the best fighters of their generation”. Rather than giving a sober assessment of Socialist Labour’s election returns (with a few exceptions they are no better than those achieved by the left as a whole since the war - less than two percent on average on May 1 1997), he pretends that “we politically represent a small, but significant, part of the British people, a fact which is reflected in our election results”. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of the population are not even aware of the existence of the Socialist Labour Party.
According to comrade Sikorski, “The SLP set up the main lines of its fundamental policies in a democratic manner and spirit not seen before in British politics.” In fact, where Scargill disagreed with the conclusions of the policy workshops which met in March 1996, he simply ignored or overrode them. Only three general policy areas were discussed at the founding conference, the rest being determined by the NEC. The constitution was imposed by Scargill decree and were not endorsed until the December 1997 3rd Congress.
But it is the vice-president’s disappointment - even despair - which shows through, however much he waxes lyrical about the SLP’s “complete break” with the past. The truth is that Scargill’s autocratic rule, leading to the haemorrhaging of the membership, has brought the SLP to the brink of disaster. Everyone is against everyone: Arthur is at war with Bob Crow, Harpal Brar is out to get Fisc, Roy Bull hates Pat Sikorski, Pat Sikorski loathes the Stalinites.
Comrade Sikorski cannot see beyond the utopian but vacuous ideal of the “new phenomenon in British politics” - “something which, while it is based on the lessons of the past, is at the same time totally new”. The SLP is so “new” and original that its constitution (largely) and structure (almost entirely) are based on those of the Labour Party.
Amazingly the novel achievement of the SLP is its “atmosphere of mutual support, respect for others’ opinions and democratic openness”. The witch hunt, the bureaucratic exclusion of communists and democrats, the banning of opposition conferences, the political diktats from on high, are all either skimmed over or justified by a single passing phrase - “the abuse of openness by some left groups”, which made it “necessary to draw a firm line against ‘entry work’” (Fisc, Stalin Society, the Bullites, etc excluded).
The hypocritical phrases about “mutual support”, “respect” and “democratic openness” are reminiscent of the hypocrisy of New Labour or the John Nicholson leadership of the Network of Socialist Alliances. These forces, like himself, erect a smokescreen of sweetness and light to mask their intolerance of any real opposition to their views.
When comrade Sikorski stresses “the continuing need for further creative discussion about our political programme, strategy and tactics”, he is hardly speaking out for the right of the membership as a whole to democratically determine the direction of the party. After all, he is a member of the national executive that “unanimously” “postponed” the 3rd Congress until November 1999, agreeing instead to stage this weekend’s special congress where no motions from the membership have been permitted.
No, what worries him is the continuing erosion of his influence. Certainly, he wants to restrain the worst of Scargill’s dictatorial excesses, but only so that wise courtiers like himself can provide their own corrective guidance.
Comrade Sikorski’s tinkering proposal will not transform our party into a vehicle for workers’ liberation. For that we need genuinely open, democratic discussion before the whole class. We need to end all bans and proscriptions, and strive to achieve the greatest possible cooperation (including electoral) amongst the left, with the aim of forging a higher unity.