12.11.1998

Left in crisis

Party notes

The revolutionary left in Britain does not present a particularly pretty picture. We are faced with the deep crisis of the Socialist Party, the miserable decline of the Socialist Labour Party, the sectarian sterility of the Socialist Workers Party and the practical irrelevance of the score or so of little left sects that constitute our movement. For us, this pretty parlous state of affairs is far from bleak or hopeless. But what it does underline is the need for a Party orientation, a recognition of the fact that the time for sects is coming to an end.

This paper and the organisation that sustains it have consistently fought for the Party principle. We believe that it is now self-evident that the tasks of 21st century demand that all genuine partisans of our class be united into a single revolutionary organisation. Under a regime of genuine democratic centralism, it is quite clear that many of the differences of theory that currently keep revolutionaries apart will prove to be secondary: episodic at best, sectarianism at worst.

Clearly, as the reports from various parts of the workers’ movement featured in this issue of our paper underline, we are in a period of tremendous fluidity and change. Predictably, this cycle of flux has opened with a process of dissolution and disintegration of many established organisations. While this has meant comrades are at last starting to break down the foolish proscriptions on working with others so long characteristic of the left, the overwhelming feature of this period is negative. We are seeing groups shed potentially good cadre who subsequently drop out of working class politics altogether, or start to peddle rightist answers to the crisis of the left.

Essentially, this takes the form of a retreat for the fight for a working class Party. The ex-Socialist Party comrades from Liverpool are only the latest in a long line who seem to have denounced this struggle as ‘premature’, ‘inappropriate’ or even ‘outmoded’. In contrast, our organisation understands that the fight for Party is the vital political question facing revolutionaries.

Out of the current confusion on the left, we call on others to work with us to crystallise a Partyist pole of attraction. What would this mean in practice?

Critical unity. Partyism does not mean a blind, ‘my Party, right or wrong’ attitude. The Party project demands a critical attachment. This is why our paper is the most openly self-critical and polemical on the British left, why our comrades have the right to organise factions with freedom to publish their views openly. If we are to build a genuine Party of the class (and not simply another mono-idea sectlet), the proletarian leaders who will constitute its ranks will inevitably have disagreements, sometimes of the sharpest variety. They must have the chance to openly fight for these ideas, to have them attacked and modified in front of the class itself. We are in business to raise workers to the level of the ruling class of this society. The truly pathetic argument that the open expression of political differences in the same organisation “confuse workers” is an insult to our class and is an implicit warning of the type of top-down ‘socialism’ envisaged by people who think this way.

For Party patriotism. It is a common misconception on the British revolutionary left that ‘Lenin split with the Mensheviks’. In fact, before the fundamental schism in the international workers’ movement of August 1914, we see Lenin - the incorrigible ‘splitter’ in the collective mind’s eye of our sectarian comrades - fighting again and again for Party unity with the Mensheviks. Examples of this are legion. Thus, in addition to being a product of the profound theoretical/programmatic crisis afflicting our movement, the frivolous splits that litter the British revolutionary left underline the seeming determination of the revolutionary movement to remain as amateur and ineffectual as possible.

For the right of the minority to become a majority. Within any Party regime, we expect genuinely scientific, Leninist ideas to start in a minority. Relatively simple causal-consequential relations and surface connections present themselves as ‘common sense’ in politics as in other spheres of life. The job of science - in its particular political form, as in the natural sciences - is the attempt to formulate more profound and fundamental laws of social being and thinking. Our insistence on Party openness is therefore a commitment to the best conditions attainable to facilitate the fight for the revolutionary working class programme and to forging effective Party unity around it.

Thus, if joined by other substantial forces in the struggle to reforge the Communist Party, we Leninists expect and - given our commitment to the Party project - are prepared to be a minority as long as we can fight openly for our politics.

At present, we do not find a ready audience for explicitly revolutionary ideas, either on the left or in wider society. This is why we must fight for the rights of minorities in our organisation even when we are today in a majority.

Despite the formal adherence of many groups to some sort of ‘revolutionary politics’, the evolution of Blair’s Labour simply seems to have presented them with the opportunity to … reinvent Labourism. Few would argue that they would not have been members of the Communist Party when it was founded - 1920 is a long time ago, after all. But the marked reluctance of these comrades to commit themselves to a broad, democratic and revolutionary Party project in the here and now underlines the dualism of their politics: revolutionary in 1920; reformist in 1998.

Once again, we urge comrades to break from ceremonial adherence to Bolshevism and join the real fight for Party today.

Mark Fischer
national organiser