28.01.1999

Exquisite irony

Party notes

The Weekly Worker is delighted to carry the article by ‘Delphi’ (see pages 4, 5 and 6). This somewhat shy but erudite comrade is clearly a leading member of the rapidly fragmenting Socialist Labour Party. With even a cursory reading of the piece, it will not be hard for regular Weekly Worker readers to guess the identity of our contributor. The new levy of witch hunters in the SLP will have no problem either.

Others writers will have plenty to say about the comrade’s convoluted arguments, but a few general points are apposite.

Delphi cannot resist a side swipe at our organisation and its supposed proximity to the “Stalinism” of Harpal Brar, both politically and organisationally. There is an irony here that is really quite exquisite. Delphi’s co-thinkers in the SLP are more guilty than even Brar, Bull and others in letting what they now call in private “that bastard” Arthur Scargill create an internal regime of anti-communist bans, proscription, organisational fiat and arbitrary expulsion a million times more akin to “Stalinism” that anything the Provisional Central Committee could ever be accused of - even by our most rabid critics. Actually the Communist Party has won for itself the banner of revolutionary democracy and openness precisely through an unremitting struggle against those like Brar - and Delphi - who regard politics as a conspiracy behind the backs of our class.

Now, having been complicit in the creation of a self-devouring Scargillite regime of intolerance and silent intrigue, Delphi is forced to turn to the Weekly Worker to combat elements they previously tolerated while they were hunting down democrats and communists in the SLP. Now Delphi bemoans Socialist Labour’s “abysmal level” of political culture and the “urgent need for the history of the world socialist movement to be discussed critically and objectively”. One might ask - where, comrade? In the pages of Socialist News? Via the thriving internal life of controversy, discussion and principled factional clash facilitated by your once beloved leader, the almighty Scargill?

No - in the Weekly Worker, a publication banned and proscribed by the SLP apparatus. We sincerely welcome the comrade. But it would have been nice to hear from you long before now.

Delphi says that Brar’s views need a “point by point” refutation. That is why his dismissal of the critique authored by comrade Phil Sharpe (see Weekly Worker December 3 1998) smacks of philistinism. Yet Delphi’s eclectic theoretical framework militates against a coherent Marxist analysis. Delphi’s views are an odd amalgam of standard Trotskyism, anti-Bolshevik liberalism and social democracy.

Thus, large parts of the article consist of little more than formally accurate corrections of some of the more crass historical distortions of Brar’s Stalinist mythology. The author seems in some places to be situated firmly in the tradition of Trotskyism, as with the claim that 1917 “vindicated” the theories of “uneven and combined development and permanent revolution”. Brar’s selective quote-chopping is designed to discredit Trotsky and bolster the case for Stalin, the great leader. Delphi counters by identifying the source of these apparent contradictions in the nature of Soviet social reality itself, not in Trotsky’s logic. Thus the suggestion that “Trotsky contrasts the actual and potential developments based on the gains of the revolution, particularly state ownership of the means production, with the deadening effect of the rule of Stalinist bureaucracy which was engaged in betraying the revolution.” In other words, a restatement of the Trotskyist analysis that the central contradiction in the Soviet social formation - an assumption that “state ownership of the means of production” under Stalin - remained a ‘gain’.

Yet towards the end of the article, Delphi collapses. The USSR was “not socialism; it was not a workers’ state”. In fact, the ruling stratum constituted “a ruling class based on the collective control of production and the state apparatus” (my emphasis). He chides the “Trotskyists [who] have been incapacitated by the need to maintain the myth of the ‘workers’ state’, a problem they inherited from their founder …”

In this way, as a bureaucratic collectivist fresh out of the closet, Delphi implicitly rejects the earlier assertion that Trotsky’s supposed “contradictions” were a rational theoretical reflection of Soviet society - “in fact, the fundamental contradiction in the situation itself”. That is, the progressive gains of the revolution - centrally “state ownership of the means of production” - presided over and defended by a reactionary bureaucracy.

Now, in the theoretical schema Delphi casually adopts, nationalised industry has become in fact the ‘property’ of an anti-proletarian ruling class. Indeed, the bureaucratic collectivist school (which Delphi becomes a convert to somewhere in the course of this article) argues that national property forms were in fact a mode of control of the workers, a form that increased their exploitation and powerlessness. That is, in contrast to the assertions of Trotsky - and Stalin, of course. In fact, nationalised property forms facilitated the vicious exploitation of a totally subordinated and alienated working class.

Delphi is thus all over the place. It is established that Trotsky was hostile to the Soviet bureaucracy, despite what he regarded as the progressive survival of the achievements of the revolution, gains over which the Stalinites were the illegitimate and unreliable custodians. Brar’s selective quotes from Trotsky were certainly mischievous, but clearly caused Delphi some pain. However, by the time of the concluding paragraphs, Delphi has subsided into a totally untheorised rejection of the whole Bolshevik tradition - Lenin, Zinoviev, Trotsky: the lot. Thus, “the whole Bolshevik tradition in fact has played a stultifying role on the development of Marxism in particular, but also socialism as a whole …” (my emphasis).

Really, if he has any sense - which he does - Harpal Brar will fall on this passage with some glee. His essential point - like that of Stalin’s - has always been that, whatever the subjective intentions of those who follow Trotsky, the logic of these politics will lead them into the camp of the bourgeoisie, either in the form of social democracy, or even more explicit reaction. Here, Delphi presents Bolshevism as a retrograde step from the centrist Marxism of the Second International, which not only degraded Marxist thought, but “socialism as a whole…” - which in contemporary terms can only mean social democracy, I presume.

This is a species of the miserable views held by some leading SLP comrades from a Trotskyist background that the best that could be achieved by the working class in this country is a variant of Labourism. According to the dogma of these comrades the Communist Party of Great Britain was an aberration, a growth “gouged” out of the viable main body of the workers’ movement in 1920 which separated from its host organism could only dwindle and die. Indeed, Delphi goes further, appearing to believe that this was a phenomenon which characterised communism internationally. That the whole experiment of the Third International (of the October Revolution itself, perhaps?) was at best a mistake, at worst delirium.

Brar, Bull and their perversions of Marxism cannot be fought with this brand of limp disdain for the actual history of the workers’ movement in the 20th century. Delphi is to be congratulated for a brave leap into the light, for at last beginning an open fight. But this should not blind us to the opportunist and thoroughly defeatist nature of such politics.

Mark Fischer
national organiser