18.02.1999

Call for enquiry

Party notes

On the Saturday January 30 Bloody Sunday demonstration in London, Eibhlin McDonald - effectively the leader of the Spartacist League/Britain - was subjected to a violent assault by Ian Donovan, publisher of Revolution and Truth. This attack was serious enough to leave her with cuts and bad bruising around one eye.

The Communist Party opposes violence as a means of settling disputes in the workers’ movement. Comrade Donovan’s actions were totally wrong, utterly intolerable. We have no hesitation in condemning the attack. We are pleased to see that Ian himself has now repudiated his foolish act. That does not end the question however. More must be said.

First, there is no reason to believe that the SL/B will be displeased with its afternoon’s work on this year’s commemoration. The standard forms of intervention of this shrill sect are staged provocations.

Ian Donovan is a comrade who was chewed up by the Spartacist League’s internal life - he was a member till 1986. The wretched experience of forced hysteria, the nightmarish atmosphere of denunciation and heresy-hunting that is the cultural life of this organisation took a terrible toll. The experience left him and other comrades now outside the ranks of the SL/B with deep emotional scars.

This is something that SL/Bers have been fully aware of and - grotesquely - have revelled in. I have personally witnessed SL/Bers taking a ghoulish delight in baiting comrade Donovan in public, fully aware that they were prodding at very sensitive emotional points He was deliberately brought to the boil over and over again.

Specifically, on the Bloody Sunday march, SL/Bers taunted comrade Donovan as an “RUC supporter” - not an especially endearing thing to shout out on an Irish march, of course. While this was no justification for the assault on comrade McDonald, it is a good example of the type of rubbish that passes for polemic in the twisted world of Spartville.

The logic goes like this: Ian Donovan takes a leading role in the London Socialist Alliance. The Socialist Party is in the London Socialist Alliance. The Socialist Party has a chauvinist line on Ireland. Ipso facto, Ian Donovan is “a Labourite toady and apologist for British imperialism, in the tradition of Arthur Henderson who led the cheering in parliament when James Connolly was shot by a British firing squad”. Why? Because “the Labourite Socialist Party which Donovan defends upholds this chauvinist tradition” (SL/B statement, February 2).

Of course, no examples can be cited of comrade Donovan ‘defending’ the SP’s politics, on Ireland or anything else. In fact, the comrade has views on this question that are more or less identical with the SL/B itself (a form of imperialist economism, in the view of this writer). Accuracy is not the point of Spart polemics, however.

Thus, I remind comrades of the last time the SL/B crossed polemical swords with us. Incredibly, the SL/B claimed that this organisation campaigned on “the demand that the NUM organise a strike ballot” during 1984-85 (Andrew Gastos for SL/B Weekly Worker January 9 1997). Readers should bear in mind that this accusation was made in the midst of our work around the Socialist Labour Party, a body then with a fair sprinkling of miners and activists from 84-85 and led by Scargill himself. In the context of the crassly undemocratic culture of the SLP, this lie was effectively an attempt to target our comrades for attack - bureaucratically and physically, I would suggest.

SL/B even produced a statement (April 21 1997) - distributed freely to SLPers - that crowed that the Weekly Worker “whines that [CPGB] supporters were expelled because of Workers Hammer polemics exposing the fact that they were on the wrong side of the class line in the 1984-85 miners strike, by calling for a ballot”. Of course, there is a lie added to a lie - here is what we actually said about the fate of SL/B’s outrageous fabrications: “... comrades report that witch hunting national executive committee members in the SLP have actually attempted to utilise this Spart-originated ‘ballot’ rubbish against the Communist Party” (Weekly Worker April 10 1997). However, it is not hard to spot the glee in the Sparts’ words as they (inaccurately) reported how their fabrications were being used by Scargill’s minions to void communists and democrats.

In fact, the SL/B’s ‘ballot’ nonsense lie had barely got off the starting blocks before this paper kicked it to oblivion. We challenged the SL/B to “cite one single leaflet, article or statement” where this ‘demand’ appeared (Mark Fischer and Tom Ball Weekly Worker January 16 1997). Further, we showed how the SL/B had cynically manipulated quotes by omission, deliberately cutting short selections from our press where we went on to actually denounce as “treacherous” the notion of “calling for ... and campaigning for” a ballot (ibid).

Thus exposed, the next issue of Workers Hammer simply dropped the polemic. Like most bullies, SL/Bers are a cowardly outfit, happy to taunt those they perceive of as vulnerable, quick to run squealing in the opposite direction when faced with forces they identify as strong.

Yet while the SL/B has wisely thought better of pursuing this ‘ballot’ line, it has continued to reiterate the central accusation that this snide polemical jibe was meant to provide some evidence for - ie, that our organisation and others at one time influential on the left of the SLP “constitute a rightwing opposition to Scargill” (Workers Hammer April/May). In effect, the SL/B actually gave backhanded, mealy-mouthed support to the Scargillite anti-communist purges. In a polemic against the International Bolshevik Tendency in the latest issue of Workers Hammer for example, they actually write that it would be justified to

“accuse Scargill - who has stood to the left of the IBT on such crucial questions as the picket line and Soviet defencism - of opportunism in letting them join his party” (Workers Hammer January/February 1999).

In other words, the purge was worthy of critical support, or at least a smug silence. Seen through the prism of Spart dogma, Scargill, his handful of NUMists, the Fiscites, the Bullites and other witch hunters represent “the most advanced layer of the proletariat” (Workers Hammer February/March 1996). Informed by this ‘logic’, the SL/B bizzarely characterise the purge as the left wing culling the right - which are deemed enemies of the Great Strike and no doubt class traitors to boot. Thus, I am not aware of a single statement where the SL/B has clearly and unequivocally condemned either the witch hunts in the SLP, or the physical violence that has accompanied them. Indeed, I openly challenge it to do so now. Or are you still in a bloc with Scargill on this one, comrades?

The SL/B is clearly an organisation in deep crisis. Readers will be amused by this evaluation of the British group by one of its leading International Secretariat spokespersons, Jon B:

“Unable to deal with a somewhat more complex reality, the SL/B resorted to ‘simplifying’ (ie, falsifying) the positions of our opponents. That is the kiss of death, enabling our opponents to dismiss us as liars and thereby keep their membership sealed off from our criticisms. And if we have to lie about our opponents in order to deal with them it means we have no confidence in ourselves and our programme” (‘Opponents’ work/propaganda - SL/B and SpAD’, July 7 1996, cited in The Internationalist September-October 1998, p16).

Thus, even the international SL leadership - a body not renowned in our movement for its own commitment to the truth - characterised the British organisation as liars. And bad ones at that.

Spart-bashing is pretty easy and - given the sorry state of the group - even a little sad for those amongst us with a spark of compassion. However, the concrete issues arising from the attack on a leading SL/Ber must be addressed. We believe that this must happen in an open forum where lessons can be drawn for our entire movement. This is why the Communist Party is backing the call for the London Socialist Alliance - of which comrade Donovan is chair - to convene a commission of enquiry into this incident.

Comrades from a variety of political backgrounds are being approached. Certainly, any Communist Party members who are involved - either as commission members or as witnesses - will not be bound by Party discipline. They will be free to argue for what they see fit on this sensitive question. Our Party urges that all protagonists commit themselves to accept the recommendation of such a body. We believe that this is the principled way to deal with this unfortunate event. In its own way, such an approach can be an important example of the type of culture revolutionaries need to build - open, democratic and accountable to the movement we all purport to serve.

Mark Fischer
national organiser