25.02.1999

Inquiry

Party notes

A commission of inquiry under the auspices of the London Socialist Alliance is being organised to look into events on this year’s Bloody Sunday demonstration in London. As reported in last week’s paper, Eibhlin McDonald of the Spartacist League/Britain was subjected to a violent assault by Ian Donovan, editor of Revolution and Truth and chair of the LSA (Weekly Worker February 18).

The commission will consist of comrades Bob Pitt (What next? editor and Labour Party member), Toby Abse (Independent Labour Network member), Tina Becker (Hackney LSA member) and Lee Rock (Socialist Perspectives member). They will meet on Saturday March 13 at a central London venue to take written, taped and verbal submissions from both sides in this particular dispute and from others who feel they have material worth consideration. Organisations and individuals will be approached for evidence over the next few days, but if comrades have information they think relevant, please contact Tina Becker.

For our part, the Communist Party is quite clear. We have no hesitation in deploring comrade Donovan’s action - it was intolerable. We condemn violence as a means of settling our political differences in the workers’ movement.

But then Ian’s method is not characterised by a resort to violence. The man is not a Tony Goss (a thuggish ex-member of the Socialist Labour Party given to launching himself at political opponents). Comrade Donovan has written coherently and comprehensively on his differences with the SL/B, an organisation he parted from acrimoniously in 1986, and with its United States-based parent body, the International Communist League. In the view of this writer, he has done rather a fine demolition job on at least one of the central pillars of Spart dogma - popular fronts (see Revolution and Truth No1, summer 1998). It appears that Ian resorted to his fists in frustration after being baited by an organisation which brands him a “dangerous lunatic”.

In other words, it is impossible to consider this moment of madness in isolation. Just as juries - even as they find people guilty and worthy of punishment - can cite extenuating circumstances, the Communist Party urges that due weight is given to the modus operandi of the SL/B. We believe that it should be recognised as a contributing factor in this incident and also stands worthy of condemnation.

Here we have an organisation characterised by its own international leadership as inept liars. We have cited the comments of one Jon B, spokesperson for the ICL international secretariat, who crushingly observed that “if [the SL/B] have to lie about our opponents in order to deal with them it means we have no confidence in ourselves and our programme” (Weekly Worker February 18). However, it is precisely on the basis of such fabricated evidence that this group repeatedly launches campaigns against political opponents, branding them ‘scabs’, ‘picket line crossers’ or ‘supporters’ of loyalist terror gangs. Moreover, this abuse is often raised in political circumstances where the SL/B’s opponents are in effect being set up for not just political attack, but physical harm.

The degraded form of SL/B external intervention is a more or less faithful replication of its delirious internal life. This is characterised by forced hysteria, a nightmarish atmosphere of denunciation and heresy-hunt designed to cohere the sect’s adherents around the one great revealed truth embodied by the ICL. It is a sect par excellence in other words, an extreme manifestation of the general problem that cripples our movement.

Of course, none of this justifies physical reprisals against this organisation or its comrades - quite the opposite. Political exposure must be the chosen method and a degree of comradely patience shown to past and present SL/Bers that have been so obviously bent out of shape by the experience of membership. To this end, the CPGB will urge that the LSA commission conduct its work dispassionately, with even-handedness, and with the wider interests of the movement as a whole uppermost in its mind.

Mark Fischer
national organiser