04.03.1999

Still loyal to Arthur

Royston Bull, editor of the Economic and Philosophic Science Review and vice-president of the SLP, was expelled last month (see p8). We reproduce the main text his January letter sent to Scargill just before he was hauled before the notorious complaints committee

I can see no real solution to this problem [Scargill’s NEC resolution and the demand for EPSR closure or self-censorship on SLP politics; and the subsequent annoucement that he was to take his recently elected vice-president before the complaints committee - ed] other than to offer my resignation as SLP vice-president.

As explained below, EPSR closure is not an option for all kinds of reasons. Socialist Labour is a coalition of anti-capitalist tendencies which has declared itself open also to those who argue for a Marxist-Leninist approach to the class struggle - provided, of course, that it is the SLP that is being built and nothing else, and no organised factions.

The EPSR has always fully supported this SLP unitary constitutionalism, and fully supports it still, and will carry on advocating its support. However, it is obvious that having someone so prominently connected with the EPSR elected to a leading position in the party has created some difficulties.

Were these political differences (such as over the extent and nature of the imperialist crisis and how this should affect the work, propaganda and development of the SLP), I would stand my ground and argue. I would consider that a proper contribution to the SLP. But arguing over the apparent implication that it is a liability for the SLP to have as vice-president someone so identified with the EPSR seems pointless to me. If the SLP leadership is not happy with such a relationship, then there is no point in forcing it.

(1) The EPSR is an independent journal publishing for nearly 20 years and supported by far wider circles than the handful of readers and contributors who happen to have joined the SLP in the last two years. It is partly backed by financial support which is only available “for the publication of an independent Marxist journal”. It is out of the question that the EPSR would ever cease to publish a weekly Marxist commentary on the international class struggle and in particular from the perspective of the UK workers’ movement.

(2) What I was asked for at the December 12 NEC was an undertaking in writing in respect of a very detailed, complexly worded motion of which no copies were available, and which I was hearing for the very first time in a farcically rushed last few minutes of an agenda which the chairman was insisting would have to be abandoned at any second because there were trains to catch, etc. In an effort to be helpful to committee proceedings which seemed to me to be incorrectly conducted but which I was new to, I gave assent to what I thought would be a possible way of satisfying the party on compliance with that motion. …

(5) With no acknowledgement of that written undertaking (delivered as requested by December 31), you now return to an EPS Review published on December 15. Presumably, either the written undertaking was considered inadequate, or a different issue has arisen, or the goalposts have been moved.

(6) But even though much of the material of the December 15 publication had been prepared before the weekend of December 12-13 (when I was occupied with the business of that SLP NEC meeting in London), and I had less involvement than usual in bringing out that issue, I am as content for the EPSR to be judged on No979 as any other, from the point of view of the SLP constitution and the NEC resolution of December 12. Let these matters be sorted out once and for all.

(7) No979 has this small criticism about an SLP refusal to comment on the moral and political crisis for the American ruling class over Clinton: “A workers’ party should try to give a lead to the working class over all such politically prominent moralising upheavals” - fully in line with its 20-year fight for Marxist philosophy, and in line with motions moved at SLP congress. Such a comment would have been routine at any time for the EPSR to make on a significant party in the labour movement in 20 years analysing developments there. If that is considered “commenting on the affairs of the SLP” in defiance of an NEC instruction, then the presumed offences will be never-ending because the SLP is a key part of the labour movement and its decisions will always be central to any commentary on how the class struggle will be fought.

(8) The Trotskyite factionalising against the SLP is attacked comprehensively, just as Trotskyism has always been attacked for 20 years as anti-communism and anti-Marxism, and as it will continue to be so attacked. The ex-IMG grouping known as Fisc represent a relatively prominent typical trend in recent Trotskyism and might come under attack at any time for what they do, and not just because they have become involved in the SLP (as would appear to be being alleged if this is the cause of the complaint). It is their reactionary Trotskyite fake ‘leftism’ which is the problem, not specifically that they are now practising it around the SLP. They are routinely criticised as unrepentant defeatists, just like all the Trots, who refuse to give up misleading the working class by getting Ireland wrong, the imperialist crisis wrong, their itch for ‘left’ alliances wrong, etc, etc. Trotskyism will remain in the EPSR’s firing line.

The bilious Trot outburst insisting that “cranky Marxism” should have been “swept away along with the Berlin Wall” just happens to be one of those memorable illuminating moments which define fake ‘left’ reaction in politics, and it just happens to have been uttered at a London region SLP meeting [by Fisc’s Brian Heron - ed]. It will have to go on being referred to again and again. The question of the role of the world’s first workers’ states in the 20th century will inevitably remain the absolute front line of all class war ideological struggle, and will have to be returned to again, and again, and again.

(9) There may be other points of complaint against EPSR No979, which can be responded to when presented, but the point of this general defence of the EPSR’s position is to explain what its policy has to remain (as an independent journal), decided 17 years before the SLP was thought of, and decided and maintained by a loose alliance of theoretically like-minded socialists, most of whom have no connection with the SLP.

(10) The problem arises over people closely involved in the EPSR’s 20-years publication who have then become active in the SLP - in particular myself who has been the Review’s immediate past editor.

(11) But the oddity here is that three years ago when the EPSR was running frequent polemical arguments about the SLP (before deciding by an editorial board majority to be generally supportive of the SLP project), some of the criticisms that were made were inevitably hostile. The arguments finally settled down towards being increasingly encouraging about the working class building the SLP, to such an extent that the Review is now routinely jeered at by the Trotskyite swamp as being ‘sycophantic’ towards the SLP. Yet part of the complaint would seem to be that by becoming more and more supportive of the SLP project the EPSR has earned for itself the wish of the SLP leadership that it should be closed down.

(12) As for individuals with an EPSR background such as myself, how does my position differ, say, from a very prominent SLP member [Alec McFadden - ed] who is very closely associated with the Welfare State Network newspaper, an individual who has publicly campaigned inside the SLP for the party to become organised supporters of the Morning Star, that sad vestige of revisionist degeneracy, and whose WSN paper agitates for the working class to vote and support New Labour! - just as the Morning Star does? Surely if people who have been actively responsible for spreading that sort of theoretical and practical backwardness can be encouraged in their SLP membership, the people responsible for the EPSR’s development into becoming the scourge of the SLP’s enemies and detractors (ie, all the Trots and revisionists with their “left alliance” and “pro-‘left Labour’ MPs” factionalising, their anti-unitary-party oppositionism, their defeatism, and their anti-Scargill organisational agitation, etc) should be welcomed even more?

How does the SLP standing of a journalist whose paper has won scores of people to become active SLP members compare with that of a journalist [Victoria Brittain - ed] whose paper The Guardian publishes nothing but contemptuous attacks on the SLP, the NUM, on communists, and on the workers’ states, and runs warmongering propaganda direct from the CIA against China, Korea, Kampuchea, Zimbabwe, etc, and whose own material takes a western imperialist line against Kabila in the Congo??

Even the Socialist News publishes articles advocating non-SLP policy (such as separate schools for black children in Britain, and a Blairite retreat from arguing for socialism on the doorstep, etc) which the EPS Review would not touch with a barge pole.

And unlike other papers in support of the SLP, the EPS Review is right in the forefront of ideological struggle, having produced the only coherent theory of the dialectical puzzle of the Soviet Union’s priceless strengths and achievements coupled with its catastrophic failing; having been light years ahead of everyone else in explaining the importance for the fight for socialism in Britain of the triumphant national liberation struggle in Ireland which the Trots and revisionists describe as a defeat; and having consistently exposed the looming crisis for American imperialism and revisionism when Trotskyism and revisionism was still doubting the economic crisis, and defeatistly capitulating ideologically to the supposedly all-powerful US ‘New World Order’, etc, etc, etc.

(13) And if a complaints committee investigation is called for, should it not be into who leaked details of that December 12 NEC meeting to the following issue of the Weekly Worker, a paper totally hostile to the SLP, rather than against the subsequent EPSR issue, which made no mention of NEC proceedings? Should it not be an investigation against whoever has leaked the details to the Weekly Worker of every single NEC meeting that has ever taken place, as opposed to the EPSR which has never reported or commented on NEC proceedings ever?

Should it not be a complaints committee investigation against whoever was responsible for supplying the Weekly Worker with the full text of a factionalising, all-out attack [‘Renewing our sense of purpose’, written by then vice-president Pat Sikorski - ed] recently by SLP prominent Trots on how the party has produced nothing but “weakness in organisation” and “weakness in collective leadership which undermines goodwill among members” and “recreates all the old demoralisation and cynicism so familiar on the traditional left”, etc? Or a complaints committee investigation into the factional and unconstitutional agitation for a special congress of the party as a way of refusing to accept the official special congress results?

Or an investigation into the monstrous vilification campaign which the CPGB Trots started up because they felt they had been beaten by pro-constitution EPSR agitation, and which Fisc Trots then took up as a way of hoping to reject the special congress results which went against them?

(14) I offered to submit myself to a full-scale party inquiry into these foul allegations of ‘homophobia’, but it was rejected as “seeking to continue an internecine debate” on my part!! No such thing. It was the internecine Trots in the SLP who started all this, outrageously distorting EPSR articles on the Labour Hackney council’s ‘politically correct’ cover-up for the 16-year paedophile career of Hackney Labour councillor Mark Trotter, and on the New Labour government farcical ‘one lapse of judgement’ cover-up of the pitifully shambolic Welsh secretary, Ron Davies - solely in order to manufacture a ‘victory’ over the EPSR (having lost every political argument to the EPSR’s superior Marxist understanding of the world, and stauncher backing for the SLP’s constitution and subsequent development). Exposing this Labour Party use of PC nonsense to cover up the failings of rotten opportunists was ‘internecine’ to no one in the SLP other than to the artificially exaggerating Trotskyites, who were looking for any excuse to start a campaign of vilification against the EPSR and myself in particular.

And the hypocrisy of these people is unbelievable. The most abusive ‘homophobic’ stunt-vilification by the defeated Trots after the election results which closed the November 1998 special congress came from Tony and Ann Goss. Here is how these Sikorski backers were characterised just two years earlier in the Weekly Worker Trot rag:

[Using his familiar cut-and-paste technique, Bull reproduces an SL Kenning article from the Weekly Worker of November 21 1996, where Sikorski’s support for the Gosses, despite their own anti-gay prejudices, was exposed.]

But far from any protection from this disgusting Trot practice of using the most deliberately inflammatory personal vilification to score points when political argument fails, this complaints procedure is now unwittingly encouraging this abuse tactic by giving it further credence.

(15) The implication of organised entryism and of being a party within a party is particularly unpleasant. The EPSR has never campaigned against any election result; or agitated for any special congress; or tried to manipulate the women’s section for its own political ends - or the black section as it was; or publicised a slate of candidates; or threatened to strike and to consciously defy the constitution; or campaigned systematically against any party policy; or ever held any party-manoeuvring planning meeting or ever urged its readership to do so; or do anything other than what it has always done - which is to put out a weekly commentary on the international class struggle, including observations on the more noteworthy philosophical and political shifts of significant tendencies within the British labour movement, which must include the SLP.

(16) The EPSR’s original analysis, made during the birth of the SLP, is that the party could become a major centrist revival movement for the cause of socialism in this country, helpful to restoring working class confidence in socialism, and as such deserved to be actively supported by those specifically fighting also to keep Marxist revolutionary science alive as a necessary part of that fight for socialism.

(17) It has been the EPSR’s understanding that such an aim could remain fully compatible with active, loyal membership of the SLP. It is nice to think that perhaps the congress vote for me as vice-president reflected the same sentiment, but maybe not.

(18) I certainly have no wish to be at odds with the party leadership on an issue such as this, which surely should have been sorted out ages ago. And the EPSR has not the slightest interest in collecting positions of offices inside the SLP. It has one interest only - the permanent fight for a Marxist-Leninist understanding of the world. SLP-building helps that and is helped by it.

(19) If what you are saying with this complaints procedure is that such a prominent EPSR link as myself is an uncomfortable problem in the leadership of the SLP, then I would prefer to offer my resignation herewith, rather than haggle with the complaints committee over the finer points of interpretation of what each clause in the constitution actually means, etc.

I see all this as a political question, not a disciplinary matter and, apart from the additional comments I might want to make once the full details of the complaint are presented, all that I want to say on the subject is contained in this statement, which I would request goes immediately to all members of the NEC for their decision.