29.04.1999

‘Oracle’ speaks

Delphi is a disillusioned Scargillite

It was Delphi’s intention to follow up the analysis of the Stalinism of Harpal Brar with an autopsy of the politics of Royston Bull. Partly from an unwillingness to kick an SLP ex-vice president when he is down, but mainly due to incipient brain damage from ploughing through back copies of Extra Sensory Perception Review, this project fell by the wayside. However, since Bull has finished digging his own grave as far as the SLP is concerned, I have no objections to assisting his departure by banging one last small nail into his coffin.

His letter attacking Scargill (Weekly Worker April 8) must be his swan song, not only as far as the SLP is concerned, but as an aspiring leader of the left in general. How can someone aspire to office in a political party and then, within months, denounce it and its leader with invective such as “the nastiest bureaucratism … demagogic … reactionary … ludicrously nationalistic … social chauvinist …”?   Either Bull suffered from a serious misjudgement when he put himself forward as vice-president, or he was being duplicitous, or he is wrong in his present appraisal of the party. This rather undermines confidence in his politics and the sincerity with which he presents his arguments.

Of course Bull entered the SLP with the intention not of serving the party, but of causing as much disruption as possible under the guise of ‘discussion and polemics’. Bull’s only concept of class struggle is confined to ‘theory’ and “the science of Marxism-Leninism”. It does not stem from the living reality of class struggle itself, or of historical change. This is made clear by his arrogant dismissal of ‘praxis’, single-issue campaigns and trade union struggle. It is also the reason he is unable to grasp the nature of revolutionary opposition to the European Union.

He attacks Delphi’s description of the EU as “the actual concrete form taken by imperialism in post-war Europe”. Instead he tells us: “The American Marshall Plan/IMF/Nato, Cold War domination, tail-ended by Britain, has been the main imperialist driving force overall.”

Well, that’s true enough, if somewhat crude and simplistic in formulation. Then he goes on: “The EU became a ruling class challenge, started by six west European states, to that Anglo-Saxon domination.” Does Bull mean to say what this apparently clearly states - that the EU is a “challenge” by sections of the European bourgeoisie to “Anglo-Saxon domination”, that is, US imperialism? Is that why we shouldn’t call for withdrawal, because the EU is an anti-imperialist challenge? Surely Bull is not advocating the replacement of a “ludicrously [British] nationalistic” view with an even more ludicrous form of European social chauvinism?

There is ample evidence that, far from being a challenge to US imperialism, the EU fulfils the US-driven economic and political strategy for Europe. The present role of the EU in the Balkans is a case in point. Obviously there are still trade and political rivalries between the US and the EU, and between the US and particular European countries, but disputes about bananas do not constitute a “challenge” to imperialism. In 1971 the annual US presidential report on foreign policy, which hailed the expansion of the EC, stated:

“The US has always supported the strengthening and enlargement of the EC. We welcome cohesion in Europe because it makes Europe a sturdier pillar of the structure of peace. Regional cohesion contributes to world stability and America’s and western Europe’s fundamental interests are parallel in most areas of policy ...” (J Paxton A dictionary of the EEC 1976, p265).

It is quite clear that the present EU, with all the developments towards greater economic and political integration, is a further phase in the development of European imperialism and part of the process of globalisation. This is a concrete manifestation of imperialism. Its political, economic and state institutions are actual. Its effect on British and European peoples is real.But rather than having a practical strategy towards the EU, Bull, as always, talks in an abstract way about an abstract ‘imperialism’, which exists only in his head and has not evolved beyond a condemnation of Cold War militarism and big business.

Bull’s attitude to the SLP policy on Europe accords with his subjective world view on all issues, a view which bears more relation to religious messianism than ‘Marxist-Leninist science’, or any other mode of rational thought. His views are a kind of Manichaeism, in which the contending duality of good and evil is replaced by the cosmic battle of ‘anti-imperialism’ versus ‘imperialism’. This is no different from, but certainly more pretentious and obscurantist than, the ‘Capitalism bad, socialism good’ approach he condemns in Socialist News headline articles.

What Bull is quite incapable of, not only in the case of Europe, but on every issue affecting working class and other oppressed people, is proposing practical action which relates to those engaged in struggle and helps carry them forward. Hence his haughty dismissal of “trade union journal-type activity” reports in Socialist News. Symptomatic also is the fact that, despite being just down the road, he has not been on any of the main Tameside careworker demonstrations in Ashton under Lyne. Bull has absolutely nothing to learn from working class people. Like the religious fundamentalists he already has all the answers. He knows what is good for everyone - hence gay people and black people are not only wasting their time resisting specific forms of oppression, but are positively obstructing the greater fight against imperialism. But what form this fight takes, apart from evangelising the one true gospel of ‘Marxist-Leninist science’ (authorised Bull edition), is not elucidated anywhere in all of his semi-coherent outpourings.

Unfortunately, in this attitude, Bull only represents a reductio ad absurdum of one of the main failings of the left. The Leninist idea that working class struggle cannot transcend trade union consciousness without the introduction of theory from outside, by professional (and usually middle class) revolutionaries, has been one of the main factors in preventing Marxist ideas gaining ground in the working class.

Bolshevik-type organisations have tended to adopt a didactic approach to political education - what the Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire, a humanist Marxist, has described as “the banking theory of education’” The recipient of knowledge is just regarded as a passive repository of facts. Instead, he argues that education, or consciousness-raising, must relate to real life experience. The educator must start from where the worker or peasant is actually at, from their perception of the world, not from where they would like them to be.

Theory is worthless unless linked to the practical struggles of everyday life. “We proceed by asking questions”,  as the Zapatistas say. It is necessary to be in a dialogue with those in struggle - to constantly interrogate reality. Instead Bull tries to inject his creed, formulated in another epoch and light years behind today’s reality, into an idealised, ‘heroic’, working class craving enlightenment.

What Bull means when he complains of the lack of political education or discussion in the SLP is that he has not been provided with the platform to harangue the membership with his panaceas for “overthrowing the entire imperialist system”. In fact what he interprets as “anti-theory” is in fact anti-dogmatism - a desire to avoid the old sectarian disputes which should have been buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall. Scargill’s plea for members to leave their old baggage outside the party has been ignored by those like Bull and Brar who have imported not only their baggage, but all the furniture, including the kitchen sink. And, in the case of both Bull and Brar, that sink is full of the detritus of age-old dirty Stalinist pots.

Delphi has gone on record as stating the political education within the SLP is abysmal. But one of the reasons for this is the legacy of rigid, doctrinaire views which Bull, Brar and other supporters of the Bolshevik Revolution Re-­enactment Society still propagate. Fortunately, as the myth of the ‘workers’ states’ recedes into the mists of folk memory, as the last material base of Stalinism dissolves along with the North Korean slave state, the theoretical delusions of the Stalinoids become even more vapid. This permits the development of genuine political education within the SLP and the working class as a whole. It also improves the opportunity to create a new vision of socialism and new strategies for the revolutionary transformation of society.

Perhaps with the indulgence of the Weekly Worker, and Simon Harvey’s continuing chivalry in safeguarding Delphi’s anonymity (or is he bluffing?), Delphi may be permitted to explain not only what we are against, but what that vision and those strategies are.