06.05.1999

Friends fall foul

Royston Bull, former SLP vice-president, replies to Delphi the “disillusioned Scargillite” (Weekly Worker April 29)

At least your ‘Delphi’ Trot is open about his anti-Leninism, inventing a completely false ‘irreconcilable contradiction’ between the dedicated spread of revolutionary theory and solidarity action with workers in their daily spontaneous struggles. His is the arrogant condescension towards the workers: “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.”

This is exactly the dumbing down line of the SLP/Socialist News. ‘Workers do not want to hear what one long-dead Russian revolutionary said to another’, etc, has been quoted several times from the platform. Delphi sneers at the Economic and Philosophic Science Review for its “idealised ‘heroic’ working class braving enlightenment”. He merely sneers at himself. Only complacent philistine conceit instructs Socialist News contributors to “keep it at the level of the Mirror or the Sun, which is where most of our recruits are coming from.”

The Bolshevik attitude was that “workers come to the revolution thirsting for knowledge”, and provided it in newspapers which make the EPSR seem like a light read. That Delphi has given himself “incipient brain damage” from struggling to get through the EPSR will tell workers everything they need to know about the backwardness in part of the SLP’s founding circles and concept.

The demand for ‘recommendations for practical action, not theory’ from the EPSR shows that it is Delphi who is out of touch, not the fight for Marxist science. Tameside careworkers understand the class-war rottenness of how they have been betrayed into outrageous injustice, and can organise and agitate for their own case better than anyone, as can any workers in struggle.

What they do not needis patronising Trot visits to teach them how to picket and write leaflets. They can already do that for themselves better than any Trot academic. What they do lack is the opportunity to develop a theoretical grasp of the stage of the imperialist crisis reached, the degree of Labour/TUC class-collaborating degeneracy reached, and what political struggle perspectives to add to their industrial-struggle fight.

Tragically, they will get no such political leadership from visiting SLP Trots or any other posturers from the fake ‘left’ swamp - just more dumbed-down head-patting, such as Delphi offers here.

What ‘practical action’ does Delphi ‘propose’ for those in struggle? In the absence of condescending ‘practical tips on strike organisation’, presumably the recommendation is to ‘politically trust the SLP’. Other Trots still recommend ‘keep on trusting New Labour’ presumably, like the SWP at election times. Brian Heron at SLP congress said, ‘Just roll your sleeves up and help strikers with practical matters’, in the most tail-ending SWP style.

These are all aspects of the philosophically bankrupt single-issue politics which have remained barren in nearly two centuries of reformism and centrism, but are still being defended by Delphi. To suggest that reformist illusions (that fascist degeneracy can be squeezed out of capitalist society by anti-racist and anti-homophobic agitation and other anti-Nazi legislation) is part of the problem rather than the solution does not imply “didactic haughtiness” towards spontaneous struggles, or any less disgust at the nail-bomb terror threat to ethnic, gay and other minority communities. Possibly the opposite, because although all self-emancipatory awareness movements do properly win legal rights and have a profound educative and civilising influence - do they not also, however, imply that capitalist society is ‘getting better’, and hide its deepening contradictions which simultaneously are driving towards increased violence and a general return towards renewed fascist warmongering?

Just because there is a lot of paranoia about does not mean that New Labour is not preparing more and more class collaboration treachery (and reaction around the imperialist system generally), when Jack Straw jumps on the anti-nail bomb bandwagon to declare: “We are becoming a better society, so let us stay united, and work together to continue defeating this kind of thing.”

Meanwhile the rat race continues to disillusion youth and breed atomising conflict throughout society, with the full blessing of New Labour opportunism and humbug, and fascist blitzkrieg continues to rain down terror-destruction on the whole of Serbia, turning a nasty civil war into a holocaust catastrophe because of the strategic interests of imperialist exploitation and domination worldwide, and nothing whatever to do with bogus ‘concern for ethnic minority rights’, there or anywhere.

Under cover of wittily heaping up personal abuse, and daft distortions of EPSR positions, the truth is that Delphi is anti-theory - completely, in the Leninist sense. He says the EPSR offers nothing about “how to fight … apart from evangelising Marxist-Leninist science”. Absolutely correct, and Marxism-Leninism guided the only successful revolutionary overthrows of imperialist states that there have ever been so far in history, and it will stay that way.

No doubt bolstered by the latest Cold War series brainwashing on BBC TV, Delphi goes into raptures to denounce the “North Korean slave state” and to look for its demise - the theory being, ‘All those central Europeans who broke up the Iron Curtain and destroyed the Berlin Wall cannot be wrong’. The revulsion against the dictatorship of the proletariat continues on a roll; but cautiously, the fake ‘left’ still mostly only openly reject Leninism, but not yet Marxism, which first laid bare the scientific necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat and its philosophical justification.

These knee-jerk anti-Stalinists could not be making a bigger mistake. Historically, scientific anti-Stalinism alone is able to explain the epoch-making anti-imperialist pricelessness of the 20th century’s workers’ states whilst exposing the crippling theoretical damage imposed on the international movement by accumulating revisionist mistakes, starting in the 1920s. To judge things by shallow temporary mass opinion in central Europe, in the period of apparently triumphant imperialist-boom consumerism and apparently incurable proletarian-dictatorship bureaucracy and paranoid arbitrariness, is as daft as judging fascism’s worthwhileness by Hitler’s mass popularity in the 1930s, and Princess Diana’s worthwhileness by the morbid fan-worship her death brought forth.

Theory says that as the capitalist free market sinks deeper and deeper into inter-imperialist warmongering slump and crisis, so will the considerable achievements of the workers’ states (in supporting anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements worldwide, in stalemating western nuclear-imperialist military domination, and in so spreading certain universal educational, economic, social and cultural rights as to make capitalist welfare state development obligatory in the west) become increasingly attractive with hindsight.

Current demands are to ban fascist nail bombers in Britain. But even some Trots can see the pitfalls and contradictions of asking the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie behind a largely police-dominated ‘democratic state’ to exercise even more political-banning powers, and with ostensibly ‘left’ encouragement. Political leadership in the Marxist science of class-state dictatorship would be the best ‘practical action’ to start off with. But, one, Delphi would not see that as ‘practical action’ and two, Delphi is against all such “didactic” theory anyway - all supposedly so far from “where the worker or peasant actually is”.

What is clear, however, is that Trot academics who cannot tell the difference between inter-imperialist struggle (United Kingdom versus United States of America) and anti-imperialist struggle (Cuba) are out of order in presuming to decide “where the workers are actually at”. Let such middle class philistinism just speak for itself. Workers do not fall for every petty bourgeois stupidity, even under the most dumbing-down influences of the greatest consumer boom in capitalist history.

Your ‘Delphic’ Fiscite is not so much ambiguous (for which the oracle was notorious) as plain muddled - pretending amazement at EPSR views which slate Scargillist reactionary bureaucracy yet which still support the SLP project in general, yet having themselves circulated vice-president Sikorski’s famous attacks on the party leadership for producing “weakness in organisation”, and “recreates all the old demoralisation, factionalism and cynicism so familiar on the traditional left”, while still on board.

I certainly did “put myself forward as vice-president”, but with known published criticism of many of Scargillism’s limitations, and with open agitation, through motions and contributed articles (often not published), calling for vastly improved political analysis in the party, and a regular structure of regional and national schools to develop a serious cadre force. But unlike Sikorski, who also put himself forward as vice-president last November, just the same, despite criticisms, I knew nothing about how Scargillism’s leadership operated.

It is, of course, an utterly ludicrous stage-managed joke, and Heron and co need to explain why Scargill saw the need to instantly invent reasons for expelling me from the party the moment I get elected onto its NEC, for fear of what I would see and say there - yet he could tolerate the Sikorskis and Heron being ‘in’ on this autocracy seemingly endlessly (two years or more). In whose ‘sincerity’ and political judgement should SLP members have confidence in the light of this? Who should they distrust for their ‘duplicity’? Scargill feared the EPSR and instantly moved to have it closed down from the NEC (and then the party) at the very first meeting I attended.

But having trusted getting elected would at least give the opportunity to raise arguments and help organise agreed motions, it was important to then take up Scargillism for its underlying political/philosophical bankruptcy and not just for its instantly observable mafia-like autocracy and sycophancy (as unpleasant and significant as they are) which immediately frustrated that trust.

Scargillism’s grotesque ‘disciplinary’ stitch-ups - a sordid insult to human intelligence - were a new factor, not necessarily revealed in the earlier inevitable decisions to refuse membership to open factional recruiting and agitation inside the SLP (the EPSR rejects factionalising too, then and now). In the light of these ludicrous stitch-ups, the underlying political backwardness of Scargillism (which was unavoidably going to come into ever greater prominence as world developments moved on, leaving Scargilism further and further behind, and is already doing so) has had to be re-emphasised; and continuing support for the SLP project has had to be advised to quickly turn to fighting backwardness as openly and noisily as possible in Scargillism’s grossly bent and uneven arena.

The SLP’s response to Nato warmongering has been utterly pathetic, failing to expose the stooge role played for imperialist aggression by academic dilettantes from the ‘left’ swamp airing their knowledge about ‘minority self-determination rights’ in the catastrophically wrong context; failing to explain the whole imperialist system’s crisis-driven need to turn to warmongering destruction at this stage of its ‘overproduction’ and collapse nightmare; and eventually slithering onto pro-KLA (and pro-warmongering) stoogery itself in the latest Socialist News.

On Europe too, events have caught up unreconstructed SLP backwardness, typified by Delphi who declares bluntly that the Marxist-Leninist science (of inter-imperialist splits being the most vital to understanding 20th century class struggle) is a complete invention by the EPSR, choosing to pretend that the EU has been described as “anti-imperialist”. No such nonsense.

And Delphi’s total rejection of all concept of inter-imperialist conflict as the crucial ground for future world socialist revolution demonstrates a complete rejection of all Marxist understanding. Being in or out of the EU is not the point. The problem is with the SLP misleading the working class that any specific rearrangement of inter-imperialist trading relationships, as such, can significantly alter (for Britain or anywhere else) the long-term consequence of the systemic monopoly-imperialist crisis. It cannot.

The revolutionary overthrow of the slump and war-ridden monopoly capitalist system is the only scientific perspective.