17.06.1999

Eurotalking

While the Euro election votes were being counted, the CPGB’s regular monthly aggregate provided the opportunity for comrades to discuss the election campaign throughout Britain.

The biggest bone of contention arose around a section of Mark Fischer’s column in the Weekly Worker (‘Assessing Euro ’99’, June 10). Comrade Fischer, CPGB national organiser, dealt with the collapse of our Socialist Alliance partners, which had forced the CPGB to stand alone (under the ‘Weekly Worker’ banner) in the Euro elections in the London and the North West regions. He then went on to make a call for support for other lists where the CPGB was not standing, expressing critical support for the Scottish Socialist Party, the Socialist Alliance in West Midlands, and the Alternative Labour in East Midlands. The column continued: “Elsewhere the SLP could be given extremely critical support” (original emphasis).

A minority of comrades were opposed to what they called “unconditional support” for Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party. They considered this to be a reversal of what the CPGB had long campaigned for, one comrade in particular emphasising that our aim should be “to kill” the SLP. They asserted that if this was so, it was inexplicable and contradictory to call for a vote for the SLP. Scargill is a labour dictator and would lead the working class to disaster. The Euro elections could increase that danger. It is not in these comrades’ view correct, therefore, to bolster the SLP by calling for a vote for it; such a stand makes us appear inconsistent.

Comrades from the majority noted that the call for “extremely critical support” for SLP lists was only for those Euro regions where the CPGB, the Scottish Socialist Party, the Alternative Labour List, or the Socialist Alliance were not standing. In effect, five of the Euro election regions (Eastern, North East, South East, South West, and Wales) out of 11 in Britain; in these five regions the SLP received a total of 27,959 votes, about a third of its total of 86,749. The major reasons for making such a call, outlined by several comrades, was to underline our non-sectarian method and expose the bankruptcy of the old left. After all, both the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party, to name but two groups, failed to make any call as to which lists members and supporters, let alone the working class as a whole, should vote for in the country as a whole.

No comrades disagreed with the aim of positively ‘killing’ all sects and sectarian projects. Therefore we want a non-sectarian approach. All communists, left socialists and partisans of the working class should be fused in one party under true democratic centralism - unity of action, freedom of criticism. Evidently the mass of those who voted SLP on June 10 are part of our natural constituency. Whatever we think of the leadership, those who vote SLP are not to be mourned, but organised. Hence, some thought the minority’s approach of not calling for an SLP vote anywhere smacked of leftism.

Our organisation beyond two regions, London and the North West, where full CPGB lists were standing, is virtually non-existent. While the CPGB did stand in what were the equivalent of 20 Euro constituencies (incorporating well over 100 parliamentary constituencies) following abandonment of the field by our allies in the Socialist Alliances in these areas, the party’s weakness beyond these two regions was of course illustrated by the call for a critical vote for the SSP, the Alternative Labour List, and the Socialist Alliance, as well as an “extremely” critical vote for the SLP in those regions where none of these was putting up a list. Whilst minority comrades accepted that the Party should indeed have made its call in relation to the left lists covering four regions, they were opposed to the call for a vote for the SLP in the remaining five regions, especially, as they, wrongly, asserted we had previously called for no vote to be given to Scargill’s lists.

Minority comrades were challenged on the special status they accorded the SLP. Other comrades refuted their contention that the SLP was now so thoroughly reactionary that it could never be supported in elections. No articles in the Weekly Worker have at any time called for no vote to be given to Scargill’s party on a blanket basis; the fact remains that the CPGB put forward no conditions when arguing for support for the SLP and Socialist Party candidates in the May 1 1997 general election. What in the SLP had changed materially in the interim? Very little. Had there been a fundamental qualitative break in the SLP? No. Minority comrades cited the undemocratic internal regime of the SLP. But as comrades from the majority noted; the internal regimes of the SWP and the Socialist Party are nothing to write home about, and indeed that of the New Labour Party may be more democratic formally than any of them. Still, the minority comrades would not object to a call for votes to the SWP and SPEW on the basis of their lack of internal democracy, would they? So why use this criterion to reject a call for votes for the SLP? Some comrades present concluded that minority comrades’ objections to the call for the vote for the SLP had a moralistic, not to say naive, tinge to them.

The left got it wrong, mightily so, in the Euro elections. The working class, which each sect purports to aim to lead, was given no indication of how to vote in most of Britain. In addition, indications from the SWP or SPEW where they did give them were sorely lacking any coherent argumentation, let alone Marxist analysis. In calling for a vote for the SLP in the way it did, according to majority of comrades, the CPGB made clear its antipathy to sectarianism and avoided both passive abstentionism and political silence.

Comrades from the minority were adamant that unconditional support for the SLP was anyway impossible. They appeared to be content, however, that comrade Fischer’s article called for “extremely critical” support; it was just that support should have been conditional, too. Other comrades derided such a suggestion. They were keen to know what particular conditions minority comrades had in mind. When challenged over a specific case, that of Dave Rix, an SLP union official in Aslef who trounced the left Labourite Lew Adams for the post of general secretary, the minority comrades were in some difficulty. Surely it was of benefit to the working class, argued majority comrades, that Blairism was challenged and beaten. Therefore Rix’s election had to be supported. But minority comrades still wondered if it would be better to have put conditions on support for Rix.

One minority group comrade suggested that the Humanist Party was closer to the CPGB than the SLP. It was pointed out to this comrade that the Humanist Party was not a working class party. The SLP still is. Support for the SLP from our quarter is like the rope supporting the hanged man, as one comrade put it, quoting Lenin. The left’s crisis of auto-Labourism contains all sorts of possibilities: moralistic boycottism, anarchistic abstentionism, aloofness, localism and organisational disintegration. Our task is to resolve the crisis positively, however. We cannot overcome sectarianism with sectarianism.

Tom Ball