WeeklyWorker

01.07.1999

Incredible

Party notes

Workers Power - a small, left Trotskyist sect - has in the past been synonymous with cretinous auto-Labourism. It will therefore come as a surprise to many to read in the June issue of its paper that in the recent European Union elections it called on readers to “vote against Labour” (Workers Power June).

However, WP’s new position sees it descend into sectarian incoherence and is an indication of a crisis of perspectives. In place of voting Labour, it put forward no national strategy at all. It suggests that voters should have supported Ken Coates’s Alternative Labour List in East Midlands, the Socialist Alliance in West Midlands and the Scottish Socialist Party. These trends can be supported because they represent “credible anti-war candidates within the workers’ movement” (my emphasis). In every other constituency - covering the vast bulk of the electorate - the comrades called for the spoiling of ballot papers by writing across them, “Nato out of the Balkans, independence for Kosova”.

Explicitly, WP ruled out any vote to Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, since it is a “pro-Milosevic and therefore pro-ethnic cleansing” party. More interesting was the reason it gave for refusing to countenance a vote for the CPGB in London and the North West. The ‘Weekly Worker’ lists could not be supported, as they “represent nothing at all in the labour movement other than an irrelevant sect, the Communist Party of Great Britain”. Space prevents full examination of this sectarianism, but a few points must be made.

In most constituencies around the country, WP advocated a weak propagandist gesture - spoiling votes in protest against the war. Yet in two of the most important areas, there were actually candidates standing on a manifesto whose central theme was opposition to the war - on precisely the slogans WP advocated! Every vote for the ‘Weekly Worker’ list was a vote for these two exact slogans. Other than malice, what stopped these comrades voting for us? I presume they would hang their objections on that delightfully vague word, “credible”.

First, we must clarify exactly what the comrades are talking about. Do they mean political credibility? Surely there can be no argument about the fact that our manifesto represented a revolutionary platform, in contrast to the reformoid politics of the other lists WP supported? On the central question of the war, the slogans WP identify as key were prominent parts of our manifesto. How “credible” do you want it, comrades?

In fact, it appears that WP attempts to characterise trends as “credible” only if they are supposed to represent something with some social weight - an electoral base of some sort. However, with this criterion, they dig themselves even deeper into the hole.

The “credible” candidates WP recommended averaged 2.13% of the vote. Indeed, if you take away the relatively more successful SSP, you get 1.51% for the English lists. In other words, more or less the same sort of votes CPGB candidates have consistently scored over the years. For example, as recently as the 1998 local elections in London, all six communist candidates won over 2% of the vote. Apart from this year’s EU elections, when our organisation was severely hampered by the last-minute collapse of the SA and by not being able to stand under its own name, our “irrelevant sect”, as WP entertainingly dubs us, has consistently achieved at least the same level of results as WP’s “credible” trends did.

Yet WP has never once offered even critical support to our candidates. Indeed, it has used the notion of being with the mass of workers - who retain illusions in Labour - to excuse its automatic electoral prostration. It specifically justified its enthusiastic vote for Blair in 1997 by assuring us that a ‘crisis of expectations’ would inevitably be precipitated by the Labour victory. Thus it dismisses the performances of the Socialist Party in England and Wales and the SLP on May 1 - “Both parties did abysmally” (Workers Power May 1997), we were snottily told by an organisation that has never had the guts to stand one candidate in the 20-plus years of its modest existence.

Instead, WP prided itself on being with what it calls “the mass” - that is, the millions of atomised individuals, the majority of whom were sociologically working class, who voted Labour. As leading WPer Mark Harrison put it (ineptly for one who would no doubt claim to be a ‘Leninist’), “We’re not interested in the small number of advanced workers in [SPEW and the SLP]; we want to be with the mass” (cited in Weekly Worker May 15 1997).

Of course the word ‘mass’ has two key political meanings. The first simply refers to the majority. However, there is a second meaning. It also refers to those sections of the people or class that have been drawn into action.

In a quiet period mass actions can involve only very small numbers of people. As objective circumstances mature, mass movements swell until they becomes the “majority, and not simply a majority of the workers alone, but the majority of all the exploited” (VI Lenin CW Vol 32, p475).

The sectarian dismissal of the “tiny” SPEW and SLP by the widely uninfluential Workers Power was a reflection of its own self-delusion that it was strategically placed to benefit from the ‘crisis of expectations’. And this would happen “sooner rather than later”, according to the organisation’s perspectives document.

Now, without any attempt to explain where this predicted ‘crisis’ has vanished, WP urges a “vote against Labour”, with no rational explanation, let alone theorisation, of why. We ask the comrades:

Clearly, the pretensions of sects like Workers Power have been cruelly exposed by two years of New Labour. For some time now its leadership has - farcically - postured as a sort of small SWP, dismissing others of comparable size (or larger). Politics has a way of being ruthless with such silly poses. Workers Powers’ plunge into sectarian gibberish over the European elections represents an important degenerative moment for it

Mark Fischer
national organiser