30.09.1999

Party notes

I am grateful to the comrade who drew my attention to the website of the Socialist Democracy Group. In the subsection of its ‘links’ area titled ‘the hard left’, the web addresses of nine organisations are given along with brief descriptions and political evaluations. In keeping with its assiduously cultivated ‘fluffy’ and ‘non-sectarian’ self-image, the critical remarks it directs at most are fairly muted.

For example, the Socialist Workers Party is “not very keen on far-left unity”; the revamped Class War is “somewhat lacklustre” and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty is implicitly criticised for its failure to “oppose Yeltsin’s coup in 1992, or Nato’s war against Serbia in 1999”. The tone of all of this is very much in line with its declared aim of rising above the internecine bickering of a chronically divided left. On the other hand, here - in full - is what the SDG comrades have to say about the Weekly Worker:

“This poisonous shit sheet denouncing the whole left (including their own correspondents), produced by a bunch of ultra-left nutters with half the price of a printing press, is, nevertheless, a source of (often ill-gained) documents and news of the far left. Wash your hands after reading.”

I confess that I am absolutely delighted with this passage and am thinking of reproducing it on a teeshirt. The left in this country is characterised by a smug complacency, even as it disappears down the plughole. If the sharp, uncompromising and thoroughly principled open polemic conducted by the Communist Party has blown the cover of this two-faced sect and prompted this cowardly little snarl, I am happy. Moreover, it is so refreshing to see the SDG actually say what it means without detour into long pretentious meandering and Delphic formulations. The author is to be congratulated.

The stated aim of the SDG is to aid the formation of a centrist/left reformist “party of recomposition”, a strategy to counter the “growing problem of dispersal and fragmentation on the socialist and radical left” (Socialist Democracy No1, November 1997). Such “broader and more inclusive formations” would cast off the rotten traditions of “ostracism, denunciation and vicious attacks” (not the one quoted above, presumably) that has been the standard fare of the sectarian left and which in fact is a “gross distortion of the spirit of debate and controversy which pervaded Lenin’s party”. The SDG - apparently - represents a group of sincere, young (or so they told us) comrades turning their backs on “the heavy-handed, authoritarian regimes which seek to batter down, intimidate and eventually drive out oppositions and even critically-minded individuals” (ibid).

I think readers can guess the type of welcome that communists - we “ultra-left nutters” - would receive in the type of party the SDG has in its mind’s eye. In fact, we hardly need to draw our conclusions simply from the quoted passage on the group’s website. There is also our concrete experience of SDG individual members over the last few years.

Not only does this mushy little sect include unrepentant anti-communist witch-hunters from the days of the Socialist Labour Party; the SDG was actually instrumental in attempting to expel the Communist Party from the London Socialist Alliance in July last year. Then, a document circulated inside the SDG revealed the actual agenda of these ‘democrats’. The author was Duncan Chapple, leading SDGer. Tucked away in the inflated verbiage was the call for a purge of the “absolutist” CPGB: it would be better, comrade Chapple concluded, to “find ourselves in the position where we … are in different alliances” (Weekly Worker July 9 1998). It was in ‘honour’ of this shameful attempt to split the embryonic alliance that we dubbed the organisation the ‘Socialist Hypocrisy Group’ - ‘open’, ‘inclusive’ and ‘democratic’ on the outside; deeply sectarian at the core.

Thus, we pointed out the delicious irony that the Chapple document could blithely jabber on in one paragraph that the LSA needed “clear, free, open and participatory discussions to clarify the alliance goals” and in another suggest that it must “select and control those who are within the alliance on the basis of what they bring to it” (ibid). If ever there was a formulation to justify “[driving] out oppositions and even critically minded individuals”, this is it.

Clearly our exposure still smarts. The snide reference to “ill-gotten documents” reveals as much. In fact, the Chapple piece was supplied to us by an SDGer who suffered a spasm of conscience about the nefarious activities of their organisation.

Apart from what it reveals about the real agenda of the SDG, the website passage itself is hardly worth commenting on, although we are gratified to see that the comrades now believe that we are necessary reading for “news of the far left”, even if with surgical gloves on. This represents a more honest appraisal compared to their printed estimation of our journal as “irrelevant sectariana” (Socialist Democracy No2, January-February 1998).

In many ways, the SDG is an excuse for not forming a serious political organisation. However, in conditions of general meltdown, demoralisation and fragmentation, it can have a certain attraction for some. I spoke to a recent recruit who was quite explicit that there were no good reasons for joining its ranks: indeed, he agreed with my characterisation of his new political home as “a holding pen for traumatised Trots”. This actually is the defining feature of the SDG. Yet, given this period, it is still a danger.

The group has identified as its “best opportunity” for growth and influence an intersection with “the forces emerging from the Militant tradition” (Socialist Democracy No7, August-September 1999). We have already reported on SDG hopes at one stage to carve away a section of the remaining Socialist Party organisation in London (Weekly Worker May 27 1999). Indeed, we have been told that our article was important in spiking the attempt for the time being.

Splits and individual defections from the Socialist Party so far have been almost uniformly to the right. The SDG is the manifestation in organisational form of that mood of defeat and liquidationism. Its pretensions are to offer a new and ‘radical’ alternative to the sterile sectarianism of the past. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It was formed casually, by a small group of comrades who split from the Socialist Party, without a hint of anything that could be graced with the title of ‘political struggle’. In other words, it came into existence in the same light-hearted, prissy manner in which so many new, immaculately formed little sects regularly appear on the left. Its founding conference advertised itself as “open to anyone who agrees with the need for the construction of a broad, pluralistic socialist party” (Socialist Democracy No2, January-February 1998) - “anyone” apart from communists, that is. We were explicitly excluded. In pursuit of its own trademark shibboleth - a right-leaning “party of recomposition” - it has since proved itself willing to split alliances to exclude communists and others on the left who disagree. Exactly the same sort of “ostracism, denunciation and vicious attacks” it claims to abjure.

Thus, although we do not take the website ranting at all seriously, this group is not as innocuous as it claims. In its own way, it is a walking, talking example of many of the things that are wrong with the contemporary revolutionary movement.

Mark Fischer
national organiser