14.10.1999

Liquidationist step

SP dissidents to attend Socialist Network conference

Writing in the Weekly Worker of October 7, London Socialist Alliance chair Nick Long sprang the mild surprise that his organisation - the Socialist Democracy Group - was “no more”. Apparently, the SDG had already dissolved itself in order to enter a new grouping - namely, the Socialist Network, scheduled for launch on October 16 in Liverpool.

Comrade Long pushed this initiative as open to “all those who support the need for a new Marxist politics and are willing to examine and reassess how socialists should organise”. A line or two later, he flatly contradicted this when he crudely gloated that the Communist Party would be explicitly excluded from the event.

Comrade Long’s bumptious article prompted a sharp retort from the hosts of the event, the Merseyside Socialists (see below right). In particular, Anne Bannister - whose telephone number comrade Long publicly advertised as the contact point for the event - reacted cuttingly. At a North West Socialist Alliance meeting on October 9, she in effect made a statement of rebuttal.

Quoting this particular excerpt of Nick Long’s Weekly Worker article, the comrade made clear that Liverpool is not an open event. It is private, intended for comrades from the SP tradition alone and a few privileged guests who share “similar views”, as the statement puts it.

Nick Long’s Weekly Worker article had stated: “... the SDG is no more. We have resolved to liquidate our organisation and put our resources at the disposal of a much larger group of comrades and help facilitate the development of the Socialist Network”. Comrade Bannister made it clear that she regarded this statement as “ludicrous”. She indicated that the meeting to be held on October 16 is not one at which the liquidation of organisations into the Socialist Network is appropriate or called for.

This seems to flatly contradict Nick Long’s ebullient announcement last week. Both comrade Bannister’s intervention and the Merseyside Socialists’ statement seek to play down the October 16 gathering and pooh-pooh any idea that it is a launch event of any new, or recently augmented, Socialist Network. On the face of it, this apparently leaves comrade Long’s SDG in an awkward position. After all, the comrades seem to have “liquidated” into an organisation that does not want them. Perhaps they should reconstitute themselves until they find something else to liquidate into. Given the track record of some of the SDG comrades, that should take the best part of a week.

However, despite the attempts to talk down the event, the Liverpool meeting is clearly not without some political significance. It is another development of the seemingly inexorable decline and disintegration of the Socialist Party. In this sense, the event is undoubtedly an expression of the whirlpool of liquidationism that is sucking the SP under.

The stated position that this is an attempt to rally just comrades who have “come from” a Socialist Party tradition is at best a little disingenuous. We know of many instances up and down the country - London, Wales, Manchester, the Midlands and Coventry - where current members of the SP are being mobilised to attend, head-hunted for what are perceived to be their ‘dissident’ opinions. Moreover, observers such as Nick Long are being invited on the basis of perceived “shared views”. He was never a member of Militant/SP to my knowledge. A more accurate assessment is that this meeting represents a gathering of the rightist, liquidationist SP ‘opposition in exile’, some courted malcontents who remain inside Taaffe’s organisation for the time, plus a ragtag bunch of various disorientated centrists and left reformists they have drawn in their puny wake.

Clearly, such a clot will be defined by many divergent tensions. For example, practically every member of the SDG you speak to will give you a different interpretation of what the meeting is all about. In contrast to that jolly witch-hunter Nick Long, several have assured us that they would protest against any attempts to exclude us from the meeting.

However, despite the mild spat between the SDG’s Nick Long and the Merseyside Socialists, there are clear - right liquidationist - themes to the event that certain political forces find attractive.

First, there is its political narrowness and sectarianism. Unprompted, comrade Bannister underlined that, whatever her other disagreements with Nick Long’s interpretation of the nature of the meeting, he was spot on when he boasted about its sectarian political agenda:

“After discussion with other comrades we are not offering an invitation to the Weekly Worker or the CPGB to attend the event in Liverpool on October 16. We do not think that your attendance would assist us to develop an open and honest exchange of ideas, when it would be likely that the discussion would be misrepresented in the next issue of the Weekly Worker. Nor do those attending want their names printed in the Weekly Worker” (e-mail, October 11).

We can dismiss the smokescreen about the printing of comrades’ names. One, because it seems inconceivable that the leadership of the SP will not have its own mole at the meeting, taking careful note of who attends and who says what. Two, because while this paper is certainly in the business of exposing opportunists’ real political identities, it has never knowingly set anyone up for a witch hunt - unlike some of the participants on October 16, I am afraid.

Furthermore, the perennial squeak of opportunists outed in this paper - ‘I/we have been misrepresented!’ - almost defies comment. If there is one place where ‘misrepresentations’ can be openly contested by those attacked - often at considerable length and over an extended period - it is in the pages of the Weekly Worker.

In other words, the comrades’ political project is too weak to defend openly: it needs the cover of darkness to have even a chance of survival. Yet again, we are faced with an attempt to cohere political forces - theoretically or organisationally - behind the back of the movement they are meant to be serving.

The second point is that, however much they present themselves as a break with the past, as new, fresh, open politics, the rancid smell of the Socialist Party’s terminal crisis hangs in the air. The Merseyside Socialists have set the pace and agenda, pulling the likes of the hapless SDG behind them. This small circle in Liverpool was the latest limb to drop off Taaffe’s England and Wales ‘party’, typically without any serious political or theoretical struggle.

Third, where has been the honest attempt to openly come to terms with the Socialist Party “tradition”, to explain how the comrades have broken from it and why? In fact, the SP claims continuity with a longer tradition, going back through Trotsky’s Fourth International to the Bolsheviks. Of course, we dispute this lineage from the left - we say today’s SP has nothing ‘Bolshevik’ about it: it is a right-leaning centrist organisation. But it is clear that SN comrades regard themselves as having broken with the SP tradition and - by implication - the whole 20th century history of revolutionary working class organisation. What exactly do they think socialists and revolutionaries should put in its place today? Their eclectic agenda reeks of petty bourgeois dilettantism.

The Liverpool meeting offers nothing new. Its significance lies in the negative lessons it teaches about the nature of political struggle in Peter Taaffe’s dwindling organisation. Overwhelmingly, the opposition to the dull bureaucratic centralism of the SP apparatus is right-leaning and liquidationist. Unless the SP generates a principled left opposition, its days are cruelly numbered.

Mark Fischer