04.11.1999

Scargill and Scargillism

Dave Osler discusses the lessons he draws from two years of SLP membership

I was a member of the Socialist Labour Party during its heyday, during the two years when it was possibly a viable force in working class politics. For everyone on the left who wants to see some sort of party of regroupment - and there is an increasing realisation that we all should be in such an organisation - there is a need to take on board the lessons of the SLP.

It was a promising project for the construction of a socialist party in Britain, but has reached a dead end. I use the term ‘dead end’ rather than ‘dead’, because, as both the Greens and the UK Independence Party have illustrated recently, it is not actually essential for a party to have a mass membership, or even large financial backing, to be at least minimally electorally viable. It is also quite apparent that the SLP is not going to shut up shop tomorrow. It was Trotsky who remarked upon the capacity of some of the worst sects to become ossified and survive for decades in splendid isolation.

So the SLP is still going to be with us. But, that said, it is certainly shrinking numerically very rapidly, and there is now zero prospect of any trade union affiliating at a national level. I would also suggest that, even if there was some sort of split from New Labour, or for example the expulsion of the left wing of the parliamentary Labour Party, the vast majority, perhaps with a handful of exceptions, would not see the SLP as a political home.

However, it would be wrong to demonise Scargill as an individual regarding what happened to that party. There are other people who must take the blame for some of that, including some past comrades of mine from the Fourth International tradition, who played a major role in stymieing the development of the SLP.

In fact Scargill has very many positive characteristics. He is willing to engage in and lead class struggle. His personal courage (as opposed to his political judgement) in the 1984-5 miners’ strike is beyond question. That certainly sets him qualitatively apart from any other trade union bureaucrat in Britain today. The tragedy was that during the 1992 pit closure crisis Scargill was adapting to public-opinion-shaping tactics. Whatever his political courage, he has not set about the task of systematically constructing some sort of opposition to past collaborationism within the trade union bureaucracy, largely of course because he is himself a bureaucrat.

Let us then look at what Scargillism is, what it represents. Politically it has been shaped by three main strands: Stalinism, syndicalism and the Yorkshire National Union of Mineworkers tradition. Another considerable factor is his own personal characteristics, which include an ego not much smaller than the Yorkshire coalfield itself - and a not inconsiderable capacity for self-delusion.

First Stalinism. I think Scargill has probably been embarrassed by the Weekly Worker’s revelations of comrade Brar’s little Eurostar jaunts to the Belgium Maoists. But politically he would not dissent from the content of the remarks Brar makes. It might be inopportune at a time when he is trying to distance himself from Stalinism, but, based on some conversations I have had with him, yes, he is very much a Stalinist of the old school - they don’t make them like that anymore. His political apprenticeship in the Young Communist League left him with a vision that is essentially a reformist road to an authoritarian state. His support for Jaruzelski and the crackdown on Solidarnosc in 1982 proves quite conclusively that he does not cavil at the idea of using tanks to smash mass workers’ uprisings.

Stalinism gave Scargill his broad left orientation within the trade union bureaucracy. His own rise was premised on almost a lifelong project to capture the apparatus of the NUM. The essence of this is the achievement of a left bureaucracy instead of a right one. It is actually counterposed to an orientation of socialism from below, one of seeking to unite the rank and file against the bureaucracy itself. Paradoxically, initially at least, Scargill’s own bureaucratic project entailed actually organising the rank and file as a pressure group on the trade union bureaucracy. This came about in the shape of the Barnsley Miners Forum, which was the basis of Scargill’s subsequent rise. This was a group in the 60s informed by Stalinism and syndicalism, but not actually a Communist Party front organisation.

So, if the man is a Stalinist, why then the organisational break? He never actually joined the CP - his career stopped in the YCL. Why was that? The CP was in the 60s arguably a viable party, if deeply flawed politically. It still had an independent and powerful existence. It was seen as a party that an aspiring careerist in the trade union movement could join - probably no hindrance; possibly even a help in some unions.

This is where we see the influence of syndicalism - the belief that trade unions, in and of themselves, are an adequate vehicle to take on capitalism. I think Scargill looked upon the NUM, which at that time had hundreds of thousands of members, as almost a party. In comparison the CPGB was small beer. What he saw was a Scargillite cadre force with a large bank account, a mass membership and socialist influence across wide areas of Britain.

In 1966 Scargill joined the Labour Party, while retaining CPGB politics - the British road, based on the perspective of electing a leftwing Labour government. In the meantime he had placed himself at the head of what was essentially a spontaneous upsurge in miners’ industrial activity in the late 60s and early 70s, particularly in Yorkshire. The apex was Saltley Gates in 1972, which catapulted Scargill very much onto the national stage, at least in terms of the media. Subsequently he was able to capture the Yorkshire presidency of the NUM and, on the retirement of Joe Gormley in 1981, the national presidency.

Scargill’s finest hour was undoubtedly the miners’ strike of 1984-5. It has to be said that he never betrayed the strike - where he was culpable was in lacking a strategy to bring the dispute to victory. This flowed from his inability to break from the trade union bureaucracy, to appeal for solidarity to the rank and file, if necessary illegally. One of the key turning points was when the dockers came out over a separate issue. Instead of appealing to them to deepen and intensify their action, thus breaking with the leadership of the Transport and General Workers Union and the TUC, Scargill actually went on television and stressed that the disputes were separate.

It later emerged that whole sections of the TUC leadership were in active collaboration with the Tory Party and the right in order to weaken the strike - most notably Bill Sirs of the ISTC, who was in receipt of honorariums from Tory-linked trusts to try to buy off steelworkers, signing local deals with regional NUM officials to undermine the dispute.

Scargill went wrong because he did not break with the bureaucracy throughout the course of the dispute. Since then we have lived through the consequences of that defeat: the isolation of the left as a whole within society, as well as the isolation of Scargill himself within the labour movement. He was a victim of a vicious witch hunt in the national press and socialists were quite right to defend him. It was possibly one of the most sustained media campaigns to blacken an individual’s name in British post-war history - quite remarkable in its way.

This must have cost him a lot of support amongst his own constituency within the coalfields. If you throw enough shit, some of it does stick. Eventually Scargill did lose his seat on the TUC general council and by 1992 we saw the man who had led a mass class struggle less than a decade earlier basically reliant on a popular frontist, media-driven strategy against pit closures - marches of hoteliers in Cheltenham, sharing platforms with bishops.

By 1993 Scargill was making speeches effectively calling for the foundation of a new political party. Much of this occurred in the form of the ‘Unshackle the unions’ campaign, in which the Sikorskis and Brian Heron were officers. This was in effect, even at this stage, the nucleus of what was to become the SLP, launched formally in 1996.

Right from the start - and I know many people have personal experience of this - the SLP was, to say the least, marred by a certain lack of internal democracy - a reflection of left social democratic politics. Political confusion, though, did reign within the party. Scargill would often make rhetorical nods towards Marxism. However, I remember being with him in Newport East during the 1997 general election campaign. While he was stopping to talk with an elderly couple, somebody started talking about revolutionary socialism and class struggle. He knocked them down. Later I had a private word with him. I said, “Come on, Arthur, you’re a Marxist, for god’s sake. Why have you got a problem with people using Marxist terms?” He replied: “Yes, but not in front of our Rene.”

The Marxism is only for the internal consumption of the SLP elite. The rest are handed the left social democratic platitudes in the official party policy statements.

Within 18 months the atmosphere had actually become too poisonous for those accustomed to even the most minimal degree of labour movement democracy. There has been a substantial outflux of the best elements of the membership and we are left, effectively since the 1997 congress, with the rump we see today.

As well as these political influences, Scargill’s personality can fairly be described as authoritarian. He seems totally untroubled by self-doubt, and will not brook any criticism whatsoever, with the resulting ossification of the SLP - a small sect with little clout and even poorer prospects. Perhaps in a way it is reminiscent of the SPGB, who constantly reassure us that they have several hundred members, but, because they fail to intersect with the rest of the left and society as a whole, we have no way of knowing that. Maybe that is the fate of the SLP as well.

That said, I think the CPGB’s characterisation of the SLP as “red-brown” is a polemical exaggeration. Scargill’s strategy is nationally based and little Englander, but no more so than the CPGB as was. Certainly there is no evidence of collusion with anti-semitic or fascist elements, for instance. The phrase does not just denote socialism in one country: it has been used specifically to refer to the links between the Russian CP and Zhirinovsky-type elements. It is an unfair grenade to lob at Scargill - let’s face it, there is enough other ammunition.

To conclude, after the historical experiences of the 20th century, I am more and more of the opinion that we have to stress that socialism is an emancipatory project rather than an authoritarian one. We do need party regimes based on internal democracy. We do have to get as far away as we possibly can from the disastrous legacy of Stalinism, both in its organisational forms and even in its symbolism and its speech.

The experience of the collapse of Eastern Europe has left Stalinism comprehensively discredited, so I do not believe we will see new mass Stalinist formations or any sizeable socialist organisations that are authoritarian. There are of course thriving Stalinist formations in the third world. If a new Livingstone formation turned out to be an SLP mark II, then it would stay small. Similarly if people like John Nicholson and Dave Nellist continue down the road that they seem intent on following, then that too will kill the potential for growth of the socialist alliances.

We do have to take on board the insights of feminism and environmentalism. To some extent environmentalism is where anti-capitalism is at, especially as far as young people are concerned. To put it in stark terms, the far left must start recruiting young people or it will be dead in a couple of generations. There is now a noticeable age gap - there are precious few people under 30. Young people are getting involved with activities like destroying GMO crops, targeting nuclear-carrier ships. We should be looking to recruit from those layers. We need to explain how our ideas as Marxists complement their ideas, and the role of capitalism as the system that is destroying the planet. This is as sensible as an orientation towards students and popular music was in the past. I make no apologies for saying this.

The party of recomposition is no more a pipe dreams, no more something to be invented, than the future mass Communist Party. It is a viable project to work for. Of course I would be in the forefront of those arguing for the freedom of revolutionary Marxist currents to exist within it. We have the good example of Bandiera Rossa, who exist as a Trotskyist current within Rifondazione Comunista, openly affiliated to the Fourth International, with its own journal and with leadership comrades elected on a Bandiera Rossa ticket. That provides a model of how a party of recomposition could function democratically with a revolutionary Marxist-Trotskyist current within it.

Those seriously arguing for a Bolshevik-Leninist democratic centralist formation are very much a minority. On crucial questions, yes, the membership has to act together. What we in Socialist Democracy do not like is the way democratic centralism has operated in party regimes in the past. Personally I think that the term is indelibly stained. We should be a democratic organisation and leave it at that.

That will mean moving away from such formations as the SLP, towards the building of a broader party of recomposition - a socialist party in Britain.