03.05.2000

IBT and holy water

The new issue of the Marxist Bulletin, publication of the small British grouplet loyal to the ex-Spartacist splinter group, the International Bolshevik Tendency, made its appearance shortly before the London elections. It contained rather belated advice to the working class to give "critical support" to the London Socialist Alliance, while at the same time firmly rejecting any support to Ken Livingstone's campaign for mayor, denouncing the former GLC leader's campaign as cross-class and "popular frontist" (No11, April).

Readers may well wonder, given these comrades' bizarre progenitors and their evident small size and isolation, why it is worth even polemicising against them. This would be a wrong attitude - the comrades, though somewhat depleted nowadays, are generally better as socialist militants than the Spartacist albatross they are forced to carry would suggest. In any case, many of their conceptions are shared by other sectarian elements on the left, and the IBT comrades manage to articulate themselves better than other isolated individuals who have argued in the pages of the Weekly Worker less coherently more or less the same case in the recent past.

The IBT's reasoning for refusing to support Livingstone is the widely reported fact that, in an opinion poll published in March, it was reported that, "Livingstone's cross-party popularity in London has become so great that more than 70% of Labour and Liberal Democrat voters say they will support him against their party candidates - and an extraordinary 48% of Conservative voters say they will back him." In the same vein, they go on to assemble various anecdotes about Livingstone's willingness to call for a vote for the Greens, to appoint a sequence of powerless 'deputy mayors' from other parties on a rotating basis, and not least of course (given the IBT and Spartacist fixation on the 'military defence' of Serbia's occupation and ethnic cleansing of Kosova, irrespective of the views of its inhabitants) Livingstone's 'socialist' support for Nato's war against Yugoslavia in 1999.

All this is meant to prove, apparently, that Livingstone's campaign is in no sense based on the working class; that, in the IBT's words, "As splits go, this has very little real content"; and at the same time that the Livingstone campaign is "popular frontist". This obviously tactical voting of some Tories for Livingstone, which is based on a naked desire to wreck Blair's project by manoeuvre, is presented as proof that Livingstone is a Blairite. Strange 'tactic' that - 'vote for a Blairite to wreck the Blair project'!

In an even more remarkable piece of unintended self-mockery and political blindness, the IBT lectures leftists who give any kind of support to Livingstone's campaign for fetishising "democracy as the fundamental principle of politics. But unless democracy has a political content, in fact a class content, it becomes a cheap means for misleaders out of power to criticise those they wish to supplant. We support Livingstone's right to stand for mayoral candidate of the party of which he was a member, and for Labour Party members to democratically choose that candidate free from political stitch-ups. But we have no particular interest in who administers London for Tony Blair."

Thus, incredibly, the IBT denounces the left for fetishising democracy in supporting Livingstone, and insists that there has to be a 'class content' involved in such a question to take a position. Yet the only basis on which it can bring itself to support Livingstone's right to stand is ... unadorned and unqualified 'democracy'.

You might think that what was really going on in this contest was an ordinary piece of petty corruption in any political party, like the dispute between Thatcher and Heseltine over Westland Helicopters in 1986. The fact that the stitch-up that resulted in Frank Dobson being fraudulently selected as Labour candidate was centrally characterised by a direct assault on and disenfranchisement of Labour's trade union base in London by the Millbank machine counts for nothing for the IBT. The enormous majorities in trade unions that balloted for Livingstone, as against the naked and anti-union character of the stitch-up, with the Blairites corruptly barring several 'left' unions from the vote, and with Blair's stooge Ken Jackson dictating the vote for Dobson in the strategic AEEU, does not constitute a matter with any 'class content'! For the IBT, the only issue at stake was 'democracy'. In truth, the IBT could not tell a genuine class polarisation if it hit it in the face.

The IBT further attempts to claim that, even within the framework of bourgeois politics, Livingstone's scheme of issuing public sector bonds for the tube amounts to a Blairite/Thatcherite scheme of partial privatisation "by another name". By this logic, the issuing of gilts by every social democratic government that ever existed from Attlee to Callaghan to finance 'public ownership' and other reformist panaceas amounted to privatisation à  la Thatcher/Blair. In reality, of course, Livingstone's plan amounts to a bourgeois nationalisation scheme, not Thatcherite/Blairite privatisation.

Revolutionaries, of course, take no responsibility for such schemes and seek to expose their illusory character before the workers. But the reason why such schemes generate illusions in workers with reformist consciousness is precisely because they appear to pose a way to modify the workings of capitalism in the interests of the working class. This alone explains the class polarisation within the London labour movement over the Livingstone candidacy. But the IBT leaders - sectarians trained in the Spartacist school - are unable to discern or analyse such processes in the workers' movement.

Some of the things the IBT says about Livingstone are true, of course. He does have a strong tendency to popular frontism. However, even popular frontism would be a qualitative advance on the Blair project. After all, in order to have a popular front - a coalition between a working class formation and bourgeois forces - one has to have some sort of independent working class formation to start with. But the Blair project aims at the destruction of Labour's remaining ties to the trade union movement. The fact that resistance to such outright liquidation of working class politics may be led by reformists like Livingstone who are capable of making more limited blocs with bourgeois formations does not mean that resistance to the destruction of working class politics led by such people should not be critically supported.

But for the IBT there is no difference in principle between a Maurice Thorez or a Léon Blum, involved in a bloc between a bourgeois workers' party and a small bourgeois liberal party, and the likes of Tony Blair, who seeks the outright destruction of even nominally independent working class formations, and regrets that the Labour Party was ever formed at all! In truth, it is not difficult to imagine circumstances when a confrontation between forces with these kinds of counterposed political programmes could pose point blank the possibility of proletarian revolution.

For the IBT, of course, following their Spartacist mentors, a popular front is a bourgeois political formation, pure and simple, not a formation with any kind of class contradiction between its component parts. For them, a popular front must be treated no differently from an outright bourgeois political formation, and to even consider voting for any component of a popular front amounts to 'class treason'.

The rationale for this, as a piece of inherited dogma from the Spartacists, is as brazen a piece of historical falsification as ever disgraced the communist and revolutionary movement. In order to cohere the Spartacists as a political cult, the Spartacist leaders engaged in a flagrant falsification of historical quotations, mainly from Leon Trotsky but also from other early communist sources, in order to facilitate the coherence of such a cult. Adherence to the views of the Spartacist leaders on the question is compulsory - not only in the Spartacists, but also in the IBT. When in 1998 as an IBT member I produced a detailed analytical refutation/exposé of the Spartacists' sectarian falsification of communist history on this question, internal discussion of my views was effectively prohibited by the leadership (see www.dono.dircon.co.uk/RevTruth for the political materials generated in this aborted attempt at a historical/political discussion).

Which brings us to the IBT's "critical support" (from a distance) to the London Socialist Alliance in the elections. In a sense, of course, all the organisations involved in the LSA are giving it critical support. The LSA, as a formation, allows all its participants to publicly criticise any aspect of its propaganda, programme and actions. But the IBT's real objection to the LSA is not the limitations and often left reformist nature of the demands contained in its programme. After all, the IBT was quite prepared in the past to participate, without any propaganda organ at all, for well over a year in the openly left reformist/Stalinoid Socialist Labour Party, before finally launching its Marxist Bulletin in the spring of 1997. It had a lot less opportunity to criticise the explicit reformism of the SLP than it would have the limitations of the LSA platform today (indeed, the IBT at that point made a virtual principle of refusing to publicly criticise the SLP).

Of course, one could say that one aspect of the LSA programme that the IBT could criticise (from the right) would be its demand for "the scrapping of all immigration controls", a demand the IBT systematically avoids out of its deference to an idiosyncratic and implicitly chauvinist position on immigration developed by the Spartacists in the 1970s, worrying that the 'national identity' of the imperialist countries could be wiped out by hordes of immigrants. It is worth noting that the IBT's opposition to the demand for progressive taxation - ie, the demand to "tax the rich" as irredeemably reformist - belies the fact that such demands have been part of the communist programme since the time of Marx and Engels, precisely for their agitational significance.

But fundamentally the IBT's conception of the party is what is behind their hostility to the LSA. The IBT glories in its own sectarian political 'tradition', where all political dissent is muzzled in public, and all members have to publicly defend the views of 'the majority' of a tiny political sect on all political questions, from the class nature of Stalin's Russia to the idiosyncratic position of James Robertson on the popular front in 1936. This means that members who disagree with any majority position are under discipline to lie about their political views to anyone outside the charmed circle.

What is profoundly subversive about the Socialist Alliance project, with its freedom of public criticism, is that it has an organic tendency to break down this Trotskyist, Cannonite, but profoundly anti-Leninist, non-Bolshevik concept of 'party discipline', and it is this that makes the profoundly sectarian, Spartacist-trained IBT react to the LSA project like the devil confronted with holy water.