05.07.2006
Workers Power split
As many readers will be aware, Workers Power and its 'oil slick international', the League for the Fifth International, has just expelled one-third of its members. Mark Fischer draws up a balance sheet
The bare facts of the split in the Trotskyist group, Workers Power, (and the associated ripples through its tiny international front, the League for the Fifth International) are now well known on the left (documents from both sides of the split, plus commentary on WP's politics, can be found on our website).
On July 1, some 33 members (around a third of the total internationally) - mostly based in Britain, but also including comrades from Australia and Ireland - were pre-emptively expelled by an international leadership now centred on Richard Brenner and Dave Stocking. Amongst the people turfed out were prominent WP names such as Mark Hoskisson, Keith Hassle, Stuart King, Helen Ward, Kirstie Paton and George Burnett. Inevitably, others will follow - either voluntarily or after a shove. This is a major bloodletting for this organisation, gouging out the majority of its experienced cadre, including many founder-members of the tendency from 1975.
On one level this may seem remarkable, but on another it is surprising that it has taken so long. Clearly, for some time WP has been a group travelling extraordinarily lightly in terms not simply of its own distinct political tradition, but also in its adherence to Marxism in a more general sense.
When we have felt it worthwhile, we have featured some journalistic commentary on this. We have pointed to the group's pandering to anarchistic sentiment in the so-called anti-capitalist movement; its overblown perspectives concerning the political character of the period; its mildly embarrassing bout of youth vanguardism; and its laughably pompous and profoundly misplaced belief in its own destiny as the anointed leader of the world's proletariat, often expressed in the form of a lofty disdain for the rest of the revolutionary left.
However, we also observed that this growing eccentricity would produce considerable strains. Frankly, anyone with half a political brain should have simply known that the more stable, experienced and serious section of the leadership and rank and file would view the pop-eyed perspectives adopted at the 2003 LFI conference as pure nonsense. We speculated in this paper where the fault lines would appear, which individuals would align on which side. And, naturally, we were taken to task for spreading "gossip" about the political trajectories of individuals based on flimsy guesswork and wishful thinking. In fact, the split confirms our appraisal - negatively, unfortunately.
'Negatively' because, while WP is virtually without influence in the movement and - in terms of wider politics - the spat will scarcely register a blip, this farce should underscore the truth of the criticisms we have made of the sterile sect culture of practically the entire left. A positive way out of the morass will not be presented, in other words. This pervasive atmosphere of bureaucratism, schism and excommunication has a disorganising and demoralising affect on the advanced sections of the workers' movement: it reduces politics to conspiracy and, correctly, discredits Marxists in the eyes of advanced workers.
Comrades on both sides of this WP split need to seriously consider how this ruinous state of affairs for their organisation has come about, how and why revolutionaries have been further fragmented and rendered even more ineffectual. Time to grow up, in other words, comrades.
Bureaucratic centralism
At the core of the problem, as we have argued many times with WP comrades, is the question of democratic centralism. For example, in an exchange in 1998, I cited a passage in the group's now defunct Trotskyist International by leading WPer Dave Stockton that seemed to me to lay bare the political method of treating politics as conspiracy:
"The working out of the overall perspective, strategy and key tactics of that programme is, necessarily, the task of a small nucleus of political cadres. A new programme, a new party, cannot be born and find its way in the world except in struggle against pre-existing parties or movements and their ideas and their programmes. Such an original nucleus must, therefore, develop the maximum homogeneity in order to see its ideas triumph" (January-June 1998, pp45-46).
Now there is no argument that the aim of achieving "maximum homogeneity" in a political group is a desirable one. No one celebrates serious difference between comrades for its own sake. But totally missing from this quote is a notion of process, an idea of how exactly a revolutionary organisation or party might win, and then - crucially - defend, genuine ongoing unity around a political programme. In truth, the "maximum homogeneity" is not 'developed' in organisations where comrade Stockton's crass bureaucratic parody of democratic centralism rules. Instead, a fabricated, totally false "homogeneity" is projected to the movement by the public gagging of minorities. "Homogeneity" is imposed, not won.
This not only stunts and distorts the development of the group's theory. It discredits the organisation. It reinforces the cynical view prevalent amongst wide swathes of advanced workers in this country - let alone the mass - that politicians are professional liars, people whose business it is to hide their genuine views and criticisms in order to secure narrow advantage for themselves and their particular faction.
And - the greatest crime of all - it excludes the working class from the very process through which it trains itself for rule over society as a whole. That is, the clash of developed ideas, theoretical struggle and polemic. WP has been no different to any other sect, in this sense: in practice, whatever promissory notes they sign for the future mass workers' party, all regard the working class in the here and now as capable only of assimilating simple ideas, simply expressed and without the 'confusion' of counter-argument, intellectual challenge or conflict. A foul attitude towards our class.
Internal war
If nothing else, the civil war in the ranks of WP has seen the morphology of a sect neatly laid bare. As the expelled minority point out, the 2003 LFI conference did indeed see the organisation's majority lurch further along a path of political incoherence and leftism. It "decided that globalisation had exhausted all of its economic potential, that world capitalism had entered a phase of stagnation and that the political situation could be characterised as a worldwide 'pre-revolutionary period'" (Expelled comrades' statement, July 3). Naturally, given a set of assumptions about the world so at odds with reality, an informal trend of disagreement amongst more experienced members quickly hardened into factional form - the International Faction - which waged an internal struggle by various means for two years.
Ostensibly, this minority has been expelled for preparing for a split - an odd and peculiarly inept response on the part of the leadership, of course. Quite apart from any considerations of the need to be solicitous about unity in our movement, the notion that it is tactically astute to pre-empt a looming split by culling the oppositionalists - thus compacting them - is simply dim. Instead, generous democratic concessions could have been offered - if nothing else, to spread doubt and hesitancy amongst those in the ranks of the minority not fully committed to walking out. Whatever else the leadership of the majority is, it ain't bright.
By disputed means - were they leaked, were they stolen? - the minority's emails found their way into the hands of the leadership and were used as evidence of the faction's malign plans. In these, explicit preparations for a split before the organisation's world conference later this year were outlined. Part of these plans included the lifting of membership and contact lists from the central office, the expropriation of materials and an abrasive approach designed to leave WP as wrecked and traumatised as possible.
This split will have some of the smaller and half-starved Trot sects salivating. WP - effectively the only real organisation in the LFI - has been profoundly disorientated over the past period and increasingly susceptible to raiding parties. Others will simply see the current WP crisis as an opportunity to either mop up a handful of recruits or - more likely - to put the boot into a prone rival and drive another batch of "centrists" out of politics. They will act like sectarian vandals in the movement, in other words.
Serious working class politicians have a very different approach to this crass method. In truth, WP has been embroiled in a crisis for quite some time - as chronicled by this paper when we thought it worthwhile to cover the political travails of one of our secondary opponents on the left.
Yet for all of this period, in the supposed interests of the aforementioned "maximum homogeneity", the critical trend within the organisation was silenced (voluntarily, no doubt) and forced - in the name of a grotesque perversion of 'democratic centralism' - to publicly defend positions it increasingly regarded as disastrously wrong.
Thus it peddled a brand of politics that - if WP had been more influential - it believed would have introduced profound political confusion and disorientation into the ranks of advanced workers. Is that really the job of communists? Of course not, but minority comrades were not only forced to be complicit: they had to pretend they actually agreed with such lunacy.
With both sides entombed in the fetid atmosphere of this hermetically sealed political tomb, it is hardly surprising that the dispute had become "increasingly bitter" and that "comradely relations broke down" (Permanent Revolution steering group statement, July 2 - the expellees plan to launch a journal named Permanent Revolution in the near future). Clearly, the minority despaired of ever turning the majority round and made plans essentially for a wrecking operation.
The hopelessness of their position is noted rather smugly in the majority statement of July 1, which tellingly observes that the dissidents "recognised they had no chance of winning a majority at the congress and were unwilling to continue within the League after it. They described the prospect of having to remain in the League as being 'trapped'" (www.workerspower.com).
In this situation - and "trapped" as they undoubtedly still are in the sterile paradigm of Trotskyist bureaucratic centralism - the attitude of minority comrades to the organisation that they were still members of undoubtedly took a morbidly antagonistic turn. In one of the leaked emails obtained by the leadership, Mark Hoskisson suggests that a task of the minority, as it forms a "viable new organisation", will be "the maximisation of chaos and disarray in the ranks of the organisation we leave behind" (June 23).
The majority on the other hand - wedded to a disastrous set of catastrophist perspectives that envisaged some sort of imminent final assault on the citadels of capitalism - increasingly cast the minority as people engaged in passive sabotage of that life or death struggle. A creeping restriction of the minority's democratic (internal) space inevitably followed.
More to come
The process of fracture and schism is unlikely to have exhausted itself with the July 1 expulsions. The majority statement continues its smug tone when it observes about the expelled grouping: "Part of the minority opposed the demand for a new workers' party in principle, claiming that the tactic did not apply because there is already a workers' party in Britain - the Labour Party. The other wing of the minority - less dogmatic but also less consistent - argued that the demand could apply, but used tailist logic, saying it should only be used where there is resonance for it - ie, within the RMT or the FBU - but not across the working class movement as a whole. Should they form a new organisation, one of their first challenges will be overcoming the fact that they are split down the middle on a central question for the class struggle in Britain today" (www.workerspower.com).
However, the notion that the majority bloc - weakly cohered as it is by a set of frankly loopy perspectives - will not be prone to divisions and splits is foolish. Frankly, without the ballast of the serious cadre that the majority have seen fit to dispense with, what is left of WP could veer off in even more weird and wonderful directions.
There is nothing unprincipled per se with splits in revolutionary organisations (eg, if the parting of the ways is over the fate of the revolution). But with genuine democracy, the points of conflict in WP would have surely been easily containable. Either way, differences over strategy and important tactics must be fought out in front of the working class in order for political lessons to be learnt. But what lessons has our class learned from this rather squalid episode?
Perhaps only this - do not be part of a minority in a communist organisation. If you are, you will have no public outlet for your politics and may spend the rest of your political life retailing politics you actively disagree with. Unless, of course - always the temptation - you decide to split, form a smaller group where again everyone 'agrees' and wait until the whole sorry process repeats itself.
Like all sects, Workers Power was based on a lie of "homogeneity". In truth, it was premised on the censorship of dissident voices in its meagre ranks. Perhaps the key lessons its comrades should internalise as they pick through the wreckage is that it is actually time to tell the truth about your politics to the class you are meant to serve. A general lesson that the left should perhaps apply its mind to.
More or less the same fate as WP waits around the corner for all organisations that do not take this on board, we confidently predict.
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