Last November in the first issue of this magazine we made clear our attitude to fragmentation on the left, to fusions and to unity. The position that we argued stressed our commitment to revolutionary regroupment “around a clear programme — a clear strategy and precise tactics.”
“The nucleus of the British revolutionary party does not exist in any of the large revolutionary organisations. Our experience has convinced us that the International Socialists, the largest group, cannot build that party. Those who have broken or are breaking with the dead-ends represented by the leaderships of the major tendencies (compromised as they are by economism, sectarianism and opportunism) must make a serious attempt to develop an alternative strategy capable of building the party on firm foundations.”
“To such a task we dedicate our small resources. We welcome into our ranks comrades with a similar perspective. We shall fuse our organisation with any grouping sharing the same fundamental political principles.”
The fusion which took place between ourselves and Workers Fight was entered into by us on a perfectly principled basis. The two groupings had independently adopted principled positions (on such issues as the Common Market, the General Strike and Ireland) that separated both organisations from the rest of the revolutionary left. But agreement went beyond these issues. We shared a rejection of the Cliffite and Healyite traditions of opportunism and sectarianism and an insistence that no democratic centralist international based on an international revolutionary programme was in existence. Against the USFI we both insisted that an international in the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky still had to be built. Agreement existed on the need for new work and debate on the nature of Stalinist states. The fused organisation was committed to doing that work.
Tactical differences existed and continued to do so. The principle tactical differences at the time of fusion concerned work in the Troops Out Movement (TOM) and the orientation to the mass reformist party. It would, however, have been criminal of us not to attempt fusion with the only grouping on the left which could be characterised as standing on the same political terrain as ourselves.
The fusion was not simply to be declared and recognised on an organisational level. Both sides recognised the need for a period of political argument and debate culminating in a conference which would terminate all organisational remnants of the arrangements made at fusion. The primary focus for this political work was to be the production and discussion of an Action Programme; and it is on this issue that the differences of political method between ourselves and the WF were revealed most sharply.
As we will demonstrate for those not privy to the inner life and circles of the fused I-CL organisation, clear political differences did emerge. However, it was the Matgamnaites’ approach to argument and debate that ensured that those differences were actually obscured inside the I-CL and lost in a storm of slander and manoeuvre.
The Workers Power group entered the fusion with Workers Fight on the clear understanding that a comradely and objective discussion would take place on all areas of difference. This did not happen. Every political debate of any substance was sabotaged by charges of cliquism, apolitical factionalism (a sample of the flavour of political debate can be gathered by the uninitiated from the hysterical I-CL press releases and letters to Workers Action and Red Weekly). De-fusing coming as the only possible response to the split manoeuvres of Matgamna and Co, as a result, left most of the political differences blurred. This is a bad situation but one which we accept no responsibility for.
Throughout the debate the ex-WF leadership showed a consistent chronic unwillingness and inability to concretise their own positions or to politically characterise ours. At times we were ‘semi-syndicalists’, ‘unregenerated ISers’, ‘orthodox Trotskyists’, ‘catastrophists’. Not one of these political characterisations was seriously argued for. With astonishing light-mindedness they were raised and dropped at the convenience of the Matgamnaites. It was not always convenient for the Matgamnaites to recognise that political differences existed. Not surprisingly it would have required concretisation and accounting of their own political line. For whole periods wild and unsubstantiated accusations as to our political position were in fact dropped in favour of accusations as to our motives, our drive for power, our competitiveness and (most consistently) Matgamna’s favourite charge of cliquism. Using such blunt instruments Matgamna absolves himself and his acolytes from any serious political debate and allows him to indulge his talents for Healyite slander and falsification.
Despite the theoretical ‘reticence’ and ‘coyness’ of the Matgamnaites we are however perfectly prepared to analyse and detail their politics which explain why the Workers Fight group — which was the healthiest independent tendency on the revolutionary left in this country from 1971 to 1974 — is now on the way to sectarian degeneration and irrelevance.
The period and political practice
Revolutionaries operating in the epoch of wars and revolution need a clear notion of the period of capitalist development and class struggle, international and national, that they themselves are situated in. This is not because an analysis of the period reveals ‘processes’ which revolutionaries merely have to wait for or ‘relate to’. It is because the transitional programme has to be re-elaborated and fought for on the basis of the concrete period of capitalist development and the consequent perspective for the class struggle. Perspectives and tactics for revolutionaries must flow from the relationship between our understanding of the period and the programme we fight for, and the size and implantation of our organisation. Only on this basis can scientific and concrete perspectives and tactics be developed.
Matgamna, Thomas and Hornung have no serious or consistent appraisal of ‘period’. They share, of course, with all Bolshevik-Leninists the tenet that we live in the epoch of imperialism, of the transition to socialism. But they have a horror of the sort of theoretical generalisation which directs attention to the problem of period. Matgamna can thus say, as he does, that the present problems of world capitalism are not a down-turn to stagnation but a mere hiccough. What is also revealing that this is not even a serious opinion based on acquaintance with the literature (bourgeois or Marxist) on the subject.
The whole question is seen as an academic and irrelevant one. Thomas, for example, does have a propensity for ‘catastrophist and optimistic’ revolutionary forecasts. Matgamna is a ‘black pessimist’ about Ireland, Portugal, and Spain. He envisages a capitalism still capable of considerable expansion and stabilising itself. Both, however, agree that the question is irrelevant and inconsequential. For instance, Thomas wrote a perspectives document for the I-CL during the pre-conference discussion. One draft envisaged a massive upturn in class struggle; the next was far more ‘cautious’ and ‘sober’ — the important point however is that the conclusions, the proposals remained absolutely identical!
Recoiling in horror from the automatism — the process politics of the USFI where the “world revolution” does this or that and “the permanent revolution” enforces its will regardless and independent of parties and programmes — Matgamna and Co have fallen into the shallowest empiricism. The safest way not to be trapped into the snare of generalisations is to not make any. Instead they work by the well-known rule of thumb principle “where can our group make the biggest gains”. This all seems so very practical and down to earth. It is a “sensible” oh-so British method that has led Cliff and IS to sectarianism. It is leading the I-CL there by a shorter route.
A correct understanding of period prescribes tasks for revolutionaries. Tasks which arise out of the needs of the class nationally and internationally. On this point it is possible to err seriously. Organisations like IS with no programme and indeed a contempt for programmes start off from the subjective moods of the class — what are the workers fighting for at the moment. This leads to chronic opportunism over what revolutionaries do not fight over and a low prioritisation of questions such as Ireland and women.
The sectarian starts from the needs of their organisation which is identified with the only need of the class — the abstract need for a revolutionary party. The political assessment of period, perspective is then skewed to fit the sect’s priorities.
This process is visible in the I-CL. Perspective is derived from ‘where next’, the position of new and hopefully open opportunities for recruitment. Thomas is already, consequently, playing with a theory of a ‘revival of social democracy on a world scale’. The wilier and more consistent empiricist Matgamna is more deeply suspicious of anything that goes beyond ‘we can recruit best in X or Y’. He consoles any nagging doubts about the world outside with the thought that capitalism is stable anyhow, or that (in true Cliff style) he will “bend the stick” the other way if something crops up. Thus the ‘principled’ sectarian and the ‘non-sectarian’ opportunist find themselves in agreement.
Thus it is in the I-CL that Matgamna and Co were unwilling to produce any perspectives, economic, political, trade union or Labour Party. General trends of development have no interest for the I-CL. Against this paucity of analysis we had to argue our own perspectives which had been worked out over a long period — the Left Alternative Political Perspectives in late 1974, the Workers Answer to the Crisis, in the spring of 1975 and the Political Perspectives of the first WP aggregate in the autumn of 1975 — and in the written contributions made to the I-CL Programme Commission (and incidentally never circulated to the membership).
The present period
It is worthwhile briefly summarising our analysis:
A new period of stagnation, instability and insecurity opens before world capitalism. The long boom of capitalism in the fifties and sixties (when recessions were mild and expansion the norm for most capitalisms) is now finished. On the crest of the massive post-war expansion of American imperialism, capitalism temporarily achieved relative stability and growth. But this very stability was increasingly undermined by a whole series of factors which have worked their way to the surface in the world capitalist economy of the 1970s.
Wholescale destruction of capital, the destruction of working class resistance by fascism and stalinism, and the expansion of US imperialism into new markets enabled capitalism to temporarily offset the effects of the tendency of the rate of profit to decline. That tendency has reasserted itself in a world system where no new openings and possibilities exist on a scale sufficient to set it.
The creeping stagnation is crowned by an inflation which has been fuelled by the very forces that enabled capitalism to stabilise itself — massive credits, the hegemony of finance and banking capital, monopoly pricing mechanisms and massive unproductive state expenditure bills. Capitalism has failed to maintain the rate of exploitation of surplus value, to perpetually raise the productivity of labour abreast of increasing organic composition of capital.
But the roots of capitalism’s present crisis are not to be found inside the metropolitan countries alone. Passing from France and Britain, the mantle of gendarme of world imperialism, and with it massive armament bills, passed to US imperialism. In the 1960s and seventies, US imperialism suffered serious blows from the anti-imperialist forces of Asia, Africa and South America. Anti-imperialist victories in Cuba, Vietnam and now in southern Africa not only precipitated serious political crises in the metropolitan heartlands (Portugal and the US), they also removed vital national economies from the direct exploitation of American imperialism. US imperialism, itself facing economic instability and uncertainty, has proved incapable of stemming the tide of anti-imperialist national liberation struggles.
The prerequisites do not exist for a new and dramatic period of growth for world capitalism. Stagnation and instability will be uneven, with stronger and weaker links at every stage of the boom/slump cycle. Competition for markets and investment will sharpen between individual capitalisms and trade blocs. The present so-called boom shows clearly how terrified the ‘stronger’ capitalisms are of triggering inflation by increasing growth. Weaker capitalisms can not look to world ‘booms’ to drag them through.
Britain belongs, with others, to the weaker links. It has long-term, historically inherited weaknesses which require major surgery rather than short-term palliatives. Whoever determines the future of British capitalism — Europe or America — will demand that surgery at the expense of the working class.
The strength and size of the working class movement, the trade unions in particular, their shop-floor organisation, present a serious obstacle to this long-term solution. The British bourgeoisie can only solve its problems if the working class is prepared to accept, or is forced to accept, a massive change in conditions it has known for the last 25 years. This ‘change’ to the advantage of the ruling class — drastic weakening of shop-floor organisations and action, a fall in real wages, a permanent wages policy, welfare substantially cut, labour mobility involving the creation of a much larger reserve army of labour — is neither finite nor automatically guaranteed to provide the stability of British bourgeoisie.
In its vast majority the ruling class prefers to accomplish these changes, whenever possible, with the co-operation of the trade union bureaucracy — incorporating the whole trade union structure as a policing agency. It would clearly like to weaken and incorporate the shop-floor organisation, stewards committees etc. However it is fully aware of the limits of incorporation and has prepared and is improving and openly discussing the necessary instruments of coercion.
The ideological offensive
The working class therefore faces a prolonged period of crisis in the ‘national economy’ with threats to whole sections of industry through wholesale restructuring and massive redundancy. On the wages front the class faces the twin attack of inflation and wage restraint. Social services taken for granted as gains by the labour movement will continue to be viciously attacked.
A massive ideological offensive accompanies and justifies this attack — the national interest, pulling together to save Britain, charges of selfishness and attacks on non-productive workers — will threaten the working class with division and sectionalism. ‘Pure trade unionism’ is chronically unable to meet this challenge, prone as it is to sectional and special case arguments, to local particularism. Events in industries as varied as cars, textiles and steel show how far the process has already gone, involving collaboration with the bosses and the scrapping of conditions won over twenty years of struggle.
The ‘national political alternative’ of reformism, in itself an extrapolation into the parliamentary field of trade unionism’s bargaining within the system, minus even the most minimal involvement of workers in active struggle, further isolates and fragments the class in the face of the attack. This is not because the workers have great illusions in the Labour Party but because it is (apparently) the only pro-working class governmental possibility.
The challenge that revolutionaries face is to relate their programme and policies to the impasse the class, under reformist leadership, faces. The Workers Power group, against the Workers Fight leadership, has a definite conception of the period through which we are living and the tasks with which it faces us. Baldly, these are the re-elaboration of the transitional programme and the fight to build an international.
This task has faced revolutionaries since the war but the heightening period of crisis — the eruption of revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situations in Portugal and Spain, serious economic and social upheavals in Italy, France and Britain — makes the urgency of those tasks clearer and sharply tests the strategy and tactics of the major tendencies in living struggles. Linked inextricably with this are the national tasks of relating to the ‘crisis of leadership’ in Britain, both on the revolutionary left and amongst the vanguard militants in the workplaces. No group which fails to even address itself to the whole new period and to the chaos and confusion in the working class and revolutionary movement can hope to play a significant role in solving this impasse.
The I-CL sits four square with the sectarians. Significant sections of its leadership believe capitalism to be on the eve of a significant upturn. North Sea oil will come to the rescue of British capitalism and the I-CL! In the history of the I-CL the ex-Workers Fight leaders could only accuse comrade Hughes of ‘catastrophism’ every time our position was argued while producing no written alternative to it. Matgamna and Co know too well that such predictions are dangerous if actually set on paper! The entire ex-Workers Fight leadership shared one thing in common — whatever the likely outcome for capitalism nationally and internationally, it was purely academic to them, their perspectives and their programme.
It is no accident that the I-CL leadership never understood what we meant when we talked of the fragmentation on the left, and the need for an orientation to splits and fusions. Having no notion of ‘period’, being therefore more guided by having had their fingers burnt in previous discussions, the ex-Workers Fight leaders could only understand our position as meaning, as they said on numerous occasions, that Hughes and Stocking nurtured ambitions of joining other groups and grander regroupments and were, in all probability, having discussions with other groups. (At the July NC of the I-CL it was actually implied that Hughes was talking to at least two other groups.)
The perspectives debate
The attitude of the Workers Fight leadership to the debate on the period was no accident. Prompted by a day-to-day real-politik and manoeuvre to maintain and propagate their sect, the Matgamnaites actually reject the need for perspectives for the period and the class struggle. Perspective and tactics for them, and all sectarians, are derived from their needs and the hunches and inspirations of the leaders. It is no surprise therefore that in the I-CL it was the Workers Power comrades who produced all but one of the perspectives documents for the conference (the Economic, Political and Industrial). Our method was attacked by the rule of thumb sectarians as ‘perspectivitus’.
Now perspectives are a necessary part of orienting, preparing and arming an organisation. They do not have magical properties nor should they be a “consolation” for impotence. Any organisation should reject the sort of perspectives which outline broad, optimistic historical processes which assure a rosy future for our very limited tasks and endeavours. However it is necessary, unless revolutionaries wish to wall themselves within the confines of abstract propaganda, to focus our activity on the key problems facing the class nationally and internationally. We need perspectives which coolly assess developments and realistically relate them to our size, situation etc., producing from this a set of realistic and concrete tasks for the coming period. The activity which is focussed by this process is not only our agitation or “mass work” — subject as this is to our size, composition, the state of the left etc. Our propaganda needs also to be focussed, as for example Workers Fight’s was in 1972 on the General Strike. The current period is very different, dominated by different factors and changed situations. We need an analysis of the situation and an honest assessment of our tasks.
Now any membership has a right to expect this. It is one of the most important ways in which they can judge the competence of the leadership they have elected — hold them politically responsible. Matgamna and Co find such a view abhorrent. This is not to be explained by their psychology. Matgamna and Co’s political method — their reliance on manoeuvre, on timeless, ‘periodless’ propaganda — leads them to treat the I-CL membership with contempt, to treat their organisation with the manner of proprietors, with members who will follow and trust the ‘judgement’ of the leadership.
The organisational state of the I-CL is therefore a product of the political method of its leadership — it has no programme or perspective for building a party in the class. Such a position can only be defended by an exaggerated polemical stance on the left, and increasingly by lies and falsification. By turning away from involvement in living struggles (as was the preoccupation of the Workers Fight in the 1972-1974 period) towards abstract propaganda in the discussion milieu that the I-CL is increasingly relating to.
In fighting for a split with the Workers Power group the ex-Workers Fight leadership was in fact fighting to defend its prerogative (as it sees it) to direct the organisation free from the accountability that comes from properly outlined perspectives.
The programme
The disastrous effect of not using the Marxist method to analyse the world around us was demonstrated most graphically when Matgamna made an abortive attempt to write a programme. This task is a great revealer of political inadequacy. Though it appears to be at the ‘other end’ of political life from mass action, as with great events in the class struggle, it focusses like a burning glass all the strengths and weaknesses of a party’s politics. Duncan Hallas’s never to be published draft programme exposed IS’s nakedness sharply and clearly, so has Sean Matgamna’s, although the left will have to wait for the unveiling of that document.
The most telling points against his programme were made by us on numerous occasions: it did not assess the period but contented itself with a few perfunctory remarks that would not do justice to a filler article in a paper let alone a section of a programme. The transitional programme itself was weak on this score as Trotsky himself recognised. He held that serious work remained to be done on imperialism. Yet he had 20 years of his own, Lenin’s, Bukharin’s and the Comintern’s analysis behind him. The ‘great events’ of the twenties and thirties had fundamentally endorsed this analysis, requiring little more than short-term analysis. We who have lived through at least 25 years of remarkable stability in the ‘metropolitan’ imperialist states and have, in the seventies, clearly moved into a new period of instability will have to take some account of this!
A further error is the view of the programme as “written for communists not advanced militants”. Now in one important sense this is true. Without communists, without a communist party the programme is a dead letter. It is a communist cadre who use the key elements of the programme in agitation and propaganda, who are directed and co-ordinated in their day-to-day work by its general strategy. But in another important sense the programme is written, not only for advanced militants but for the working class.
“A programme is formulated not for the editorial board or for the leaders of discussion clubs but for the revolutionary action of millions.” (Transitional Programme)
It is not merely a disjointed series of theses on tactics. If it were then the worst sort of eclectic picking up and dropping of slogans or the worst sort of didacticism would be in order; it is a coherent articulation of a general strategy for the seizure of power.
Matgamna and Thomas during the discussions took up a whole series of apparently contradictory positions which it is worth listing. The only internal consistency revealed is a desire to oppose the conceptions advanced by the Workers Power comrades:
- What is needed is a ‘manifesto similar to the Action programme for France’. (Jan, NC minutes — Matgamna)
- ‘To re-write the transitional programme at the moment, given our resources and the level of research and knowledge, is impossible.” (March NC / programme commission — Thomas)
- ‘The programme flows from communist principles, not the crisis or the period.’
- ‘Transitional demands are only agitational within the context of class-wide struggle. They are not raisable in sectional struggles, only in the context of soviets.’ (Thomas July)
- ‘The programme is for communists; not for advanced workers. It is a tool-kit of tactics, swivelled as fits the occasion by the party members.’
- ‘Transitional demands are only raisable in the context of government — governmental demands on the Labour government.’ (Matgamna — Sept. 76)
What pattern emerges from this, apart from a factional hopscotch performed when faced with the arguments of the Workers Power comrades?
Firstly, a hostility to the transitional programme as a coherent strategic document addressed to a whole period of capitalist crisis, a crisis reflected in the crisis of leadership in the workers’ organisations.
Secondly an aversion to the agitational use of key slogans to generalise struggles, to point toward class solutions, to point towards soviets, to a workers government and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Instead the I-CL/WF view of the programme is as a series of disjointed lectures, the meat of propaganda circle discussion and polemic with other tendencies, but not for rallying the advanced militants around, not for mass action.
The programme, ‘manifesto’, as a ‘tool box’ for day-to-day manoeuvre is revealed most clearly in Matgamna’s own introduction to the draft Manifesto/Action Programme. Talking of the programme he has this to say:
“Its revolutionary validity or otherwise is determined not by whether its basic theoretical bedrock and basic analysis is sound, but by the other more immediate, more conjunctural factors — that is all that is specific to the reactions, concrete analysis and practice of the party.”
A leadership which has no ‘basic analysis’ of the period or bedrock perspective for the class struggle needs to reduce the programme to immediate practice — to what we do now, to what we did then… but never to what we will do or what we argue the class must do.
Given the politics of the ex-Workers Fight leadership we are not surprised that such a misconception of the method of the transitional programme gave birth to a disjointed and malformed monster, the Manifesto/Action Programme. Matgamna was incapable of producing such a document and was later to argue that such a document could not be produced. But the I-CL distorted history now views matters differently. This is how one of their absurd press statements reports the matter:
“The discussion on the Draft Manifesto at the February National Committee served to alarm the ex-Workers Fight leadership because of the blatant factionalism of Hughes and Stocking. Many criticisms were made of the draft, most of them accepted by the author of it, S. Matgamna. Hughes and Stocking attempted to weave all the disparate criticisms into an argument for a different type of Manifesto — an Action Programme. Instead of a collaboration we had ultra-factional point scoring.” (Sic)
As usual Matgamna defends his prerogative to change the terms of the debate — then labels his opponents as cliquists, ultra-factionalists etc. for defending agreements made at fusion.
Despite such factionalism, in the course of the debate on the programme key areas of political difference between Workers Power and Workers Fight emerged, that went beyond those on ‘the period’ and the significance of the method of the transitional programme.
The trade unions
In the old Workers Fight ‘Where We Stand’ one finds: “Although they cannot organise the struggle for workers power, the trade unions, are indispensable for the defence of workers’ interests.”
In the programme one finds them described as “the bed rock organisations of the working class, indispensable for the defence of workers interests”. Interesting that the authors of these lines should be so indignant about those calling the trade unions “fighting organs of the class”, and so hot in their insistence that that was how Workers Power comrades defined the trade unions. The above quotations clearly envisage them as organs of defensive struggle. Actually they are organs of one of the three basic forms of the proletarian struggle distinguished by Engels, economic as opposed to political and theoretical. They are crippled even in this function by a parasitic class collaborationist bureaucracy. But the bureaucracy is not the trade union and is not to be confused with supposed natural limitations (restriction to economic struggle — bargaining within the system) of the trade unions as Martin Thomas does. Thomas had this to say of the trade unions in the present period:
“The trade unions are fundamentally not fighting organs of the class, but organs of the bourgeois state for domesticating the working class.” (from ‘Building the ICL’)
This negative assessment of the trade unions, however, is not a prelude to rank-and-file-ism, but to turning from the trade unions to the Labour Party as the crucial focus for combatting reformism.
It is an emphasis not shared by Trotsky. This grotesquely one-sided assessment contrasts sharply with Trotsky’s position:
“The decay of British capitalism, under the conditions of decline of the world capitalist system, undermined the basis for the reformist work of the trade unions. Capitalism can continue to maintain itself only by lowering the standard of living of the working class. Under these conditions trade unions can either transform themselves into revolutionary organisations or become lieutenants of capital in the intensified exploitation of the workers.” (Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay)
Again, from the same document:
“From that point on, (from the emergence of the trade union bureaucracy and its commitment to counter-revolution — WP) the most important task of the revolutionary party became the liberation of the workers from the reactionary influence of the trade union bureaucracy.”
Trotsky is quite aware of the conservative nature of trade union organisation. He envisaged at least two possible extremes of development as the British working class approached a revolutionary situation: either the trade unions would lag hopelessly behind workplace organisations such as factory committees or workplace-based delegate bodies like councils of action and soviets, or they might even do duty for them in Britain. Workers Power, which fought economism in IS, has no illusions about the stultifying role of trade union cretinism. For us the key question is the fight for communist politics in the trade unions. We do not underestimate the difficulties facing revolutionaries there. However, the idea that the Labour Party arena is a more free and healthy milieu because of its ‘openness to politics’ is an illusion. It also has its particular dangers — parliamentary and electoral cretinism. To say that there are less of a problem is to ignore the adaptationism which has crippled every tendency of Trotskyists doing work there. What is more it is a milieu less exposed to the sharp test of mass struggle.
The major historic form of the united front suited to British conditions — because of the great size and authority the trade unions have built up over a hundred years — is a rank and file movement aiming to transform the unions into real fighting organs around a programme of class struggle. To do this a rank and file movement must seek to democratise the unions from bottom to top, that is to oust the bureaucracy.
Trotsky pointed out, in the transitional programme:
“A correct policy regarding trade unions is a basic condition for adherence to the Fourth International. He who does not seek and does not find the road to the masses is not a fighter but a deadweight to the Party.”
For Trotsky, in the imperialist epoch, the fundamental question facing the trade unions was either integration into the capitalist state or to become, under the leadership of communists, “organs of proletarian revolution”. It is characteristic of Matgamna and Thomas that they present the former tendency as an accomplished fact. Martin Thomas, in the conference document, ‘Building the I-CL’ writes:
“The trade unions are fundamentally not fighting organs of the class, but organs of the bourgeois state for domesticating the working class.” (MT’s emphasis WP)
A careless formulation perhaps? Not so. Matgamna embroiders on the same theme at greater length:
“The education system and the media, of course, reinforce the ties of bourgeois ideology over the working class; most important, however, in a situation where the working class has created an organisationally independent political force and has periodically engaged in major struggles with the bourgeoisie, is the role of the trade unions in sustaining the false consciousness created by the basic social relations of bourgeois society (sic!) and restricting the struggles of the working class from breaking through that consciousness. The trade unions ‘socialise’ the class to acceptance of bargaining within the system and, therefore, taking responsibility for it in times of crisis.”
The turn away from the trade union milieu will automatically make its mark on the I-CL cadre. It will increasingly green and inexperienced in this field. Bolstered by ‘new’ theories as to the nature of the trade unions, in their essence sectarian, the I-CL will continue to drift further and further away from the central arena for combatting reformism in the British working class. This sectarianism will bear fruit in opportunism. It already has. The hysterical attacks on those who advocated voting IS in the Walsall bye-election is a case in point. The I-CL’s position was defended, in public, by claims to be speaking to the masses (a sudden sloughing off of the limitations of the tiny propaganda group). In private it was revealed to be a collapse into opportunism dictated by the tactical needs of the I-CL.
The Labour Party
The Labour Party was created by the trade union bureaucracy caught between a ruling class offensive and a mounting working class upsurge in the period 1900-1918. In this respect it was unlike any other European social democracy (except to some extent the Belgian Workers’ Party). To an important degree it remains an extension into the parliamentary sphere, of the trade unions. In Trotsky’s definition:
“…the Labour Party which, in England, the classic country of trade unions, is only a political transposition of the same trade union bureaucracy.”
“The Labour Party and the trade unions — these are not two principles, they are only a technical division of labour.” (Communism and Syndicalism)
We have made it clear, time and time again, that in political terms there are no differences between the Labour Party leaders and the trade union bureaucracy. Yet there is a difference of function between a trade union and a parliamentary reformist party, particularly where the former have over ten million members and the latter, if bloc affiliations are deducted, under half a million. The Labour Party is a mass party of the British working class via the trade unions. The Labour Party’s strength and influence is based on this link. The Party’s funds and, at election times, the bulk of its activists, come directly from the trade unions and are not involved in day-to-day work in the wards and constituencies on a regular basis. When the Labour Party/Trade Union alliance is strong, as at present, the Labour Party influence appears unshakeable. When it is weak, as in 1969, the Labour Party’s influence can appear almost negligible. Neither ‘appearance’ is quite what it seems. IS, for example, encouraged its members to draw ultra-left economistic solace from the post-’69 situation. The I-CL, whose leaders then adopted an attitude to direct action and the Labour Party which they would now regard as syndicalist, are busy building a new ‘theory’ on the basis of the last two years experience of class struggle and a ‘re-reading’ of the history of the revolutionary tradition in Britain.
To the Matgamnaites now the principle factor explaining the weakness and isolation of the revolutionary tradition in Britain is, in fact, a consistently false tactical line taken by revolutionaries in relation to the Labour Party. In the new history by the I-CL the CPGB’s isolation was not a result of the Stalinisation of that party’s leadership and the resultant rupturing of the independent potential of the Minority Movement. It was in fact due to an earlier, false, position adopted towards the Labour Party. (This position was expounded by Matgamna at a school in the Midlands where the early history of the CPGB was dealt with without even a serious mention of the Minority Movement.)
In the educationals of the Matgamnaites the central and most important lesson to be learnt from the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s is the tactic adopted towards the mass reformist parties. The ILP’s history is subtly re-jigged, to quote Matgamna:
“The ILP was a pole of attraction until, in the 1930s it broke from the Labour Party — and subsequently, failing to break with centrism, withered away.”
The implication being that the ILP withered away because it left the Labour Party.
A wrong tactical position on the Labour Party is also held up by Matgamna as the principle cause of the disarray in the British Trotskyist movement after the second world war. Programmatic confusion is ignored by the Matgamnaites, it was the tactics that the Trotskyists got wrong.
But, some will say, Matgamna is only ‘bending the stick’ to persuade his own membership to take advantage of immediate opportunities. He himself is fond of warning his present allies that he will see them as a right-wing deviation at some unspecified and future date. Such ‘faith’ in Matgamna’s far-sightedness condones a contempt for theory, a pillaging of the history of the movement to find scanty justifications for present orientations and a systematic miseducation of the I-CL cadre by the Matgamnaite leadership.
The ‘open valve’
Workers Fight always had a peculiarly ambiguous theory about the ‘open valve’ relationship between the Labour Party and the trade unions. If all this formula means is that the party and trade union bodies can be linked at all levels, that there is an overlap of activists and that trade union militants may join the Labour Party as individuals or participate on GMCs etc. as delegates of their trade unions, who could possibly deny it? And why is such a designation as the ‘open valve’ necessary?
Actually it is an evasive formula — what it suggests is not the possibility of the involvement of the masses of trade union members in the Labour Party, but that this flow is likely, regular, normal etc. This is a pale and shamefaced version of the theory that the working class alternates between political and industrial action. It is a position based on the swing of the pendulum theory.
Matgamna and Thomas now argue that 1974 showed the working class the ‘limits of militancy’ and they have ‘turned’ to political action. Hornung, in fact, puts it, characteristically, as a ‘defeat of consciousness in 1973′ locating it in that year because it had low strike figures (there was no miners’ strike in that year as there was in 1972 and 1974!) If this shallow and schematic theory has any kernel of truth, it hinges on a defeat of the working class on the trade union front. The crisis, the society-wide nature of the required answers and solutions, and the dangers of sectional isolation, all underline the limits of sectional economic militancy, of the fighting methods that pushed up living standards in the sixties and early seventies.
Developing fatalism, a crisis of political alternative, does buttress the trade union/Labour Party social contract. But it does not drive militants, in large numbers, into the Labour Party.
In fact since the last war the trend of working class involvement has been downwards. This is not an irreversible process. But it would take either a massive ‘direct action’ debacle, or a fighting left reformist current to either drive or pull militants in on a mass scale. In fact all the signs are that larger and larger numbers of militants are cynical and sceptical about the left reformist parliamentarians while retaining illusions in the TU bureaucrats with identical politics — compare the barracking Norman Atkinson got at the Nov. 17th rally with the rapturous reception of Alan Fisher. On the other hand large numbers of workers remain totally under the influence of the paralysing ‘national crisis’ ideology while at the same time less and less interested in voting-in a Labour government to carry out the necessary ‘national’ (anti-working class) policies. The least organised, least class conscious, are being radicalised towards the open racists of the National Front and National Party or towards the petty bourgeois nationalists in Scotland and Wales.
Workers Fight/I-CL are approaching the dangerous equation: trade unions equal economic struggle, and that therefore the ‘hold of reformism’ is best challenged via the Labour Party. The identification of the whole trade union structure (minus the mechanically abstracted ‘shop floor organisation’) with the trade union bureaucracy can only bolster this view. With Trotsky we say ‘… the trade union question remains the most important question of proletarian policy in Great Britain’. But we do not say this out of a syndicalist fetish for trade union routinism. The trade unions are the central arena for the raising of communist politics and the fight for a communist programme.
Work inside the Labour Party is an important auxiliary to this. The long-term objectives of communists must be the building of a fighting left-wing tendency under the leadership of revolutionary ideas (like the National Left Wing movement in the 1920s but without the political errors stemming from Communist Party and Comintern misdirection.) The weakness of revolutionary forces in Britain is likely to make ‘the united front from within’ an important tactic for the years to come.
The mass turn?
But it is not the central tactic. Those who see it as such will be increasingly likely drawn away from the advanced militants and the crisis of leadership in the class. This will be so whatever motives and justifications lay behind the tactic. It will be so of those who consciously turn ‘the tactic’ into a strategy (supporters of the Militant and the Chartist, for example), for those who posit a growth in the influence of ‘the lefts’ over workers in struggle and serious splits within the ranks of the Labour Party, and for those who see their tactic as guided by a search for ‘raw youth’, for potential new cadre to be educated in the politics and line of the grouping.
The Matgamnaites refused to offer a perspective of growth for the Labour Party as a focus and battleground of class struggle. Not for them ‘perspectives’ or ‘scenarios’ as they like to call them. For them, as we have already explained, such issues are academic. Growth for the I-CL now, as a timeless propaganda group, is the crux of the matter. When one of our comrades asked the question is there a real influx of militants into the Labour Party to justify a major turn, is there a refocusing of struggle — Matgamna’s answer was:
“Masses and mass trends are relative. If there was a genuine mass influx into the Labour Party, we could not gear into it directly, anyway. We would relate to individuals and handfuls of people directly.” This was the revealing answer of an empiricist, obsessed and guided by the inability of his grouping to address advanced militants, who sees the task of party building purely in terms of the primitive accumulation and education of cadre.
The I-CL turns its back on the crisis of leadership amongst advanced militants in the current period. It is too small, it tells itself, to address these problems yet. As a result it underestimates that crisis of leadership, the crisis of leading workers facing the ideological and programmatic demands posed by a capitalist crisis and reformist collaboration. To the I-CL, therefore, the Right to Work Campaign march, the Walsall by-election Socialist Worker candidature, could simply be dismissed as the work of an ‘irrelevant sect hostile to the I-CL, to the mass Party and the working class’ (Sean Matgamna’s characterisation of the IS candidature in Walsall). In the case of the Walsall by-election the ‘irrelevant sect’ is compared to the ‘mass party of the working class’.
To the I-CL, those workers who have broken organisationally with the Labour Party have, as a rule, sunk without trace into ‘sects’ such as IS or the CP. In the I-CL view of the world, advanced militants are either of no account because they are lost in ‘sects’ or else beyond the influence of a grouping the size of the I-CL; meanwhile the masses looking to, and under the influence of, the Labour Party, will be addressed by the I-CL with a view to breaking them from Labourism — ‘The militants will not listen to us, but the masses surely will’!
The revolutionary party
In September 1972, those of us who were attempting to form a ‘Left Faction’ in the wake of the IS betrayals over Aldershot and its chronic tailism over the Pentonville jailings, produced an outline set of theses. On the revolutionary party we said:
“The party unites the most politically conscious workers on the basis of its programme, strategy and tactics. It is before anything else the embodiment of political class consciousness.”
“The aims of the party are not simply the same as those held by trade unionists in struggle. The party is not a revolutionary knuckle-duster on a trade union fist.”
“The need for a centralised party flows from its role as the embodiment of the highest class consciousness as the formulator of scientific (Marxist) strategy, on the basis of which all its members undertake their activity.”
We argued that, in the present period, the clash of strategies occurred, most importantly, among the strata of the class which in the past led the day-to-day struggles and in 1972 brought Britain to the verge of a general strike. Our argument was, and is, that this strata, broadly speaking, the shop stewards movement, was not immobilised at present because they accepted Healey’s cuts etc., but through their recognition that the previous methods and goals of struggle no longer answered the problems presented to them by the onset of the period of capitalist instability. The role of revolutionaries is to attempt, by all means possible, to win this strata, the vanguard of the class, to a communist programme which, starting from a Marxist analysis of the present period, would highlight the key problems, political, economic and organisational, facing the class and point to the corresponding demands, action, and organisation required to overcome them and go forward to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist society.
Our arguments fell on deaf ears. Not understanding the way in which past acceptance of many bourgeois ideas clash with today’s needs for struggle in the vanguard of the class, the I-CL runs away from the fight to win that vanguard to communism. Instead they look to ‘raw youth’ — because they are not yet enmeshed in bourgeois ideology. Their task as they see it is to educate these raw recruits so that in the future there will be a communist current in the working class. In justifying this approach, the I-CL rump argue that their first priority is to overcome the USFI’s ‘process politics’ which sees the ‘world revolution’ as something inevitable and doing the job of the party for it. They also seek to oppose the catastrophism of the Healeyite tradition. Their smug sect may well avoid some of the theoretical struggles of these groups but if they do not learn to relate to the arena in which the struggle for ideas within the working class centrally takes place, that will not matter one iota.
Developing the programme
If revolutionary parties are to be built then they will be built through the struggle to develop a programme and the fight for it in the class. If the programme is to be more than the idle fancies of a small group, it must be developed in relation to the actual struggles of the class. As a result the development of the programme, and the party that embodies it, will necessarily involve the arguing through of differences amongst Marxists. Sharp polemic, centred around the key questions of strategy and tactics, is needed to achieve the clarity and unity between Marxists that is, at present, so obviously lacking. That polemic has frequently degenerated into sterile point scoring and factional horse-play, is the result of its not being concentrated on clarifying the strategy and tactics of today’s class struggle on an international scale.
Within revolutionary groups, the principles of democratic centralism — free and honest debate over the issues in question, disciplined unity in carrying out agreed decisions and the recognition of the need to regularly review the work of the group in order to revise and amend its practice and theory — are the guarantees of the healthy organisation of the group.
Between groups, comradely discussion, despite the sharpest differences of opinion, is necessary to test the lines of the organisations in the spirit of a common search of principled unity.
Such ideas find no place in the method of the WF/I-CL. In discussion with other groups their sectarian manoeuvres and motives hide behind a facade of a thoroughly worthless and phoney ‘Bolshevik intransigence’. Within their group the ex-WF leadership do not recognise their duty to hold themselves and their ideas open to challenge and debate by other comrades.
At the present time they are engaged in an orientation toward the mass reformist party and youth, based, not on a hammered-out and agreed-on perspective that pointed out the reasons for the change of course, the developments in the class that dictated it or the likely results of carrying it out, but purely on the hunch of the leadership that they could pick up a few more members in this new milieu. An integral part of forcing through such ill-considered changes was the violation of all the norms of democratic centralism within the I-CL as we outline below.
Democratic centralism and the I-CL
To have explained the differences is not necessarily to have explained the split. Many on the left, including I-CL members, will say, was it necessary to break off the fusion? Surely such differences could have been accommodated in the I-CL? Surely the split took place before the issues had been properly argued out before the members of the I-CL?
One point we must repeat. The differences were not clarified in the I-CL. Of this most comrades are aware. In fact in the entire history of the fused I-CL it is a history of a deliberate clouding and avoiding of the issues by the leaders of the ex-Workers Fight that made political debate impossible. Slander, manoeuvre and demagogy characterised the internal life of the I-CL; on every key issue, the ex-Workers Fight leadership sought to confuse, avoid or cancel political debate and decision.
We will outline the history of the argument in the I-CL, in order to illustrate our point. We consider the behaviour of the ex-Workers Fight leadership flows directly from their view of party building, of theory, of tactics and strategy which we have outlined in this document.
It proved impossible to carry out the tasks set by the fusion of the Workers Fight and ourselves. It proved impossible to argue and debate the differences. A break was inevitable with the politics of abstract empiricism and manoeuvre espoused by the ex-Workers Fight leadership; we fought to break the I-CL from Magamna’s politics, not to split the I-CL. That the split came when it did — i.e. immediately before the I-CL conference — is the direct result of the ex-Workers Fight leadership’s attempt to hijack the leading bodies of the organisation, to suspend leading Workers Power members as their last contribution to the “debate” and “argument” before the I-CL conference.
We do not feel hard done by — as the I-CL proclaim — we outline the history of the arguments inside the I-CL to put the record absolutely straight. Once all the Workers Power members on the Political Committee were suspended (unconstitutionally by a lower majority of the conference) all vestiges of democratic centralist unity were broken.
It is the membership of the I-CL/Workers Fight who must seriously evaluate why their leadership ruptured the fusion with Workers Power — why their leadership replied with slander and organisational reprisals to the attempts to democratically and openly debate the perspectives for the I-CL. It is for the I-CL/Workers Fight membership to call their leadership to account — not for us.
The Action Programme ‘debate’
Clear and concrete differences emerged over the Action Programme. This we have explained. How did Thomas and Matgamna argue their case? How were the differences discussed?
The charges of “factionalism” was first raised in the Action Programme debate. It was made by comrades Matgamna, Thomas and Semp at a drafting commission meeting on 19th March. It was announced to comrades Hughes and Stocking at the Steering Committee of the ex-Workers Fight group had met and expressed concern at the discussion of the Action Programme/Manifesto. Hughes and Stocking were charged with having been uncomradely and unconstructive in their attacks on Matgamna’s draft Action Programme/Manifesto in combining in an unprincipled fashion with NC members against it, with cliquish jockeying for positions, with organising a campaign against Matgamna and with supporting a demagogic cry for “perspectives”. This was all put down to Hughes, Stocking, King and McSweeney’s having been a faction within IS and now failing to break up “their” faction within the I-CL. We were invited to “break up your faction” with the alternative that “they” (i.e. the whole ex-Workers Fight steering committee) would have to take “counter factional action”. We were further invited to take part in a campaign “against factionalism” and against the “cry for perspectives”.
Was there any substance in such accusations? No. Firstly the “Action Programme”. The fact is that the draft that comrade Matgamna produced was very different to the one the Political Committee commissioned. Cde. Matgamna admitted that his conception had changed as he was writing it. Before embarking on the draft he had said that whilst re-writing the transitional programme was too grandiose a task, creating “something in the nature of the Action Programme for France” was a possibility. Hughes outlined the format he wanted to see: “The format should be capitalist crisis/resultant attacks on the working class (and also middle class sections) and on specific sections of the working class / response of reformists / workers’ answer to the crisis/thus popularising the working class /answer to the crisis/thus popularising the working class response to the Labour government/key goals for the working class / how the working class should prepare itself/question of Labour Party and Trade Union bureaucracy/Labour Movement democracy/rank and file movement.” PC21.1.75. No one disagreed with this outline; no one objected to its immediacy or its focus on “the working class response to the crisis”.
The draft appeared shortly before the Feb. 29th NC. It had been discussed at a PC the night before where Cdes. Stocking, Hughes and King expressed their criticism. It should hardly be surprising that they did since the Left Faction inside IS argued for an action programme — the faction platform was called, “A Workers’ Answer to the Crisis” and outlined the analysis, tactics and demands which would constitute one. As this document was never critically discussed by Matgamna (though subsequently he admitted that he did not bother to read it) and Workers Fight comrades announced that we had no political disagreement, we assumed that there would be no problems that could not be resolved by open and democratic debate. It is curious that in all the accusations of catastrophism, programme fetishism, “orthodoxy” that have been levelled at us since, no reference has been made to the Left Faction documents submitted to Workers Fight before the fusion and reprinted in the April internal Bulletin. Since then we produced documents for discussion on the crisis, the crisis of leadership, the British working class in the coming period, for the programme commission. Cde. Hughes produced the economic perspectives. Again no charges of catastrophism were substantiated from these documents. They have not because they cannot be substantiated. Cde. Matgamna, Hornung, Thomas and Semp in December expected, like us, an Action Programme relating to the change of period in world capitalism, to the long-term crisis of British capitalism and the problems posed to the vanguard of the British working class by these long-term problems. One relating to their sharply posed present forms — unemployment, cuts, inflation, the TUC/Labour Party alliance, the inadequacy of apolitical militancy, a ‘transitional’ programme relating today’s struggles to the fight for workers’ power.
Despite subsequent mythology there was nothing concerted, ‘put up’ or factional about the fact that four or five other NC members expressed their agreement with Hughes’ and Stocking’s criticisms. In fact, Cdes. Matgamna and Thomas as much as took up a violently defensive stance of their ‘new’ programme. What is worse, they tried to broaden the issue into a them/us confrontation, to draw in all sorts of extraneous and irrelevant issues and to de-rail the issue under discussion. The differences over the nature of the programme were lost in a welter of accusations as to the factionalism of Hughes, King and Stocking. The charge, “Have you dissolved your faction?” has exactly the same effect as the old, “Have you stopped beating your wife?”. Either response, yes or no, proves the charge. When the charge was denied this did not, “reassure the comrades — rather the reverse”, i.e. if we said we were not a faction, particularly if we said it so indignantly, then it was, “very likely to serve as a factional banner”. (Thomas)
The debate on the programme collapsed inside the I-CL. The programme commission stopped meeting. The political issues were lost but the accusations and methods of factionalism by the ex-WF leadership remained.
The July conference
As the July conference approached, attention focussed on the drawing up of documents, resolutions and perspectives for it. The first document produced, ‘Building the I-CL’, did not pose clearly the difference (pre-dating the fusion) of the practical priority of either an orientation to the mass reformist party or the trade unions. Its drift was clearly toward the former (the words of Cde. Hornung). It contained a series of warnings against ‘pseudo mass work’ by which was meant, it appeared, agitational work in the unions. The latter were characterised one-sidedly as, ‘fundamentally organs for integrating the working class into the bourgeois state’. That there should be a difference over tactical emphasis on perspective should not have surprised the ex-WF leadership. Comrade Thomas had himself drafted into the fusion agreement a statement that a substantial section of the organisation would argue for a heavier orientation towards the mass reformist party and youth, at the coming conference. That conference was to mark the final fusion of the two groups, the end of organisational arrangements such as parity on leading bodies within the I-CL.
It was agreed by all concerned that the process of discussion and amendment of ‘Building the I-CL’ was fudging the issues and that Cdes. Hughes and Stocking should produce political and industrial perspectives documents and that Cdes. Thomas and Matgamna ‘Building the I-CL’ and Labour Party perspectives respectively, in the hope of clarifying the issues. It was likewise agreed that to continue ‘amending’ these documents would be counter-productive.
Charges of factionalism
The agreed documents were produced by Cdes. Hughes and Stocking. Matgamna produced nothing. He refused, for his own convenience, to commit himself or his perspectives to paper. A fortnight before conference Cdes. Matgamna and Hornung produced a vitriolic document re-raising in exaggerated form the charges of factionalism. The ex-WP comrades on the political committee were an unprincipled and apolitical faction trying to turn the I-CL into a semi-syndicalist sect, it was claimed. They had, simultaneously (if illogically) ‘given up hope for the fusion’. According to later charges we were also engaged in some sort of deal with the Workers’ League and the IMG.
On these grounds Matgamna and Hornung demanded the cancellation of the conference, ‘or a split would be far from the least likely outcome’.
Under protest, in an attempt to save the fusion, we agreed to the cancellation on the clear understanding that the political issues be debated and the charges of factionalism dropped. This, alas, did not happen. Instead Matgamna started a campaign for the removal of two ex-WP comrades from the Political Committee; this would have produced a committee comprising four ex-WF and two ex-WP, as against the constitutionally guaranteed parity.
The July conference was rescheduled as a cadre school. It was turned into a school against the positions of the Workers Power group, spiced with uncomradely attacks by the Matgamna faction. The debate on perspectives and orientation, like the debate on programme before it, was turned into an unpolitical maul over ‘factionalism’ and ‘cliquism’ by the Matgamna leadership.
In the summer, when it became necessary for one of the ex-WP comrades to stand down from the Secretariat, the Matgamna faction, through a temporary majority on the Political Committee, debarred comrade Hughes from replacing him on the grounds of his factionalism. As a result the Secretariat consisted solely of the ex-WF leadership.
The suspensions
In early September, Cdes. Hughes, Stocking and King replied to the whole campaign of character assassination and vilification, expressing the view that the whole fusion had been seriously threatened by the behaviour of the ex-WF leadership. Immediately, the Matgamna/Thomas faction circulated a document for signature to NC and non-NC members, stigmatising the ex-WF leadership as splitters ‘unwilling to submit to the fusion’. At the PC of September 10th, the two ex-WP comrades able to attend were subjected to a cross-examination centring on whether they would accept the decisions of the rearranged conference if they were in a minority, whether they accepted the fusion as an accomplished fact and that there were no longer either WP or WF groups, only a split between themselves, as factionalists, and the I-CL majority in the form of the ex-WF members of the PC, and whether they intended to join the Workers’ League or the IMG.
The comrades replied that the responsibility for breaking up the fusion rested with Matgamna, Thomas and Hornung, that the norms of democratic centralism were based on comradely discussion, not on character assassination, (this time the charge was that Hughes was a ‘cult figure’ (sic!) with a group of friends around him) and that they could not in advance announce their submission to the decisions of a conference yet to take place. At the Midlands Regional Aggregate, Matgamna and Thomas announced that Stocking, ‘had placed himself outside the organisation’ and that he would probably be suspended by the PC. Therefore, he could not speak at the aggregate to explain the Workers Power position on the dispute on the PC. Fortunately the Midlands comrades reacted strongly against this and when challenged to explain by what authority they could announce the suspension, Matgamna and Thomas beat an unceremonious retreat.
Unsatisfied with their showing in the Midlands, Matgamna, Thomas and Hornung returned to London, held a secretariat meeting and suspended the remaining ex-WP Cdes. on the PC from the organisation. They then called in Cde. Landis, the only other PC member and, as an inquorate but unconstitutional PC, ratified the decision of the secretariat. Now it might seem strange that comrades so full of ‘party spirit’, so zealous to defend democratic centralism, should have overlooked the point that a vital principle of the latter is that lower organs are subordinate to higher ones; that a secretariat is not empowered to suspend PC members, nor to summon PC meetings when three members are not notified because ‘suspended’. To add a touch of farce to this melodrama, the locks on the I-CL headquarters were changed on the morning of the secretariat.
One outraged ex-WF NC member tried to arrange an emergency NC to re-instate the suspended PC members. The Matgamnaite secretariat/PC refused to call an NC until the morning of the conference and persuaded the recalcitrant NC member that though the action was unconstitutional, ‘the safety of the organisation was the supreme law’. The ex-WP comrades were told they could ‘re-instate’ themselves providing they gave a ‘formal written repudiation of the attitudes on democracy, the forthcoming I-CL conference and their relation to it’ which they had expressed at the PC and the Midlands aggregate.
The suspended PC members demanded re-instatement on the sole ‘condition’, one which they had never ‘flouted’ or ‘denied’, that they accepted the authority of all properly constituted bodies of the I-CL from branch to NC. That they intended to argue, before the fusion conference, that it was not competent to consummate the fusion, the pre-conference discussion having been wrecked by the Matgamna grouping; and that they were, as was their right, intending to call a meeting of all I-CL members who agreed with this position. This condition the Matgamna grouping would, in no circumstances, accept. Their repeated demand was that we recognise the existence of the fusion. They nevertheless, set up a hypocritical cry that we, ‘would not go to conference’ and were ‘deserters’, were showing ‘contempt for the membership’.
The overwhelming majority of ex-WP group members refused to continue discussing ‘orientation’ and ‘priority’ as if a fused organisation existed. We were clear that, unless the (ex-WF) majority of the I-CL were prepared to break with their leaders and destroy their factional hold on the organisation, we had no choice but to consider the fusion to have been finally broken. At a meeting on September 19th 1976 we decided to reconstitute ourselves as an independent political organisation.
Since then a series of lies and distortions have been issued by the ex-WF rump of the I-CL. These hinge around the charge that 30 or so comrades have been duped into following a ‘personal clique’ — a ‘circle of friends’ grouped around a ‘cult figure’, into a split. The charge of cliquism and circle politics, repeated in letters to the left press, is merely a continuation of the WF/I-CL leadership’s policy inside the organisation — a total refusal to even look at our political arguments.
“…peculiar idealisation of workers in the factory place’ ‘workerist romanticism’ and ‘peering in fascination at the mysterious world beyond the factory gate'” (both quoted from I-CL perspectives document, by Matgamna, published after the suspension of the WP members of the PC). That is how they characterise an orientation to the unions, to the factory floor, to the rank and file, in arguing which we explicitly, time and time again, recognised the tremendous ideological battle with reformism, sectionalism, craft-consciousness, sexism and racism that this level of dishonesty and distortion has been reached and when every norm of democratic centralism has been violated, then the accusation that we lacked ‘party spirit’ and were deserters, rings hollow indeed.
The differences which racked the I-CL were, at root, serious political ones intimately related to the deepening period of crisis that faces us. Can revolutionaries break from the crippling split between an ossified programme and opportunist tactics and re-elaborate an international programme capable of rallying the proletarian vanguard? Can Marxists break out of the propaganda circle mentality that has fostered sectarianism — a sectarianism which, as Marx said, ‘is historically justified’ only so long as ‘the working class is not yet ripe for an independent historical movement’. The period of capitalist expansion and social stability of the fifties and sixties is decisively over. To these questions, which the new period of social crisis presents, the I-CL leadership insisted on replying with a resounding ‘No!’. That is their own condemnation — their own sentence to irrelevance.
