A statement from Workers Power, the former Left Faction of the International Socialists
AT THE end of October the entire Left Faction of the International Socialists was expelled from that organisation.
Hiding behind the treacherous pretence that the Central Committee was only purging IS of the disruptive elements in the Faction, over half the faction membership was expelled or suspended between mid-August and the beginning of October. The National Secretary explained in a circular to branch secretaries that while being a member of the Left Faction was not forbidden, ‘promoting factional policies’ or ‘factionalising’ was. In short, an IS member might belong to the Faction as long as they did absolutely nothing about it. This was vividly illustrated by the expulsion of the Faction Secretary in mid-September for—in Jim Nichol’s own words—‘continued organisation of factional activity.’
Intimidation failed to stop Left Faction members from fighting for their politics. The leadership were therefore forced to resort to bloc expulsion of the Faction.
The Left Faction organised a joint meeting with the IS Opposition on the issue of the backdoor expulsions. The attendance of 100 IS members from all over the country put paid to the leadership’s hope that they could quietly rid themselves of the Left Faction without the membership being any the wiser.
At this meeting, seeing the low-profile tactics in tatters, Steve Jeffries delivered the Central Committee’s verdict: The Left Faction—if it had the temerity to exist at the end of October—would be expelled forthwith.
The policy of backdoor expulsion was a direct continuation of the leadership’s refusal to politically debate with us as a faction. Most notably during the so-called pre-conference period, they produced not one written word against our positions, and their supporters consistently argued against our representation at district aggregates.
IS members are being given the miserable argument that democratic centralism does not permit factional activity in the nine months between conference discussions. This period permits only the implementation of national policy wheresoever and by whom it may have been decided. This is, in itself, a grotesque and one-sided distortion of democratic centralism. As if the issues posed by the class struggle kept to a timetable like a suburban bus. The leadership themselves have no intentions of sticking to such ‘rules’. They have not taken the membership at conferences seriously.
The last ‘conference discussion’ was disrupted by their decision to restructure the basis of discussion and delegacy. What perspectives came out of the conference that followed these manoeuvres?
Gimmicks
Despite the most severe economic crisis of British and world capitalism since the Second World War, the conference had no perspective for the class and nothing for the membership to implement. Instead, the leadership has been forced to cast around for new gimmicks and answers to orientate the membership and enthuse sagging morale.
The September Council was presented with a new scheme from the Central Committee to build the Socialist Workers Party out of readers of Socialist Worker. None of this was discussed with the IS membership. Since then the ‘Right to Work Campaign’ has been conjured up as a route to building both the Rank and File and IS’s periphery. These policies have no consistency except a perpetual distrust and contempt for the seriousness and patience of IS members.
These methods have not developed overnight. The history of IS has been a series of increasingly less successful campaigns and solutions. The absence of a serious democratic accounting of the leadership’s schemes ensures that most ‘answers’ become quietly forgotten.
The factory branches were to be the bridge to the party. Then it was to be the workers’ paper with Paul Foot as editor. Now the organisation has been galvanised to ‘hate the Labour Party’.
None of these issues were ever seriously debated and decided by conference. Even the factory branch campaign—‘build 80’ etc.—was launched several months after the conference supported careful and cautious recognition of them. They were all swung upon a thoroughly unprepared membership.
Worker leaders
Throughout these chops and changes, the composition of the leading committee has remained remarkably consisten. Annual ‘prize’ workers have come and gone in a welter of rhetoric about the worker leadership. Despite all the talk, the worker members have remained manipulated and increasingly demoralised by the only undeclared and unprincipled faction in IS—its leadership. Treated like prize bulls one year, they have consistently been declared backward-looking elements by the next.
Economism
The IS leadership is totally unwilling to present the most rudimentary political and organisational proposals for debate by the membership.
Why?
Partly because their half-baked schemes would not stand up to the test of serious examination. The leadership are increasingly incapable of providing a clear strategy and coherent tactics.
But this is not the entire answer.
We do not think that the leadership in IS has been seized by a group of incompetents and bunglers. Their errors, in fact, go much deeper than a series of increasingly farcical mistakes.
To build without a programme, i.e. an operative strategy for the party and class, is to build on sand. IS has done serious and often splendid support work for workers in struggle (in every was a crucial task). But its socialist policies have remained on the level of abstract propaganda for socialism and workers’ control.
To those of us who pointed this out, attacked it as Economism, and called for a programme, the leadership replied that we were ‘not in a transitional period’. Apparently, socialism was a long way off, so meanwhile we had to take (and leave) workers’ struggles as we found them!
This faith in the eventual spontaneous politicisation of the industrial struggle served IS well in the period from 1968 to 1972. A recipe of ‘more militancy’ and ‘hate the Tories’ meant IS could stand as a pole of attraction. The effects of unemployment, inflation and a Labour government made such a recipe increasingly inadequate IS has not been able to cut with the grain again.
The deep and prolonged crisis has revealed a leadership without any serious answers. No answers, for example, as to how to fight inflation. IS chased after ‘big claims’—30% plus—until the Mark II Social Contract imposed the £6 limit. Before that, it had simultaneously condemned the threshold deals and then lamely joined in when masses of workers fought to get them. While all the time rejecting the rising scale of wages (lump sum increases for each increase in the workers’ cost of living index) as a disastrous check to militancy, Cliff saw inflation not as a danger, but as the ‘locomotive of revolution’.
Reformism
When the £6 limit was imposed, the IS leadership turned in frenzy on the Labour Party. Previously, IS had contented itself with making fun of the Labour Party for its falling votes and diminishing ward membership. It was incapable of addressing the confusion sown by reformism in the working class, of providing more relevant answers than ‘more militancy’, ‘hate Labour’ and ‘build the Socialist Workers’ Party’. Ignoring the firm hold of reformist ideas via the trade union bureaucrats and the sobering effects of unemployment and inflation on industrial militancy, IS has neither the political nor organisational means to tackle these key problems.
IS will neither put demands on Labour so as to mobilise against them, nor outline clear alternatives to the old, inadequate, sectional methods of trade union struggle.
Offensive
We think that such an alternative can only be posed in terms of a clear transitional programme. This programme will be indispensable for transforming defensive class struggle into a class offensive. It would outline a clear Workers’ Alternative to the crisis, and the strategy and organisation necessary to turn the crisis against the bosses. It would be the basis of an offensive leading masses of trade unionists and others into the direct struggle for workers’ power.
With the crisis thundering ‘who shall pay—the workers or the bosses?’, ‘What is the alternative?’, and ‘Who rules this country—the government or the unions?’, the IS leadership still intends to play things by ear—to suck it and see. They continue to scramble for a magical set of gimmicks and campaigns to keep their organisation on the road.
Having rejected transitional politics, they have no alternative. Behind the hysteria of ‘Social Democracy Out—Workers’ Democracy In’ and ‘Social Contract or Socialism’, lies not one shred of programme or strategy for the road to workers’ power.
Tony Cliff has written a biography of Lenin and a series of journal articles in an attempt to enshrine this methodology. Lenin the revolutionary, not surprisingly, had no time for democratic centralism or a political programme.
The Socialist Workers Party turn will not answer the problems confronting IS. The sudden new sectarian turn against the Broad Left and the launching of the so-called Engineers’ Charter, the prospects of a Walsall IS candidate without a programme or support in the area and the new answer to slow recruitment (those who don’t join are the best members of all and will lay the basis for the new revolutionary party) are the stunts of a sect—not the reasoned and consistent strategy of the revolutionary party nucleus. Only by further diminishing internal discussion within IS and preventing contact between IS members and other contending forces in the labour movement will the leadership hold this proto-sect together.
What did Left Faction stand for in IS?
It commenced in 1972 as a response to the leadership’s position on Ireland. One bomb in Aldershot immediately exploded any pretence on their part to argue for support for those fighting the British Army in Ireland. Since then, IS’s Irish work has diminished to virtually zero.
We objected to this failure to argue for clear Internationalist politics in the British working class. We have consistently opposed IS’s opportunistic and unpolitical approach to international work and the building of the International. How many IS comrades know the political programme of the PRP(B-R) or the criticisms of IS made by the Socialist Workers’ Movement in Ireland? If comrades do know, we can be sure they were not told by the IS leadership.
Strategy
This failure to argue clear politics was not, we argued, because of an absence of abstract propaganda for socialism or a planned economy. IS had no clear programme and strategy for the class.
We opposed the draft programme offered by the Cliff leadership. We said it was a useless mish-mash of history lessons, rosy portrayals of the future and endless lists of elementary and immediate demands. As such it could never be offered to the class as IS’s alternative. We were right. That programme never saw the light of day, let alone the test of shop floor battle! It was quietly buried by those who commanded us to obey the conference they so brazenly held in contempt.
IS could never develop a programme for the class as a result of the contemplations of cloistered leaders. Only the experience of the membership could develop a programme and a correct line and orientation for the organisation. As a result, we have always argued consistently for democratic centralism and against the violent twists and turns that have resulted from a lack of serious democratic accounting in IS.
We were not taken in by the baloney about a ‘Workers’ Leadership’, seeing it as dishonest, a token, and at worst the smokescreen for further manipulation. A workers’ leadership can only emerge as the result of genuine democratic argument—any other ‘committees of workers’ were sure to get in the way of the leadership and had to be declared backward-looking or no longer sufficiently proletarian!
We have argued for a consistent fight to build a genuine rank and file movement independent of the swings of the IS leadership. We have always argued for a serious, alternative, workers’ programme for the crisis as an answer to the illusions and blind alleys of reformism. We have argued for women’s politics not to be an optional extra, but central to the battle for our ideas in the working class movement. We are proud of the consistency and correctness of our ideas.
Purge
We attempted to remain in IS on a principled and perfectly open factional platform. The alternative was the gossip world of secret factionalism. The IS leadership has expelled us for the former.
We consider the mounting crisis increasingly reveals the inadequacies of the politics of this leadership. The internal regime makes correction and new direction impossible. The leadership will first try to smother and ignore argument and differences. If they fail in this they will reply with expulsions once again. We are confident that they will be forced to purge the membership in the immediately foreseeable future.
The Party
We will argue for our politics outside IS. The increasing bankruptcy of IS makes ever more urgent the need to build the revolutionary party. Some comrades in IS are not yet clear to what extent the organisation is reformable, or, on the other hand, only going through a ‘bad patch’. We urge them not to wait and see but to argue for their differences only before the membership. Only in this way will they put the IS leadership to the test.
We are committed to building the party. The crisis of capitalism poses the need and possibility most sharply. IS cannot meet that challenge. We appeal to all IS members sickened by the political bankruptcy and bureaucratic practices of the International Socialist leadership to join us in that fight.
