Being A Revolutionary Means Getting Your Hands Dirty

This is another document from the archives. I wrote it for the WSL Internal Bulletin No. 40 in February 1983. It takes up a call from a section of the WSL for a partial withdrawal from the Labour Party. As the document sets out this move - which was defeated at the time - would have been a sectarian mistake. The following year the Miners Strike broke out as the biggest workers struggle in over a decade alongside other struggles, all of which as the document argues meant that workers were looking to the LP to provide political answers, and that meant that the LP itself was the centre of political activity.

Ironically, after the WSL Minority were expelled it was only a few short years before the same kind of sectarian and centrist politics warned of here, became an increasing trend in the WSL, and subsequently AWL's, politics. The attitude to the LP in Britain and to the PSUV in Venezuela being a perfect example.

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“As the experiences of the Russian Revolution teach us – remember this in England and America! – the most important thing of all is to stay in the midst of the masses of workers. You will often go wrong with them, but never leave the mass organisations of the working class, however reactionary they may be at any given moment” (emphasis added).

(Zioviev’s closing speech at the 15th Session of the Second Congress of the Comintern)

Stoke I-CL (International Communist League) was possibly one of the most sectarian branches in the group. Coming, as a worker, into the group, which was heavily student dominated, my impression was of a group of people who saw being a revolutionary as going to I-CL rallies, conferences and demos, and going along to the YS to give the Militant an intellectual kick in the groin, but who did nothing to translate the all the fine words from the rallies and conferences into practice through consistent work in the local Labour Movement. The Branch Organiser, for example, was not even a member of the LP, and was afraid to talk to workers on the picket lines for fear that they would realise he was a student.

This is what is wrong with the position of those who would have us withdraw from the LP, or like Cunliffe would have us adopt a different method of operating in the LP to in the TU’s. They fail to recognise that a partial or full withdrawal from the LP reflects a sectarian political deviation, which, sooner or later, would manifest itself in the Trade Unions and other areas of our work. (A sign of this is the attitude of some comrades to CND). What indeed would happen when, having handed the LP back to the Right Wing, the witch-unt is extended to the TU’s (as Weighell has attempted). Would we, faced with expulsion for selling the paper/being a member of an “illegal” organisation, throw our hands up in despair, like the SWP, declare that it would be unprincipled to continue working in the TU’s, and set off to build our own pure revolutionary unions? It is the path that sectarianism towards the LP has already led the SWP, and the logic applies equally to sectarians in the WSL.

I am not saying that because the sectarianism in the Stoke I-CL stemmed from students that this type of sectarianism is peculiar to student comrades. Obviously not. One only has to read the speeches of Willie Gallagher during the debate on the Labour Party at the Second Congress of the Comintern to realise that TU militants can easily fall into the same sectarian approach. It reflects an attempt to find easy routes to the revolution. In this respect, sectarianism is similar to centrism, resulting in abrupt changes of course when the going gets tough down a particular route. “…. For the working class, for Communism there can be no opposition from the left.” (ibid) One has only to look at the IMG’s hot and cold attitude to the LP to see how the politics of sectarianism and centrism merge. But, being a revolutionary involves more than working where its easiest, more than rallies, conferences and WSL Summer Schools; it means getting your hands dirty doing the boring routine work of canvassing etc. that is necessary to win the respect of workers whose political outlook at best centres around reformism and Parliamentarism, and it means the hard work of winning those workers in the process of struggle against the reformists in the LP and TU’s to our programme.

Missing from these comrades position is any political perspective for the course of the class struggle and its reflection in the LP, and symptomatic of their sectarian approach is any consideration of the effect our actions might have on the course of that development. As JM wrote in SO (Socialist Organiser) 118 p8, “whether a return of the Tories, a right-wing Labour administration or a coalition – will mean an intensification of the struggle on the industrial front….Any administration taking power will be forced to attack the TU’s.”

Such an attack like the Tories attacks up to yet may be successful/meet no response. If so it is likely that workers as they did after the Tories took office will turn to the LP for a political answer to their problems (certainly it is more likely than them turning to the WSL). Alternatively, workers may resist further attacks, the upturn in militancy radicalising further the rank and file of the LP. Additionally, the struggle inside the LP would be renewed from a higher level were the Tories to win the election as the right-wing would be blamed for defeat, resulting from their refusal to fight for Conference policies, from the witch hunt etc. Were labour to win the election they would be faced with attacking a working class with expectations of an improvement in their condition, and with a Party rank and file angry over conference policies being dropped, and which could be threatening reselections, and demanding Leadership elections. Whatever the variant, the centre of working class political struggle will be in the LP. It would be sectarian madness were we to voluntarily isolate ourselves from that struggle. We must begin to make whatever organisational steps are needed to give us the flexibility to intervene in that struggle.

As I wrote in SO93 on Labour’s Programme, the ideas may be limited, but even the limited gains for the working class will not be achieved “Without a fighting organised left-wing in the Party and adequate mechanisms to ensure democracy and accountability, this Programme like all the others in the past, will be no more than waste paper.” We should build that organised left-wing to fight for the limited reforms of the Programme and their extension, the necessity of which we will prove in struggle. That way we will build the WSL and break out of the isolation which British Marxism has faced since the beginning of the century, an isolation resulting time and again from its sectarian stance to the Labour Party.