The "Market Theory" of Left Wing Groups
Parables for Socialists 11
Now.. mainstream... politics in the media is reduced to a sub-species of sports commentary...The 'Revolutionary Communist Party' (RCP) was a small 1970s splinter of the SWP... middle-class cult in the 80s and early 90s... It functioned as an ideological scab-herding outfit during the great miners' strike of 1984-5
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Now that the mainstream parties agree on most important issues, politics in the media is reduced to a sub-species of sports commentary.
Journalists ruminate wisely on this politician's performance, that one's new "position", this other one's charisma or lack of it. Reporters ask people in the street what they thought of this politician's recent speech, in terms of his "performance", if they think that one's recent shift in "position" has really made his party more "electable". Politics? That is politics! Policy? (Eh?) That is policy!
The "left" naturally has its own version of the "politics is sport" phenomenon. Ex-activist kibbitzers — has-beens, never-weres and never-tried-to-bes — find in what might be called the "market theory of left groups", the master key that explains everything. One of its advantages is that you don't have to bother with old style socialist politics at all. left wing politics? Left wing politics is gossip and kibbitzing, stupid! Where have you been for the last 20 years?
The following article disected the "market theory of left groups".
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The 'Revolutionary Communist Party' (RCP) was a small 1970s splinter of the SWP, which flourished as a middle-class cult in the 80s and early 90s, publishing a magazine called Living Marxism (later LM). The only thing noteworthy about the 'RCP' is that it functioned as an ideological scab-herding outfit during the great miners' strike of 1984-5.
Insisting that they were 'revolutionary communists' and 'Marxists', and simultaneously indulging in pseudo ultra left criticism of the National Union of Mineworkers because its 'demands' in the strike did not question the basics of capitalist society, they championed the scab Notts miners - the majority of Notts miners - who worked throughout the 13-month strike. (They would soon form a breakaway union, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers.)
At the time when the demand for a "ballot" of the NUM was the cutting edge of Tory propaganda against the miners, and of the labour movement right wing's campaign to stop other workers giving them solidarity action, the RCP threw everything they had behind the scabs and the Tory and Labour scab-herders.
It was a piece of deliberate and calculated betrayal.
No matter how critical you felt towards the Stalinist NUM leaders, nobody with labour movement instincts and loyalties could do other than stand with the miners and contribute as much as possible to helping them fight Thatcher.
Nobody except the strange cult which, perhaps sarcastically, still called itself the Revolutionary Communist Party!
A man who was a member of this cult during or soon after their heroic work in the miners strike, Paul F., contributed his mature reflections on the 'RCP', and on the AWL, to a recent left wing paper.
Giving a caricatural account of a dispute, about 'left wing anti-semitism', which he overheard between Al Richardson of Revolutionary History and Sean Matgamna of Solidarity, he speculates on what drives us to stand up to the "big battalions" of the 'left' on such questions. He offers a 'psychological' explanation.
We just want to be different, he thinks.
He solemnly rehashes the droll old joke - he doesn't know it is a joke - that the multiplicity of groups on the left can be explained according to simple supply and demand market theory: people look for gaps in the political market and "produce" "lines" that will fill it.
Thus, we decided to identify with the US Workers' Party of the 1940s, not because we realised that much of what we'd been saying for years had already long ago been said - and usually better said - by them, but because we saw a gap in the "market", for Shachtmanism!
F., in passing, accounts for the RCP: "As an erstwhile supporter of the RCP I am only too well aware of how left groups mark themselves out by exaggerating extreme positions, or by going to extremes in opposing other ones. With the RCP I don't know how much of this was the product of a conscious decision to be different or extreme [or] the end product of searching for a theoretical focus around which the group could operate"
Even as a psychological account, this begs all the important questions, the psychological, no less than the political ones. Alright, they wanted to "be different", to find their niche "in the market". But why and how did this impulse come to overwhelm every other impulse, principle, judgement, sympathy, assessment that should have governed what people calling themselves "communists" did in the biggest class struggle battle in Britain since the 1926 General Strike?
And, while we're at it, why, Mr F., were you a member, during the miners' strike or soon afterwards, of an organisation that did that? How can you be so smug about your own strange political history as to offer this dim-wit's pseudo-psychological and largely apolitical explanation of your organisation, the R!C!P? It's a confession? You just wanted to "be different"? And now you've decided to conform?
Herbert Spencer, the great propagandist for Charles Darwin's theories, and militant atheism, invented "agnosticism" - the "I don't know" position between atheism and theism - as a joke, a reductio ad absurdum. The joke found its own "niche in the market" and lots of people who like to ward off unpleasant certainties by keeping things hazy call themselves "agnostic".
The "market explanation" for the divisions on the left was also originally concocted as a reductio-ad-absurdum - that's what it was when I first came across it, anyway - of the political practice of "Marxists" who change their "line" for organisational advantage, just as focus group-obsessed bourgeois political organisations do, seeking votes. (To give a real example from the history of the SWP: against their own long-time convictions they became fervent opponents of the EU, because that "line", they thought, would better help them "build the revolutionary party" in a labour movement saturated by CP and Labour left little-Englandism.)
It originated, I think, with the late Ken Tarbuck. (He had another nice satirical fantasy about individuals smoothly transferring from one revolutionary organisation to another, like footballers changing clubs, at a price - so much for a "theoretician", so much for an "organiser", and so on.)
Ken Tarbuck's satirical joke, like Herbert Spencer's reductio-ad-absurdum, agnosticism, has found its "niche in the market", as an a-political explanation for political divisions, and it is now presented in solemn seriousness by dim kibbitzers like F., for whom revolutionary politics and "group-watching" is an alternative to trainspotting or collecting football cards.
It appeared as a serious "explanation" in Tribune 15 years ago, in pseudonymous pieces written by John Sullivan, another of the half-wise revolutionary "trainspotters". It appeared, applied to the AWL, in a floundering polemical piece by Jim Higgins, in Workers Liberty magazine some years ago.
Yet the idea remains what it was when it started, an absurdity.
Observably, some people on the left do this sort of thing some of the time, ergo everybody does it all of the time! Nobody acts out of conviction and principle?
Other than as a joke, this a-political "explanation" could only be taken seriously by people who themselves have no political convictions they think are worth fighting for, and simply cannot understand people who do.
Yet its acceptance by people who think they are being serious, is symptomatic of the state of the left.
Michael Bakunin once observed - and Trotsky repeated it, applied to the USA, in 1938 - that the prevalence of market concepts in bourgeois society was so strong that in the USA a man who had a million dollars was said to be "worth" a million. The behaviour of organisations like the Healyite WRP and the SWP over half a century, and of the Stalinists for much longer, has come to seem so "natural" and "normal" to the dimmer observers, or those - Jim Higgins, for example - obsessed by a Tony Cliff or a Gerry Healy, that the "market theory" of socialist groups has been transmuted from a satirical absurdity into a serious idea.
The pseudo-left has made itself satire-proof!
F’s. dopey self-satisfaction is unfortunately not unrepresentative of the mind-processes of the half depoliticised "trainspotting" citizens who pollute the fringes of the pseudo-left.
Solidarity 3/37. September 25, 2003
Cyclops
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I Suppose
F's response to the question why he was a member during this period etc. would presumably, given his psychological analysis, be the same as that given by people who for years have been members of religious cults. Unfortunately, people do not always act logically, that's why religion survives. Often such people after they leave are as bewildered as anyone else as to why for years they beleived the mumbo jumbo.
Perhaps in similar vein it could be asked whether the leaders of religious cults "believe" the things they say, or are they just all con men that have found a way to avoid getting a proper job at worst, or making money and massaging their ego at best (for them) and so the contradictions in their positions is easily understood, and simply find a gap in the market for their particular brand of snake oil.
Arthur Bough
The austere Vice-Chairman of
The austere Vice-Chairman of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Rajani Palme Dutt, rounded on someone who said that he had no sense of humour: 'When someone tells a joke, I laugh.' When I had a satirical letter published in today's CPGB paper a couple of years back, drawing upon my late pal John Sullivan's light-hearted writings on left-wing groups, about how the AWL might evolve its distinctive outlook on certain issues, a certain 'Cyclops' responded in the AWL's paper in a manner that showed that he lacked a certain appreciation of satire, and he spent almost an entire page of the paper's valuable space denouncing me.
A rather disporportionate response, one may think, to a mildly amusing letter in an obscure paper, but then perhaps I touched a raw nerve. I won't deal here with comrade 'Cyclops' and his inability to recognise a joke, I will look at one question, that of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
I was not actually a member of the RCP, I was a supporter of it. But to the point about the miners' strike, and the question of the ballot. This the RCP raised during roughly the first month of the strike, when it was not clear whether Nottinghamshire miners would come out or not. It was a way of trying to call the bluff of the right-wingers in Notts and elsewhere -- OK, you want a national ballot; let's have one.
The chances are that during that period, a national strike ballot would have been won, and, in that situation, the Notts leaders and other right-wing NUM leaders would have been forced to support the strike, or be exposed as strike-breakers. Hence, the call for a ballot was seen by the RCP as a means of building the strike.
The failure to get all the miners out on strike was one of the biggest problems of the 1984-85 strike. It gave ammunition both practically and ideologically to the right-wing press, the Tories, the right-wing Labourites and other enemies of the miners.
A key question is this: were the Notts miners, and the other ones who wanted a national strike ballot, scabs from the start, irrevocably destined to break the strike and help sabotage it from day one? We did not think so, we thought that a combination of mass picketing, a national strike ballot and a strong propaganda campaign by the NUM and its supporters could have succeeded in bringing out the NUM as a whole. After a month or so, it was obvious that the question of a national ballot was irrelevant, so we dropped the call for one.
That, comrade 'Cyclops', was not strikebreaking; it was an attempt to make the strike a lot more solid. The NUM members that the RCP recruited during the strike obviously didn't think that we were helping the scabs, they would not have joined us if they had so thought.
A lot of things have changed since 1984-85. The RCP itself has disappeared into a politically indistinct think-tank. I have developed many criticisms of my old lot on all manner of issues. But I think that the call for a national strike ballot in the first month of the miners' strike was correct; after all, the alternative, what actually happened, was hardly a victory, was it?
A Question
that miner comrades always raised that I myself could never really understand was - "Why when everyone knew a showdown had to come, when it was clear that the Government was preparing for one with the build up of coal stocks etc., didn't the NUM call an overtime ban way ahead of the strike?" Why hadn't ground work been done. Its almost as though the NUM leaders wanted the strike to be a long one from the beginning.
Arthur Bough
As I recall it....
...and it was a long time ago, we had the same debate about the strike ballot issue within what was then Socialist Organiser. There were certainly many comrades, myself included, who thought that while a ballot was not required on grounds of principle, it would certainly be wise on tactical grounds, for the very reasons Paul F states.
In general however, the RCP did always seem to me to be looking for USPs and taking up contrary positions purely to increase its own visibility (their position on AIDS and safe sex was a notably shocking example), so I wouldn't entirely dismiss the market theory.
And I think left groups in general, AWL included, do tend to emphasise their differences rather than their similarities. That's not the same as adopting a position to fill a gap in the market, but it is a form of marketing.