Ex-Trotskyists in auto-destruct mode: Bad news delights Socialist Organiser
Socialist Outlook newspaper1990sPaul ClarkeTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
SINN FEIN president Gerry Adams lost his West Belfast seat at the general election, a fact greeted by Socialist Organiser (SO 520) with the headline: 'Good news from West Belfast'.
For Socialist Organiser this amounted to a 'rejection of sectarianism' by West Belfast workers.
At the level of facts this is absurd. Adams lost his seat despite the fact that his vote, absolutely and in percentage terms, went up. Some hundreds of loyalist voters switched to the SDLP to vote Adams out.
SO supporters say the SDLP is the 'party of the Socialist International'. It may be thus affiliated, but it is not, like the Labour Party, a party based on the workers movement. It is a bourgeois nationalist party, full stop.
Joy at defeat
SO's joy at Adams' defeat stems not from principled considerations, but from their irrational prejudice against the national struggle in Ireland.
Adams' defeat is simply a victory for imperialism, albeit a marginal victory. Let Socialist Organiser chief Sean Matgamna's joy be unbounded.
This particular piece of nonsense led some SO contacts to stop buying the paper. But worse was to come.
In SO 521 Matgamna lets off steam with a huge attack on Ken Livingstone, denouncing him as a 'pantomime candidate', unleashing a stream of bizarre epithets (Lord Redken, Cheesy Red, the candidate of the Sun and culminating with 'scumbag'); and calling on Tony Benn to stand against him.
Of course Marxists have many disagreements with Ken Livingstone. Maybe Tony Benn would have been a better left candidate. But so what? Marxists don't support left Labour candidates against the right because we agree with them politically on everything, but because we support the fight of left against right to advance the struggle.
The main factor in the situation is that someone on the left has been prepared to get up and fight back against the new realists. The whole left should therefore stand behind Livingstone's campaign, while quite rightly making its criticisms of his policies.
But the bizarre antics by SO are not the end of the matter. SO supporters in the National Union of Students intend to take the NUS to court over its abolition of winter conference.
Court intervention
The motivation for calling on the bourgeois courts to take action, overriding the independence of the NUS, is a simple factional one: NUS conferences are the highlights of the Organiser annual political routine. When paper sales and contacts are up for grabs, who cares about political principle?
The present political gyrations of SO are just the latest of a series of eccentricities of this ex-Trotskyist grouping.
Others are, notably, denouncing the whole of the far left as 'irrationally bigoted against Israeli Jews' for backing the Palestinian struggle, and giving almost uncritical support to Boris Yeltsin.
Socialist Organiser is moving to the right politically at a rate of knots. Increasingly based on students, its leadership seeks to distinguish itself from all other left forces by the adoption of bizarre sectarian badges of honour.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with open polemic in a Marxist paper; it educates and clarifies. But what is happening to a socialist tendency which denounces someone on the left as 'scumbag'? Especially when that denunciation comes from its best-known leader?
These kind of antics are the stock-in-trade of the international Spartacist tendency and other loonies. They reek of factional degeneration. Socialist Organiser is going into auto-destruct mode.