Editorial
Left at the Crossroads?
As the crisis mounts in the Labour Party, discussion of whether or not a new Party should be formed is raging on the left, if often behind closed doors.
The past couple of years, and 9 months in particular, have brought forward a plethora of journals and discussion documents addressing the issue from every conceivable standpoint.
Socialist Outlook maintains the view that such a new Party is necessary. However it cannot be produced simply by a voluntarist act of a few tens or hundreds of militants. To have any real weight, such a Party will develop out of struggles which break out between sections of the working class and the government.
It cannot be forged just by reshuffling the existing left - bit must be built in a way that makes it relevant and attractive to new forces coming into struggle today.
This is not to say revolutionaries and other militants should simply sit back and wait. Far from it. The discussion needs to take place in the open now of what kind of party the class needs - in our view revolutionary with the maximum of internal democracy - and under what conditions it is right to form a new party.
We hope we have begun to make a modest contribution to this discussion in these pages over the last few months. We plan to ask others with different viewpoints to write in the next few issues and attempt to play a role in developing a non-sectarian discussion on this vital issue.
We expect to able to collaborate with the comrades of Socialist Perspectives who recently resigned from the SLP (see pp 13-14) who have agreed to use their own publication to further this discussion on a broad basis.
We make these moves without any illusion that by discussing everyone is going to agree on every dot and comma of British and world politics. That is why the party we want to see created must in our view be democratic - because it must allow for on-going differences and dissent.
We understand why there some are sceptical that the British left can overcome its traditional sectarianism. However we respond that this is more even more necessary today than at other times if we are to have the chance of beating back the attacks that New Labour are meeting out on our class - a class whose organisations have been undermined and weakened during the long night of Tory rule.
It is only to the extent that militants unite now where they agree on aspects of building the fightback that the maximum forces can be brought together which can lay the basis for such a party at a later stage.
The formation of the SLP and the expulsion of Coates and Kerr are only the first expressions of the breaking of the hold of the Labour Party, in its new Blairite guise, on the working class. There will doubtless be many more.
What the Left has to avoid, however, is further fragmentation rather than a strengthening of its forces. We are committed to playing our part in both discussions and in activity with as broad as forces as possible. We hope others are coming to similar conclusions from their own starting points and that together it will be possible to begin a deeper process of collaboration than the disunity and sniping which gets the left such a bad name amongst the thousands of people searching for an different vision than Blair's New Labour, New Britain.