Workers Power jumps ship and Socialist Fight splits

 

Given the current state of play in the Labour Party it is hardly surprising that one of the Trotskyist groups that entered the Labour Party to leach off the growth of Corbynism have decided to "jump ship" or at least re-emerge in their actual rather than their hidden form.

The following announcement (part of it anyway) was made on the League For the Fifth International's website:

UK: Why we are relaunching WORKERS POWER

With this issue, WORKERS POWER is resuming publication after six years – replacing RED FLAG which appeared for 39 issues during the four and a half years of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party and the first 18 months of Kier Starmer’s. In all respects, RED FLAG argued for the same politics as its forbear and continued as the organ of the British section of the League for the Fifth International.....

This is because the right’s loyalty is not to the party, let alone the working class, but rather to its enemy: the Establishment and the capitalist class. Corbyn’s internationalism, and support for Palestinian resistance to Israel’s attempt to destroy them as a nation, meant he had no hope of a security clearance and would never have been allowed to become prime minister.

We will continue to relate to the left reformists and subjective revolutionaries from this milieu, but we can no longer say to them, or to the new generation of class fighters, that the battle inside the Labour Party is the central issue of the day.

On the contrary, socialists must turn to the social movements like Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and Kill the Bill to provide practical support and offer political leadership. We must connect with the rank and file base of the unions, whose members face imminent threats of job losses, pay cuts and casualisation and whose leaders offer only compromise and sell-outs.

In doing so we want to re-emphasise our own revolutionary tradition as WORKERS POWER, which goes back to 1975. While we never abandoned this tradition...

No they didn't but were so small as to hardly be noticed by anyone except the most inveterate sectarians. The group has never been large and certainly no more than a few dxen members at most. Workers Power originated inside the International Socialists (now SWP) in 1973 and got themselves expelled in 1974.

One of the most tedious groups you are likely to come across who also set up a rival to the many Fourth Internationals that claim to to be inheritors of Trotsky by setting up the League for the Fifth International with a handful of other tiny co-thinkers around the world.

They are in the process of rebranding all their social media so haven't seen a copy of their new rag yet but I'm sure the paper will shortly reappear on a few street corners.

Meanwhile not to be outdone one of the two tiny groups of individuals squabbling over the rights to the name of Socialist Fight seems to have given up and created a new party which they named on the words of V.I.Lenin himself that the Bolsheviks should present themselves as "consistent democrats". Personally I just think the far left has run out of combinations of the usual socialist/revolutionary/party/league combinations that are normally used.

Led by Ian Donovan who created a theory too bizarre and antisemitic even for the highly sectarian Communist Party of Great Britian (Weekly Worker) who spend their time fronting groups to defend antisemites from being expelled from the Labour Party.  He actually believes there is an International Jewish (not Zionist) bourgeoisie who control world affairs  It's just a modern version of the fake Protocols Of Zion. Read it for yourself here: Jews & Modern Imperialism.  

Donovan teamed up with a minor ex-WRP figure  inside the grouping called Socialist Fight. Readers may recall Downings car crash of an interview with Andrew Neil on TV after his well deserved expulsion from Labour. They fell out when it suddenly dawned on Downing that Donovans rheses of Jews was actually antisemitic and to his credit apologised. Unusual for a Trot but welcome. He still holds anti-Zionist politics but not as extreme as Donovan and his "Consistent Democrats".

Downing addressed this during the internal faction fighting that tore the group (of no more than 20 or so people) apart:

Ian Donovan has obviously drafted the LCFI Statement on the departure of the Downing faction of Socialist Fight (Britain) of February last. It quickly establishes its view that Zionism is the force that controls the entire planet, in particular the imperialist countries themselves.

Donovan and his supporters seem to see the hand of Jews everywhere:

...the Zionist Jewish establishment as ‘successful citizens in the West’ can only refer to the Jewish-Zionist bourgeois layers that use the power of their property and wealth to give rise to the ‘strong and powerful’ Israel lobby, which is primarily an ethnocentric lobby or faction within the bourgeoisie. Which is disproportionate in size simply because of the much higher proportion of Jews who have risen into the Western bourgeoisies over a prolonged period, a historical legacy of the social role of the Jews as a class of commodity traders under European feudalism.

Donovan wants to expel anyone who supports Israel from the Labour Party which apparently goes too far for Downing who only wants to expel The Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel. Problem for Donovan no one is listening. His group is difficult to find in a google search and if you really do want to read his inane mutterings then go to their Facebook Page.

The one thing these groups have in common is their obsession with Israel and the Jews. For Workers Power the issue is "central" and for Consistent Democrats "Israel is second only to the USA as a threat to world peace." Fortunately these groups are small but there ideas are simply more explicit than the rest of the hard left who hide their prejudices behind dodgy memes and so-called anti-imperialism. Strasserites for modern times.