28.11.1996

Room for all revolutionaries

We print below a letter from the Communist Party (dated November 26 1996) to the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International on the question of communist rapprochement. This was requested by the LCMRCI, a Trotskyist organisation, composed largely of comrades from a Workers Power/League for a Revolutionary Communist International background. The comrades are seeking clarification of our stance to provide the basis for future exchanges on the question of Party-building and the possibility of joint work.

Dear comrades,

We have been asked by one of your comrades to outline our attitude to communist rapprochement. Our most developed position is contained in Jack Conrad’s ‘Party, non-ideology and faction’, as well as in subsequent exchanges with organisations such as Open Polemic, the Republican Worker Tendency and the Communist Action Group. I enclose these polemics separately.

This is a large body of material, so I outline our basic approach below.

1. A genuine party of the class cannot be organised on the basis of a single exclusive interpretation of history, the revolution or the development of the workers’ movement. Within the broad parameters of the programme, there must be room for all revolutionary communists to unite and fight together. The idea that the advanced layer of the proletariat - composed as it will be at times of millions of people - will all one day believe in state capitalism, Trotskyism or any other single strand of revolutionary thought is a nonsense.

2. This in no ways implies agnosticism. We believe objective truth exists and must be fought for. Indeed, as you will have seen from the process of communist rapprochement as it has been reflected in the pages of Weekly Worker, the organisations we are attempting to draw closer are not offered a ‘non-aggression pact’ of any sort.

3. Thus, we believe that the Party must have a provision for open factions and open ideological struggle. Like Lenin, we do not believe that factions are good things in themselves, but actually provide the best conditions for overcoming factionalism - for the faction’s re-absorption into the main body of the Party.

4. Similarly, factions must have the right in general to be open, to argue for their position in front of the entire class. The Party is not a conspiracy behind the back of the proletariat. Workers must know what the political positions of their leaders are, what they actually believe and why. The ‘not-in-front-of-the-workers’ attitude that dominates the rest of the left is indicative of the fact that they have the mentalities of sects, not a Party outlook.

5. Concretely, we have approached a number of organisations to join with us in the project of reforging the Communist Party. This is not an undifferentiated call to the entire left to line up to fill the pages of our paper every week, as foolishly claimed by the likes of Workers Power. The organisations that we have attempted to engage with thus far are either those that have had a certain history with us in the past, or at least a formal adherence to what we have called ‘Partyism’. As this process has been an open one, other organisations such as the Revolutionary Democratic Group have presented themselves and made important contributions.

6. ‘Partyism’ is an understanding of the inclusive character of the Party of the proletariat. This is in stark contrast to the methods of the bulk of the left, which only searches out close co-thinkers for unity and sees the Party of the future exclusively in terms of projections of its own - narrowly defined - organisations.

We would be happy to discuss the project of revolutionary unity with comrades from any tradition in the revolutionary movement and believe that an exchange between us on this question can be useful.

We look forward to your comments.

With communist greetings,

Mark Fischer
national organiser, CPGB