05.06.1997
Party time ...
Party notes
Dave Craig’s article in last week’s paper (‘Nothing less than a federal republic’) is to be welcomed. It helps to facilitate a development that a number of comrades in the Communist Party have felt necessary for some time - that is, to precipitate a crisis in our relations with Dave’s organisation, the Revolutionary Democratic Group.
Regular readers will know that when the leadership of our Party first initiated the call for communist rapprochement, we roughly delineated a number of ‘stages’ of the process. The organisations first approached were small groups that formally held the same position as us on the need to reforge the Communist Party. Indeed, a number were actually small splits from our organisation now peddling bastardised forms of our politics in various sectarian backwaters. If nothing else, the serious call for communist unity had the satisfying effect of calling the bluff of posture-monsters like the Communist Action Group, Open Polemic, and the Independent Communists. A small service to the workers’ movement, but a service nevertheless.
This ‘schema’ was adopted for the sake of pragmatism rather than anything else. We have made it crystal clear that our understanding of communist rapprochement had nothing to do with searching for political co-thinkers. Thus, when the RDG presented itself as being ‘up’ for the project it was welcomed by us as a useful development, despite our many theoretical differences with an organisation from a state capitalist tradition.
Unfortunately, the RDG’s approach to revolutionary unity has smacked too much of precisely this sectarian approach. It has placed emphasis on a search for a theoretical convergence of its world outlook with that of the presently constituted Party majority. In the words of a draft for a joint statement on communist rapprochement (now thankfully revised), it envisaged the creation of “a revolutionary democratic communist tendency ... likely to involve only a minority of the communist movement” (Thesis on communist rapprochement working draft January 16 1997). Combined with what we perceived to be a marked reluctance on the part of the RDG majority to accept the organisational and discipline norms of Party life, this has meant that progress towards unity has been painfully slow and - frankly - very uneven among RDGers as individuals.
Clearly, things are changing. There is an understandable mood of impatience amongst Party members with what is perceived as prevarication by a group of individuals rather than a viable group. Martin Blum’s letter (Weekly Worker May 22) suggesting that “the RDG exists in name only” thus voiced a widely held opinion in the Party. In the Party Notes’ column in the November 28 issue of the paper, I had already implied that the RDG fell into the category of those that had failed the test of rapprochement and that comrades must address themselves to “how we now move on”. While work with RDGers as individuals has continued and has been useful, I stand by this assessment of the RDG as an organisation.
Dave Craig’s article should be seen in this context, therefore. Before briefly replying to its charges we should note something about its tone. It is very sharp, angry, and pointed. It certainly represents a change from Dave’s normal more measured style. I believe this has more to do with the pressure applied on the front of rapprochement, rather than our organisation now hawking “the most foul and rotten pieces of stinking reformism” (Dave Craig, ‘Nothing less than a federal republic’ Weekly Worker May 29). Given that the RDG has attempted to identify communist rapprochement with a theoretical convergence, my initial guess was that this polemic constituted an attempt to create ‘clear red water’ between us in order to justify a break. I am assured that this is not true, however.
The Party convened a special seminar on Sunday June 1 to give the opportunity for a leading RDGer to develop the critique. His points against our positions were comprehensively answered and I think the meeting actually reached a degree of political consensus.
Essentially, Dave had made two charges. First, that the CPGB seemed to have abandoned republicanism in practice - either in entirety or through a programmatic split with our Scottish organisation - “in favour of ... ‘serious rapprochement’ with the programme of Scottish Militant Labour”. The evidence cited for this was the call for a “parliament with full powers” in an article by Nick Clark in our May 15 issue.
Second, Dave suggests that the very call for such a parliament in and of itself is a concession to Blairism: it means nothing more than a “reformed constitutional monarchy”, he states.
As Mary Ward’s reply in this issue makes clear, our organisation has made no concession on the fight for a federal republic, far from it. Rather than an abandonment of our position on the federal republic, the call for a Scottish parliament with full powers is an application of this strategically important, programmatic demand in the context of today’s Scotland.
Practically any demand short of the call for the insurrection itself can be treated in a reformist manner. This cannot be guarded against simply in the formulation of the slogan itself, still less in us avoiding certain words or phrases just because they happen to have graced the lips of various bourgeois politicians.
For example, Labour talks about a minimum wage; so does the Communist Party. Quite apart from the level it is set at, the difference is that ours would be won as a result of working class self-activity and power. Thus, the notion that as Blair talks about a parliament with limited powers and we call for a parliament with full powers, we are somehow simply tinkering with Labour’s reform of the constitutional monarch is banal.
We operate in a non-revolutionary situation, circumstances in which we must fight for reforms in a revolutionary way. In Scotland, there is a movement which expresses a desire for democracy, a yearning to change the way the people are governed. The Scottish Socialist Alliance, a serious organisation with some roots in society there, is collapsing before the sop offered by Labour and betraying its own founding principles.
The demand for a parliament with full powers is not a programmatic demand; the federal republic and self-determination are. However, in the concrete circumstances of Scotland, this demand becomes one of the points of application of the demands for self- determination and a federal republic. Should we instead simply shout our federal republic slogan at the backs of the masses as they march away from us?
No, that would be sect politics. The task for our comrades is to step forward as the most intransigent champions of the founding principle of the SSA - the right of the Scottish people to a constituent assembly that can decide its relationship with the rest of Britain and the world - and fight to give the movement our, revolutionary, content.
In the course of such a struggle, the demand for a parliament can be left far behind depending on the tempo of struggle and the organisational and political forms that the movement generates. The struggle is the key, however, comrade Craig.
The point was made during the course of the seminar that many of these political differences arise from the semi-connected nature of RDG comrades to the Party. They do not participate in the debates and work of the organisation in an organic way and therefore have a tendency to comment - often inaccurately - from outside. In conversation, comrade Craig has mused with me about arcane and involved “organisational structures” that could overcome this weakness.
There is one very obvious one, of course. It is called membership, comrade.
Mark Fischer
national organiser