20.06.2002
A reply to comrades
Last week's paper carried a letter from the Communist Struggle group in the Ukraine, suggesting that our two organisations have the possibility of "fruitful cooperation"
Comrades Many thanks for your letter of June 10 (Weekly Worker June 13). The leadership of our organisation has not had the chance to discuss its contents properly yet. This letter therefore does not represent a fully considered response to you. However, in the meantime here are some initial thoughts.
We cannot comment on the political situation you face in the Ukraine - this needs more knowledge than we currently have. However, there are some broad principles we should elaborate that will guide any future cooperation.
You note the "sectarian struggle and mutual distrust of the different sects" you have encountered. As a group of comrades in what was once part of the USSR, you are in a good position to observe this depressingly resilient culture. In Britain itself, defeat of the miners' Great Strike of 1984-85, the predictable fact that Blair's government did not produce a crisis of expectations, the palpable failure of the various sect-leaderships' 'master-plans' for world domination - these factors have combined to push the left into a degree of civilised cooperation. Hence the Socialist Alliance's five principal supporting groups. This is welcome. But abroad, the sects still seem to behave in the old way. From the little we know of your experience, the various splinters of the British revolutionary left have attempted to build Ukrainian replicas of themselves. This is sad to watch, frankly.
Groups that can barely reproduce themselves in this country expend gargantuan amounts of time, resources and energy attempting to construct 'Potemkin village' versions of themselves in other parts of the globe. Entertainingly, members of these sects will castigate our organisation for not being interested in this sterile and pointless work - 'You're not internationalists,' they taunt us. In fact, their understanding of 'internationalism' is thoroughly degenerate. Our comrade Marcus Ström has cuttingly dubbed their efforts as constructing "oil-slick internationals".
Given time and tide (and the internet), it is possible to spread yourself over a wide geographical area and pick up small knots of (supposed) co-thinkers across the globe. There is no depth to the phenomenon, however. It is all on the surface and, given the non-permeable nature of the material, it can never go any deeper. A sect internationalising itself is not 'internationalism'.
Our approach is rather different. It is Lenin's:
There is one, and only one, kind of internationalism, and that is working whole-heartedly for the development of the revolutionary movement and the revolutionary struggle in one's own country, and supporting (by propaganda, sympathy and material aid) this struggle and only this line in every country without exception. (VI Lenin CW Vol 24, Moscow 1977, p24)
In other words, we are not interested in winning a 'trophy' section in your country or anywhere else on the planet. We are interested in doing whatever we can - by "propaganda, sympathy and material aid" - to assist the communists in the Ukraine build a mass revolutionary communist party, with deep roots in their indigenous working class.
From your study of our materials on the web, you will be aware that our understanding of what a genuine proletarian party is - how it organises and grows - is qualitatively different from most of the revolutionary left. We believe that such an organisation must be characterised by political transparency. Again, we are with Lenin when he states that,
There can be no mass party, no party of the class, without full clarity of essential shadings, without an open struggle between the various tendencies, without informing the masses as to which leaders are pursuing this or that line. Without this, a party worthy of the name cannot be built. (VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p153)
Moreover, this is a process that we believe must start now, today, despite our relatively primitive level of development as communist trends. Thus, at the core of our "fruitful cooperation", as you put it, must be full, frank and honest political exchanges. We intend to tell you - openly - when we think you are wrong. We expect you to reciprocate.
For example, perhaps you made a mistake to leave the Komsomol in the way that you did. Too often the left has walked away from mass or strategically important organisations because they disagree over this or that programme or historical issue. This method was extended to their own circles. As a result the left is hopelessly fragmented and impotent. Staying in the Komsomol would have had its costs. But there would also be rewards - if you published your views and analysis openly. Maybe we are incorrect. But let us discuss and learn from each other.
The Weekly Worker can be an important vehicle for this. We would urge you to use its pages to develop your ideas, to critically engage with comrades, not simply in the UK and the Ukraine, but around the world. In many ways, we believe this to be the key task of communists in this period.
The official world communist movement degenerated and died in the last century. The states where its parties held power were grim caricatures of genuine socialism - their ignominious collapse underlines their nature as dictatorships over the working class, not of the working class. Unless communists can provide theoretically verifiable explanations to the new generations of the political defeat suffered by our class in the 20th century, how can we win the 21st?
The precondition for developing genuine Marxist ideas - as a critical, questioning and perpetually developing science - is openness. Without constant critical engagement with other ideas, partial insights - even when they are the insights of leaders such as Trotsky - become ossified into dogma, or semi-religion.
This explains the sorry plight of the Trotskyist sects of which you have had such bad experiences. These groups contain many fine comrades. Historically they have defended some fundamental Marxist principles - such as the need to smash the capitalist state apparatus - against the rightward drift of the official world communist movement. Yet internal regimes were constructed that were more about policing the ideological views of the members than being of real use to the class.
Again, I emphasise that our approach to party-building is not, as some idiotically suggest, based on an appeal for an ideological truce, or an agnostic attitude to the pivotal theoretical questions facing the workers' movement. We are for a hard, clean, transparent, Bolshevik culture of open debate, sharp clarification and united action.
We see some potentially fruitful areas for cooperation:
- The translation and publishing of each other's material.
- Exchanges in the Weekly Worker.
- As a small group, we have little to offer in the way of material aid. But we can certainly technically assist any website or publishing projects you may have.
- Joint work within the European Social Forum - crucially at its launch in Florence later this year.
- Whenever possible, face-to-face meetings and exchanges would be useful. In particular, we invite you to attend our forthcoming annual school - the Communist University - and to present a session to our comrades.
Lastly, we emphasise again that we are not proposing the formation of yet another micro-international grouping, built along 'democratic centralist' lines. Given the rudimentary nature of both our organisations, this would be clowning with the concept of 'internationalism'. However, we do sincerely believe that principled work and open debate between our two groups will make a very positive contribution to the project you correctly identify as our common goal - the creation of "new, real mass workers' [parties] in the UK and internationally".
With communist greetings
Mark Fischer
national organiser, CPGB