13.03.2014

Rival politics of the miners’ strike

Mark Fischer introduces another blast from the past

An important spur to the launch of The Leninist as a monthly newspaper was the slightly sobering recognition by our comrades that their small, youthful and relatively isolated tendency in the Communist Party of Great Britain was ranged against competing factions that were all, to one extent or another, liquidationist. The gerrymandered 38th (liquidationist) congress of the party dramatically confirmed this. A victory for the Eurocommunist faction hardened divisions in the organisation and quickly paved the way for bitter clashes over the political direction of the Morning Star, mass expulsions and splits.

So despite its organisational weakness, The Leninist group felt it was incumbent on itself to take on responsibility for transforming its organisation and publication into what it dubbed in its first monthly issue - itself a result of our faction upping its game - the “motor of pro-partyism”.1 This April 1984 edition reads as a sort of extended mission statement for the paper and its wider role in reaching out to advanced workers in the movement, with the intention to draw them as Leninist partisans into the inner- party struggle.

The Communist Party and its crisis were a central factor in the disarray of the broader workers’ movement in the face of an implacable Tory class war offensive. In and around this organisation were still grouped the largest number of class-conscious workers in the UK, organised in the orbit of a party that continued to wield relatively enormous influence. The theoretical and political campaign of The Leninist was not to be an “open struggle” because it ticked some politically correct ‘democratic’ box, but because it had the potential of “drawing new forces into the party from the working class” itself - it was a recruitment drive for a strategically important factional war. Given the key position of the CPGB in the workers’ movement, the “ideological struggle” that The Leninist was waging was clearly not the esoteric “preserve of intellectuals”, but was actually the “vital concern of the working class itself”.2

The article we reprint below from the May 1984 edition of our monthly actually underlines just how “vital”. Obviously, on one level it (together with the article we republished last week from the same issue) is simply our first tentative attempt to make that link between the Communist Party’s programmatic crisis and the advanced part of the class a living, reciprocal one. And true, they still reflect the nature of the comrades who were penning them at the time - young, relatively inexperienced and isolated. However, for all the undeveloped and ‘unconnected’ feel they have in some places, these two articles have huge political strengths.

As we shall see over the coming months, the material we reprint from The Leninist will become more authoritative and knowledgeable. However, these two initial articles correctly identified some the key political issues that, left unresolved, would come to cripple the miners’ fight and ultimately lead to their defeat.

Despite their historically specific nature, it is remarkable how contemporary these articles still feel. They work as critiques of the illusions and political absurdities of the left today.

Mark Fischer

Notes

1. The Leninist, no8, April 1984, p3.
2. The Leninist no1, winter 1981, p7.