29.01.2015

What Kate did next

Andy Croft (editor) After the party: reflections on life since the CPGB Lawrence and Wishart, 2012, pp224, £15.99

This is an awful book that is probably clogging up jumble sales and remainder shops as we speak if its publishers were unwise enough to print too many copies. However, it is worth a few passing notes in the form of a review, as it does vividly illustrate how the politics of the ‘official’ Communist Party of Great Britain, which was formally liquidated back in 1991, still shadows and lives on in our contemporary left.

By comparing the recollections of two people who were in different sections of the CPGB - Kate Hudson and Mark Perryman - we can see how nostalgia for this or that element of the old party’s reformist practice forms a corrosive complement to the present. Simply put, most of the ideas that animated the closing decades of the ‘official’ CPGB and its various factions are not benign objects that can be wielded without causing immense damage in the future.

Kate Hudson, Left Unity’s national secretary, has a chapter that has also been reproduced on the LU website.¹ Hudson joined the CPGB in 1979 and was a member until the party’s dissolution in 1991. Indeed, it seems she is a relatively unreconstructed ‘official’ communist, offering a sanitised and selective version of its past. Thus, Rajani Palme Dutt - a leading member of the party until the 1950s (although he did not pass away until 1974) and editor of Labour Monthly - is referred to as a “formidable anti-colonialist” (p34). This, as Hudson well knows, is definitively not what Dutt is remembered for, given that he became somewhat notorious, even among broadly pro-Soviet elements in the CPGB, for his endless toadying toward Moscow. (However, it should be noted that she also throws in a quote from Trotsky (p39) to suit the more agnostic tenor of our times, where it is not really the thing in polite left circles to quibble over ‘dead Russians’.)

In strategic terms, Hudson makes it clear that she does not have much of an argument with the ‘official’ CPGB’s strategy. She writes: “The Communist Party had been an anchor to the left in British politics, and with its dissolution a small yet extremely significant part of the political landscape was vacated and has not yet been filled” (p36). Hudson goes on to state that those who closed the CPGB down failed to “understand the political role of the Communist Party and the historical necessity for it in the advancement not only of the working class, but of humanity as a whole” (p37). This clearly reflects the dogmas espoused by the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain (CPB), of which Hudson was a member until 2011. It is true that the old CPGB did to some extent act as an anchor of a broader left in the British labour movement, but by the 1980s the strain of espousing (broadly) reformist social democratic politics left it bereft of any independent role and ripe for liquidation.

In the very best diplomatic fashion, Hudson chooses not to elaborate directly why the CPB did not measure up to the old CPGB in the political stakes. However, we can guess whom she has in mind from the following passage concerning those parties who “think that the essence of communism was defined by tradition and formula rather than by how actually to advance the anti-imperialist struggle in the current moment, and that this might involve the same principles but different strategy, tactics and methods” (p41). Hudson goes to argue that such parties are “nostalgic communist sects, living in the past” (p41).

This judgement is a part acknowledgement of previous subterranean tensions inside the CPB. During Hudson's work in the Stop the War Coalition, she was considered by an unregenerate Stalinist section of the CPB's membership to have simply 'gone native with Trotskyites' alongside Andrew Murray, another CPB member working in StWC. Here, she says what “an interesting and very positive experience” it was to work with the Socialist Workers Party and other left groups (p47). While CPB general secretary Rob Griffiths was prepared to tolerate this kind of breezy agnosticism, others inside the organisation were a tad more negative and a tad less forgiving.

But, while Hudson might now be formally outside the ‘official’ communist movement after departing the CPB, it is the politics of the old CPGB that continue to shadow her thinking. She bemoans that the absence of a “hegemonic anti-cuts position” is down to the disappearance of the CPGB and that the loss of “that anchor to the left of the mainstream” is “a blow to our society” (p47). As a recipe for her current organisation, Left Unity, this makes depressing reading and suggests little advance beyond an indecent nostalgia for politics that drove the CPGB into crisis from the 1960s.

Eurocommunists

Mark Perryman’s own brand of nostalgia is focused more specifically on the legacy of popular frontism and his role as self-appointed spokesman for a tiny groupuscule that wishes to celebrate the Eurocommunist incarnation of Marxism Today under the editorship of Martin Jacques in the 1980s (the odious Eurocommunist faction was by then effectively in charge of the CPGB, in alliance with a deluded section of the party’s old leadership).

However, he does raise one decent point when complaining that, after the Democratic Left and other forgettable Euro ‘heirs’ of the old party had sunk into predictable oblivion, the substantial capital assets of the CPGB were “given away to an ineffectual electoral reform group” - a reference to the Unlock Democracy organisation (p29). As Perryman notes, this has meant that organisations that have nothing to do whatsoever with communism have benefited from the hard work of past generations of its activists. (There is a sub-argument here about ‘Moscow gold’, which, in my opinion, is a bit of a red herring, given that not much of the ‘gold’ percolated through the party.)

But then this is what happens when the liquidationist politics that figures such as Perryman argued for come to fruition - alien politics take on alien organisational forms. In any case, this legalised ‘asset stripping’ had already started to take place in the CPGB in the form of Perryman’s beloved Marxism Today. The party was effectively subsidising a publication that had been wrenched away from its former role as the party’s official discussion journal and transformed into a bland and anodyne ‘left’ journal that was seemingly open to any passing ephemeral musings of the Euro faction and its friends - or, on occasion, reactionary establishment figures such as Sir Alfred Sherman, ex-communist turned Thatcherite (Marxism Today, however, did not necessarily have a better track record as an actual party discussion journal under the previous editorship of James Klugmann - it was unfondly dubbed Revisionism Today by some of the party’s left factions).

As is to be expected, most CPGB members actively loathed Marxism Today and Jacques. Perryman himself, who joined the magazine in 1986, is forced to admit that even “the centrists [ie, those ‘loyalists’ not directly associated with the party’s left opposition] resented the success of the Marxism Today ‘label’ at the expense of the CP’s label” (p20). Another Euro active at the time, Willie Thompson, putting perhaps the best-possible spin on the situation, says: “Inside the party the number of unqualified enthusiasts for the journal was not large.”²

This “success” turned out to be a very fragile thing indeed. What drove those such as Neil Kinnock to hail Marxism Today was that it was a CPGB journal that was seen to be flaying communism. In bourgeois circles, this was the overriding interest in it and the entire rationale for its energetic promotion. As Perryman notes, “the magazine’s media coverage was more often than not couched in terms of how strange it was that a Communist Party magazine should be writing these things” (p19). He adds: “If anybody else had done so it would have hardly been worth a mention” (p19). Perryman is not exactly trumpeting the quality of Marxism Today’s editing and writing here, but it was no surprise then that the journal winked out of existence shortly after the CPGB itself. There was simply no further need for an anti-communist magazine run by communists - that was all so 1986, darling.

For Perryman, Marxism Today (get a sick bucket ready for this one) “echoed my evolving understanding that, if politics was to be effectively transformational rather than to retreat into its own version of conservatism, it required forms that were prefigurative and plural, a culture that was participative and pleasurable” (p16). Where, pray, were these types of values on show on behalf of the Euro faction in the CPGB, as it used the traditional, conservative, bureaucratic centralist machinery of the party to quash dissent and expel whole swathes of the membership? I wonder how “participative and pleasurable” it was for Perryman to be part of a Young Communist League leadership busily expelling communists after the police were called on black members in Hackney in 1984.³

However, do not despair, dear reader: all is not dead in comrade Perryman’s ‘official’ communist world! He talks about how the unpopular popular fronts of the 1930s (“which managed to include vicars [gasp!], Liberals and even Tories” - p26) have given him some very profound inspiration indeed for his Philosophy Football T-shirt concern: “Who would ever have imagined that a grounding in creative Marxism could form the basis of a small business’s niche-marketing success?” (p26). Who indeed?

Perhaps this could form a fitting epitaph to the CPGB’s Eurocommunist faction: ‘I signed up for the project of human liberation and all I got was this lousy T-shirt’.

Howard Phillips

Notes

1. http://leftunity.org/political-life-after-the-communist-party.

2. W Thompson The good old cause: British communism 1920-1991 London 1992, p199. Most of Marxism Today’s readers were outside the CPGB by the mid-1980s.

3. See Mark Fischer’s reply to Perryman (Letters Weekly Worker December 19 2013).