03.08.1995

Unprincipled liaisons

THE OPEN expression and thrashing out of differing views is an essential prerequisite to building understanding and trust between communists, one of the conditions without which communist unity cannot be forged and strengthened. As Lenin put it, “Publicity is a sword which heals the wound it makes.” Openness of ideas is both a sign and a source of strength for revolutionaries, for whom dishonesty in ideas is counterproductive.

Not so, however, for the Labourite reformists of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, whose continuing abuse of the name ‘communist’ can only survive away from the glare of publicity. When “the party” gets a mention in the Morning Star’s columns these days, it invariably means the Labour Party.

The CPB’s hint in June that an “important announcement” on communist unity would be made soon has not yet been enlarged upon in the Morning Star’s editorial, news or features columns. Further information came on July 15, when an advertisement from the CPB welcomed “all those individuals joining on the basis of the party’s aims, constitution, policy and programme” - in other words, accepting the reformist British Road to Socialism.

Precisely who was joining the CPB only became clear a week later when the anti-BRS Communist Liaison group, in its own Morning Star advertisement, urged all comrades to apply for membership of the CPB “in order to further communist unity and the revolutionary struggle for socialism”. Pull the other one! “Communist Liaison has agreed to dissolve its organisation from September 1 1995.”

After the Euro faction liquidated the CPGB into the Democratic Left in November 1991, CL was formed when the majority of the anti-British Road Straight Left faction of official communism split, through impatience with Straight Left’s congenital do-nothing ‘strategy’.

Now their (relative) dynamism, far from leading them towards the revolutionary organisation our class needs, has returned them to their much less taxing status of hopeless oppositionists in a hopeless pseudo-communist organisation loyal to the trade union bureaucracy, Labour, and hence British capitalism.

Despite dissolving their organisation, those CL individuals who join will no doubt constitute an unofficial anti-BRS faction in the CPB, increasing its inherent tendency to split and splinter in the face of new developments.

Ian Farrell