19.10.1995

Stalinist by name

An SWP member from East Midlands puts some questions to the RDG on its joint open letter with the CPGB to the SWP

I have a brief comment to make on the open letter, which I feel bears the clear stamp of the CPGB’s approach to unity (as evidenced by recent Weekly Worker articles).

Although the CP claim to want to build a ‘non-idelogical’ party in which ideological, historical questions should not dominate, it seems to me (and other comrades I discussed this with) that the biggest ideological question of all is the very name ‘Communist Party’.

This carries more discredited historical baggage than anything else. The idea that the Socialist Workers Party should respond to an initiative to reforge such a party is repugnant to most.

It amounts to an ultimatum that the SWP, with its thousands of members, join a tiny group which only recently broke with Stalinism and adopt its name! Whilst constituting the overwhelming majority of the Party, the SWP would then be given full factional rights!

That a group such as the Revolutionary Democratic Group should go along with this seems to me to be bizarre and a repudiation of the whole International Socialist/state capitalist tradition. Perhaps you have a different assessment of the CPGB Leninists’ trajectory?

Dave Craig of the Revolutionary Democratic Group (faction of the SWP) replies:

The open letter is not any kind of ultimatum to the SWP. It is a principled call to begin discussions and work for communist unity. All communists, regardless of what faction, sect or group they belong to should support that call. Sectarians in our movement prefer to wallow in disunity.

We are ready at any time to have discussions with the SWP about greater unity, without any preconditions. The CPGB are equally ready to work for unity. To demonstrate that we mean what we say we are not waiting for the SWP central committee but are working for unity between the RDG and CPGB now.

Whether we will be able to fuse into a single organisation remains to be seen. But I can say that comrades in both organisations can recognise real benefits from the work done so far. Not least amongst these has been a higher level of debate and ideological clarification. Unity is a process that has to be worked for.

If the SWP was prepared to unite with other communists then the organisational arrangements would be subject to discussion and agreement. But let us be realistic. Since the SWP has the majority of Marxists in its ranks, it is inconceivable that they would join the CPGB. The most realistic form of unity would be for us to join the SWP.

Now let us consider the name ‘CPGB’. The present Provisional Central Committee of the CPGB is a small group of communists with a direct line of descent from the Party founded in 1920. They are not a Stalinist organisation, either in terms of their view of the USSR or the nature of their internal democracy.

But you are quite right to say that the CPGB carries a heavy baggage of Stalinist history.

By taking the name ‘CPGB’ these comrades have assumed the responsibility for settling accounts with the past and establishing the truth about their own heritage. Surely this is better for the working class than discarding the name and calling yourself ‘Democratic Left’ or whatever.

It is wrong to say that the name ‘Communist Party’ is a Stalinist name. It was the name expropriated by Stalinism in order to fool the working class, just as Tony Blair sometimes calls himself ‘socialist’. The Bolshevik Party was not a Stalinist party. It was transformed into one. Neither was the CPGB until Stalinism took over.

You seem to think it is “bizarre” that the RDG, from the IS/SWP tradition, should talk with the CPGB, which comes from a Stalinist tradition. But perhaps you do not recognise that the USSR has ended. This was a political event of some significance. Perhaps we are amongst the first to recognise this, unlike Socialist Worker which still carries the slogan, ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’!

We have to break down our own ‘Berlin Wall’ which now keeps the communist movement artificially divided and helps our class enemies.