Letters

Enough said

Bob Smith reckons “enough said” about the recent Party aggregate: not after his last article, there isn’t ... (Weekly Worker 116).

Apparently, the Party leadership was “tardy” in distributing key documents to members. Rather than poor organisation or pressure of work - the “charitable” interpretation, says Bob - this is actually yet another expression of the bureaucratic ‘leader centralism’ endemic on the left.

The key documentation referred to is the draft Perspectives ’96 currently under discussion by the Party. This outlines our broad approach to the coming twelve months, the main areas of our intervention, our assessment of our strengths and weaknesses in relation to opponents on the revolutionary left.

Most Party members had this 10-page, 3,500-word document three to four days before the November aggregate. As Bob Smith correctly notes, not really long enough for a full Party discussion and a properly informed debate.

However the November aggregate was the preliminary discussion, the beginning of the debate on a very recently completed Perspectives document. As was made clear in all written information relating to the meeting, as well as in verbal exchanges at the aggregate itself, we are formally scheduled to actually vote on Perspectives ’96 at the December aggregate.

In other words, Party members will have over a month as a minimum to discuss Perspectives, formulate objections, compile amendments and so on.

Moreover, and again as was made clear to Bob and his faction at the November aggregate, it has never been the practice of our organisation to truncate these important debates. In previous years, we have extended discussions of the Party’s plans into the year the Perspectives actually related to!

Thus, comrade Smith misleads readers when he says November exemplified Party membership aggregates being turned into a “glorified rubber stamp”. Comrades were not asked to “rubber stamp” or vote for anything at this aggregate, just to begin discussions towards a vote.

Why not even mention this, Bob? I know it does not do much good for the arcane theory of ‘leader centralism’, but it is true, isn’t it?

Mark Fisher
National Organiser

Tait tailism

In the October/November issue of Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! James Tait states categorically that the CPGB is in favour of ethnic cleansing in Ex-Yugoslavia. May I state equally categorically on behalf of the CPGB that this is not true.

I do not know what grounds he has for his claim, but suspect he may be confusing our call for the right of self-determination for all the peoples in the region to be respected as a carte blanche for the majority to expel the minorities. It is nothing of the sort. It is an attempt to suggest a way in which working class values can be introduced into the situation and a beginning made in re-establishing trust between workers in the area.

Comrade Tait is not interested in independent working class politics, but is content to tail bourgeois forces in a vain hope of preserving a lesser evil against a greater.

Phil Kent
Rochester