23.11.1995

Fools rush in

Bob Smith - For A Permanent Party Polemic Committee

The CPGB group, like the majority of other vanguardist organisations in Britain, is getting a lather up over the recently floated ‘Socialist Labour Party’. Should we join, should we affiliate, should we ignore? In the CPGB a head of steam is building up for affiliation, should the possibility present itself.

‘As long as we can keep our specific identity as communists, as long as we keep our organisational integrity, we communists should be in the thick of things, influencing events from the beginning, winning the militant workers to communism, putting forward our revolutionary programme in contradistinction to the left reformist programme of the Scargillites. It is no good carping on from the sidelines - communists must be in there, learning from and winning over the advanced workers. All this can only enrich our theory, develop our comrades and enhance communist rapprochement.’ This is the broad contour of the argument being put forward.

Well, communists certainly have no point of principle to prevent their entering social democratic institutions - left, right or centre. The merits of each situation, the tactics to be employed, are collectively determined by the Communist Party. The same goes for election work, participation in parliament, left united front work, and so on.

We communists do not tie our own hands by infantile abstentionism - we are not afraid to participate in the world of politics, no matter how impure. Our hatred of twentieth century social democracy and its perfidious role does not prevent us, when we consider it opportune, to work in social democratic formations. This is not opportunism, unless we water down our own revolutionary programme and fall in line behind the reformist one. I don’t think any of this is contentious amongst communists.

Where the contention arises is whether it is opportune now for communists, complete with their continuing ideological, political, organisational fragmentation, to be busying themselves with left social democrats. The argument that communist rapprochement will be enhanced by our participation in a Socialist Labour Party seems highly implausible to me.

If the majority of Marxist circles are hesitant to engage in communist rapprochement of their own volition, I do not see how the cut and thrust of a left reformist party will catalyse the process. On the contrary I think we will likely replicate the existing divisions. Each communist faction will be manoeuvring for position, seeking not only to win raw recruits to its own organisation but to recruit from each other. Group against group, programme against programme, tactic against tactic. No, comrades, I do not see this as a conducive climate for communist rapprochement; just more of what we already have - vanguardism.

The CPGB comrades are approaching this situation from the standpoint that there is a united communist party - and they are it. This, as Open Polemic never tire of pointing out, is a lie. Our task must remain the same - the ideological and political unity of communists, and this process has hardly begun.

Some small Marxist-Leninist circles are now in contact with each other - that is good - we should expedite that process. The majority of organisations however are keeping their distance. They have their own trajectory and they are wary of departing from it. It will take painstaking work of a non-sectarian nature to nurture what we have started. Rushing headlong into the heady world of the left reformists with their crass longings for another Attlee is no panacea for what ails our project.

The battle for a historically non-specific (non-ideological) party, a multanimous collectivist party, where democratic centralism and open polemic are the norm of party life, where the archaic practice of leader centralism has been fully exposed and consigned to the status of a twentieth century aberration - this battle is yet to be fully joined, let alone won.

Mark Fischer correctly pointed out to the CAG that we communists cannot make a ‘real difference’ “until the advanced elements of our class are organised into a genuine party with real roots in the broad mass of working people” (Weekly Worker 115). This was said in relation to Cuban solidarity work. Is it not equally true with our work with left reformists?

By all means let us welcome a left split from Blair’s New Labour and let us say so openly and publicly. Let us ‘wish them well’ while signalling our future intention to challenge their rotten reformist programme. But for now we fully conscious partisans of the class have our own work to do. Let’s get on and do it.