Letters

Living paper

Inevitably as Bob Smith enters a living, breathing, dynamic organism and attempts - through his nightmare utopian schema - to turn it into a mere dead machine of its former self, he will find himself in all sorts of muddles.

His confusion and frustration, as represented in last week’s and previous columns, should therefore not surprise us.

Throughout the rapprochement process of course we have constantly debated and attempted to clarify the questions raised, but lest comrades think they are banging their heads against a brick wall, I think it is important to locate the roots of the problem.

The process of party building and the party structure envisaged by Bob Smith lack a real understanding of the relationship between the Party and the class, theory and practice, form and essence.

Therefore Bob Smith admits (apparently without embarrassment) that as a member of the Weekly Worker editorial committee, he does not read most of the paper, because he does not care what comrades think about Bosnia, strikes, the health service - or anything, it seems, that does not relate to his rather elusive category of  ‘Marxist- Leninists’.

Apparently our job is to unite ‘Marxists-Leninists’ in a faultless - or almost faultless - mechanical structure. Only when all the bolts are in the right place and every joint is well oiled can this, at last, be unleashed on the world to manufacture a mass party.

I have been moved to write this week, after several Bob Smith hand-wringing columns, because of his comments on the paper. The substantial point has been made, but just to smooth out some of Bob’s ruffles ...

The Weekly Worker, like the organisation, is a living, breathing, developing paper which because of - not in spite of - the Bolshevik flexibility of our organisation, forged through theory and practice, can intervene in events in a multi-layered world.

As a theoretical journal, an agitational Daily Worker (as it was for a time), as a tool for rapprochement, as election propaganda. How it develops will depend on how successful we are and who, when and what joins the process of reforging the CPGB.

At present we discuss and debate in seminars, in other Party organisations and in the paper in order to come nearer the truth about everything, in order that the future Party of the working class has the ability to transform everything.

This is not an anarchic free-for-all, but an attempt to collectively come to a higher understanding which we hope will be expressed more often than not in a majority view that is correct.

In its striving for truth, through the ongoing process of debate, the paper does therefore reflect collective discussions - past and present - particularly the weekly PCC political report (which is, incidentally, for comrades outside London, reflected in the paper - the first point of organisation for communists).

Articles are signed nevertheless so that shades of opinion or open disagreements can be argued out in the paper. Resolutions, PCC statements, editorials and factional columns are indicated as such.

The front page is usually a short agitation piece guided by discussions and the emerging majority view, edited by myself.

Bob’s factional eye on the organisation is undoubtedly useful and will take every comrades’ understanding onto a higher level. However I can assure him and Open Polemic comrades that more long serving members are only too aware of organisational weaknesses. Weaknesses that Bob cannot even conceive of until he breaks out of his formalism and launches himself fully into the communist work of collectively striving to understand and influence all aspects of life.

Party organisation must be fought for, nurtured and developed through this struggle, not in isolation from it.

Lee-Anne Bates
Editor

Distinction

Bob Smith thoroughly confuses the issue of the disagreement around the name his faction has chosen for itself (Weekly Worker 116).

The objection to his ‘Provisional Polemic Committee’ is not that he and his comrades are vigorously counterposing “what is” to what “should be” by choosing such a name. The comrades are at perfect liberty to agitate for any platform they wish although I and many others believe their views to be hopelessly wrong.

The point made was that they are not a committee of the Party. Unlike the Provisional Central Committee of our organisation they have been elected by no one and are thus accountable to no one in the Party. I’m pleased to see that comrade Smith acknowledges this. I am also happy to note that his faction undertakes to sign all subsequent documents (external and internal, I hope) ‘For a Permanent Party Polemic Committee’ - an accurate description of their current incarnation.

The Party as a whole has not democratically agreed that we will have a permanent Party polemic committee. The Party has - on the other hand - agreed that we need a leadership, that this leadership is correctly called a central committee and that at this stage of the process of fighting for a reforged Party it is accurate to qualify its status as ‘provisional’. With that common understanding our entire organisation voted for such a leading committee and created the PCC.

I do think it important that the comrades appreciate the distinction that is being made, to declare themselves a Party committee would simply be a recipe for organisational anarchy, not democratic centralism.

Mark Fischer
National Organiser, CPGB

Inexplicable

Echoing Bob Smith’s query (Weekly Worker 118) - in his ‘Challenge to Labour’ article, is Mark Fischer expressing his opinions, the opinion of the Weekly Worker editorial board, or the opinion of the PCC? It’s a serious query because of the serious content of the article and the seriousness of the unspoken questions it raises.

As to the content, Mark Fischer asks the right question: namely, what sort of alternative to the Labour Party will the Socialist Labour Party prove to be? Unsurprisingly he is unable to answer this question; his inability is unsurprising since none of the public statements issued either by Arthur Scargill or Militant Labour have provided enough of substance from which to draw the necessary conclusions. What is inexplicable is Mark Fischer’s failure to describe in any detail what sort of organisation the Socialist Labour Party should be.

Alongside this failure to clarify his/the paper’s/the Party’s position, there is a tension apparent throughout the piece. It is the tension between the CPGB’s desire for a quick fix to their current isolation from the working class (an isolation they share with the rest of the revolutionary left), and their recognition of the need not for a left alternative to the Labour Party but for a revolutionary opposition to it. After all, left social democracy is still social democracy.

What I get from the above is the whiff of an almost indecent haste on the part of Mark Fischer (or is it the Weekly Worker editorial board, or the PCC?) to put the CPGB forward as a would-be affiliate to an as yet unspecified Socialist Labour Party; to an organisation without aims, constitution, principles or programme (but that’s another story).

If this is not the case, then why has not Mark Fischer, the Weekly Worker editorial board, or the PCC engaged in print with alternative/opposition to Labour proposals of either Militant Labour or the WRP? Even more telling in this regard: why hasn’t the Weekly Worker provided coverage of the Red Action-inspired Independent Working Class Association Initiative? It is an initiative which the CPGB has been involved in for some time, and it is an initiative which has been discussed by Red Action, the RCG and the CAG (among others), in their respective publications.

Publish the various proposals; let your readers contribute to the debate which must occur over these different initiatives. And to get things moving along, how about some answers - from Mark Fischer, the Weekly Worker editorial board, the PCC or whoever - to the following questions:

• What sort of organisation does the CPGB think the Socialist Labour Party should be?
• Why hasn’t there been a response to either Militant Labour’s or the WRP’s proposals?
• What is the CPGB’s position with regard to the Independent Working Class Initiative proposed by Red Action?

R Hickman
Bristol

Lefty

In Weekly Worker 118 Phil Kent says that I, through the pages of Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!, accuse the CPGB (PCC) of being “in favour of ethnic cleansing in ex-Yugoslavia”.

I made the same accusation in a letter to the Weekly Worker (107). Funnily enough neither Phil nor anyone else chose to reply to my letter.

Interestingly, in the same article Phil quotes Socialist Organiser’s call for “solidarity with the Bosniacs”. Phil then adds in brackets “Bosnian Muslims”.

I think this says volumes about the CPGB (PCC)’s deceitful political line on Bosnia. Bosniacs are Serb, Croat, Jewish, mixed and Muslims.

Of course the Bosnian people’s struggle (against Serb and Croat expansionism, Nato/UN imperialism and, indeed, their own treacherous leadership) for national independence and the right for people to live together, whatever their ethnic/religious background, is not always as simple as we would like.

Of course there are reactionaries on all sides but, if whenever the going gets tough, lefty runs away, things are not going to get better.

However the CPGB (PCC)’s history of standing up to fascism is a pathetic one, as anyone acquainted with your group’s antics within and then desertion of Anti-Fascist Action shows.

James Tait
Edinburgh