07.12.1995
Competing revolutionary theories
The CPGB organised a special meeting last Sunday to discuss the recent splits in the League for a Revolutionary Communist International, which is led by the Workers Power group in Britain. The issues that have precipitated these splits are of vital importance to the entire revolutionary movement and thus should be debated openly. The main speaker was José Villa, a leading member of the LRCI’s Bolivian section, Poder Obrero. Danny Hammill reports
THIS WAS a very lively meeting, which was attended by around 40 comrades from different organisations and trends in the revolutionary movement. The debate covered a whole range of important questions - the counterrevolutionary nature of this ‘epoch’, the role of imperialism and anti-imperialism, the crucial importance of democracy in forging revolutionary organisations, and so on.
In many ways, this was also a significant meeting. The old lines of division - which previously have only acted to impede, if not retard, any genuine debate - are now gradually melting away, creating room for a creative ‘cross-fertilisation’ of all the competing revolutionary theories and schools of thought. This only bodes well for future discussions and, crucially, for the project of communist rapprochement.
The only disappointment was that Workers Power was unable to attend the meeting to defend its position. We would welcome further exchanges on this issue however.
Comrade José Villa remarked that Trotskyists have always believed that “Stalinist” organisations, such as the CPGB, are anti-democratic and do not allow open discussion. However, said José, “Now the opposite is true.” Here he was speaking at a CPGB meeting “with complete freedom”, while he is banned from attending meetings of the Workers Power group, which professes loyalty to orthodox Trotskyism - “a new situation”, as he described it.
The main bulk of José’s speech dealt with the twists and turns of WP’s political history, characterised as it is by frequent and dramatic line changes. José’s group, Poder Obrero, began discussions with WP 10 years ago and aligned itself to WP/LRCI not long after.
The Bolivian comrades supported the WP line on Ireland, Argentina and the Soviet Union. This saw WP upholding and then attempting to develop the classical Trotskyist position on the bureaucratic socialist states, defining them as degenerate/deformed workers’ states.
But, according to José, by the end of the 1980s, WP started to exhibit signs of instability, which led to “big shifts” in its world view. The August 1991 coup/counterrevolution in the Soviet Union provided one of the most dramatic examples, with WP advocating that revolutionaries should form ‘united fronts’ with Yeltsin and the various newly forming proto-bourgeois parties.
This caused consternation in the Bolivian section. The comrades there took it for granted that bourgeois/parliamentary democracy would be a step backwards for the ‘degenerate workers’ states’ - as José eloquently put it: “I prefer Fidel Castro a thousand times, compared to a Tony Blair.”
According to WP, though, the move to bourgeois democracy in the Soviet Union and elsewhere was now classified as progressive. As far as José was concerned, this was “going in a liberal direction ... under the pressure of bourgeois democracy.”
This shifting and vacillation is apparent on a whole swathe of issues - eg, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, etc. José and his comrades found WP’s ‘pro-muslim’ orientation in the Bosnia war particularly upsetting, given the fact that WP had originally condemned all sides to the conflict in ex-Yugoslavia. He was outraged by WP’s recent call for “the defeat of the Serbs” - issued when Nato bombs were falling on Serb positions in Bosnia - and by the fact that the mass ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Serbs from the Krajina area by joint Croatian-muslim forces was welcomed as “progressive”.
José posed the question: “How can you have internal democracy in an organisation like WP, which changes its position like you change your underpants?”
This raised the vital questions of party democracy and the internal regime inside WP. When the Bolivian comrades in 1992 decided to form a faction, José told the meeting that the WP leadership told them point blank that they did not have the right to form a faction, or publish their views openly.
July of this year saw the resignation of the founding leadership and half the members of the New Zealand WP group, as well as a meeting of the International Executive Committee of the LRCI.
José was banned from the meeting - in clear violation of LRCI statutes, which declares that every full member has the right to attend an IEC meeting. Worse still, José was forbidden to talk to IEC members.
After nearly four years of confining their criticisms to internal meetings, bulletins and documents, Poder Obrero decided to go ‘public’. As a result, the Bolivian section - along with the fraternal Peruvian section - were expelled from the LRCI. The IEC/LRCI circulated a document in Bolivia justifying the move. José says he was never sent a copy - obtaining it via a member of a different organisation!
At the end of his speech, José stressed the importance of “open discussion” and of learning the lessons from WP’s degeneration into a “rightwing, bureaucratic sect”, as the comrade coined it. Various views were expressed in the subsequent discussion.
Brian, an ex-member of WP, believed that the “biggest tragedy” was WP’s chronic misunderstanding of the “nature of the period” - ie, its counterrevolutionary nature. By failing to grasp which direction history is moving in, WP was condemned to “opportunism” and irrelevancy. Brian saw this as the main lesson to draw upon: “Workers Power missed what is happening in the world and they have been run over by it.”
Phil Sharpe, from the Trotskyist Unity Group, drew a different lesson. He said that the “theoretical gains” made by WP in the early 1980s “tragically turned into its opposite”. For Phil this was the result of “complacency” and “stagnation”, which strongly revealed itself during the Great Miners’ Strike. This reached its culmination in the publication of the Trotskyist Manifesto, whose approach to history was “objectivist and fatalist”. By this, Phil meant that WP regarded history as something which moves inexorably towards its ‘final goal’ - ie, communism. There-fore, why worry about a little bit of counterrevolution here and there?
Phil argued, with conviction, that you can generalise from the WP experience. Like other revolutionary left groups, WP suffers from what Phil called “party ideology”. This is the strange belief that your party world view is inherently true, and everybody else’s is inherently false. For the TUG comrades this is contrary to the Marxist spirit: any ‘real’ revolutionary Marxist organisation must continually criticise its own programme and theory. To be a Marxist means, by definition, to ruthlessly criticise everything that passes as ‘Marxism’.
An Open Polemic comrade reminded the TUG comrades that they needed to be inside the Party process to make their philosophical arguments relevant. Other groups could strengthen the rapprochement process which he felt the CPGB was retreating from.
Comrade John Bridge from the CPGB agreed with TUG that “party ideology” needed to be fought. In comrade Bridge’s opinion, it sprang from the notion that there is an ‘absolute truth’ to be defended. Logically, you then build an internal regime whose sole aim is to defend this ‘truth’ - by any means necessary ...
Comrade Bridge contrasted this absolutist approach to sect-building with what he regarded as the genuine Leninist approach to party-building, where “all our internal differences must become the property of the class”. We should not be “embarrassed” by the fact that we have differences and disagreements. No party, or human being, has a monopoly on truth, which can only be arrived at through openness and revolutionary practice - not through “exclusivist world views”.
This sentiment was echoed by a comrade from the Communist Action Group. He had been initially dubious about the CPGB’s proposal for a “non-ideological” party, having assumed it to be a call for an ‘ideological’ truce and a retreat into political/philosophical “agnosticism”.
There were many other useful contributions, including two from other South American comrades. A comrade from the International Bolshevik Tendency found it interesting to see the question of party democracy within WP, and other leftwing groups, being discussed seriously by a non-Trotskyist organisation. This provided a refreshing new angle. However, he was still unsure as to whether openly discussing internal differences was healthy for a revolutionary Leninist organisation - it could weaken it, in his opinion.
A comrade from the Revolutionary Democratic Group put forward the idea that the collapse of ‘official communism’ also signalled the end of Trotskyism, which depended on ‘Stalinism’ for its ideological existence.
The debate was thought-provoking and stimulating - it also gave us a feel, albeit on a micro-scale, as to what the ‘non-ideological’ Party of the future will be like. This was recognised by José at the end of the meeting, when he said: “I will go back to Bolivia and tell my comrades that the CPGB is not a Stalinist party.”