21.12.1995

‘The Third Faction’

Bob Smith - For a Permanent Party Polemic Committee

Last week I spoke of there being not one but two factions operating under the banner of the CPGB. The Open Polemic faction (For a permanent Party polemic committee, FPPPC) and the Leninist faction. While Open Polemic comrades had openly constituted themselves as a faction, the ‘Leninists’ of the old CPGB had not. This situation needs to be rectified post haste. But the actual situation is more complicated yet. There is, in effect, a third faction, an external faction of the CPGB consisting of those comrades who, in mid 1993, left the organisation.

Some of the details of their departure are laid out in a CPGB text, Problems of communist organisation. This is principally the Provisional Central Committee’s view of events that led up to the rupture, but it does include, as appendices, statements from departing comrades. It is not Open Polemic’s intention to replay that particular set of circumstances. Nor do we intend to take sides in that dispute. What we do say is that the content matter of the dispute is of central concern to the Open Polemic project.

What we would say to those comrades who left - get back in touch with the CPGB. That can be done through the pages of the Weekly Worker or it can be done in the first instance by private correspondence. It can be done by contacting Open Polemic or its comrades inside the CPGB. The point being is that it can be done and should be done.

Why do we make this call? Primarily because things have changed for the better in the past year.  The process of communist rapprochement has begun. The questions raised by the departing comrades are back on the agenda. The Open Polemic faction is geared up to continually addressing these questions of democratic centralism. For all these reasons, and none that I can think to the contrary, contact should be re-established.

Apart from anything else, this would be a real test of the maturity of the CPGB organisation. If it cannot reach a reconciliation with its own ex-comrades (when there is no fundamental programmatic difference), then it has little chance of carrying through the rapprochement process. But if a reconciliation can be achieved then we can all enter the New Year with a belief that all things are possible.

Concretely we can point to a number of very positive developments in the CPGB. Firstly, the pages of the Weekly Worker are increasingly being opened up to debate with and by other tendencies and groups. Secondly, the Bob Smith column has been published regularly and without the least hint of censorship for the past four months. Thirdly, open debate is regularly taking place with other currents at the London seminars as witnessed by the recent debate concerning the LRCI. Fourthly, the Weekly Worker is being expanded to a regular eight pages in order to allow more polemic to be published. Fifthly, a certain maturity is finding its way into the work of the PCC, as evidenced by their dealings with both the RDG and the Open Polemic comrades. But despite all these healthy signs, everything is embryonic, tentative and prone to reversal. The situation will only be firmed up with the participation of other serious comrades.

Rapprochement can take many forms. Open Polemic has chosen a representational entry, as comrade Fischer has pointed out to the RDG, but there are other ways forward. It’s now opportune for the ‘third faction’ to rejoin the fray and add its weight to the process of communist rapprochement. Open Polemic considers this urgent, all the more so since we have detected a strong tendency both outside and even inside the CPGB for communist rapprochement to begin amongst the intermediate strata of the class, a bottom-up approach to re-building the nucleus of the party. Open Polemic insists this is wrong. We have asserted from the beginning that it is the advanced workers, the communist workers who must first take account of their own ideological and political fragmentation. CPGB comrades would do well to heed this Leninist tenet.