21.12.1995

The year ahead: Nothing is preordained

Mark Fischer, CPGB national organiser, looks at Perspectives 96 - adopted by a Communist Party members’ aggregate, December 1995

In the few months since the first draft of the Communist Party’s perspectives document for 1996 was written, working class politics have started to move. Proposals from Scargill to form a ‘Socialist Labour Party’ have caused real movement and change.

Some leading militants have resigned from organisations in disgust at their leadership’s negative knee-jerk reaction. Sects like the Communist Party of Britain are starting to exhibit pre-split fault lines, as elements of the organisation respond in very different ways. The largest group on the revolutionary left - the politically fragile Socialist Workers Party - is struggling to maintain its sectarian distance from the new organisation. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of the very best militants of our class are looking to the new development with hope. Behind them, millions more are potential recruits to a viable party, able to articulate the bitter anger of working people.

This is a very exciting development. In our Perspectives 96 we noted that:

“Objectively ... conditions for the working class to take big strides forward exist - an intact movement, an extraordinarily weak ruling party (also, it should be added, a large body of organised revolutionaries, generally of good quality) ... everything is in place for us to make real advances. The real problem is a subjective one.”

A major realignment of forces to the left of Labour could fill the enormous political vacuum that has opened up in society. This could be an opportunity of historic importance to solve this subjective lag - the absence of a mass, revolutionary working class party in Britain.

All of our activity in the coming period must be subordinated to this key question. It sets in context all of the details of our perspectives for 1996 and all our work.

Perspectives 96 notes that the discussions around the new party “offer us real opportunities if we move to influence and shape them as they happen”. Clearly, the ‘Scargill draft’ - his proposals for the constitution and rules of the new party (see Weekly Worker 122) - opens up a key area of contentious debate. Our comrades must respond vigorously.

We will argue for a ‘Democracy Platform’ in the Socialist Forums where we are active and in those that we are cooperating with others to form. We currently are in discussions with other organisations to formulate this platform more precisely but we are clear that its key elements must be:

The sovereignty of the founding congress.The only body with the authority to decide on the constitution, rules and essential nature of the new party is the founding congress itself. Until such a democratically convened congress, all documents - no matter how authoritative and respected their supporters - must be seen as contributions to the debate.

To be a real party of the working class, there must be genuine democracy.Political unity cannot be imposed from above. There must be room in the new organisation for organised political platforms, tendencies and for affiliated organisations to retain their own programmes, principles and policies, to have distinctive and separate propaganda in addition to their support for the publications of the new party.

For political openness!There must be no more secret meetings and samizdat constitutions. These questions are of vital importance for the workers’ movement - all of it. They must be debated openly by all individuals and organisations committed to the fight for socialism.

These are the core elements of the democratic platform that communists will fight for in the debates around the launch of a new party of the working class. Our comrades and others must intervene as decisively as we possibly can to ensure that the huge potential of this initiative is not squandered.

This is the key fight for our organisation in the coming period and sets into context our other work. For example, there is the question of communist rapprochement.

What is rapprochement for?

The fight for rapprochement and communist unity is not a separate process in our single-minded orientation towards the new party. On the contrary, developments such as the projected ‘Socialist Labour Party’ are precisely what rapprochement is all about.

A year ago, our organisation launched the call for others to join us in the fight for a reforged Communist Party (see Weekly Worker December 14 1994, supplement by Jack Conrad - ‘Party, non-ideology and faction’). We underlined that this was not a demand for other trends to dissolve themselves. Full factional rights were offered to other groups - the right to publish independently or in the pages of the Weekly Worker; the right to organise their own finances and events. The only restriction is during agreed actions of the Party - in other words, freedom of open debate and discussion, unity in action.

A number of small organisations have responded positively to the offer - representatives from Open Polemic took the courageous decision to enter our organisation as a minority faction. This is very pleasing - it represents more progress than many of us believed possible in such a relatively short space of time. However, such realignment amongst micro-groups does not lie at the heart of the process of communist unity.

The membership aggregate that passed Perspectives 96 vigorously debated our attitude to rapprochement. Comrades from the For a Permanent Party Polemic Committee (the Open Polemic faction of the Party) expressed their sincerely held fear that by pushing ahead with the discussion of programmatic questions - an element of Perspectives 96 - the Party majority would alienate potential candidates for rapprochement.

In fact, the majority of organisations we are currently in contact with have welcomed our orientation to questions of programme. This is a secondary point, however.

The unity of different viewpoints under the banner of Partyism is the significance of rapprochement. I have put it this way - our initiative on communist unity is not about constructing an organisation where the current organisations which inhabit the British left feel comfortable. The communist rapprochement process is to create an organisation where the advanced elements of the class itself will be ‘comfortable’, where leaders thrown up by real struggle will be able to fight for clarity and then unite for action.

Communist unity is - as Lenin points out - something that the workers themselves win, not the sects. Advanced workers are advanced precisely because they are able to articulate the interests of the class as a whole. Thus they self-define in relation to questions like the Socialist Labour Party or programme, not the mantras of ‘Marxist-Leninist’ orthodoxy advocated by OP comrades.

The new party must be able to bring together the advanced elements of our class in a combat party - this is the real point of our fight for communist unity.

Strengths and weaknesses

Obviously, we have very big tasks facing us in 1996. How does our organisation measure up?

Perspectives 96 identifies some of our key strengths and weaknesses. One of our key problems remains our lack of local organisation and a tiny cadre base. This is a frustrating problem we inherit as an historical legacy from our factional fight inside the disintegrating Communist Party during the 1980s. Undoubtedly, we will have to spread our organisation very thinly to intervene in all the struggles our class faces this coming year. This will require our comrades - all of them - to raise themselves to tasks, to grow qualitatively as working class politicians.

Our numerical problems notwithstanding, we judge that we are in a relatively strong position vis à vis our opponents on the revolutionary left.

CPGB strengths

Tradition of communism. We have captured the banner of the Party. No other organisation could legitimately lay claim to it now. Despite its opportunist degeneration, the legacy of the Communist Party is an important one. All other sections of the left define themselves in relation to this genuinely working class party’s history - both positive and negative.

Rapprochement process/‘Partyism’. Our roots in the heritage of communism in Britain have given us a real understanding of party - the key question facing all elements of the revolutionary left. This understanding has been deepened and enriched by the process of communist rapprochement. All our opponents - from the largest to the most ephemeral - are characterised by their lack of understanding of communist unity and democratic centralism. All treat political differences as matters of conspiracy. At best, dissent is reserved for ‘internal bulletins’; at worst it is suppressed. A workers’ party can never be built in this way.

Details

Perspectives 96 contains detailed proposals designed to develop the work of our branches. National meetings and events are presented in a far more integrated way to develop a more homogenous feel to our organisation.

However, these details of Perspectives are not written in stone. We believe that the potential of the SLP dwarfs any quantitative improvements we could make in our organisation in abstract. The debates, realignments and growing cooperation between different trends could yield a qualitatively new organisation - a reforged revolutionary communist party. Indeed, through this process of engagement and struggle, our organisation - and all the comrades in it - must transform themselves to meet the challenge.

It’s all there to fight for, comrades!