18.01.1996

An alternative anarchist pole

RAY Hickman wrote on behalf of the Open Polemic Editorial Board in Weekly Worker 124 to criticise my article (Weekly Worker 121) on the newly formed Independent Working Class Association. This reply, however, must of necessity be more to him as an individual rather than as a representative of some extra-Party body, bound by uniform views. He himself is not a member of our organisation.

As it has developed, the IWCA has constituted itself as an alternative pole to the process of communist rapprochement underway in the CPGB. Yet the most authoritative members of the Open Polemic EB are in fact now members of the Communist Party. The rapprochement that we are involved in together is described by them - quite rightly in my view - as the highest point of communist organisation in Britain today. It is not just another “possible site of communist rapprochement”, as Ray puts it - it is real rapprochement unfolding in practice. Thus, Open Polemic’s customary organisational agnosticism simply will not do any longer, I’m afraid.

Ray’s role - like the other non-CPGB members of the OPEB - is a dubious one. While leading figures of his organisation participate in a communist collective which stands undeviatingly for partyism and communist rapprochement, he is an active (and uncritical) participant in a group which reveals itself as anti-party, semi-anarchistic.

Before Ray rushes into print to defend the painfully confused politics of the IWCA, perhaps he could spare us a few thoughts on this glaring contradiction?

Moving on, I must say I was disappointed by the Hickman letter. When it contradicts itself, it does so clumsily, normally in the very next paragraph of text. When it accuses me of omission, it does so by leaving out relevant facts. It damns us with dastardly double-dealing, but in an underhand and false way.

First, on the contradictions of the politics of the IWCA (and Ray Hickman, of course). In particular, the Labour Party.

Ray accuses me of “great stupidity or a tremendous effort of will” when I suggest that the IWCA is dubbing the Labour Party a “middle class party”. Instead, he suggests that all that is being spoken of is the social origins of Labour’s “influx of new members” (all Hickman quotes from his letter, Weekly Worker 124).

Gormlessly, he then writes in the next paragraph that I should consider “how far Labour’s constitutional, programmatic and organisational abandonment of the working class - made manifest in its changed class identity - has to go before he removes the word ‘workers’ from his description [ie, of Labour as a bourgeois workers’ party - MF]”.

So in fact, what Ray is heavily implying here is that Labour’s fundamental nature has changed and in fact the class composition of new recruits is a necessary reflection - a ‘manifestation’ - of this change. The IWCA leaflet at least has the merit of being less wordy: “Labour, a middle class party for middle class people”.

This is gibberish. Many of the right’s changes in the 1980s and ’90s have actually relied on the support of the trade union bureaucracies. While the link with the trade unions has been weakened, it has not been broken. Important changes have taken place, but none that justify us suggesting that Labour has become a qualitatively new organisation. Still less, that it has become the political expression of the middle classes in Britain. This stratum remains tied to the existing system by a thousand golden threads and thus has no imperative to seek independent political expression.

In the fight for revolution, it may be correct for the proletarian party to make an alliance with revolutionary organisations the middle strata may throw up in the future. Yet this is a secondary question to the main revolutionary task in Britain - splitting the working class base of Labour to a revolutionary alternative.

To glibly call today’s Labour Party a ‘middle class party’ is to suggest that this task is no longer relevant. This is - of course - precisely the content of the position of Red Action, the main proponents of the IWCA and the drafters of the document that Ray breathlessly defends.

Ray fails to tell our readers this. But it is in the context of this posturing that we should read the passage that suggests that the IWCA will “reject entryism and the prospect of reform, be that reform of Labour or reform of the economic system”. I write that this smacks of leftism. Ray responds that it is obviously just an uncontroversial rejection of reformism.

First, a minor point. Entryism into Labour should be rejected as a strategy: but should it be rejected as a tactic? How is it possible for communists to reject any tactic in advance?

Then we move on to the question of ‘reform’ of Labour. The IWCA rejects tinkering with this “middle class” party. After all, it now has nothing whatsoever to do with the proletariat, so why bother?

Communists must be more serious, however. We are after the mass working class base of Labour, the base that will probably vote them overwhelmingly into power at the next election. Our tactics to win this layer must be flexible and infinitely patient.

Is the IWCA - or its representative Ray Hickman - safe in the knowledge that communists will never again apply for affiliation to Labour and the reforms to its constitution this would entail? Are they in the position of knowing for a fact that the CPGB will never again sponsor the development of an organisation such as the National Left Wing Movement, an attempt to “crystalise out the development of a left wing in the Labour Party” (cited in EH Carr, Socialism in One Country, Volume III-I, p348).

Then we have the nonsense of the rejection of “the reform of the economic system”. Are you saying that you are against a minimum wage, comrade? Are you against equal pay for women? Are you against work or full benefits for the unemployed?

The difference between revolutionaries and reformists is not over reforms as such. It is over method and programme. For revolutionaries, our struggle for reforms is subordinated to our strategic goal of revolution. For reformists, reform is the beginning and end of the movement.

Ironically the IWCA, rather than reject reformism, as Hickman suggests, has actually constituted itself as a sub-reformist political organisation. It intends to combine the absence of a programme with “dialogue with local communities to decide immediate priorities”.

Any organisation in today’s conditions which decides its priorities by a ‘dialogue’ with a local working class and which at the same time rejects the need for a programme will quickly dissipate into dead-end localism.

Look at the anarchists, Ray. Most of these - who also reject programme, along with tactical approaches to the ‘middle class Labour Party’, and who have disdain for the partial, economic struggles of the class for ‘reforms’ like a living wage - are a species of sub-reformists.

A reformist programme at least has a certain coherence. It presents a series of interconnected demands that lead to desired social goals - ‘socialism’ or more accurately welfare capitalism.

Sub-reformism of the anarchist - and, it seems, IWCA type - has no such coherence. It relates totally spontaneously to whatever issue or problem presents itself immediately. The IWCA is replicating the errors of the anarchists. Perhaps on an even lower basis.

I must deal briefly with Ray’s other sin of omission. He suggests to readers that PCC reps at the inaugural meetings of the IWCA played a duplicitous role, that I personally “felt unable to carry out [an] agreed task ...”

Here are the facts. In all the meetings of the proto-IWCA, PCC represent-atives made crystal clear their disagreements with the documents produced by Red Action. Prior to a meeting on October 21, we submitted two pages of amendments to the RA-authored The moment of truth. This is in stark contrast to OP rep Ray Hickman, who submitted no amendments and did not raise his voice once in the course of the meetings to express disagreement.

To push the initiative forward, however, we suggested to the meeting that the founding statement of the IWCA be just four lines of the document, a broad and principled statement that all could agree on. We then took away and completed the bulk of the meeting’s work, including the item that Ray snidely suggests we felt “unable” to undertake.

What was actually agreed? In an RA document produced prior to the October 21 meeting - Promotion, propaganda and reinforcement - a ‘programme of action’ was outlined that included the production of IWCA propaganda, with The Moment of Truth forming “the basis of the initial leaflet”.

We drafted and designed a leaflet that did just this. As indicated, we had many openly expressed disagreements with the text. Thus it is hardly likely that we would have agreed to simply “lay out” the material. We took those elements of the RA text that we identified as providing the basis for broad agreement and rewrote a draft for approval by the next meeting of the IWCA.

Indeed, we met a representative of Red Action before this meeting and incorporated his amendments.

This meeting - absurdly in my view - rejected the draft without even looking at it. It had to be The moment of truth line by line, or nothing. Ray Hickman was present at this meeting. He said nothing, I am told.

We had made our objections to this document abundantly clear. We had even taken the initiative in keeping organisations united by suggesting a limited founding statement for the IWCA. In the face of this insistence on a wrong political statement, we had no choice but to withdraw. The RDG took a similar position.

Ray’s real agenda slips out despite himself. In a mealy-mouthed fashion, he writes that this document does not explicitly “contradict OP’s Marxist-Leninist fundamentals”. Actually, he has more than a little sympathy with the IWCA’s anarchistic leftism on the Labour Party. Similarly, I have shown how the programmeless nonsense about “reform” of the economic system or the Labour Party in the IWCA document can in effect constitute itself as a species of sub-reformism.

Ray Hickman’s day-to-day practice, I would suggest, has far more in common with this than with those of the OPEB who have joined the CPGB and are involved in the “highest point of communist organisation in Britain today”. Really, Ray, it is time to stop being a dilettante about communist unity.

Either you join your comrades in the struggle for the main link - a reforged communist party - or let’s hear from you what anarchistic prejudices still prevent you from doing so. As Red Action would probably say - put up or shut up.

Mark Fischer