29.02.1996

Communists and the SLP

Bob Smith - For a Permanent Party Polemic Committee

At this month’s all-member aggregate of the CPGB it was agreed to support the recommendation that all supporters of the CPGB and all partisans of the class should join the SLP, the purpose being “to further the fight for communist rapprochement and a reforged Communist Party”. Broadly speaking the Open Polemic representatives were in agreement with this strategic call, although we did have a sharp difference with the final formulation of the resolution.

While we are not opposed to the call for ‘partisans of the class’, whatever that particular phrase might mean, to join the SLP in order to further the split between right and left social democracy, we do not think it is politically correct or astute to call on them to do so for the purpose of reforging a communist party. This may seem an obscure and hair-splitting difference, but let’s follow things through to their logical conclusion.

In the first instance the job of reforging a communist party falls to those who already consider themselves adherents of Marx and Lenin. Our call for the party must be to these comrades. At the same time it is perfectly correct for communists to encourage militant workers to break from Blair’s rightwing social democracy and join forces in the leftward moving SLP. This is happening anyway, but our call may act as a catalyst to the process.

Yes, we eventually must win this stratum of militant workers to the communist party, but to make that call now when we communists are ideologically and organisationally fragmented, is not only premature but shows a contempt for the Leninist conception that the working class differentiates itself according to consciousness. What the majority in the CPGB confuse is the difference between the tiny stratum of advanced workers with that of the much larger stratum of intermediate militant reformist workers. While there is no absolute Chinese Wall between these two strata there is a definite political distinction and it must not be blurred. Accusations of ‘elitism’ directed at OP are trite and incorrect. Accusations of ‘party building by stages’ are essentially true and we plead guilty to the accusation. The process of party building is both an art and a science - not a matter of bland and general calls to the class as a whole.

What Open Polemic is fighting for is the organisation of revolutionaries. This should not be confused with the SLP which only has the potential of developing into an organisation of militant workers. They are not the same, and our work in the SLP must proceed from this understanding. Out task now, given our hopelessly divided forces, is to work towards creating a single communist pole of attraction ideologically within the SLP. And in so doing it should never be forgotten that, while we can work alongside the left social democrats in a principled united front for working class reforms, we are unambiguously opposed to the strategy of reformism and its accompanying ideology of social democracy in all its guises. Forget that for a moment and communists face liquidating themselves into the SLP. So when one CPGB comrade argued that our task is to ‘turn the SLP into a revolutionary party’ he is doubly wrong - politically and ideologically.

The OP difference with the Leninists of the CPGB boils down to our different conceptions of what a communist party is. For the ‘Leninists’ it seems increasingly to be a Menshevik party which opens its non-ideological doors to ‘all partisans of the class’, but of course with a tight leader-centralist clique directing affairs from the legitimacy of the central committee. For OP the communist party is the general staff of our class, a professional organisation of revolutionaries in which the entire membership is trained in the highest levels of theory, strategy and tactics and where the whole membership makes political policy culminating in its highest body - the party congress.