14.03.1996

Three-legged stool

Bob Smith - For a Permanent Party Polemic Committee

Astute readers of the Weekly Worker would have noticed that the regular column ‘Communist Press’ did not appear last week. When quizzed on this by the Open Polemic representatives, the editor offered a cocktail of excuses.

Firstly, it was a matter of ‘space’ - the article was too long. This didn’t convince, so then it was a question of ‘priority’ - another article was more pressing. When it was pointed out that the ‘Communist Press’ column was a collectively agreed weekly column, the question of ‘content’ popped up. Now this third excuse was far more convincing, given that the column contained material highly critical of the Leninist faction of the CPGB. Some people in the CPGB really are having more difficulty with the principle of multanimity than others. Anyway, all’s well that ends well - the editor has agreed to reinstate the offending article.

What is the moral of this little story? If we keep it in mind that the Communist Party paper is and should be the central organ of the Party’s central committee, and that the editorial team is, in effect, a sub-committee of the central committee and that the editor is an appointee of the central committee, it will not be surprising to find many such conflicts between the centralism of the CC and the democratic impulses of the membership generally. Although the editor of a communist paper should be sensitive to the expression of minority views, in the first instance their function is to propagandise around the majority view as interpreted by the CC. This is precisely why Open Polemic has been advocating a ‘permanent polemic committee’ for a future Communist Party - a committee whose function is to ensure that all contending views are given fair expression in the Party publications and forums, and to act as a democratic counterweight to the very necessary centralism of the CC.

This would represent a partial separation of democratic and centralist functions within a future Party, not as a step towards diluting the authority of the CC, but rather to enhance its authority by allowing it greater freedom to carry out its constitutional functions - ie, that of organising the whole Party around the majority decisions of the Party congress. A polemic committee should not be seen as a rival to the central committee, but rather as an electoral partner along with perhaps (even) an elected control commission, neither of which should contain current members of the CC. A three-legged stool is more stable than a two-legged one and a damn sight more stable than a one-legged one!

And then there was the Sunday seminar. One leading PCC comrade told the meeting that a middle ranking SWPer had defected to the SLP and that he really didn’t know if this was a leftward or a rightward move on behalf of that individual. Then others chipped in saying how difficult it was to tell left from right these days.

This is precisely why Open Polemic has been hammering away at the need for a common theoretical programme as a necessary prerequisite to a more general revolutionary programme for the whole class. If we are unable to define what is left and what is right we will make a pretty sorry vanguard for the working class.

As regards the defection, of course leaving the SWP and joining the SLP as an individual act is a rightward move! No matter how economistic, opportunist, chauvinist and leader centralist the SWP has become, it still stands for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. That puts the SWP in a qualitatively different camp to the left social democratic grouping around the SLP. Yes, things are fluid and can turn into their opposites, but that should not excuse us from identifying things as they are now.