21.03.1996

The British disease

Bob Smith - For a Permanent Party Polemic Committee

Although perhaps not fully aware of it ourselves, Open Polemic is fighting for its very life. Not the result of some internecine struggle within the editorial board, I’m relieved to say, nor a loss of confidence in the OP general strategy. No, the dangers facing OP are far more insidious.

Superficially we could say that the dangers derive from our representational entry into the CPGB and its subsequent euphoria over the advent of the SLP, or alternatively from our affiliation to the anarcho-communist orientated IWCA. But this is not the heart of the matter. The danger is more accurately and profoundly located in what I might describe as the ‘British disease’ or, in the ‘philosophico-political’ language of the Trotskyist Unity Group, activism. Consider the closing sentence from TUG’s Phil Walden in his letter to Weekly Worker (March 14):

“Activism around the SLP is a diversion for communists from the priority of reflecting on and discussing the problems within Marxism.” The power of these few lines lays not just in its warning of the dangers of “activism”, but also in its recognition that there are indeed “problems” within Marxism. OP might be tempted to amend their formulation with the following: “Activism around the SLP is a fatal diversion for communists from the priority of reflecting on and resolving the problems with Marxism-Leninism.” But we recognise in the TUG a serious ally in the fight for a ‘common theoretical programme for communists’. Their untheorised obsession with ‘Stalinism’ is as frustrating as Partisan’s obsession with Trotskyism, but both organisations in their own particular and one-sided way are involved in the practical struggle to assess and elaborate around the fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism. Not so surprising then that TUG and Partisan, fierce protagonists in the battle for orthodoxy, should meet eyeball to eyeball around the OP conference table.

But TUG and Partisan are not the only unlikely bedfellows in the political drama that is currently unfolding. What of the Revolutionary Democratic Group? They too are calling for “joint work and ideological clarification” as a prerequisite for the “fusion into a single organisation with a common programme and full faction rights under democratic centralism” (Weekly Worker February 22). The key words here must be “joint work and ideological clarification”. But one must take priority over the other and OP has never been in doubt as to which is the more primary at this point in our communist history.

Let’s hear more of what the RDG has to say: “Ideological struggle is an essential means for distilling revolutionary democratic theory from its poisonous surroundings, creating an even more solid theoretical foundation for the party.” OP says that whosoever retreats from the building of a theoretical foundation is likely to go down in the swamp of economism, of activism and, we must be blunt, of liquidationism. Three diseases - or perhaps they are all symptoms of the one ‘British disease’.

At one end of the communist spectrum we know that the SWP and ML have become infected. At the other end of the spectrum we know that the NCP and CPB are deeply contaminated, possibly terminally. But what of the Leninist faction of the CPGB? The early symptoms are definitely there yet the body is young and resilient. It is currently developing the most lively communist press that Britain has seen for some time. Its forthcoming seminar programme is unrivalled in scope and intensity. Its commitment to communist rapprochement is still strong. And the forthcoming ‘Communist University 96’ which it is involved in, promises to be the most theoretically challenging to date. If they heed the warning from the TUG they may yet pull through (to play their part in the future party of the new type). But no-one, OP included, is naturally immune from the British disease.