18.04.1996

Chasing shadows

Bob Smith - For a Permanent Party Polemic Committee

We should thank Tony Clark from Partisan for his letter ‘Two views’ (Weekly Worker April 11), which highlighted so concisely the complete futility of trying to reconstruct the Communist Party on historically specific criteria. Clark wants to know which view the PCC upholds now and will support in the future in respect to Trotsky and Stalin. The Trotskyist Unity Group (TUG) wants to .know the same thing. Both organisations, reflecting the divisions and mentality in the communist movement generally, are stuck in a deep rut of their own making, and they just keep on digging. I would hope most sincerely that the PCC now and in the future would have no truck with this sort of infantile politics.

Yes, the PCC should welcome both of these organisations into the CPGB rapprochement process and give them full opportunity to argue out their respective historical interpretations in full view of the advanced strata of the working class. But to imagine for one moment that a Communist Party can, in the coming century, be built around one or other particular view of Stalin or Trotsky is to build the Party on shifting sands.

What is required for communist unity is the science of Marxism-Leninism (historical and dialectical materialism), a science that must seek to transcend the particular in favour of the general, transcend the historically specific in favour of the universal. But like any science these universals do not present themselves readymade, carved in a stone tablet. They can be no more than a set of theoretical premises, collectively arrived at at any given time, and continually tested and modified in the course of life itself. Views on Stalin and Trotsky will undoubtedly inform the Party’s view on contemporary questions for some time to come. But to imagine that we would be swayed by this or that Marxist circle, with this or that ‘truth’ of Soviet history, is no longer tenable.

If either Stalin or Trotsky were to be the basis of communist rapprochement we would expect to see two competing revolutionary blocs in formation - and on an international scale at that. What we see is the opposite - myriad splits and widespread ideological and political fragmentation. But this is held up as a virtue by our friends in Partisan. ‘This is the way to arrive at the truth,’ they tell us. What idiocy! This is a recipe for keeping the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary forces perpetually divided while to our left, anarchism ingratiates itself into the communist movement, and to our right, social democracy seeks to reinvent itself in ever new appealing guises. While our learned professors from Partisan and TUG are in constant pursuit of a final reckoning with their imagined adversaries, our real opponents - reformism and anarcho-communism, are emboldened by our disarray. TUG and Partisan are chasing shadows.

The historically non-specific Party, as advocated by Open Polemic and supported ambiguously by the current PCC, is not historical idealism. Quite the opposite. It is a theoretical construct which seeks to be most historically specific in respect to Marx’s split with the anarchists and Lenin’s split with social democracy. The historically non-specific Party is also historically specific in recognising that the revolutionary process in the former Soviet Union threw up competing strategies and competing leaderships. It recognises that the Party in the Soviet Union was incapable of containing these revolutionary alternatives - instead it resorted to leader centralism and the accompanying arbitrariness of decision making. It is historically specific in that it recognises that the Party could not complete many of the tasks set it by the October Revolution. It completed some tasks but not others. The future Party will contain rival assessments. Majority and minority views will emerge and re-emerge over the coming decades, but no one particular view will be the criterion for Party membership. Guided by the principle of multanimity, the future Party will begin its work afresh.