23.05.1996

Leaders and led

Party notes

We are verbally informed that the comrades from Open Polemic - who recently decanted from our organisation - are “furious” with our article explaining their action. They ran away from the Party, panicked by the prospect of our 13th Summer Offensive and the personal sacrifices they might have to make for it. Now, it seems, they are fed up that we have told everyone.

In fact, the Party has every right to be irked by the behaviour of these comrades. They have displayed a giddy and frivolous attitude to the vital task of communist rapprochement. Their rhetoric of ‘pro-partyism’ stands exposed as just that - rhetoric. Flatulent phrases about building vanguard parties and leading the British revolution count for very little when they are unwilling to undertake fundamental Party tasks agreed to by the entire organisation, themselves included.

These comrades started from an original position of contempt for all actions of the Party. Writing about or intervening in a strike was - by definition - “economism”. We were warned against the “blind activism” that plagued so much of the revolutionary left.

Slowly, they were being weaned away from this sectarian attitude. In that sense, the Summer Offensive perhaps came a little early for them, before they had fully assimilated Party norms and standards of work. We have always realised that this annual campaign acted as a purge of our organisation, flushing out all that was weak, inconsistent or pompous. Unfortunately for the comrades of Open Polemic, the slow process of their assimilation into the organisation was not far enough advanced for them to face the challenge.

Nor, it must be added, is the leadership of this group sufficiently mature to recognise this fact and produce practical solutions. Faced with the disjuncture between their blood-curdling phrases of granite-hard Bolshevism and the mushy reality of their organisation, these comrades collapsed ignominiously.

Thus, I direct these comments concretely to those comrades in Open Polemic who could have taken part successfully in the 13th Summer Offensive, who could have led the more backward elements forward during this campaign. At the moment these comrades have chosen to constitute themselves as leaders of parochial backwardness rather than Leninism. No amount of jumble about ‘dialectics’ and ‘Bolshevism’ hides this basic fact.

This is not the task of leadership. Of course, all comrades bear responsibility to their organisations. Affiliations should never be treated in a flighty way. Yet leaders must also be prepared to lead not simply by flowery phrase, but by action. Thus, when a particular course is correct, it should be taken. If it is true, then eventually masses of people, let alone the flimsy ranks of Open Polemic, will follow.

Instead, the advanced elements of OP have lumbered themselves with what Lenin called the approach of the bourgeois intellectual, who is “only prepared to ‘accept organisational relations platonically’”. All sorts of extravagant promissory notes can be written for future self-sacrifice and commitment, the future levels of work of the Party. In the here and now of course, there is the kitchen floor to be sanded and that holiday I always promised myself ...

A retreat into a world of lifeless abstraction is worse than useless in the concrete circumstances facing Marxists today. What should characterise all our activity must be the fight for genuine communist work. In this, we should take as our example Lenin, a man for whom theory reached its highest point as it broke into practice

Mark Fischer
national organiser