16.01.2025

Anti-partyist partyism

Mike Macnair continues his series of articles on the ‘party question’ by turning to the negative critique and unsupported spin of Lawrence Parker

This is the fourth part of my discussion of some of the interventions in the discussion on the left ‘party question’ since September. It is addressed to Lawrence Parker’s arguments. Though more extensive in ostensible scope, these are actually addressed primarily to arguing for the liquidation of the existing organised group of CPGB members that publishes this paper. (We use the name CPGB, but recognise that we are not a party. As we say in What we fight for, “There exists no real Communist Party today”, or in “About us”, “There is no proto-party, and the main task facing the working class movement is to construct one in the here and now.”).

There are notoriously ‘57 varieties’ of far-left groups. But there are at least 5,700 varieties of far-left groups of one member, otherwise called ‘independent lefts’. Both phenomena are driven by one principle: anti-factionalism, unwillingness of minorities to work as a minority faction in the hope that splitting will lead them to success in fresh fields and pastures new, and unwillingness of majorities to put up with the allegedly time-wasting ‘talking to ourselves’ of minorities.

The ‘independents’ take the view - essentially for the same reason: unwillingness to be in a minority - that the existing organisations are worse than no organisation at all. As a result, when the ‘independents’ attempt to unite against ‘the sects’, they produce ‘Heath Robinson’ constitutions designed to protect individual rights and to protect themselves against the evil ‘Leninist sects’, and, as a result, caricatures of the Labour Party.

Comrade Parker offers a purely negative critique of the far-left groups, including - and especially - the CPGB/Weekly Worker. But, in reality, negative critique contains an implicit positive. It has become transparent that the purely negative critique offered by Platypus contains the implicit positive of US-patriotism.¹ Comrade Parker’s purely negative critique of the groups analogously contains the implicit positive of the ideology of ‘left independent’-ism. The struggle to remain in the realm of negative critique leads him into falsification of the character of CPGB as a group (supposedly “North Korean”!).

I begin with the question of the press, posed by comrade Woodrow’s letter of November 28 in response to my November 21 article, ‘What sort of party?’, my response in my article ‘What sort of partyism?’ (December 5), and comrade Parker’s letter replying to that point (December 12). From there I move on to comrade Parker’s direct contribution to the Prometheus discussion, ‘The Communist Party: yesterday and tomorrow’;² and from there in turn to comrade Parker’s elaborated arguments in a series of posts on his blog: both directly against the CPGB/Weekly Worker and around the idea that ‘little Lenins’ is a culture flaw fatal both to the old pre-1991 CPGB and to the modern far left.

Press

In my original November 21 article, I argued that the fundamental task of a party is not to coordinate strike, etc, struggles, but to offer a political voice for the working class that can attempt to break the capitalists’ monopoly of political voices and choices at the level of ‘high politics’. I argued that this task had three elements: offering a general programme; a party media, especially a regular press; and electoral work. I said:

The second element is publishing an alternative to the capitalists’ advertising-funded media, and especially the national press, which drowns out oppositional speech by the amplification of the proprietor’s and his editor’s voices and thereby helps enforce the choice between the ‘party of order’ and the ‘party of liberty’. This point is important.

It is quite widely believed that various forms of pure online publication can do the job of a party press. But, in reality, this sort of publication, because it is not fully regular, cannot be agenda-setting in the way that the Murdoch and Harmsworth press are agenda-setting on the right. On the left, the Morning Star, in spite of the numerical weakness of the Communist Party of Britain, continues to be agenda-setting (as is very visible in the history of Corbynism, but also in the character of the Socialist Workers Party’s ‘united front’ operations).

The absence of advertising subsidy requires party backing; the Morning Star partly substitutes backing from China, etc in the form of public library subscriptions; the weeklies (Socialist Worker, The Socialist, Communist, Solidarity, Weekly Worker …) can only operate with considerable efforts to raise party funds.

Comrade Woodrow responded:

Macnair’s claim that an online publication cannot be agenda-setting seems self-refuting - his own article was written as a response to a call-out by an online publication! And there are plenty of other examples - during the Corbyn years, online publications such as Novara Media or Skwawkbox at times had significant impact in setting the agenda for the left. Meanwhile, online rightwing publications, such as Guido Fawkes, have often had enormous effects on setting the agenda for mainstream media.

Macnair says the issue is that, unlike print media, online media “is not fully regular”, but this isn’t strictly true. The practicalities of print production obviously force you into a rhythm of periodic releases of larger bundles of content, and that can certainly help with agenda-setting, but it doesn’t have to be regular. Salvage and Notes From Below are both print publications that are not “fully regular”, operating with a more or less flexible schedule, depending on capacity, priorities, etc. Conversely, there is nothing to stop the editors of a purely online publication from operating a newspaper-style schedule if they thought that was appropriate (albeit there may be countervailing incentives, encouraging them to run a different schedule).

I replied:

Comrade Woodrow here displays one of the fundamental common errors of the British left: the confusion between taking initiatives, on the one hand, and setting the political agenda, on the other. Working backwards, Guido Fawkes has produced a great many stories. Among these, it is only those, many fewer, stories that were picked up by the Tory daily press that became politically agenda-setting. Secondly, but slightly differently, Novara Media and Skwawkbox also produced a wide range of stories with ephemeral excitement around them: but the whole political agenda of the Corbyn years continued to be framed by Britain’s road to socialism and the ideas and methods of the Morning Star.

Comrade Parker’s December 12 letter responds quite violently, accusing me of fetishising the print form - and, as Marxism Today types (and other opponents of the maintenance of a party press) accused their opponents, of failing to understand how the capitalist media really works. He alleges that: “The whole idea that comrade Macnair appears to be promoting - that we can rely on something that merely replicates the current singular production set-up of the Weekly Worker (lord, save us) to set agendas in the future - is a virulent sect fantasy.” He does not answer at all my points about the continued dominance of agenda-setting by the regular capitalist press on the right and by the Morning Star on the left.

I am not particularly committed to the print form.³ Nor would a press that ran on less of a shoestring than the Weekly Worker display its “current singular production set-up”. But my original point was that purely online publication forms “not fully regular” could not play the agenda-setting role. The agenda-setting role arises because the publications in question are regular; frequent; persistent over years; and edited to spin the stories they publish in favour of the publication’s political line.

Producing a regular daily, which could be agenda-setting, would take just as much in the way of journalistic, editing and tech resources if it published online as producing a regular print daily. It would thus also still be seriously expensive. The same is true for a weekly (digital or print), or, indeed, for a monthly. This is reflected in the fact that left groups who have thought that online publication could be more speedily responsive to the news have found in practice that it is less so. The lack of regularity means that the resources are not committed to produce regularity. These resources may, at need, be redeployed for instant response.

Comrade Parker says that “A huge chunk of that work [of a communist party of thousands] will need to be done through a rich diversity of online publications, whether older comrades like it or not. Let a thousand digital flowers bloom.” Certainly. But that is not an argument against having a central press/media that attempts to engage at the level of the capitalist press. Counterposing the “thousand digital flowers” to this task is precisely to abandon the field to the capitalist press (and, more immediately, to the Morning Star).

Yesterday

I drew an analogy above between comrade Parker’s method of negative immanent critique and that of Platypus - as containing an implicit positive. There is a second analogous result of this method: as I observed of Platypus two years ago, it tends to produce premature obituaries of existing political trends.⁴ In ‘The Communist Party: yesterday and tomorrow’ this problem is at work already in the assessment of the old CPGB, in the sense that he reproduces the standard Trotskyist rejection of the old CPGB as being a “sect” - as comrade Parker puts it, “a non-sect in process of becoming a part-sect” - already in decline in this way in the 1930s.

But this is to imagine, on the one hand, that the mere fact of regroupment implies not being a sect (which would lead us to believe that the Atlanticists for Workers’ Liberalism or Anti-Capitalist Resistance are not sects; but in both cases regroupment leads not to Aufhebung of the original group, but to its reassertion as politically narrower); and, on the other hand, that control by central bureaucracy implies being a sect (which would lead to the conclusion that the Labour Party, or the Communist Party of China, are sects).

The real question is whether the old CPGB was a party, meaning, a real part of the workers’ vanguard that was understood by the broad vanguard in general as pursuing an independent political project, and not merely a fractional sub-group. And this the old CPGB clearly was throughout its life. It took its character as a party from the 1914-20 split in socialism and the authority of the Russian Revolution: it lost it when it abandoned this link, finally in 1991. In between it started out with around 5,000 members, rising to a peak of 12,000 in 1926 and falling back to a low of 2,500 in 1930; but then it grew steadily through the 1930s, reaching 20,000 by 1940 and 56,000 by 1942, falling to 42,000 in 1946; down to 33,000 in February 1956 and 25,500 in February 1957. From this point the membership rose in the late 1960s to early 1970s, to reach just over 30,000 in 1973, before declining precipitously in the late 1970s and 1980s to 7,600 in 1989 and then 4,700 at dissolution in 1992.⁵

The old CPGB was thus a minority party - perhaps analogous to the Liberals in their ‘telephone box’ phase, or the nationalists before their rise. Equally, comrade Parker argues:

In what became a default setting, pretty much until its liquidation in 1991, the CPGB instead sought to step around the advanced political workers clustered around the Labour Party, the Independent Labour Party and so on in order to appeal to the more immediate demands of the proletariat (or at least those immediate demands that communists imagined workers should make).

This is a very curious characterisation of the considerable influence of the old CPGB on the Labour left and in particular of the ‘British road’ and ‘Alternative economic strategy’ in the Labour Party of the 1970s.

Comrade Parker’s account of the history of the old CPGB is grounded on his own expertise in the inner life of the party and its factions. But the effect is spun in the direction of the idea that the history is entirely an internal dialectic. Thus

… by the 1970s, a patchwork of left factions and local groupings had started to develop alternative structures and lines of command. This, and the complete failure of the BRS strategy, pushed the CPGB into overt crisis and the leadership faction into the arms of a small Eurocommunist circle, which took over parts of the bureaucracy, started to expel the left and liquidate any remaining party élan.

The CPGB can thus be seen as the negation of the process of communist unity that birthed it …

This understates radically the “élan” of the Marxism Today group, which conveyed real dynamism and made inroads in the academy, in the Labour ‘soft left’, and in the ‘social movements’ (the last at the expense of the far left). The problem was that, as a guy who left the CPGB in the late 1970s, characterising it as reformist, and joined the Labour Party, said at the time, “If I’m going to be in a reformist party it might as well be a big one” - Marxism Today issued in Blairism.

The underlying driver of the 1980s collapse was neither the factions nor the “complete failure of the BRS strategy”, which could only be properly said to have “completely failed” when its foundations in the gradual extension of the “socialist camp” failed in 1989-91. It was, rather, the influence of Eurocommunism as an international trend, driving the “broad democratic alliance” conception rightwards to take distance from the Soviet regime both by making clearer rule-of-law constitutionalist commitments, and by deepening methodological nationalism. Comrade Parker’s account of a CPGB driven by its own internal logic to destruction internalises this methodological nationalism.

Pretenders

The second half of comrade Parker’s article has the subhead, “The pretenders”. It consists of Private Eye-style sardonic capsule sketches of a series of currently existing groups, all taken to be in different ways hopeless.⁶ The only (limited) hope comrade Parker sees is in the Woods-Sewell Revolutionary Communist Party’: “Children who try on their parents’ clothes look ridiculous, as has the RCP at times when it has garlanded itself with majestic ‘Communist Party’ garb. But even as they look ridiculous, projecting yourself into the future and seeing something else in the looking glass has human potential.”

This thin positive reflects comrade Parker’s general sympathy for voluntarist stunts (also seen in his approval of the Young Communist League’s ‘left period’ a few years ago⁷). On the other hand, his characterisation of the RCP as “wearing new ‘Communist Party’ robes to catch a small tide of activists tuned into Leninism” almost certainly misses the point, which is that Socialist Appeal picked up students not by virtue of “Leninism”, but by offering students a Marxisant alternative to the discourse of ‘intersectionality’ dominant among left academics and also among the bulk of the far left.

This failure to see a dynamic at work is also reflected in comrade Parker’s characterisation of the revival of Maoism - not just in Britain, but elsewhere - seen here in the recently increased visibility of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). Comrade Parker sees this only as “run by the Brar family dynasty on strictly North Korean lines” (it is not clear what comrade Parker knows about CPGB(ML)’s internal life to justify this conclusion), and as having “a set of abhorrent social attitudes: its transphobia is essentially the homophobia of founder members in the Maoist movement of the 1960s, transplanted into the modern era”.

A few years ago Maoism looked nearly dead, but it has to some limited extent revived. If we ask why, the answer is plainly enough the renewed salience of imperialism in early 21st century politics: Maoism was always the tendency that took Lenin’s diagnosis of imperialism and the relevant theses of the early congresses of Comintern and ran with them. Moreover, in spite of the evolution of the People’s Republic of China towards capitalism (and imperialism), the 2008 global crash and the USA’s turn, under Obama,⁸ to an anti-China policy, has led the Chinese leadership to stress socialist credentials. Meanwhile, neoliberal cuts in state welfare have issued in the necessary ‘other’ of liberalism: the revival of the politics of nation and family, with the result that George Galloway’s “nationalist Workers Party of Britain, which left our erstwhile revolutionaries fronting rightist law-and-order campaigns,”⁹ did better than most left groups in the 2024 general election. Comrade Parker’s diagnosis thus offers a premature obituary.

In the case of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain it is necessary to observe that we in this paper were also guilty of premature obituaries of the CPB: in the early 2000s, it appeared that this organisation was failing to reproduce itself generationally (we in CPGB were then briefly recruiting among students). Plainly no longer true: having fallen to a low of 772 around 2015 (probably reflecting flight into the Labour left) CPB membership climbed to 1,300 in 2023.

We failed to recognise that ‘official’ communism still has wide political support in the workers’ movement, which in Britain has the effect of boosting the Morning Star and therefore lending support to the CPB from outside. Comrade Parker’s method of analysing only the internal dynamics leads, again, to a premature obituary:

The CPB, like the RCP, is very much a disaster waiting to happen, given its members have been enthusiastically sold the idea of massive growth and it has some newer cadres who seem to care about the faction in a way that the elderly membership never did in the 1990s. Always a problem when someone cares about you.

Comrade Parker actually offers no evidence to support this judgement, other than his previous premature obituary of the British road to socialism, which he claims “had strategic goals that were a dead letter as early as 1950”.

Comrade Parker’s premature obituaries would clear the way for a wholly new partyism (as Platypus’s premature obituaries of the left were supposed to clear the way for a new theoretical beginning of the left). But at least one of the zombies still needs, in comrade Parker’s view, to be killed off. This is the CPGB, because it is in his view a sect - and a personal cult round Jack Conrad - which pretends to be partyist.

Mean talk

Comrade Parker’s argument against the CPGB consists essentially in the idea that, because Jack Conrad has been in the central leadership for 44 years, the organisation is ipso facto a sect. The argument occupies about a third of his article for Prometheus. It is then elaborated at considerable length in four blog posts.¹⁰

Comrade Parker admits that (as I have also argued in the past¹¹) it is problematic for the left to do without long-service volunteers at all: “Most comrades on the left have to rely on wage labour under capitalism to survive. Full-time work on the far left is not viewed positively by prospective bourgeois employers. Factions have to rely upon a small caste of bureaucrats to ensure the most basic of tasks are conducted.” But his argument actually is for merely doing without. This is linked to his position on the press, that “a thousand digital flowers” will do the job.

It is clearly not a strength of the CPGB that comrade Conrad has been in the leadership for 44 years. But it is a reflection of our weakness; not the cause of it. Comrade Parker engages in dishonest journalistic spin to exaggerate comrade Conrad’s control. He gives me poisonous compliments as being “better” than comrade Conrad because I am less sharp in polemic. He wholly disregards comrade Yassamine Mather’s political contribution. He pretends that Paul Demarty and other contributors to the Weekly Worker are mere puppets for Conrad.

There is a load of unsupported spin, so that, for example, he says that “despite formal freedoms inside the CPGB-PCC, people who fall out with the comrade, personally or politically, are marginalised or pushed out. Conrad abuses a recommended list for the leadership to ensure it remains a body with which he is entirely comfortable.” One might expect that the footnote would provide evidence for the proposition; in fact, it merely says that “I am not against recommended lists in principle.”

He argues that the CPGB periodically tries to “bypass far-left rivals”. His evidence for this proposition is overt strike support work in 1992-93, a period immediately after the liquidation of the old official CPGB (so that what could be recovered from the liquidation was not clear), and a period in which comrade Parker has previously celebrated the early CPGB-PCC’s voluntarist “élan”.¹² The second is:

Similarly, during the Corbyn era in the Labour Party, the CPGB-PCC ran its own cloistered and sectarian front, Labour Party Marxists (formally in existence since late 2011, but you could not join unless you were a CPGB-PCC member; even close sympathisers were excluded). Other Marxists inside the Labour Party were bypassed, as the faction attempted to take a short cut to the Corbynistas. Again, the CPGB-PCC got precious close to zero from this venture, bar an internal conflict that rumbles on to this day.

Labour Party Marxists was certainly a front: an attempt, not at any sort of regroupment, but to create a “semi-legal” form of publication and organisation within the Labour Party. Any left group attempting to operate in the Labour Party is obliged to use such a tactic. The “internal conflict” was about participation in attempts to construct a new Labour broad left project, along with the long-time broad-frontists of Labour Briefing, by CPGBers engaging in diplomatic silence on aspects of communist programme unacceptable to Briefing-ites. It should be said that the CPGB was only concerned to get the right to put our positions to the vote in the broad front - not planning to split if they were voted on and lost. The other side of the debate in the CPGB on this issue also got zero. In reality, the far left in general got zero from the Corbyn movement: Socialist Appeal (now RCP) grew very modestly outside Labour.

This is a really fundamental point, because in his three blog posts, comrade Parker argues that the basic problem with the CPGB’s “culture” is an inappropriate commitment to “hardness”, which, he claims, derives from a false (official CPGB) image of Lenin that produces “brittle Bolshevism”.

The Corbyn movement was a large mass movement, into paying for membership of the Labour Party in order to vote for Corbyn. But, on the one hand, the Corbynista leaders themselves were committed to Labour as a broad party with unity with the right (who were determined to knife the Corbynistas) and promoted the idea of a new, ‘kinder’, ‘grass roots’ politics as the ‘branding’ for this project. The existing Labour far left were committed to broad-frontism towards the Corbyn leadership.¹³ The ex-far leftists who went into the party did so with similar agendas of broad-frontism towards the left leaders, which the SWP, CPB, Socialist Party in England and Wales and so on have been promoting without actually joining Labour.

The newly radicalising forces also expected a new, ‘kinder’, ‘grassroots’ politics - that was what Corbyn had offered them. They did not expect a hard, prolonged fight with the Labour right, involving not just clicktivism, but regular in-person attendance at very tedious meetings, and standing up to abuse and bullying by the Labour right and the capitalist press. The result was that very many of them just dropped out, and the right retained control not just of the apparatus, but of many constituencies.

The question of “hardness”, then, is not a matter of illusions of Bolshevism. It is needed in present-day politics because we need to recognise that we are a minority - and a minority which the ruling regime seeks to silence. It seeks to silence us by overt censorship (like that currently being applied to Palestine activists). But not just that. It seeks to silence us by drowning out dissenting voices by subsidy (which we can only begin to combat by organising to publish, which requires resources and actual organisation). And it also seeks to silence us by demands for civility. I have made this point before in argument with comrade Parker and others; and in 2016 against the Labour right’s complaints of ‘bullying’ by the left.¹⁴

All this means that we need obstinacy in defending minority positions, and “hardness” in doing so against the pressure to be more accommodating to majority views. Comrade Parker’s elaborate polemic against “brittle Bolshevism” attempts to negate the organised far left’s efforts to take differences seriously. It would leave us merely with the dominant broad-leftism and speech controls in the name of “safe spaces”, “intersectionality” and “civility”. The result of this policy is visible from the outcome of the Corbyn movement.

1. I do not say ‘social-patriotism’ because there now does not seem to be any ‘social’ element in it.↩︎

2. prometheusjournal.org/2024/11/29/the-communist-party-yesterday-and-tomorrow.↩︎

3. Except insofar as the present very visible drift towards censorship may in the not too distant future have the result that full illegality of the far left entirely closes off our access to online publication and forces us to print somewhere overseas and smuggle stuff in. Since this is not something any of the current groups are capable of, it has to be left on one side as an issue.↩︎

4. ‘History and anti-history’, April 20 2023: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1439/history-and-anti-history (a bit hard to follow due to heavy editorial cutting, but the point should be clear enough). See also my contribution to the Trotsky panel at Platypus’s 2021 convention (not transcribed): www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSGIqXkJYCA, at 15:12 - 27 of the video.↩︎

5. A Thorpe, ‘The membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1920-1945’ Historical Journal Vol 43 (2000), pp777-800, table at p781; hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2013/02/03/the-cpgbs-1957-special-congress; H Carter and G Silkstone-Carter, ‘Research note: regional membership figures for the Communist Party of Great Britain, from 1945 to 1989’ (2008): www.researchgate.net/publication/316636668_Regional_Membership_Figures_for_the_Communist_Party_of_Great_Britain_from_1945_to_1989; Wikipedia, ‘Communist Party of Great Britain’.↩︎

6. The list is incomplete, depending on criteria. If it is based on size, the CPGB should be excluded. If on name, at least the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) should be included. If on open willingness to avow communism, as opposed to requiring self-naming as ‘party’, the Revolutionary Communist Group, the Communist Leagues (both the Maoist and Barnesite variants), and the International Communist League (the Spartacists) should be included.↩︎

7. Various articles at communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/category/cpb-morning-star-ycl/page/5.↩︎

8. On the conciliatory policy of the GW Bush administration towards China, see foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/04/the-untold-story-of-how-george-w-bush-lost-china.↩︎

9. As, in a sense, the Independent Working Class Association already did in the late 1990s to early 2000s, reflecting the social dynamics already discussed by the ‘left realist’ criminologists in the 1980s.↩︎

10. communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2024/11/28/poor-substitute-further-histories-british-partyism; communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2024/12/22/patrick-stewart-little-lenins; communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2024/12/31/devil-quote-scripture-own-purpose; communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2025/01/11/building-rcp-living-marxism-1980s.↩︎

11. weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1248/full-timers-and-cadre.↩︎

12. communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2024/05/28/agit-prop-election-campaigns-1992-93.↩︎

13. This was true even of Socialist Appeal, with its campaign to restore the Lassallean 1918 ‘clause four’ of Labour’s rules.↩︎

14. ‘Upfront, sharp and personal’ November 30 2023: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1469/upfront-sharp-and-personalmj; ‘Attempt to outlaw justified anger’, October 20 2016: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1127/attempt-to-outlaw-justified-anger.↩︎