13.02.2025
Problems and progress
We are ready now to get down to programmatic specifics, but there are the ‘partyists’ who are not walking the walk ... yet. Jack Conrad reports
Our fourth round of Zoom discussions, on February 9, began with reports from Cat Rylance and Ed Potts about the situation with the Prometheus editorial board, the third element of the Forging Communist Unity process. Both comrades are EB members.
It should be added that myself and Mike Macnair represented the CPGB’s Provisional Central Committee and Nick Wrack was there for Talking About Socialism (comrade Potts too - wearing ‘two hats’). Gaby Rubin was also present taking minutes.
The comrades told us that the Prometheus EB has divided, roughly 50:50, over FCU. Things are not hard and fast. Shades of opinion exist on both sides.
Understandably, there are legitimate concerns amongst RS21 comrades. Continuing to work in that diffuse, but politically fluid, organisation, while participating in a process that at some stage will require a definite commitment to abide by the outcome of a communist fusion conference, might be incompatible.
As we have explained before, that is absolutely not the case with us. Members of RS21 who join the Communist Party would be encouraged, even obliged, to maintain their membership, contacts and struggles. The aim would be to win the majority for communist fusion.
Other comrades on the Prometheus EB will doubtless have their own particular concerns and perhaps there will be those who, while they talk the talk of partyism, fear doing the walk … as of the moment. You can read the EB’s very diplomatic statement on its website.1
Of course, in our tradition, we would name names and openly present exactly what the differences are about to readers. Either way, there is a pro-party EB faction that is committed to the process and we agreed to continue our discussions with them - that while seeking to meet with the doubters and worriers. If that happens - and we hope it will - there will be a get-together of some sort between Nick Wrack and myself representing FCU and the comrades.
Naturally, we shall attempt to persuade them all. But, failing that, we shall not allow those holding back to hold us back. Indeed our progress will be the biggest argument in favour of communist fusion. Not that we should be afraid of splits - the expanded core of the over-delayed future mass Communist Party that we all envisage will doubtless be arrived at through a series of splits and fusions on the existing left.
Ones, twos, hundreds … thousands even can be recruited individually. But positively overcoming the confessional sects, the illusions in broad-frontism and the bourgeois politics of the trade union bureaucracy cannot be ignored, skipped or avoided.
That is why sharp polemics and drawing clear lines of demarcation are vital throughout. Those who describe that tried and tested method as a problem reveal either unschooled naivety or ingrained opportunism (the first is easily overcome and should be treated with patience; the second requires much harsher medicine).
Anyway, having discussed the factional divisions on the Prometheus EB, we moved on to the main item of the agenda - the first of the six fusion points proposed by Talking About Socialism. That is: “What should a partyist organisation’s fundamental principles and programmatic commitments be?”2
After an initial silence, I dived in with an unprepared four-point answer: (1) the aim should be a mass Communist Party: that is, a party that organises the advanced part of the working class and goes on to lead the working class as a class, and which can therefore exercise hegemony over the middle classes, even elements of the bourgeoisie; (2) democracy in the party, in the workers’ movement and in society as a whole; (3) decisive working class rule: ie, the working class party in command of state power; (4) international socialism and therefore the global transition to communism, socialism in one country being delusional. All fleshed out, as I stressed, in the CPGB’s Draft programme.
Showing where we are at, there were no dissenters. Comrade Potts explained that the TAS six points were more like prompts and were designed to be taken as a whole.
Anyway, we turned to the CPGB’s Draft programme. Comrade Wrack said that he might take a different approach, mentioning in particular the length. He and comrade Potts will present their thoughts at our next meeting in a fortnight’s time.
Both myself and comrade Macnair readily admitted that our Draft programme is long, certainly compared to the very, very brief minimum-maximum programmes of the Second International. Theirs took a few thousand words or less, ours around 13,000. We have, though, made a determined effort to cut the wordage wherever possible and resist the endless calls to add this, that and the other. Yes, less is more!
But, especially in the light of the experience of the Soviet Union, we have considered it necessary to go in for far greater detail than in the past. Our commitment to democracy needed to be explained and emphasised whenever possible. The fight for democracy is vital in the workers’ movement and in relation to the capitalist state as well. Hence the demands for elections, recallability and officials taking only the average wage, and calls to abolish the House of Lords and the monarchy, for a federal republic, replacing the standing army with a popular militia, etc. The fight for democracy must continue under socialism too till the point where the state itself finally withers away and we have the mere administration of things.
The same goes with internationalism. It needed to be explained and emphasised. Communist internationalism is about far more than anti-imperialism and opposition to nationalism. It is a recognition that the working class cannot liberate itself in one country alone. It requires organisation and coordination on a global scale. The decisive breakthrough will though probably happen on a continental scale. That is why we devote half a page, a whole section (3.1.6), to Europe.
Not that the programmes of ‘official communism’ were short. If anything, they were/are far longer than ours … and have a habit of already being hopelessly dated even before they come off the printing press. The British road to socialism comes to mind.
Finally, we noted the successful launch of the Why Marx? ‘Building a Communist Party’ series on February 6 and the Prometheus/TAS ‘Marxist unity: building a mass Communist Party’ February 8 day school in Salford.
Both evidence of modest, but real progress.
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For all six points, see ‘Second-round progress’ Weekly Worker January 16 2025: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1521/second-round-progress.↩︎