20.02.2025
Speech controls yet again
There are those who want to keep differences polite, internal and under tight control. That is the approach of the opportunist right. Mike Macnair takes issue with those complaining about the CPGB’s ‘bad culture’
I attended the February 8 ‘Marxist unity’ day school in Salford organised by the Prometheus online magazine and Talking about Socialism. Comrade Carla Roberts has reported on the day school, and we print this week a set of letters from participants (which we put online last week).1 In this article I am concerned with a specific feature of the discussion, which is part of a long-running ‘debate’ (I put quote-marks round ‘debate’ for reasons that will appear later). Comrade Roberts’ article refers to “hesitation about the Weekly Worker and its ‘style’, as an RS21 comrade put it in Salford”. I myself heard a comrade complain in the meeting that the paper was “snarky” in comments on other groups.
Among the letters, Daniel Brady offered a specific instance of complaint: “The reports that were published in the Weekly Worker on Jack Conrad’s assumptions of the RS21 position were quite understandably read as an attempt to pose ultimatums and shape the narrative in bad faith.”
Comrade Brady’s point has the merit of condemning us for something specific - that is, that we speculated about what internal discussion might have led RS21 to break with the pro-imperialist, pro-war Ukraine Solidarity Campaign. What “ultimatums” are posed by our speculation on the issue is unclear - except in so far as we in the CPGB are quite open in arguing that the basis of any communist unity has to include opposition to our own imperialist state on Ukraine as much as on Palestine.
How this can be supposed to be “in bad faith” is completely impossible to see. To prevent it from “shaping the narrative” all the comrades need to do is to publish their discussion. What comrade Brady’s argument impliedly claims is that RS21 has the right to the privacy of its internal discussions, and should not be forced to publish them in order to show that the Weekly Worker’s speculations are wrong.
On this issue we make absolutely no apology. The CPGB has been arguing since the 1990s, and The Leninist before it, that parties and groups that claim to offer a political lead to the working class are obliged to publish their internal debates - as the Social Democratic Party of Germany did before World War I, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party did down to 1918 and the Russian Communist Party did into the 1920s.
We think that this task is essential to political parties and groups playing an educative role for the broader workers’ movement and being answerable to it. Education, as distinct from training, happens through dialectic: grappling with the confrontation of opposed views. Organisations that do not publish their internal debates and do not debate with other groups which disagree with them tend to dumb-down their readers and the broader workers’ movement. It is for this reason that we publish groups’ internal discussions when they have not and we are able to, and we speculate about where the groups have changed their position and we do not have information about the debate available to publish.
I put quote marks round ‘debate’ above, because, while The Leninist and the Weekly Worker have been arguing this position since the 1980s, almost no-one has been prepared to actually argue the contrary. At most we have received assertions (like comrade Andrew Northall’s defence of Stalinist norms in our letters page2). Or we hear general smears, without concrete evidence offered - like the complaint about the paper’s “style” referred to above, or comrade Lawrence Parker’s arguments – again, unsupported by evidence - about our supposed bad “culture”. Without much more “further and better particulars” than has been offered so far, we are not in a position either to argue or to make concessions on this front.
Compromise
No doubt it is necessary in politics to be willing to compromise, as Lenin argued in 1920 in ‘Leftwing’ communism.3 And hence no doubt there are issues on which CPGB should be willing to compromise for the sake of broader unity. But, taking this for the moment as a starting point, Lenin went on to argue in the next section of ‘Leftwing’ communism:
The Communist Party should propose the following ‘compromise’ election agreement to the Hendersons and Snowdens: let us jointly fight against the alliance between Lloyd George and the Conservatives; let us share parliamentary seats in proportion to the number of workers’ votes polled for the Labour Party and for the Communist Party (not in elections, but in a special ballot), and let us retain complete freedom of agitation, propaganda and political activity. Of course, without this latter condition, we cannot agree to a bloc, for that would be treachery; the British communists must demand and get complete freedom to expose the Hendersons and the Snowdens in the same way as (for 15 years - 1903-17) the Russian Bolsheviks demanded and got it in respect of the Russian Hendersons and Snowdens: ie, the Mensheviks.4
Compromise, then, but not at the price of abandoning freedom of sharp criticism. And Lenin’s comment on the Bolsheviks refers to their history as a permanent public faction of the RSDLP. It was this public factional character that allowed the Russian workers to choose between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
The other side of this coin is given by ex-left pro-war SPD writer Heinrich Cunow’s 1915 objection to Rosa Luxemburg’s polemic against the SPD’s August 1914 decision to vote for war credits:
The opposition to our Reichstag fraction’s vote on August 4 and December 2 last year is assuming ever more obnoxious forms. Those who do not agree with the vote on war credits undoubtedly have the right to criticise it, in an objective, party-comradely fashion, of course - although even on this condition one could be of the view that for certain reasons it would be better to postpone criticism until after the war. Yet when the German social democratic working class and its leaders are accused by opponents in Germany and abroad of cowardice, betrayal, a lack of principles, abdication, collapse and so on then surely there can hardly be any talk of objective criticism.5
This demand for “objective, party-comradely” criticism was repeated in stronger forms by the Labour right complaining of “intimidation” by Corbynistas in 2016-17.6
To accede to the demand for civility in polemic is, then, to accede to the demands of the loyalist right wing of the labour movement, which supports and is supported by the capitalist state and the capitalist media.
Of course, comrades who raise this issue against the Weekly Worker do not think that that is what they are doing. But the reality is that the pro-capitalist right wing of the workers’ movement has been demanding ‘civility and respect’ in debate - meaning deference to their scab politics - ever since the ‘revisionism’ debate in the SPD in the 1890s-1900s. Comintern began to concede to this demand from the right with Georgi Dimitrov’s speech to the 1935 seventh congress:
“The communists attack us,” say others. But, listen, we have repeatedly declared: We shall not attack anyone, whether persons, organisations or parties, standing for the united front of the working class against the class enemy. But at the same time it is our duty, in the interests of the proletariat and its cause, to criticise those persons, organisations and parties that hinder unity of action by the workers.7
This idea has become the common coin of both the Labour left and the far left. The Labour and trade union ‘official’ left clings to unity with the right as the only way to get a government. Hence it internalises the right’s demand for ‘civility and respect’. It, then, demands of the far left as a condition for united action that the far left should use the methods of diplomacy, ‘civility and respect’, towards the ‘official left’, and hence should self-silence.
This in turn has led the far left to internalise the same principles - going back in this country at least to John Ross and his co-thinkers’ “priority united-front axis towards the left social-democratic organising cadre” in the International Marxist Group in 1973-75, and in 1976-77 the International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party’s Right to Work Campaign, modelled on the popular-front version of the old Communist Party’s 1930s unemployment campaigning, and the Anti-Nazi League from 1977.
This 50-year (or more) history has so ingrained Dimitrov’s ideas into the far left that both ‘left independents’ and small groups who subjectively seek to build communist, Maoist or Trotskyist parties cling to diplomatic methods and find it impossible to live with real political openness and sharp criticism. Thus their anti-educative culture appears to them as the CPGB’s “bad culture”.
Unity
Equally, without real openness and willingness to live with sharp criticism there can actually be no effective unification of the Marxists. The problem is already apparent in comrades’ failure to specify what it is that counts as the CPGB’s “bad culture”. What is an unacceptable insult? We have been called out in the past for calling people “opportunist” and “centrist” - but these are merely (sharp) political characterisations. On the other hand, comrade Lawrence Parker accuses us of having a “North Korean” internal life and other such slanders; is this to be taken as comradely criticism?
We object to the falsity of comrade Parker’s arguments, but not to their rudeness. Similarly, back in Left Unity in 2013-15 we noted that the proposer of a ban on heckling (which we opposed) promptly heckled a CPGB speaker in the same meeting. The indeterminacy of what counts as unacceptable forms of polemic quite inevitably produces double standards in critics of the CPGB’s “bad culture”.
This problem of indeterminacy and double standards means that, as soon as serious disagreements arise, the opposing side will be accused of “bad culture”, ‘uncomradeliness’ and so on. Left Unity is, in fact, a classic example: its ‘safe spaces’ rules (never actually voted in during that period, but used in practice) gave rise to the organisation’s disputes committee being utterly clogged up with meritless complaints.
The pattern of factitious disciplinary charges against opponents from majorities (central or local) - and overreactions to insults and provocations by minorities walking out - is not just a matter of the history of Left Unity. It is equally the history of far-left splits - going back to the notorious 1953 split in the Fourth International, and continuing through the history of the 1970s (and since) splits in the SWP - and a relatively recent example is the 2014 collapse of the International Socialist Network over ‘chairgate’.8
To compromise on the issue of open and sharp polemics would, then, in fact be to destroy the possibility of unity of the Marxists and to condemn ourselves to repetition of the patterns of left failure over the last 50 years. An indefinite future repetition, but not an endless repetition, because it will only last until the growing ascendancy of the irrationalist right issues in a generalised nuclear war. This ascendancy is itself the product of the Marxist left’s self-silencing acceptance of the loyalist and ‘official left’ labour bureaucracy’s demands for confidentiality and ‘civility’.
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weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1525/two-meetings-and-many-possibilities; and weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1525/additional-letters.↩︎
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On Northall and Parker, see ‘Upfront, sharp and personal’, November 30 2023 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1469/upfront-sharp-and-personalmj), with references; on Parker, again, ‘Anti-partyist partyism’, January 16 2025 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1521/anti-partyist-partyism).↩︎
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Partei-Zusammenbruch? Ein offenes Wort zum inneren Parteistreit Berlin 1915 (The collapse of the party? An open word on the controversy in the party) p3 (Ben Lewis’s translation).↩︎
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See, for example, ‘Attempt to outlaw justified anger’ Weekly Worker October 20 2016 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1127/attempt-to-outlaw-justified-anger).↩︎
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www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm#s7 - see ‘The chief arguments of the opponents of the united front’.↩︎
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C Winstanley, ‘IS Network: self-flagellation and the “kinky split”’ Weekly Worker February 13 2014 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/997/is-network-self-flagellation-and-the-kinky-split); D Harvey, ‘ISN: not waving, but dying’ Weekly Worker July 24 2014 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1020/isn-not-waving-but-dying).↩︎