06.03.2025
A very English possibilist
Steve Freeman of the Republican Labour Education Forum dismisses the idea of a mass Communist Party as utterly utopian. Instead he proposes a Commonwealth Party
The article by Mike Macnair, ‘Going beyond strikism’ (February 6), identifies four contributions to Prometheus’s discussion on the party question. These were from the Socialist Party of Great Britain, Ansell Eade (One Big Party), Chris Nineham and myself. Mike makes an argument that the SPGB has an ultra-left position and comrades Eade, Nineham and myself are opportunists, lacking communist principles.
He conducts his argument through a 19th century debate between those labelled ‘impossibilists’ and ‘possibilists’. He says: “Why this history is relevant is that, while the SPGB are ‘impossibilists’, comrades Ansell Eade, Steve Freeman and Chris Nineham - and, it must be added, the large majority of the British far left - are ‘possibilists’ - though they would never admit to it.” Implicit in Mike’s view is the CPGB defending the true communism against the heretics to their left and right.
Framing the present as a fight between ‘impossibilists’ and ‘possibilists’ may suit the CPGB, but not the working class. The movement has to have a necessary discussion about what is or is not possible now. If bourgeois politics is the art of the possible, Marxist politics is the science of the possible. What is possible and impossible are not fixed categories. Impossible today may become possible. At the heart of this debate is whether it is possible or not to build a mass Communist Party in England in 2025.
Realism
All talk about doing that now is empty rhetoric. Unless we rule this out, we cannot make real progress. Realism is not a betrayal of communism. Yes, a million-strong Communist Party would be a huge step forward, but there are not a million communists ready to join it, but left communist fantasies are not going to be put off by facts. Is it possible to make realistic steps forward? We start from the actual consciousness of the working class and the current level of struggle and not how we hope it could be.
My proposal is both possible and achievable in the present, no matter how unlikely it may seem, given the history of the British left. Mike alleges that, because I am a ‘possibilist’, I believe “Marxist politics may be relevant at some point in the future; but, for the present, advocating Marxist politics is an obstacle to what needs to be done, which is to focus on ‘the possible’.”
I have never said Marxist politics “may be relevant at some point in the future”. On the contrary, the argument for a commonwealth party and communist party is an “application of historical materialism” to the present conditions and state of the class struggle in England, the rest of the UK and the wider world. Mike speaks only about “advocating Marxist politics”.
There is a significant difference between making Marxist propaganda for a mass Communist Party and applying Marxism to solve the actual problems facing the working class. Applying science to the evidence leads to the obvious conclusion - a mass working class party is possible in present conditions and a mass Communist Party is not. This may be harsh and disappointing, but it is based on reality, not fantasy. Mike is not interested in applying Marxism to the present, but merely making propaganda for it.
Chris Nineham’s ‘A party mood?’, as quoted by Mike, is connected to observable facts. Chris says: “There is a big left in this country, whatever its weaknesses. It formed the activist base for Corbynism, it coalesced again around the short-lived 2022 strike wave, and it has been at the heart of today’s unprecedented Palestine movement.” I agree in general with this assessment of the situation. In attending these demonstrations I saw a mass Palestinian ‘party’ with Palestinian flags, but no evidence of a mass Communist Party.
The first thing to note about comrades Eade, Nineham and myself is that, while comrade Eade has a single-party model, comrade Nineham and myself are speaking about two parties. He identifies the first united front as a “new anti-neoliberal and anti-war party” and second for “a revolutionary organisation”. Two is not an opinion, it is just counting. Similarly I argued for two ‘parties’ - a commonwealth party and communist party. For the sake of greater precision I am going to use the term, ‘left populist party’ (LPP), and an ‘international republican communist tendency’ (IRCT).
The two-party model comes from a division of working consciousness between a social democratic majority and a republican-communist minority. Marx had to deal with a similar problem. He supported the Communist League, the Chartist party and the First International. The Communist manifesto says that “the communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working class parties”. Whether you agree with Marx and Engels here, they are dealing with more than one working class party.
The First International was not a Communist Party. Marx did not stand around until it had been formed, so he could join as a pure communist, unsullied by the compromise deals needed to set it up. He got stuck in and drafted a compromise platform that could unite the disparate working class forces. It should be noted: “When [Marx] drafted the declaration of principles for the International, he was careful to avoid all demands and formulations which might offend any one of the disparate tendencies represented in the new organisation. Consequently we do not find, either in the ‘inaugural address’ or in the rules, any statement calling for the nationalisation of the means of production, a demand which would have been unacceptable to the Proudhonists” (‘The principles and statutes of the First International’).
Did Marx abandon Marxism for ‘possibilism’ or did he apply Marxism instead of talking about how great Marxism was? Was he making a scientific assessment of the state of working class politics to find how to take the movement forward? Even though the First International failed (as inevitable as the collapse of the Socialist Alliance), it took the working class movement forward. Marx did not abandon communism, but took steps towards it through the First International.
In ‘Leftwing’ communism Lenin deals with the complex relationship between two working class parties - the Labour Party and the newly emerging Communist Party. He condemned those who try to deduce tactics from principles. He criticised the left communist idea that “The Communist Party must keep its doctrine pure, and its independence of reformism inviolate; its mission is to lead the way, without stopping or turning, by the direct road to communist revolution”. He says this leftist method “will inevitably fall into error” (Selected works volume 3, Moscow 1976, p351).
Lenin goes onto explain that these ‘left communist’ principles “are merely a repetition of the mistake made by French Blanquist Communards, who in 1874 “repudiated” all compromises and all intermediate stages”. According to left communists like the SPGB, “intermediate stages” are nothing but ‘possibilism’. Yet for communists they are at the heart of any serious discussion.
Let me reformulate the case for many left parties to become two parties - a left populist party (LPP) and an international republican communist tendency (IRCT), standing in comparison with Nineham’s two - “a new anti-neoliberal and anti-war party” and “a revolutionary organisation”.
A mass Communist Party in England and the rest of the UK is simply not possible in the current period. Our task is to unite republican communists as an independent tendency that can challenge and overcome Stalinism and Trotskyism. There is no basis for a mass international republican Communist Party. The majority of Marxists in the UK - Stalinists and Trotskyists - are opposed to it. The present priority is not for disparate republican communists to declare themselves a mass party: it is to fight for the unity of republican communists in a third organised tendency. This new tendency must aim to become the majority of Marxists. Mike rightly says that “it is not possible to go round the larger organised groups of the far left”. So, if the current members of the CPGB, Talking About Socialism, Prometheus and RS21 organised into one tendency, that could drive through Stalinism and Trotskyism rather than try to skirt round them.
By contrast, there are those who are in favour of something like comrade Eade’s ‘one big party’. Mike says: “What he proposes is - pretty explicitly - a return to the Socialist Alliance(s) of 1998-2003”. Mike takes us back to the failures of the past, but he draws the wrong conclusions. He seems to think they failed because they were too broad, contained too many people and did not accept the leadership of a Communist Party. The responsibility for failure has to be with the communists, who did not fight against the social-monarchist programmes of all these groups. Instead of fighting to win them to the demand for a democratic republic, they capitulated and then surrendered. The communists were only interested in demanding full communism and calling for a Communist Party, which made them appear to non-communist workers as a bunch of sectarians.
Broadness
The central CPGB thesis is that these organisations failed because they were ‘broad’ rather than because of their strategies and programmes. These organisations and the Corbyn Labour Party stood for a left ‘social-monarchist’ programme. They failed for many reasons, but fundamentally because their politics was out of date and out of time. No broad party can succeed if it is built on the rotting foundations of the 1945 social monarchy. Comrade Eade’s attempt to pretend that the Socialist Alliance or any of the other failures had anything serious to do with democratic republicanism is laughable.
Many of Mike’s criticisms are valid, but misplaced. The CPGB played an important part in these failures, starting with the Socialist Labour Party. The CPGB became one of the principal six organisations of the Socialist Alliance. I think it supported the launch of Respect and became involved in Left Unity. In my mind the aim of the CPGB in all these interventions was to try to turn these organisations into the Communist Party of Great Britain. This was never going to work.
Let us now turn to Martin Greenfield (Letters, February 13), who we will assume was a member of the CPGB in 2001. There was a rapprochement process back then and at first it involved the CPGB and the Revolutionary Democratic Group. The issue was the same facing the unity initiative today. Would the RDG simply join the CPGB or would we create a new organisation? Today the equivalent outcome would be the CPGB joining RS21.
Clearly Martin saw the whole matter in terms of whether individual RDG members would join the CPGB. He seems to think I led the CPGB on a merry dance and then did not join. He still feels irked by that, which he explains as my cowardice. He asks: “And why did communist rapprochement between the CPGB and RDG fail? I think Steve needs to buy a mirror to answer that question. Like a nervous horse at the Grand National, he approached every hurdle and asked for it to be moved a little bit further away before organisational unity was possible.”
Martin considers only the narrow aspect of who did and did not join the CPGB. Whilst there were many cynics in the CPGB who looked at the process simply as a means of increasing their membership, I don’t think Jack Conrad was one of them.
The fact is that there was a process, which went beyond the question of RDG members joining the CPGB. The CPGB, the RDG, Communist Tendency and Trotskyist Unity Group, along with some ex-CPGB members, did form an organisation called the Republican Communist Network. It produced six issues of a magazine called Republican Communist, which contained articles by Jack Conrad, myself and many others.
The RCN was a “network of groups and individuals united under the slogans, ‘Republicanism’, ‘Revolutionary democracy and culture’, ‘Workers power’, ‘International socialist revolution’ and ‘World communism’”. I would be interested to know which of these slogans are supported by RS21, Prometheus or TAS. Of course, these points are not a programme, but a set of parameters within which one could be developed (today I would probably seek one improvement). All this was established before September 11 2001 and did not survive long after. The RCN never created a programme. It would have been the next step to a unified organisation, but it split along national lines and collapsed in England.
The Republican Communist Network was the highest achievement of communist unity at the beginning of the 21st century in the UK. This might seem an outrageous claim, so I stand to be corrected, if anybody has a better example. And to those whose only interest was recruiting members to the CPGB, the RCN was not a barrier - more likely, it had succeeded, then failed. It failed, but it set a benchmark for Republican Communism, which is already stronger today than 20 years ago.
It is easy to speak about learning the lessons of the failures of the broad-left parties and ignore what went on in our own backyard. The RCN did not intervene in the new Socialist Alliance, because in practice its components went in different directions - in contrast to the RCN (Scotland) that was active in the Scottish Socialist Party. Consequently republicanism has far greater purchase on the Scottish left, compared to its absence in England.
The issues are similar today. Is this new fusion merely a means of persuading Nick Wrack and Cat Rylance to join the CPGB or is something stronger than the RCN going to emerge without retreating from its principles? Martin is optimistic. He says: “In stark contrast, I commend Nick Wrack’s serious and mature attitude in the [Why Marx?] meeting, where he said that sometimes you lose a vote.” Martin sees this as a signal that Nick is getting his mind ready to join the CPGB.
The CPGB big fish may eat the smaller ones but the biggest fish is RS21. I cannot see them being swallowed up by the CPGB, although they might be split up by this process.