13.03.2025
Getting down to details
Our first face-to-face meeting took place on March 8. The aim was to find out where we agreed and where we disagreed. Mike Macnair reports on Forging Communist Unity
We have met more than once online. But these meetings have been short, and online meetings in general flow less well and are less productive than when we are face-to-face. So on March 8 Manchester comrades came down to London for an all-day meeting of two delegates from the CPGB (Jack Conrad and myself), two from Talking About Socialism (Nick Wrack and Ed Potts), and two from the wing of the Prometheus editorial board which has agreed to participate in the talks (Cat Rylance and Archie Woodrow). Comrade Farzad Kamangar was present, not as a delegate, but having organised the room, and agreed to take minutes.
We began the day with a position paper from the ‘pro-talks faction’ of Prometheus (to give it a name for convenience), which had resulted from a meeting of theirs and had just been circulated. Comrade Rylance introduced the text. The Prometheus pro-talks faction agrees with TAS that the Forging Communist Unity’ process should develop its own programme, rather than attempting to amend the CPGB’s Draft programme, though a unity conference might wind up considering competing drafts. It needed to be short and tightly focussed. FCU should also - but not in the programme - draft a strategy document about the next steps for a unified group, analogous to the discussions of the existing left in the CPGB’s 1994 text.1 On the TAS ‘Heads of agreement’, comrades from the Prometheus pro-talks faction do not agree with point xiv on the USSR, which is insufficiently nuanced. Comrade Archie added to this point: the question of a strategy document was important; the CPGB Draft programme is too much like that of a mass party; what we produce should be more abstract; for the same reason, point xiv on the USSR was too narrow.
This gave rise to a significant discussion, in which everyone participated. It is fairly clear that there is still a difference about the nature of the sort of programme we need: CPGB comrades still think, though others seem to disagree, that it needs to be a clearly maximum-minimum design and that, in the light of the 20th century, both the maximum and the minimum need more elaboration than was present in the Erfurt programme or the 1903 RSDLP programme. We also continue to think that the programme should try to chart a path to the revolution, rather than responding to the immediate needs of a small group. There is also a disagreement about the present need for a ‘strategy document’ - in this case one which divides the Prometheus pro-talks faction from both CPGB and TAS comrades; though we are agreed on the need to aim to win the existing organised left.
Principles
Most of our day was spent focussed on this ‘programme question’. We started out with setting on one side the idea contained in TAS’s document2 that general principles include matters which have to be agreed for unity - as opposed to accepted as the basis for common action. We will come back to that issue later. However, we did start with looking at what we agreed to.
The reason for this is that, where we are all in agreement, there is no immediate need for further discussion. Where there is disagreement, we might be able to clear it up quickly; or might need further discussion; or might end up with something which would have to be voted on in an actual fusion conference.
We took TAS’s ‘Heads of agreement’ (paragraph 9, sub-paragraphs i-xvii) as the starting point for the sake of convenience. We agreed at the outset to look at the parallel principles in the CPGB’s Draft programme together with them, but about three points in, when we reached our first disagreement, we got derailed from this practice (my individual fault, since I had proposed the method of looking at parallels, but did not keep bringing the meeting back to it.)
The TAS comrades have usefully summarised the actual decisions in their report of the meeting.3 It is enough here to say that we all agreed generally and without significant discussion to points i-ii, iv-vi, viii-ix, xi and xvi-xvii - that is, 10 of the 17 points. It is worth reporting a little further on the points where more needed to be said.
Point iii is: “This requires a fundamental break with capitalism.” The following point iv is: “Our party does not aim to manage capitalism, but to abolish it.” I argued that point iii is unclear and should be dropped. The issue, as it rapidly appeared in the discussion, is the difference between the CPGB and TAS, identified in earlier discussions, on the extent of a “transition period” between the overthrow of capitalist rule and communism, and the meaning of ‘socialism’ - which the CPGB uses (following the later Second International practice) for the transition period.
Related to this, for the CPGB the overthrow of capitalist rule is the overthrow of the capitalist state and the creation of “extreme democracy”, which then creates the conditions for a transition period - as comrade Conrad put it, “as short as possible, as long as necessary”. We reject - as I said at one point in the discussion - the argument of Parvus in der Staat, die Industrie und der Sozialismus (1910) that the workers’ movement should downgrade the question of political democracy in order to focus on ‘socialisation’ issues.
Terminological
I think comrades recognised that the terminological question is in itself not critical, but what lies behind it are real questions of practical politics. One is whether the political strength the working class would need to develop in order to take power would be so great that any period of transition would be so short that we would not need a minimum programme, or programmatic slogans in relation to the middle classes, at all. A second is the question of the USSR - which the Prometheus comrades had raised as a problem in relation to point xiv. Should we call the USSR and similar countries any form of “socialism”? CPGB has used “bureaucratic socialism” as an analogue to Marx’s and Engels’ use of “feudal socialism” in the Communist manifesto.
A related issue is how far it is possible for the working class to take power in a single country. I raised the point that continental-scale action was needed to avoid starvation by way of ‘sanctions’-type siege warfare; but that this implied the involvement of subsisting peasant and artisan classes in continental Europe - again posing the transition period and the minimum programme. Comrade Wrack agreed with the need for continental scale; comrade Woodrow thought that there was more of a case for the Socialist Workers Party’s view that national revolutions could not be simultaneous. It was clear that this issue needed further discussion.
On points v-vii, there was a discussion about the “ownership” formula (the problem, in my view, is that “public ownership” is not “the collective ownership of the majority working class” without working class democratic control of the assets in question). What we agreed was a more limited change to point vii: “It requires the abolition of the exploitation of labour to make a profit” - which we agreed (as a maximum programme aim), but on the basis of amending the text to refer to control over the surplus product, rather than to “profit” per se. The point of this change is that the Soviet bureaucracy did not make profits, but did exclude the working class from control over the surplus product.
Point x is: “The working class in power will establish new forms of democracy at all levels of society, which will enable everyone to participate in the running of society.” We had some discussion of this, since it is in my opinion at risk of committing to the fetishism of the soviet form, but in the end agreed it unamended.
Point xii, “Our party stands for the unity of the working class. We fight against all divisions that weaken that unity” gave rise to some discussion, because, while it is aimed against sectionalism, it can be read as rejecting open disagreements (and was so read at the 7th Congress of Comintern in 1935). It was not clear that there was an actual political difference on the issue, but we agreed that this point needed at least further discussion with a view to reformulation.
Point xiii - “We reject nationalism. There is no national road to communism” - also gave rise to substantive discussion. The second sentence was generally agreed, but in relation to the first sentence comrade Conrad made the point that we needed to distinguish the nationalism of the oppressed from the nationalism of the oppressor. Comrade Woodrow agreed - perhaps more strongly - with this, asserting the need for willingness to create developmental regimes in the colonial world rather than wait for the imperialist working class to move. There was further discussion, but it was clear that this formulation was not, as yet, agreed.
Democracy
Point xiv - “Communism is democratic. We reject the idea that what existed in the former Soviet Union and similar states, or what exists today in China or North Korea, was or is in any way communist or a transition to communism. We oppose all forms of dictatorial rule” - had already been flagged by the Prometheus pro-talks faction as a point of difference. Comrade Conrad added two points: the first was that the early Soviet regime did indeed have an aspect of transition towards communism. The second was that the last sentence, “We oppose all forms of dictatorial rule”, seemed to amount to a disavowal of Marx’s and subsequent socialists’ use of the idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, meaning the political rule of the working class over other classes in the transition to communism. Comrade Potts argued that the formulation was necessary to draw a clear line against the Soviet and similar bureaucratic regimes. Comrade Rylance made the point - which I think is correct - that even if we never use the expression, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, the political agents of capital will use it against us, and we have to be able to explain its true meaning. Again, there was further discussion, but it was clear that we did not yet have an agreed view on the issue.
Point xv is: “In the struggle to end the present system our party bases itself on the working class, the only force in society that has the size, strength and potential power to change the system.” I made the point that this formulation is mistaken. It is not the strength and power of the working class which gives it the potential to change the system. (This is the mistaken idea of the general-strikists.) It is the fact that - being separated from the means of production - the working class is forced to cooperate in trade unions, coops, collectivist political parties, and so on - and hence points towards communism. We agreed a redraft in principle, but here there is still a difference with TAS’s note, which is “Should be redrafted to make clear that the working class being the bearer of socialism is due to both its interest in doing so (as a result of being separated from the means of production), as well as its strength” (emphasis added).
We ended the day with a brief discussion of Communist University, currently planned for early August. The CPGB has agreed to invite TAS and Prometheus to co-organise this school, in a stronger sense than just sponsoring it - meaning the creation of a joint committee to discuss topics, invitations and so on. The TAS comrades agreed to this proposal; the Prometheus comrades need to take it back to their faction and to the full editorial board.