10.04.2025

Rediscovering our words

Communist unity needs solid programmatic foundations if it is going to succeed. Towards that end, Jack Conrad says that we need to return to our common language to overcome common misunderstandings

Some 12 years ago, when working in that ill-fated venture, Left Unity, we briefly united with comrades Edmund Potts and Nick Wrack in the Socialist Platform. Regretfully, nothing came of it. We strongly objected to the social-imperialist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty being included; we objected no less strongly to the imposition of indicative votes and a take-it-or-leave-it ‘Statement of aims and principles’.¹

Thankfully all that is behind us now. However, the reason I raise old history is that some old problems remain with us today - not least our lack of a common political language.

In the context of Left Unity and the Socialist Platform, I wrote about how words, phrases and formulations, such as ‘minimum programme, ‘socialism’, ‘communism’, ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ and ‘democratic centralism’, will often be misunderstood.² After all, our movement has been tragically separated, divided, disorganised into numerous parties, groups and sects over many years. All too frequently then, we mean different things when we say the same thing. There is a disjuncture between speaker and listener.

By way of an analogy, I used the example of the Polynesian peoples and their colonisation of the Pacific. They headed out from Taiwan some time between 3,000 to 1,500 BCE and settled on one island after another. Their descendants finally reached Tonga and Samoa around 900 BCE. While they all remained part of the same Lapita culture, for the most part their 40 main languages developed in isolation. There was little, if any, two-way communication. Hence, although the languages spoken by Polynesian peoples are closely related and have many words in common, when a Samoan talks to a Tongan there is confusion, misinterpretation and sometimes just plain “mutual incomprehension”.³

So, when former members of the Militant Tendency or members of the SWP, SPEW, RS21, the Communist Workers’ Organisation, Counterfire or this or that sect of one hear us talking about reforging the Communist Party, the centrality of programme, the necessity of having a minimum (or immediate) section of that programme, of socialism being the transition period between capitalism and communism, or of socialism beginning as capitalism, but ruled over by the working class, there is frequent misunderstanding and sometimes downright incomprehension.

Real differences

Of course, it is not only a matter of language, of words. Discussions in the Forging Communist Unity process have revealed wide areas of agreement, as would be expected from those who call themselves communists, but important differences too - crucially when it comes to certain key strategic conceptions and aims. Differences can be overcome, at least in part, through further exchanges. This year’s Communist University (July 31-August 7) will be a great chance to make progress. There is joint sponsorship, a tripartite organising committee and there will, of course, be many formal and informal opportunities to debate and discuss over the week. There is always the possibility too, if we can get to that stage, of minorities loyally abiding by majority votes, trying to win the argument and thereby become the majority. Meanwhile, we need clarity.

Before proceeding, let me outline a few areas of broad agreement between the CPGB, Talking About Socialism and the pro-party faction of the Prometheus editorial board. We all reject notions of a British road to socialism. Socialism is international or it is nothing. Together we envisage Europe as a strategic point of departure. Therefore, the absurd delusions peddled by the SWP, SPEW, Counterfire, the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain in Lexit are to be condemned. Leaving the European Union has done nothing to progress the struggle for socialism. Nor do we think there was anything to admire, to emulate when it comes to the Soviet Union of the five-year plan epoch. The same goes for today’s China, Vietnam and Cuba … nowadays all examples of bureaucratic socialism on the capitalist road. Doubtless, what marks us out collectively though is a commitment to communist unity, not least through a process of organisational fusion - that has, by the way, been consistently upheld and championed by today’s CPGB and its Provisional Central Committee since its very inception.⁴

What about our differences? First and foremost there is programme. Nick Wrack is right when he says that the CPGB wants its Draft programme to be the “basis for the programme in any fused organisation” and that TAS disagrees with us about that. Yes, we envisage submitting our Draft programme to a fusion conference for debate, amendment and a binding vote. That is one of the reasons we have a Draft programme. It not only provides the programmatic basis for today’s CPGB members, committees and media: it is the programme we envisage for the mass CPGB of the future (up to the point of the conquest of political power by the working class, when, obviously, it will, depending how secure we are, need to be thoroughly rewritten).

TAS, on the other hand, wants a programme - more like an article of faith - for a new, fused organisation that sets out “essential points in succinct, easily understandable points, so that any worker or young person can readily grasp what our organisation is about”.⁵ As the new organisation grows, not least through new fusions, the idea appears to be that new “essential points” will be added as pleasers. Either way, what is being suggested is something like the minimalism of Socialist Worker’s emaciated ‘What we stand for’ column rather than a comprehensive, fully rounded, communist programme.

The comrades denounce capitalist society and promise an end to exploitation, the hierarchical division of labour and classes under socialism. There will too, they insist, be extensive democracy. Good stuff, which we can readily agree with. However, it seems, that the TAS comrades reject the idea of a minimum-maximum programme tout court. I say “seems” because at the moment it is more implied than explicitly stated. Nonetheless, comrade Wrack does provide us with this telling statement:

I see the programme … as being a programme for government - a government by the working class. It is a statement of intent, a series of policies that the working class will implement to change the way society is organised, to break the power of the ruling class, to end for ever the exploitation of the majority of the world’s population.

If the programme is based on the ultimate destination, but fails to map out the route needed to get there, then what we have is an attempt to combine the SWP’s minimalism with the utopian impossibilism of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its ‘Our object and declaration of principles’.⁶ We shall see.

Apparently though, a minimum-maximum programme is an utterly obscure concept, understandable only by Marxist wonks like you and me. It cannot, however, be understood by their “any worker or young person.” Hard to credit, if that is what the comrades are really suggesting. After all, they rightly insist on emphasising how comparatively well educated workers and young people are today in Britain, compared with, say, a century ago. Workers and young people in the 21st century are, therefore, surely able to grasp the ABC idea that the communist programme consists of two main parts.

Thin air

First, there is the immediate economic and political demands we fight to realise under capitalism. Second, the maximum: what we seek to attain after taking state power, beginning with the working class constitution and going all the way to achieving our aim of a communist society, where “real human history begins” and there is “general freedom”.⁷

And remember the minimum-maximum arrangement has its origins in the programme of the French Workers’ Party (1880), the German Social Democratic Party’s Erfurt programme (1891) and the programme of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (1903). These parties - and parties like them - recruited on a huge scale.

We are told that the demands contained in the minimum section of our Draft programme were written by a few people and plucked out of thin air. Hardly. No, our demands and aims are what workers need to fight for in order to make them into a class for itself and therefore a potential ruling class.

They are certainly no more plucked out of thin air’ than the programme of the French Workers’ Party drawn up by two Frenchmen and two English Germans in the front room of London’s 122 Regent’s Park Road. The preamble - the maximum section - was dictated by Karl Marx, and he and Jules Guesde formulated the minimum economic and political demands with help provided by Fredrick Engels and Paul Lafargue (the economic section reflecting the current, spontaneous, demands of the workers’ movement in France). Engels described the maximum section as “a masterpiece of cogent argumentation”.⁸ Later he highly recommended the economic section to the German social democrats in his critique of the draft of the 1891 Erfurt Programme.

TAS comrades want to substitute the minimum programme with a few vague phrases about securing whatever gains that can be made under capitalism. Specifics are notable by their absence. Likewise the comrades deny, skip over, denounce any notion of a transformation period, long or short, perhaps lasting a generation or two - a period we, following Marx’s Critique of the Gotha programme and Lenin’s deservedly famous State and revolution, call the lower phase of communism, what we call socialism, that necessarily must happen between the capitalism that the working class takes over and the realisation of full communism.

Let us examine Marx’s Critique beginning with this celebrated passage:

What we have to deal with here [after the working class has achieved state power] is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.⁹

Marx outlines how this society will operate according to the bourgeois principle of equal exchange. People will work and according to their work they receive back from society a commodity equivalent of what they have given (minus what is needed for the “common funds”). But, therefore, Marx explains, this “equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour.” People are different, some work more, some work less, some have children, some do not. Such a defect is “inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society.” What of fully developed communism?

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and with it also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but itself life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly - only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!¹⁰

Hence for Marx there is a phase of transition from capitalist to communist society, which the state, he said “can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”¹¹

By the time Lenin got round to publishing his State and revolution (1917) it had become usual or common to call this lower phase of communism, “socialism”.¹² Note too: Karl Kautsky writes of the “commonwealth of the future” and “socialist production”.¹³ Nikolai Bukharin calls the transition to fully communist relations of production “state capitalism turned upside-down.”¹⁴ Equally, Evgeny Preobrazhensky took it for granted that the Soviet Union was a “commodity-socialist form of economy”.¹⁵

In other words, socialism is not, and cannot be, a mode of production, with a definite social law: ie the law of value or the law of the plan. It combines both, the outcome being decided by which law wins out and which law loses. Hence we envisage the gradual transformation of material conditions and the gradual transformation of human beings, so that the law of the plan eventually triumphs over the law of value, with the realisation of the higher stage of communism. TAS rejects the economic gradualism of Marxism. Instead they propose a Bakuninist leap from today’s capitalism to the communist future, where there is no state, no classes, no money, no markets.

Therefore, the comrades not only risk triggering economic chaos. They fail to take into proper account the danger of foreign blockade, wars of intervention and attempts at sabotage. A working class state with its accompanying popular militia is essential. Correspondingly, they fail to consider the position of the middle classes - neutralising them, winning them as allies, slowly, voluntarily drawing them into the socialised economy, through material advantage, through the benefits of cooperatives, etc. Note, in the UK there are some 6.5 million small to medium enterprises employing from zero to 49 workers. If we take Europe, our decisive starting point, the proportionate size of the middle classes is substantially bigger. Those who see only two classes, proletarian and capitalist, who refuse to acknowledge the existence of the middle classes, might as well live on the moon.

We are breezily told that after the overthrow of the capitalist state there will be no exploitation through wage-labour, no private ownership of the means of production: “there will be the complete eradication of private (capitalist) ownership of the means of production”.¹⁶ So are we to envisage forcible expropriation? The closure of specialist building firms, little breweries, artisanal furniture makers, landscape gardeners, corner shops, single-boat fishing enterprises? Laws to prevent family farms hiring seasonal hands? An approach reminiscent of Pol Pot … which will, I guarantee, drive the middle classes into the arms of reaction and constitute them as a counterrevolutionary bloc. Strategically dumb, to say the least.

Not that small and medium (capitalist) enterprises will be left free to enrich themselves and become big (capitalist) enterprises. There is a working class state and a communist government. That means progressive taxation, much improved legal protections, a massive extension of trade union membership, tough safety regulations and radically shortened hours.

Struggle continues

So the CPGB insists that the class struggle continues after the working class overthrows the capitalist state and constitutes itself as the ruling class. Why? Not only is there the middle class and hostile foreign powers: the exploitation of the working class cannot be abolished overnight. Even if, as we would expect, there was the nationalisation of utilities, infrastructure and the commanding heights, we still begin with wage-labour, money, markets and forms of commodity production. That is a simple statement of fact that only utopians can deny. Such features are inherited from capitalism and are slowly superseded, as the law of value gives way to the law of the plan. Something that cannot be a spontaneous process. It relies on consciousness.

Nor, closely related to this, can the position of the working class as an underclass be ended overnight. Privileged background, education, accumulated wealth, personal connections, the division of labour - all ensure that there are those with massive advantages … which also sometimes gives them a socially vital role (say, in management). Hence the class struggle must be continued on the cultural front too. Access to the arts, science, sports, etc can be made available to all. Education should not end at the age of 18 or 21, but be lifelong. That way, skill monopolies enjoyed by various middle class professionals can be rapidly overcome, as we train ever more red doctors, surgeons, dentists, statisticians, architects, computer programmers, engineers … and managers.

Meanwhile, there has to be a class struggle to overcome women’s oppression by socialising housework and childcare. Nor should historic national, ethnic and regional disadvantages be overlooked. There has to be a levelling up. No less to the point, the working class needs to prevent a bureaucratic caste emerging from within the new regime. A real danger, as seen in today’s trade union movement, the co-ops and political parties, including the larger confessional sects with their self-perpetuating central committees and labour dictators. That means demanding term limits, caps on incomes, access to information and popular supervision of elected officials.

There is too, therefore, the likelihood of mass campaigns demanding the removal of a particular official or set of officials. Obviously we do not know. But till there is the self-administration of the general population by the general population, we should not imagine everything proceeding in sweet harmony. Even then there will surely be all manner of individual and group disputes, arguments, conflicts and demands.

On the macro level, there is the climate crisis. Restoring the planet to good health will be the work of many decades - such is the horrendous damage already done. There will, though, have to be radical measures, curbing - perhaps stopping - certain lines of production and certain forms of consumption. Those who believe that there are no natural limits and everyone should be able to enjoy the lifestyle of today’s billionaire class will surely loudly object.

Again with the climate crisis in mind. Perhaps some low-lying areas, even whole town and cities, have to be abandoned to the rising seas. There are bound to be those - eg, those living there - who will oppose any such policy. They could well demand more coastal defences, more flood barriers, more pumping stations. They could even stage mass protests and live-ins.

A micro example. Take something really basic like the allocation of living spaces. Everyone can have good-quality accommodation - that is comparatively easy to achieve through takeovers, good organisation and a determined building programme - but not everyone can have a penthouse flat overlooking the Thames or a Georgian townhouse sitting on the edge of Hampstead Heath. It cannot be otherwise. Such problems come with geography - ie, the finite nature of space - and will have to be resolved by coming to some sort of agreement, perhaps sealed with an authoritative vote. Most will have to settle, therefore, for second best when it comes to location, location, location.

Demands

Comrade Wrack has things proceeding altogether smoothly. Eg, he has no time for the idea of demands after the working class has achieved state power: “… when the working class comes to power it will not be ‘demanding’ that anyone else, not any other class, implements these policies. It will implement them as a class itself, acting collectively.” Obviously something to discuss and debate, but it surely has to be admitted that our Draft programme deals with real political tasks, real social contradictions, real dangers that have not been plucked out of thin air and which have to be recognised (not wished away).

No less to the point, we should not paint a Manichean black and white picture of the pre-revolution and the post-revolution society. There is a process of going out of existence and coming into existence. The political economy of the working class emerges under mature capitalism, with developments such as Chartism and the demand for a 10 hour day, and continues to advance, true, contested step by contested step, with strong trade unions, cooperatives, mass political parties, measures of workers’ control over production, concessions such as universal suffrage, unemployment benefit, universal primary and secondary education, health services provided according to need, etc.

Clearly, not a linear process - gains can be and are taken away. Nevertheless, the political economy of capitalism, the law of value, is in decay because of the political economy of the working class. A political economy that is carried over into socialism and in due course fully blooms. Taking power is a vital, qualitative moment, true, but in what is an “epoch” of transition “from capitalism to communism” that begins long before.¹⁷

Comrade Wrack is blind to this dialectic. He calls for an immediate, a complete, a total break with capitalism. Therefore he objects to our Draft programme when it says this: “Following on from here are the immediate political, social and economic measures required for winning the battle for democracy and ensuring that the market and the principle of capitalist profit is subordinated to the principle of human need.”

He (mis)interprets this formulation as saying that it appears that the CPGB sees the “working class taking power and instituting democratic changes but ruling for a considerable period of time while presiding over capitalist property relations in the workplace and the economy as a whole”. Well, yes, in a lot of small to middling workplaces, but hardly the economy as a whole. Moreover, there is the transition from the capitalist principle of receiving according to work done, to the communist principle, as Marx envisaged, ie, receiving according to need (a transition, of course, dependent on the progress of the world revolution).

In the name of total collectivisation comrade Wrack therefore objects to a 2007 Mike Macnair article saying the following: “Forced collectivisation of the petty proprietors is to be rejected. This implies a substantial period of transition between capitalism and socialism [communism] which begins with the overthrow of the international capitalist state system.”¹⁸

Again, “I do not agree with this,” says comrade Wrack. Yes, he wants to leave aside the “issue of ‘forced collectivisation of the petty proprietors”, which “nobody [sic] has advocated”. As if this was not what is at issue. He accuses us in the CPGB of advocating “a long period in which the working class does seek to manage capitalism, rather than abolishing it”. He does not see how it is possible for the “market and the principle of capitalist profit [to be] subordinated to the principle of human need”. Capitalism and the principle of human need are “irreconcilable”. The two are in “permanent conflict with each other”.

He is right: capitalism and the principle of human need - ie, the political economy of the working class - are indeed “irreconcilable”. The two are in “permanent conflict”. However, that does not stop them coexisting. That is the case under capitalism. It is likewise the case under socialism: ie, the revolutionary dictatorship or rule of the working class.

As an aside, in the attempt not to be tainted by Stalinism, the TAS comrades want us to completely dissociate ourselves from terms such as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and concepts such as democracy ‘as a form of the state’ withering away. A capitulation to the ruling ideas of the bourgeoisie that will simply not work.

We are tainted by our past. A past that has to be scientifically - ie, rationally - explained. We cannot, though we might like to pretend otherwise, skirt around the fact that the militarisation of Bolshevism under civil war conditions did contain within it the seeds of what happened in the 1930s. Not that the purges, the gulag, the slave labour were inevitable.

And Marx, as we have seen, proudly used the term, ‘the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat’, to describe the workers’ state, and Lenin explained, taking his cue from Engels, not least in State and revolution, that this extremely democratic state, ie, working class rule, would give way to general freedom.¹⁹ Any half competent TV interviewer would therefore skewer us if we attempted to claim that we simply uphold democracy and oppose all forms of dictatorship. Well, of course, we can make such a claim … but, logically, that would lead us to abandon terms such as ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ (newly adopted by TAS) and, in time, the whole body of orthodox Marxism. That is something we in the CPGB refuse to do.

In fact the class struggle involves words and their meaning as much as wages and conditions. We can leave terms such as ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ to the likes of the CPGB (M-L), because the permanent persuaders of the bourgeoisie - successfully at the moment - lie, twist and distort. That or we take ownership of the canon of Marxism and insist on historic context, original meaning and our own take. There is no need to kowtow before the bourgeois consensus … even when it comes to supposedly ‘objective’ dictionary definitions.

Expropriation

Anyway, back to universal expropriation. Unless that happens, says comrade Wrack, we would have a situation that would be “unacceptable” to workers. They “appear to have control of the [new] state, but continue to be under the arbitrary and tyrannical rule of the bosses at work”. The situation would be “intolerable”, he writes.

Well, yes, except workers really do have state power and they exercise control over what remains of the boss class both from above, in the form of the state, but also from below in the form of strong trade unions and workplace committees. It would be essentially the same, to begin with, in state-owned enterprises. To pretend otherwise is either to peddle a deliberate lie or to foster utopian illusions. Communists should do neither. Our class needs the unvarnished truth.

Nonetheless, if capitalism continues, albeit in highly attenuated forms, comrade Wrack fears that workers would experience “demoralisation” and thereby open the “door for the capitalist class to make a comeback”. That is why he rejects “half-measures” and wants a “complete break with capitalism”.

Exactly what Stalin said in 1929 with the launch of the first five-year plan, the forced collectivisation of peasant agriculture and the liquidation of the kulaks as a class. A counterrevolution within the revolution which coincided, of course, with the re-enslavement of workers, mass starvation, the emergence of monocratic rule … and eventually led, not to communism. No, after terrible suffering, it led to the 1991 counterrevolution within the counterrevolution and the restoration of capitalism, albeit of a gangster sort.

Note, however, that comrade Wrack and TAS want us to agree that what happened in Russia had “nothing” to do with socialism. A muddled formulation, because what they mean, I hope, is that what happened in the Soviet Union post-1929 had nothing to do with proletarian socialism. We in the CPGB can agree with that. But the 1917 October Revolution had everything to do with the heroic attempt to take “steps towards socialism”. Isolation, failure in Europe (crucially in Germany), blockade - that is what led to defeat, not the failure to go for immediate, total nationalisation.

Let the fusion process continue.

1. We split from Socialist Platform and formed a separate Communist Platform - which, of course, was run on fully democratic lines. Before finally breaking with Left Unity in February 2016 over its complete failure to engage with the Labour Party following the election of Jeremy Corbyn and the mass membership influx, we had a four-strong fraction on its national council (see ‘Why we’re out of Left Unity’ Weekly Worker February 22 2016).↩︎

2. J Conrad ‘Left Unity: communicating across the archipelago of isolation’ Weekly Worker August 29 2013: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/975/left-unity-communicating-across-the-archipelago-of.↩︎

3. See P D’Arcy (ed) Peoples of the Pacific: the history of Oceana to 1870, chapter 13 Abingdon 2008.↩︎

4. So FCU is a very positive step forward, especially for TAS, which only a short while ago refused to countenance even talking to the CPGB - see W McMahon and N Wrack ‘Nothing positive to be gained’ Weekly Worker January 4 2024: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1472/nothing-positive-to-be-gained.↩︎

5. N Wrack ‘FCU - dealing with differences’ April 4 2025.↩︎

6. www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/our-object-and-declaration-principles.↩︎

7. CPGB Draft programme London 2023, p48: communistparty.co.uk/draft-programme.↩︎

8. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 46, London 1992, p148.↩︎

9. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 24, London 1989, p85.↩︎

10. Ibid, p87.↩︎

11. Ibid, p95.↩︎

12. VI Lenin CW Vol 25, Moscow 1977, p472.↩︎

13. K Kautsky The class struggle New York NY 1971, chapter 4.↩︎

14. N Bukharin Economics of the transformation period New York NY 1971, p71.↩︎

15. EA Preobrazhensky The crisis of Soviet industrialisation New York NY 1980, p56.↩︎

16. N Wrack ‘FCU - dealing with differences’ April 4 2025.↩︎

17. CPGB Draft programme London 2023, p9: communistparty.co.uk/draft-programme.↩︎

18. M Macnair ‘Leading workers by the nose’ Weekly Worker September 12 2007: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/688/leading-workers-by-the-nose.↩︎

19. See VI Lenin ‘Engels on the overcoming of democracy’ CW Vol 25, Moscow 1977, pp459-461.↩︎