10.04.2025

Unity in three parts

When it comes to Forging Communist Unity, acceptance is vital, agreement is not. Thomas West reports on Mike Macnair’s opening to the April 6 CPGB aggregate of members, candidate members and invited visitors

On January 4, Talking About Socialism made a proposal for a six-point plan in which the three groups’ representatives in the Forging Communist Unity process would first talk about the political basis for unity; subsequently there would come questions about the necessary organisational form, etc. On January 11, the three groups met and agreed upon six points. However, disagreement on the Prometheus editorial board about continuing this project produced a situation discussed on February 9: that day’s meeting included a Prometheus pro-talks faction participating in the first stage of discussions of the basis for fusion.

Comrades from TAS and the pro-talks wing of Prometheus objected to the CPGB’s Draft programme as being too long for ordinary readers. On March 8 an in-person meeting in London discussed TAS’s 17 points of agreement. In TAS’s view this is the minimum political basis of agreement necessary for a common organisation. The CPGB had already given its view that, whatever anyone agrees, the basis of common organisation is not agreement to everything, but acceptance of it as a basis of common action. That is how we regard the Draft programme - the basis of common action. Nonetheless, the CPGB agreed to go ahead with the meeting to identify points of agreement and disagreement. Mike proposed identifying a parallel text, as it were, between TAS’s points of agreement and the equivalent points in our Draft programme, but that was lost track of at the first point of disagreement.

Transition

That first area of disagreement was the question of transition. Is there a period of transition after the working class takes political power - a period of transition to communism? Should we call the period after the working class takes power ‘socialism’, which the CPGB does? Or should we instead recognise a period of workers’ power and use the word ‘socialism’ as a synonym for ‘communism’, as does TAS?

Secondly, there was the disagreement over the Soviet experience. There is no common position between the CPGB and the other participants on this question, or, probably, within any of the groups. The problem is partly one of history and partly theory. How do you approach this? TAS comrades seek to take moral distance from the Soviet experience, asserting that our socialism will be democratic. The argument that there is no period of transition seems to be part of the same issue. Its comrades are only recent users of the word, ‘communist’, while Prometheus comrades use it more extensively, and the CPGB has, of course, done so since the beginning.

At our latest online meeting in March, comrades from the three organisations went further into the question of the Draft programme. On the question, ‘Do we need a minimum programme at all?’, there was a clear disagreement with TAS comrades, but not with those from Prometheus. Should we simply propose our maximum aims? Karl Marx and others invented the minimum programme in 1880. ‘Maximum programme’ was not their phrase, but it was used in the 1890s within German social democracy; Marx called it the outline statement of the communist aim.

Will the working class, on taking power, socialise everything, including the pub down the road, the barbershop two doors away? It appears that the comrades from TAS object to the CPGB’s assertion that the working class must take political power in the first place, and then there will be a process of rapidly taking over the larger concentrations of infrastructural capital, the banking and the finance system, and large monopolies. But there will be a substantial surviving petty bourgeoisie when the working class takes power and therefore a period of transition, in which the process of socialisation takes place.

TAS comrades also objected to Mike’s formulation observing that there will be substantial skills and information monopolies in the hands of the managerial middle class. Again, there must be a period of transition, when the managerial middle class is held in subordination to the working class through mechanisms of political democracy; and at the same time the skills and monopolies that they hold as private property are socialised by virtue of term limits and the expansion of education and training. Is there such a period of transition or not? Comrade Ed Potts of TAS argued that, because of the development of working class skills in the last century, we could expect, immediately on taking political power, to dispense with the managerial middle class altogether. That is a matter of very substantial, fundamental political difference, not to be underestimated in importance.

Like Bakunin’s position and similarly Proudhon’s, this is a form of the difference which says: socialisation has to come first, not political democracy. This was not the view of Marx and why he preferred Narodnaya Volya over those who self-identified with Plekhanov as Marxists in Russia around 1880. Is the development of capitalism such that problems of skills and monopolies or small private enterprise and the petty bourgeoisie have disappeared?

Negative

There is a danger of generating a negative dialectic, where you have a debate that pushes the participants into opposing positions - both of which are more incorrect than the original positions held. The clearest example is the debate about soviets and democracy in 1918: it resulted in Kautsky abandoning his pre-war position, in favour of now seeing ‘democracy’ as meaning Weimar-style constitutionalism with an independent executive and judiciary, but with universal suffrage. On the other hand, Lenin and co-thinkers pushed towards rejecting “democracy as such”. This led to the idea that the proletariat as a class needed to be represented by its advanced part: the party of the advanced minority, which rules over the backward majority in the period of transition. This was a position striking at the foundations of Marx’s politics.

However, the danger is that the negative dialectic induces the TAS comrades, in attempting to avoid the danger of insufficient political/moral distance from Stalinists, to take the position of the Socialist Party of Great Britain - nothing happens now except propaganda for socialism, until billions agree - then you can introduce full communism on a world scale.

From the CPGB’s side, the danger is to underestimate the substantial element of socialisation in what we propose in the minimum programme. What the CPGB proposes is basically political democracy. But we propose substantially more socialisation in the minimum programme than the Eisenach, Erfurt or Russian Social Democratic Labour Party programmes, because capitalism has developed further. Marx in the Critique of the Gotha programme sees a first stage of communism of “To each according to their work”. However, today’s NHS and public education system are “To each according to their need”. There is a danger in downgrading the element of socialisation, and failing to recognise that we are in transition - a process that begins before the working class takes power. However, when the working class takes power, that becomes a decisive moment in the transition. But a lot happens before then and we need a minimum programme now.

We can expect very rapid developments after the working class takes power. In 1688, the bourgeoisie seizing power in this country took the form of a Dutch invasion, putting in a government opposing the monarchical regime: it kicked off a nine-year European war and open warfare in Scotland and Ireland. But it also led to the very rapid creation of the London stock market, the Bank of England, insurance companies, paper money, road transport companies and newspapers funded by advertising.

The rapidity of what takes place after the seizure of power is important, but the question also arises concerning what needs to happen beforehand. If we leave in place the managerial regimes within the workers’ movement, no-one can imagine the working class or any collective group of workers running society. As long as we do not have clear and unambiguous struggle against managerialism and for political democracy in the state and the workers’ movement, we cannot pose the question of socialism. Working together without agreement on this question is still possible, but this is a very important, fundamental issue.

Public faction

The second point is the question of unity in itself. The CPGB has been happy to function as a public faction within broader unity projects in the Socialist Alliance, Respect (where it was more difficult), Left Unity and the Labour Party through Labour Party Marxists. The CPGB also had the experience of working in the Campaign for a Marxist Party (which also came to nothing).

We have operated as a public faction in the various unity projects, even where there is a substantial difference. The same would be true, supposing the SWP and SPEW somehow merged, saying ‘We’re the party’. The CPGB would be happy to function as a public faction within such a unification process. But what are we actually looking for from this unity project? Is it possible for us to have communist unity, as opposed to another one of those ‘broad front’ projects? We must be aware that (1) many outside our ranks are interested in this as a possibility and (2) if we cannot accomplish unity in this project and it fails, it will cost us politically. Such failure will say to those outside that unity is not possible, given the level of differences between the various groups. It matters to the CPGB that we try to make the Communist Fusion project work.

Based on experience, that unification must be on the basis of principles that we intend to be valid from here to the revolution, not principles which are defined by the current conjuncture. It is in this context that the CPGB has agreed the need to keep discussing this question of the programmatic basis of organisation for some further meetings before going on to other issues.