08.05.2025
They come with thorns
Demands for ‘civility’, avoiding ‘name-calling’ and approaching others ‘in a comradely way’ are phrases that come straight from the dominant culture of opportunism. Mike Macnair defends the CPGB’s good culture of open criticism and robust polemics
Last week has seen the return of complaints that the CPGB and this paper have a ‘bad culture’. The Why Marx? online meeting on May Day offered a platform for the three groups engaged in the Forging Communist Unity discussions. It was well attended, with 100 present at one point. The discussion from the floor was to a considerable extent addressed to the issue of “approaching others in a comradely way” (as comrade Soraya Lawrence, for example, put it); or “avoiding name-calling” (as comrade Danny McGowan put it). The issue also formed a substantial part of our discussions at the weekend’s Forging Communist Unity meeting in Manchester on May 3 (see Jack Conrad’s report).
Meanwhile, it has been reported by CPGB comrades that RS21 people have complained about my article on the UK Supreme Court’s Christianist ruling on the definition of ‘woman’.1 The complaint is about my characterisation of the position of much of the left (including RS21), who cling to defending Theresa May’s model of self-identification within the framework of the compulsory gender binary, as ‘useful idiots’. This is, allegedly, an example of the CPGB’s ‘bad culture’.
Regrettably, the boot is exactly on the other foot. In demanding ‘civility’ and ‘comradeliness’ in debate, against sharp forms of polemic, comrades of the 21st century British2 far left have, without recognising what they are doing, internalised norms of the bureaucratic right wing of the workers’ movement, which were created with a view to suppressing sharp political dissent.
It makes no difference that what is sought is tactical self-censorship rather than formal censorship regimes. Tactical self-censorship was already what Georgi Dimitrov called on the communist parties to do at the 7th Congress of Comintern in 1935: to refrain from criticising the right wing unless they broke the unity of the united front or people’s front.
It equally makes no difference that diplomatic language is sought towards potential ‘allies’, as opposed to ‘enemies’. On the one hand, the whole of the workers’ movement, including its right wing, have to be seen as potential allies (in relation, for example, to the successful conduct of strikes, or to forcible self-defence of the movement against fascism). On the other, former leftists may suddenly become Atlanticists (like Paul Mason), mutating from friends to enemies; in 2015 one of the CPGB’s own former members broke with us and became a participant in the anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism witch-hunt.
It makes no difference either that new or young comrades may find sharp language ‘intimidating’ (a point argued by comrade Cat Rylance at Saturday’s Forging Communist Unity meeting). It is equally true that new or young comrades may find unfamiliar democratic procedures, or the use of Marxist theory, intimidating. So, too, the more bureaucratic procedures of trade unions or the Labour Party, which comrades need to learn to work with if they are to fight effectively against the right wing. The solution is education and self-education.
The use of civility and deference in political debate is anti-educational for young and new members. It blurs differences - and it is through dialectic in its old sense - the confrontation of opposed ideas - that new starters acquire the ability to form their own opinions, as opposed to being ‘trained’. ‘Civility’ involves in practice deference to the ideas that are dominant not just in the movement, but also in the society - which are the ideas from time to time promoted by the ruling class.
Insults
I begin with ‘useful idiots’, because it is actually rather a good example of the problem. It is an expression first attested in 1864, which means someone who naively adopts a political line that can be exploited by more sophisticated political operators - whether by opponents, as in the 1864 example, or by ‘supporters’ (in quotes) who actually have ulterior motives (as is more commonly the case in more recent uses).3
In my article I said that non-conservative feminists who celebrated the UK Supreme Court decision were useful idiots who were fronting for their supposed supporters from the Christianist right. I went on to say that the majority position of the left - to defend Theresa May’s scheme, as attempted by the Scottish National Party government - also involved being useful idiots: this time, because the scheme created a soft target for the cynical dog-whistle operation conducted by the Christianist right.
It has been suggested that I could have used less harsh language. The problem is that, if I am right on the issue, the comrades who hold the view I am criticising have adopted a policy that is disastrous immediately for trans people and in the medium term for women. If I had said that the comrades had adopted a ‘soft target policy’, or that they had ‘naively adopted a political line that can be exploited by more sophisticated political operators’, this, too, could perfectly well have been described as ‘harsh language’, ‘name-calling’ and so on. The issue is one of substantive political difference, in which I charge the comrades with having made a very serious political mistake: and there is no soft-touch or diplomatic way of expressing this difference.
Of course, I may be wrong. Precisely for this reason, the Weekly Worker has a largely open letters column, and also invites comrades who disagree to write at more length. But to avoid stating the objection to a policy I regard as disastrous, on the basis of the possibility that I might be wrong, would, in essence, be to fudge the substantive political difference.
The underlying problem is that what is ‘insulting’ or ‘offensive’ language is in the eye of the recipient. Thus in 1721 the mayor of Northampton was prosecuted for sending a licence to keep a pub to the Earl of Halifax - “which the court said was a libel (defamatory, insulting) in the case of a person of his [the earl’s] quality”. More recently, in Masterson v Holden in 1986, the court held that two gay men kissing at a bus stop was “insulting behaviour liable to cause a breach of the peace”, so that they were properly convicted under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1936 (originally purportedly aimed against Mosley’s fascists).4
Yet more recently, the anti-Semitism witch-hunt has been extensively conducted under the aegis of section 26 of the Equality Act 2010, which defines ‘harassment’ as conduct that (among other phenomena) has the effect of creating an offensive environment for the complainant - and the complainant’s view is the first of the factors listed for courts to take into account.5 Palestine protests are then claimed to create an offensive environment for Jews who support the state of Israel, and thus amount to ‘harassment of Jews’.
In short, to accept the principle that what we write should not be considered by the targets of disagreements to be insulting or offensive is to give people who merely claim to have been insulted, ‘name-called’, or whatever, the right to control the political content, not just the style, of what is said.
History
The history of this claimed right not to be insulted is long and closely associated with the right wing of the movement. This year is the 150th anniversary of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, originally merely sent privately. This was published in 1891, against the furious objections of ‘Lassalleans’ on the leadership of the Social Democratic Party of Germany to its insulting character, as can be seen from Engels’ correspondence at the time.6 Rosa Luxemburg and Alexander Parvus were both accused of using an excessively insulting tone in their early polemics against Bernstein in 1896-1900.7
Luxemburg was again targeted in similar terms by Heinrich Cunow, defending in 1915 the SPD leadership’s 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.8
Cunow and his immediate co-thinkers had been part of the SPD left before August 1914 led them to jump to social-chauvinism.9 This demand for “objective, party-comradely” criticism was repeated in stronger forms by the Labour right complaining of “intimidation” by Corbynistas in 2016-17.10 Thus 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.
In 1920, Lenin argued in ‘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.11
Compromise, then, but not at the price of abandoning 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 December 1922 Executive Committee of Comintern’s Theses on the united front similarly maintained:
The Executive Committee of the Communist International considers that the chief and categorical condition, the same for all Communist Parties, is: the absolute autonomy and complete independence of every Communist Party entering into any agreement with the parties of the Second and Two-and-a-Half Internationals, and its freedom to present its own views and its criticisms of those who oppose the Communists. While accepting the need for discipline in action, Communists must at the same time retain both the right and the opportunity to voice, not only before and after, but if necessary during actions, their opinion on the politics of all the organisations of the working class without exception. The waiving of this condition is not permissible in any circumstances. Whilst supporting the slogan of maximum unity of all workers’ organisations in every practical action against the capitalist front, Communists cannot in any circumstances refrain from putting forward their views, which are the only consistent expression of the interests of the working class as a whole.12
Comintern began to concede ‘civility’ to 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.13
This idea has become the common coin of both the Labour left and non-Labour 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 it 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 to the International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party’s 1976-77 ‘Right to Work Campaign’, modelled on the popular-front version of the old Communist Party’s 1930s unemployment campaigning; and to the Anti-Nazi League from 1977 (a model that the SWP has been attempting to repeat, with diminishing returns, ever since).
This history has so ingrained Dimitrov’s ideas into the far left that both ‘left independents’ and small groups who subjectively seek to build communist or Trotskyist parties cling to diplomatic methods and find it impossible to live with real political openness and sharp criticism. Thus their anti-educative and bureaucratic culture appears to them as the CPGB’s “bad culture”.
Like and dislike
Comrades who put forward these objections to the CPGB’s ‘bad culture’ commonly preface them by saying that they like the CPGB’s democratic politics, and/or the open character of the Weekly Worker. Fifteen months ago comrade Archie Woodrow from RS21 in a letter combined very similar criticisms with characterising himself as a “great admirer of Mike Macnair’s writings on revolutionary strategy and the need for communist regroupment”. I responded the following week with the observation:
… he needs to be aware that my Revolutionary strategy book could never have been published without the character of the Weekly Worker as a paper of “Marxist polemic and Marxist unity” (emphasis added), of which he complains.
As Karl Marx wrote in 1842, “you cannot enjoy the advantages of a free press without putting up with its inconveniences. You cannot pluck the rose without its thorns!” The book originated as a series of articles in this paper polemicising with the 2006 debate on strategy in the French Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire and Alex Callinicos’s interventions in this debate. Both the Ligue and Callinicos would certainly have regarded the articles as ‘rude’ if they had bothered to respond at all.14
Majorities usually regard minority views as rude, condescending and ‘abstract and self-important polemicising’. This is just the normal left-bureaucratic or debating-society method. And the demand for ‘politeness’ is in reality the same demand made by the Labour right against the left (compare my article, ‘Attempt to outlaw justified anger’, October 20 201615) - just on a smaller scale.
The reality is that free speech is indivisible. The call for tactical self-censorship is as much a call to shut up as any other sort of no-platforming.
Unity
Moreover, the CPGB’s rejection of ‘civility’ requirements is a necessity for any real and stable unity.
First, no-one on the far left is willing to deny themselves the right to call Keir Starmer (for example) a scab and a class enemy. The requirement of civility and comradeliness is restricted to potential friends, not to open enemies.
But, as we have already seen, potential friends can rather rapidly become open enemies. Starmer started out as a Pabloite Trotskyist in his youth, was among members of the Parliamentary Labour Party willing to serve under Corbyn, and even when he stood as Labour leader claimed (almost certainly falsely) that he would continue Corbyn’s policy platform. The British far left has repeatedly celebrated (and insisted on diplomacy towards) soft-left groups: Corbynites, Podemos, Syriza, Die Linke, Rifondazione Comunista …
The question posed is then: when do we say that these soft-left projects of one sort or another are almost certain to end in political collapse? Is saying so before the moment of actual political collapse ‘failing to approach others in a comradely way’, or in some other way ‘bad culture’? (This is certainly the view of the CPGB held by leaders of the SWP, or of Anti-Capitalist Resistance, and so on, in so far as they pay any attention to us at all).16 If you take this approach, you guarantee endless repeats of the far left’s diplomatic approaches to the soft left.
Secondly, as I have argued earlier in this article, what counts as an insult is a matter of subjective judgment. It is inherent in politics that any united left organisation will throw up disagreements. It is inherent also that some of these disagreements will pose the question of one side possibly going over to the enemy camp. There will be anger and sharp or objectionable characterisations of opponents in argument.
If you attempt to prevent this sort of ‘uncomradely’ behaviour, the result is to stifle dissent and double standards. 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. 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.
Another variation. In Britain, the Mandelites have been through a series of ‘unity projects’ - both in the form of broad-front projects and ‘revolutionary regroupment’ factions within these. The broad-front projects have not lasted - but neither have the ‘revolutionary regroupments’. The organisation which is now Anticapitalist Resistance was before that Socialist Resistance and before that in turn the International Socialist Group.
The ISG originated in 1987 as a regroupment. On one side were tendencies that had recently split from the old International Marxist Group-Socialist League - principally the International Group led by Phil Hearse, Dave Packer and others; on the other was the Socialist Group of Alan Thornett, John Lister and others, who had recently been expelled from Sean Matgamna’s Socialist Organiser group (itself a collapsed regroupment; now Alliance for Workers’ Liberty). The regroupment was joined by elements of the Chartist Minority Tendency (which ran Labour Briefing); by the Socialist Labour Group, the British group of the Lambertiste ‘Fourth International - International Centre for Reconstruction’; and by some others. By the early 1990s it was plain that the group was merely an enlarged International Group: Alan Thornett had become fully integrated in the Mandelite core, the Socialist Group wing had withered away, and most of the other tendencies (including what became the Fourth International Supporters’ Caucus in the Socialist Labour Party) had split off. The 1990s were to see a series of further splits and attrition, which reduced the ISG to a small size.
Splitters
In part these splits were attributable to the dogmatism of the splitters. In particular, for the Chartist Minority Tendency and the Lambertistes, Labour Party entry was a matter of strategic principle and any involvement at all with attempts to regroup the left that went beyond the Labour left therefore amounted to a ‘principled’ basis for a split.
More fundamentally, however, what made it impossible for the differences within the ISG to be contained within a single organisation were two fundamental and linked features of the Mandelite ‘tradition’: the diplomatic conceptions both of ‘the united front’ and of party unity. The original 1987 unification was on the basis of agreement on documents which were fuzzy on questions of principle, rather than openly and clearly expressing points of difference: they could therefore be agreed by comrades who held mutually opposed strategic conceptions. The Mandelites also work in the same way in relation to their version of the policy of the ‘united front’: it involves, for them, diplomatic accommodations of their public political positions to the people they plan to work with.
These diplomatic approaches have two consequences. The first is that, since strategic and programmatic principles are never clarified, any unification is in fact not on the basis of principles, but of tactics. As soon as the tactical agreement is overturned by new developments in the political situation, the basis for unity disappears. The second is that the public press of the group has to apply the diplomatic approach to the group’s current external collaborators. As a result, the press is bound to be politically anodyne in character and controlled by a narrow group who ‘really’ understand the tactic.
A trivial example from my own experience - in 1986-87 I wrote for the IG-ISG’s journal a critique of Militant’s policy of introducing socialism through an ‘Enabling Act’. My critique was based on the politics of British constitutional law. Publication was refused on the ground that this would be read as an implicit critique of the IG-ISG’s Labour-left allies. I was perfectly well aware that I held minority positions in the IG-ISG, though I was surprised to find that I held them on this particular question, and I was an old lag (long-time dissident). So this little bit of bureaucratism was no great shock to me. For other comrades (who had believed what was said in the unification discussions), when tactical differences came to the fore, and as a result they themselves came up against this bureaucratic-clique self-censorship of the group’s press, reasons for staying in the group were weak.
The political approach of diplomatic silence in broader organisations thus entails the silencing of dissenting views that might disturb the broader diplomatic unity. And this is turn produces unmotivated and unprincipled splits and attrition of membership at the base.
The pattern of unity on the basis of diplomatic agreements, followed by overreaction to ‘insults’ and provocations, is not just a matter of the history of Left Unity and the ISG. It is the history of far-left splits more generally; a relatively recent example is the 2014 collapse of the International Socialist Network over ‘chairgate’.17
Suppose - and it is perfectly possible - that the opponents of the CPGB’s ‘bad culture’ persuade enough of the CPGB’s members and supporters that publication of this paper in its present form should be brought to an end. That would not prevent the logic of splits.
The alternative is to unite on the basis of a clear, long-term, programmatic-strategic project - not on the basis of leftwing ‘motherhood and apple pie’ sentiments or agreement on immediate tasks - and within that framework, to accept that there will be forms of polemic that are considered offensive or insulting.
For the CPGB to compromise for the same of unity on the issue of open and sharp polemics would, then, in fact be to destroy any real possibility of unity of the communists, and to condemn ourselves to repetition of the patterns of left failure of 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 results in a generalised nuclear war. This growing ascendancy of the irrationalist right 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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‘Case of judicial usurpation’, April 24: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1535/case-of-judicial-usurpation.↩︎
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From my limited reading of left materials from other countries, the problem seems much less severe there. But, of course, there are sharp limits both on my language competence and on my time for reading, so this may be merely an impression based on a limited range of countries. “21st century” because this oversensitivity to sharply critical language among the far left seems to be a recent development.↩︎
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Mayor of Northampton’s case (1721) 1 Strange 422; Masterson v Holden [1986] 1 WLR 1017.↩︎
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foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/C16-Critique-of-the-Gotha-Program-1st-Printing.pdf collects the letters.↩︎
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P Nettl Rosa Luxemburg Vol 1, Oxford 1966, chapter 5.↩︎
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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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B Lewis, ‘World War I: SPD left’s dirty secret’ Weekly Worker June 26 2014: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1016/world-war-i-spd-lefts-dirty-secret (and subsequent articles in that series); M Macnair, ‘Die Glocke or the inversion of theory: from anti-imperialism to pro-Germanism’ Critique Vol 42 (2014), pp353-75.↩︎
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See, for instance, ‘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/history/international/comintern/4th-congress/united-front.htm, Thesis 18.↩︎
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www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm#s7.↩︎
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weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1476/letters, and weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1477/letters.↩︎
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weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1127/attempt-to-outlaw-justified-anger.↩︎
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I should say that our method in this respect is Trotsky’s in the 1930s. Quotations in ‘Principle not diplomacy’ Weekly Worker November 23 2022: www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1420/principle-not-diplomacy; and www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1935/04/centrism.htm.↩︎
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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.↩︎