05.06.2025

Collaboration, yes; opportunism, no

Programme is central. We have taken many years fashioning, discussing and fine-tuning. It would be the crassest opportunism to abandon what we have achieved. Jack Conrad replies for the CPGB

For the Talking About Socialism statement, see here.

It is a step forward that the TAS comrades are drafting a programme. This marks a welcome departure from the dominant anti-programmism and the so-called ‘transitional method’ prevalent on much of the contemporary left. A TAS draft will hopefully allow us to see whether the differences between us are of secondary importance or matters of principle.

The communist programme is, of course, no list of election promises, let alone a hastily written concoction designed to bring about unity for the sake of unity. No, the programme deals with the nature of the historical period, sets out key principles, maps out the long-term strategic approach and establishes the immediate demands needed to organise the working class into a ruling class. A mass Communist Party therefore grows out of the programme, not the other way round.

It is, then, unfortunate, to say the least, that the TAS comrades characterise our insistence that the CPGB’s Draft programme be included in unity discussions as a rejection of “collaboration”. We have not issued ultimatums. On the contrary, we have consistently said our Draft programme is open to debate and amendment. But it must be on the table. That is genuine collaboration.

As an organisation, programme has always been central for our project. We began the preliminary process of working towards a party programme in the early 1980s by critiquing the ‘official communist’ British road to socialism, the Eurocommunists’ Manifesto for new times and Militant: what we stand for. That work took book form in 1991 with Which road? After thoroughly debating every section, every clause, every line, every word, we finally produced our Draft programme in 1995. Since then we have done some updating and fine-tuning … the second edition came off the press in 2011 and the latest - the third - edition, in 2023.

Our Draft programme was never intended to be some confession of faith for a small group of communist militants. No, our Draft programme was intended from the first to be our submission to a “refoundation congress of the CPGB” - an organisation which despite its “early limitations and later failures”, was “undoubtedly the highest achievement of the workers’ movement in Britain”.¹

With this in mind, the idea that CPGB representatives in Forging Communist Unity would, or could, abandon our Draft programme was never on. Rightly, if they did anything like that, they would be subject to immediate recall by the next CPGB membership aggregate.

We have no fear of being in a minority. If sufficiently important principles were involved, we would reserve the right to constitute ourselves an open faction in a fused organisation. But we envisage winning a majority through argument and persuasion.

We would insist on every delegate to a unity conference agreeing to be bound by the results. We would insist too on existing group discipline being ended. Consultation, discussion, coordination, yes, but nothing more. When it comes to programme, the best course, would be to debate a fully elaborated draft programme. So, no, we are not going to abandon our Draft programme and begin again from scratch - in search of what? A lowest-common-denominator compromise? That would not be ‘collaboration’, but surrender to the dominant left culture of economism, unprincipled unity and the suppression of sharp polemics. That we shall not do.

Nevertheless, a TAS draft programme that has been openly debated, amended and democratically agreed by its membership will allow us to see if we have substantial differences.

In other words, we look forward to July 6 and the resumption of talks.

CPGB Draft programme London 1995, p6. The current version is online at communistparty.co.uk/draft-programme.↩︎