05.06.2025

Putting things on hold

Talking About Socialism has written this letter to the CPGB and the pro-talks faction of Prometheus, suspending our talks

Dear comrades, TAS has decided to pause its involvement in the Forging Communist Unity Process talks until July 6 2025, so that TAS can produce its own draft programme for submission to the FCU discussions.

It has been clear for some time that there is no agreement between TAS and the CPGB over what programme any new organisation arising from the FCU process should adopt, or how a programme should be produced.

On February 22 2025, two documents were submitted to the FCU process on behalf of TAS. One was a formal, agreed TAS document: ‘A contribution to the Forging Communist Unity process from TAS’. The other was a contribution submitted in the name of Ed Potts: ‘Developing a suitable programme for communist unity’. This second document contained the following:

We in TAS hope that the FCU process will bring about a new fused partyist organisation, which is greater than the sum of its parts.

As part of that process it would be a positive step forward if it could produce its own programme, which represents the common effort of the various tendencies involved, which is simultaneously ambitious and bold and yet also accurately reflects the level of development of the organisation as it actually exists in the coming period.

This would be preferable to a process which limits itself to trying to reach only “acceptance” of any document or draft that currently exists.

This was and has remained the shared position of the TAS comrades involved in the FCU process.

On March 7 2025, the comrades of the Unity Faction of the Prometheus Editorial Board (PUF) sent an untitled submission by them to TAS and the CPGB, which began:

The Unity Faction of the Prometheus editorial board believe that the FCU process would be best served by seeking to develop, collectively, a new programme as the product of our discussions together. This could be worked on by a committee, based on an outline determined by the FCU discussions, and, if successful, could be presented to a future conference when we reach the agreed stage of progression to binding decisions. It may be the case that we can’t reach such agreement through the FCU process itself and that competing programmes or versions of programmes may ultimately be presented at such a conference. However, we feel it would be productive for us to attempt to see if this could be possible.

The advantages of such a development of a new programme, we believe, would be in producing something which, at this initial stage of regroupment, would represent our collective endeavour and be a product which we had shared ownership over. Such a process of development itself we feel would be extremely productive in forging our identity as a new organisation.

The CPGB has rejected this collaborative approach and stated that it intends to submit the CPGB’s own draft programme as its proposed basis for any organisation to be created by the FCU process.

In these circumstances we in TAS committed ourselves to produce our own draft programme for consideration in the FCU process. We have not so far been able to do so. For that we apologise. We have now concluded that in order to produce such a document we in TAS need to focus for a short period on drafting and agreeing it.

To accomplish this, TAS has therefore decided that it will pause its participation in the FCU process until July 6 2025, by which time we hope to have completed our period of discussion and to be able to submit a TAS draft programme to the FCU discussions.

We do not comment on whether the comrades from the CPGB and the PUF continue to meet in our absence.

The FCU meetings have usually taken place on a fortnightly basis. Our ‘pause’ will mean that we will not be at meetings that would (if continued) take place on June 1, June 15 and June 29.

We believe that this pause is necessary for TAS to be better able to present its views in a written form to the FCU process. In our opinion, the FCU process will benefit from this pause.

This does not mean any pause or cessation of the parallel discussions involving TAS, the CPGB and the PUF in preparation for Communist University.

Comradely

Ed Potts

Nick Wrack

Talking About Socialism … from a Marxist point of view

May 29 2025