03.07.2025

One step back

Marx provided many lessons of how to draft programmes. However, they were not only about building unity around concrete aims: they were also about drawing clear lines of demarcation, says Jack Conrad

On June 24 we received a curt message signed by Nick Wrack and Ed Potts informing us that their organisation, Talking About Socialism, had agreed this thoroughly retrograde, rather sad, resolution on Forging Communist Unity at a members’ aggregate.

Here it is in full: “This meeting believes that there is no prospect of achieving any worthwhile or meaningful unity with the CPGB from the current FCU process and therefore agrees to withdraw from the FCU process forthwith. We will instead concentrate on developing TAS and finding other potential partners in building communist unity.” The two comrades add that “TAS will therefore not be sending representatives to any future meeting of FCU.”

We wish the comrades well in their attempt to build TAS and finding other potential partners. However, real, existing partners will ask why no explanation of the TAS bail-out was provided, why no alternative collective route forward was suggested, why no internal disagreements were admitted. If you wish to be treated seriously, you would surely expect something of the kind.

After all, just a few short weeks before the TAS split announcement, the comrades reassuringly told us that they would be taking a temporary ‘step back’ from fusion talks in order to give themselves the time needed to draft a programme for the Communist Party in Great Britain that we in the CPGB, TAS and Prometheus are all formally committed to build. That is why, note, we all call ourselves partyists. We were due to reconvene on July 6 on Zoom at our usual time of 10am.

Now it seems some want to talk the talk, but not walk the walk ... except to walk away. More than a pity. Comrade Cat Rylance of Prometheus wrote in reply:

I believe this to be a profound mistake. The project we are arguing for is bigger than any of our small parts and the result of this now is not only that we have lost the opportunity FCU represented, that disheartenment will replace hope and interest, but that actually collectively we have now done serious damage to the project of programmatic unity we are supposed to be arguing is achievable. This will only give ammunition to those on the left who seek to convince others that arguments for communist unity are a waste of time, we can’t even achieve it in our ranks, etc. I’m unsure what ‘continuing to pursue communist unity with others’ in this context means.

Our sentiments exactly. Hence the Provisional Central Committee of the CPGB agreed the following letter to TAS:

Comrades, your announcement, breaking off talks between TAS, the CPGB and the pro-party faction of Prometheus is something that we deeply regret. We still have before us a great opportunity to take forward what is our joint project of forging communist unity and building a mass Communist Party in Great Britain.

You, however, have set this project back by your decision to walk away from what we always envisaged as a highly promising, but prolonged, process.

The CPGB is and remains committed to talks, debates and, crucially, the perspective of fusion in the struggle for a mass Communist Party. Our door remains open.

We would, therefore, ask you to reconsider your decision to break from FCU. We would ask you to invite a member of the CPGB’s PCC to speak at a TAS membership meeting - an invitation that ought to include the pro-party faction of Prometheus too. This is, remember a tripartite process that also reaches into RS21 and, in fact, considerably beyond. Good communists here in Britain, and internationally, are closely following our debates and efforts to achieve organisational unity.

If you seriously believe that the CPGB has behaved in an underhand, reprehensible or unprincipled manner, that is something that ought to be openly addressed. We are certainly ready to account for our commitment to robust and open polemics.

We therefore issue our own invitation. Provide a speaker for one of our regular Online Communist Forums. You will be given as much time as you feel you need.

TAS surely has nothing to lose. Together our cause has everything to gain.

I attended the June 30 TAS Zoom meeting, where comrade Wrack defended the decision to walk. I was granted a grand three minutes to put the CPGB case. Needless to say, I urged patience and stressed that we always envisaged a prolonged process. Comrade Wrack got 10 times longer … 15 times longer if you count his reply. Not my idea of a serious approach, when it comes to dealing with differences between organisations. Everyone apart from comrades Wrack and Potts were treated as atomised, three-minute individuals by the hectoring chair, Soraya Lawrence. She cut off and cut off again and again what were important contributions. Evidence of an unhealthy political culture for any serious communist.

Comrade Wrack boasted that FCU was initiated by TAS. True, instead of jointly participating in some education course, he proposed fusion talks. And, he should have had the honesty to add that we were delighted. But, no, he simply went on to complain about the CPGB culture of robust debate. Yes, we have critiqued the existing left from the point of view of orthodox Marxism, the reformism, the broad frontism, the nationalism, the tailism, the economism, the social-imperialism. We have even looked at TAS articles, statements and proposals … and found them wanting too.

Did he really expect us to abandon Marxist orthodoxy for the sake of some give-and-take rotten compromise? We are proud of our culture of open polemic too. We began with that culture as an act of disciplined rebellion back in November 1981 with the first edition of The Leninist. We shall continue to defend, uphold and practice open polemic as a matter of the highest principle.

Speaking bitterness

Comrade Wrack bitterly complains that it is all abuse, lies and misrepresentation. In the name of not putting off others, promoting unity and winning recruits, he demands moderation, politeness and being acceptable … to himself. The comrade refuses to address the substantive politics. Maybe he can’t.

During the TAS Zoom meeting, inevitably, the CPGB, either in whole or part, was called all sorts of ‘horrible names’ by comrade Wrack and his closest lieutenants: ‘Kautskyite’, ‘Stalinist’, ‘anti-Marxist’, etc, etc. Presumably this is moderation, politeness and being acceptable in the topsy-turvy world of TAS.

For myself, I don’t give a damn. Of course, I reject the accusations, but we expect them ... and more. It is the norm, when it comes to politics. Nor can we expect to benefit from the plusses of polemics without accepting the minuses.

When there is a serious point being made, we will give a serious reply … sometimes calmly, sometimes with fire and passion. That is the writer’s prerogative. When there is a silly point being made we might give a serious reply … or we might dismiss it with a contemptuous laugh or launch a sustained campaign of mockery. Once again, the writer’s prerogative.

Our opponents will hide, conceal, mask their economism, diplomatic compromising or simply mistaken politics by insisting that criticism of them is nothing but abuse, lies and misrepresentation. After all, the left, the workers’ movement in general, is dominated by a dull, complacent, mind-numbing opportunist common sense. We do everything we can to awake, shock, unsettle … expose the shortcomings, the absurdities, the endless cycle of tried and tested failures. We encourage critical thought and foment open rebellion. We should expect, therefore, all manner of demands for polite language, claims that we are habitual liars, even accusations that we are police agents.

Frankly, we have not the least interest in cosy deals with the forces of opportunism. When we were in the ‘official’ CPGB, Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, the Socialist Alliance, Respect, Left Unity and the Labour Left Alliance, it was for purposes of war. Not peace. While comrade Wrack snuggled up to John Rees and the SWP, George Galloway and Salma Yaqoob, we fought and fought again.

Understandably, our opponents - the ‘official communists’, the economists, the reformists, the centrists of all stripes, those in, or close to, the labour and trade union bureaucracy, want to silence us. They plead for ‘safe spaces’ and a limit, a curb or a ban on impolite, disloyal and disrespectful language: ie, robust criticism. Even under threat of expulsion, even subjected to violent assault, we have never abided by any such restrictions. That, after all, is why The Leninist and after it the Weekly Worker exist ... we are free to openly speak our mind.

Do comrades Wrack-Potts really think that we would abandon our party responsibilities, our party name, our party programme, our party culture … for the sake of what? The promise of unprincipled political unity with rank opportunists on the existing left. That was never going to happen. On the other hand, principled organisational unity based on a solid programme - unity where majorities exercise majority rights, where minorities struggle to become a majority, but, meanwhile, accept majority votes - that is something else. That is indeed what we have argued for. Without such a democratic approach there can be no worthwhile or meaningful communist unity, that is for sure.

Doubtless, after the falling away of RS21 and the Prometheus non-talks faction, comrades Wrack and Potts slowly came to the realisation that they would constitute a small minority at a fusion conference. Doubtless too they feared members of TAS being won to take our Draft programme as the starting point for section-by-section debate and amendment. Moreover, as a minority they would have to live with majority decisions, when it comes to electing leadership bodies and appointments to responsible positions … intolerable.

Hence they chose to start an irresponsible squabble about abuse, lies and misrepresentation. Painting themselves innocent victims excuses breaking from FCU talks and saved them from the humiliation of being a minority. But without minorities accepting their position as a minority - albeit with the opportunity to become a majority - we are doomed to go nowhere.

That is why we would urge TAS members to think again.

Programme

Actually we welcomed comrades Wrack-Potts giving themselves some time out. Venturing into the unexplored - for them - realm of drawing up, debating, amending and agreeing a draft communist programme could have had positive results. Most of the left shows not the least understanding of the centrality of programme.

Not that I was naive about the prospects. As we have consistently emphasised, the communist programme is no pious wish list or a factional declaration, let alone a hastily written ‘motherhood and apple pie’ concoction designed to bring about the unity of disparate elements.

Hence, when it comes to our Draft programme, we deal with the nature of the historical period, set out key principles, map out the long-term strategic approach and establish the immediate demands needed to organise the working class into a ruling class. A mass Communist Party, we argue, grows out of the programme. Not the other way round.

Comrades Wrack and Potts, had assured us that they now reject Leon Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional programme and the whole so-called ‘transitional method’. Clearly, however, that does not include all TAS members. No less to the point, given the two drafts which the comrades have managed to produce, it is clear that their heroic labours have been in vain. Chances are that they will not even serve to maintain the fragile unity of TAS itself.

No aim of forming a mass Communist Party, no accounting for past failures, no account of capitalist development, no account of capitalist decline, no global strategy, no mention of Europe, no mention of America, no concrete immediate demands around hours and working conditions, housing, pensioners, education, youth, crime and prison. No commitment to free speech. No commitment to proportional representation. No commitment to disestablishing the Church of England and secularism. No commitment to a unicameral popular assembly. Nothing about the specifics of women’s oppression. No acknowledgment of gay and trans people. No federal solution, when it comes to the national question in Scotland and Wales and no demand for the reunification of Ireland. No unambiguous call for the abolition of the standing army and the police and their replacement by a people’s militia. No perspective of overthrowing the labour and trade union bureaucracy, etc, etc.

Besides that there is a litany of highly dubious formulations - eg, clause 12: “We reject the idea that the authoritarian, undemocratic regimes that existed in the former Soviet Union and similar states, or that exist today in China or North Korea, were, or are, in any way communist or a transition towards real communism. We oppose all forms of dictatorial rule.”¹

Did the October 1917 Revolution have nothing to do with real communism? Was the Bolshevik realisation of ‘All power to the soviets’ undemocratic? Was the Bolshevik decision to rule as a political minority after Brest-Litovsk, in the expectation of revolution in Europe, indefensible? Was the founding of the USSR unrelated to the goal of eventually achieving real communism?

In our Draft programme we celebrate October 1917 not least for inspiring the formation of parties such as the CPGB. We go on to state that the “October Revolution marked the beginning of the present epoch”: the epoch of the “revolutionary transition from capitalism to communism”. We explain how the “capitalist class was determined that there should be no more Octobers”. How the “asphyxiating isolation” of the workers’ state led to the “counterrevolution within the revolution” in the late 1920s and eventually the 1989‑91 counterrevolution within the counterrevolution.²

Do we really want to reject the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, as advocated by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels? The Marx-Engels team opposed the dictatorship of kings and tsars, they opposed military dictatorships, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and Bonapartist dictatorships too. They also opposed schemes for an educative dictatorship associated with revolutionaries such as ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf and Auguste Blanqui. However, they celebrated the Paris Commune as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Indeed they unproblematically took the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as a mere synonym for the rule of the working class. They bracketed it with the democratic republic.

Marx and Engels were keen to associate themselves with the achievements of the Commune in implementing real democracy. Elections, recallability, limits on official salaries, popular militia, etc. Engels, therefore, attacked the “social democratic, philistine” - ie, rightwing SDP Reichstag deputies - who were “filled with wholesome terror at the phrase: dictatorship of the proletariat”.³ They were mortified when Engels published Marx’s views on the democratic republic and working class rule. There was an unseemly rush to the safety of constitutional loyalism. The SDP refused point blank to include the demand for the democratic republic in the draft Erfurt programme. They feared another anti-socialist state ban.

It was Eduard Bernstein who, following Engels’ death, wanted the SDP to distance itself from the terrible phrase: it “is so antiquated”, he wrote, “that it is only to be reconciled with reality by stripping the words ‘dictatorship’ of its actual meaning and attaching to it some kind of weakened interpretation”.⁴ He rejected class dictatorship of any kind and wanted the SDP committed to the parliamentary road to socialism. Naturally too, he counterposed ‘democracy’ and ‘dictatorship’.

Comrades Wrack and Potts write fully in the spirit of Bernstein’s revisionism and the social democratic philistine. We, on the other hand, stand fully in the tradition of Marx and Engels. Our Draft programme again: “The socialist state, the rule of the working class (or proletarian dictatorship) is needed in the first place to overcome capitalist resistance. Though this can involve draconian measures, it must be emphasised that as the rule of a large majority the socialist state is characterised by the fullest flowering of democracy.”⁵

Both comrades Wrack and Potts are trained lawyers. Being exact with words is part of their profession. So we must take it that they mean what they say and say what they mean. It is not sloppiness.

Another example - clause 17: “The working class does all the work. It produces all the goods and provides all the services.” The exact same claim is repeated in clause 56: “The working class … is the class that produces everything and delivers all the services we rely on.” And clause 57 too: “Nothing is produced or delivered without the working class doing it.”

Do the middle classes, including the petty bourgeoisie, not work? Do they not produce goods and services? So, yes, the worth of what the TAS leadership duo can draft is hardly impressive.

Perhaps the comrades are thoroughly ashamed of their two drafts. They ought to be. Perhaps that explains why they finally decided to throw in the towel when they did. Maybe they could not bear the shame of having to publicly defend such revisionist muddle. Who knows. They certainly do not possess thick skins. So I would expect the charge of revisionism will be added to the list of abuse, lies and misrepresentation. Either way, it is clear that drafting a worthwhile communist programme is beyond the capabilities of a couple of lawyers writing in between demanding court cases.

After all, despite having a whole history of active involvement on the left, the leading TAS comrades have no history whatsoever of championing the need for, working towards, let alone drafting a Communist Party programme. So we are dealing with experienced comrades with no principled programmatic experience. Put another way, their draft programme has its origins entirely in their narrow-minded factional response to our CPGB Draft programme within the context of FCU.

French lessons

True, Marx could dictate the whole of the maximum section of the Programme of the French Workers’ Party almost without stopping to take breath. But he was a genius … and moreover he had decades of prior programmatic experience dating back to the Manifesto of the Communist Party and the Programme of the Communist Party in Germany (1848). More than that, he wrote the general rules and most important declarations, statements and resolutions of the First International.

But, when it came to the Programme of the French Workers’ Party, there was more to it than the brilliance of Marx and his vast experience. Let us provide a little background.

The left and the workers’ movement in France had been slowly reviving in the aftermath of the defeat of the 1871 Paris Commune and this led to the French Workers’ Congress of 1879. A hugely significant event in the history of the workers’ movement in France, crucially because it voted strongly in favour of the formation of an independent workers’ party, along with universal suffrage, women’s equality and the necessity of collectivising the means of production.

Understandably, Paul Lafargue and Jules Guesde sought out Marx’s help and advice in preparation for national legislative elections in 1881.⁶ Lafargue, of course, was a well-known socialist and through his marriage to Laura Marx was Karl Marx’s son-in-law. As for Guesde, though prone to “revolutionary phrase-mongering” (Marx), becoming one of the ‘intransigent’ opponents of the ‘possibilist’ reformists, he was certainly the joint author of the minimum section of the programme.

The Programme of the French Workers’ Party had nothing to do with some lowest-common-denominator unity-mongering. A widespread misconception. On the contrary, the foundation of the French Workers’ Party and its Marxist programme effectively marked the eclipse of Jacobinism, Blanquism, Bakuninism and Proudhonism - schools of thought which had previously dominated socialism in France. Marxist politics was on the rise and opponents on the left furiously denounced what they instantly branded as the ‘London programme’. Why? Because there was an implicit rejection of elitist socialism, putschist socialism and cooperative socialism. The French Workers’ Party would use elections and the struggle for democratic and economic reform demands to build a powerful organisation and gain mass influence ... the vital foundations of working class state power.

No less to the point, the minimum section of the Programme of the French Workers’ Party was a year in preparation … Marx drew up a 101-point questionnaire for working class readers of Benoît Malon’s paper, La Revue socialiste, and 25,000 copies of Enquête Ouvrière (‘Workers’ Inquiry’) were circulated. It formed the basis for similar initiatives in other countries.⁷ The aim was to find information about the living and working conditions in France that would inform the drafting of demands. Guesde toured the country to organise local and regional groups and found that workers were particularly concerned with greater social and civil rights.

Following the tour, Guesde and Lafargue travelled to London to meet up with Marx and Engels. They got together in the front room of 122 Regent’s Park Road. Engels’ house. That was in May of 1880 … and, of course, their draft programme was debated and agreed by the delegates of the November 1880 founding congress of the French Workers’ Party meeting in Le Havre.

What comrades Wrack and Potts have produced owes nothing to the approach or the method of the Programme of the French Workers’ Party. Nor the 1891 Erfurt programme of social democracy in Germany, nor the programme of the Russian Social Democratic Party agreed at the 1903 2nd Congress. Such programmes mapped out a coherent strategy and drew clear lines of demarcation against other trends on the left. In Germany it was primarily against the Lassalleans; in Russia, the economists, the revisionists and the Bundists.

In fact, as I feared, comrades Wrack and Potts have done little more than produce a soft-focus, banal, incoherent parody of the maximalism of the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s ‘What we stand for’.⁸ The TAS duo hate my coming out with any such a description. It is one of those ‘bad words’ they cite to excuse their break with FCU. Pathetic. The comrades plead that they do not reject reforms per se - indeed they don’t. Nor for that matter does the SPGB.⁹ No, what we have is bog-standard condemnations of capitalism, combined with the promise that everything will be fine and dandy once we overthrow capitalist rule. Actual demands are, however, either notable by their absence - that or they amount to empty platitudes.

Their whole approach is, yes, motivated by “diplomacy” (Nick Wrack). The attempt to find some middling course acceptable to the existing, non-‘official communist’, left. That means avoiding sharpness, viewing clarity as a problem and in effect compromising with today’s economism, strikism and broad frontism.

Did anyone really expect us to back such an approach? If they did, they know nothing of the CPGB. We will brook no watering down, no trading away of principles, no blurring of differences with opportunism.

No ultimatums

Despite the TAS accusations, we have not issued ultimatums. On the contrary, we have consistently said our Draft programme is open to debate and clause-by-clause amendment. But we must be allowed to present it for consideration. True, we have rejected out of hand the proposal that we put our Draft programme aside, begin again from scratch and write an entirely new programme, along with TAS and the pro-talks wing of Prometheus, over perhaps a month or two. The very suggestion is a giveaway. The comrades have absolutely no experience in writing a communist programme.

And why trade in the real thing for a poor imitation? I am reminded of the early 2000s ‘Sculptor’ advert, where a young Indian man decides to convert his Hindustan Ambassador into a Peugeot 206. To the background beat of the Bhangra Knights playing ‘Husan’, we see him using a sledgehammer, even an elephant, to reshape the Ambassador. There follows a celebratory drive with friends in the newly formed replica, and admiring looks. But the end result is an obvious joke. We were meant to laugh … and buy a 206 (Peugeot’s supermini, its best selling car of all time and on many occasions an industry prize winner and rally champion).

The communist programme is no joke and should not be treated as one. We need the best we can get. For certain, nothing serious would have come from such a presumably three-way commission (as proposed by the pro-talk faction of Prometheus). Anyone who suggests otherwise is simply kidding themselves. Programmes, if they are going to be worthwhile, are based on long preparation, firm principles and clear perspectives. Not diplomatic haggling and trade-offs.

Neither TAS nor the pro-talks Prometheus faction has any sort of consistent political record (except eclecticism). Leave aside the pre-history of tailing the SWP in the Socialist Alliance and Respect and the semi-anarchist Anti-Capitalist Initiative. Neither of the two organisations have a history of treating the programme question as central.

Where are the critiques of the programmeless SWP, the reformism of the Communist Party of Britain’s British road to socialism, the Labourism of Militant: what we stand for, the economism of the 1938 Transitional programme or the maximalism of the SPGB? As I have written before, maybe that work has been done. But, if it has, such work remains a secret ‘locked with seven seals’. Not unreasonably, I reckon that such necessary preparatory programmatic work remains undone. Programme for the comrades constitutes an afterthought … brought about solely by engagement with the CPGB.

By contrast, 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’ Alternative Economic Strategy.¹⁰ James Marshall then dissected the 1978 BRS in The Leninist No4.¹¹ From these foundations we went on to tackle the Eurocommunists’ Manifesto for new times and Peter Taaffe’s Militant: what we stand for.

The 4th conference of the Leninists of the CPGB, meeting in December 1989, agreed to begin the work on drafting a programme in the “form of a proposal to the congress of a reforged CPGB”. That preparatory work took book form in 1991 with Which road? There were two concluding appendixes. Appendix one, ‘The communist programme’, dealt with the necessity of a programme and its architecture. Appendix two, ‘Outline of a draft programme’, sketched out first thoughts and provided the bare bones.

However, having meticulously prepared a draft programme, not least using cell meetings and weekly seminars to draw up and debate every section and every clause, we finalised 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. Needless to say though, 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”.¹²

With this in mind, the idea that CPGB representatives in FCU 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, ours included. Consultation, discussion, coordination - yes, but nothing more. So no binding mandates.

With that in mind, we have to rely on persuasion, education and political understanding within our ranks too. We have no wish to sire a Menshevik wing that looks for the middle course of compromise and conciliation. An ever present danger. But we are prepared to risk it. If the present members of the PCC found themselves heading a minority, we would have no intention of walking. As long as proceedings are fully, unambiguously democratic, we will accept, if we must, being a minority … and fight, perhaps as a public faction, to become a majority.

Our differences

As we have already illustrated, the TAS Wrack-Potts leadership have differences with us over the middle classes. We think that many of them work. We also think that many of them produce useful goods and services such as building repairs, driving taxis, growing food … providing legal advice and defending us in criminal trials.

The question of the transition from capitalism to communism is closely related. Is there going to be a relatively long period of working class rule, albeit through a semi-state, over: (1) the tiny class of progressively expropriated capitalists and (2) the not so tiny middle classes? We say ‘yes’. This lower phase of communism, which we, following Lenin’s State and revolution, call socialism, therefore begins, as with the capitalism of more or less what we have today: eg, commodity production, wage labour, money and a market. It ends, however, with the final withering away of classes, the state and the realisation of the ‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’ principle of full, or higher, communism.

By the bye, comrades Wrack and Potts make a great song and dance about taking our cue from Lenin. They say he misread Marx. In fact, he simply followed mainstream Second International orthodoxy after Marx’s ‘Critique of the Gotha programme’ was first published in 1891. Social democrats, including Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lenin and Trotsky, “commonly” or “usually called” the first phase of communism “socialism”.¹³

We need not get into the extraordinary complexities about how to scientifically characterise Soviet Russia - such a discussion does not belong here. Suffice to say, what matters when it comes to programme is not semantics, but substance. We advocate progressively expropriating the capitalist class. The commanding heights will probably be taken over at a stroke, as one of the first measures. However, not medium and small businesses. There will be strict employment laws, strong trade unions, workplace committees … but also commodity production and money. That means class struggle from below, but with the huge advantage of working class state power. There will too, surely have to be class struggle from both below and above against any tendencies towards bureaucratic self-serving, even rule.

There will certainly be planning. But even with quantum computers it will not be easy. There will be dangers of malfunction, miscalculation and even breakdown. Perhaps emergency measures will be needed. That will probably be the case while socialism is not yet a world system and a surviving capitalist mode of production exists alongside the emerging communist mode of production. However, in step with the the progress of the world revolution more and more goods and services will be supplied at token or no cost to meet their needs. People would be expected to consume responsibly, they would also be expected to contribute according to their abilities. We need, of course, to change people, as well as ownership and control over the means of production.

For the TAS duo, however, there has to be the immediate nationalisation, socialisation, of all small to medium-sized enterprises: corner newsagents, pubs, fish and chip shops, curry houses, alternative health set-ups, hairdressers, little businesses of every kind. A recipe, in our view, for handing over millions of people to the camp of counterrevolution. So, whereas we would strive to take things forward voluntarily, ‘as fast as possible, but as slow as necessary’, the TAS comrades insist on ‘as fast as possible’. Without liquidating the petty bourgeoisie as a class and collectivising all SMEs (small and medium enterprises) workers in that sector will remain exploited, they say. True they will remain exploited, but, with a ‘fast as possible’ approach, the danger is that we go down to bloody defeat.

The comrades are oblivious to all such dangers. They write, “wherever the working class comes to power first”, it will “be an inspiration” to the “working class of the rest of the world, who will no doubt want to copy that achievement”.¹⁴ Coming to power in one country would send out a powerful message. October 1917 inspired workers throughout the world. But the correct communist approach is to stress coordinated, simultaneous revolution. We envisage Europe as our decisive point of departure. That could well mean holding back, if possible, in one country, while others catch up. After all, an isolated revolution, not least in Britain, would face chaos and dire poverty ... hardly inspirational.

It is in this context, by the way, that we have raised the spectre of Pol Pot. We do not charge the TAS comrades of wanting to emulate the mass murder seen in Kampuchea. That would be unfounded and stupid. No, they have good intentions … but the road to hell. But we do warn that their approach unintentionally points towards to the horrible outcomes we have witnessed in Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, Kim’s North Korea … and Pol Pot’s Kampuchea.

Production is global. We in Britain not only rely on huge imports of food, when it comes to industry (say, the car industry): there is likewise a reliance on imports. An isolated socialism in Britain could, for example, produce cars. But, without German or Japanese engines and gear boxes, TASmobiles would have to be horse-drawn.

On this ‘as fast as possible’ basis the TAS comrades unwarrantedly charge us with wanting to limit the revolution to the immediate programme, to achieving the federal republic: ie, the form we envisage for the rule of the working class. Obvious nonsense, as any objective, unjaundiced reading of our Draft programme will show. Here we emphatically state that communism, the realisation of human freedom and full individual and collective development is “what we want to achieve”.¹⁵

We look forward to TAS returning to our discussions.

1. ‘For a communist future’, version two.↩︎

2. CPGB Draft programme London 2025, pp6, 9, 10: communistparty.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Draft-Programme-Post-print-With-Cover-April-2025.pdf↩︎

3. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 27, London 1990, p191.↩︎

4. E Berstein Evolutionary socialism New York NY 1961, p146.↩︎

5. CPGB Draft programme London 2025, p47.↩︎

6. L Derfler Paul Lafargue and the founding of French Marxism, 1842-1882 Cambridge MASS 1991, pp184-85.↩︎

7. notesfrombelow.org/article/introduction-karl-marxs-workers-inquiry.↩︎

8. www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/who-we-are.↩︎

9. A Buick, Letters Weekly Worker June 26 2022.↩︎

10. F Grafton ‘The road from Thatcherism or the road from Marxism’ The Leninist No1, Winter 1981-82.↩︎

11. J Marshall ‘Some thoughts on the British road to socialism’ The Leninist No4, April 1983.↩︎

12. CPGB Draft programme London 1995, p6.↩︎

13. VI Lenin CW Vol 25, Moscow 1977, p475.↩︎

14. ‘For a communist future’, version two.↩︎

15. CPGB Draft programme London 1995, p48.↩︎