11.09.2025
Tailing the tailists
We are for the existence of factions where there are substantive differences. They can aid political clarity and the educational quality of debates. But what Carla Roberts proposes is that the CPGB should follow the standard far-left path. This is liquidationist, argues Mike Macnair
This is a reply to Carla Roberts’ letter of last week (‘YP inaccuracies’, September 4), which was itself a criticism of Farzad Kamangar’s report of the CPGB’s recent aggregate meeting (‘Political clarity vital’, August 281). It is not an official reply from the Provisional Central Committee, but simply my own response.
I begin with the very basic point that the disagreement is not about “glaring inaccuracies”: that is, that comrade Kamangar’s report made factually false claims. It is about what is the right political interpretation of the proposals made by comrade Roberts and others to the aggregate.
The next step is the question why the PCC (through comrade Conrad’s report to the aggregate) “described those moving various amendments as risking being viewed as a ‘rightwing and liquidationist’ faction”. Comrade Conrad’s point in his report was that the final amendment in particular (which was not put to the vote, consideration of the substance being deferred to the next aggregate) proposed to insert, among other points:
Ensure the Weekly Worker plays a leading role in cohering communist forces in [Your Party]. Proposals to achieve this should be presented to the next aggregate by the editorial team for review, amendment and adoption. The editorial team could consider co-option and providing structured access to pages for comrades outside our ranks, always ensuring we retain full control.
Comrade Conrad pointed out that the phrase “could consider co-option” would only be meaningful if what was really intended was “should consider co-option” - and that this would imply giving editorial responsibility for the Weekly Worker to ‘friends’ who did not accept party discipline, pay dues, etc.
I can add that the proposals seemed to PCC comrades at our meeting before the aggregate to be a diluted form of one previously made in connection with the Forging Communist Unity discussions - and in particular of the objections to the CPGB’s supposed “bad culture” discussed in those discussions and more than once at Communist University - that overcoming the Weekly Worker’s supposed ‘bad culture’ would benefit from co-opting onto the editorial team opponents of it who were otherwise politically close to the CPGB.
I also added in the discussion that the penultimate amendment, linked to the final one, proposed to replace the bulk of section 11 of the resolution as passed2 - which offers a summary cross-reference to the CPGB’s Draft programme as giving our political orientation for Your Party (aka the Jeremy Corbyn Party) - with “We fight to equip the YP with a Marxist minimum-maximum programme, while also making specific propaganda around some of the key political questions that are likely to encounter us in the YP - see ‘What communists fight for in Your Party, point 16’.” This amendment - ‘What communists fight for in Your Party, point 16’ - I argued, is a sub-minimum programme of the sort commonly put forward by left groups to form broad-front projects (albeit a relatively left version of such a sub-minimum programme).
In other words, what “risks being viewed as … liquidationist” is that the penultimate and final amendments proposed to commit the CPGB to the sort of project conducted by the SWP, SPEW, Counterfire, RS21, Anticapitalist Resistance, Workers Power … and so on, and to make the Weekly Worker into a political outlet of the same sort as the papers and websites of the majority or ‘normal’ far-left groups. These are tailored to their broader-front alliance projects and (as RS21 on one occasion said explicitly) try to avoid open polemic with other far-left groups.3
Action faction
Comrade Roberts’ joke that “this alleged faction would have to be called the ‘action faction’ …” was a bit of a blast from the past for me. Fifty years ago, or thereabouts, supporters of the leadership majority in the International Marxist Group argued for an orientation in student work to what they tagged as the ‘action faction’ among the student left - leftists who sought to organise demos and occupations round ‘bread and butter’ issues - as opposed to the other part of the student left, whose tag I cannot now recall (perhaps ‘theory faction’??), who sought to campaign around exposing the pro-capitalist commitments in the university curriculum and around international solidarity issues.
This approach has been broadly the common ground of the far left ever since the 1970s (it has earlier roots). Once upon a time there was theory that underlay it: very roughly, that people radicalise ‘in action’ rather than ‘by propaganda’, and the task of the left is therefore to set broad forces in motion by initiatives in action, whose aims are adapted to the current level of consciousness. Tony Cliff’s version was ‘moderate demands, but militant action’; the Trotskyists offered versions of ‘transitional demands’ and the ‘transitional method’ and so on. Nowadays, it is merely the common sense of the far left. Failure to pursue it may be variously accused of being ‘sectarian’, ‘passive’ or ‘propagandist’.
When comrade Roberts says that “there were no practical proposals from the PCC”, she is in substance saying that the PCC did not propose ‘initiatives in action’ of this sort. In reality, it was not that the comrades who proposed the amendments looked at the PCC proposals and found them inadequate: comrade Roberts proposed the initiative and the drafting of a sub-minimum platform for a ‘Communist Platform’ to the PCC by email on August 10; the PCC then elected to draft our own motion (on the basis of a discussion on August 18), because we disagreed with the method of comrade Roberts’ proposals; the proposals then resurfaced in a partially toned-down form in the later part of the amendments proposed.
Comrade Roberts’ argument for this approach is at the end of the day the same as the argument against the CPGB’s supposed “bad culture” - that is, for toning down the polemics in the Weekly Worker. It is the idea that turning to this sort of approach is the only way in which the CPGB can grow.
It is certainly true that the majority of the far left has been able to grow by pursuing its policy to recruit and to build organisations of some hundreds, and in a few cases of a few thousand. In high moments of class struggle, groups like the Italian Lotta Continua, or the Chilean Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria in the early 1970s, or the Iranian Fedayeen-e-Khalq in the revolution of 1979-81, could grow much larger. But, remaining trapped in the ways of thought of groups of a few hundred or a few thousand, they could not lead a struggle for power.
Why has this policy enabled the creation of groups of a few hundred or thousand, but not further to the creation of a real mass party? On the positive side, the first ground of partial success is the combination of, first, the syndicalist refusal of ‘electoralism’, giving a social base in the most elemental sort of low-level class politics (militant but apolitical trade unionism). The second ground is the particular dynamics of student leftism, in which it is genuinely possible for the leadership to ‘elect a new membership’ if the existing members fail it (as is apparent with the SWP’s recovery after its 2013 crisis). A succession of ‘initiatives in action’ aimed at newly radicalising activists on the basis of their existing level of political consciousness can produce a sufficient stream of recruits to keep the organisation young and active and to grow it up to a point.
Must be wrong
The CPGB is a very small minority, and is not currently recruiting numerous youth. From the standpoint of the majority far left, that proves that we ‘must be wrong’.
The trouble with this line of argument is that those who make it against us are also small minorities, relative to the majorities they disagree with. Talking About Socialism seems to be even smaller than the CPGB. RS21 has a few hundred members and an irregularly updated website. The SWP reports 2,628 subs-paying members as of November 2024 and produces a weekly newspaper (and other publications). If being the minority proves you are wrong, RS21 is wrong against the SWP. The British organised far left in total adds up to something under 10,000 people. The Labour Party has 333,325 members as of the end of 2024 (as well as major trade unions affiliated and commonly voting with the party right).4 Your Party claims over 800,000 sign-ups; the very large ‘silent majority’ of these numbers will be claimed, as was the case for the smaller Momentum, as backing forms of plebiscitary means of centralised bureaucratic control, and ‘proving’ that the organised left is wrong.
Labour won the 2024 general election with 9,708,716 votes (33.7% of the popular vote). The Tories obtained 6,828,925 or 23.7%, while Reform UK obtained 4,117,610 votes (14.3%). The Lib Dems, who last time there was a hung parliament went into coalition with the Tories, and who are led by ‘Orange Book’ pro-capitalist Ed Davey, obtained 3,519,143 or 12.2%. Labour is thus a minority. If being in the minority proves that you are wrong, all forms of leftism are ‘proved wrong’.
The negative side of the ‘action faction’ policy is that the policy of ‘initiatives in action’ necessarily tendentially entails bureaucratic centralism, which drives splits. It does so for reasons I explained last year in criticising Steve Bloom’s arguments.5 If the primary job of the organisation is to take ‘initiatives in action’, time is of the essence and democratic modes of decision-making are objectively time-wasting. Moreover, such an organisation’s work needs to be resolutely aimed outwards, and internal arguments are a distraction. And ‘initiatives in action’ require central control, so that there need to be centrally appointed local organisers and the micro-management of branches and sectoral organisations (trade union fractions, and so on) to secure united action round the latest policy.
Further, since every group seeks to seize the initiative, the inevitable result is a multiplicity of competing ‘broad front’ initiatives. Thus - for example - SPEW’s National Shop Stewards Network, RS21 and others’ Troublemakers at Work …
The flipside of this story is that the commitment to adapting the political ‘offer’ to the target audience in practice, with a view to mobilising action, results in making yourself a political tail for currently dominant political ideas, whether liberal or nationalist-patriarchal. Several US cartoonists have pointed to this dynamic between ‘moderate’ Republicans and Democrats: as the Democrats ‘meet the Republicans halfway’, the Republicans move further right, and then offer again to ‘meet halfway’. The organisation gradually acclimatises itself to more rightwing politics.
But, in addition, the organisation trains the youth it recruits in the ‘meet halfway’ approach - and the upshot is that the majority of recruits, who do not become fully integrated in the core cadre, come out at the end of the process, after some years’ membership of the group, as moderate trade union officials, as social democrats or as Eurocommunists or other ‘identity politics’ opponents of the organised left.
What is involved is a package of politics. Comrade Roberts asks: “How will we try to win over those people who are, for example, inspired by Mike Macnair’s book, Revolutionary strategy, but who remain wedded to projects that are weak on the anti-Semitism smear campaign and/or gravitate towards social-imperialist positions on Ukraine?” The problem is that ‘initiatives in action’, bureaucratic centralism, anti-factionalism and the demand for limited ‘action programmes’ and for avoiding ‘insulting’ potential allies are all interlinked.
It is not the specific issue of RS21 comrades who like Revolutionary strategy being in unity with social-imperialists in RS21 that makes it premature to propose organisational unity with the comrades at the level of participation in editing the Weekly Worker. It is the method. I pointed out in an exchange of letters with comrade Archie Woodrow in 2024, when he said that Revolutionary strategy was useful, but the Weekly Worker’s polemical culture was undesirable, that a paper that rejected the Weekly Worker’s polemical culture would never have published the articles that became the book.6
Comrade Roberts celebrates the fact that “The CPGB has by far the best politics of any group on the left in Britain or internationally. It stands out from the myriad of confessional sects, on the one hand, and unprincipled broad fronts, on the other. What other group fights for principled politics in the open and democratic way the CPGB and its publication, the Weekly Worker, does?”
But she does not seem to understand that these strengths of the CPGB are possible because of our insistence on the party as a political voice based on a programme and a press, and with a view, when we can do it, to electoral intervention. This conception of the party is opposed to the conception of the party as having as its main role organising initiatives in action on the basis of less than the minimum programme.
It was not an insult or a misrepresentation for the PCC to argue that comrades who had coordinated to submit a body of amendments to the PCC’s proposed motion for the aggregate were acting as a faction. We are for the existence of factions where there are substantive political differences. They aid political clarity and the educational quality of debates.
‘Liquidationist’ reflects the point that - as PCC comrades argued at the aggregate and I have argued here - the major proposals of the ‘action faction’ would, if carried into operation, turn the CPGB into just another of the far-left groups.
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revsoc21.uk/2023/02/15/on-counterfire-and-trans-oppression.↩︎
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‘Fetishising revolutionary crisis’ September 26 2024 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1508/fetishising-revolutionary-crisis) (the last third of the article).↩︎
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‘Marxist polemic’ February 8 2024 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1477/letters), replying to comrade Woodrow’s ‘Depressing’, February 1 2024 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1476/letters).↩︎