16.10.2025

Principle, splits and unity

Alex Green agrees that Nato’s proxy war in Ukraine is a split issue. However, it is not only about opposing our own imperialism. The comrade believes that Russia is an imperialist power and he believes that the CPGB believes it too. He also raises the question of China and calls for serious study and debate. A good idea

Mike Macnair rightly defends the presentation of a motion in the Dutch Revolutionaire Socialistische Partij which drew a line: the war in Ukraine is inter-imperialist (‘Probabilities, not certainties’ Weekly Worker October 2).

This is an issue of principle. As his antagonist, Jacques de Fouw, said in the previous issue,

If you say that you agree with the ‘inter-imperialist’ position, it logically follows that the party should take part in protests, strikes and direct action against any efforts by our own government(s) to fuel their side of the war. However, if you agree with the ‘self-determination’ position, it follows that you ought to form a sort of national front with your national bourgeoisie, or some temporary alliance, in order to defend the Ukrainians and their state.¹

However, de Fouw objects to this decision, because it led to the Dutch Mandelites splitting from the RSP, as they refused to carry out the majority line: “With the RSP adopting the position of the inter-imperialist conflict by majority vote, it mandated all members to engage in ideological - but, more importantly, practical - political work on the basis of this position.”

He draws the wrong conclusion. This split replicates the necessary division between internationalists and social-patriots in the old Second (Social Democratic) International, which led to the formation of the Third (Communist) International. The September 29 statement by Polish prime minister Donald Tusk that Nato is at war with Russia, and that the Ukraine war is “our war”, underlines the immediacy of this position.

The communist split with social democracy was justified not by a violation of democracy by the reformists leading the old International, but by the impossibility of staying in the same party as the organisers and promoters of working class blood and ruin under each competing national flag. Today, international unity requires opposition to the war effort of Russia and Belarus, on one side, and to each of the Nato members, including the Netherlands, on the other. The Ukrainian war, like the great war of 1914-18, is a reactionary war.

This division in the RSP raises the broader question: when is a split in the Marxist wing of the labour-socialist movement justified? This is a discussion worth expanding.

I take it as read that a broad party formed and led by left reformists (like Corbyn’s and Sultana’s Your Party) cannot be bound by a single programme: such a party will always end up with three or four main tendencies or factions - not least because it will contain open reformists and avowed revolutionaries, and non-Marxists as well as Marxists. I feel that Macnair’s arguments are about how to organise among revolutionary Marxists (communists).

I agree with his basic thrust: that a Marxist political tendency should be defined by its principles and programme. That means, therefore, it should not be delimited by its analysis or its tactics: nor by its positions on theory and history, if they have no impact on its programme. If the point is to change the world, then the party should assemble the maximum active weight behind the changes needed (policies, actions). Differences of interpretation should enrich, but not divide, the Marxist forces. We do not want splits, if we can possibly help them.

It is obvious that any serious communist would want to part company with a pathological party which has become a criminal enterprise or a police front - or a morass of immorality like Gerry Healy’s old Workers Revolutionary Party. The interesting cases, however, involve genuine shadings of view or outright counterpositions over political ideas and actions.

Hugo Oehler split from the Communist League of America (the Bolshevik-Leninists) because he disagreed with the tactic of joining the Socialist Party in France in 1934: that was not a difference over programme. When his group refused to take bourgeois nationalist China’s side in the war of resistance against invading imperialist Japan in 1937, the split was not just a fact, but was dictated by principle.

To split today over a question like the assessment of Kamenev’s role in February-October 1917 in the writings of Lars T Lih would be lightminded. Maybe less obviously, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or the Korean War (or indeed the defence of the long-gone Soviet workers’ state) are no longer operational questions.

However, the provision of weapons and intelligence and staff operations by Nato imperialists to their Ukrainian ally and puppet, in the reactionary war following Russia’s equally imperialist invasion of Ukraine, is an unavoidable issue today.

Like the threat of a widened conflict with Nato in the Baltic zone, or the Israeli/US bombing of Iran in April, this is a question where taking one side excludes taking the other side - or taking no side. Bolshevik deputies in the French national assembly would not be able to vote both with Macron and against him on sending missiles to Kyiv. Nor would a new generation of outlawed Russian Marxists be able to support the war effort, while opposing Putin’s war budgets.

Bolsheviks

Marxists should not split lightly, or give up without a fight. The repeated attempts by the Fourth Internationalists around Trotsky to win the Spanish POUM away from its suicidal participation in the popular front electoral pact and Catalan government were unsuccessful, unlike Lenin’s fight against ‘Old Bolshevism’ in April 1917, but similarly necessary.

1917 saw an unbridgeable and final split by the Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks. The latter supported continuing the predatory imperialist war, and were for anti-revolutionary class collaboration to support the capitalist-landlord government (‘agreementism’). 1917 also provides an example of principled fusion, over the same questions.

The Inter-District Organisation led by Trotsky joined with the Bolsheviks led by Lenin, on the basis of a common programme. This programme was laid out most completely and starkly in Lenin’s three articles of April 1917, later twice reprinted (once in July, once in October 1918) as the mass-circulation pamphlet entitled ‘Political parties in Russia and the tasks of the proletariat’.²

Lenin observed, a year after the establishment of Soviet power, that this brilliantly clear statement of Bolshevik tasks and positions had “held true in all … stages of the revolution”, including “during the October Revolution of 1917, and after it”.

In it we read:

3) What is their attitude towards socialism?

A. (to the right of the CD) and B (CD). Decidedly hostile, since it threatens the profits of the capitalists and landowners.

C. (SD and SR). For socialism, but it is too early to think of it or to take any immediate practical steps for its realisation.

D. (“Bolsheviks”). For socialism. The Soviets must immediately take all possible practicable steps for its realisation.

Lenin’s own footnote refers to two further questions: “20) Shall the peasants take all the landed estates immediately?” and “22) Shall the people take over the largest and most powerful capitalist monopolies, the banks, the syndicates of manufacturers, etc?” To which the Bolshevik answers are, of course, both in the affirmative.

In the statement, ‘Political parties in Russia …’ Lenin treated the Russian revolution as the embodiment of the transformation of the imperialist war into civil war. It proceeded from the accomplished fact of dual power to say that the bourgeois democratic tasks (land reform, national self-determination) could only be achieved by the proletariat, supported by the poor peasantry, seizing power. This meant replacing the bourgeois provisional government with the rule of the Soviets of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants Deputies: such a government would be forced to embark on a road of socialist measures, even to hold its position against imperialist intrigue and capitalist disruption.

Later in 1917, in the penultimate section of State and revolution, Lenin sums up the programme for Russia:

We, however, shall break with the opportunists; and the entire class-conscious proletariat will be with us in the fight - not to “shift the balance of forces”, but to overthrow the bourgeoisie, to destroy bourgeois parliamentarism, for a democratic republic after the type of the Commune, or a republic of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, for the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat (my emphasis).

In early May 1917, Trotsky and Lenin conferred on Russian soil. From then, to and beyond the seizure of soviet power, the leaders worked in tandem on this, their common programme, and did not dwell on their old disputes. They had a single, joint, Herculean job.

My take on this amalgamation is that their ‘theoretical’ positions converged, and crystallised in a common programme. Macnair’s assessment is that their positions on the nature of the revolution never converged, but we both agree that they came together on a common programme.

As events progressed, this critical lesson of programmatic unity was underscored. Lenin was obliged to stand with Trotsky, days after the Bolshevik-led insurrection, against ‘Old Bolshevik’ backsliding (strikebreaking). At this 11th hour, a faction arose in the Bolshevik leadership led by Kamenev and Lunacharsky, which wanted to bring the Mensheviks and SRs into the leadership of the soviets, and even to remove Lenin and Trotsky from their leading positions, as a token of conciliatory good faith.

In that context Lenin argued for “no compromise: ie, for a homogeneous Bolshevik government”, and famously said of Trotsky: “As for conciliation [with the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionists], I cannot even speak about that seriously. Trotsky long ago said that unification is impossible. Trotsky understood this and from that time on there has been no better Bolshevik.”³

Trotsky was sufficiently a politician to refrain from ever uttering the symmetrical observation: that from the April theses onwards, there was no better ‘Trotskyist’ than Lenin. But they stood together for the same socialist and democratic goals, by the same soviet methods, and by the rule of the same classes (the working class supported by the poor peasantry).

The Bolshevik programme omitted or deferred nothing important. What you saw was what you got. As Trotsky pointed out in 1934 (as if remonstrating with decades of ‘Trotskyists’ to come),

At a gathering of workers who are monarchists or Catholics, I would deal cautiously with the altar and the throne. But in the programme of my party and in all its policies, its relation to religion and monarchy must be formulated with absolute exactness. At a meeting of a reformist trade union, I, as a member of the union, might be compelled to leave much unsaid; but the party as a whole, in its papers, its public meetings, pamphlets and proclamations, is duty-bound to say everything.

Should police conditions compel the legal press to be cautious in its formulations, the party must have an illegal press besides. When Marxists demand that ‘things be spoken of as they are’, they have in mind not every isolated speech in some special situation or other, but the policy of the party as a whole. The party that for ‘tactical’ reasons hides its position is no revolutionary party, because it repels the advanced workers, because it adapts itself to the prejudices of the backward workers. And the backward workers can be re-educated only through the advanced workers.

But even at a particular meeting, while using all the tact necessary in approaching a given group, one must not forget that among them there are workers on different levels and that, while it may be necessary to adapt oneself to the backward ones in the method of exposition, it is impermissible to adapt one' s political position to them.⁴

It was essential and comprehensive unity (already demonstrated in daily common revolutionary work) which formally brought together 75,000 Bolsheviks and 4,000 inter-district ‘Trotskyists’ in July-August 1917 at the party’s Sixth Congress, where they were also joined by a number of radicalised Menshevik internationalists. (The numbers tell the story of the preceding success of ‘Old Bolshevism’ in building an anti-opportunist socialist workers’ party. This party-building was a prerequisite - as Trotsky observed retrospectively in 1940 - for the success of the common programme.)

The fusion was only possible because of the highly principled split of the socialist proletarian forces from the Menshevik and SR “conciliators” over war, annexations, pay, workers’ control of production, and agricultural revolution (‘Bread, peace and land’). The Bolshevik Party was therefore able to set out, from the beginning in April 1917, with the aim of “proceed[ing] to construct the socialist order”, as Lenin put it in October 1917 - when all power finally fell to the soviets.

China

Returning to today, we should take care to single out for our programme critical planks that split us from the reformists who hold back the Marxist movement but are central to our goals. We need a programme that is as minimum (as narrow) as possible, to create the widest unity, while being as maximum (as deep) as necessary. The truth cannot be abridged: for example, a wealth tax is a desirable partial reform, but also a means for fooling the working people, if the need for expropriation of the bourgeoisie is not advanced.

A Marxist programme must be internationally coherent. You can try to stay silent about the nature of the Chinese Communist Party leadership, while sharply condemning the British bourgeoisie from London or the American capitalists from New York. But in Beijing (or Brazil, Vietnam or Zambia) that will not work.

China is the defining question of the modern era, and one which determines where a fault line lies - as important as the one between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1917, or the one between Trotsky and Burnham in 1939-40. Is China challenging the hegemony of the US in a ‘cold’ inter-imperialist conflict, or is China some kind of socialist, non-capitalist or subordinate (oppressed) capitalist country? From this depends the Marxist position on China in a war.

Last month the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation met in Tianjin under Xi Jinping's tutelage. The division of the world into two main blocs - one led by the United States, the other by China - could not have been clearer. These are both economic and military blocs. The hostility of the economically declining military hegemon to the challenge of China is patent. To remain agnostic on the class nature of China today (and its role as a great power) is like Lenin or Kautsky or Luxemburg not having a view on German imperialism in 1912, or us not having a view on Russia, imperialist or non-imperialist, today. It is to be disarmed in the face of reality.

In these regards the Draft programme of the CPGB⁵ is an odd document for an organisation claiming to be united around its programme. The word ‘Russia’ appears five times in 64 pages, and ‘China’ appears in none of them (the glancing references to Russia deal with the period of the revolution, over a century ago). This programme is out of time, and nationally narrow.

We have to look to the CPGB’s ‘Perspectives’ for 2025 to get a view on the People’s Republic of China:

17. When it comes to global hegemony, the US has only one serious rival and that is China: the world’s second largest economy and a proto-imperialist power … China alone is a full-spectrum challenger - economic, military, diplomatic, technological and ideological. Hence the well-financed propaganda … All carefully crafted to cover for the push to surround, strangle and subordinate China. The left must adopt a clear defeatist line in relation to the bellicose policy being pursued by the US and its allies, without in any way prettifying the Beijing regime.

….

19. While it is clear that China will not be a viable alternative hegemon any time soon, over the last three decades the country has seen massive, historically unprecedented, economic growth, especially since 2001 and WTO membership. Modern China’s revolutionary origins, state-controlled capitalist development, successful integration into the world market and Mao-Deng-Xi ‘official communism’ has made it something of a model [for some countries and parties] ... Surely there will be many more leftwing Sinophiles. Marxists - ie, genuine communists - need to develop a concrete analysis of China in all its contradictory complexity, not content themselves with either bestowing trite labels or echoing the nonsense of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. (my emphasis)⁶

This latter task of developing an analysis is critical.

I believe that the sentence beginning “The left must adopt a clear defeatist line” expands to this: “The left in western imperialist countries must be for defeat of their own bourgeoisie in the preparation for, or in the event of, it waging war on China.” Does that mean that the Chinese workers should support their own rulers and bourgeoisie militarily in such an event, or should they also be defeatist? Is China ruled by its bourgeoisie, or by bureaucrats who are not capitalists? If China is not capitalist, what is it? And if it is capitalist, why is it not imperialist, but only ‘proto-imperialist’?

Open process

In every left group I come across there is uncertainty about these kinds of questions, usually sitting alongside a ‘democratically’ imposed set of majority answers. This implies that there would be great value in making concrete steps towards the “concrete analysis of China” projected in the perspectives. That would increase clarity and preparedness in a period of impending war, and would touch on questions that are frequently (and wrongly) passed over in silence, for fear of yet more splitting.

But these questions cannot be avoided in a true international Marxist party, because they bite sharpest in the areas of the world where the working class has grown in numbers and potential power. In my view we face the double task of constructing an independent workers’ movement in the Brics and global south (where the proletariat has grown) and reconstructing the movement in the ‘west’ (where globalisation and Blairism have eroded the working class and rolled back most of the gains even of the Second International). That is a formidable task, and cannot be approached without tackling this job of concrete analysis.

As well, for those who are coming to the Marxist movement for the first time (perhaps as the result of developments like Your Party), education and self-education on the questions of Russia, China and imperialist war is of great interest, and generally important.

So far as I can tell, the CPGB does not follow the degenerated post-Trotskyist definition of democratic centralism as a form of secret society, where the existence of debate and the various positions during a debate (and even after its conclusion) are kept from the world. Perhaps this makes you a suitable organising centre for an open process of education and debate, taking in all strands of Marxist thought and activism, on the subject of China?

1. ‘Paved with good intentions’ Weekly Worker September 25: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1554/paved-with-good-intentions.↩︎

2. VI Lenin CW Vol 24 Moscow 1964, p93.↩︎

3. Minutes of the Bolshevik Petrograd Committee, November 1 1917, reproduced in L Trotsky The Stalin school of falsification (originally published in Paris as La Révolution défigurée in 1929).↩︎

4. ‘The SAP, the IC and the Fourth International’ Writings of Leon Trotsky (1933-34) London 1976, p20.↩︎

5. communistparty.co.uk/draft-programme.↩︎

6. communistparty.co.uk/our-perspectives-agm-2025.↩︎