23.10.2025

Down memory lane

Some are extraordinarily reluctant to face up to the global dynamics ushered in by the 1989-91 collapse. China cannot be substituted for the USSR. Neither can we revive the Spirit of ’45 nor the promises of Keynesianism. Mike Macnair explores the perspectives of the CPB’s EC and the SWP’s CC

By coincidence, two important left documents have become available to us at the same time: first, the draft resolution for the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain’s upcoming congress (due November 14-16), ‘Capitalism’s general crisis and the gleam of socialism - build the united front [BUF] against war and austerity!’; secondly, the first pre-conference discussion bulletin (PCDB1) for the Socialist Workers Party’s conference due in the new year - including the central committee’s general perspectives document, ‘Seizing the key link [SKL]: revolutionary politics in the new age of catastrophe’.

Also in PCDB1 are important CC subsidiary documents on perspectives and tasks: ‘Urgent new tasks in the fight against racism, the far right and fascism’, ‘Revolutionaries and Your Party’ and ‘Party democracy: what we should defend; what we should reconsider’ (this last argues in essence that “we should defend” 95% of current SWP practice, and “we should reconsider” 5%).

The CPB is Britain’s most influential far-left group: both because the Morning Star paper itself is a daily, and because the political ideas of the CPB’s programme, Britain’s road to socialism, are widely held in dilute form among the Labour, ex‑Labour and trade union left. (This is partly because the BRS and the CPB’s ‘official communist’ organisational conceptions are adapted to the interests of the labour bureaucracy as a social stratum in holding the membership in subordination.) The SWP is Britain’s largest far-left group, with around 2,500 paying members, around twice the size of the CPB (1,270), of the Socialist Party in England and Wales and its recently enlarged splinter-competitor, the Revolutionary Communist Party (mark IV), formerly Socialist Appeal.¹

At the end of the day, neither the CPB nor the SWP is decisively stronger than either group’s competitors on the left. But both organisations hold themselves out as “the” party: the CPB claims it is “the independent Marxist-Leninist party of the labour movement” (BUF lines 643-744; emphasis added; shortened version at line 977); for the SWP, “a revolutionary socialist party that is able to offer leadership within struggles, make the links and offer a way out of the crisis” (SKL, p5).

For both organisations, the perspective concludes with an individual recruitment drive (BUF, lines 936-63; SKL, p9); there is no suggestion of changed relations with the rest of the organised far left. Rather, both are committed to trying to obtain privileged relations for their own small party apparat with this or that group of ‘official left’ labour bureaucrats (BUF, lines 541-42, 582-85, 735-39; SKL p7, section ‘Mobilising the anti-racist majority’, etc).

A third common feature, directly connected to this last one, is that both the CPB and the SWP are partisans of the people’s front policy adopted by the 7th Congress of Comintern in 1935. Both curiously name this policy the “united front”. Thus BUF in its title, and in the section, ‘Build the united front!’ (lines 540-89), where the People’s Assembly (popular by name if not by nature) is characterised as part of the ‘united front’, in the hope for Your Party to “form the core of a wider alliance of left and progressive forces” (line 736), and in the projected alliance with gender-critical feminists, conceptualised as a “powerful women’s movement”, which is “needed alongside a labour movement … building a united front in practice …” (lines 901-02). And thus also SKL in the section, ‘Mobilising the anti-racist majority’; the line is also reflected in the whole approach of the SWP’s ‘Urgent new tasks in the fight against racism, the far right and fascism’.

The CPB is a British inheritor of the tradition of the 7th Congress. What is surprising then is the non-use in BUF of the expression ‘popular’ or ‘people’s’ front, and the recharacterisation of such a formation as “united front”. The SWP is in origin a Trotskyist group, descended from a movement that defended the united class front of workers’ parties and organisations (without any suspension of political criticism), proposed by the executive committee of Comintern in 1922 as an alternative to the ‘Cartel des Gauches’ electoral alliance of the left in France, and extended by the 4th Congress of Comintern in the same year. The SWP went over to the 7th Congress conception with the ‘Anti-Nazi League’ from 1977, in seeking merely the broadest possible alliance against ‘Nazism’, but has never admitted to the shift, instead characterising single-issue campaigns including bourgeois politicians, of a type that predated the appearance of the workers’ movement, as ‘united fronts’. It looks as though the SWP usage has infected the CPB.

The fourth common element is that both sets of perspectives in different ways express politics of nostalgia - in this sense like Labour, the Tories, the Lib Dems and Reform. The CPB and the SWP are extraordinarily reluctant to face up to the global dynamics in which the period that began in 1945 is, increasingly clearly, coming to an end; and to the degree of decline of Britain as a productive economy and the implications of that. The routes of the two leaderships to these results and to their similar political conclusions are, however, significantly different.

CPB details

The CPB’s draft proposes to commit the incoming EC to produce a new edition of Britain’s road to socialism (lines 943-45). The character of the present document plainly foreshadows such a draft: it is, in effect, a programmatic text, albeit one (like previous editions of the BRS) over-tied to conjunctural analyses. This makes it much more wide-ranging than the SWP document, and I do not propose to go through all the detail, but merely discuss the broad framework. I have already referred to the commitment to a people’s front ‘trinity’ approach, with the ‘gender-critical feminists’ seen as the ‘official leadership’ of the women’s movement in the section, ‘Sex and gender’ (lines 825-903). The third element of the CPUSA-style ‘trinity’,² the question of racism, is posed in the same way, but at less length.

The central feature of the argument of BUF is that it is a wager on the proposition that nothing fundamental changed with the fall of the USSR, the ‘Soviet bloc’ in eastern Europe in 1989-91 and the break-up of Yugoslavia, starting at the same period. And no lessons have to be learned from the fact that the Soviet leadership collapsed its own system. Rather, merely, the People’s Republic of China and the Communist Party of China replace the USSR and the CPSU as the leadership of the international communist movement. And, while capitalism is in “all-round general crisis” (line 59), “China’s economy - with its socialist state power, central planning and extensive public ownership - is likely to grow twice or three times faster than those of G7 countries” (lines 35-36).

The place of the ‘anti-imperialist camp’ of Soviet allies among nationalist regimes in 1949-89 is taken by the Brics+, which “offers developing economies an alternative to western imperialist domination and dependency” (lines 41-42). This point is developed further in the third section, ‘Militarism and war or solidarity and peace?’ (lines 147-237), which similarly promotes diplomatic alignment with China as the sign of a progressive role.

‘Proxy war in Ukraine’ (lines 239‑73) starts badly, but broadly correctly assesses the war. ‘Genocide in the Middle East’ (lines 275‑333) reflects the left’s common understanding of the development and has the strength of noting left illusions in Iran and the ‘axis of resistance’ (lines 318-21), and that US policy is driven by its global geopolitical control needs (lines 325‑27).

‘Cold war on China’ (lines 335-71) again displays illusions in Chinese foreign policy and in Brics+. It is also mistaken to analogise the current US policy of aggressive encirclement of China to the British policy of aggressive encirclement of Germany in 1900-14 and to the 1947-91 cold war. The fundamental reason is that, however much the Morning Star/CPB may want to think of China as the new USSR, on the one hand, China, with its billionaires, stock markets and weak welfare system, has nothing like the scale of the global ideological appeal of the USSR; and because of this, on the other hand, the USA’s policy is not one of ‘containment’, as it was in 1948-76, with accompanying concessions to the working class in the ‘west’ and to nationalists in the ‘south’. On the contrary, the USA continues to press both directly and through the International Monetary Fund for ‘rollback’ of all the concessions made to the working class since 1917, and for more radical subordination of other countries to US interests. In this context, the operative alternative offered by the section, ‘Britain’s rearmament programme’ (lines 373-423) is the promotion of pacifism (part of the general people’s front perspective).

BUF’s second section is on the ecological issues, especially climate. Again, “People’s China, while still developing its economy, is showing the way forward with its active pursuit of an ‘ecological civilisation’ …” (lines 129-30); but what is needed in Britain is a “Green New Deal” (lines 123, 125) - an idea that displays common left illusions in the Roosevelt administration’s policies in the 1930s, which were on the road to World War II. The section’s ‘action programme’ bullet-points (lines 134‑45) consist of a combination of trivialities (eg, improvements to household waste recycling) and hand-waving (eg “massive investment in non-nuclear green energy technology …”).

BUF moves into British politics with the section, ‘State-monopoly capitalism in Britain’ (lines 425‑93). The subhead recalls the cold war era concept of ‘Stamokap’ (state monopoly capitalism) as a stage beyond imperialism. Beyond this, however, the section starts with the correct observation that:

More so than ever, British capitalism is predominantly a rentier economy, dominated by financial services, generating income from credit and speculation and acting as a conduit for international capital flows. The City is a financial laundromat, washing dirty money from around the world. The banks provide very little credit domestically for small businesses and productive industry, while US private equity is buying up assets for quick profits across the British economy.

Almost five decades of neoliberal economic policy and deindustrialisation have smashed Britain’s productive capacity … (lines 426‑32).

This is not a Stamokap analysis. What follows it is neither a Stamokap analysis, nor an attempt to make sense of the British economy on the basis of the recognition of its dominance by financial sector skimming from global profits.³ On the contrary, it is a descriptive account of social inequality in Britain, accompanied by a broadly left-Keynesian prescription: tax the rich, borrow more to invest. Like all Keynesian analyses, this is characterised by methodological nationalism: the belief that the national economy can be characterised and managed as a closed economy.⁴

This left-Keynesian economic analysis is then ‘cashed’ in the form of ‘A leftwing programme for Britain’ (lines 495‑538). This is, as the draft says, “part of a wider Alternative Economic and Political Strategy (the AEPS)”, that is, a revamped version of the old Communist Party’s and CP‑influenced Labour left’s ‘Alternative Economic Strategy’ of the 1970s.⁵ It is, in substance, a programme for a mitigated form of ‘socialism in one country’ - which takes no account of the dependence of the UK on imports for 46% of the food consumed here (leave aside other commodities).

It is also almost purely an economic programme: the only democratic bullet point is the last: “Repeal repressive laws against rights to organise and protest and take measures to break up monopoly ownership and control over the press, broadcasting and online media.” Democratic questions are deferred to “Britain's democratic, political and institutional crisis” (lines 591‑655), which suggest a series of very limited reforms (more limited than those of the Blair government!).

The democratic demands in BUF are, then, not part of the tasks of the “united front” (lines 540‑89). This is to have “the trade union movement at its core”. The CPB’s EC recognises that

… this united front cannot be built by trade unions alone, weakened as they have been by deindustrialisation, anti-union laws … Workers need to rebuild strong, militant trade unions rooted in the workplace, combining industrial with political struggle and building leadership at all levels, including more collaborative approaches by unions and trades councils to recruit and organise workers in non-union workplaces.

But the means of this policy are to be merely the work of the CPB in building trade union broad-left formations and promoting their coordination “inspired by the successes of the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions, which brought together workplace militants and left officials from the late 1960s into the early 1980s to defeat wage controls and anti-union laws”. This is merely empty nostalgia for the 1960s‑70s: the LCDTU was a high point of a shop stewards’ movement that had been built in the first place against ‘left officials’ in the 1940s. The changed structure of employment, as well as the anti-union laws, mean that to construct a new means of rebuilding trade unionism will need new means of mobilising creativity at the base - which implies a struggle for political democracy and against bureaucratic managerialism within the movement. On this, BUF is simply silent.

Nostalgia for the 1960s‑70s, then, is dominant in the global analysis, which sees China merely substituting for the USSR; in the analysis of Britain, which mentions but takes no operative account of Britain’s radical de-productivisation and dependence on finance; in the policy of prescriptions that follow from this (a rerun of the 1970s AES); and in the concept of the united front - imagined as rebuilding the old 1960s‑70s broad lefts and the LCDTU without going through the sort of process that created the basis for these movements.

SWP’s method

The SWP CC’s perspectives document is considerably shorter and simpler: 6,018 words to the CPB EC’s 12,148, and sharply focussed on the far-right threat and the anti-racist movement, ‘Your Party’, and building the SWP. It should be apparent that this is also politically weaker than the CPB EC’s draft with all the faults of that text.

The starting point is a question of method - and a misleading Lenin narrative, which all Cliffites assert - not just the SWP, but also people in Counterfire, RS21, and so on:

The Russian revolutionary socialist, Vladimir Lenin, argued that the “whole art of politics” lies in seizing the key link in the chain. A political organisation has to assess the link that “most of all guarantees its possessor the possession of the whole chain”.

So what are the key priorities at this given moment? It is the political crisis that (1) fuels Reform UK in the polls and the fascists on the streets; (2) produces the possibility of a mass left reformist organisation, Your Party, of hundreds of thousands; (3) underlines the necessity of building a revolutionary socialist party that is able to fight for leadership within struggles, make the links, and offer a way out of the crisis (p5).

The question of method that this poses is fundamental to the SWP’s general orientation. And it relies on a reading of Lenin to give political authority to this method.

The background to this endlessly repeated trope is to be found in the 1975 first volume of Tony Cliff’s biography of Lenin:

Lenin teaches us that in the complicated chain of political action one must always identify the central link at the moment in question, in order to seize it and give direction to the whole chain.

“Every question ‘runs in a vicious circle’ because political life as a whole is an endless chain consisting of an infinite number of links. The whole art of politics lies in finding and taking as firm a grip as we can of the link that is least likely to be struck from our hands, the one that is most important at the given moment, the one that most of all guarantees its possessor the possession of the whole chain.”

He [Lenin] often returned to this metaphor and in practice always obeyed the rule that it illustrated; during the most critical periods he was able to set aside all the secondary factors and grasp the most central one. He brushed aside anything that could directly or indirectly divert him from the main issue.⁶

John Sullivan remarked that “Cliff is an admirer of Lenin, but it’s a Lenin viewed from a distinctive angle. His four-volume life of Lenin reads like a biography of John the Baptist written by Jesus Christ.”⁷

The passage quoted by Cliff is from What is to be done? Lenin is polemicising against L Nadezhdin, who had argued against Iskra that “To speak now of an organisation held together by an all-Russia newspaper means propagating armchair ideas and armchair work” and represents a manifestation of ‘bookishness’, etc”: hence that it was necessary first to build strong local organisations around “activities that are more concrete” (strikes, street actions, and so on) before posing the question of a national paper. Nadezhdin had argued that starting with a paper was a “vicious circle”; hence the form of Lenin’s response.⁸

The point that the link to be seized is the one “that is least likely to be struck from our hands” is precisely to emphasise that the overseas propaganda paper is something the party project can control. But the Cliffites’ use of the tag is precisely to support a variant on Nadezhdin’s objections to Iskra as “too bookish” …

Did Lenin “often return to this metaphor”, as Cliff argues? The availability of the translated Collected works online at Marxists Internet Archive enables us to test this claim by searching. The answer is, in fact - twice: once in 1918 and once in 1921 (quoting himself in 1918). Both of these uses are concerned with the tasks of the Soviet government and with the contrast between the tasks of demolition of the old order and those of construction of the new.⁹

Cliff’s, and the Cliffites’, use of the tag is a lot closer to Solomon Lozovsky’s article praising Vyacheslav Molotov on the occasion of his 50th birthday in 1940:

Lenin has said that the art of politics consists in being able at each given moment to grasp the key link whereby to disentangle the whole chain.

To single out the main thing, the essential thing, from a multiplicity of facts and events, to direct attention to the thing that matters most is a faculty which Lenin had and Stalin has to perfection. This faculty of separating the primary from the secondary, grasping the main idea, directing attention to the main point, leaving out unessentials VM Molotov acquired from Lenin, under whose leadership he worked for many years, a faculty he has acquired from Comrade Stalin under whose leadership he works from day to day.¹⁰

Trotsky commented on more than one occasion that the Stalinist bureaucratic regime operated by zigzag movement from left to right after the fact. A good example is in The revolution betrayed:

The historians of the Soviet Union cannot fail to conclude that the policy of the ruling bureaucracy upon great questions has been a series of contradictory zigzags. The attempt to explain or justify them “by changing circumstances” obviously won’t hold water. To guide means at least in some degree to exercise foresight. The Stalin faction have not in the slightest degree foreseen the inevitable results of the development; they have been caught napping every time. They have reacted with mere administrative reflexes. The theory of each successive turn has been created after the fact, and with small regard for what they were teaching yesterday.¹¹

Lozovsky in the passage quoted is praising this character of zigzag evolution of theories after the fact. Cliff’s version of Lenin was doing the same thing.

Nostalgia

Back to the SWP’s perspectives. The introductory political analysis, ‘An age of catastrophe’ (p1), is extremely superficial. The war drive and the campaign for rearmament almost (not quite) go missing. This present situation is then asserted to be a “very protracted crisis” on the basis of a quotation from Gramsci’s Prison notebooks (always a questionable authority, given the obscurity of Gramsci’s writing under prison censorship). Labour is in difficulties because it lacks economic room for manoeuvre (true enough). “The British state faces a serious crisis of legitimacy over its support for Israel.” This is seriously overstated. We could speak of a “serious crisis of legitimacy” if millions, rather than hundreds of thousands, were on the street; or if rank-and-file police officers were refusing to arrest protestors, and so on.

From this superficial discussion we plunge into ‘The far right threat in Britain’ (pp5‑6), ‘Debates in the anti-fascist movement’ (pp6‑7) and ‘Mobilising the anti-fascist majority’ (p7). Here (and also in the document, ‘Urgent new tasks in the fight against racism, the far right and fascism’) we are still, in Trotsky’s terms, in the ‘zig’ stage of the bureaucratic zigzag. Reality ought to have caught up with the SWP leadership - but hasn’t. And its response, for the moment, is to dig the hole deeper. Counter-mobilisation against the far right has been decreasingly effective. The liberal slogan, ‘Refugees welcome here’, has negligible political purchase. The response of the SWP CC is to concede nothing to critics beyond very limited anti-Zionist statements from Stand Up To Racism (while still clinging to unity with Zionists).

Like the CPB EC, the SWP CC imagines that there is a mass of trade unionists out there ready to be mobilised (in this case for confronting the far right), if only the leaderships would agree to mobilise:

Second, the trade union movement with six million members has the power to turn out hundreds of thousands. But why hasn’t it mobilised its big battalions? Many union leaders shy away from talking about immigration, fearing it would cause a row with their own members. But there should be an argument in the unions about racism (p7).

Missing here is the very limited ability of trade unions to mobilise their memberships for any purpose. The SWP CC obviously will not celebrate the LCDTU and the role of the old Communist Party in that organisation. But in this passage it is, like the CPB EC, nostalgic for the glory days of the 1960s-70s.

But, in addition, the absolute dominance of the ‘confront the racists’ project in the perspectives is in itself a form of nostalgia. The Cliff group in the early 1960s was a smallish group of the same anti-anti-imperialist character as today’s ‘Atlanticists for Western Loyalism’ (Alliance for Workers’ Liberty!) operating in the Labour youth wing alongside other Trotskyists. They ‘jumped on board’ the wave of unofficial strikes and shop-stewardism and grew substantially; all the more so when they launched a unity offensive towards the rest of the left after Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of blood’ speech. But their trade union ‘rank and file groups’ were never as strong as the LCDTU and did not even radically outpace the Socialist Labour League’s All Trade Union Alliance. The 1974 Labour government’s ‘reforms’ radically undermined shop-stewardism and unofficial action.

Cliff’s first response was the launch of the SWP as a party and an attempt to do electoral work, which failed to marginalise far-left competitors.

Then, by good luck, Rock Against Racism - organised without party approval by rank-and-file SWPers - gave the SWP the leverage to organise the Anti-Nazi League people’s front (1977) with the old Communist Party, various Labour and trade union lefts, and other liberal ‘celebs’. This was the glory days, and the SWP has engaged in repeated attempts to recreate the phenomenon - as with the ANL, under its tight organisational control. It is nostalgia for this past that shapes the SWP CC’s perspectives draft.

Time to rethink, comrades. You are looking backwards rather than forwards in formulating your perspectives.

1. The Revolutionary Communist Party (mark I) was a Trotskyist organisation existing in 1944-49, which gave birth to all the later major Trotskyist organisations (Gerry Healy’s ‘Club’-Socialist Labour League-Workers Revolutionary Party, Tony Cliff’s Socialist Review-International Socialists-SWP, and Ted Grant’s Revolutionary Socialist League-Militant, leading to Peter Taaffe’s SPEW, and Ted Grant’s Socialist Appeal - now Alan Woods and Rob Sewell’s RCP). RCP Mark II was an ex-Trotskyist group existing in 1978‑97, originating in a split from the Cliffite International Socialists, and descending into the rightwing ‘provocateur’ group, Spiked. RCP Mark III is the RCPB(ML), the former Maoist Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist), renamed in 1979 at the same time as its turn from Maoism to pro-Albanian Hoxha‑ism). SWP PCDB 1 also contains a polemic by “John C (Colchester)”, arguing that the RCP (mark IV) radically overstates its membership numbers (not a practice unknown to the SWP) and has in fact around 800. This is still around a third of the SWP’s 2,500 dues‑paying membership.↩︎

2. On the ‘trinity’ and popular-frontism, compare (among many other articles from different perspectives) M Macnair, ‘Intersectionalism, the highest stage of western Stalinism?’ (ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4e207cae-a7bb-4327-a0b9-2e0ba8332b95).↩︎

3. Compare M Macnair, ‘Class composition in a nutshell’ (part 2) Weekly Worker August 28 2025 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1550/class-composition-in-a-snapshot).↩︎

4. Compare M Macnair, ‘Keynesianism: nationalist ideology’ Critique Vol 41 (2013).↩︎

5. The history of the AES is conveniently summarised from a ‘centre-left’ point of view by J Callaghan in ‘Rise and fall of the alternative economic strategy: from internationalisation of capital to “globalisation”’ Contemporary British History Vol 14 (2000).↩︎

6. www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1975/lenin1/chap14.htm.↩︎

7. www.marxists.org/history/etol/critiques/sullivan/fourth1.html.↩︎

8. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/v.htm.↩︎

9. ‘The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government’ (www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/mar/x03.htm); ‘The importance of gold now and after the complete victory of socialism’ (www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/nov/05.htm).↩︎

10. ‘A Bolshevik statesman’ (www.marxists.org/archive/lozovsky/1940/05/x01.htm).↩︎

11. www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch05.htm.↩︎