10.10.1996

Wretched

The International Bolshevik Tendency has criticised the Communist Party for refusing to liquidate itself. The CPGB’s national organiser replies

Comrades are unlikely to have read an article on the Socialist Labour Party in the latest issue of 1917, publication of the International Bolshevik Tendency. This is the obscure journal of an obscure group, an international split from the Spartacist League with little to distinguish it programmatically from its parent organisation, apart from criticism of its closed and outlandish internal regime. Indeed, 1917 has been made even harder to get hold of since the British section of the IBT, under instruction from North America, apparently decided to ‘liquidate’ in order to be part of the SLP initiative.

The article is worthwhile reading, however. It is - in a word - quite wretched, eloquent testimony against those who have advocated that the Communist Party and others close their papers, disband their organisations and creep into Scargill’s organisation as unorganised and atomised individuals. More than this, it is evidence of the crass hypocrisy of this sterile little sect. For while it has pompously lectured others against ‘fetishisation’ of “organisational details” - like their continued existence - it is absolutely crystal clear from this article, from the behaviour of their comrades in the SLP and from the 1917 article’s clumsy designation of these people as IBT “supporters”, that the IBT continues to exist as an organised group in Britain. Notwithstanding its poisonous call to others, it has not followed its own advice.

Nothing to lose

There are two points to make about this ‘liquidation’. First, for the IBT it could be argued that it is a sensible enough ploy. After all, what do they lose? The IBT comrades in Britain - although politicians with some potential - had no roots, no press of their own, no contacts, no numbers and practically no one to speak to. Paying the price of ‘liquidating’ an organisation like this is perhaps understandable. It was cheap to the point of being free.

The problem comes when the IBT imperiously demands that every other organisation on the British left do the same. In 1917 for example, they wonder why the Communist Party did not conclude “that the time, resources and energy required to maintain a separate organisation and publish a weekly press could be better spent getting the SLP off the ground” (1917, No18 - undated). A perverse argument, regular readers will agree. The Weekly Worker has been outstanding in its honest and objective coverage of the SLP and thus in building the SLP as the type of party our class needs. Certainly, the work of the CPGB and its supporters has dwarfed any influence the handful of IBTers have had.

More than this, it has exposed in practice the hypocrisy of the Fourth International Supporters Caucus and its hangers-on - an invaluable service to the entire workers’ movement.

But for the sake of argument, let us imagine the ‘liquidationist’ scenario for a moment. Socialist Workers Party leader Tony Cliff - the head of an organisation ostensibly with 10,000 members, a widely read weekly press, an array of journals with some intellectual clout and quite wide influence, and a history of revolutionary struggle going back to the 1940s - should have gone to Scargill and said, ‘OK, Arthur. We give up. We no longer exist - can we all have party cards now, please?’

Perhaps on ‘Planet IBT’ this sounds likely - or even desirable. Here on earth it would be a little more problematic, however.

First, there is the little problem of credibility. The reason why the IBT British section was able to ‘dissolve’ and slip relatively unnoticed into the SLP is because very few people would have actually noticed. In their more honest moments, I am sure even IBTers would admit that you have to be a connoisseur of the esoterica of  the revolutionary left to even know of the existence of the IBT, let alone what they are thinking this month about the SLP. (This is particularly so as their ‘open’ letter announcing their formal dissolution was sent to a very select and restricted audience - the Communist Party certainly did not get one.)

Second, it would have made no difference, comrades. Scargill’s constitution has from the very beginning been framed precisely to keep people like the SWP and - more specifically - Militant Labour out of ‘his’ party. It really does not matter what they did - they would have had the door slammed in their faces.

However, the IBT’s snotty lecture to the rest of the left illustrates something more than a simple-minded generalisation of its own impotence and a projection of its irrelevance onto everyone else. It is pristine sectarianism; we shall include it in a future textbook on the subject. Would the general interests of our movement be served at the moment by the simple dissolution of left organisations like the CPGB, ML or the SWP? Perhaps the IBT calculates the narrow interests of the IBT - as a group that would remain organised around a particular programme - are best served by this, but what a cynical way to treat the revolutionary movement!

In pursuit of their argument, the IBT paints a thoroughly false and consciously dishonest picture both of the SLP and of the CPGB.

Thus, 1917 readers are told that as the CPGB lacks any “coherent programme ... it could not possibly maintain any kind of identity as a current within the broader working class movement. This explains the CPGB leadership’s insistence on remaining organisationally aloof from the SLP” (Ibid p31). This is an incredible claim.

Far from being “aloof” from the SLP initiative, the CPGB has been intimately involved at every stage of its development. This IBTers will know, of course, as they have worked closely with comrades who have joined the SLP as a direct result of our call. The witch hunt in the SLP has been exclusively directed at purported CPGB “members and supporters”. Despite this, the IBT is determined to have the CPGB suffering from the same malady as the rest of the revolutionary left - we are all apparently impotent abstainers from a real movement of the working class. Why does the IBT resort to such crass claims?

Left covers

The article makes the correct, but mundane point that “most left groups have been slow to grasp [the potential of the SLP], and very few have drawn the appropriate political conclusion” (p31). This is illustrated by a quick trawl through the British left, briefly examining the contradictions in the positions of the likes of ML, the Spartacist League, Workers Power, the SWP and some other smaller organisations.

Yet there is nothing more than mild criticism of the McCarthyite constitution of the SLP which bans these organisations from becoming involved in terms of individual membership and affiliation. Despite a certain conservative and sectarian inertia, the revolutionary left is not the main problem: the main problem is the witch hunters’ charter that passes for a constitution in the SLP. Yet farcically, the IBT claims that, “for all the criticism that can be made of the SLP and its leaders”, the “internal life of the SLP is on the whole quite open and democratic” (p26). Even for an organisation with its origins in the semi-hysterical inner world of the Spartacist League, this is a weird thing to write. The reason it does so is simple. The IBT is committed to a strategy of deep entryism. It is in other words another version of Fisc - except it is on the outside of power, where Fisc has managed to join Arthur Scargill’s inner circle.

Objectively therefore, the IBT is in danger of becoming a left cover for social democracy, for the witch hunting right of the SLP and its ugly bureaucratic constitution. Grotesquely, the IBT cites the sectarianism of the left as the main problem, and excuses the NUMist, Fiscite and Labourite leadership of the SLP, a bureaucratic layer that treats the movement as its private property.

Open polemic

There is more than a hint of petty malice about some of the IBT’s specific criticisms of the Communist Party. In particular, it makes the bizarre claim that the Provisional Central Committee of our Party is in reality “a faction ... a grouping that published The Leninist magazine in the early 1980s” (p31). Of course, the PCC is the elected leadership of our organisation, appointed by our last conference.

The simple truth is difficult for the IBT to admit. It wants to avoid the central political question in Britain - the need to reforge a democratic central-ist Communist Party. A Communist Party, which unlike the IBT, allows for the existence of different political trends and contains within its rules the right to form factions able to openly publicise their views.

The IBT has to present us as a fragmented, heterogeneous clot of dispirited addle-heads, holding “aloof” from the SLP, because as an organisation it is a classic sect - all members are obliged by rule to publicly agree with all its pronouncements and repeat them as if they were automatons. According to the IBT, “The CPGB ... is a shifting agglomeration of centrist groupuscules, Stalinist fragments, refugees from Cliffism and various other bits of political flotsam” (p31). The fact is that this could be an uncharitable - but nevertheless partially true - description of the SLP itself. As a description of the process of communist rapprochement around the CPGB, it shows that in pursuit of power in the SLP, the IBT is being drawn to the right.

Members of the IBT have admitted to me in unguarded moments that in the absence of the SLP, they were themselves thinking of becoming involved in this messy “shifting agglomeration” of communist rapprochement. Their snotty dismissal of it now is more than a little churlish therefore. However, they are forced to caricature the CPGB’s commitment to democracy in order to indirectly defend their own sub-Spartacist internal regime. Our advocacy of “freedom of criticism, unity in action” is, the IBT says, “lifted from the early years of the Bolsheviks, when they were in a common party with the Mensheviks. In practice, it means that every disparate fragment can say whatever it wants, whenever it wants” (p31). In contrast, the Communist International “insisted on democratic centralism as the organisational principle for its sections and repudiated the formula, ‘freedom of criticism, unity in action’” (Ibid).

In fact, the Bolsheviks officially adopted democratic centralism in 1906 - an organisational form which allows for the freedom of criticism within Marxism and demands unity in agreed actions.

The idea that anyone can say anything they want any time they fancy it is not one you will find much sympathy for in the Communist Party. Quite frankly, it is not even implied in the formula, ‘freedom of discussion, unity in action’. As you are well aware, comrade IBTers, we are a highly disciplined organisation, a fact testified to by our weekly press, the disproportionate impact our organisation makes in its interventions, our standard fundraising levels, our annual Summer Offensive and so on. The suggestion that in the ‘freedom/unity’ equation, we limply place “more emphasis on the former rather than the latter” (p31) is rubbish and you know it to be so.

Grappling with Trotsky

Obviously, facts simply do not deter the IBT. It keeps on trying to hammer the square peg of the reality of the CPGB into the round hole of its own sectarian needs. Thus, it reiterates the tired old accusation that our organisation has “avoided grappling with the record of Trotsky’s Left Opposition and its struggle against the corruption of the international communist movement by Stalinism” (p31).

In fact, a straw poll of the membership of the Communist Party today would probably reveal that the vast majority regard themselves as critically building on the same broad tradition as the United and Left Oppositions of the 1920s and 30s. Presumably, the IBT is simply relying on the political ignorance of the 1917 readership when it accuses us of having closed chapters of history.

In fact, our organisation has from the very beginning debated and come to definite conclusions about the history of the world movement and its degeneration, the role played by such outstanding, though flawed revolutionaries as Trotsky, the nature of the Soviet Union, and other key questions. Today, this discussion continues, has developed and finds expression in the pages of the Weekly Worker and our meetings - both public and internal. We have in the past organised a whole year’s series of London seminars on Trotsky and his heritage. In preparing our current series, we actually invited the IBT to present an opening on the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International. (It refused - the opening was eventually given by Richard Price, a leading member of the Workers International League).

So the IBT knows better. It is simply misleading its readership in the most crude and cynical way. We offered this organisation a chance to expose our ‘reluctance’ to confront the history of Trotskyism, no doubt represented in its view in chemically pure form by the IBT itself. It didn’t show - so who is avoiding who?

Boycott

In fact, IBTers in Britain have taken the deliberate decision to “boycott” (their phrase) all Communist Party events and our press. They thus have a certain protection against our polemic: as a ‘liquidated’ organisation they can simply ignore it and get on with their deep entryist opportunist burrowing.

This is an outrageous attitude for an organisation that dubs itself as ‘Leninist’.

We make the open offer to the IBT to debate the issues raised by its SLP article and the criticism of our organisation. We are happy for this debate to be ‘private’, although we would want to feature its essential elements in the pages of our paper for the benefit of the movement as a whole.

Apparently, the CPGB’s core weakness is our lack of “a coherent programme” - in contrast to the IBT, of course. OK, comrades, we’re prepared for educative polemic and debate. Are you?

Mark Fischer