05.12.1996

Two wings

Party notes

Was the Communist Party of Great Britain liquidated in December 1991?

This question has been posed repeatedly in negotiations with organisations involved in the process of communist rapprochement. For instance, for some comrades in the Revolutionary Democratic Group - in particular, those more distant from the prospect of unity - this seems to be a key question. They see in the name of our organisation a reflection of our mass-party posturing, the attempt to think, act and work as if the Party of the working class had already been achieved.

Instead, they suggest, the Communist Party was liquidated at its 1991 congress. Thus, we get a formulation in the RDG letter rejecting immediate fusion, but expressing interest in “continuing the work to create a new organisation” (see RDG letter dated November 28, reprinted on page 3 - my emphasis).

Of course, there is more to it than this. The RDG’s key concern seems to be our “methods of work and organisation”, an important debate that we will soon be conducting in these pages. Nevertheless, there is an insistence from many political forces that our organisation cannot claim a political and organisational continuity with the Communist Party founded in 1920.

Even some Party members have lazily started to speak about - the old ‘liquidated’ Party and ourselves as a ‘new’ organisation.

We should be clear. What was liquidated in 1991 was the Eurocommunist wing of the CPGB, not the Party as a whole. Meeting in their fourth national conference in 1989, the Leninists of the CP resolved “to form a distinct revolutionary wing” of the Party, a development of the struggle they had been waging as a faction since 1981. Organisationally, this meant that the Leninists in the Party worked under their own elected national leadership, raised their own separate finances and declared The Leninist to be the “true central organ of the Party” (The Leninist December 23 1989). We created the Communist Party of Great Britain (The Leninist).

Thus, the leadership of the Eurocommunist wing were not in a position to liquidate the Party: its December 1991 ‘congress’ decided to drop all reference to ‘communism’ from its name. This was a positive development, as the Euros “never had the slightest legitimacy in using the proud name of our Party” (The Leninist December 6 1990).

In the light of the Euros’ decision to change their name, our organisation no longer needed the suffix, The Leninist, to distinguish it from these traitors. At our fifth conference, the Leninists resolved that “from now on we will simply call ourselves the Communist Party of Great Britain”, as “that name must not be buried by the Euros or taken over by one or the other crisis-ridden ‘official communist’ rumps” (ibid). As it turned out, we were slightly premature organisationally, but not politically. Despite a recommendation from its leadership, the 1990 Euro ‘congress’ decided to delay its name change for a year for legal and financial reasons.

Despite our name change, we underlined that “our main task remains reforging the CPGB”, a task conditioned by the fact that as a Party - an organisation with organic roots in the class - the CPGB had indeed been “liquidated”, but actually well before the Euros’ limp capitulation to the bourgeoisie.

Opportunists of various hues have a problem calling our organisation by its name, of course. Instead what we get is odd amalgams, such as “the provisional Communist Party”, the “CPGB (PCC)”, “The Leninist”, the “CPGB (Leninist)”, the “Provos” and - the most puerile so far - the “CPGB (sic)” from Jules Alford of the International Socialist Group. What all of this clumsy name-juggling expresses is the inability of these individuals and groups to seriously face up to the task we have consistently recognised as key and since 198l have organised to realise: to reforge the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Mark Fischer
national organiser