23.01.1997

Living dead

This is to signify that I wish to resign from the CPGB. I have decided to concentrate my main efforts on aiding the DHKP-C.

Since my visit to Istanbul in July at the time of the hunger strikes, Turkey and Kurdistan have been matters of consuming interest to me. In my waking hours there has been little time in which I have not thought about revolutionaries and their struggles there, often in the face of harsh imprisonment, torture and death.

The CPGB has often used the Summer Offensive to praise the self-sacrifice of Turkish communists. I have found this to be an accurate description of communists from Turkey. Their self-sacrifice is most marked in Turkey itself, where revolutionaries risk everything, but it can also be observed in this country. When I observed what revolutionaries in Turkey are up against, I decided I had an obligation to help them. There is a heavy workload involved in helping the DHKP-C (to me, the principal, though not the only, communist organisation in Turkey), while the CPGB also makes heavy demands on individuals, so sooner or later a choice had to be made.

You might argue that I should stay in the CPGB and argue for the course of action I have chosen, and that I am running away from a debate. The two hours of discussion we had at a Weekly Worker branch meeting pretty much served to set out the main lines of argument. Further discussion would merely have hardened those opposing points or resulted in the repetition of stated positions. It is clear that the gulf is unbridgeable.

For all sorts of reasons, I have always thought in international terms. My own interest lies in world revolution, with special attention to Turkey, demonstrably a country racked by crisis: the CPGB focus is on Britain, which I suspect will erupt into revolution several weeks after Antarctica does. I am not limited to the English language, and I will not let the boundaries of the UK confine my activities, especially when other parts of the world are more revolutionary. 

I do not consider myself to be a Stalinist, nor do I hearken back to the ‘good old days’. When I declared my support for the CPGB in the summer of 1993, Socialist Outlook doubtless thought I had gone over to Stalinism. Ironically the CPGB these days tends to be not exactly Trotskyist, but Trotskisant (I prefer this French word to the rather ugly “Trotskyoid”). Its reflex responses to events are surprisingly similar to those of Trotskyism or ‘Marxism-Leninism-Tony Cliff Thought’. North Korea is merely to be laughed at, Russians who want the Soviet Union to be restored are automatically to be despised, the Maoists of the TKP(ML) can have their name put in quotation marks and so on. A certain washing of hands is going on. On the other hand, I have detected a tendency in the CPGB to show courtesy to Trotskyists, whereas Stalinists are simply dismissed as the “living dead”. This is perhaps some kind of ‘British turn’ - the UK is the one place on earth where Trotskyists are numerous.

Yet, on the world scale, revolutionaries do not possess the state of mind noticeable in the CPGB and most of the western far left. In Turkey they do not, in Peru (where the Tupac Amaru embassy seizure is an inspiration to anti-imperialists everywhere) they do not, in a host of other more impoverished nations they do not. Besides my special interest in Turkey, I want to link up with those struggles. I can’t do that in a CPGB which thinks my primary focus should be Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party and British politics in general - truly an arena of the “living dead”.

I have learned things in the CPGB which I intend to use in the fight against imperialism and the New World Order, the fight to take communism into the 21st century. You have made me a better communist than Socialist Outlook could ever have, but the time has come to part.               

Andrew MacKay
                         

Jack Conrad replies:

There can be no doubting the sincerity of comrade Andrew MacKay. While working with him I have been impressed by his humanity, intelligence and wit. One cannot but help liking him.

True, since becoming a CPGB supporter in 1993 he has had a decidedly undisciplined, on-off relationship with our organisation. Nevertheless highs of industry and enthusiasm more than made up for the lows of despondency and disengagement.

Comrade MacKay has talents. But I am sure he would readily admit that he does not have a firm grasp of Marxist theory.

His communism, as with mine, was born from a hatred of capitalism and an admiration of those in the front line of anti-imperialism. Unfortunately comrade MacKay’s communism essentially remains at the level of gut emotion and hence spontaneity - a hopelessly unreliable guide even in the foothills of revolution. We won him from Socialist Outlook but were unable to win him to understand the scientific world view and the need to subordinate himself as a political personality to the demands of necessity.

Of course, comrade MacKay is far from unique in failing to overcome spontaneity. Ludicrously many consider trade unionism and ‘strikeism’ the pinnacle of communist practice. Others seriously believe getting a Labour government elected is the historic task of communists.

Especially amongst isolated middle class intellectuals, anti-imperialist solidarity work represents an alternative, but no less limiting form of spontaneity. For comrade MacKay and the like the heroic struggle of others - in Vietnam, South Africa, Cuba, Iran, Turkey, etc - substitutes for the long, difficult, but inescapable task of making revolution against one’s ‘own’ state.

Comrade MacKay revealingly says Britain “will erupt into revolution several weeks after Antarctica”. Frankly this is an example of petty bourgeois pessimism. Actually it also belies his rather pompous claim to be a 21st century St George who, unfettered by the UK’s borders, will slay the New World Order. If we in Britain are wrong to “focus” on Britain - a major centre of global capital - and its politics, instead of a periphery such as Turkey, why did not comrade MacKay present his ‘superior’ strategy for world revolution to our membership and argue it out in our press?

That is not only his right. It is his duty to his fellow communists. Despite what comrade MacKay says, he did not “discuss” his latest retreat in the Weekly Worker cell. He simply hinted at it and then kept silent after hearing my answers (including his wrong assessment of the SLP and our supposed dismissal of Stalinites and softness towards Trotskyites).

Vicarious revolutionism is pseudo-revolutionism. But it has the great virtue of enhancing the revolutionary self-image, not least because of its perceived distance from the dull routinism of British reformism.

The fact of the matter is that we did nothing to discourage comrade MacKay from engaging with revolutionaries from Turkey. The Weekly Worker has devoted considerable attention to Turkey and the importance of the Turkish and Kurdish community in London. Jack Conrad’s Draft CPGB programme is for example translated and published in Turkish. Turkey is a country of crisis and a weak link of imperialism. Class, national, cultural, religious and other contradictions assume particularly acute forms, and this has had a profound impact on mass consciousness.

Those who constituted our initial leadership had all been members of the Communist Party of Turkey. That is no secret. The reason for joining the CPT was not to offer “help” because revolutionaries in Turkey face “imprisonment, torture and death” - to all intents and purposes a liberal formulation. On the contrary the aim was to absorb the rich lessons of the revolutionary struggle in Turkey as communists in order to apply what was general to Britain.

Evidently that had nothing to do with some national narrowness in our ranks, as comrade MacKay foolishly and somewhat insultingly implies in his resignation letter. Reforging the Communist Party and making revolution in Britain is an obligation stemming from proletarian internationalism.

That is the best service communists living in Britain - whatever their country of origin - can perform for the world working class and the cause of human liberation. Without a Communist Party in Britain nothing serious can be offered nor delivered. Comrade MacKay’s “help” to the DHKP-C and other guerillaist organisations such as the Tupac Amuru in Peru, however well intentioned, is a mere individual gesture.

Comrade MacKay and ourselves recognised that despite his linguistic abilities he could never become Turkish (neither culturally nor politically). Hence in our view comrade MacKay should continue work under the direction of the CPGB’s Provisional Central Committee. He should, we argued, employ himself as a conduit - bringing the politics of Turkey to Britain, taking our Marxist theory to the revolutionary movement of Turkey, the DHKP-C included.

We stressed that this would help to overcome both the insularity of British revolutionaries and the insularity of London’s Turkish and Kurdish community. It is a crime that the revolutionary Turkish and Kurdish population in Britain has not been actively encouraged to assimilate into British politics by its leaders, not least those who consider themselves Marxists.

Marxism recognises the progressive role of assimilation. Marxism upholds the principle of one state, one party. That is why in the name of the CPGB we urge the revolutionary Turkish and Kurdish population to take its rightful place in the vanguard of the working class movement in Britain.