03.07.1997

Rapprochement: where now?

Has the process ground to a halt? Dave Craig of the Revolutionary Democratic Group (faction of the SWP) gives his views

Rapprochement between the CPGB and the RDG has been subject to a certain amount of speculation in the Weekly Worker. It has been suggested that it is all over, and that the CPGB is only interested in big fish like the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party.

All this is the speculation of individuals and not the collective decisions of definite groups. Obviously if the CPGB want to pull out that is their decision. But the RDG comrades remain committed to the process. We joined the process in 1996. We are not pulling out. We will only leave this process when or if we come to a political dead end. If this happens we will make a collective statement on the reasons for our decision.

Neither is there any crisis in our relations with the CPGB as far as the RDG is concerned. Certainly there have been disagreements over the tactics to be deployed in Scotland and in the SLP, some of which have been debated openly in the Weekly Worker. This does not constitute a crisis: rather a testing out of the differences that a fused organisation would have had to cope with.

Rapprochement is a process, not an event. The RDG and CPGB agreed what should constitute the substance of this process. It meant representatives of both groups meeting to produce some joint statements. These could then be put before the full membership for discussion. As well as positions already agreed, we were producing a joint statement on rapprochement, as well as clarification of our differences on the national question and permanent revolution. In addition to this we were looking at programmatic differences and at the question of the rules. Work began on this and came to a halt in January 1997. Nothing further was done until May.

In this sense the agreed process came to a halt rather than a dead end. Whether this can be explained by lack of political will or pressure of other activities is open to question. Personally, I put it down to pressure of work. However, work has begun again and on the plus side there is now a draft agreed between representatives on the issue of rapprochement itself. If that is ratified then we can move on. We are certainly not trying to delay anything.

If there is a crisis of rapprochement it is not down to the alleged sectarian approach of the RDG. The failure of negotiations to continue has mixed with different conceptions of what we are doing and why. This has caused a minority(?) to become frustrated. This was reflected in the letter by Martin Blum (Weekly Worker May 22).

Mark Fischer stated that there was a political difference between us over the question of rapprochement. This is why it is quite right for the RDG to seek agreement on this before proceeding further. Some CPGB comrades, as evidenced by Martin Blum’s letter, see things in very simple terms. Will you join the CPGB - yes or no? We want you to join now and we are getting fed up with your delay. Documents, agreements and debates are all a waste of time. Just take out a membership card.

Unfortunately this is the same kind of approach practised by the SWP. Will you join the SWP - yes or no? They used to be quite patient with doubters. Then you would be written off as worthless. However the SWP did not disguise this with highfalutin titles like rapprochement. Build the party, join the SWP. We saw this non-programmatic method to recruitment as opportunistic and therefore sectarian

Of course this is not to deny the differences between CPGB and SWP when it comes to approaching new recruits. If we join, we will be allowed to say critical things in the Weekly Worker, but not in Socialist Worker. This aside, some comrades in the CPGB are not a million miles away from the recruitment methods of the SWP.

Organisational rapprochement (or ‘join immediately’) has been tried and failed. It has been tried with Communist Action Group, Open Polemeic, the Republican Worker Tendency, International Socialist Group and - last but by no means least - the Bullites. The ideas of the Bullites, who we are now told are mad and homophobic, were no problem when it came to joining. I was certainly told that Roy Bull either had joined or was about to. Organisational rapprochement is nothing more than the raider mentality. We fuse so that each is better able to raid the membership of the other. Later we part company with much bitterness and hypocrisy all round. This does not create factions loyal to a common project, but rather the worst kind of competitive factionalism.

The RDG has a different conception. We do not see this process in terms of trying to recruit people to our group or network. None of our comrades have either openly or secretly tried to recruit members or supporters of the CPGB. We have certainly entered debates with the aim of influencing your political ideas. This is not because we cannot find the membership forms. It flows from our conception of genuine rapprochement.

The process of rapprochement is far more important than grubbing around for an extra member or two. However, we now seem to get regular appeals to join you with the ‘threat’ of being slagged off if we do not. I am not yet convinced that your ‘join now’ policy is any more successful in producing recruits than ours. So far the score is nil-nil. The frustration shown by Martin Blum comes from his ‘join now’ politics. So severe has this become, that he is now trying to terrorize us into joining. If you don’t join soon there will be an almighty big bang.

Building a communist party is absolutely an ideological and organisational question. Since we see rapprochement as part of the process of building towards such a party, it would be strange indeed if we defined this in purely organisational terms.

If you see the process in purely organisational terms, then you end up with loads of groups and grouplets in one organisation - ‘27 wild cats in a bag’, as someone recently called it. To put it another way, we will not win the boat race simply by having 15 people in a boat, if they are all rowing in different directions. We are not getting into any boats which we think are going in fundamentally the wrong direction over the nearest waterfall. Even if we are given the freedom to shout out, ‘This boat is about to crash and we’ll all be killed’. Of course we don’t think that is true of the CPGB. Otherwise we would have bailed out by now.

Those who think in purely organisational terms set up a straw person. They claim that we demand that everybody agrees with the theory of state capitalism before we can fuse. This is nonsense. We have to work out in practice what needs to be agreed.

Strictly speaking, real rapprochement must be programmatic rather than theoretical. The argument for programmatic rapprochement is clear. Those who get in the boat will have an agreed map of where they are going. The map may contain some mistakes that will have to be altered on the way. Some may try to steer more left and others more to the right. Perhaps there will be some zig-zagging. But it will be zig-zagging in the right direction.

We have some experience to draw on. Look at the success you have achieved with organisational rapprochement in terms of the Bullites and Open Polemic. Open Polemic made no programmatic rapprochement, which they considered a barrier. In this sense Open Polemic was the polar oposite to the RDG approach.

The failure of organisational rapprochement does not prove our approach successful, but it certainly points out what has failed. We seem to be told this failure is down to the fact that these people are not up to standard, or are a bunch of misfits and malcontents. Non-ideological rapprochement provides us with a non-ideological explanation.

One last point. It now seems to becoming fashionable to conclude that the RDG does not exist and therefore is not worth bothering with. The RDG does not claim to be anything other than what it is, and the politics it represents. We are more or less the same group or network that we were when we first began this process. I do not think we have changed. We remain as unimportant and non-existant as ever. If the Provisional Central Committee were thinking of pulling out, and there is no concrete evidence that they are, this would reflect a change of policy in the PCC, not some diminution in the size or importance of the RDG.

In conclusion, we remain committed to the rapprochement process. We continue to have infinite patience with you. We hope you will continue to reciprocate. The next step is to publish the joint thesis on rapprochement. We will be discussing this and coming up with some concrete proposals to take the process further forward.