09.10.1997

Strengthening the theoretical roots of our propaganda

Linda Addison replies to Jack Conrad’s assessment of the CPGB’s campaign around the referendum in Scotland

What Jack Conrad is trying to convey in his ‘Party notes’ column (Weekly Worker October 2) is indeed “uncertain”.

I admit I may perhaps be more in the dark than other CPGB comrades since I have been away and therefore not involved in the debate following the referendum in Scotland. I can only glean what I can from a few articles in the Weekly Worker, Anne Murphy’s report (September 18) and Conrad’s rather more cryptic column in last week’s paper.

It is not even clear whether Conrad is replying to me or his opponents in the debate which, I presume, must have taken place at a Party aggregate and the London seminars. He quotes from a letter I wrote in reply to Dave Craig, but suggests that in this letter I complained that the Provisional Central Committee had somehow “overestimated” the movement for self-determination. This may or may not be the view of his opponents: it is certainly not the view I put forward in the letter.

Nevertheless Jack Conrad in this column does display what I would more accurately describe as his customary organisational - if not official - optimism. In this context he is quite right to accuse me, if not his debating opponents, of ‘pessimism’, if he likes.

I certainly like to take a more sober appraisal of developing political events and their aftermath. But this in no way, as Jack Conrad seems to think, implies a difference in method. My approach to politics is to observe closely developments in all fields of political and cultural life to see how and where communists can intervene, make an impact and, at the point where we move with events and are able to win the mass to move with us, then change the course of history. It is certainly useless to always conceive the left as doomed to failure.

This said and hopefully believed, I think it is equally important for our organisation at the moment to be very clear about the period we are living in, the impact we are having and can have and to assess carefully the shape politics are taking around us.

I do not think we did any of these things adequately in the run-up to our campaign in Scotland, during it and, as far as I am aware, in its aftermath either. Breakdowns of the voting patterns are still very patchy, it is true. Anne Murphy’s article was written just a few days after the vote, but Jack Conrad’s column appears three weeks after that vote. I do not think it is enough for us to pat ourselves on the back, to try and gee comrades up with the argument that “there is every reason for us to ‘measure our success’ in terms of tens of thousands of abstentions and thousands of spoilt ballot papers”. Indeed Conrad ends his comments with the completely obscure remark that “the mystery is solved”.

What mystery is he talking about? The referendum campaign, or the orientation of our organisation, or both? Neither of these are a particular mystery - they just need a little less complacency in assessing their impact for the future development of our political organisation.

In Conrad’s eagerness to root out fatalism and complacency in the method of comrades - undeniably a noble cause - he can often have the opposite effect, discouraging comrades from actually fully appraising a situation and creating despondency when our ability to seize the moment turns out to be a little less dramatic and a little more akin to what many comrades had expressed when we started out. This, I think, is what Anne Murphy was expressing in her article, which I can largely agree with (though I agree, as Jack Conrad points out, that “predictions” was a clumsy term to use). No communist should be in the business of crystal ball gazing - this is an accepted cliché for both the mechanical materialists of the ‘inevitable school’ and Marxists alike. But this should not mean that we are frightened of closely scrutinising our organisation, the left in general and the political opportunities and hurdles that present themselves, and the tasks that face us for the immediate - dare I say it? - future.

No one could seriously accuse our organisation of voluntarist adventur-ism in practice. Despite limited resources, we have had an impact with the paper and our interventions far beyond the sum of our parts. This is of course to be admired. But a spirit of adventurism which is sometimes apparent in Conrad’s comments, if not tempered with a clear and sober analysis of our situation, can threaten to disorientate our organisation.

Personally, though I do not think that the PCC had ‘overestimated’ the situation in Scotland, I do think a key individual on the PCC took Jack Conrad’s course and failed to allow for a clear analysis of events. I remember meetings where any talk of the low level of militancy in Scotland would be met by bombastic tirades about crystal ball gazing and the fact that ‘we are in the business of making history’ not ‘watching it’. All sentiments the comrades could put their hands up to. Given the history of the Second International and the tragic distorted development of the Third International, we should be aware of the shortcomings of deterministic, mechanistic and productivist approaches to political practice. Yet neither should we fall into the kind of crude voluntarism which led Lukács to theorise a view of the party as the “methodologically indispensable subject-object” (History and class consciousness London 1974, p146), replacing the working class as the subject of history, with a man-made deus ex machina.

That is why I in no way intend to imply that it is not vital that such methods are ‘rooted out’. But how you do this is part of the point and, though central to this reply, is perhaps a side issue in this current debate. Our organisation needs to learn method, not simply by carrying out in practice the maxim that ‘anything is possible’ - almost, but by studying the method, by studying the history of our movement, its mistakes, its failures.

Although comrades have thrown themselves energetically into the campaign in Scotland and indeed debates in the Socialist Labour Party, many comrades, I feel, have found themselves theoretically and programmatically at sea in this work. This can express itself in many different forms: disillusionment with the everyday life of Party work; an inability to link the theory of rapprochement fully with everyday tasks; or falling into a routine approach to such work, unable to develop it simply through practice.

Yet I would not like to deny the propaganda impact we have made with our work in Scotland nor in the SLP, around both the question of working class organisation and working class self-activity. Nor would I deny how comrades have developed as Party cadre through the process of this political activity, despite its very low level.

The difficulty seems to lie in the fact that the main ideas on which our organisation works together - primarily the idea of Party and more recently rapprochement - has failed to be collectively theorised and linked with our practice. Thus we end up beating our opponents over the head with the idea of Party and carrying out that important practice on faith - but unarmed. The idea of Party and rapprochement and all that entails, including a critique of the Second and Third International and the development of our Marxism, as well as a critique of and development of our Leninism, has been seen as something separate to the actual practice of our organisation.

As an organisation we have always taken study very seriously, but the form of this study at all levels can often seem dry and academic if it is not linked to the central tasks of communists in a period when Marxism has been virtually wiped off the political map. At the highest level we have made no significant attempt to develop theory and theoreticians: surely this must be our primary task in this period, over and above training efficient propagandists.

I do not see these as mutually exclusive. Rather that our propaganda has suffered from a lack of theoretical roots and, given the limited impact of our communist propaganda presently, surely our emphasis must be on developing those theoretical roots, both individually and, most crucially, collectively. Why else would we organise together as communists at the moment? In the absence of a mass movement we must be developing the theory of communist practice that can arm a future movement as well as win other comrades and partisans to that important struggle - ie, the development of theory and the idea of Party in practice. Again, because I can hear the objections now, this is not to deny any of the impressive impact our paper and organisation have made on the small but important layers of the class we have been in contact with.

To the more specific point on Scotland. I suppose I should mention Dave Craig, who seems very upset at the tone of my reply to him which he counters in the Weekly Worker of September 25. I do not have time here to analyse in any detail his method, which - at the risk of another flood of upset at the language I use - I still hold is often so concerned with categorising phenomena (or ‘things’ if you prefer) that it fails to see their potential for movement in all sorts of directions.

I am reminded of his article on the Socialist Labour Party a few months ago when, as a result of assigning the different groups their seemingly appropriate labels - according to their past, rather than their present and possible future - he seemed to end up aligning himself with the Fourth International Supporters Caucus as an opposition against the Stalinists, despite the fact that at the time this group constituted the chief witch hunters. Maybe we can continue this debate in future papers. I was saddened that Craig had such an emotional response. It almost seemed that it was he that wanted to shut down debate by writing my letter off as Marxese. I was not aware that words like ‘phenomena’ or ‘abstract’ were exclusive to Marxism, let alone Marxese.

The main point hopefully I will address in response to Jack Conrad, who comes to the defence of Dave Craig and his abstentionism barometer in Scotland in his column.

In the first part of his column Conrad reasserts the purpose of the Campaign for Genuine Self-Determination and the tactic it raised of an active boycott. I agree that “we used the referendum-boycott campaign to promote the idea that self-determination be exercised for a federal republic”. I also fully agree that “The CPGB utilised the official campaign in an exemplary fashion by calling for an active boycott of the vote on September 11 and making mass propaganda for self-determination and a federal republic.”

Strange though it may seem to Conrad, I also agree that “Abstentions and spoilt ballot papers must have a positive side. They cannot be dismissed because the boycott campaign did not get the masses out onto the streets.” I made this point in my original letter, agreeing with Craig that abstention is a kind of vote, but simply

“not necessarily and certainly not a wholly positive phenomenon. In Scotland those that abstain may be very cynical about Scotland Forward and the sop parliament on offer, but unless that cynicism is developed into positive action it can be a very negative force” (Weekly Worker Letters, September 11, emphasis added here).

Neither do I think that any comrade involved in the campaign would imagine - certainly I have never done so - that “we had no effect.” (To attribute this argument to opponents is to set up an Aunt Sally). My argument with Dave Craig was over how we assess the political significance of abstentions in relation to the aims of the campaign. From a slightly different angle this is the same argument with Conrad, though it raises questions concerning the method of our organisation. With Craig I think I am arguing with a slightly different political method.

My argument then is with Conrad’s conclusion, whose basis was a report in The Herald newspaper, that “there is every reason for us to ‘measure our success’ in terms of tens of thousands of abstentions and thousands of spoilt ballot papers. The mystery is solved.” On the basis of the low turnout in Glasgow and Dundee and the number of spoilt ballot papers, he assesses the impact of our campaign. So all those that did not bother turning out at all and all those who spoilt their ballot papers are claimed as a “positive” vote for the active boycott campaign.

It is true that both Glasgow and Dundee had low turnouts in relation to other areas and a larger percentage of the voters spoiling the ballot papers. Conrad neglects to continue The Herald’s commentary on the spoilt ballot papers which throughout Scotland were a surprise to everyone. Nearly twice as many question two (on tax-raising powers) were spoilt as question one. In Glasgow and Dundee it is only about a third more. According to The Herald - and again, having been away, I have no further information on this - most of the spoilt ballot papers were either completely blank or had crosses in both boxes.

To me this speaks more of confusion than a political statement. Conrad neglects to mention one glaring explanation for the low turnout and spoilt ballot papers in Glasgow. Corruption on the council was a dominant theme throughout the campaign, with mooted suspensions eventually carried out. Total cynicism with politicians, and particularly Labour politicians looking for a free lunch, pervaded the campaign in Glasgow - not a promising backdrop for an enthusiastic vote for another talking shop.

Conrad’s statistics are not very impressive, but more important is his method. His concluding paragraph seems to suggest that abstentionism was the aim of the campaign and he ridicules those who he thinks are upset because the masses did not come out onto the streets. This was my main argument with Craig. When I was campaigning in Scotland, it certainly was not for abstention. Nor did our propaganda, apart from in the last couple of Weekly Workers, actually call on people to spoil their ballot papers. This never was the aim of the campaign.

Before the boycott campaign leaflets were produced and Jack Conrad’s pamphlet written, it had become clear - certainly to me, and other comrades I know - that the militancy that had been evident had dissipated and the likelihood of any active opposition to Blair’s sop was slim once the Scottish Socialist Alliance rallied behind the Labour bandwagon. Nevertheless I believe that we were right to carry out what was a propaganda campaign for an active boycott because it raised the method necessary for the working class to win hegemony over all questions, both within Scottish Militant Labour and the SSA, and planted that idea for any future movement.

In terms of mobilising the masses onto the streets the campaign has been a failure, but of course a qualified one, because no one was under any illusion that we went into this campaign in a revolutionary situation - quite the opposite, with the working class absent from the political stage. But whether or not we achieved an active boycott was in a certain sense not the point: the point was whether we fought for that perspective amongst the class, to the extent that the class exists. Our failure to achieve an active boycott comes as no surprise: it further underlines our useful, if not fully worked out, estimation that we are in a period of reaction of a special type.

There are two aspects of the campaign that have ramifications for our future work. One is the impact we had on SML and the SSA and the implication of their reaction to it for the direction of the rapprochement process. The other is the political landscape in Scotland - including the weakness of our own organisation there - but also the different pulls of nationalism, Labourism and working class militancy. It is probably true that it will be difficult for us to make a great deal of impact in the immediate future - this is the reality our organisation faces at the moment. Though there are many political openings to be exploited, the Marxist forces in place to exploit them are extraordinarily weak.

Failure, the word which so upsets Conrad, is probably an incorrect estimation, because we did not think that our propaganda would succeed in creating action and turning itself into agitation. I concede that the propaganda effect was positive. But this cannot be accurately weighed in terms of an undefined mass of abstentions. The impact of the idea we were trying to propagate is best measured by our direct contact with members of the SSA.

My argument is that we did not do enough to strengthen our own theoretical development through that propaganda. The programmatic and theoretical orientation is becoming lost in a rush to seize all the propaganda openings we can find. I do not think our organisation will develop and steel itself in this political climate by the flippant optimism that Conrad seems to be trying to propagate in his column.