23.10.1997

Party notes

The debate in the Party around our perspectives for next year is now starting in earnest.

Obviously, within this discussion, our recent intervention in the Scottish devolution campaign will figure prominently. Perhaps it may spark some controversy. Using our experience in Scotland, the theme I want to return to is the question of how a political organisation such as ours gains an audience for its politics, how it creates a space for itself.

Comrades will remember how we were warned by a variety of very different political forces in the lead-up to the referendum that our call for a boycott would cut us off from the most militant and active sections of the Scottish people. From those ‘hard’ sectarians, the Spartacist League through Scottish Militant Labour, to Bob Pitt of the journal What next?, almost the entire spectrum of the British revolutionary left assured us that the precondition of even being listened to in Scotland was to ride shotgun for Blair. As Bob put it, our stance had “walled [us] off from the very people [we] seek to influence” and indeed he found it “difficult to see how Marxists could get a hearing for their programme without critically advocating a double ‘yes’ in the referendum” (Weekly Worker September 11).

As I replied at the time to comrade Pitt, not only is this nonsense from the point of view of Marxist theory, it is demonstrably untrue.

Comrades are currently debating the extent of our impact in Scotland through our sponsorship of the Campaign for Genuine Self-Determination and the mass work it undertook. However, there are a number of points that we should understand as we enter into this exchange of views between comrades.

First, we ran a successful mass campaign in Scotland, particularly in its proletarian capital of Glasgow. Of course, comrades have a million and one frustrations with our work. Undoubtedly, the organisation as a whole must learn more sophisticated political arts. We must combine ambition with sober assessment of our prospects and ability to translate our politics into action. But it is clear that our key problem remains the huge discrepancy between the mass character of our politics - their ability to impact on a situation alive with potential - and the paucity of our cadre base. Of course, this is not a permanent state of affairs; we should be aware of the potential for rapid growth in Scotland.

Second, through this work, we have ‘broken out’ as an organisation in Scotland. Our impact was not just limited to Glasgow. For the first time we have actually made a real impression across the country.

Third - contrary to the advice so generously offered to us from friends in SML and elsewhere - it was precisely through our sponsorship of the CGSD that we have carved out this potential mass political base for ourselves.

I know that some comrades have reacted sharply to Jack Conrad’s ‘Party notes’ column of October 2, where he claims that our success can measured “in terms of tens of thousands of abstentions and thousands of spoilt ballot papers”.

We will debate the details of course, but I want to underline that in one sense this is quite a conservative way to “measure our success”. Comrades, let us remember that we were the only group that stood for - and actively fought a mass campaign around - the right of Scotland to self-determination. Thus we were alone in giving a voice, in articulating in any way, a mass desire for democratic change which embraces millions of Scottish people. In other words, the numerical majority of people who hold this sentiment - who want more than what has been offered - actually voted ‘yes’ in the referendum. The malcontents are not simply those who abstained or spoiled their ballot papers. Every other force on the left caved in to an insulting sop designed by the British establishment to buy off, to obviate, this mass demand.

Our task now must be to give coherence to this potential political base, to shape it and build on it. This requires our organisation projecting itself - as we did through the CGSD - onto all-Scotland politics. Those in Scotland who capitulated to Blair’s cynical campaign have compromised themselves on the fight for the democratic rights of the Scottish people - perhaps fatally so.

Which brings us back to the question of creating a space in politics. Carving out such a space - an area of work, intervention, reputation or tradition that you have an unchallenged right to claim and which can give you a potential base in society - is a key task for any organisation. That is why it has been so important for us to claim the title of Communist Party of Great Britain - and to see off all challengers for the tradition, reputation and real meaning this name embodies.

In his time Lenin explained how his organisation fought for and won the space as the most consistent, ‘extreme’ democrats in the context of the fight against the tsarist autocracy:

“To advance the revolution, to take it beyond the limits to which the monarchist bourgeoisie advances it, it is necessary actively to produce, emphasise and bring to the forefront slogans which will preclude the ‘inconsistency’ of bourgeois democracy” (VI Lenin Collected Works Volume 9, p45).

Surely, this is precisely what our call for a boycott of the Scottish referendum, our uncompromising demand for the right of self-determination, did in practice? Thus, far from having ‘walled us off’ from the masses in Scotland, our courageous mass campaign has actually formed a very precious link with them. The task of our organisation now - in Scotland and throughout the rest of the country - is to debate how to cohere this potential into real organisational and political advances for the forces of communism.

Mark Fischer
national organiser