30.10.1997

Rapprochement: against

Open polemic attacks the joint ‘Thesis on rapprochement’, agreed by the CPGB (PCC) and the Revolutionary Democratic Group (faction of the SWP)

The fundamental flaw in the ‘thesis’ is contained in the postulation that: “The highest stage of communist rapprochement is the struggle to create a revolutionary democratic communist tendency”.

It might be, as the RDG puts it, that Marx and Engels were combining “the ideas of revolutionary democracy with the aim of communism” but they did not attempt the combining of revolutionary democrats and communists into the same party. This was for the obvious reason that, although all communists are revolutionary democrats, not all revolutionary democrats are communists.

Revolutionary democracy is composed of all anti-feudal and anti-imperialist forces who struggle for self-determination, for the overthrow of the existing state and the establishment of the bourgeois democratic republic. In particular countries, in certain objective conditions, communists may form part of and even lead the forces of revolutionary democracy. At the same time, they seek to extend the revolutionary democratic struggle into the struggle for socialism and, in that process, win revolutionary democrats over to the aim of communism.

However, on the question of the application of revolutionary democracy in the union state of Britain, differences exist among British communists. Combining ‘revolutionary democratic’ with ‘communist’ in the title of a tendency and a future party amounts to a sectarian attempt on the part of the authors of the ‘thesis’ to ensure that a united communist party would be constitutionally established around a revolutionary democratic struggle.

Revolutionary democracy however is a programmatic question for communists in different countries which, in Britain, needs to be left to the majority decision of the future party.

Open Polemic, of course, cannot participate in a revolutionary democratic tendency, let alone a so-called revolutionary democratic communist tendency, but it is prepared to participate in a communist tendency, along with both those who support and those who oppose a revolutionary democratic programme for Britain.

The difficulty with the ‘thesis’ is that it confuses the struggle of ‘revolutionary democracy’ with the general, constitutional and programmatic questions concerning the democratic and the revolutionary that pertain to the communist party. This is connected with the assertion that: “There can be no united communist party without a hard fight against all forms of bureaucratic and anarchist ideology.”

There is no such thing as a bureaucratic ideology any more than there is any such thing as democratic ideology. Bureaucracy and democracy are pervasive forms of social organisation in both capitalist and socialist society. Bureaucracy is restricted and eventually overcome to the extent that the struggle for democracy advances and gains the ascendancy. Democracy, in its turn, will give way to an even higher, pervasive form of social organisation in the higher phase of communism.

The thesis refers to the early CPGB being formed in 1920 through a process of communist rapprochement that was inspired by the Russian Revolution. What its authors do not wish to accept and therefore fail to mention is that the rapprochement process for the formation of the CPGB rested on the ‘common theoretical programme’ of the 1919 Third International. This accorded with the theories and principles elaborated by Marx, Engels and Lenin: that is, with scientific communism in its continuing development or, in short, with Marxism-Leninism.

The rapprochement process for the early CPGB, in fact, floundered on attempts to organise the Party around a revolutionary programme that was particular to British conditions. The negotiators were eventually obliged to concede that it was firstly necessary to establish the Party and then to proceed to resolving the main questions concerning a particular, revolutionary programme through majority decisions. If anything is to be learned from that experience it is that a united Communist Party today most certainly cannot be established around agreement on a particular revolutionary programme.

In this, in contrast to the authors of the ‘thesis’, OP is adamant that communists, as against anarcho-communsists and reformo-communists, must be defined by their support for the leading role of the Party prior to and within the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In their confusion about scientific communism in its continuing development, denoted in the term ‘Marxism-Leninism’, and in their quest for a particular, programmatic way forward for communist unity, the authors of the ‘thesis’ have merely wound up confusing revolutionary democracy with the aim of communism.

Open Polemic