27.11.1997

Phantom liquidationism

Jack Conrad’s report of November’s aggregate of CPGB members (Weekly Worker November 13) needs a reply, as it is awash with inaccuracies, aunt sallies and the odd shoal or three of red herrings.

The point of this reply, as well as our amendments to the theses on the referendum put forward at the meeting, was not to win the argument through clever debating devices and thus prove our infallibility. Our aim is to explore the concrete objective and subjective conditions and to critically evaluate our campaign during the referendum in an attempt to find the truth.

In his opening paragraph comrade Conrad gets straight to the point. He declares generally that the differences raised by comrades amount to rightwing liquidationism. He fails to level this at specific individuals or relate it to specific comments. This accusation appears to be levelled against anyone who disagrees with the PCC theses. Are all those that abstained or voted for any of the amendments condemned likewise? The implicit message to the rest of the membership is: express support for any of these changes and you too will be tinted in the same yellow shade of rightwing liquidationism. It should be stressed though that at the aggregate only a small minority explicitly described our views in such tones. However, it would be interesting to hear - or better read - the opinions of other comrades at the meeting.

In what can only be described as an effort to muddy the waters, Conrad, both in his report and at the meeting itself, attempted to merge our assessment of the Campaign for Genuine Self-Determination in Scotland with our criticisms of the Weekly Worker. We will attempt to deal with these issues separately.

Conrad’s second paragraph mentions that the theses on the referendum presented to the aggregate were unanimously agreed by the PCC.

He refers to “a backward and fluctuating minority” grouped around the Scottish committee’s amendments. No doubt this is in contrast to the monolithic view of the PCC, although in the weeks prior to the aggregate two current PCC members had expressed differences with Conrad’s perspective. So have these comrades been transformed from ‘fluctuating backward’ elements to members of a monolithic leadership (at least in front of the membership)? Perhaps defeating this phantom liquidationism en bloc was more important.

The comrade then goes on to divide our amendments into two types. There are those that remove “all internal polemical references” and those that “eliminate or water down all reference to the mass impact of the CPGB and CGSD”. In categorising the first type, he questions our motives: he declares we did it not “to protect the organisation as a whole in an honest and misguided fashion. Rather their prime concern seems to be to shield themselves and their perceived allies.” What does he mean and whom is he referring to? It should be noted that there is a lack of consistency here, because it was actually the PCC that removed from the original draft the names attributed to the quotes in thesis three. Why? Surely the same ‘stinging’ accusation can therefore be aimed back at the PCC.

The report then goes into a lengthy digression with the author’s imagination running riot, because he leaps to the conclusion that there was some link between this and what he described as a “coordinated attack on robust internal polemics”. This undoubtedly refers to criticisms we make in a document on the Weekly Worker - a full discussion on which has not taken place yet, although Conrad appears to want to drag it into the debate around the referendum and our campaign.

The real difference between ourselves and Conrad is the validity of his “artistic” interpretation of the many thousands of abstentions and spoilt ballot papers that were recorded on September 11. The comrade seems preoccupied with quantifying the percentage or numbers that abstained directly due to the influence of the CGSD campaign. He is determined we should “measure our success in terms of tens of thousands of abstentions and thousands of spoilt ballot papers”. Our argument is that from our present limited information this cannot be assessed and we should not deceive ourselves or waste our time with some mythical, statistical abstraction.

We believe our campaign had a peripheral, but real, impact on the masses in parts of Scotland. However, there were several factors that must be considered in assessing the abstentions. Like the impact of the CGSD, we do not attempt to put figures on the influence of such factors as Labour sleaze in Glasgow and Paisley, the outdated electoral register, or Labour’s resounding general election victory. Conrad implies that by raising these other factors we were attempting to do everything to deny our mass impact. This is completely false. Comrades should actually read what we write and not attempt a psychological interpretation of what they think we ‘really’ meant. Perhaps this is a further example of bending the proverbial stick.

Let us look at our amendment to thesis 18. While agreeing with the formulation proposed - “Claiming every single abstention or spoilt vote is ridiculous. However, it would be equally ridiculous to imagine we had no effect. The boycott campaign was based in Glasgow. The CPGB has a record of electoral support in Dundee” - our amendment was simply to add: “However, it is impossible to assess the extent of our impact in terms of non-voters or spoilt ballot papers.” The amendment was defeated.

The remainder of his article consists of him banging away at similar phantoms. At the meeting no one stated that it was impossible to achieve an active boycott of the referendum following the SSA majority committing itself to campaigning for a ‘yes, yes’ vote. However, what was said was that such a decision made the active boycott much more difficult to achieve. This we stand by.

Dave Craig raises some interesting points in his letter (Weekly Worker November 20). The main objective of the CGSD was not to “win votes for abstention” and have people stay at home on referendum day. We explicitly called for an active boycott through strikes, demonstrations and civil disobedience to win a parliament with full powers - ie, self-determination, nothing less. While our campaign did not win this, among other things it did show the correct method in fighting for what is necessary, fighting for independent working class politics - independent of nationalism and Labourism.

We agree with Craig: we should congratulate the 49% in Glasgow and the 1.5 million nationally who abstained and were not bought off by Blair’s proposals nor enticed by the dinosaurs of the ‘no, no’ campaign. We must recognise that no amount of speculation now will bring us any closer to identifying how many did so due to the CGSD.

In a document on the referendum campaign prepared by the Scottish committee before the November 9 meeting our final paragraph read: “We should be proud of the campaign we waged. We should look now to pursue our politics in Scotland and fight within the SSA for our position of a federal republic.” We are pleased to see that Jack Conrad’s front page article in the Weekly Worker (November 20) is echoing that call for a campaign throughout Britain.

This raises another aspect of the CGSD that should not be brushed under the carpet: namely, there was no manifestation of the campaign south of the border. The Weekly Worker carried many articles promoting the campaign in Scotland and pushing the need for a federal republic, but despite worthy intentions expressed by comrades there was no organisational form of the CGSD in England.

Whilst we were correct to leave the CGSD open to all those fighting for real self-determination, in hindsight the slogan ‘For a federal republic’ should have featured more prominently in the CGSD, particularly when we did not win other organised forces to the campaign. This would have helped prevent any caricature of our campaign as “extremist nationalist” (The Times). By placing more emphasis on the voluntary unity of the working class through a federal republic of Scotland, England and Wales as a valid and democratic outcome of genuine self-determination, we could have more effectively challenged the nationalism of an independent Scotland that “a parliament with full powers” can conjure up.

Finally to return to Jack Conrad’s fallacious charge that we organised “a coordinated attack on robust internal polemics per se”. He deals with this argument over nearly two columns of his article, during which there are various examples of incorrect reporting and misrepresentation. We shall only deal with two of them here.

Let us be clear: we are not in favour of “an amalgam of a hole in the wall debating society, a Quaker gathering and US-style political correctness”, as we are accused. However, comrades and their opinions and ideas should be treated with respect. As we said in our document the comrade has quoted from, “We must develop a culture within the organisation where comrades feel they can voice their opinions without fear of humiliation or derision. This is not to say that comrades should not be tackled sharply or challenged forcibly on their ideas, but insults are unnecessary and are a diversion from the pursuit of the truth.” Repeated use of terms such as ‘stupid’ or ‘foolish’ get us nowhere, apart from discrediting the target of the description, without having to defeat their ideas.

It is then us who are accused of “dumbing down our communist culture”, when we are arguing that we must deal with the ideas and the arguments and not soften up the audience with a smattering of insults. No one at the meeting was complaining about political attacks or argument or sharp debate, but all comrades should avoid the use of gratuitous insults.

Finally readers are told: “It is amazing therefore to hear comrades in Scotland referring to the Weekly Worker in general and the use of the formulation ‘national socialism’ as being “insulting, rude and sneering” or a “diversion”. What we actually said as part of an assessment of the Weekly Worker was:

“In terms of style the driving ethos appears to be the Millwall supporters syndrome - no one likes us, but we don’t care! Yes, the Weekly Worker needs to tell the truth, be sharp, polemical, etc - not insulting, rude and sneering.”

On ‘national socialism’ what we actually wrote was: “We continually defended our paper’s right to use such a phrase to describe one of our political allies in the Alliance (SSA). However, the longer the Weekly Worker kept on bashing away at the right to use the phrase, so the phrase eclipsed the real argument about the nature of socialism, etc. Sadly the debate ... over ‘national socialist’ has allowed SML ... to divert the debate from the national question itself to the nature of the Weekly Worker and the methodology of CPGB polemics.” Hopefully these extended quotes will give comrades a more accurate picture of what we were trying to say rather than Jack’s selected quotes.

While not an exhaustive reply to the points raised by the comrade’s article, we have attempted to address some of the key points

Nick Clarke and Mary Ward