27.11.1997

Rapprochement

Party notes

Rapprochement discussions between representatives of the Provisional Central Committee and the Revolutionary Democratic Group have reached an important stage. While some details still need to be thrashed out, what is on the table now constitutes a provisional timetable for the merger of the two organisations. This will be an important step forward for the project of principled revolutionary unity and offers a way out of the current organisational and political impasse that cripples the left in Britain.

The RDG and PCC representatives now have proposals for a series of joint aggregates where important issues that still need clarification will be debated. Importantly, these meetings - starting in January of next year - are open to the participation of other comrades and groups. We will be issuing invites and fighting for others seriously committed to the project of revolutionary unity to attend.

Given some of the confusion that has been created around the tactic of communist rapprochement - some of it accidental, some of it not - it is worthwhile stating again what it is and what it is not.

First, the essence of the process is most certainly not about trying to establish a cosy home for wildly divergent trends: a sort of organisational non-aggression pact between political irreconcilables. What we have fought for and what now seems in the offing with the comrades from the RDG is unity of different revolutionary views in the fight for a revolutionary party.

Key to this is democratic centralism, the universally applicable principle of revolutionary organisation that requires freedom of criticism and unity of action. I find it particularly amusing that some of the sternest critics of our understanding of democratic centralism are themselves composed of wildly divergent revolutionary viewpoints. But instead of holding these trends together democratically, they actually advocate bureaucratic centralism as a working model. Unfortunately, there are plenty of examples of this on the revolutionary left.

Comrade Richard Brenner of the Workers Power group has recently featured in our paper defending this distortion of Leninism (see Weekly Worker October 2, October 23 and October 30). Richard wrote that WP’s “principal activity” is to “campaign in a disciplined manner for our politics and programme” (October 2), having already equated “activity” with what an individual or trend in the party says and writes, not simply what they do.

John Stone of the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International points out that over the question of Afghanistan, WP contained two lines (at least) that would have placed them on “opposite sides of the barricades” in the war (see page 6). The distinguishing feature of WP’s ‘democratic centralism’ was that the minority viewpoint was allowed no rights of open debate or polemic for over a decade - until it shaded a majority itself in this tiny group. The majority now has the right to bureaucratically stifle any expression of the former public position of the group.

This method is congenitally sectarian and typical of much of the left, in that it offers the workers’ movement nothing. The RDG/Communist Party initiative therefore comes not a moment too soon.

If one were being charitable, one could characterise revolutionary politics in Britain as having a degree of ‘fluidity’. More accurately, I suggest, we are seeing a disintegrative process resulting in a number of dispirited splits. The left of the Socialist Labour Party was cited in this context last week. The newly formed Socialist Democracy Group suffers from exactly the same malaise, having left the Socialist Party without a serious fight and with no suggestion that its supporters had been bureaucratically excluded from the SP.

What is healthy about some of these new forces is a certain commitment to openness; what is negative and potentially fatal is a lack of perspective. Many are simply nostalgic about the past, in despair about the present and have some forlorn hopes about the future - none of which adds up to much of a fighting programme of action.

The formal commitment of many such comrades to revolutionary politics cannot be doubted. But this being so, at the top of the agenda must be the unity of revolutionaries and communists. The RDG/CPGB development should therefore be studied seriously by these forces. We call on all comrades to enter into this process, to begin the task of establishing a viable revolutionary pole of attraction organised in a democratic, open and disciplined way.

Mark Fischer
national organiser