22.01.1998

Rapprochement aggregate

Party notes

On January 31, the Provisional Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Organising Committee of the Revolutionary Democratic Group are organising the first of a series of joint aggregates that we hope will lead to the fusion of the two organisations. This will be a small, but important step forward for the project of communist rapprochement that this paper has explicitly campaigned for over the past four years.

You can’t please everyone, it seems. In some sections of the workers’ movement, the Communist Party is branded as an organisation of incorrigible splitters, nit-pickers and professional sectarians. Other people will confidently tell you that the CPGB is in fact a mushy, laissez-faire-type organisation, a “shifting agglomeration of centrist groupuscules, Stalinist fragments, refugees from Cliffism and various other bits of political flotsam”, as our chums in the International Bolshevik Tendency have colourfully described us (1917 No18, undated).

Of course, both these caricatures have in their own way pointed to a certain truth about our organisation. This is why they do their work as caricatures and keep the membership of various rival organisations either chuckling quietly to themselves about us, or – more often – running pell mell in the opposite direction whenever we appear.

It is true that for us unity – in a campaign, a ‘united front’, an alliance or even a single party – in no way implies a cessation of hostilities between different trends in our movement, a polemical truce. Quite the opposite, in fact. The proximity of different organisations in some form of working unity should be taken as an opportunity to heighten the struggle for truth, to openly clarify differences.

Thus we explicitly reject the approach of our Scottish Socialist Alliance comrades in organisations like Scottish Militant Labour, or the Socialist Party in the rest of Britain. Their ‘80/20’ approach – that is, ‘let’s talk about the 80% we agree on and ignore the 20% where we differ’ - is inimical to Marxism. Our participation in the important electoral and campaigning work of the Alliances in no way implies that we end our fight against the national socialist or reformist illusions of some of our bloc-partners.

On the other hand, our tactic of fighting for communist rapprochement during this period has been parodied by various sects in the style quoted above. We reject the charge that we are programmatic agnostics, that issues of political and theoretical clarity are irrelevant to us.  However, we believe that in a party regime motivated by genuine democratic centralism, with the right to form open factions, many of the divisions that today wall working class militants into various hermetically sealed sect-tombs would quickly be revealed as episodic and secondary. Yes, we believe that the unity of all revolutionary partisans of the working class is possible – and desperately necessary – in the here and now.

These are testing times for all trends on the left of the workers’ movement. The period in which we operate is producing a certain fluidity and it is certainly pleasing that a number of organisations apart from our own are defending – in principle, at least – the idea of revolutionary unity and openness. However, the dominant theme of the moment remains one of disintegration and fracture, not the coming together of militants. Over the last few years or so, for instance, we have seen a small flurry of journals such as New Interventions, What Next?, Historical Materialism and the imminent Cutting Edge sponsored by Red Action activists.

A common theme of these publications – whatever their particular market niche – is the need for “open discussion uninhibited by sectarianism or dogmatism” (What Next? No5); “for discussion unfettered by any orthodoxy or ‘party line’” (New Interventions winter 1997-98); or as Historical Materialism puts it, “[we are] not aligned with any particular tendency or party [and thus aim] to ensure that political differences are neither simply repressed nor asserted a priori …” (autumn 1997, No1).

It is hard to quibble with any of this – apart from perhaps the danger of a latent anti-party stance that could flower in the ‘interstices’ of any of these projects. Yet all are – quite explicitly – products of profound defeat, of the quite ignominious collapse of previous perspectives.

Mark Fischer
national organiser