19.03.1998

Good morning, judge

Party notes

A number of comrades currently embroiled in industrial action against the Morning Star have commented with some bitterness on the crassly bureaucratic approach of the despised Rosser-Hicks “North Korean” dynasty and their various cohorts. True, there is nothing even remotely communist about these people. Their culture, bearing and mindset reek of arrogant (and inept) capitalist managers.

Perhaps the most ugly example of this so far popped out of the mouth of Mary Rosser when she told Carolyn Jones - management committee member and Institute of Employment Rights director - “you’re not here to put the union case. You’re not here to defend the editor. You’re here to uphold the management’s right to manage” (quoted in Weekly Worker, February 26).

The contrast with how the Communist International wrote of a workers’ paper could not be starker. In a resolution of July 12 1921 it underlined that such an organ must be “a proletarian fighting organisation, an association of revolutionary workers, of all its regular contributors, type-setters, printers, administrators, distributors and sellers …” (Theses, resolutions and manifestos of the first four congresses of the Third International London 1983, p252). Clearly these types of reciprocal political ties, which in turn generate their own morality and culture within an undertaking such as publishing a paper for the movement, simply do not exist at the Star. You may as well speak Martian to people with the politics of Rosser and Hicks.

Yet the journalists on the Star - many of them members of the Communist Party of Britain - are unfortunately guilty of having connived with these attitudes. The comrades even upheld precisely the same sort of bureaucratically formal, capitalistic norms when they perceived that some narrow political advantage was to be gained from it.

Thus, it strikes us as a little ironic to read comments in the strikers’ bulletin that “the NUJ chapel is fighting to save the Morning Star from dynastic dictatorship for the movement to which it truly belongs” (quoted in Weekly Worker February 26). Surely it cannot just be ourselves that find, when comrade Haylett calls on this management team to “put loyalty to the movement before loyalty to cliques or individuals”, it jars a little?

After all, the CPB was set up essentially as a support group for the bureaucratic rebellion of elements of the management of the Morning Star against the then Eurocommunist dominated leadership of the CPGB in the mid-1980s. Rebellion would have been a fine thing if it had been motivated by a healthy desire to defend revolutionary politics against the poison of the Euros. In fact, it was precipitated by the fears for their jobs of the likes of grey, deeply conservative apparatchiki like Rosser and Tony Chater (then editor) should the Euros seize control of the Star as they had Marxism Today, the Party’s ‘trendy’ theoretical journal.

Yet a layer of the centrist opposition within Party - which later decamped into the CPB - rushed to support this rebellion with no political conditions on the management of the paper, despite the fact that they had a record almost as bad as the Euros.

Typically, throughout the rebellion of the Star Rosser and Chater studiously avoided a principled political fight against the CPGB leadership. With the support of the centrists, they fought out the battle using exactly the same type of narrow legalism that they now try to employ against Haylett.

Perhaps most famously (and disgustingly) they described the CPGB - the organisation that had set up, maintained and sacrificed for the paper throughout its existence - as an “outside” body (Morning Star June 1 1983). A few days later, they were denouncing the Party as “a powerful pressure group” exerting “undue influence”. Characteristically, they proposed fighting the political challenge of the Euros in the only way that seems to occur to these time-servers - with changes to the rulebook. Such a modification would apparently “prevent a recurrence of the present situation” (Morning Star June 4 1983).

This paper, and the organisation that supports it, says that the fight of the Star workers against this oppressive management is principled and deserves support. Yet comrades, where were you when we were threatened by exactly the same narrow legalism of these people?

In the Weekly Worker of March 5, I reminded readers about the time these self-same bureaucrats threatened our leadership with the courts, bankruptcy and possible imprisonment. Our crime? A trial relaunch of the Daily Worker in 1992 to serve the struggle for communism in the April 9 general election (see Jack Conrad In the enemy camp London 1993, pp116-118). We received a threatening letter from solicitors acting on behalf of the management committee of the PPPS (the cooperative that formally owns the Morning Star): “It has come to the notice of our clients that you have commenced publishing a newspaper also entitled Daily Worker, the copyright in the title clearly belongs to our clients as can be evidenced by documents going back many years. Our clients are not prepared to grant permission for the use of the title by yourselves.

“Unless we hear from you … within the next three working days that you will desist from using the tile … proceedings will be taken out against you without further notice for an injunction to halt publication forthwith” (Letter March 30, 1992).

Our reply in fact came a few days later, when a team of our CPGB comrades occupied the Morning Star offices.

The CPB was set up as a Morning Star supporters’ group. The question of programme and political principle (the essence of the fight waged by our trend within the Party) was viewed as uncomfortable luggage, to be dumped at the first convenient opportunity. Now, the logic of these unprincipled politics comes back to haunt the CPB and perhaps threaten the very existence of the group itself. Sooner or later comrades, unprincipled politics always do.

Mark Fischer
national organiser