21.05.1998

Education, education, education

Party notes

Communist University ’98 is starting to loom on the horizon of the Party’s annual calendar. This year, the venue is London and so we hope for greater input from other trends and organisations in the movement, a feature which always adds edge to the debate and accelerates the learning process. Over the coming few weeks, our Centre will produce more structured reading lists and suggested areas of discussion for participants in the school, especially newer comrades. Please ensure your place by paying your £25 deposit as soon as possible.        

Controversy has recently surfaced around the question of Party education - or more precisely, around the theoretical development of our comrades. This question was taken up by comrades who have since resigned. What they advocated was a retreat from practical intervention in order to study. It was proposed to replace the Weekly Worker with a fortnightly paper - a move which would have produced exactly the opposite result of what was intended.

This question had raised its head before. From July to September 1992, members of the Communist Party were embroiled in a vigorous struggle around the meaning of democratic centralism. A minority charged that the Party leadership dominated the organisation as a bureaucratic clique, strangling initiative and causing the sclerosis of our entire group. Party education was also one of the banners these comrades fought under, demanding the task be approached with “far more seriousness and rigour” (J Conrad Problems of communist organisation London 1993, p53). What characterised this little group was also a retreat from the hard practice of the organisation - as comrade Conrad pointed out in an intervention that produced near apoplexy amongst them, “backsliding … has characterised members of the minority” (ibid p37).                     

Now, it should be underlined here that I am not drawing a direct line between the two sets of ‘oppositions’. The 1992 battle was a far more fraught affair and the personal intentions of individuals in that minority consciously malign, in my opinion. The comrades who have left recently have more honourable records of work and commitment to the Party - which made the manner of their leaving all the more wrong. However, the core of the problems besetting both has been the pressures of being a communist, the wearying demands that can be made on the individual. It is instructive for us therefore that ‘Party education’ has come up in a manner that - implicitly or explicitly - counterposed it to the practical work of the organisation.        Of course, the comrades’ complaints had a basis in reality. The demands of the Party’s day-to-day interventions are exacting, especially for those comrades who have jobs to hold down. This is why events such as Communist University - which afford cadre the luxury of a week of intensive, full-time study - are so precious. But there is a deeper question touched on here - just how does a communist learn to be a communist?                   

A recent London seminar in our series studying Hal Draper’s examination of Marx’s theory of revolution uncovered an interesting insight into this problem. Far from Marx being a ‘theoretician’ who arrived at understanding through abstract study, throughout his life practical work and intervention also guided him, uprooted his previous theoretical positions and showed him new truths. As Draper writes: “Marx entered active political life at the age of 24 as a liberal democratic journalist, the champion of political democracy. This period opens at the beginning of 1842, when he wrote his first published political article, and closes toward the latter part of the following year when he became a communist. The development in between, which transformed him from a radical-democratic liberal into a revolutionary-democratic communist is centred around his work for the Rheinische Zeitung ...

“The transition was not primarily a philosophical process, nor one made through philosophical lucubrations. This young Marx is often portrayed as having come to a revolutionary understanding of society through a critique of Hegel’s texts on the state and society. The biographical fact, however, is that he came to the content of his critique of the Hegelian view of the state through a year and a half of rubbing his nose against the social and political facts of life, which he encountered as the crusading editor of the most extreme leftist democratic paper in pre-1848 Germany…” (H Draper Karl Marx’s theory of revolution: state and bureaucracy London 1977, p31).

Communist University ’98 is an invaluable opportunity for comrades to reflect on and learn from the all-year-round work of the Party. Please confirm places as soon as possible

Mark Fischer
national organiser