02.07.1998

Craig agonises

Party notes

I know that Dave Craig of the Revolutionary Democratic Group will be reassured by my comments in this week’s column. The comrade has been featured twice in our letters page agonising over the “big hole” that has appeared in the CPGB’s practice of revolutionary openness. What has occasioned the comrade’s pain is the fact that we have not so far reprinted the replies by comrades Mary Ward and Nick Clarke - two comrades who recently resigned CPGB membership - to my ‘Party Notes’ column of March 26, which touched on their departures. He fears “spin doctoring”. All the Provisional Central Committee and its reps have given us so far is “petty trivia about hard times and comrades’ personal problems”, perhaps even a nervy attempt to “sweep things under the carpet” (all quotes from Dave Craig, Letters Weekly Worker June 25).

The comrade contradicts himself in the space of one of his very first paragraphs. Correctly, he notes that “openness does not and cannot mean that any and everything must be printed in the central organ”. Quite right. Yet, in rather clumsy fashion, his next sentence suggests that “a ‘right of reply’ in the letters page … is a minimum requirement …” Thus he complains that the “Dundee comrades” (Ward and Clarke) have “had no choice” about our decision to delay publication of their letters. It was “imposed on them”.

First, if comrades have left our organisation, they can have no rights in or claims on it. Even a moment’s thought reveals the opposite idea as thoroughly uncommunist. Our paper is the collective weapon of our organisation. This has nothing to do with petty proprietorial concerns. This publication has been collectively produced - at the price of a great deal of effort and sacrifice over the years - to further the project that this organisation is in business to serve.

There is nothing remotely ‘sectarian’ per se about this. Clearly, it depends on what the nature of our project actually is - in other words, a political estimation must be made as to whether our ultimate goal is sectarian. Manifestly, ours is not. This paper has an unparalleled reputation for honesty and openness. This approach flows from our aim - a mass communist party, constructed not on the shibboleths of this of that theorist or leader, but on the principled programmatic unity of the advanced section of the class itself.

But the paper remains a weapon to be deployed in this fight. The notion that any organisation (or individual, as comrade Craig implies) has an automatic ‘right’ to use our paper as a bulletin board for their own particular hobby-horse project is antithetical to Leninism.

At its most extreme, what if such a reply consists of personal abuse, threats and offensive references to people’s families? This is the type of foul invective we have had from some wayward comrades in the past (I underline that none of our recent departees have behaved in this despicable way)? Did these renegades have the ‘right’ to have their bile reproduced in the pages of our Party press? Comrade Craig must see that this is nonsense.

Each and every item that appears in the pages of this paper is there because it has been assessed politically, not according to some inviolate abstract ‘right’. In this, we fully accord with Lenin’s approach to the question.

A few years after having Bogdanov expelled from the Bolshevik faction, he attacked the Vpered group to which the man belonged in the Bolshevik paper Pravda. Bogdanov sent a reply, which was published. Outraged, Lenin wrote to the editors telling them that their decision was “so scandalous that, to tell the truth, one does not know whether it is possible after this to remain a contributor” (VI Lenin CW Vol 19, p173). Lenin saw no ‘right’ for Bogdanov - the leader of a trend which proposed the dissolution of the Party - to be accorded space in the pages of the Bolshevik press to propagate these views, even if responding to a polemical attack. Right or wrong, he assessed it politically, in other words.

Then we come to the specifics of the particular decision not yet to publish these two very short letters (together, they amount to just over 1,300 words). I reiterate - none of our recently departed comrades have raised a single issue of political substance. In contrast, Dave suggests that our setback is “a result of [our] intervention in Scotland” around Blair’s referendum in September of last year and tells us “we need to find out … the real politics of the situation”.

If I were being unkind, I might suggest that Dave Craig appears to have an ‘etch-a-sketch’ memory. Did the comrade not read our press, where the interpretation of the Scottish referendum was extensively and openly debated? Was he asleep in seminars and Party aggregates (RDG comrades have a standing invitation to attend these meetings) where this question was exhaustively explored by both sides?

Comrades should not be too puzzled, however. I believe that Dave has been made intensely uncomfortable by the perfectly correct assessment of this organisation (not just PCC ‘spin doctors’) that - whatever faults and weaknesses we manifest in our day-to-day practice and political ideas - the recent spate of resignations are an expression of the implosion of individual communists in a period of profound world reaction.

This is not “petty trivia about hard times and comrades’ personal problems” which we need to “get rapidly away from”, as Dave suggests. Comrade Craig must tell us how the politics of the Scottish question have been obscured by the non-publication of these two brief letters. He has read both of them. What new insights into our practice do they contain? What would they bring to the debate? Apart from some spurious notion of a ‘right to reply’ in our paper, what are the political merits in favour of their appearance in our press?

The leadership of the Party took the perfectly correct and mature decision to delay possible publication to allow for period of calmer reflection and the preparation of a substantial reply that took these comrades and our history of common work and struggle seriously. Dave should beware of setting himself up as the attorney for backwardness in and around our organisation.

Comrades from the RDG - not just comrade Craig - now have both the original critical letters from our Dundee comrades and the reply. In the spirit of revolutionary openness that animates comrade Craig’s concerns, I am sure I speak for all comrades when I say we would be interested to hear their opinions on this exchange.

Mark Fischer
national organiser