10.09.1998

United Kingdom communists

Party notes

At the launch meeting of the Network of Socialist Alliances in Rugby last Saturday (see report on front page), the Communist Party supported amendments to the Liaison Group’s draft constitution which would have deleted its restriction of membership to “anyone living in England”. Our comrades attempted to explain why we call for socialist organisation throughout the United Kingdom. Given the crass restrictions on the debate by the scrupulously unfair chairperson John Nicholson, they did not do a bad job. The fact that they faced either incomprehension or ridicule from certain quarters had little to do with the coherence of their arguments: far more to do with the nature of the times we are living through. Defending the proposal of the Liaison Group to restrict membership to England, one delegate even surreally speculated: “I’m not sure we should even be talking about Great Britain anymore”.

In periods of profound world defeat such as this one, it is not simply the organisational strength and coherence of the workers’ movement that takes a battering. The theoretical and political positions that have been conquered in previous periods are often lost to the reactionary tide and have to be actively fought for and reconquered. The existing culture of most left organisations is marinated in philistinism.

The most obvious example of this poverty is on the Party question of course, including foolish jibes on the name we fight under. 

First, let’s reassure the pig ignorant. We do not call ourselves the Communist Party of Great Britain because we concur with our rulers that Britain is fab, a cool place to hang out. For example, the latest issue of New Interventions (summer 1998) features Roger Cottrell sideswiping the hapless Socialist Party of Great Britain - “Still less can I take serious a party that refers to ‘Great Britain’ in its title ...”, he tells them. In the past, I have had Spartacist League members sniffily asking me, ‘What’s so great about Britain, then?’ Well, its bigger than lesser Britain - ie, Brittany ... berk.

Geography lessons apart, there is a serious point here. The organisation of any party should correspond to the conditions and purpose of its activity. Of course, these conditions of struggle constantly change and communists have never claimed an unchanging blueprint for their organisational norms. Yet always implicit in the structural form we adopt is an attitude to the existing state.

The main task of those that purport to be fighting for socialism is to overthrow this state - not one that exists in their imaginations. This state is the United Kingdom, originally formed by the Act of Union in 1707 (although the term Great Britain had been in use earlier). Later unions created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1801) and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (1922), the state form we face today. This state is the executive committee of the capitalist class, dominated in Britain by the imperialist bourgeoisie - our main enemy.

In such a struggle, the forces of the proletariat need to win the maximum degree of unity, overcoming internal sectional divisions to fight as one against this powerful foe. The divisions that exist between Scottish, Welsh, Irish and English workers, chauvinism against women or gays - these and other problems are obstacles to presenting a serious challenge to the capitalist class.

Clearly, the attempt by elements in the Socialist Alliances to introduce national exclusion into the organisation of the workers - demarcations which do not correspond to the contours of the state that confronts us - is an opportunist adaptation to the poisonous nationalism that infects our movement in Scotland and is starting to grow in Wales. More than that, for all the Liaison Group’s talk of ‘inclusion’, in attempting to define the Network as open only to “anyone living in England”, this bars others. What of the socialists in Scotland and Wales who do not want to organise separately from their class brothers and sisters in England? Are we to insist that they constitute themselves as nationalists?

The pursuit of the narrow interests or transient prejudices of a section of the working class - whether it is defined by occupation, nationality, sex or whatever - is the defining feature of opportunism. In its particular rightist manifestation by the Liaison Group, this approach underlines that these comrades are reformists, that their orientation is towards adaptation to and tinkering with the capitalist state. Bearing this in mind, it is rather amusing to be called “imperialists” by them because of our principled position on the organisation of the working class.

Mark Fischer
national organiser