29.10.1998

A common perspective

In reply to Dave Craig, the CPGB’s Jack Conrad reasserts the need for opposition to the Scottish Socialist Party and the correctness of pursuing communist rapprochement

Our friend and comrade Dave Craig raises a number of interesting and important issues of theory and practice (Weekly Worker October 22 1998). Two questions in particular require an immediate response. First, Scotland and the communist attitude towards the formation of the Scottish Socialist Party. Second, the process of rapprochement between the Communist Party of Great Britain and his Revolutionary Democratic Group.

On the Scottish Socialist Party comrade Craig makes a great deal of the different formulations advanced by himself and the CPGB’s national organiser Mark Fischer. In the red corner from comrade Craig we appear to have the SSP as a “communist-Labour formation”. In the blue corner comrade Fischer’s term “centrist”. As comrade Craig admits, in the abstract the two are not mutually exclusive. The SSP can be centrist and at the same time a communist-Labour formation. Of course, the real task is not to berate each other with abstract definitions plucked from thin air, or partial truths, but to actually grasp the SSP in terms of origins in its non-self, its present character and contradictions, orientation and logic.

Let us begin with centrism. Centrism is a broad category denoting a political position that exists and oscillates between pro-capitalist reformism and consistent scientific socialism. Centrism should not be assessed or approached simply as a thing in itself. Rather it is political beginnings and direction. If, for example, there was a mass working class split from Labourism, it would be churlish, not to say puerile, to dismiss or belittle such a movement on the basis of (inevitable) programmatic shortcomings and illusions. That would be the mark and mentality of a sect.

The task of any communist worthy of the name can be summarised as follows: join, work loyally, attempt to infuse the membership - each stage of struggle raising receptivity - with the ideas of Marxism. It would be ludicrous to lay down maximalist ultimatums, or insist that this or that ideological nostrum be religiously enshrined before communists deign to involve themselves. No serious communist would turn their backs on a real workers’ movement because it was not formally revolutionary. Nor would we insist that our membership was impossible without the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, ‘proletarian internationalism’ or some such phrase being inserted into the programme. Communists must do their utmost to fuse themselves with the workers as they begin to move into political activity and towards class consciousness.

That was the approach of those organised under the banner of, and influenced by, the Provisional Central Committee vis-à-vis the Socialist Labour Party. True, prior to Arthur Scargill’s monstrous constitution being imposed (and well before it was adopted by a conference) we supported a fully articulated alternative revolutionary programme for the purposes of debate and clarification. But once the SLP’s reformist politics fully crystallised and the disastrous Sikorski-Scargill witch hunt was unleashed, the Weekly Worker took the lead in championing democracy. Our paper gave “full support” to the SLP’s Revolutionary Platform, the Left Network and other such broad campaigns. As comrade Craig says, “The CPGB participated constructively, joined the new party and sought to organise with other revolutionaries”. Indeed we did everything to provide ammunition for, cohere, and give direction to all SLP democrats.

The SLP was in its origins a break to the left from Labour. Scargill played a highly ambiguous and paradoxical role. He made the whole thing possible. The SLP would not have happened without him. Simultaneously he ensured that the SLP died as a mass workers’ movement almost at birth. Neither Tommy Sheridan nor Peter Taaffe, neither the SWP nor the CPGB were wanted. His personality and history attracted a layer of class fighters and socialist activists. Yet his ‘little England’ politics, authoritarian methods and inclinations drove many of these very people away. Like a magnet he equally pulls and repels. The SLP is today a (dwindling) right centrist rump, a weird and highly unstable Scargillite sect under a would-be labour dictator.

Had the communists and democrats been successful, the SLP would have become through movement, if you like, a communist-Labour formation (itself transitionary to something else). In other words a centrist formation in which the left pole of the contradiction, where Marxists are not only tolerated but are gaining hegemony over the pole of Labourism. Not, it should be emphasised, as a result of capturing branches, committees, sections, etc, through organisational methods. On the contrary because their ideas prove to be the most effective, most illuminating, most powerful in the school of practice.

What of the SSP? It was voted into existence by a conference of the Scottish Socialist Alliance. The SSA began as an alternative to the SLP and was part of a (much weaker) all-Britain Socialist Alliance movement. At its core the SSA consisted of Scottish Militant Labour (then an integral part of Taaffe’s Socialist Party break from Labourism). This right centrist majority was added to, and given political weight and legitimacy by the adherence of a thin, though not insignificant, layer of organised and unorganised activists and leftwingers.

Whatever the reformist nonsense peddled by the SML majority, however hollow its Marxist claims and Leninist pretensions, it was surely correct for communists to take a full part in the SSA and thus produce a formation containing communists, centrists, left reformists and left nationalists in conflict but unity. Such a balance between unity and conflict had to increasingly give way to a purely conflictive approach when faced with the long signalled goal of transforming the SSA into the SSP. That perspective should have been met head on by an energetic and imaginative fight for a split based on posing and building a realistic alternative.

Why? The SSP represents neither a move to the left nor the right, along the traditional horizontal political spectrum. The SSP is a descent, a collapse into petty nationalism. Indeed fundamentally it is a national-based split - a Scottish split from the SP, a Scottish split from the Socialist Alliances in England and Wales. Comrade Craig is right to argue that the only correct communist position is intransigent opposition to such nationalism.

Those on the left in the SSP, the Red Republicans and Alan Armstrong’s Communist Tendency, cannot be described as communist, if by that we refer to the internationalist theory of Marx, Engels and Lenin, as opposed to the national socialist theory of Otto Bauer, Joseph Pilsudski, JV Stalin and Tom Nairn. Nor should we work for what is a right centrist-left nationalist-Labourite formation to be honoured with, or camouflaged by, any kind of communist prefix or coloration.

The term ‘communist-Labour’ to describe the SSP, or to characterise our aim, is therefore wrong. This, comrade Craig, has nothing to do with the CPGB having “no members in the SSP”. We would recruit, and under certain circumstances, keep comrades in the SSP. However, we do not, and will not, urge anyone in Scotland to join and agree to, or accept, its membership terms and conditions.

Communists do not oppose the formation of the SSP because it carries over the right centrist politics of SML. Here I wholeheartedly agree with comrade Craig. The idea of refusing to join the SSP due to its leadership seeing no advantage in pretending to be revolutionary is foolish in the extreme. Communists fight for real revolutionary politics and consciousness through the movement of the class and the logic of struggle, not empty gestures. We prefer Tommy Sheridan, Alan McCombes, Hugh Kerr, Allan Green, et al to be honest. Neither they nor the SSP are revolutionary. Communists object to the SSP because it is a nationalist step backwards, a nationalist split by a declining SML and its allies left and right.

The defining founding principle, the basis of the SSP’s agreed electoral, and all other such ongoing work, is not the unity and forward march of the working class. It is the division of an existing British nation state and an existing all-Britain working class along the lines of nationality. Objective circumstances demand no such exceptional course. Scotland is neither a Kosova, nor an Ireland, nor an East Timor.

The SSP declares for a Scottish class state merely on the basis of the fleeting ups and downs of opinion polls. This is rank opportunism. An attempt to ride to power on a surge of nationalist sentiment. McCombes polemically brandishes, primarily against a politically bankrupt Socialist Party in England and Wales, Mori surveys of young people between the ages of 18 to 25. He uses them as justification for his entire political trajectory. A slim majority opt for independence over devolution. Pathetically SPEW’s general secretary Taaffe can raise no objection (he agreed in the first place to the formation of SML on the basis of opinion polls).

The SSP is therefore a leftwing tail or variant of the Scottish National Party. Under such circumstances communists do not dither about whether or not to enter its ranks. Uncertainty empowers and encourages no one apart from enemies and opponents. Therefore the Weekly Worker and the CPGB should not, as comrade Craig demands, “give full support” to those who have yet to “declare their intention” of joining the SSP. We will “give full support” to those, who on the basis of firm principles, refuse to join, and who fight in theory and practice, for a viable alternative based on the interests of working class.

Communists do not demand the SSP becomes revolutionary - ie, demand a lie, an illusion; under present conditions the SSP does not contain the theoretical raw material nor the class struggle experience to become revolutionary. No, what communists demand is that the SSP ceases to be nationalist. That means more than mere words and pious resolutions. Everything must be subordinated to fighting for, and organising, not a Scottish, but an all-Britain alternative. All-Britain not out of any sense of imperialist nostalgia or red, white and blue patriotism or anything like that. The British state is our main enemy. Here is the necessity for working class unity - to overthrow and replace the constitutional monarchy state (in such a democratic struggle the workers can and must use their own methods and pursue their own class and historic agenda).

Comrade Craig ends his article by bemoaning the lack of a “common perspective” between the CPGB and the RDG. He also complains about the “infamous CPGB ‘style of polemics’” and not getting the “kind of ‘good vibrations’ coming from organisations about to fuse”. He cites the SSP as the “latest example”. Frankly I am amazed. There are differences of nuance between the majority of the CPGB and the RDG. That is for sure.

However, what strikes me as remarkable is the broad areas of programmatic and political agreement between the two organisations - Scotland and the SSP included. We can search for, highlight, or exaggerate differences. That can have its uses. But when it comes to discussion of communist rapprochement, it is similarity and common thinking that ought to be given pride of place.

Comrade Craig says the CPGB has a better organisation than the RDG. A matter of fact witnessed by our Weekly Worker, finances, membership, influence, etc. Against that he claims that the RDG has a superior programme. This writer begs to differ. Unless our comrade is suggesting that designating the Soviet Union as state capitalist is an essential precondition for the merger of our two organisations and the self-liberation of the working class, there is nothing fundamental that separates the CPGB’s draft programme and the programme of the RDG. The RDG document has a number of formulations which could beneficially be incorporated into the standing CPGB draft. Nevertheless, on balance it is the latter that is the more comprehensive and honed. Either way, differences between RDG and CPGB comrades can be, ought to be, contained within one fused organisation. That would send a powerful and positive message throughout the workers’ movement.