29.10.1998

Fighting isolation

Party notes

October’s aggregate of Communist Party members began discussion of our perspectives for next year. Much of the discussion had to remain tentative at this stage, given other factors. For example, the precise form of our intervention in next year’s important round of elections is hard to specify here and now. This largely depends on the attitude of others to the unity call we have issued (see Weekly Worker October 22). Our attitude remains flexible. We will continue to agitate for principled united left slates, with our Party name included. However, we will not forgo any opportunity to make mass propaganda for the ‘honour’ of acting as mere foot soldiers for left social democrats.

Similarly, it is hard to anticipate now the precise state of the British and world economies a year hence and what political fall-outs this may have.

This lack of certainty found expression in the working title of the document prepared as notes towards our Perspectives 99 document - ‘1999 - a year of change?’ A great deal is happening in the field of bourgeois politics. There is a space crying out to be filled by the forces of the working class. Yet a feature of the left remains decline and disintegration.

The evolution of Labour away from even a nominal relationship to the interests of the working class has precipitated movement from some sections. Thus, while the Socialist Workers Party’s slip into the electoral field is a welcome one, we have no illusions. This has been a step taken reluctantly and will pose problems for it. We have consistently pointed to the programmatic weaknesses that have mercilessly torn the Socialist Party apart. Is the SWP actually any stronger politically? We have seen plenty of examples from its history of centrifugal forces ripping bits out of Cliff’s organisation when it engaged in a broader range of interventions. We should not be surprised to see the same process re-start inside the SWP now they have half-emerged from their sectarian bunker.

Of course, we are not in favour of this decline and disintegration of our opponents on the left per se. Without a strong revolutionary pole of attraction, all it will produce is the dispersal of working class cadre to the winds.

Within the trade union movement, there is some change with Labour in power. The tough talking at the 1998 TUC conference was hot air, of course, but it does indicate an evolving relationship between the trade union bureaucracy and the party it gave birth to nearly a century ago. Problems in this relationship explain the tame theatrics at the conference, rather than attempts by the union leaderships to contain anger from below, as has been suggested by some sections of the left. We should therefore not be surprised to see some token protest called by the union tops, but within strictly defined limits. Without a politically independent rank and file - and not just ‘independent’ within the narrow sphere of trade union militancy - the union bureaucracy will not launch a serious challenge to Blair. And in the struggle to construct such a rank and file movement economics are important, but politics are central.

This is where communist organisation comes in. The aggregate discussed in some detail where our organisation is at the moment and the problems of cadre development in such a lean period. The meeting opened with a series of reports from cell secretaries on the work and development of their teams. These revealed a number of features of the organisation, including a certain unevenness across the Party in its political levels, tempos and structures of work. However, a common characteristic highlighted was a tendency to isolation.

Given the reactionary nature of the period we are fighting through, many of the arenas we have been active in are pretty degenerate and sparsely populated. This affords little opportunity for our comrades to develop as rounded communist politicians: they tend to stay theoretically underdeveloped and passive. This is the key problem of Party culture, explaining many of the problems with education and our ongoing casual attitude to recruitment.

All this does is underline the hardness of the political period, however. It does nothing to point the way forward, to answer the question of what we as an organisation do next in the coming 12 months and beyond. It is to our great credit that we have maintained ourselves and built something serious in this period, that we have a relatively impressive theoretical and practical record. Bigger forces than us have succumbed or are in the process of succumbing. Our politics are dynamic and we have proven ability to punch way beyond our weight.

Yet to be sanguine about what we have achieved would be to place it all in jeopardy. The aggregate was clear that isolation was a real problem for our organisation, producing weaknesses at all levels.

The meeting agreed that there were no easy answers to this generally recognised problem - what do our comrades actually do that requires them to question old ideas, to reach out and absorb new ones?

An orientation to trade union work was raised as a possibility. Of course, it is a self-evident truth that the unions currently operate at a very low level and that the left’s fetishism of ‘trade unionism’ reflects its much deeper political problems. Yet, despite losses, the unions remain mass organisations of the class. In the longer term, it is unlikely that anything serious can ultimately be achieved without communists winning their leadership.

In the short term, there remains the possibility of movement in them, but it was underlined that any move towards this type of work would not be made in order to transform our comrades into ‘trade union secretaries’, the archetypal ‘working class leader’ fixed in the mind’s eye of much of the left.

We would be in the unions to fight politically. These mass organs of the class can be important points of application of our fight for a communist programme, against economism, to transform our comrades into tribunes of the oppressed.

All cells should discuss the material submitted so far to the debate around Perspectives 99 and ensure that materials written as contributions reach centre swiftly for distribution.

Mark Fischer
national organiser