Letters

Open debate

We have read with interest Mark Fischer’s ‘Publish and be damned’ article (Weekly Worker December 10). You have indeed published and your own words do indeed damn you - well done to the comrade who came up with the title for the article!

It is unfortunate, if not entirely unexpected, that in their narrow-minded response to our proposals for discussion the PCC has decided to place their ‘openness’ fetishism before our attempts to move towards genuine political regroupment. Leaving aside your dubious arithmetic (a set of five six-weekly discussions is actually just over seven months, not “nearly one year”), we find it strange that such vocal proponents of ‘Partyism’ can only conceive of serious political discussion taking place within one framework.

The IBT has a proven commitment to serious political engagement with the CPGB. Over the past year we have, for example, given presentations at your Sunday forums and Communist University and have attended your ‘Against economism’ school - all were public discussions with other organisations and individuals present and at events organised by you. We note, however, the low attendance of your comrades at public forums organised by us. These public discussions were useful and certainly should not cease if we were to undertake a serious programme of organisation-to-organisation talks. Surely it is not unreasonable to expect you to try it our way for five meetings. You are employing the most simplistic formal logic to counterpose our discussion proposal to all other forms of interaction between our organisations.

Our disagreement is over whether private, organisation-to-organisation discussions would represent a higher level of debate, and resulting clarity, than less structured, public discussions with a wider range of views represented. The structure of discussions is, of course, a tactical question but, as you recognise, this disagreement indicates more profound differences in methodology between our organisations. We understand this difference to be based on the different emphasis the two organisations give to the struggle for programmatic clarity between the different tendencies in the workers’ movement.

This is, in part, over the nature of democratic centralism. Bolsheviks subordinate themselves to the democratically decided degree of centralism for all aspects of our political activity. The IBT considers that it is useful to generally draw the line of centralism to cover all public activity - both written/spoken propaganda and concrete actions. The CPGB applies centralism only to joint actions,while relaxing that discipline for most written and spoken propaganda. Although you formally recognise that an organisation can prevent minorities arguing their views in public, in practice your members interpret your advocacy of ‘openness’ as an inherent individualistic ‘right’ on the level of principle. This is nothing to do with genuine democratic centralism.

Hence your insistence on these meetings being regularly ‘reported’ in the Weekly Worker before the series is completed. From past experience we note that such ‘reports’ are often your major polemics against other organisations, based on comments made during verbal debate. Even when reported in context (which is often not the case), such comments will inevitably be a less sophisticated representation of the organisation’s position than published material - thus, conveniently for your writers, easier to polemicise against. The resulting misinterpretations create a barrier to political clarity and waste precious time.

We were intrigued to read in the last letter from the PCC that you

“think these sharp polemical exchanges, the correcting, refining and the evolution of positions as they are reflected in the written words of the other organisation, is actually the core of the search for the type of programmatic ‘clarity’ you [the IBT] purport to be seeking” (my emphasis).

We have published a large number of programmatic articles in the Marxist Bulletin, our international journal 1917 and other IBT pamphlets. Yet most significant polemics against us in the Weekly Worker have concentrated on tactical manoeuvres in the SLP or on reported discussion. Your article in which you attempt to justify your failure to defend Iraq against US and British attack is a welcome recent exception.

A verbal debate is one thing; an exchange of written polemics is another. A public, multi-faceted discussion is one thing; a focused discussion between two clear sets of views is another. All these fit very nicely alongside each other in discussions between organisations. But they are not the same thing, and cannot be blindly achieved through universal ‘openness’. A major obstacle to the process of clarity is your organisation’s inability or unwillingness to define such a clear set of views: that is, a programme.

In politics there inevitably will be occasional misrepresentations of others’ positions, written as well as spoken. We were disappointed to see that you do not have the political courage to own up when one of these misrepresentations is exposed, as in my letter to the Weekly Worker (November 26 1998). Does the CPGB seriously expect anyone to believe that the earlier article written by Danny Hammill is not a misrepresentation of our politics? Let us repeat what he wrote in case you have forgotten. Quoting from a Marxist Bulletin supplement on the recent rail disputes, he said:

“We are informed that ‘railworkers need what all workers need - secure jobs, good pay, strong unions, decent free healthcare, good education, and more leisure time’. Not a mention, you notice, of what workers really need so that they can take control of their own lives - political power to make a revolution” (November 12).

What are the words “not a mention” supposed to mean when we read them in the pages of the Weekly Worker? Or perhaps for the CPGB the phrase “political power to make a revolution” has nothing in common with our following paragraph:

“But militant trade unionism by itself is not enough to get what we need. Any major strike of workers against the bosses comes up sooner or later against the cops, courts and government - the forces of the capitalist state. Instead of trumpeting the virtue of the rank and file in and of itself, we need to build caucuses in the unions around a political programme for working class power that can successfully meet the assaults of the bosses” (my emphasis).

At least comrade Fischer’s article includes something approaching a political argument as he attempts to justify the CPGB claim that we are economist. Because our leaflet does not include a long list of general democratic demands, it seems that this proves that the IBT merely limits itself to economic struggles and the demands associated with them. This accusation is bizarre - as any reader of our journals would attest. We would suggest that CPGB members actually read our material and judge for themselves whether the programme of the IBT is deficient on

“the realm of high politics, the question of how the people of this country are ruled and by whom, the task of making the working class the hegemon of the fight for democracy”, and whether “all of this is left unaddressed”.

The topics we proposed for discussion represent what we consider to be some of the central questions of Marxism which keep our two organisations apart politically. We note that comrade Fischer does not respond to my point that Marcus Larsen was at fault in his description of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. We suspect that differences of approach to the Socialist Alliance and the SLP might have something to do with our different conceptions of united front work. Our differences on Ireland are well known, but there are also differences on the national question in terms of distinctions between imperialist and non-imperialist countries and how revolutionaries should relate to conflicts between them, such as the imperialist bombing of Iraq. These are all worth discussing.

We were somewhat disappointed that your responses, both written and verbal, to our proposal for organisation-to-organisation discussions have focused quite so completely on organisational questions with virtually nothing to be said about the political content of the topics proposed (casually dismissed by comrade Fischer with a petty slur about our international connections). If the PCC believes that there are more important political questions that could be usefully discussed between our organisations then we would welcome alternative suggestions - but we have been deafened by the silence.

Despite your unwillingness to move the discussions between us onto a more tightly focused organisation-to-organisation level, we still wish to engage your organisation in debate. To that end we propose a public debate, chaired by a mutually agreed independent figure, on the following topic, which we consider deals with one of the central differences between us at this time - ‘Democratic revolution and permanent revolution’.

Alan Gibson
IBT (Britain)