04.03.1999

Brittle Bolsheviks

Party notes

Over the last few years, I have written several times of certain problems in the levels of discipline and standards of Party work. Obviously, this has not been a linear process. At different times and under different circumstances, all comrades in our ranks have shown real drive and commitment. However, like every other organisation on the revolutionary left, the Communist Party has suffered from the period of reaction. This is a hard time for communist cadres.

We have had some comrades leaving us citing our ‘unreasonable’ demands in the abstract. While they were themselves already operating at a level well below what has been agreed as our ‘minimum’, they objected to Party discipline in principle. Its demands - apparently - are “unreasonable” given the ‘level of the workers’ movement at the moment’.

Then there are those comrades who might be called the ‘brittle Bolsheviks’. These are good comrades who have a very formal commitment to the correctness of our approach on Party discipline. Thus, they agree wholeheartedly with our demand for 10% of members’ income, commitment to active weekly participation in Party organisations or the serious financial and political involvement implied by our annual financial campaigns, the Summer Offensives. In fact, they agree so much, that the moment they as individuals slip below required levels, they insist on resigning from the Party as an expression of their toughness on these questions.

No-one can show their commitment to the project of reforging a genuine Bolshevik party in this country by leaving our organisation, no matter how ‘hard’ they are on themselves as they do it.

Discipline in a communist collective is not a set of rules and regulations imposed externally, by a barking Bolshevik ‘sergeant major’ laying down the law of some a priori set rule book. Discipline must be a process of internalising the morality generated by the struggle for communism. Communist discipline understood in a rounded way is not a formal check list of ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ - it is a lifetime commitment to the project of human liberation represented by the fight for communism.

A commitment to the project of human liberation - if it is to have any meaning at all - must be linked to the fight to build the Party. Otherwise, it is pious wishful thinking. Such a Party is built from human material, with all its frailties and inadequacies. Therefore, ‘the Party’ and its discipline are not lifeless, abstract concepts - they only acquire meaning through being constantly related to the human material that builds them.

Thus, a mechanical application of the highest standards of Party membership that we enshrined in resolutions a few years ago would lead to a pretty drastic purge of our ranks - today, as it would then - and what would be the point of that? Real Party discipline - an internalisation of the fight for communism - means striving to solve comrades’ personal problems, the difficulties we all may occasionally experience, through and with the Party.

‘Brittle Bolshevism’ is a parallel of ultra-leftism. Its facade of ‘hardness’ hides massive internal tensions which tend to shatter it to fragments when it receives serious knocks. Similarly, an ultra-leftist is often an opportunist afraid of his/her own shadow - just look at the way the ‘extremists’ of the Revolutionary Communist Party have been quietly absorbed by mainstream society over the last few years.

Communist discipline is therefore a process, not a finished rule book through which comrades must be ‘sieved’.

The Party project is tough enough to withstand the vicissitudes of our comrades’ episodic wobbles, whether these are precipitated by private relations, financial crises or political exhaustion.

The question is - are the comrades who claim adherence to the Party project ‘tough’ enough?

All our problem should be solved with and through the Party. This is the essence of being a communist under present-day circumstances.

Mark Fischer
national organiser