11.03.1999

No public criticism

The main left group in Austrailia, the Democratic Socialist Party, refused a representative of the Communist Party of Great Britain permission to attend its 18th national conference in January. We reproduce the DSP’s reasons and the reply of comrade Marcus Larsen (pp6-7)

To: CPGB Provisional Central Committee - December 11 1998

Dear comrades

n your letter of December 2 1998 you ask us to reconsider our decision, communicated to you in our letter of November 16 1998, to decline your request to have a representative of the CPGB attend the DSP’s 18th national conference in January 1999. You ignore our reasons for this decision: ie, that in light of the fact that we have had no indication from you that you wish to develop collaborative relations with our party, we see no constructive purpose in agreeing to your request. Instead, your letter is devoted to defending your public criticisms of our party.

You state that these criticisms are not intended to encourage an attitude of distrust toward our party among readers of the Weekly Worker, and are only intended to “critically engage with the politics of the DSP in order to help clarify a number of issues - not least of which is the unfolding revolution in Indonesia”. However, your method of “critically engaging” with us - public criticisms based on misrepresentations of our views - cannot but have the effect on readers of the Weekly Worker that we have complained about.

Your November 19 1998 article, which you cite as an example of your approach to the “open airing” of differences, provides an instructive illustration of this method. In the article you stated that our programme “seems ambiguous”. You quoted a sentence from our programme which begins by noting that bourgeois nationalist forces may be part of anti-imperialist movements in colonial and semi-colonial countries (surely you do not deny this historical fact - were not bourgeois nationalist forces part of the anti-imperialist, democratic movements in a whole number of colonial and semi-colonial countries such as India, Cuba and Nicaragua?). The sentence then points out that

“historical experience has shown that the national liberation movement will not succeed if these forces enjoy political hegemony within it, or if the revolutionary-democratic forces subordinate the mobilisation of the worker-peasant masses to the goal of maintaining bourgeois nationalists within the anti-imperialist alliance”.

You stated that this is “slippery stuff”. You then ascribed to us the view that because we recognise that bourgeois nationalist forces have participated in past anti-imperialist, national-democratic movements, and might participate in future anti-imperialist movements in semi-colonial countries, we have capitulated to Menshevism and Stalinism: ie, to the class-collaborationist policy of subordinating the revolutionary mobilisation of the worker-peasant masses to the goal of maintaining bourgeois nationalists within the anti-imperialist alliance and of the revolutionary-democratic forces not challenging the hegemony of bourgeois nationalist forces within the national liberation movement.

Two paragraphs later you stated that “At the level of tactics all manner of temporary alliances are possible.” The implication of this statement is that you do not exclude temporary, tactical alliances between Marxists and bourgeois nationalist forces in national liberation struggles. This of course is consistent with the position of the Communist International when it was led by Lenin. Thus in his ‘Preliminary draft theses on the national and colonial questions’ adopted by the 2nd Congress of the Comintern (1920), Lenin pointed out that:

“The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form.”

This position was reaffirmed at the 4th Congress of the Comintern (1922) in its ‘Theses on the eastern question’, viz:

“The colonial revolutionary movement is at first championed by the indigenous bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intelligentsia, but as the proletarian and semi-proletarian peasant masses become more involved and the social interests of the ordinary people come to the fore, the movement starts to break away from the big-bourgeois and bourgeois-landowner elements. A long struggle still lies ahead for the newly formed proletariat in the colonies, a struggle that will cover an entire historical epoch and will confront both imperialist exploitation and the native ruling classes, who are anxious to monopolise for themselves all the gains of industrial and cultural development and to keep the broad working masses in their former ‘prehistoric’ condition.

“The struggle for influence over the peasant masses will prepare the indigenous proletariat for political leadership. Only when the proletariat has done this preliminary work in its own ranks and in those of the social layers closest to it can it challenge bourgeois democracy, which in the conditions of the backward east is even more inadequate than in the west.

“The refusal of communists in the colonies to take part in the fight against imperialist tyranny, on the pretext of their supposed ‘defence’ of independent class interests, is the worst kind of opportunism and can only discredit the proletarian revolution in the east. No less harmful, it must also be recognised, is the attempt to remain aloof from the struggle for the immediate everyday demands of the working class in the interests of ‘national unity’ or ‘civil peace’ with the bourgeois democrats. A dual task faces the communist and workers’ parties of the colonial and semi-colonial countries: on the one hand, they are fighting for a more radical answer to the demands of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, directed towards the winning of national political independence; on the other hand, they are organising the masses of workers and peasants to fight for their own class interests, making good use of all the contradictions in the nationalist bourgeois-democratic camp.”

After telling your readers that “at the level of tactics all manner of temporary alliances are possible” - presumably including temporary alliances with bourgeois nationalist forces - you then went on to state that “to ascribe a programmatically progressive role to the national bourgeoisie will lead to disaster”. The clear implication of this being that, because we recognise in our programme that bourgeois nationalist forces in colonial and semi-colonial countries might participate in anti-imperialist movements, we are ascribing a “programmatically progressive [ie, consistently revolutionary-democratic] role” to the colonial and semi-colonial bourgeoisie, and thus our programme is a “capitulation to Menshevism and Stalinism”, even though our programme states that:

1. “The indigenous capitalist class, while favouring steps to improve its position in relation to imperialism, is unwilling to lead a consistent struggle against imperialist domination because of its dependence on foreign capital.
2. “The complete and lasting attainment of the goals of national liberation in the third world can only be carried out by an anti-imperialist movement based on an alliance of the working class and the peasantry, that transfers power to a revolutionary-democratic government and destroys the capitalist state apparatus” (our emphasis).
3. “... the national liberation movement will not succeed if these [bourgeois nationalist] forces enjoy political hegemony within it, or if the revolutionary-democratic forces subordinate the mobilisation of the worker-peasant masses to the goal of maintaining bourgeois nationalists within the anti-imperialist alliance.”

In your December 2 letter you state that in the November 19 article you merely “expressed a concern that the DSP programme ‘allots the bourgeois nationalists an anti-imperialist - ie, progressive - role’.” However, your November 19 article did much more than that: it argued that our recognition that bourgeois nationalist forces might participate in anti-imperialist, national liberation movements was ascribing a consistently revolutionary-democratic role to such forces: ie, that our recognition of the historical fact that bourgeois nationalists do often participate in such movements, is “a capitulation to Menshevism and Stalinism”.

If you really wanted to “engage with the politics of the DSP”, to “learn from its activity and ideas”, to conduct a “comradely” and “constructive discussion” with us (as you claim in your December 2 letter) - why did you not simply send us a letter asking us to clarify what you may have perceived as “ambiguities” in our programme? Why did you rush to make a public pronouncement that we have capitulated to Menshevism and Stalinism?

Similarly, you state that the November 19 article “compared” the DSP programme “to the practice of the PRD in Indonesia - an organisation which has a different political programme, but is nonetheless influenced by the DSP”. After denouncing our views as “a capitulation to Menshevism and Stalinism”, you add that the article “then noted the PRD’s stated perspective of a government which includes counterrevolutionary forces such as Rais and the PDI’s Megawati”. You state in your December 2 letter that you “believe the call wrong”, but then add: “While the article contains several reservations”, it was merely expressing an “opinion” based on “the facts” at your disposal. If you want to develop comradely relations and constructive discussion with revolutionaries in other countries, don’t you think it is an elementary act of comradely behaviour to try to ascertain their actual views before you launch into a public denunciation of them as capitulators to petty-bourgeois class-collaborationist reformism (Menshevism and Stalinism)?

The claim that your approach is just the “open” expression of “opinions” that Lenin stood for, is ridiculous. Lenin never advocated that the paper of a revolutionary organisation should print every ill-informed“opinion” held by any and every member of such an organisation.

Equally ridiculous is your appeal to Lenin’s “famous” comment that: “There can be no mass Party, no Party of a class, without full clarity of essential shadings, without an open struggle between various tendencies, without informing the masses as to which leaders and which organisations ... are pursuing this or that line.” When Lenin made this comment, in 1907, the RSDLP was a mass party with 150,000 members. Neither the CPGB nor the DSP is a mass party or anything approaching it.

Furthermore, prior to January 1912 the RSDLP was not a Bolshevik-type party consisting exclusively of Marxist revolutionaries, but a party consisting of both Marxist revolutionaries and pseudo-Marxist opportunists. Up to August 1914, Lenin accepted the Kautskyist conception of the revolutionary workers’ party as a party that should seek to include in its ranks all those who considered themselves socialists, including avowed reformists. Thus in 1909, in defending the exclusion of the ultra-leftist Bogdanovite tendency from the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP, Lenin argued that:

“In our Party Bolshevism is represented by the Bolshevik section. But a section is not a party. A party can contain a whole gamut of opinions and shades of opinions, the extremes of which may be sharply contradictory. In the German party, side by side with the pronoucedly revolutionary wing of Kautsky, we see the ultra-revisionist wing of Bernstein. This is not the case within a section. A section in a party is a group of like-minded persons formed for the purpose primarily of influencing the party in a definite direction, for the purpose of securing acceptance of their principles in the purest form. For this, real unanimity of opinion is necessary. The different standards we set for party unity and sectional unity must be grasped by everyone who wants to know how the question of internal discord in the Bolshevik section really stands” (VI Lenin CW Vol 15, Moscow 1977, p430).

After August 1914, Lenin rejected the Kautskyist conception of the “all-inclusive” workers’ party, arguing that:

“The crisis [of the Second International - DL] created by the great war has torn away all coverings, swept away all conventions, exposed an abscess that has long come to a head, and revealed opportunism in its true role of ally of the bourgeoisie. The complete organisational severance of this element from the workers’ parties has become imperative. The epoch of imperialism cannot permit the existence, in a single party, of the revolutionary proletariat’s vanguard and the semi-petty-bourgeoisie aristocracy of the working class, who enjoy morsels of the privileges of their ‘own’ nation’s ‘great power’ status. The old theory that opportunism is a ‘legitimate shade’ in a single party that knows no ‘extremes’ has now turned into a tremendous deception of the workers and a tremendous hindrance to the working class movement” (VI Lenin CW Vol 21, Moscow 1977, p257).

In analysing the opportunist degeneration of the west European social democratic parties Lenin also reviewed the history of the RSDLP and of the struggle within it of Bolshevism against opportunist currents (economism, Menshevism, liquidationism). He recognised that the Bolshevik organisation had not, in practice, been built upon the Kautskyist conception of an “all-inclusive” workers’ party. It had constituted itself as a centralised organisation of Marxist revolutionaries separate from the Russian opportunists - formally in 1912, but in practice long before then - and he held up the Bolshevik organisation as a model for Marxist revolutionaries around the world. He observed that:

“The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party has long parted company with its opportunists. Besides, the Russian opportunists have now become chauvinists. This only fortifies us in our opinion that a split with them is essential in the interests of socialism ... We are firmly convinced that, in the present state of affairs, a split with the opportunists and chauvinists is the prime duty of revolutionaries, just as a split with the yellow trade unions, the anti-semites, the liberal workers’ unions, etc was essential in helping speed up the enlightenment of backward workers and draw them into the ranks of the Social Democratic Party.

“In our opinion, the Third International should be built up on that kind of revolutionary basis. To our Party, the question of the expediency of a break with the social-chauvinists does not exist: it has been answered with finality. The only question that exists for our Party is whether this can be achieved on an international scale in the immediate future” (ibid pp329-330).

When the Bolsheviks constituted themselves as a separate party organisation from the opportunist Mensheviks in 1912, they adopted precisely the rules that you falsely attribute to being an innovation of Jim Cannon’s: ie, they prohibited the right of minorities within the Bolshevik party from making public “pronouncements disruptive of the actions and decisions of the majority”. Instead, minorities within the party were to have

“the right to discuss before the whole Party, disagreements on programme, tactics and organisation in a discussion journal specially published for the purpose” (VI Lenin CW Vol 20, Moscow 1977, p519).

This Leninist application of democratic centralism was reaffirmed in the ‘Theses on the organisational character of the communist parties’ adopted by the 3rd Congress of the Comintern in 1921, viz:

“In their public appearances members of the Party are obliged to act at all times as disciplined members of a militant organisation.If there are disagreements on the correct methods of action on this or that question, these should, as far as possible, be settled in the Party organisation before any public activity is embarked upon and the members should then act in accordance with the decision made. In order that every Party decision is carried out fully by all Party organisations and Party members, the largest possible number of Party members should be involved in discussing and deciding every issue. The different levels of the Party apparatus must decide whether any given question should be publicly discussed by individual comrades (in the press, in pamphlets), in what form and to what extent. If the decision of the organisation or leading Party body is in the view of certain other members incorrect, these comrades must not forget, when they speak or act in public, that to weaken or break the unity of the common front is the worst breach of discipline and the worst mistake that can be made in the revolutionary struggle.”

This Leninist position - that whether or not internal political disagreements on any given issue within a Bolshevik-type party should be publicly discussed by individual members is a matter for the party, not individual members, to decide - was the viewpoint upheld by Cannon.

In opposition to this position you counterpose, not the mature post-1914 Leninist position, but the Kautskyist conception of pre-war social-democracy, a conception of party-building which Tony Cliff articulated in its most “refined” and opportunistic form in 1960:

“Since the revolutionary party cannot have interests apart from the class, all the party’s issues of policy are those of the class and they should therefore be thrashed out in the open in its presence. The freedom of discussion which exists in a factory meeting, which aims at unity of action after decisions are taken, should apply to the revolutionary party. This means that all discussions on basic issues of policy should be discussed in the light of day, in the open press. Let the mass of the workers take part in the discussion. Put pressure on the party, its apparatus, its leadership” (‘Trotsky on substitutionism’ International Socialism No2, autumn 1960).

Long before 1914, Lenin had become convinced (as a result of the rise of economism in the RSDLP in the late 1890s) that such a conception of the relation between the revolutionary vanguard organisation and the mass of the workers was bankrupt and that an organisation of revolutionaries in Russia whose actual functioning was based on such a conception would repeatedly succumb to tail-ending the spontaneous, bourgeois-reformist, politics of the ideologically backward mass of the workers. Of course, it is possible to proclaim agreement with such a conception and to “safeguard” the organisation from this fate - by creating a culture of sect-like ultra-factionalism behind a demagogic public posture about openly airing differences.

In your November 19 article you stated that you “cannot pronounce fully on the correct tactics vis-à-vis the bourgeois ‘democratic’ forces of Rais and Megawati, but to call for a government of these people is fundamentally wrong”. After this categorical judgement, you add the following “reservation”:

“While support for Amien Rais et al as part of a coalition government which includes the PRD may be intended to expose those sections of the current movement who are conciliatory to the regime, it carries the danger of handing the initiative over to counterrevolutionary forces ...”

All tactical manoeuvres by revolutionaries, particularly when their forces are small, contain “dangers of handing the initiative over to counterrevolutionary forces”. Infantile leftists avoid these dangers by doing nothing, or rather by abstaining from involvement in mass struggles and issuing doctrinaire pronouncements from the safety of their editorial offices.

If the CPGB’s chief concern was that the PRD comrades were making a tactical mistake in calling on the liberal bourgeois leaders to act on their proclaimed opposition to the New Order regime by appealing to the masses to take revolutionary action to overthrow this regime, why did you not just write to them expressing your concern? You provide an answer, of sorts, to this question in your December 2 letter to us: you wanted to “engage with the politics of the DSP in order to clarify a number of issues - not least of which is the unfolding revolution in Indonesia”. So you printed an article in the Weekly Worker comparing the programme of the DSP with the practice of the PRD, which you note is “an organisation which has a different political programme,but is nonetheless influenced by the DSP” (our emphasis). The assumption appears to be that the “practice of the PRD” is “influenced by the DSP” (that is certainly what the article sought to convey to your readers) and therefore, if the PRD is making tactical errors, these can be laid at the foot of the DSP and its programmatic “capitulation to Menshevism and Stalinism”.

In your December 2 letter you acknowledge that the purpose in writing the November 19 article (and the others you have carried on Indonesia) was not to build solidarity in Britain with the mass struggle for democracy in Indonesia, but to “engage with the politics of the DSP”. This, of course, explains why that full-page article said absolutely nothing about the British imperialist state’s support for the Indonesian New Order regime and the need for British revolutionaries to campaign against British imperialism’s support for this regime.

In your December 2 letter you acknowledge that your starting point in covering developments in Indonesia in the Weekly Worker is not what you have in common with the mass movement in Indonesia, but what distinguishes your small propaganda group in Britain from the DSP in Australia. This admission perfectly illustrates what we meant when we said in our previous letter that the CPGB views politics through the sect-like prism of factional point-scoring within the revolutionary left. That is certainly how your organisation has related to our party.

In our previous letter we cited as an example of this sectarian-factionalist approach to politics the way you have reported our relations with the Labour Party of Pakistan. We pointed out that: “... in the October 15 Weekly Worker you refer to the ‘Pakistan group ... being circled by a hopeful Australian Democratic Socialist Party’.” We went on to ask:

“What purpose is served in describing our relations with the Labour Party of Pakistan in this way - other than to give your readers the impression that we are some sort of international political ‘predator’ which views the Pakistan group as our next factional ‘meal’?”

In your December 2 letter you make the following reply:

“How do we know that the DSP has developed ‘collaborative relations’ with the Labour Party of Pakistan? It is through reading leaked documents from the Committee for a Workers International, not your Green Left Weekly. But when it has suited the DSP’s needs you have sent us your own internal bulletin, The Activist, to expose the secret on-off negotiations between yourselves and Militant in Australia. What are we to make of this?”

In answer to your last question, what we sent to you regarding our “relations” with the Militant group in Australia was our reply to a statement mailed out on the internet by Militant which attempted to justify their threatened physical attack on a public demonstration against racism organised by our comrades in Melbourne on August 28. This reply was not sent exclusively to the CPGB, but to all the left political organisations around the world that we exchange publications with.

With regard to our complaint about the way you publicly characterised our relations with the LPP you respond with the complaint that you were not able to work out that we have developed “collaborative relations” with the LPP from reading Green Left Weekly. Perhaps you missed the articles in Green Left Weekly that reported the growth of the LPP as a positive development for the working class movement in Pakistan (including articles written by LPP leaders and articles written by DSP leaders who had attended LPP-organised events in Pakistan)?

In any case, your complaint is a red herring since you acknowledge that you knew from leaked CWI documents that we were developing relations with the LPP. The question we asked, and which you evade in your December 2 letter, is why, in referring to the fact that we are developing relations with the LPP, did you seek to give the impression to your readers that our intention in developing these relations has some sinister, narrow factional, goal behind it? Why did you not simply report the fact that the DSP is seeking to develop relations with the LPP?

You state that it is your view that “open criticism is an obligation and prerequisite for ‘mutual solidarity and comradely discussion’.” Surely though, the prerequisite for mutual solidarity and comradely discussion between proletarian revolutionaries is the recognition that, despite whatever differences may exist between them, they have the same fundamental objective - a classless society to be achieved through a proletarian revolution - and they therefore seek to work together to achieve this common objective. Consequently, the discussion of their differences over how to achieve that common objective should be conducted in a manner that does not undermine, but promotes, their practical collaboration.

Your approach to date toward our party, however, has not convinced us that you wish to develop collaborative relations with the DSP (which would include a comradely discussion of differences). “Comradely discussion” between parties does not, in our view, mean the unilateral launching of public attacks by one party against another, but a mutually agreed exchange of views in a mutually agreed forum - which might, if both parties think this will be of benefit to them, be a public forum. Such comradely discussion of differences, however, should be aimed at promoting the primary objective of the relationship: ie, developing practical collaboration between the parties on mutually beneficial basis. At no time, though, have you made any proposals for practical collaboration between our parties.

At the beginning of your December 2 letter you state that you “regret” that we “see no ‘constructive purpose’ in a representative of” the CPGB “attending the DSP’s 18th national conference”. You ask us to reconsider in order that you “may initiate the ‘comradely discussions’ to which” we refer, adding: “We believe that the DSP is the most important revolutionary organisation in Australia to engage with, both in order to criticise the political shortcomings which exist and to learn from its activity and ideas.” At the end of your December 2 letter you state:

“Again, the CPGB asks the DSP to reconsider. We no doubt have much to learn from each other. Both the DSP and the CPGB hold that we have criticised our pasts and opted for Leninist politics. Yet clearly differences remain. Far from hiding these differences, we should openly air them.”

On the basis of your approach to our party up to now, and your defence of that approach in your December 2 letter, we can only conclude that you do not conceive of “collaborative relations” between our parties as amounting to anything other than us agreeing to “engage” with you in a public polemic in the pages of the Weekly Worker over our alleged “political shortcomings”. Your statements about wishing to initiate “comradely discussions” and to “learn from our activity and ideas” are consequently nothing but diplomatic cover to help you attain this objective.

We have no principled objection to public polemics between socialist organisations. We just have more politically important and urgent things to expend our time and energy on than the public polemic that you want us to engage in.

Your December 2 letter has therefore given us no reason to reconsider our decision to reject your request for a representative of your party to attend our 18th national conference. To the contrary, it has only confirmed our original view that no constructive purpose would be served by such attendance.

Yours comradely

Doug Lorimer
for the DSP national executive