19.08.1999

300

Reaching the 300th issue of the Weekly Worker is a major achievement of our organisation. On behalf of the leadership of the Party, I send congratulations to the editorial team, the comrades in charge of the technical arrangements of its production, the regular contributors to its columns and to its coffers. Comrades, we have a paper we can all be very proud of, a publication that is indispensable reading for anyone who wants to really know the state of the revolutionary left in Britain today.

Our paper has carved out a political space for the politics of the Communist Party. Our opponents on the left grudgingly admit to regularly reading the Weekly Worker for the information it provides on other trends. Of course, when it comes to our reports of the developments in their own organisations, these same people lamely insist that it consists of nothing but “lies” and “gossip”.

The point hardly needs to be made that if this journal filled its pages with “lies” and “gossip”, no one would want or need to read it. Our circulation levels - which must make the Weekly Worker the most successful paper on the left relative to the size of the organisation that produces it - are sufficient proof against these slanders.

The revolutionary openness which characterises our press and for which it campaigns vigorously is not a political quirk or eccentricity. It is a direct product of the project we fight for, a reforged Communist Party united on the basis of a genuinely communist programme.

To reforge a real Communist Party - an organisation that will unite the advanced part of our class itself - we need openness. Lenin leaves no room for misinterpretation when he states that

“there can be no mass party, no party of a class, without full clarity of essential shadings, an open struggle between various tendencies, without informing the masses as to which leaders … are pursuing this or that line” (VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p159).

Likewise, the open clash of ideas is the only environment in which the scientific ideas of Marxism - which almost invariably start as the viewpoint of a minority, or even an individual - to struggle, conquer and find concrete expression in practice.

This is the task to which our paper and the organisation that sustains it are committed. So, as we reach this landmark, it is timely to survey where we are and where we come from.

The defining struggle of our organisation has been against the sectarianism that plagues the left. We originated in the factional struggle that tore the Communist Party of Great Britain apart in the 1980s. The core of today’s Party leadership organised around the journal The Leninist, the only factional publication to be explicitly banned by the Eurocommunists. It raised the banner of principled, open struggle against the liquidation-ist cancer gobbling up our Party and - significantly - in issue number three printed a ‘Call to all communists’.            

This urged “all genuine communists to join the Communist Party of Great Britain”. The organisations we then targeted for this call underlined our origins on the left wing of the official world communist movement and now have little more than historical curiosity, but the method is the key. Despite our “many disagreements” with these organisations, we wanted “them all to orientate themselves to the Party” (The Leninist No3, September 1982). In other words, our defining project was not a politically narrow, exclusive one. We have always believed that the fight to recreate the CPGB required drawing fresh forces into its ranks from other traditions in the revolutionary left and - crucially - the advanced part of the working class itself.

By issue 100, The Leninist had been transformed from a quarterly theoretical journal into an influential fortnightly paper. The milestones in this qualitative development were, first, the miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85, when we leapt from the theoretical journal to a monthly newspaper to keep pace with events. While the heating up of the class struggle developed our organisation positively, it acted to accelerate the degeneration of the opportunist trends we fought in the Party.

Second, a new stage in our struggle came in November 1990 with the 5th Conference of the Leninists of the CPGB. It had one purpose. In the light of the Euro leadership’s unanimous vote to rename their organisation, we were determined to preserve the name and idea of the CPGB. Even as we did so, we emphasised that “our main task remains reforging the CPGB. Although we have the name of the Party, the Party itself has been liquidated” (my emphasis The Leninist January 30 1991).

By taking on the name of the Party, however, we assumed some very heavy responsibilities. Lengthy discussions were held on how to transform our journal, how to intervene in day-to-day struggles, how to draw fresh forces from the class and the movement into the Party’s ranks. The Leninist had a proud history, but it was essentially a factional journal and thus by definition had a narrower remit, one based on the extensive political agreement of the comrades involved.

The social explosions around the miners in 1992 transcended these debates. Immediately, we transformed the paper, changing its name from The Leninist to the Daily Worker. As the movement around the miners ebbed, we retreated to the production of the Weekly Worker, gradually expanding its size to carry more vital debate and polemic. Our stated aim was to preserve and enhance the best features of both The Leninist - its rigorous and extensive theoretical polemics - and the Daily Worker - its fresh, agitational and bold style.

Many things have changed since then, of course. The historically low level of the class struggle has shifted the emphasis of the Weekly Worker heavily in the direction of polemic and debate. Yet one thing has not altered.

Characteristic of our publication in all its manifestations has been its willingness to tell the truth, no matter who it upset. Whether it has been warning of the liquidationist crisis threatening the CPGB in the 1980s; the crippling limitations of Scargill’s tactics in 1984-85 and again in 1992; the death agonies of bureaucratic socialism; the fatal illusions of so much of the left in the promise of a Labour government; the need for openness in our movement and exposing the crass infringements of elementary working class democracy by Scargill and Fisc in the SLP; the crude economism that passes for Marxist politics across large swathes of the left - this paper has told the truth.

As issue 300 of the Weekly Worker hits the streets, the left in this country presents a sorry picture. Mired as it is in sectarianism and befuddled by the crisis of its various programmes, the entire left now seems to be threatened by the liquidationism that totally sunk the CPGB by 1991 (the Democratic Left now wishes to change itself into a quiet and educational trust, possibly to be called the New Times Network: the liquidators liquidate).

One key factor that would facilitate a positive resolution of this crisis of the left would be the consolidation and growth of this organisation and the ideas it defends. As I have illustrated above, this is not a sectarian aim. It simply recognises that, in a world where the old is dying, the new has to struggle to be born.

Despite a committed and assured cadre, our organisation still exists as a school of thought on the revolutionary left rather than a coherent national organisation able to affect the political outcome of events by social weight, not simply by force of persuasion or argument. This is something we must strive to remedy.

The role of our newspaper will be essential in this. If you are a regular reader and accept the need for the type of workers’ party it fights for, I urge you to make a commitment to help build it. We need readers of our press. But, more than that, this paper needs active partisans.

Mark Fischer

national organiser