26.08.1999
‘Official communists’ open up
Will Robert Griffiths be the death of the CPB?
Something very strange is happening in the world of the Morning Star’sCommunist Party of Britain, the ‘official communist’ split from the CPGB in 1988. The spring issue of its normally paralysingly dull journal, Communist Review, is actually an interesting read. Despite our continued profound disagreements with much of its political content, we can only applaud a willingness to challenge - even implicitly - some of the sleepy orthodoxy that previously constituted CPB ‘thought’.
We welcome and will do everything we can to encourage this. However, we must sound a note of caution. This process of waking up, of starting to actually think, will inevitably precipitate arguments, fierce polemics and differences. Yet the whole culture of the group - which now has less than 250 paid-up members - militates against this. If there are comrades who are now contemplating a revolution in some of their key ideas, they should perhaps include the CPB’s version of ‘democratic centralism’, in reality bureaucratic socialism.
For without the fullest democracy, without public debate and the right to form open factions on the basis of wide-ranging platforms, the looming political tussle threatens to bust the CPB into numerous fragments. Again, despite our fierce opposition to its current orientation, we see nothing to be gained from the even further dispersal of working class militants that an implosion of the CPB would entail.
And make no mistake, comrades of the CPB: the logic of the politics being hinted at in the latest issue of Communist Review would represent an about-turn in your world view. Given your years of theoretical and political stagnation, what could this entail?
The ‘socialist’ countries
The highly combustible nature of the differences now smouldering in the CPB can be confirmed if we look at the article on China by Ken Fuller, a member of the newly expanded CR editorial board.
Fuller begins his piece by warning against “an uncritical approach to societies which proclaim themselves socialist: when things go badly wrong, as happened with the Soviet Union, disorientation and disillusionment is the result” (p6). Specifically, the comrade is vigorously taking to task Frank Williamson, who penned an article entitled ‘China’s road to socialism’ in CR autumn/winter 1997 as well as a more recent series in the Morning Star earlier this year. Comrade Fuller does a pretty effective job of debunking the inanely positive interpretations his opponent forces onto events such as the cultural revolution, but takes particular exception to the concluding paragraph, where Williamson light-mindedly muses:
“… what are the real risks in their policy of ‘market-socialism’? … After all, if a socialist government encourages a market philosophy, if it boosts a positive ‘free-for-all’ … how can it at the same time move towards the more responsible attitudes which socialism should foster? We await further enlightenment from our Chinese comrades.”
The last sentence in particular stings Fuller to reply that “this is precisely what we cannot afford to do unless we are to risk the disorientation and disillusionment referred to earlier” (p7). It is “clear”, he states, that economic reform in China “has little to do with socialist regeneration” and “is overwhelmingly nationalist and bourgeois” (p10). He is scathing of the method of “[clutching] at straws” and “[hoping] that the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party may, after all, still maintain a socialist perspective”, explicitly criticising in this context “the last in a series of articles which appeared in the Morning Star in 1997, around the 15th Congress of the CCP” (pp10-11).
In fact, “China has embarked on the road of rapid capitalist development.” The notion - or rather “fancy” - that “if the CCP can maintain its monopoly of political power … the time will come when … the ‘socialist’ superstructure will be able to transform the capitalist base” is just “wishful thinking”. In fact, whatever the “socialist” protestations of the CCP, Fuller starkly ends by telling the likes of Williamson that “we must bring the same kind of thorough-going analysis on societies claiming to be socialist as we would on our own” (p11).
Of course, for readers of this paper the views outlined here are not in any way controversial. Yet, for the political tendency that the CPB represents - Stalinite, centrist, historically uncritical of the Soviet Union and “living socialism” - these opinions are dynamite. Fuller is not simply saying that an uncritical attitude to the present-day leaders of what remains of the purported ‘socialist’ countries is wrong (although even this would be too much to stomach for many CPBers). No, in his very first paragraph he explicitly links his rejection of “uncritical” approaches to societies which “proclaim themselves socialist” to the experience of the USSR itself.
And if the more conservative-minded sections of the CPB were not already beside themselves with apoplectic rage, there is the article by Mike Squires, a labour historian, who concludes his review of a biography of JT Murphy with these explosive thoughts about the collapse of the USSR and Eastern Europe:
“Are we to believe that without a whimper the working class of the socialist countries gave up their property, the means of production, distribution and exchange and handed them over to private investors. That workers who had previously controlled the places at which they worked gave up that power to unelected managers. It seems an unlikely scenario. Yet socialism and working class power are interlinked.
“Without democracy there can be no socialism. If the workers were not in control can a society be described as socialist?” (p30).
Heresy
For a section of the CPB - Andrew Murray, Nick Wright, John Haylett et al - such views will be little short of heresy. Holding them privately would be bad enough, but voicing them in the “theoretical and discussion journal of the Communist Party”, as the Communist Review bills itself, will surely be beyond the pale.
Perhaps such comrades now have a certain sense of déjà vu, a sinking ‘here we go again’ feeling in the pit of their stomachs? After all, one of the cardinal sins of these comrades’ bête noire in the Communist Party of yore - the Marxism Today journal - was its anti-Sovietism, its willingness to raise what were timid criticisms of the ‘socialist countries’. These comrades will not be comforted by editor Mary Davis’s rather bland reassurance that the expansion of the editorial board “does not betoken any change in political aims” (p2). Clearly, the current issue contains material that would never have found its way into previous issues of CR - something is going on.
While the controversy has not yet broken out openly, we can see the storm clouds gathering if we look at some of the more recent issues of the Morning Star.
Apart from Frank Williamson’s foolish series on China, we have had Paul White’s ‘China diary’ (Morning Star August 8). Here - incredibly - the recent crackdown by the Chinese authorities on the falum gong sect is cooed over as perhaps “just what the party needs to purge its ranks of the corrupt and the superstitious and restore its revolutionary prestige, which has been on the wane since the decade of the cultural revolution from 1966”.
In case readers are confused, this is the self-same cultural revolution described by his comrade Ken Fuller as “in essence an attack by Mao upon the CCP itself, using politically immature students … [characterised by] the absence of a class outlook, nationalism, the dearth of Marxist-Leninist work, the lack of inner-party democracy …” (p9).
White essentially defends the suppression of falum gong against charges in “the western press” that it is an “overreaction by a party that fears political challenges”. Not at all, he informs us, as “the list of Chinese dynasties overthrown by mass uprisings led by dervish cults … is a long one”. They are right to be paranoid and to have responded with heavy-handed oppression, in other words.
Thus, within the political entity that constitutes the CPB, we have trends represented by the likes of Williamson and White who are explicit in their support for the current regime in place in China, viewing it as some sort of socialism. Not only that, they are generally supportive of the repressive measures this monstrosity takes to maintain itself in power over the working people of that country and to manipulate society for that end. In a passage not explicitly polemicised with by Fuller, Williamson crassly writes that:
“All socialists should study carefully the two great contributions which the Chinese are making to political theory - the socialist market economy and the voluntary one-child policy. Both are equally revolutionary” (my emphasis Morning Star July 14).
On the other hand, we have the trend represented by Ken Fuller who explicitly rejects the notion that events such as Tiananmen represented “a socialist state attempting to prevent its overthrow” (p10) and who are dismissive of those who take the ‘socialist’ protestations of the Chinese leadership seriously as guilty of “wishful thinking”.
How long before these political currents clash openly? And once they do, what is to stop the entire fabric of the CPB’s world view unravelling? For example, Kate Hudson’s article on the recent war against rump Yugoslavia in CR assumes as its conceptual framework a bipolar world - on the one side, the forces of imperialism; on the other, those of socialism. That is, the staple theoretical fare of the ‘official communist’ world view since at least 1928. The west’s attack on what was “a progressive and open socialist society” (p19) - which only in its later stages took the form of direct military intervention - is thus presented as the sole motor of the disintegration of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. World imperialism - for reasons best known to itself - believes that places like ex-Yugoslavia and the USSR are best reduced to “easily dominated pieces”. It was all a dastardly plot, after all.
(As an aside, the discovery by ‘official communism’ that ex-Yugoslavia was a place that deserved to be “held in high regard for its struggles for freedom and independence” will probably come as a bit of a jolt to some comrades in the ranks who will recall denouncing Titoism as a brand of fascism).
In fact, the tendency to fragmentation of the FRY - while certainly exacerbated by certain actions of imperialism, not least the IMF - is explained by its internal dynamic, by the bureaucratic way its ‘socialism’ was established and by its intrinsic lack of viability as a society.
Those in the CPB who are starting to edge towards radical conclusions on the nature of the USSR and Eastern Europe are perhaps at the beginnings of a journey that could help them start to make real sense of the 20th century.
Our comrades?
Fuller is scathing about the potential of “healthy forces” in the CCP. He writes that “for at least 30 years, the ideological training conducted by the CCP has not resembled that which would justify the description ‘Marxist’. Many Marxist-Leninists have simply died, while others were killed during the Cultural Revolution” (p10).
Now we would no doubt have a dispute with comrade Fuller over the ‘Marxist-Leninist’ credentials of the forces he refers to, but his observation does raise another uncomfortable question for the CPB. Bereft as it is of ‘Marxist-Leninist’ forces, or even trends which might ‘resemble’ such, what price the CPB fraternal relationship with such a party?
The same question is posed - even more starkly - by the CPB’s relationship with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. In the article cited above on ex-Yugoslavia, it is intriguing that Hudson writes of the opposition to the war coming “primarily from communist and former communist parties and other left forces”, first amongst which she lists - “the Russian Communist Party” (p21).
This being the same Russian Communist Party - a fraternal organisation of the CPB - that is effectively denounced in this same issue of CR for not simply harbouring individual anti-semites, but actually conniving in the propagation of this foul, counterrevolutionary filth at the highest levels of the party. An article by Steve Silver - co-editor of the anti-fascist journal Searchlight - quotes chauvinist remarks by Zyuganov, the chair of the central committee, to the effect that Jews have to decide where their loyalties lie - with Zionist Israel or Mother Russia. To rub salt into the wound, an impeccably ‘official communist’ source is then cited - Gus Hall of the Communist Party of the United States - who characterises the remarks as “unmistakably anti-semitic”. Silver adds his own evaulation to the effect that statements such as Zyuganov’s have “real implications for the international communist movement” (such as whether it is an “international communist movement” at all, we might suggest). “Something”, he tells us, is “seriously wrong”.
Indeed, he suggests that anti-semitism is not simply a contemporary aberration amongst those who call themselves ‘communists’ in this part of the world and he cites shameful incidents from not only the Stalin era, but later. In conclusion he underlines the importance of an analysis of the reasons for the collapse of the USSR that will reveal how “ideas that can clearly be seen to have been created to undermine communism, and are alien to Marxism, can be incorporated by communists … They are the politics of the enemy camp and have to be ruthlessly exposed as such” (p5).
Again, the logic of what is being said here needs to be drawn out.
Silver characterises modern anti-semitism as “the ideology of the counterrevolution” (p5), an ideology that communists must fight because it is “not only the enemy of the Jewish people but of the revolution itself” (p4). He then cites not simply instances of contemporary anti-semitic statements from those who call themselves communists in today’s Russia, but finds this “ideology of counterrevolution” in the statements of the Soviet party under Krushchev and Brezhnev. He leaves us with the rather tantalising thought that an explanatory component of our understanding of the death of the USSR must demonstrate how ideas that were the mortal enemy of real communism came to be absorbed and utilised by people who claimed the mantle of Marx and Lenin.
Silver certainly takes his critique further and deeper than a mealy-mouthed Morning Star editorial of May 22, which simply chides the CPRF for “[failing] to recognise that there are some areas of potential support that must be rejected by a progressive movement … [since the toleration of anti-semitism] weakens the party’s ability to pose as a progressive alternative to the Yeltsin regime”. The piece essentially alibis the CPRF. It declares with a heavy heart that “in its attempts to build a patriotic alliance in opposition to the sell-out by the Yeltsin regime of Russian interests to imperialism, it has fallen short of communism’s internationalist roots by not cutting itself adrift from the purveyors of racial and national hatred”.
In fact, as Silver’s article makes clear, the leaders of the CPRF are a part of an organic trend which absorbed counterrevolutionary ideology - only one strand of which was in fact anti-semitism - while claiming to be communists. Surely there are some rather large question marks over the CPB’s fraternal comrades in today’s Russia for many in the party? And what are the implications for the past generations of Soviet leaders who so shamelessly mobilised anti-semitic sentiments in their society? What does that tell us about their politics? And if this holds true for them, what of the rest of the so-called “international communist movement” the CPB declares itself proud to be part of, in reality the fragments of the official ‘world communist movement’?
So many questions, comrades.
Straw men
Clearly, the key articles in the current issue of Communist Review represent the attempt by some sections to break from now patently absurd ‘official communist’ orthodoxy. However, this cannot be done properly except by digging to the roots of the problem. When Ken Fuller blasts the likes of Williamson for “the tendency to clutch at straws” by seizing on “isolated quotes” to justify the ‘socialist’ credentials of the Chinese leadership, he is - consciously or not - denouncing the entire methodological approach of the CPB itself to what it once called the “socialist bloc”.
Thus, while Williamson’s breathless credulity at the policy statements of the Chinese bureaucracy make an easy target, we wonder if comrade Fuller will follow the logic of his argument. After all, the whole of the CPB leadership - past and present - were guilty of exactly the same methodology when it came to Gorbachev and his reassurances that he was “restructuring” bureaucratic socialism to given power to the “working people” in the USSR. What does comrade Fuller make of this passage on developments in the USSR from the CPB’s 1989 version of the BRS?
“… the restructuring of the economy and society is proceeding in conditions of fuller socialist democracy and openness, and there is a determined effort to decentralise decision-making in every area of life to promote the initiative and genuine involvement of all working people” (quoted in J Conrad Which Road? p149).
Isn’t it clear that comrade Williamson is applying exactly the same method to the present-day leadership of the CCP - a method that has been the defining characteristic of the CPB’s approach? If leading sections of the organisation are now breaking from this, we welcome their conversion to the real world. It is long overdue, comrades.
However, the question does need to be posed, why now? On one level, disturbances in the basic belief system of the CPB are not advisable. This is an organisation characterised by a pronounced theoretical and political fragility. It has survived thus far in a sort of semi-vegetative state, much like that other centrist split, the New Communist Party. Its stable ‘theory’ has been in inverse proportion to the worth of its mental activity. This profound inertia was a positive advantage to it as an organisation: it prevented it from stirring its brittle-boned frame. Crucially, it stopped it from thinking, a dangerous thing for a political organisation so thoroughly compromised by history.
One particular blank in its collective memory relates to the very origins of its programme, the BRS, which I have already quoted from. As an organisation, the CPB was established as a split from the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1988 ostensibly on the basis of defending all editions of the Party’s programme - the British road to socialism - up to and including the 1978 version against opportunist dilution by the then Nina Temple-Martin Jacques Eurocommunist leadership. The irony of this stance was pointed out at the time by comrades organised in The Leninist faction - probably the majority of the rank and file comrades who went with this split actively opposed and organised against the 1978 programme when it appeared in draft form in 1977.
Thus at its formation, we pointed out that the CPB carried from its birth all the ideological differences that the ‘official’ CPGB contained when it last debated the BRS in 1977, along with a host of ‘left’ proto-factions and ‘left’ proto-splits. (For a fuller examination of the programmatic absurdities attending the birth of the CPB, see Which road? pp133-162). Fundamentally, the CPB’s version of the BRS perpetuated the key absurdities contained in earlier versions, which in the world of the late 1980s and early 90s had come to appear manifestly false.
First, the document claimed that there had been a “a shift in the balance of forces against imperialism” (quoted in ibid p145). Historically the notion that the “world balance of forces” had shifted decisively in favour of socialism and the forces of progress had been the justification for claiming that peaceful working class “revolutions” were now possible. Second, the CPB’s BRS still saw the Labour Party as the primary vehicle for socialist change in Britain, albeit harried and cajoled by a “broad democratic alliance” centrally motivated by communists.
For some time now, the CPB has thus existed programmatically as a version of the Amish sect. It has attempted to ‘freeze’ its world outlook, to turn its back on developments in the outside world. However, the election of Robert Griffiths as general secretary has clearly opened it up. The combination of financial problems looming over the prize asset - the turgid Morning Star - and the ominous political fault lines that now are clearly appearing could prove fatal.
The falling ‘Star’
The election of Robert Griffiths to the post of CPB general secretary over the weekend of January 10-11 1998 resulted from a bitterly contested palace coup. He replaced the deeply conservative and torpid Mike Hicks, print union bureaucrat and incumbent who had held to that position by the skin of his teeth for the previous two years.
Immediately, we predicted trouble for the CPB. First, because the Mike Hicks-Mary Rosser clique retained control over the Morning Star and were likely to retaliate. As indeed they soon did, suspending John Haylett from the position of editor and provoking a five-week-long strike by the journalists (see Weekly Worker January 22-April 16 1998). The current financial spat at the PPPS seems bound to be connected with the fallout from that bitter factional dispute, concealed as it was behind the smokescreen of an industrial dispute.
Secondly - and more importantly in many ways - because the relative dynamism of the new leader threatened the unity of the sleepy and inactive CPB membership:
“Those who doze peacefully together in blissful ignorance of each other’s politics may suffer a rude awakening if stirred into activity or thought, and may find it impossible to stomach each other in the cold light of day” (Weekly Worker January 22 1998).
Comrade Griffiths has a very different background to your average CPB apparatchik. His origins are in the esoteric world of Welsh revolutionary nationalism. Once a Plaid Cymru research officer, he published, with Gareth Miles, Sosialaeth I’r Cymry (Socialism for the Welsh people) in July 1979, and the following January founded the Welsh Socialist Republican Movement. This actively identified with the republican movement in Ireland and soon its activities attracted attention. Griffiths and others were arrested and tried on bomb-related charges. He served time on remand, but unlike quite a few others from the Welsh revolutionary nationalist milieu, he was found not guilty.
As the Morning Star rebellion broke in the mid-1980s, Griffiths took the positive step away from Welsh nationalism and joined the CPGB. He did not become a Labour-loyal reformist overnight, however. Indeed, he wrote to the forerunner of this paper, The Leninist in 1985, telling us that “a number of comrades in south Wales subscribe to your paper and largely agree with a number of positions put forward by it. In particular, your treatment of the women’s question, Ireland, the Labour Party has been excellent …” We “rightly [oppose] the British nationalism that infests the working class movement and, to some degree, all sections of the Communist Party - and which we see in some of the arguments about import controls, the EEC, Ireland, etc” (The Leninist June 1985).
Always a dynamic and ambitious politician, he had soon gathered a small following of critically-minded comrades around himself. It was this group that produced The south Wales discussion papers, republished by The Leninist in 1987. This was a highly critical evaluation of the BRS from the left (see Weekly Worker March 19 1998 for an edited version).
Yet, the critique of Griffiths and the other south Wales comrades remained partial, one-sided and in danger of slipping into apologia. Centrally, they failed to go the core of the opportunist cancer eating away at ‘official communism’ in Britain and internationally - the pernicious influence of the Soviet party on the world movement after it became dominated by opportunism in the mid-1920s. This was something that these comrades - Griffiths included - fought shy of even considering at the time.
Perhaps it is being considered only now - after the ignominious collapse of ‘official’ world communism; after the deep period of reaction this has precipitated; after the disappearance of the working class as an independent political factor of any sort; and after the reflection we see of these profoundly negative developments in the evolution of Blair’s Labour away from even a nominal relationship with the working class.
Better late than never, comrades. But there is - however - still some way to go.
Mark Fischer