30.09.1999

Spies like us

Legality and illegality are different moments in the class struggle

On one level, it has been hard to take the furore over the latest round of spy allegations at all seriously. And yet witch hunts are always dangerous and can develop their own frightening momentum.

Inevitably any revelations about espionage on behalf of the former Soviet Union or eastern Europe will expose more moles in the ranks of Labour, the trade union and progressive movement than the Tories. Given the Tories’ wrecking operation against the Blair project, Anne Widdecombe’s obnoxious attempt to create maximum fuss around the latest allegations therefore has a certain purpose, even if it has been pretty desperate at times.

Viewed objectively, the whole thing has been very small beer. Quite what the real operative value of the intelligence supplied by the likes of the hapless Robin Pearson, economics lecturer at Hull university, is supposed to have had is very questionable. The tritely sensationalist BBC2 documentary, ‘The spying game’ (September 13), reported such high grade operations as “reading the dissertations” of students to identify leftist/rightist sympathies, informing his controller of those who went on to jobs in ‘sensitive’ areas such as Nato or the foreign office (although if Pearson knew, it can hardly have been very ‘hush, hush’), passing on publicly available articles and “infiltrating” (that is, attending) the meetings and lectures of opponents of bureaucratic socialist regimes.

Indeed, there is a cynical parallel between the eastern bloc state security forces and the western media professionals. In the highly bureaucrat-ised secret police of a highly bureaucratised ‘really existing socialism’, this state within a state was a law unto itself. Nevertheless, in societies where mendacity was necessary for survival - in public everyone repeated official untruths - the secret police were prone to lie to themselves. As in every sphere, targets were fulfilled, even if that meant invention. Not only would it be directly in the material interests of Stasi controllers to grossly exaggerate the importance of their contacts and the quality of the material they were supplying; it would have been fully in tune with the ethos of a system whose greatest achievements were in the realm of fictional statistics. Thus, it was interesting that Robin Pearson and his Stasi controller, for example, chose for their debriefing sessions locations that both of them had always wanted to visit - the Isle of Skye, Paris and so on.

And of course, the media professionals who have exposed this ‘nest of traitors’ have - from their own position in a highly bureaucratised, unaccountable apparatus - every interest in also talking up the importance of these agents.

Even the operative value of the material on Britain’s nuclear technology supplied by Melita Norwood is very questionable. At best, it is probably most accurate to say that her information formed one small part of a much wider technical and espionage jigsaw that facilitated the development of the USSR’s nuclear capability.

Leaving aside the media hue and cry, the incident has shown us the true balance of class forces in contemporary British society. Also, it illustrates something about the position of a communist party in capitalist society, about its relationship to those fluid categories of ‘legality’ and ‘illegality’.

All partisans of the workers’ movement must offer our support to those accused of these ‘crimes’ against their country. Most of these people - whatever some of their personal motivations and foibles might have been - took brave decisions to work for a cause they identified with: the fight for the liberation of humanity.

The fact that the state seems pretty disinclined to take things further illustrates a number of things. First, it underlines the quality of the information the establishment evaluates it has lost.

Second, it emphasises in its own way the fact we are living through a period of reaction of a special type. In general, while the organisations of the working class have not been smashed, our world movement has suffered a devastating ideological defeat with the collapse of bureaucratic socialism. The idea of a revolutionary alternative to existing society - almost of any collective answers to our problems - has been enormously discredited. In other words, the government feels there is no need for some disruptive, semi-hysterical anti-communist witch-hunt. Why refight won battles?

Thirdly, there are some important general lessons to be drawn about the nature of our struggle as communists in a capitalist society.

Shortly before being jailed after being stitched up during the 1986 Wapping strike, Mike Hicks, later the general secretary of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, was quick to assure the court that “I have never attempted to, or encouraged others to, breach the laws of our land”. Of course, rather than the expression of individual opportunism, this was the perfectly logical outcome of reformist politics, codified in the opportunist programme, the British road to socialism (in either its Eurocommunist or CPB versions).

The response of today’s CPB to the exposure of Melita Norwood is further evidence of the contradictory and problem-fraught move to the left by this organisation since Hicks was ousted by Robert Griffiths. In the Morning Star of September 17, Andrew Murray, a former Straight Leftist, forthrightly gives his opinion that comrade Norwood “did us all a service” and that she “dwarfs her accusers”. Quite right. Yet canvassed for his views, the former general secretary of the CPGB - the deeply conservative right opportunist, Gordon McLennan - assured the bourgeois press that he would have expelled her pronto. Who can doubt that the grey apparatchik Hicks would have done the same?

The orthodox communist understanding of legality and illegality does not see them as opposites, but simply as different moments in the development of the class struggle. A party that is revolutionary is essentially illegal, independently of the formal legal opportunities that may exist at a particular moment in any country. Indeed, the Communist International - in its 1921 resolution, ‘The organisational structure of the communist parties, the methods and content of their work’ - had a developed view on the combination of legal and illegal work. It criticised

“legal communist parties in the capitalist countries … [that are] not preparing for illegal work; they assume they will be able to operate legally for a long period of time and adopt structures that meet only the requirements of the day-to-day struggle” (Theses, resolutions and manifestos of the first four congresses of the Third International London 1983, p258).

It is in this context that we should view the activities of the members of the Party, without drawing formal and absolute boundaries between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’. Of course, as an organisation we discourage frivolous attitudes to breaking the law. But the boundaries of ‘legality’ are fluid anyway. During the miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85, our organisation agitated for the generalisation of miners’ hit squads, gave a platform for individuals forming these teams, and miners we influenced participated in them. However, any suggestion that sympathisers or members of the Communist Party should under today’s circumstances substitute for the class and organise terror squads to enforce small strikes would be madness.

Similarly, in Ireland the republican movement has financed some of its operations through raiding post offices, banks and the like. Because of the level of the struggle and consciousness, such actions were perceived by the wider population as engagements in a liberation war, not criminal acts. The same lesson can be drawn from sharp clashes between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks over the former’s armed expropriations. Lenin’s position on these actions was presented in resolution form for the 4th Congress in April 1906:

“We are of the opinion and propose that the congress should agree ... That fighting operations are also permissible for the purpose of seizing funds belonging to the enemy - ie, the autocratic government - to meet the needs of insurrection …” (VI Lenin, ‘A tactical platform for the unity congress of the RSDLP’).

In others words, the scope of the ‘illegal’ actions of the party are organically connected to the level of the class struggle itself. The Party is no more a gang of armed robbers than it is an espionage conspiracy organised for the benefit of ‘foreign powers’. These things are subordinated to the political purpose of the Communist Party - revolution and working class state power. Of course, it hardly needs to be said that these aims are in themselves ‘criminal’ for the ruling class.

In 1943, Dave Springhall, the CPGB’s national organiser, was arrested and sentenced to seven years imprisonment for spying for the USSR, Britain’s wartime ally. The former sub-editor of the Daily Worker, Douglas Hyde, a man who deserted the Communist Party to convert to Catholicism and plied a trade as a professional anti-communist for decades, noted that

“several other Party members during the same period were sentenced on similar charges. A vastly larger number who were guilty of the same activities were never caught” (D Hyde I believed London 1953, p133).

Springhall was immediately expelled. Opportunist political considerations were primary in this. Our Party’s support for Britain’s war effort was an important moment in the growing integration of what had once been a revolutionary party into capitalist society. Hyde, a prominent member at the time, pinpoints the real motivation behind Springhall’s ejection. It was not because the Party “disapproved of his activities as such, but for two quite different reasons: first, because we had no desire, least of all at that moment of growing popularity, to get the public reputation for condoning spying by our members …; second, because, viewed from any angle, it was a major indiscretion for the national organiser, of all people, to take such risks at such a moment” (ibid p133) - which are two ways of formulating exactly the same reason, actually.

In this sense, ‘spying’ was mass activity of the Party rank and file during World War II:

“The information came from factories and the forces, from civil servants and scientists. And the significant thing to recognise is that those that did it were not professional spies, they took big risks in most cases, received no payment whatsoever, and (this is doubly important) did not see themselves as spies, still less as traitors. As Party members they would have felt that they were being untrue to themselves and unworthy of the name of communist if they had not done” (ibid p134).

As defenders of what they regarded as a bastion of genuine socialism, thousands of ordinary members crossed the formal boundaries of legality and ‘spied’ for the USSR. The Party’s drift to the right, its “growing popularity”, given its deeply opportunist support for imperialism’s war effort, placed such comrades in a profoundly contradictory position as the revolutionary rhetoric and reformist practice of the CPGB diverged.

Springhall was only one victim of this rupture. The future reforged Communist Party we fight for will not rush to disown its own comrades in pursuit of bourgeois respectability and acceptance in the eyes of the establishment.

Mark Fischer