24.02.2000

Fighting elections

Jack Conrad In the enemy camp November Publications London 1992, pp142, £4.95

In the context of the current London Socialist Alliance election campaign, it is timely to examine the theory, history and practice of election campaigns by revolutionary socialists in the past. Jack Conrad's small book, written in the context of the intervention by the Provisional Central Committee of the CPGB in the general election of 1992, is a useful vehicle for such a re-examination.

The former Leninist grouping, which had played the role of a proto-revolutionary tendency in the process of ferment and disintegration of the Stalinised and by then deeply reformist organisation that bore the name of the CPGB in that period, stood for election in four constituencies - two in London, one in South Wales, and one in Glasgow. Of course, the results were extremely modest, but then no-one expected anything else, given the political context of rampant bourgeois 'democratic' reaction and demoralisation of the left and workers' movement in which it took place.

However, the CPGB's campaign did have a political importance, in showing how communists could make the effort to use the electoral platform in order to address sections of the working class, even in circumstances of considerable difficulty. Indeed, in 1992, when the two mainstream parties contesting the election appeared to agree on most questions of importance to the masses, such an electoral intervention was both courageous and the only way to force class politics onto the agenda, even in a small way. Those left organisations that buried themselves in the Labour Party, or abstained from the electoral arena in order to simply make abstract propaganda for socialism and revolution, merely made themselves invisible to the masses and ensured the complete hegemony of bourgeois politics in the election.

In the enemy camp contains a short exposition of the historic evolution of the parliamentary system in Britain, first of all as a means of kings in medieval times to seek the aid of the city burghers (merchants and rich artisans) to offset the barons who tended to contest the extent of royal power. The brief historical narrative here does not address the English Revolution and some of the more controversial and complex questions of exactly the role of the aristocracy in the emergence of capitalism in Britain, but these historic questions are largely outside its frame of reference. Rather, it seeks to establish the continuity between parliament as a means originally used by the monarchy to provide a facade of 'popular consent' for its rule in the past, and the role of parliament today. Parliamentary systems of government are necessarily undemocratic, as the book explains: ". the widely accepted claim that through parliament popular rule is exercised enables it to serve as a dense thicket of ideological mystification behind which the capitalist reality of the present-day state can be concealed. Parliament and parliamentary elections are used in this way to gain popular consent for the exploitation of the many by the few ..."

The specific, as opposed to general, means by which capitalist class rule is maintained in Britain are addressed concretely: "Between the army, as line of last resort, and parliament, and first line of defence, the bourgeoisie has a minefield of other establishment institutions, laws and traditions in place to protect its privileges. The courts, the two-party system, the civil service, the Bank of England, the House of Lords, the police and the mass media are all available to 'check and balance' any democratic right. Moreover, the unwritten British constitution gives it the perfect legal device to quickly change form. Using its powers of prerogative, the crown can dismiss any government and dissolve any House of Commons, at any time. After all, Britain is not officially a parliamentary democracy. It is a monarchy. Cabinet ministers, MPs, members of the armed forces, the police, the judiciary all swear oaths of loyalty to the crown rather than the elected government or people. That is why cabinet ministers constitutionally derive their authority from being appointed to the crown's privy council, not from being members of the majority party in the House of Commons."

It is actually interesting, in the light of the more recent elaborated positions of the Weekly Worker, to note that the CPGB's 1992 election manifesto did not make an issue of the abolition of the monarchy, as a demand that could potentially have a serious destabilising effect on the structure of capitalist rule in the UK. The comrades' placing this aspect of the programme of communism at the centre of their work came as a result of later discussions and the elaboration of a programme. But this is tangential to the main subject matter of this review.

Through a discussion of the tactics of the Bolsheviks and the early Communist International on the attitude of communists to bourgeois elections, the book makes a concrete case for a determined and systematic use of the tactic of standing candidates in the 1990s, as a weapon that communists should always have in their arsenal and be willing to use. Indeed, standing in election is for communists not just an ordinary tactic, or "essentially a tactical question", as the SWP's Candy Udwin told the Weekly Worker last week (February 17). What comes over from the book is that there has to be a very good reason for a communist organisation in a non-revolutionary situation not to carry out at least some exemplary electoral campaigns - notably some transient opportunity to win over wholesale a larger rival formation to the communist programme itself. The discussion of the tactics of the Bolsheviks reveals quite clearly that the Bolsheviks used the tactic of standing for election to address the masses in periods of working class retreat and demoralisation, when mass struggles were not the norm.

The discussion of the tactics of the Communist International in its revolutionary period in the early 1920s is also fruitful in this regard. In particular, in the period immediately after the Russian Revolution, as the CPGB was in the process of being founded, a series of fierce debates took place as to the attitude that communists should take towards parliament, and equally importantly the tactics that should be used in addressing the working class supporters of the Labour Party. These debates were part of a wider international debate that took place within the infant communist movement.

A sizeable group of fairly inexperienced militants, out of justified loathing for the corruption of social democratic parliamentary parties (and also trade union leaders loyal to these parties), in shepherding millions of workers from all sides into the bloody slaughter of World War I, maintained that communists should have nothing to do with parliament and elections. Indeed, in some cases these naive leftist militants went further still, and insisted that communists should not participate in trade unions either. It took a considerable fight, and some splits, for the Comintern to overcome these ultra-left currents, a struggle that involved re-elaborating again the tactics of the Bolsheviks in the various Russian dumas (toothless fake parliaments, convened by the tsarist regime to provide a fig-leaf of popular representation).

The Bolsheviks used the opportunity of elections to this powerless body as an opportunity to engage in mass agitation and propaganda for the overthrow of the tsarist regime, and as a tribune for the struggles of the working class and the peasantry. Bolshevik deputies were under the strict control of their party, and were not in the duma to engage in parliamentary careers, but rather to act as revolutionary leaders of the masses. They were thus often subject to persecution by the regime, despite their status.

The question of communist tactics towards reformist parties, such as the British Labour Party, is a key topic of In the enemy camp. The question of critical support to the Labour Party in Britain is discussed in a manner specific to the time it was put forward by Lenin and the Bolsheviks - in the early 1920s when Labour was a comparatively new party that had not been clearly seen to have betrayed the working class. In that period, the illusion that Labour was a party that would bring major gains for working class people, and that it would stand up for their interests against the bosses in parliament, was widespread.

Labour was a party that contained the bulk of class-conscious militants in Britain, and Lenin argued that communists should not only advocate that workers vote for it in elections, but seek CPGB affiliation to it in order to fight for communist politics among the mass of workers who supported it. In my opinion, In the enemy camp makes too much of the question of supposed 'British exceptionalism' in motivating this tactic engaged in by the early Comintern. In fact, the tactics elaborated at that time in principle are applicable wherever a mass social democratic or other reformist party generates significant illusions among the working class that it really stands, in some definable way, for the interests of working people against the bosses.

However, the thrust of In the enemy camp, and indeed its main strength, is as an elaboration of revolutionary electoral tactics under the conditions that prevailed in the 1990s (and indeed largely still prevail). It contains an excellent critique of the bulk of the 'revolutionary' left who lined up behind Labour, even as it was distancing itself more and more from the claim to represent the working class.

The 1992 election, it points out, was the first 'normal' bourgeois election that had taken place in Britain for a couple of decades. 'Normal' in the sense that the two parties did not really disagree about very much, despite Labour's connections to the trade unions. Labour was not seen by working people as in any sense a party with any vision of an alternative society, or even one that sought to bring significant reforms in the here and now. It was seen by a very sceptical population as being, at best, the party that would crap on the working class perhaps a little bit less than the Tories. And indeed, the difference between the two parties was so slight that even in the middle of a double-dip recession the Tories were able to convince enough people that they were still better at running capitalism that the other lot, and thus retain power with a reduced majority.

The stageist method of most of the British left, that led them to expend great amounts of effort in support of a party that at that point did not even seriously pretend to stand for anything other than the same medicine we get from the Tories, is analysed in some detail.

Also briefly addressed is the question of Militant's split from the Labour Party in the same period. In this context, I think that the PCC made a sectarian error, in that, though it campaigned for Militant's Lesley Mahmood in the Walton by-election in July 1991, as her standing was an act of defiance against the witch hunt and hounding out of the Labour Party of all those with any real commitment to the interests of the working class, the PCC refused to support Militant's candidates in the general election itself. The grounds for this were that Militant had not broken from reformism, which is of course true but irrelevant and, as a reason, inconsistent. After all, since Lesley Mahmood stood for the same organisation as Nellist, Fields, Sheridan and co, then, in the absence of any programmatic rupture among the Militant ranks, by definition she also stood for the same left reformist programme.

The appendices of In the enemy camp contain a number of documents, both from the period of the early Comintern, and from the CPGB's 1992 general election campaign. In particular, it contains some material from the debates around parliamentarism and the question of Labour Party affiliation, which adds a bit more to the quite extensive material already available on these questions from other sources, particularly Woodhouse's and Pearce's Communism in Britain, republished a few years ago by Bookmarks, though originally produced by Gerry Healy's Socialist Labour League. It also contains the CPGB's Communist Manifesto 1992 which, despite gaps that can be pointed to in retrospect, is in the main a fine document.