23.08.2000

Mapping our tradition

Notes of the discussion between the CPGB and Alliance for Workers' Liberty, held on March 17. Mark Fischer (MF) and John Bridge (JB) represented the CPGB, while Sean Matgamna (SM) and Paul Hampton (PH) spoke for the AWL

M: We may be in a period of reconstruction of the left. We hope to work out in detail the differences with you, possibly, if it develops like that, to the point of fusion. And at the same time to draw in your periphery, our periphery, and others, into a dialogue and discussion which will cover all the major issues of the left.

We are people in the Bolshevik, Comintern, Trotskyist tradition who believe that, to a considerable extent, that tradition has not been developed properly. Most of orthodox Trotskyism is an epiphenomenon of Stalinism. Much of its revolutionary perspectives are spun from the survival and expansion of the various Stalinist states. Various deviations like Cliffism said capitalism is not disappearing.

We are trying to develop the tradition. It may be that all we can do is pose questions which other people will be left to answer. But we are engaged in trying to resurrect that tradition. Without doing that, we are left with starting again, which may be necessary, although I do not think it is. It would be a big step backwards.

The other thing we are doing, as an organisation, is practice, which separates the pseudo-academics from the revolutionary Marxists. We have to be regulated by the class struggle. I am not trying to exaggerate the level of class struggle. But if we had not maintained an orientation to the class and to its organisations, which for us includes the Labour Party, I believe we would have got lost a long time ago, even if we had made more progress in sorting out the ideas, which is by no means to be taken for granted. So we are trying to build an organisation that is in the real tradition of Bolshevism, which is not Stalinoid or Zinovievist, or in national terms Cannonite.

It is essential, if any organisation is to develop politically, that it maintains freedom of discussion, freedom of dissent. We have written into our constitution an amendment, guaranteeing minorities access to the public press. Now obviously an organisation of action has to reserve the right to suspend discussion for the duration of an action. That would not necessarily impinge on the idea of an open and free discussion.

What is remarkable about the Cliffists is that they have no politics that are not negotiable, that are not junkable for organisational advantage, with the possible exception of their shibboleths such as state capitalism. For us Marxism is an attempt to map out what is going on in the real world, to codify it, define it and redefine it, because of course you always make mistakes. We believe in letting ourselves be guided and governed by what we are led to understand from our Marxism. That does not mean we believe you have to be rigidly dogmatic, and ignore the fact that your Marxist extrapolations and qualifications may not take account of things that are richer in reality than your abstractions. We think you have to be flexible on such matters. But Marxism is a guide to action. There has to be some relationship between theory and practice.

JB: In terms of theoretical tradition, we look back to the Marxism of Marx, Engels and Lenin and the 'classical period'. We do not take a sneering attitude towards the Second International. It was not the source of all evil. Organisationally, we look to the Bolshevik tradition - like you, I suspect. We come from a different angle regarding Trotskyism. As you will see in our press, in and around our organisation we have comrades who would consider themselves Trotskyites. But for our part the majority would not look at the Fourth International as an example of a genuine International. Nor do we view the Revolutionary Communist Party in the 1940s as a model to aspire to. That is not a tradition we seek to emulate.

Politically, that explains why we stress our opposition to economism. It is not because we come from 'official communism'. Actually this is something we learned from Lenin. Highlighting political issues such as Ireland or Scotland is not Stalinism, but Leninism.

Comintern had many weaknesses, not least the CPGB's ingrained economism. So we too would say that our tradition must be developed. Anyone who treats the communist tradition as static turns it into its opposite. So we emphasise the necessity of thinking - not only about historical questions, but contemporary questions as well. We regard nothing as fixed. Although obviously a stand must be taken on key issues and principles, past and present.

We started off with four comrades. They were very much isolated from the movement in Britain. Our founding comrades had all been members of the Communist Party of Turkey. Our publication of The Leninist was very much about self-clarification: we knew we did not have the answers, and were writing and publishing as much for ourselves as for anyone who cared to listen.

In terms of culture and organisation, we operate what we understand as democratic centralism. That means an elected, financial commitment and unity in action. The CPGB does not take an academic view of Marxism. Marxism is about commitment; it is a partisan project. Like yourselves we too believe that there must be freedom of criticism. If our press does not publish something, comrades have the right to publish it themselves. If someone produced a 10,000-word masterpiece, our editors have the right to say they think it is rubbish and refuse to print it. Nonetheless the author has the right to go public if they want to go to the expense and bother.

PM: Do you have an internal bulletin?

MF: No. Internal stuff is largely of a notice board character. We circulate resolutions that are going to forthcoming aggregates, and so on. Given our paper and our project, an internal bulletin is not needed.

JB: We too take the view that discussion can be suspended in the middle of an action. Yet we have often found that this is exactly when a frank discussion is required.

Our fundamental project is to reforge a Communist Party. This does not mean looking back to 1920 in some romantic way, but forward. We are not even particularly worried about the name of such an organisation (though we believe that the tradition of the CPGB - with all its faults - is a vital one for the whole Marxist and Leninist left).

We want a party of the advanced part of the class. The London Socialist Alliance as a site to argue for that. The unification of the left as presently constituted would not in itself produce a party, which must contain a politically significant part of the class so as to act as a vanguard.

MF: This sets the tone of our political struggle. Uniting the left does not mean a mutual non-aggression pact. It is not a question of subordinating minority opinions to majority opinions. It implies political struggle on two levels:

Firstly, as an organisation we have a majority viewpoint on the minimum-maximum programme, the constitution, the national question in the UK, etc. We therefore have a distinct point of view.

Secondly, we are for a cultural revolution on the left as a whole. As presently constituted, the left is incapable of building a workers' party. Its culture of debate, of democracy, stinks. More than that. The internal regimes of the left tell you something genuinely frightening about the type of 'socialism' they envisage. They refuse to allow differences in their papers as this may 'confuse' the workers! If they are 'confused' by largely trivial differences, how will they run society?

SM: Why the focus on the CPGB, which became explicitly reformist 50 years ago? That raises another question. At what point do you consider the communist parties to have ceased to be working class parties?

MF: Our origins helped us clarify the importance of the Communist Party. The CPGB in 1920 was the highest political achievement of our class thus far. It united the advanced part of the class under a revolutionary programme, situated in the living experience of Bolshevism.

Its decline and disintegration was death by a thousand opportunist cuts - some deeper than others. Throughout the period we are talking about, the CPGB organised the best militant fighters in our class. It degenerated, yes. But turning your back on the CPGB meant turning your back on the advanced part of the class itself.

Opportunist forms such as Eurocommunism were not peculiarly British - they were world phenomena. The ideological struggle in the CPGB joined us as Leninists in a global battle against opportunist trends globally.

Degeneration set in early, in parallel with the USSR. Of course, there were important turning points: the popular front, the British road to socialism, etc. But it was correct to orientate towards and struggle in that Party until the very end. Outsiders had a very crude view - for them it was 'tankies' versus 'Euros'. We are living evidence that the reality was much more complex.

SM: Yet these militants played a terrible role. Look at their work on the docks. Of course, there were some good militants. But as a generality, the CP ceased to be composed of good class fighters a hell of a long time ago.

PH: A question. Isn't the experience of Germany in 1933 decisive? For us, that is when we cease to be part of the 'official communist' tradition. What are the decisive tests where 'orthodox' communism went wrong? This happened much earlier than you are pointing to. We need to know about China, Germany, etc.

SM: Do you think Trotsky's whole orientation after 1933 was a mistake?

JB: Clearly, the decisive turning point was 1924, when the Soviet Party adopted 'socialism in one country'. The world communist movement as a whole did not rebel. The vast majority acquiesced. This tells you there was already a really big problem. Certainly, 1933 was an important moment, although the Party in Germany was already bureaucratic centralist and following a disastrous policy before 1933.

Our experience is of relevance. The Leninist was formed in 1980. When we published, we openly stated that we were conducting a war of political extermination against every opportunist trend that existed alongside us in the CPGB and internationally. Horror stories do not shock us. In almost every industry CP activists pursued a very wrong political strategy, a pro-bureaucracy line almost invariably. But throughout industry, in every trade union, trades council, etc, the collectively thinking part of the working class was organised in one party - the CPGB.

I joined the CPGB in 1968. It had 32,000 members. That mattered. When we became critical, we did so as a product of the CPGB's contradictions. We did not look over our shoulders at the Trotskyist tradition and see a movement with all the answers. Far from it. We were not and are not anti-Trotskyist, of course. In our writings up to 1989 on the USSR, there was a lot of similarity between the orthodox Trotskyists and us.

SM: When did you break with the idea that the USSR was some sort of workers' state?

JB: In the early 1990s, personally. Our published material up to then largely responded to events. With the collapse of the Soviet Union we said that we - all of the left - needed to rethink everything.

We can locate big problems in the world communist movement from the very beginning. There was a qualitative shift with Stalin's rise to power and a counterrevolutionary moment in 1928. But we do not view where we come from as having framed us negatively at all. You can be an organic product of something and still subject it to rigorous critique. The key lesson is that the left needs to be united in a Communist Party, an organisation uniting the advanced part of the class itself, but with the right politics, with a healthy democratic culture.

Thus, we do not say, 'Join us because the majority of our group thinks X, Y or Z on a particular question'. It is not a narrow project. We fought as a faction in CPGB with that understanding. When the opportunists 'closed down' the Party, they could not close us down. As loyal members, we took the name to connect us with the ongoing Partyist project, not as an act of nostalgia.

PH: The idea of a mass revolutionary workers' party not contentious. But you talk about uniting the "advanced part of class" without talking about the political basis of this unity. You have a blind spot on where the communist movement degenerated qualitatively.

What about Germany? Yes, the KPD did still organise the vast majority of militants. But its politics were hopelessly wrong; it did not fight the victory of Hitler. What does that tell you about those militants as the "advanced part of the class"? Yes, there were many militants in the KPD you would want to orientate to, to change their politics. But the fact that they gave up without a fight - doesn't that tell you something about that movement?

JB: We agree.

PH: But what conclusions do you draw? That militants could have carried on working in CPs, even in exile? You make sociology more important than politics.

JB: The answer is simple. If we had existed, if we had a publication in 1933, what do you think we would have been saying? It is a principle to publish criticisms openly. If we had been expelled, we take the consequences. But the KPD - with its mass, militant membership - is hardly something to walk away from. To win the working class, you must win its most advanced part.

PH: With what politics? Would you have called for a united front? Do you think Trotsky's approach to the rise of fascism was essentially correct?

MF: Many of his writings on the nature of fascism have great insights. His critique of the bureaucratic sectarianism of the third period is broadly correct. Yes, the call for a united front was correct. So where does that take us?

PH: So what conclusions do you draw about the world communist movement? The people you define as "advanced" stood in the way of implementing these policies.

MF: Are you suggesting that simply stating a correct argument should be sufficient for it to win a majority? Is it a moral question or one of political struggle?

JB: What's the problem? From at least 1924, the CPSU was going rotten. The fact that the world communist movement acquiesced tells you something pretty damning. 1928 happened without a rebellion from any national section - clearly a problem. Now in Germany, maybe it is correct post-1933 to say that as a leadership the KPD is "dead for revolution". But what about its million or so members? There were 200 Trotskyists in Germany at the time - yes, they called for many correct things. But they had no forces, they led nothing, no advanced part of the class. Now where was that layer of the class to be found?

PH: Trotsky did not write off militants in the CPs. He often argued with his own people about this. The point you miss is how you judge political parties. Primarily we say it must be by the political line they put forward, not by how big they are.

No CP led any sort of workers' revolution apart from the Bolsheviks. Yet for years, you argued with people to work in these formations. Many of these organisations actively led counterrevolutions - China, partly in Cuba, Indonesia, etc. In what sense could you have been in the Chinese party? - You would have been shot. Chinese Trotskyists were shot or imprisoned.

When you are thrown out, it is hardly stupid or wrong to organise with others who have your criticisms.

MF: Something more was done after 1933. A new, fourth, international was called for and - farcically - established. It was an abortion.

PH: What sense an "abortion"? Did it have a correct programme?

MF: Was it an "International"? Was it a world party of revolution? Here was a body that "thought through one head".

PH: It had more substance to it than that.

MF: No, it had no "substance" to it as an International. It is not the party of a great revolutionary's heritage that we would want to stand on. Essentially, it was a sect-building project. The type of 'International' Trotsky built, the type of discipline that prevailed in it and its sections under his tutelage, accounts for at least some of the political degeneration we see on the left today.

SM: JB makes two obvious errors. First, he says CPs were seriously defective, as shown by their reaction to socialism in one country. However, you use that to avoid the fact that there are qualitative levels of degeneration. Socialism in one country is obviously illiterate nonsense. It had terrible implications that people did not see at the time. Actually, there were revolts in the CPs of France, Germany, Belgium - people who later became Trotskyists. There are big differences between degenerations in theory like socialism in one country and China 1927, and the total surrender in Germany in 1933 and the popular front in France in '36. On one side we have degeneration in theory and on the other a crossing of class lines.

In 1938 in Britain, the CP was to the right of the rightwing leaders of the Labour Party. It wanted a coalition government.

Yes, it was true that the militants of that Party were serious militants: they were the best militants. In particular circumstances, they behaved like heroes. Who could deny that these people were communists in their guts and in their attempts to be revolutionaries?

But they were thoroughly corrupted by Stalinism. They thought they were serving the revolution because they served the USSR. In their own class struggle, they spread chauvinism, they were corrupters of the class struggle, betrayers when the Soviet bureaucracy considered it useful. They often played a vile role. Objectively then, they were not communists: not even socialists in a meaningful sense. Because they were corrupted in this way for a whole historical epoch, nothing could be done.

There was no internal life in these parties. In a sense, they were something akin to a religious sect. The authority was that of Marx, and it was interpreted by 'priests' - Stalin and so on. They had a single stated dogma - support for the Soviet Union. Everything else was malleable. Yesterday's dogma could be tomorrow's heresy. These may have been good militants to start with, but they were not the vanguard of the class. I hear what you say and am not denying the description of the antecedents of these people - often heroic and self-sacrificing, etc.

These people you call the vanguard of the class preached vicious chauvinism - anti-semitism, etc. They spread anti-semitism thinly disguised as anti-Zionism. This was not communism politically. This had to be faced. The Trotskyists - puny and weak though they were - did so.

The Trotskyists were right, yet so helpless. They inherited the programme of Comintern, without the masses necessary to realise it. Trotsky was right to find alternative sources. The vanguard of the class at one time can become the laggards of the class at another. New militants are formed in struggle.

I think it is probably true to say that the Fourth International was an abortion, except politically. It became an abortion politically because Trotsky died, leaving the International with a completely untenable analysis of Stalinism. But initially, it must be judged politically.

JB confuses two things. Yes, you have to relate to any working class-based party, whatever its politics. If it is mass and has the workers' ear, we relate to it. Tactically, we can enter it. Thus, we would agree with you about the French CP, for example. It was the mass party of the French workers for a very long time. But it was not the vanguard. In the case of Britain, you romanticise the CP.

In what sense were British CPers - from the mid-30s and 40s, certainly the 50s - the vanguard of the class? They preached chauvinism, subordination to the USSR's ruling class, pacifism, and so on. In industry, they orientated towards the bureaucracy and held back the class.

In Britain, an orientation to a mass party of the working class must be to the Labour Party. Labour did not consist exclusively of militants, nor did it have the same sort of spirit as the CP, even in a Stalinist sense. But Labour was a mass party and you could fight within it. The CPGB was a vanguard in the sense that its members were often in leading positions and played a leading - though negative - role, but not in any political sense. I can accept tactically that you would fight them within their own party if you were allowed in. It might have made sense for tiny groups of Trotskyists to join the Communist Party and take part in the discussions. That was unfeasible, impossible. My experience in the Young Communist League confirms this.

It may be true that there was no other way you could have developed. I am not trying to make you renounce your own past. But I have problems with the generalisations you draw from it.

JB: There is confusion here. Let us take a non-controversial example: Longbridge and 'Red Robbo'. He was in the CPGB. The majority of shop stewards were either in the CP or heavily influenced by it. It was not a vanguard in the sense of having correct ideas - we agree. The Leninist No1 - for all its faults - can hardly be accused of being with these people in an uncritical, laudatory, romantic way.

We attempted ruthless criticism of 'official communism' worldwide, but specifically in Britain. We were wrong on many things, but we were not a CPGB admiration society. Without thoroughgoing criticism of a genuine Party produced by our class, with all its faults and even crimes, we stand in danger of making the same errors again. We published our criticisms openly - both of the CPGB and of the world communist movement and its entire history. We would have done the same if we had been in Germany in 1933.

PH: You would have been expelled.

JB: Maybe. Then perhaps - like Trotsky - we might have found ourselves utterly isolated. When Trotsky established his Fourth International, what he wanted was quite correct: real parties of the working class, organised around a Bolshevik programme. He wanted the thinking part of our class to uphold the banner of communism. Yet despite sowing dragon's teeth what he produced was sects. What was it in his method that produced that? Sure, extreme isolation. But that tradition as a whole has a sect method. We stand for Partyism.

MF: We did not say reform the CPGB. We said reforge. What we were calling for was a revolution in the CPGB. We were not engaged in a polite debate with the likes of Gordon McLennan and Nina Temple. We were not out to modify their opportunism. Open revolt and sweeping away the old regime - organisationally and politically - was our slogan.

We published openly in order to educate the advanced sections of the class that were being made afresh in struggles. During 1984-85, The Leninist went from a quarterly theoretical journal to a monthly newspaper. We intersected with those new layers of advanced workers being made during the miners' strike. And, yes, we called on them to join the CPGB. Not as dupes for Mick McGahey or George Bolton and other NUM bureaucrats . We said, join as revolutionaries. Workers need a combat party, a revolutionary party; join and fight for one. The recruiting role we played for the CPGB was not a 'diplomatic' one. We told people what the party was, what its politics were like. We encouraged people to join to overturn the leadership.

Fighting in the Communist Party hardly meant turning your back on the Labour Party. The CPGB often gave the Labour left coherence and ideas - good and bad. Take the British road to socialism. No-one within Labour could have produced such a coherent apology for left reformism. This is not positive, but it is true.

The CPGB was not an isolated, esoteric sect on the fringes of the labour movement. Arguments within it were not walled off from the workers' movement. That was the strategic importance of the CPGB. It had a resonance far beyond its ranks.

PH: You give the impression that you want to keep coming back to your origins for your own rationalisation for what you have done and not discuss where you think the communist movement went wrong, what the stages of degeneration were.

What is your attitude to the USSR, to the first four congresses of Comintern? Those are the questions of substance we need to address. You seem to want to keep returning to your own record as a group. But you do not clarify where you are as a tradition.

There is a break somewhere and I am not clear where. Both of us would say - Marx, Engels, Lenin. Then what? We have a coherent answer - Trotsky. But where are you coming from?

SM: The CPGB was a rightist, Stalinist sect for decades. This may explain the amount of time you put into critical exchanges with political groups. You have a passive attitude to cadres. The real point is to create cadres. The historic experience of the working class movement has been that cadres formed in one movement do not necessarily move forward when that movement goes wrong - eg, the Second International. The same was true of Comintern. Cadres were lost, ruined. Good qualities were turned against them.

The various post-World War II Trotskyist groups are an example. Very few of us survived. It was hard to re-orientate cadres. In the 20th century communism was defeated - we have to face that fact. One aspect of that defeat was the incapacity of militants to break with a movement they were in when it started to turn into its opposite.

In certain areas, CP militants could play useful roles. But the CP as such, its top cadre, were agents of a bureaucracy which tied workers to the bourgeois state. We have to make cadres from the youth, from raw people who are not corrupt. CPers, whatever their motives, because they believed in the USSR did all sorts of bad things. People were motivated by high ideals. Nevertheless that is what they were politically - agents for the ruling class of the Stalinist state. The tragedy of the 20th century was that one layer of workers' parties was controlled by the bourgeoisie and their agents and then - after the 1930s - the people who had been a revolutionary alternative were controlled by the ruling class of the USSR.

Was the FI stillborn? Was it the result of some intrinsic mistakes on Trotsky's part? Fundamentally no, despite Trotsky's error on the USSR. They were the standard-bearers of 'old' communism. Those people saved the honour of communism and prepared for the future.

JB: On tradition and Paul's question. Is there some lifeline, some family tree of political lineage that links you uninterruptedly to 1848? Does that include things like the Workers Revolutionary Party? The Revolutionary Communist Party? Through German social democracy?

PH: The real point is coherence. Tracing ourselves back to Trotsky links us with the first four congresses of Comintern and so on.

JB: On making cadres, we do not have a passive attitude. We have a history of radical re-orientations. For example, we put out an agitational daily news sheets during the miners' upsurge of 1992. It came to nothing so we retreated to a propagandist weekly paper, drawing on the achievements of The Leninist. This is our real history. So we compete for cadres' loyalty as they are being made.

If you want to describe the defeats of the working class and understand them, draw lessons from them, your point of reference must not simply be social democracy, but also 'official communism'.

The defeat of our class historically is inextricably bound up with the degeneration of 'official communism', represented in this country by the CPGB. If it were just a rightist sect, then you could ignore it: for our part we would not look at the 1980s and tell the 'story' of the highs and lows of our class through the prism of the Healy group - that would be madness.

SM: We agree on many things, although you seem to take things in isolation. In broad terms, the communist tradition is the tradition carried over from Comintern by the Trotskyists. That is living tradition to be grasped. We may agree on many details on the particular role the CP played in specific circumstances. We part company when summarising, perhaps.