01.02.2001

Party notes

Join, join now

Doubtless comrades will have noted the recent non-appearance of this column. Demands of work have meant that I and other full-timers have been pulled more and more away from Party centre and to the localities. A leading comrade in the Socialist Workers Party commented on my frequent absences from the London scene and was reassured that I was travelling around the country, "building the Party". "Oh dear", he said wryly, "I was afraid you might say that."

It is generally agreed on the left that - as one of the smaller "six principal" groups - we punch well above our weight. That we are now putting on muscle will therefore certainly be welcomed by all those who are committed to the Socialist Alliance project.

It would be very silly to exaggerate our growth - it is significant, but still remains not much more than a steady trickle. The fact that it consists overwhelmingly of youth is encouraging, but also gives it a degree of fragility. Yet even with these caveats, we clearly seem to be coming to the end of a period in which recruits were few and far between, when we were forced simply by pressure of circumstance to concentrate on the preservation and maintenance of what we already had.

Our understanding of the reactionary period ushered in first with the defeat of the miners' Great Strike in 1985 and then the collapse of bureaucratic socialism in 1991 is confirmed by the current demographics of Party membership. In general, we have our long-term cadre, comrades in their late 30s to 40s. A gap (very, very few 20-somethings) and ... teenagers. The missing political generation underlines that the 1990s could be tinged more or less any colour you fancy - apart from "red", I'm afraid, comrade Taaffe.

Certainly, we have stumbled into this new 'upturn' pretty much unprepared. We have started to recruit without really trying. However, this positive development is not an 'accident' in that sense - comrades should be clear about this. It is a product of the past struggles this communist collective has fought and won. Centrally, it is because after an unflinching and tenacious fight in its ranks as an anti-liquidation, pro-revolution faction, we were able to reclaim the banner of the CPGB in 1991.

A certain 'Harry Steel' has recently bobbed to the surface of the UK Left Network internet discussion list. ('Harry Steel' is a name associated with Straight Left, the deeply pro-Labour, cretinously pro-Soviet bureaucracy, CPGB faction circa late 1970s to 1991). Whenever 'Harry' can bring himself to refer to us at all, he is at pains to present our group as a bunch of 'Trot' interlopers into 'his' Party of yore. In fact, we are steeped in the best traditions of the CPGB, with direct organic links via the founding comrades of our trend back to oppositionalist factions of the 1960s, and, through some of our veterans, back to the Party of the early 1930s.

People who want to become communists look for the Communist Party of Marx, Engels and Lenin, and now find us. It isn't hard to work out. There is more to it than that, however. The web has been very important, indeed key to our surge of growth. Some 75% of the people who applied for membership in January came from the internet. After conscientiously searching for and trawling through the other left and 'communist' sites they decided that ours is the real thing. Indeed, there is a pronounced difference between those comrades who come towards us from other routes such as telephone directory enquiries and those from the web.

The web-literate tend to be more politically informed, more aware of the differences on the left and of what marks us out as the most honest and most seriously revolutionary. In other words, when they get in contact with us, they are making a very conscious decision after a comparative study of the different political options available.

This new development requires a cultural change in our own organisation - albeit a minor upheaval rather than a revolution. For a glimpse of the problem, take a look at last week's paper. Its 'Action' column featured just two points of contact - London seminars and an e-mail for our Manchester group. In truth, this is not an accurate reflection of our present activities or concentration of forces - weak though they still are. This 'modesty' was a reflection of a rather inward-looking, narrow and conservative outlook (an unfortunate by-product of our 'care and maintenance' priorities).

In this week's paper, we feature a new list of CPGB email contact points around the country (see Action). This is part of an ongoing effort we are making to cohere and mobilise our supporters and new contacts in areas where we already have members and Party organisation of some sort. The general election looms and the tasks before us swell. Our immediate priority is to organise comrades into effective working units in order to make the biggest possible contribution to the Socialist Alliance and its electoral challenge.

Logically enough, I draw to the end of this column with a call for partisan readers to actually join, to apply for membership. It is clear that our paper and the organisation that sustains it is at the cutting edge of the most exciting and promising development on the left in at least a generation - at its core the developing unity of the revolutionary groups. As an integral part of this process, the CPGB has been the most tenacious, the most far-sighted. While, thankfully, others are beginning to catch up, there are those who are losing their reason for existence. What made them 'unique' as discrete sectarian groups no longer makes sense - the confessional 'parties' are now thoroughly reactionary; they are prison houses for the minds of their cadre. What makes this organisation strong, despite its relative organisational weaknesses, now stands out in vivid relief.

Compare our Bolshevik programmatic approach with the minimalist 'transitional' approach peddled by the SWP and co. For all its readily admitted one-sidedness, compare this paper and how it deals with politics - especially the politics of the left - with the economistic tailism exhibited elsewhere. This publication treats the advanced workers seriously because we want to train the working class to be the ruling class - the only way to end all class divisions and bring about universal freedom.

Last year, we characterised an important element of our struggle as the fight for a cultural revolution on the left. This will entail not just leaving behind drab economism, but the sect-building projects too. We have had more than enough of the plethora of mono-idea micro-groups. We are for an end to the internal police regimes of dissident-hunting, the enforced external political monolithicism on all questions, the enormous amounts of effort, time, money and talent criminally squandered in the futile effort to maintain rather than overcome the divisions of the left.

Our working class requires a mass, democratic and centralised party of its own, organised on the basis of a revolutionary programme, with deep roots in society. Clearly, the comrades coming towards us are not yet joining the ranks of anything like that. However, they are joining the fight to bring such a party into being.

You should do likewise.

Mark Fischer
national organiser