09.05.2001

CPGB's party-fetishism

Martin Thomas of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty responds to Ian Mahoney

The Alliance for Workers' Liberty argues that the trade unions should combat their exclusion from politics by the Blair faction. They should fight for their policies in the New Labour structures. Since the Blair faction has made it clear that it will respond to such a fight - even on a limited scale - by cutting New Labour's trade union link altogether, and prepared its paths for doing so, we must understand that this orientation means splitting New Labour and creating a new workers' party.

We fight within the trade unions for democracy and for working class policies. We argue for a Marxist programme for the future new workers' party. We sum this up by calling for a workers' government.

We do not walk away from the labour movement. We argue for the labour movement to fight the Blair faction's attempt to walk away with labour's apparatus of political representation. We fight - across the board, in elections and inside the trade unions - to reassert independent working class political representation.

This perspective shows "a fundamental poverty of vision", "a fatal softness on Labour", and "corrosive pessimism" - or so claims an article by Ian Mahoney in the Weekly Worker (April 19). What is Mahoney's rich-visioned, hard and healingly-optimistic alternative? The Weekly Worker wants to move "towards a Socialist Alliance party". So do we. But the purpose and necessary activity of such a party must be to inform and organise the struggle in which the labour movement transforms itself into an independent political force. It is not a choice - either party, or perspective for the labour movement. The party is nothing without the perspective; the perspective is nothing without the party (or beginnings of a party) to fight for it.

The way the Weekly Worker puts the question of the party in its 'What we fight for' column is wrong: "Our central aim is to reforge the Communist Party of Great Britain. Without this Party the working class is nothing; with it, it is everything." Rather as without an umbrella the working class would be wet; with it, it stays dry.

But a genuine working class party cannot be something which well-wishers may or may not supply to the working class - making the working class "everything" or "nothing" depending on whether it receives this boon. And a working class which is "nothing" without a party - how would this nullity ever develop a party, or provide the elements and lessons which form the organised revolutionaries and their work to build that party?

To want to "reforge the CPGB" is odd. The CPGB was, throughout all living political memory and 80% of its entire history, a despicable counterrevolutionary force, and for its earlier 20% far from an ideal model. The odd formulation can be explained only by the fact that CPGB uniquely fitted the bill of a "party" supplied to the working class by external well-wishers - or, rather, ill-wishers, in the Kremlin, without whose subsidies and prestige it could not conceivably have continued through so many betrayals and arbitrary shifts of line.

If our "vision" for the labour movement suffers from poverty, Mahoney's suffers from nonexistence, or, at the kindest, from "party"-fetishism.

The CPGB has advocated that the Socialist Alliance prioritise formal-political (democratic) demands rather than 'economistic' concerns about the health service, education, trade union rights, and workers' representation. Is this the 'hard' alternative to our 'soft' perspective for the labour movement? I think not.

It does not uphold the Marxist idea that, "The theoretical conclusions of the communists are in no way based on ideas and principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle ..." Rather, it prides itself on certain lines of advocacy whose special 'anti-economistic' virtue is precisely that they are oh-so-very 'political' that they do not "spring from an existing class struggle" at all.

More exactly, the 'anti-economistic' virtue is not in the politics as such - the AWL shares the call for a federal republic, and so do many - but rather the act of putting such peculiar emphasis on the 'federal republic' and so on, counterposing these notions so much against other political ideas (such as a workers' government), that no-one in their right mind could ever arrive at such an emphasis 'spontaneously'.

When it strays into economic demands - on the minimum wage - again, the supposed virtue is that the wage figure is one specially calculated by the CPGB. It is a 'communist' estimate of the needed minimum wage, not that of any bureaucrat or bourgeois. An odd concept this: from a Marxist view, the idea of a special 'communist' calculation of a proper 'fair' wage level is a contradiction in terms, since 'fairness' for wages is by its nature bourgeois and the purpose of communist politics is to focus workers' needs beyond the wages system rather than on a particular wage level.

But the CPGB substitutes an arbitrarily 'maximalised' minimum programme for transitional demands; it seeks a self-differentiation from the general labour movement on the figure for the wage demand, rather than on the questions of principle about how the demand is pursued; it defines the 'needs' which workers should assert in terms of a specially-calculated 'minimum wage' and ever-so-hotly-insisted-on formal democratic demands, rather than of a Marxist 'political economy of the working class' ('social production controlled by social foresight').

These politics involve a lot of noise about how "revolutionary" the CPGB is, but do not venture into transitional demands. They limit immediate advocacy to a minimum programme: i.e., one compatible with capital. Not suaviter in modo, fortiter in re, but fortiter in modo, suaviter in re. The programme should be the brightest red on the cover, but pale pink inside. Not a workers' government, but instead a federal republic without class definition. Not so much mobilising the working class against capital, as appealing to the people in general against the state.

Mahoney misunderstands Lenin. Yes, we know Lenin's 1920 speech about the Labour Party being a "thoroughly bourgeois party". In fact, back in 1966, we were, I think, the first tendency on the British left to rescue this quotation from the archives and make it a reference point in current politics (See our pamphlet Marxism and the labour movement or www.workersliberty.org/publications/wwaawwmb/sect2.htm.)

But it does not follow that Lenin's advocacy of the early (revolutionary) British Communist Party affiliating to the Labour Party was just a quick "manoeuvre" or "exceptional tactic" for the speedy "disintegration" of the Labour Party.

Marxists had advocated that the trade unions form an independent Labour Party in Britain long before 1900. The formation of the Labour Representation Committee in that year was a victory for their struggle. Although the British Marxist group, the Social Democratic Federation, disaffiliated from the Labour Representation Committee soon after it was formed, much of the left in the SDF advocated affiliation. Lenin aligned himself with their views when, in 1908, he supported the admission of the Labour Party to the Second International. The fiercest opponent within the SDF of national affiliation to Labour, Harry Quelch, nevertheless participated regularly and prominently in national Labour Party conferences as a London Trades Council delegate. The SDF was generally active in local Labour Parties. The major component of the CPGB formed in 1920 was the British Socialist Party, a continuation of the SDF left - which was affiliated to the Labour Party.

In 1920 Lenin could see communist affiliation to the Labour Party as not just a continuation of this long-standing Marxist approach, but also as a relatively short-term tactic, because he foresaw successful working class revolution soon in other European countries. Disintegration? Trotsky, writing in 1926, saw it rather as a matter of the communists winning the same leading role in the broad Labour Party as had the ILP faction of Ramsey MacDonald before them. In any case, it didn't happen. The German revolution was defeated. The Russian Revolution succumbed to Stalinism. The Labour Party did not disintegrate.

So, since Lenin's "manoeuvre" did not work, we should go back to square one? Forget the long-standing Marxist approach, flag up our 'communist' party as against Labour's bourgeois party, and recruit people one by one? No. That would be just another version of the SWP's perspective, only coloured up more gaudily and stripped of the calculating practicality which tempers the SWP's attitude to the residual Labour left.

For the SWP, the great thing about the Socialist Alliance is that the "crisis of Labourism" and the inspirational force of the "new anti-capitalist militancy" are pushing people to the left, and the alliance provides a convenient bivouac for them while they still hesitate about full-blown revolutionary politics.

This perspective, expounded in a recent article by John Rees, is questionable on the level of fact (International Socialism 90). Rees argues that the Labour Party has not fundamentally changed. The "crisis" is that reformism no longer delivers reforms. That pushes some reformists to move left.

In fact the Labour Party has changed fundamentally, although the qualitative transformation into a pure and simple bourgeois party is not yet complete. Labour activists and supporters who now look to the Socialist Alliance mostly do so because their politics have not changed (while the Labour Party has), rather than because they have changed (while the Labour Party hasn't).

In the most feted case, Liz Davies now supports the Socialist Alliance while describing herself as "proud to be a left reformist". Ten years ago, heavily immersed in the Labour Party, she would not have called herself a reformist. Nor was she one. I rather doubt that even now she is as "reformist" as she makes herself out to be. In any case, if she has moved, it is to the right. Being in the Labour Party is not what defines someone as reformist!

Equally, a glance round any Socialist Alliance meeting will confirm that the Alliance's bulk is not that of "new anti-capitalist" youth inspired by Seattle. The "new anti-capitalist" sentiment among young people is of great importance for the development of a new generation of revolutionary activists, but to subsume every hopeful trade union struggle, or every stirring of electoral rebellion, into a manifestation, expression, or consequence of this "new anti-capitalism" is to make much more of it than reality warrants, and to replace class-based analysis by blurry populist agitation.

With the faulty analysis go faulty conclusions, on several levels. Political dialogue with Labour Party members, and with Labour-oriented trade unionists, is reduced to telling them about Blair's crimes and exhorting them to come over to something more leftwing, instead of proposing political perspectives for the labour movement. Socialist Alliance work in the trade unions is reduced to a quick dash for support, rather than a steady effort to develop rank-and-file self-assertion. The Socialist Alliance election campaign is reduced to an exercise in getting as many votes as possible for a vaguely-defined "socialist alternative" to the left of Labour. Political debate within the Socialist Alliance, beyond arguments about what formulas or buzzwords do or do not 'fit the mood' and catch leftwing votes, is dismissed as 'sectarianism' that 'puts people off'.

For the strategic task of actually developing "the socialist alternative" - that is, of developing mass independent working class political action and arming it with a programme of transitional demands - is substituted the short-span task of proclaiming that "socialist alternative" on leaflets and posters. Questions of strategy and programme - or, simply, of where the Alliance goes after the general election - are blanked out.

The CPGB and the AWL have at least one important area of agreement as against this SWP approach, when we both insist on the importance of open political debate. But the false idea that going for a leftwing pole ("communist party" or "socialist alternative") is an alternative to, and mutually exclusive with, fighting for a self-transformation of the labour movement, seems to me to be common.

A better guide, I think, is Marx and Engels: "The communists are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. The immediate aim of the communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat".

Or Trotsky: "At the Second Congress [of the Comintern, in 1920] Lenin was for the independence of revolutionary parties. That party, created under the hand of Lenin, has become the greatest barrier to the new revolutionary movement. It is a new situation now ... We are convinced of the necessity of an independent party. But how to build it? Public opinion ... is against us ... When we climb up a cliff we must search for crevices, for footholds ...

"If we consider the Fourth International [i.e., the Marxist nucleus] only as an international 'firm' which compels us to remain independent propagandist societies under any conditions, we are lost. No, the Fourth International is a programme, a strategy, an international leadership nucleus. Its value must consist in a not too juridical attitude ... We must aim far. We must be patient, wiry ..."