28.03.2002
Smoke and mirrors polemic
Does the Alliance for Workers Liberty want a revolutionary socialist party? Or is the SA just a site to intervene against the SWP? Should an official SA paper contain polemics and fight opportunism? Should we stop calling ourselves 'Marxists', 'Leninists' and 'communists' because the Stalinite counterrevolution was carried out using these terms? Did economism pass away in the early years of the 20th century? Or is it still alive and flourishing in the AWL?
Martin Thomas has written a lengthy rejoinder - 'Stalinism and the return of the repressed' - against a "rattled" and "ranting" Jack Conrad, which is presumably designed to justify, or more likely obscure, the Alliance for Workers' Liberty's rueful backtracking (Weekly Worker March 14 - all quotes unless otherwise stated are from this article). Immediately following the December 1 2001 Socialist Alliance conference the comrade publicly committed himself to an unofficial Socialist Alliance paper - it would receive the combined backing of both the CPGB and the AWL. Now comrade Thomas blithely recommends that the Socialist Alliance should "rely" on a "variety" of "unofficial" papers: eg, Weekly Worker, Solidarity and Socialist Worker. In other words a complacent continuation of the sectarianism, amateurism and duplication of effort which at present blight and cripple the Socialist Alliance. No doubt in an attempt to divert attention from the AWL's unbecoming retreat and internal divisions, the comrade spends most of his 5,000 words raising numerous issues with the CPGB that are of secondary importance, entirely irrelevant or simply diversionary. Perhaps the comrade found himself in a minority on the AWL's national committee. Perhaps he agreed too much on December 1 and was therefore ordered to cover AWL tracks by turning on his CPGB partners. Perhaps that explains why a man of his obvious talents produces such an impoverished polemic. Certainly the AWL is characterised by an underlying fault line. On the one side are the economists, such as Mark Osborn and Jill Mountford, who view the Socialist Alliance and the groups and factions of the left, including the CPGB, with barely concealed contempt. Trade unionism is their totem. On the other side there are the politicals like comrade Thomas. Unfortunately these politicals are inconsistent, faint-hearted and therefore prone to conciliation. So at the AWL's conference over February 23-24 the political wing promised that their work in the Socialist Alliance would be primarily directed at aggressively undermining the Socialist Workers Party. The economists were reassured that no intention exists of constituting any kind of "loyal opposition" in the Socialist Alliance. Such ill-considered formulations hardly square with the project we presented in Towards a Socialist Alliance party and elsewhere - using a weekly political paper to build the Socialist Alliance and its membership, organisation, internal culture and social roots. Not surprisingly, an unwillingness, or an inability, to settle accounts with the economists over the Socialist Alliance causes in turn loss of direction and empty gestures. Hence the AWL backs away from an unofficial Socialist Alliance paper, simultaneously repackaging Action for Solidarity as Solidarity and giving it a four-page Socialist Alliance "unofficial news, debate and campaigns" supplement. Comrade Thomas disingenuously blames the AWL's lack of courage on the independents' lack of courage. Indeed according to his account the entire undertaking hinged on securing the active involvement of the so-called Nanas (National Association of Non-Aligned Socialists). That these comrades - mainly disorientated, demoralised debris from one or other of the confessional sects - did not rush as a 'body' to launch an unofficial paper neither surprised nor "rattled" me. On the contrary inertia, narrow-mindedness and timidity were to be expected from such a quarter. Horses and carts We say, put the horse in front of the cart. Even better, two horses. What is required is the galvanising lead, breadth of cadre, financial resources and tireless dedication that can only be provided by the Socialist Alliance's most advanced supporting groups: ie, the CPGB and the AWL. Put another way, things hinge on the hard factions, not flotsam and jetsam. If that means merging the Weekly Worker and Solidarity and initially attracting only a thin layer of pro-party independents, even that would mark a tremendous step forward for the whole Socialist Alliance project. No artificial obstacle or secondary difference should be erected to bar the way forward. Others - crucially militant trade unionists, anti-capitalist youth and a whole mass of former Labourites - will be won in due course not simply to a Socialist Alliance of happenstance, but the aspiration of forging the revolutionary party our class needs. The political situation certainly cries out for such an alternative to Labourism. Not a day passes without New Labour revealing its antagonistic relationship with the working class. Tony Blair and his cabinet fete billionaires, fawn before the city and big business, and fulminate against trade union "wreckers". Blair has even begun an EU-wide crusade along with co-thinkers in Italy and Spain - Berlusconi and Anzar - to systematically roll back long-established working class gains. No wonder there is an ongoing and constantly deepening crisis of auto-Labourism - initially amongst the left groups, now in the trade unions. What started as a perspectives collapse in the deep entryist Militant Tendency (aka the Socialist Party in England and Wales) quickly engulfed the International Socialist Group, then Workers Power, the AWL and the SWP; and, as unions like the FBU, RMT, CWU, Unison and GMB begin to question their historic auto-Labourism, even the Morning Star's moribund Communist Party of Britain is inexorably cleaved into two camps. The Socialist Alliance was born under these conditions of breakage, release and motion. Yet in our view the Socialist Alliance project can never fulfil its full potential without a serious political paper. No political paper - no consistency in principle, no organisational girding, no dialogue with the working class. By providing a lead on every issue - secularism, anti-capitalism, trade union struggles, tenants' rights, the national question in Scotland and Wales, Ireland, the NHS, the fight for substantive equality between men and women, the war on terrorism, immigration, etc - by building a nationwide network of supporters and by recruiting a whole new layer of activists, the Socialist Alliance can be made into the foundations of a revolutionary party. And, it must be stressed, the hand of friendship and the prospect of unity in a single organisation, must, at every stage, be held out to the comrades in the Welsh Socialist Alliance and the Scottish Socialist Party. Meanwhile, if the SWP leadership continues to stubbornly deny the Socialist Alliance a collective agitator, educator and organiser, then its is the duty of other principal supporting groups and all genuinely partyist forces to take up the challenge. Not some time in the distant future, but as a matter of urgency. Comrade Thomas accuses me of living in the past and wanting to mechanically "transcribe" the Russian Revolution onto Britain. He now professes to believe that our unofficial paper is a brittle attempt to re-run Lenin's famous paper Iskra. Similarly the CPGB is told off for harping on about a federal republic. Apparently myself and my comrades insist that Elizabeth II and the United Kingdom should be equated with the tsarist system. Those who refuse to kowtow before such an absurd claim are, says comrade Thomas, branded economists, "with little regard to the fact that the monarchy in Russia then has a different political and social significance from the monarchy in Britain today". What sorry nonsense. Comrade Thomas is either playing polemical games forced upon him by factional expediency or he is simply refusing to listen. Economism did not pass away with the early years of the 20th century. Nor is it confined to Russia. Indeed economism not merely survived into the 21st century: it is the dominant ideology on the British left. Economism takes countless forms - rightist and leftist, parliamentarian and general strikist, rank and filist and authoritarian, etc - but what unites all these seemingly diverse phenomena into a single political category is the tendency to downplay the necessity of democracy. When one hears, as unfortunately I frequently have, leading AWL comrades dismiss, or flatly deny, the existence of a national question in Scotland and Wales, what should such politics be called? When AWL comrades brush aside the fact that we live under a monarchy and say that a republic would hardly make a jot of difference, what are we supposed to say? When the same comrades counterpose wages and the NHS to the struggle for a federal republic, it is surely legitimate to call this what it is - economism. But let us get back to the main question at hand - the paper. Comrade Thomas pays lip service to the achievements of Iskra. However, he insists that an Iskra for the Socialist Alliance is "not possible" - not in "the present", nor in any "short-term foreseeable circumstances". SWP domination rules it out. A Socialist Alliance paper would, you see, have an SWP "appointed functionary" as editor "in place of Lenin". Clearly a brief sketch of Iskra and its role is in order. Published from abroad over the years 1900-03, Iskra had to be smuggled into Russia and distributed by professional agents. Its aim was to turn the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party from a title into an actual revolutionary combat party. Around the paper the party would take shape. It was fiercely polemical too. From every side, opponents, condemned the method of Iskra, which was accused, to quote Trotsky at the time, of "fighting not so much against the autocracy as against other factions in the revolutionary movement" (quoted in M Liebman Leninism under Lenin London 1980, p29). Comrade Thomas claims that the main problem Iskra sought to overcome was the organisation of revolutionaries in Russia in "scattered local groups" which engaged in little more than "haphazard local agitation". That, however, is only half the story. Comrade Thomas conveniently forgets that Iskra had rivals within what was then called social democracy; and each had their own party project. Besides the Bundists - ie, the jewish left nationalists - there were a gaggle of economistic publications and groupings - Rabochoye Dyelo (Workers' Cause), Borba (Struggle), Rabochaya Mysl (Workers' Thought), etc. Iskra was not launched by its five-strong editorial team as the official publication of the RSDLP. It only gained that elevated status by achieving a vote to that effect at the 2nd Congress in 1903 - other publications were ordered to close down. Ironically, victory over the Bundists and economists was though somewhat Pyrrhic. The 2nd Congress majority around Iskra proceeded to split. Of the 16 pro-Iskra delegates nine formed a majority - ie, Bolsheviks - under Lenin's leadership, while the minority constituted the core of what was to become the Menshevik wing of the party. Another irony - the Menshevik minority secured a majority on the Iskra editorial board. Lenin quickly resigned in protest. What lessons does comrade Thomas draw from this history? None, it appears, except the line of least resistance. He lackadaisically suggests that the Socialist Alliance can progress "through the interplay and dialogue of a variety of [rival - JC] publications". That is how German social democracy "developed" till 1914, he coos - a strange argument indeed. After all, in 1914 Rosa Luxemburg mournfully proclaimed that official social democracy in Germany had become a "stinking corpse". Comrade Thomas has another string to his bow though - the Russian Marxist movement "between 1903 and 1917". Again sheer complacency. The Russian party developed not only through "interplay and dialogue". The Bolsheviks did the real serious work and effectively emerged as the party of the revolution in 1917 via an unyielding struggle against opportunism: eg, the Mensheviks, who held out the 'Marxist' prospect of transforming Russia through the liberal bourgeoisie; eg, those centrists - yes, sadly including the "Judas" Trotsky - who between 1903 and 1917 preferred the solace of revolutionary fatalism to Bolshevik practice. The Bolsheviks, in contrast to comrade Thomas, never contented themselves with the existence of a myriad of factions, let alone rival centres and publications. Quite the reverse. They fought against all such disorganisation and for democratic centralism. So what lessons do we draw from Iskra? Not publication abroad nor smuggling trips into Britain. But the CPGB is committed to equipping the Socialist Alliance with a publication, be it official or unofficial, which combats opportunism in every manifestation and provides the organisational framework from within which the outline of a revolutionary party will take shape and be given mass content. Whether in the absence of the SWP this "could not have the authority of Iskra", which begun with "not only Lenin, but Plekhanov, Zasulich, Martov and others", is besides the point. Authority must be won and constantly rewon. Even if we have to make do with Thomas, Matgamna, Nugent, Clement, McArthur, Manson and Conrad, we can collectively learn from history and thereby stand on the shoulders of giants. The CPGB presents the perspective of launching a political paper for the Socialist Alliance as a whole, including its dominant faction, the SWP. That does not entail any illusions, as comrade Thomas maintains. But it does suggest a process of change. Being and becoming. So, yes, we do have a "dual vision" of both the Socialist Alliance and the SWP. Comrade Thomas is right on that score at least. The vision of what exists and the vision of what necessity requires. But we do not rely on revolutionary fatalism to bring about our desired aim. Instead, in the here and now, we say, pick up the tried and tested weapons of Bolshevik revolutionary practice. Incidentally another successful unofficial publication can be cited. The Call began life as a bold act of revolutionary rebellion in 1914. Established by the internationalist minority in the British Socialist Party, The Call waged a hard-hitting ideological campaign against the BSP's official paper Justice - edited by the jingoist and national socialist, Henry Hyndman. In 1916 the internationalist wing scored a conference triumph over the pro-war wing. The Call henceforth became the BSP's official organ. The BSP, we are proud to note, affiliated to the Third International in 1919 and played a leading role in establishing the CPGB in 1920. Again to draw the basic lessons and to apply them with due regard to our specific circumstances is not to be trapped in the past, as comrade Thomas would have it. History should not be mindlessly copied, but used for enlightenment. I am glad comrade Thomas now says that the AWL will "fight to help the alliance develop into a rounded party". Progress! In his original letter to the CPGB he worryingly dismissed the Socialist Alliance as akin to "two ex-army people" being an "armed wing" (Weekly Worker February 28). We too envisage a "rounded" - ie, revolutionary - party. And towards that goal the vital need to communicate with the working class, students, anti-capitalists, etc, is certainly recognised. Without the masses there can be no party worthy of the name. Have no fear: the publication on offer is not simply the Weekly Worker with an 'incorporating Solidarity' addition to the masthead. However, the commitment displayed by the Weekly Worker to open polemic and the transformation of the Socialist Alliance into a party must be resolutely defended and maintained. On that there can be no compromise. Therefore AWL formulations ridiculing the Socialist Alliance and a suggested leaflet to the independents' conference in Birmingham which specifically stated that our unofficial paper would not be like the Weekly Worker were either clangers or evidence that our partners have a split personality. Clarification is awaited. Comrade Thomas devotes a considerable part of his Weekly Worker article trying to dress the CPGB in 'Stalinist' garb. The attempt is entirely misdirected and hardly warrants a reply. Even if one goes back to November 1981 and the "origins" of our tendency, the fact of the matter is that the politics articulated in our publication The Leninist were not far removed from what today passes as orthodox Trotskyism (with all its strengths and many shortcomings) - our 'official communist' opponents were quick to point this out. Grunt and wheeze So yet another grunting and wheezing attempt to squeeze the Weekly Worker's pro-party 'What we fight for' statement - ie, that our "central aim is to reforge the CPGB" and that "without this party the working class is nothing" and with it "everything" - into a Stalinite box is pretty pointless. Leaving aside the tendency for the AWL, or at least elements within it, to time and again place themselves in the 'first camp' over international issues - eg, Kosova - there exists better grounds for putting the AWL into a Labourite box. Till recently the AWL described Labour as their party. They voted Labour at every election automatically. Weirdly the 1945 Attlee government was lauded as a workers' government. Then there was the over the top celebration of Blair landslide in May 1997. Afterwards the AWL waited like the rest of the auto-Labourite left for the "fructification of hope" and the predicted "crisis of expectations". Suffice to say, it never came. Even now AWLers can still be heard mumbling about the virtues of a new Labour Representation Committee, as if our class were hard-wired and doomed to endlessly relive that particular past. That aside, thankfully comrade Thomas now just about concedes that our 'What we fight for' can be read in a non-Stalinist way. How about that! It was after all directly adapted from Lenin, as we showed chapter and verse. Or was Lenin the precursor for the "Stalinist vision of party-building"? However, comrade Thomas's prime target once again is the CPGB's supposed fetishism over names and symbols, which we treat with not just quasi-religious veneration, but as the main source of our strength. Drop 'Communist Party of Great Britain' and the hammer and sickle symbol, he decrees. The main thing is the "ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin Luxemburg and the rest," he lectures. Of course ideas are our main strength. I agree. And in spite of all his considerable efforts what comrade Thomas fails to show is that I have ever claimed that our "main strength" was anything else: ie, that our strength mainly derives from names and symbols. Plucking disembodied quotes from a draft CPGB perspectives document not written by myself and which I have not even read does not help matters and proves nothing. Moreover, what the comrade forgets to mention is that my February 28 Weekly Worker reply to him touched upon names and symbols for one reason alone - because comrade Thomas himself keeps raising the issue. Is he the one with a fetish for names and symbols? In all innocence I tried to get him to concede that there is no reason whatsoever to hand over anything from "a hotly contested past" to the 'official communists' - either alive or dead. Especially in state form this trend - yes, including Stalin and Mao - were "anti-communists" and "counterrevolutionary" (Weekly Worker February 28). We should therefore give them nothing. Not "reputations as communists". Not "appellations" like 'Marxist', 'Leninist' or 'Bolshevik'. Not the "red flag nor the clenched fist". Not the hammer and sickle symbol. Not the Internationale anthem. Not a thing. And no long and winding catalogue of the horrors perpetrated by the Kremlin can alter my conviction. Indeed the crimes of bureaucratic socialism reinforces my determination to expose this malignant tumour by contrasting it to genuine communism. Suffice to say, comrade Thomas rather laughably has installed himself and the AWL as the sole arbiter of political good taste and manners. When our Beau Brummell and his dedicated followers call themselves the International-Communist League, when their youth journal gives itself the title Bolshy, when they use the clenched fist on posters, banners and at demonstrations, when in the Socialist Alliance they stand under the red flag, when at the end of their annual conference the Internationale is sung - that, you see, is fine and dandy. But when the CPGB does the same thing it is "fetishism". Hypocrisy, and arrogant hypocrisy at that. So what about the name 'Communist Party'? Comrade Thomas tells us once again that "no-one today can have any living memory" of the CPGB's role in the working class "as other than vile and corrupt". This is simply untrue. For all its faults the CPGB could, even in the 1970s, positively serve the working class - eg, in fending off attacks, be they from Labour or Tory governments. The CPGB was pulled three ways; by bureaucratic socialism in the USSR; by Labourism and bourgeois respectability; by trade union militancy and the working class. As a young oppositionist I certainly remember the CPGB taking the lead against Barbara Castle's 'In place of strife' anti-trade union bill. After that the CPGB headed the battle to halt and then smash Robert Carr's Industrial Relations Act. One of my enduring memories is joining the mass demonstration outside Pentonville jail in London, where five dockers had been incarcerated for breaking the law, and watching Mike Hicks, CPGB member and printworkers' leader, directing events, megaphone in hand, from a nearby first floor pub window. The TUC was forced by mass pressure to threaten a one-day general strike - the call for a general strike was opposed by the International Socialists (now the SWP). The five were freed with much jubilation. Indeed, casting my mind back to the early 1970s, I am not inclined in the least to casually dismiss the CPGB as simply being "vile and corrupt". Instead pride in the UCS work-in, the mobilisation of Birmingham engineering workers in support of the striking miners, the closure of Saltley Gates, two miners' strikes and the defeat of Heath's government competes with the profound enmity I still feel for leading figures such as Gordon McLennan, Tony Chater, Nina Temple and Martin Jacques. Again I remember the role of the CPGB in my own home town with mixed emotions. There existed horrible rightism and craving for respectability. Yet the very same CPGB organised thousands upon thousands to resist Tory rent rises and mobilised equally large numbers in a campaign to open a modern hospital. All in all, it was a privilege to have know many fine CPGB trade unionists and other such militants who devoted so much time and did such hard work to improve the lot of their fellow workers. They are in my mind neither "vile" nor "corrupt". But "living memory" has nothing to do with our laying hold of the CPGB name and defending and developing the intellectual achievements of communism. Human beings are not mere biological entities, nor are they caged mentally by their own personal - ie, "living" - experience. We are historical animals. Our consciousness therefore can and does in one way or another span hundreds and thousands of years (with astronomy and physics we can not only explore natural history but probe the universe to the beginning of time itself). The working class movement has therefore a collective memory which encompasses those fighters for human liberation who went before us. Figures as diverse as Jesus and Spartacus, John Bull and William Wallace, John Brown and Fredrick Douglas have found their place in our history. The establishment has no right to them. Marx and Engels The same goes, only more so, for Marx and Engels - ie, the founders of modern communism. Marx and Engles were neither the harmless utopians pictured in mainstream bourgeois accounts. Nor were they the progenitors of 'official communism' and bureaucratic socialism. Because each new generation becomes not simply through "living memory" but through historical memory, we are obliged to defend and explain what is ours. In the main we do that through propaganda. But agitation and symbols have their place too. Certainly any suggestion of letting anything from our heritage slip into the hands of 'official communism' is a dereliction of duty. After all, countless people, including nowadays, encounter communism simply by reading for themselves. The Manifesto of the Communist Party, written by Marx and Engels and first published some 150 years ago, still sells in huge numbers and exerts enormous contemporary influence. Increasingly the medium of enquiry has shifted from the bookshop and library to the internet. People, especially young people, having heard through the cultural ether that surrounds them about 'Marx', 'Marxism', 'Lenin', and the 'Communist Party', enter one or another of these key words into their search engine. The result: over 5,000 sessions every week on the CPGB's website. That, comrade Thomas, is not our main strength. But it is a strength! A quick note on Afghanistan. Comrade Thomas thinks that because we describe the April 1978 coup led by the Peoples Democratic Party as a revolution, in our mind that makes Afghanistan "the one genuine social revolution of the 20th century, after 1917". No, his polemic does not improve, does it? Comrade, let me reiterate for the nth time. There were countless revolutions in the 20th century. Mexico, Persia, China, Ireland, Germany, Russia, Austria, Hungary, Turkey, Vietnam, Indonesia, Egypt, Algeria, Cuba, Libya, Cambodia, Portugal, Angola, Ethiopia, Iran, Romania, Serbia, to name but a few. We live in the epoch of revolutionary transition between capitalism and communism. As a consequence there manifestly exists a complex interrelationship between any political revolution in this epoch and the social limits imposed by capitalist relations of production. Capitalism is dying and can only be replaced by communism on a global scale. That is why the 20th century produced so many national forms that, as well as dealing with the past, blend or interweave the two social modes of capitalism and communism together in a way that both anticipates the future and puts it off. With this in mind we could mention Clive Bradley's article on Iraq and the popular revolution of 1958, "which overthrew the monarchy" (Solidarity March 15). The mass base of that revolution "rested on the Iraqi Communist Party", which was undoubtedly pro-Moscow. Comrade Bradley, one gathers, sympathises with the revolution and opposes the counterrevolutionary attempt of March 1959, which was defeated in no small measure due to the Communist Party. The revolution finally ended in the form of Ba'athist counterrevolution from within the revolution. There was no restoration of the monarch nor the old, pro-British, order. The CPGB takes a not dissimilar view in regard to Afghanistan. A revolution led by the 'official communists' overthrew a crisis-ridden regime and then, due to its internal contradictions and in the face of counterrevolution, spiralled towards self-destruction. The revolution was saved by being killed. The Soviet Union intervened in December 1979 and we all know what happened after that. A horrendous war, Soviet withdrawal, the slow death of the Najibullah regime and then the rule of the murderous mujahedin, to be followed by the medieval horrors of the Taliban. No, I do not suffer from any illusion that April 1978 saw a workers', a socialist, revolution of the kind witnessed in Russia in 1917. There was though in my view a progressive social content in April 1978, just like Iraq 1958, that deserved support, albeit highly critical, from communists in the advanced capitalist countries. Unlike the AWL, I could never imagine myself describing the mujahedin counterrevolutionaries as "our kind of people". Finally, let me assure the AWL comrades that the CPGB has no intention of launching an unofficial Socialist Alliance political paper simply by a minor repackaging and a cynical name change of the Weekly Worker. That is not our style. However, while we are more than willing to engage in serious discussions in order to bring about the merger of the two groups in the fight for a revolutionary Socialist Alliance party, there can be no vetoes. The CPGB is obliged to campaign for a Socialist Alliance paper. And in the absence of an official one we shall work towards an unofficial paper - with you if possible, without you if we must. Jack Conrad
Worker