28.08.2002
Gossip sheet or new Iskra?
Every serious revolutionary regards the Weekly Worker as required reading - as shown by our subscriptions, sales and web hits. And yet a common attack from opponents on the left is that it is nothing but a 'gossip sheet'. Editor Peter Manson dissected this and other such attacks at the CPGB's Communist University earlier this month. This is an edited version of his speech
Gossip sheet' is one description of the Weekly Worker that we have all heard. But there have been one or two others that I would like to deal with as well while I am about it. For example, that the Weekly Worker is a "scandal sheet funded by the security services to discredit the rest of the left". Then we have those who dismiss us as "introverted". Sometimes all three criticisms are tied in together: that we carry nothing but trivial gossip; that we are up to no good and therefore must be funded by either the secret services or some other nefarious organisation; and that we are too concerned with the left and not enough with the 'real world'. Looking through the pages of the paper, we can certainly find lots of things which those accusing us of introversion could no doubt point to. For example, in this week's issue (Weekly Worker August 1) we have a front page on the South African Communist Party, and inside we have articles on, or making reference to, the Socialist Alliance, the Socialist Workers Party, the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, Workers Power, the Leeds Left Alliance, the Scottish Socialist Party and Rifondazione Comunista. In the previous two issues we also wrote about the Socialist Campaign Group within the Labour Party, the International Socialist Group, the Socialist Labour Party, the Anti-Nazi League and Globalise Resistance. Internationally we covered the United Left of Spain, the Worker-communist Party of Iran, the International Socialist Organisation of Zimbabwe, Ya Basta of Italy and the Palestinian Peoples Party. We also look at the CPGB itself, so obviously we are really "introverted" in that respect. When we have a members' aggregate, or when we have a school like this, you can be sure that you will find a full report, including all the differences among our own comrades, carried in the pages of the paper. Let us look in a bit more detail at the three allegations. First of all that the Weekly Worker is a "gossip sheet". This was used, for example, in an exchange reported by Mark Fischer in his article on the AWL school, 'Ideas for freedom' (Weekly Worker July 18).The AWL's Jill Mountford, sharing a platform with Marcus Ström of the CPGB, referred to our paper using that term, and comrade Ström offered to donate £100 to AWL funds if she was able to find one item of gossip in the current Weekly Worker. She was not able to do so, and Marcus's cheque book remained firmly in his pocket. In fact, what Mark did not put in his report was the fact that comrade Mountford did at first think she had found an item of gossip - a small article written by Mark himself in the previous issue, dealing with the formation of the SWP's new youth organisation, Red Spark. She seized upon this, but beat a hasty retreat when challenged by Mark. Ironically in the latest issue of the AWL's own paper, Solidarity, there is a small piece on Red Spark based entirely on comrade Fischer's Weekly Worker article. It ends: "You cannot help but agree with the Weekly Worker's conclusions." So, for Solidarity itself, this was presumably news, not gossip. In fact, it is really a rather important development. When the SWP decides to set up a youth organisation, but does not announce it in its own press - or in any other public forum, as far as I know - it is left to the Weekly Worker to do so. When the largest organisation on the British left takes such an initiative, is that not an important question? What will be its relationship with the SWP? What sort of regime will it have? That is just one example, of course. But Jill Mountford was not able to find any gossip in the Weekly Worker because the Weekly Worker does not contain any gossip. The second allegation - that we are "funded by the security services" - is not a new one. This kind of accusation dates right back to the days of The Leninist, the forerunner of the Weekly Worker, which was alleged to be financed by all sorts of organisations, including from eastern Europe. We were also supposed to be a satellite of other left groups. The claim that we are some sort of state agents was repeated in 1992 by Ken Livingstone when we had the gall to stand a candidate against him in the general election of that year. Harpal Brar of the Socialist Labour Party also called us MI5-funded at a public meeting in the 1999 Euro election campaign. A few years back, when I was doing some research in the Marx Memorial Library, I started chatting with the librarian, Tish Newlands, who is a member of the Communist Party of Britain, the Morning Star's group. She told me that she had just returned from South Africa, where she had been visiting the SACP's congress. I asked if there had been any interesting differences. That seemed to me a very reasonable question to ask, but she responded: "You would ask that, wouldn't you? Don't you want to know about the unity of the SACP?" Well, actually, I do want to know what the differences are. Not because I want to stir up trouble - and certainly not because MI5 or anyone else thinks it is a good idea - but because I want to get to the truth, I want to find the way forward. Is the SACP, or any other group on the entire left, a perfect organisation? If you look at the SWP, the Socialist Party, Workers Power or even the AWL, are there not disagreements, and is there not a struggle over the way forward? But the left does not like what we write, especially about themselves. All organisations - and the 'official communists' are no exception - like to give the impression that they are united. Organisations like the CPB are not content with this pretence when it comes to their own organisation: they frequently make out that there are no disagreements within the trade union movement either. They will sometimes criticise the right wing, but if there is a strike coming up, then it is treachery to question whether the planning for it is incorrect, whether the correct tactics are being adopted. They try to give the impression that we are all united, that we are moving forward together when often the opposite is the case. And this culture of 'not washing your dirty linen in public' is not restricted to 'official communism'. In fact, during our history, there have been quite a few organisations which have been more than happy to use the Weekly Worker to let slip secrets that they do not want to publish in their own press - about either internal opponents within their own group, or about other organisations. I am not saying we automatically publish this stuff: we are very careful about it. But, for example, in the 'official' CPGB, when The Leninist was decried by all other factions, it did not stop elements within the party passing us pieces of information about their opponents, and about the rotten things they had been up to. It has been the same since. It has not been unknown for the Socialist Party, elements within the SLP or even the SWP to, shall we say, point us in the right direction. The third allegation concerns our alleged introversion. We are "introverted" because we concentrate too much on the left itself, and not enough on working class struggles as they occur in the world. Obviously those two things are connected - the rest of the left would agree so much. For the most part, it is not that they do not mention themselves at all. How does the SWP, for example, portray itself? It is all straightforward: here we are - we are the revolutionary party. All that remains is to build its membership and influence. All they have to do, then, is talk about the movement - in an almost apocalyptic way - and to say, 'Come and join us: that is the answer.' Well, I do not think it is the answer. The fact is that there does not exist either in this country or in any country in the world a genuinely revolutionary party of the working class. Without that revolutionary party, we cannot make a revolution. It is as simple as that. We are going to be stuck in the same present dire situation, mired in fragmentation and sectarianism into the indefinite future, unless we grasp this one central truth. So that is why we have as our central raison d'être the need to establish in Britain a revolutionary Communist Party for the entire left. That is why we concentrate on the shortcomings of the existing left and try, through looking at history, through giving all sorts of international examples, to point the way forward. 'Official' CPGB Let me give a few examples of the work we have done in the past in the Weekly Worker, and prior to that in The Leninist. The Leninist was set up by comrades who came from the tradition of 'official communism'. We set ourselves the aim of reforging the Communist Party of Great Britain. The CPGB had of course almost from its birth undergone a long slide which ended in its eventual liquidation, and on that journey it took on more and more opportunist zigzags. Nevertheless, certainly up until the 1980s, the CPGB organised the best militants. It was the largest contingent of the socialist working class in Britain. Historically the CPGB was an enigma. On the one hand, it tried to meet the needs of the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. On the other hand, it reacted to, and attempted to serve, workers' needs in Britain - usually in a narrow, trade union sense. The CPGB did lead political strikes - for example against Labour's In place of strife and the Conservatives' Industrial Relations Act. But this was regarded primarily as a trade union question, from which would spontaneously flow the energy needed to put the national reformist British road to socialism into practice. It was essential to conduct our struggle inside the CPGB. Indeed, it was something that other revolutionaries should have done. It was not incorrect to operate inside the Labour Party, as several groups did and still do, but the key immediate site of struggle was inside the CPGB, where for a greater part of its history the leadership used the language of Marxism, and actually led militant contingents of the working class. The fate of the working class rested on reforging the CPGB, and that is what the comrades who founded The Leninist set out to do. I came across The Leninist during the miners' Great Strike of 1984-85. I was a member of the CPGB - a naive member, I suppose. I was not quite convinced by the British road - the most articulate programme of reformism that this country has ever produced. First, it was necessary to elect a left Labour majority - hopefully given some backbone by a few Communist Party MPs. Then the 'revolution' would proceed through a series of more and more leftwing governments, and end up with socialism, and maybe even communism, in one country. It is safe to say that there were shortcomings in this schema. What I learnt from The Leninist came as a revelation to me. One particular article listed all the CPGB factions and all the main revolutionary groups, and, just as I am trying to do with this speech, compared the reality of the left as it existed with the tasks demanded by the objective situation. Like today the conclusion was that the movement as it existed was not up to the job ('The miners' strike: from the jaws of defeat' The Leninist No15, January 1985). The miners' strike was full of possibilities, yet where was the left, what was it saying? This article went through all the existing left groups and ended with the CPGB itself. It looked briefly at all the factions within the party: the Eurocommunists, the right opportunists, the proto-CPB rebels, Straight Left. I was driving home after a demonstration in support of the miners, stuck in a traffic jam, when I began reading this. When the queue began to move, I did not want to put down the article and continued reading every time I stopped at traffic lights. I did not regard the description of CPGB factions as "gossip". This was my party, of which I had been a member for 15 years, yet was ignorant of such essential details of its inner life. The Leninist gave me vital information, which also pointed towards the possibility of a way forward. Then, as now, we do not have all the answers, but we are putting forward the questions. Was it wrong to do that? I do not think it was. If anything, The Leninist came too late. What we were able to save from the old CPGB was next to nothing: a handful of comrades. Before I move on to my second example, let us stay for a moment with what remains of 'official communism' and link in our coverage of the CPGB with an article on the South African Communist Party from the latest Weekly Worker. The South African media has been full of the recent developments in the party, and The Guardian has also published a couple of articles on it. The bourgeoisie thinks the SACP is important - it obviously is, but it is a highly contradictory organisation. On the one hand, it provides members of the South African government; on the other hand, it provides practically the entire leadership of the main, very militant, South African trade union organisation. I would say a central task of the working class in South Africa is to win or split the SACP. To win over all the best parts, all the most militant members, in order to establish a genuinely revolutionary party in South Africa. We featured the rebellion of SACP rank and file delegates at the 11th Congress on our front page and I think we were quite right to do so. It is interesting that Blade Nzimande, the general secretary, faced with all these reports about divisions, complained that the media were distracting from the SACP's 'unity'. He urged delegates not to do anything that might indicate the truth of these stories. The idea was to deny what was obvious to everyone - that the SACP is a party of fundamental contradictions. Tish Newlands notwithstanding, it is essential to look at the divisions and try to find a way out of this mess. This is the job of communists and must not be left to the bourgeois media. SLP shenanigans My next example concerns the Weekly Worker's coverage of the Socialist Labour Party, which was set up by Arthur Scargill in 1996. It was a very small-scale break from Labour which managed to pull together a layer of trade union bureaucrats, as well as some scattered forces from the Labour Party and the left. The SLP had possibilities and was certainly a site for struggle for the forging of a genuine Communist Party - the organisation we actually need. But it was crippled from birth by the constitution that Scargill imposed upon it. But this did not stop us from engaging with this new formation and fighting for what objectively is necessary. So in the pages of the Weekly Worker we exposed the shenanigans of the SLP leadership. We covered the 'voidings' of comrades who were allegedly members or supporters of other organisations. Their SLP membership was annulled at the whim of Scargill. He informed such people - some of them, it is true, were CPGB comrades, but others had no connection with any left organisation whatsoever - that they had never been an SLP member in the first place because they had allegedly falsified their membership application form. They had put their signature to a statement which read: "I am not a member of any other political organisation." That was the witch-hunting device he used in order to rid his party of 'undesirable elements'. Later on we covered the question of the 3,000 votes which suddenly appeared from nowhere at the December 1997 congress of the SLP. The North West, Cheshire and Cumbria Miners Association, unannounced by Scargill in advance, was able to ensure that every decision arrived at was in accordance with his wishes. Individual members accounted for around 2,000 votes at that congress, but this one organisation had a block vote of 3,000. Whether the NWCCMA has 3,000 members I do not know. But it is quite likely that the majority of them had never even heard of the SLP. Yet three bureaucrats cast votes on their behalf - in actual fact on behalf of Scargill. Then there was a certain Patrick Sikorski, who has just been elected deputy general secretary of the RMT. He was Scargill's main 'doorkeeper'. He was the one who tried to ensure that members and supporters of other political organisations were kept out. If some 'innocent' comrades were caught in the net, that was just unfortunate. And all the time, he himself remained a member of the Fourth International Supporters Caucus, whose comrades remained tightly organised together as a tolerated faction within the SLP. The weird and wonderful Economic and Philosophic Science Review comrades were also members of the SLP. Roy Bull, the editor of that glorious publication, was actually elected vice-president of the SLP in 1998, when Scargill decided he had had enough of Sikorski and Fisc. Within a couple of months, though, he had got rid of Bull too. Then of course there is that marvellous chap, Harpal Brar, whose ultra-Stalinism is really something to behold, and whose followers have provided some 'theoretical' cover for Scargill - for example, in backing the September 11 terrorist attacks on the party's NEC. So, was publicising all this worth doing or not? When the SWP's Rob Hoveman addressed Communist University, he said, when referring to those forces likely to be campaigning for a 'no' vote in the euro referendum, "How can the SLP be taken seriously? It is just a shell, a moribund organisation." Where does he get his information from about the SLP, I wonder? Scargill, as a political leader - not as a fighter for the working class, a trade union militant, but as a political leader - is discredited in the eyes of the entire left. People know what Scargill is like and that Scargillism is not the future. How do they know that? Because of the Weekly Worker. I think we did a service to the left, and to the working class as a whole, in our exposure of Scargill and the SLP. Let us now come to the present, and the final example - an organisation which is our main focus today. That is, of course, the Socialist Alliance. Right from the beginning we were part of the SA. It was originally created on the initiative of Socialist Party comrades as an answer to the SLP, when Scargill told them they could not enter his party. We joined version one of what was then the Network of Socialist Alliances - a very low-key affair with Dave Nellist in Coventry and John Nicholson up in Manchester. Nicholson et al hated us for simply reporting what they had to say. They thought we had no business repeating debates that were taking place inside a development which could lay the basis for deeper political unity. Version two started off as the London Socialist Alliance. It was formed in 1999 for the purpose of standing in the European elections in the capital. In the end the SWP, followed by every other organisation apart from ourselves, got cold feet when Scargill announced he was to head the SLP list in London - they did not think they were "viable" compared to Scargill. There was an unsuccessful move in February 1999 to expel the CPGB from the LSA - comrade Hoveman put up his hand for this proposal. He did this because we were reporting the plans and differences over the way forward among the groups represented on the LSA in the Weekly Worker. That was regarded as unacceptable. As though the left getting together is none of the business of the working class, and our differences, and the way we grapple towards a solution, should not be analysed in working class newspapers. Today, after the relative success of version three, not least in last year's general election, we are involved in an ongoing campaign for a Socialist Alliance paper. We know that the SWP sees the alliance as an electoral united front from which they hope to recruit. So they want the Socialist Alliance to stay half-formed. They certainly do not want an SA paper. We, on the other hand, see the Socialist Alliance as the main site today for our fight for what is necessary: that is, a revolutionary party. We want to win that battle, to transform the alliance itself into the kind of party we need. For that to happen we need a paper. That is why, in the pages of the Weekly Worker, we deal with the Socialist Alliance, with these campaigns in particular, as part of that central struggle. Lenin's target When the left makes criticisms of the Weekly Worker and of the CPGB, are they ignorant of the history of the Bolsheviks, and of Lenin himself? Let us come to the other element in the title of this talk, Iskra, which waged a battle in 1902-03 culminating in a united party, the RSDLP (unfortunately it split straight away, along unexpected factional lines). But against whom were Lenin's writings - not only in Iskra, but in most of his polemics - directed? Who were his targets? Was it the tsar, the Cadets, the Black Hundreds? Actually no. The main butt of Lenin's polemics were others on the left. Why was that? Did he not think that the tsar's regime was awful? He knew it just as we know that Tony Blair is not a working class partisan, and that the NHS is in a terrible state. We know those things. But we want to go beyond those self-evident truths to what we can actually do about it, to provide the answer. That is why Lenin in his day kept hammering away at what was necessary. Martov, Trotsky, Bogdanov, Plekhanov, Bukharin, etc - these personalities and the politics they fronted were Lenin's targets. So is the Weekly Worker the new Iskra? Well, I would be more modest than that. We do not have a Lenin or a Trotsky. Let us say we set ourselves the same aim as Lenin set for Iskra. The problem with the rest of the left is that they attempt to put out their version of Pravda, but they do not have a hope of reaching the millions in the current period. It is the wrong job they are setting themselves. With the founding of a Communist Party, that is the time, in my opinion, for the establishment of a Pravda. We cannot do that now. Yet we are ambitious, not only in relation to the movement in Britain, but to that of the world. We are not like the SWP. Look at how it relates to other organisations of the masses. I have already spoken about how it sees the Socialist Alliance, but how does it regard, for example, the SACP, which I have also mentioned? The SWP's fraternal grouping in South Africa, Keep Left, actually entered the SACP in 1999. Last year it pulled out. We do not know why. We do not know what the comrades had in mind when they went in - presumably it was simply for the purpose of recruitment. But would not the intervention of a genuinely revolutionary faction inside the SACP have been a crucial factor in the present crisis? Recently we carried an interview with Munyaradzi Gwisai of the International Socialist Organisation Zimbabwe (Weekly Worker July 25). He spoke about how the SWP suggested the possibility of entryist tactics in relation to the Movement for Democratic Change, the party originally set up by the trade union movement as a result of the big outbreaks of strikes and militancy that occurred in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s. Quite rightly, the ISO went in. But what was the aim? We read in the same interview that, although the comrades got the idea of entryism from the SWP, they got the idea of trying to win or split the MDC from elsewhere. So what strategy did Alex Callinicos put forward for ISO work in the MDC? Surely when you have an organisation overwhelmingly made up of working class militants, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, it also contains influential members of the black bourgeoisie and the white farmers, and is increasingly backed by international capital, what is necessary is a strategy aimed at splitting that organisation, in order to win something worthwhile for the working class. Serious engagement, not a recruiting posse, was what was called for. Why then did the SWP advise the ISO to go into the MDC? Presumably for the same reason as their comrades went into the South African Communist Party, and as they themselves act inside the Socialist Alliance. What we champion, by contrast, are the needs of the whole working class. We do not limit ourselves to recruitment to our own organisation. That is just pathetic. What we want to do is establish an organisation that can win for our class. We want that not only in this country, but for the whole world. That is why we keep hammering away on this central question of the working class party. The final thing I want to touch on, before I finish, is what would happen to our Iskra-like role, if we closed down the Weekly Worker in order to become part of a new Socialist Alliance unofficial paper? We are not talking about if the SWP suddenly had a change of heart, and agreed that there should be an official Socialist Alliance newspaper. In that case we know what that paper would be like. It would not be up to the job, and we would need to keep the Weekly Worker going. But what if ourselves and the AWL actually came to an agreement where we would pool our resources on an unofficial SA paper? Where would that leave our project? Well, as far as I am concerned, that project still holds good. I know AWL comrades have got differences with us. There would be room in such a paper for all sorts of things - more than are covered now. In my view we should cover trade union questions, for example, in the same way as we cover questions of the Socialist Alliance, the SLP, the SACP and all the rest: how revolutionaries ought to behave in those organisations, and the need for communist political organisation. For us the new paper would have to champion the need for a working class party, and the need to fight to transform the Socialist Alliance in such a direction. No doubt all sorts of compromises might be necessary. But if we are able to persuade the AWL comrades of the centrality of this project, and of the SA in furthering it, I think we will be able to come to an arrangement.
Worker