28.04.2004

Red Platform founded

Regular readers of the Weekly Worker will know that there has been a serious debate in our party recently over the proper tactics to adopt towards Respect. Our March 21 aggregate passed a resolution requiring us to work for “the biggest possible vote for Respect”, and failing to make that electoral support conditional on the three issues we had previously been pressing on the coalition’s leadership: republicanism, open borders, and workers’ representation on a worker’s wage.

Some of us argued that this was a break with our original strategy. We engaged with Respect to highlight its opportunist nature, and its retreat from the politics of the Socialist Alliance. The Weekly Worker following the Respect launch carried the headline “A bonfire of principles: John Rees ditches the politics of the Socialist Alliance for the platitudes of Respect”. This set a tone we expected to maintain until either we had won Respect to socialism, or it had collapsed into irrelevance through the weight of its own contradictions. Six comrades signed an article calling for “No unconditional vote for Respect!”, and a resolution was proposed to overturn the decision of March 21 at the next aggregate.

That took place on April 24, and the debate there was far fuller and more evenly matched than the preceding one. We had clearly increased our support, but still failed to secure a majority. A move to overturn the previous resolution and decide our voting policy closer to the election was lost by less than two to one, and another to impose conditions on electoral support by a larger margin. An emergency motion to refuse to support Respect candidates who were members of the reactionary Muslim Association of Britain was closest of all, but was still defeated. A full report of the aggregate appears elsewhere in these pages [see opposite - ed]. Although at the time of writing we had not read this report, it doubtless gives a fuller description of the debates.

Two of us feel that not only must this debate go on, but that it has raised more general questions about our strategy and method. We have therefore decided to form a platform within the CPGB to argue our case. An outline of that case appears below, and we would urge comrades sympathetic to it to join us, and help shape the platform and, above all, our party.

Manny Neira
Cameron Richards
CPGB Red Platform: email: red@cpgb.org.uk, web: www.cpgb.org.uk/red, tel 0794 997 996 5.

Founding statement

The Red Platform of the Communist Party of Great Britain is, above all, a grouping of CPGB partisans. We are loyal members, accept the party’s rules, are committed to unity in action, and fully support the statement ‘What we fight for’, published in every issue of our paper, the Weekly Worker. We recommend you read that excellent summary, and (as it says) if you accept its principles, we urge you to join the CPGB.

The name of our platform is formed of initials standing for Republicanism, Equality and Democracy - a somewhat shorter acronym than Respect’s, but one which broadly encapsulates the principles it has rejected.

Our aims are:

I. To promote socialist unity

The CPGB is distinctive on the left in demanding not agreement with, but only acceptance of, its programme. Any real mass workers’ party will draw together thousands of comrades of different political backgrounds, and hundreds of thousands of workers, students, anti-capitalists, peace campaigners and others. The way to build a party from such forces is not, as Respect seeks to do, to lower its politics to a mere universally unexceptionable general beneficence, but to present a clear programme for a socialist future, actively work for its achievement and invite others to join that struggle - while, if necessary, debating the politics driving that action.

Note that we seek socialist unity and not merely unity. The class collaborationist appetites of Respect were starkly revealed at their founding conference, as they jettisoned every policy which would make unprincipled alliance possible. The absence of greater bourgeois forces in Respect is no credit to the coalition: merely the failure of any such forces to be tempted by the Respect leadership’s craven flirtation. This reaches perhaps its lowest point in its association with the reactionary Muslim Association of Britain.

Whatever our differences with them, we recognise comradeship with members of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, the Socialist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, Workers Power and many other left groups. We believe that we should support progressive projects to cohere them into larger, democratic structures, and promote our partyist project in those structures.

We therefore call for:

1. Maintenance of critical engagement with Respect all the way to the ballot box. We must support only candidates who campaign for republicanism and open borders, and will accept a worker’s wage if elected: as by doing so they will be breaking with the populist Respect agenda. We must not support members of the Muslim Association of Britain.

We believe that Respect, as currently formed, is a blind alley for working class representation: an unprincipled, opportunist electoral project that stands no chance of winning power and will dull rather than raise political consciousness on the left and in the class. In the unlikely event that, say, John Rees wins election as an MEP, he will use this to reinforce the political thesis he spelled out at the Respect launch: that the SA failed through being socialist, that the working class is not ready to hear a socialist message, and that it can be tricked into voting for revolutionary change in society without realising it.

We agree with comrade Marcus Ström’s analysis that Respect candidates would only accept our conditions if there were a “political revolution” in Respect, and should therefore make our support contingent on precisely that revolution taking place. The fact that such conditions were not applied to the SA or the Socialist Labour Party reflects their objectively different nature: whatever their weaknesses, they were progressive and inherently partyist projects. Respect is the political negation of the SA, a regressive tactic employed by the leadership of the SWP to engage with the anti-war movement not as political leaders, but opportunist hangers-on.

2. Rejoining the Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform. The SWP leadership behaved contemptibly in not leaving the SA once it had ceased to support it, but in remaining members simply to use its majority to attempt to crush it as a possible source of socialist opposition. The SADP, which the CPGB helped found, is right to oppose them. Its comrades are our natural allies: it is barely more than a year since the CPGB was proposing to launch a joint SA minority paper with them. Though some resist engagement with Respect, they do not make this a condition of membership, and a minority believe, as we do, that Respect cannot simply be ‘worked round’. We should be still be part of that debate with them. We believe that comrade John Bridge was wrong to lead a walkout from the SADP, but argue that, even if he had been right, the grounds on which he did so are now irrelevant. Demanding that all members of the SADP retain paper membership of a defunct wider SA is now absurd.

3. Intervention into the Labour Party. Though hijacked by an overtly pro-bourgeois leadership in the form of ‘New Labour’, the Labour Party retains its historic importance as a mass bourgeois workers’ party. Vitally, it retains the affiliation of most British trade unions, and we cannot call for their disaffiliation while there remains no alternative working class party: for that would be to call for them to drift into apoliticism, syndicalism and chaos. Neither do we believe that the Labour Party can be ‘reclaimed’, as some sincere socialists who are still in Labour believe. Our aim should be to develop contacts within the party, to intervene at the meetings of its left groupings, and ultimately to publish a journal specifically addressing its politics.

II. To defend party democracy

The remarkable and continued success of the Weekly Worker is a credit to the CPGB and represents our main political weapon. Attracting something like 10,000 readers a week to both print and electronic versions, it is the most widely read journal of the British left: politically relevant in a way that Socialist Worker, though supported by thousands of paper-sellers at every demonstration and left meeting, cannot hope to become.

The paper’s reputation and importance are built on its openness. It offers not only the politics of the CPGB leadership, but of those who disagree both inside the party and out. It reports both the party’s own debates, and the debates going on in other left organisations. Indeed, it is read not least by members of other groups wanting to find out what their own leadership are doing!

But the party’s democracy is not a device to keep the paper interesting. Lenin’s call for “freedom in discussion and criticism, unity in action” - democratic centralism - is a consciously theorised form of a method which is instinctive in working class organisations. Workers have power only by acting together. A single striker can be replaced: a whole shop floor on strike halts production. Once the majority have spoken, all must act: but the minority need not be silent.

This is because unity is not enough. How can we determine the best strategy, the most effective tactics? Only through debate. No leadership group, however experienced or theoretically advanced, can be relied upon to decide for any workers’ collective. Without democracy, they become myopic and intransigent, and the organisations they lead increasingly weak, distant, and irrelevant. The stories of a dozen left sects in living memory come vividly to mind: what happened to the high hopes which surrounded the formation of the SLP?

Democracy is not only right - it works. Nor is it sufficient to rely on a formal structure or democratic ‘tradition’. The struggle to maintain democracy must be constant and fierce, and is never finally won. Complacency precedes bureaucracy. The CPGB has a strong, open culture: we must all actively defend it.

We therefore argue that:

1. The Provisional Central Committee must operate openly in front of the membership. To be able to hold the PCC to account, we must know what it is doing and why. The PCC must therefore distribute minutes of its meetings to all members. The minutes should omit only material which if published might harm the party or the legitimate personal interests of identifiable members.

2. The Weekly Worker must be open to the membership. The editor should begin from the position that articles submitted for publication by members should be carried: any decision to ‘spike’ is serious and should be open to question by our comrades. Such challenges are valid, and the assertion that the editor has the right to spike an article is not, in itself, sufficient response. There are legitimate grounds for denying publication, but they must be provided if such a decision is questioned.

3. We should cultivate criticism. Criticism is not a right: it is a duty; and comrades discharging that duty should be treated with respect. Naturally their criticisms may not be accepted, and be politically opposed, but accusations of disloyalty, indiscipline or dishonesty should only be made with the most serious justification. The leadership particularly should remember that it acts from an inherently stronger position than any rank and file critic, and the way in which their criticism is received creates the atmosphere which any other comrade, who might contemplate criticism in the future, breathes. It is true that we should help all comrades develop their political resilience for the struggle, but the attitude that comrades should simply be tough enough to cope with whatever is thrown at them is a macho pose which has no place in a communist organisation. Criticism should be treated as a principled activity unless there is the strongest reason to genuinely (and not merely rhetorically) doubt its motivation.

III. To build the CPGB

We believe that the CPGB pays inadequate attention to the simplest and most direct method of building a new Communist Party: recruitment. The reluctance to become a mere recruiting sect is understandable, and indeed commendable - we do not wish to see casual contacts signed up to some empty ‘membership’ without understanding, activity and commitment. However, we believe that it is possible to make the opposite mistake, and neglect the importance of winning politically conscious individuals to our banner. Further, merely ‘signing up’ a new comrade is not sufficient: it is merely the beginning of a process of learning and deepening which should continue throughout that new comrade’s political career, and not stop even on election to leadership!

This is what an American bourgeois politician might call ‘motherhood and apple pie’: a statement so obviously worthy that it is difficult to dispute. However, we believe that, in this case, political approval is stopping short of action, and wish to see a fresh initiative adopted to winning individual comrades to the CPGB’s banner.

Join us!

If you support the principles outlined above, join the Red Platform.

Workers of the world, unite!