01.09.2004

Yet another bloody non-sectarian sect

The Red Party Tiny Red Book (July 2004) http://www.redparty.org.uk/tinyredbook.html The Red Party Red Star, No1, August 2004, £1

Yet another new leftwing ‘party’ has been launched. On July 18 a small group set up the ‘Red Party’ and adopted a very short platform under the name Tiny Red Book. The first issue of their journal Red Star appeared in early August. The group is mainly composed of comrades who had recently resigned from the Communist Party of Great Britain, with a leading role played by Manny Neira, but also includes a former member of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Gerry Byrne. So how do the comrades justify setting up one more ‘party’? Their Tiny Red Book and the first issue of Red Star provide only limited answers.

The Tiny Red Book is genuinely tiny. It is presented as an eight-page pamphlet, but the text totals only 783 words - slightly longer than the Weekly Worker’s ‘What we fight for’ column. It is spun out over eight pages by being illustrated with imagery of a broadly Maoist character. The six pages with substantive text on them contain six points:

(1) The world is “crippled by oppression, poverty and war”. This is because society is capitalist and power is in the hands of a capitalist ruling class.
(2) “The majority, the working class, have won important reforms through struggle.” We have to defend these and support demands for more reforms. But “we are still not a democracy: we are not governed by the whole people … socialism is simply the struggle for real democracy.”
(3) To win democracy we need a revolution. Peasants and slaves have rebelled before, but the modern working class is strong. “All we need is to spread the knowledge of that power, and organise ourselves to use it. In short, all we need is political leadership.”
(4) The Labour Party was historically pro-capitalist and has now “abandoned even the pretence of socialism”; the old Communist Party defended bureaucratic rule and is now “a spent force”. The left groups “demand ideological purity. They suppress disagreement in their own ranks. They refuse to unite until they agree. Above all, they reduce socialism to an arcane secret possessed by the few, not the plainly just demand for real democracy. They speak a language no-one else understands, in a voice no-one else can hear.”
(5) There are real socialists both within and outside the groups. The Red Party is merely an instrument for creating a real party.

Pages (1) to (5) can be seen to be muddled and watered down versions of views held by the CPGB.

Page (6) asserts the particular character the Red Party aims at, and deserves to be quoted almost in full:
- “Our party must not silence anyone in the name of ‘discipline’: we need every dissenting voice to find the right way.”
- “Our party must not demand ideological conformity: we represent our class, not some 10-a-penny opinion.”
- “Our party must not conspire against itself: once the majority have decided to act, we must all act together.”
- “Our party must not have gurus: neither the leaders of the past nor the self-proclaimed ‘theorists’ of the present.”
- “Our party must not abuse its members: each has a right to their time, their privacy, and their life.”
- “Our party must not lie: about its strength, its achievements, its past, or its mistakes.”
- “Our party must not preen: it must talk in plain language, and listen as much as it talks.”

These points are almost wholly negative. The underlying message of the whole text seems to be expressed on page (5): “There are millions to be won to a cause so just that only the nonsense of the left could obscure it: we must reach them.” The only problem of winning the millions to socialism is that the far left is fucked up. And what this fucked-up-ness might be is expressed in a vague and indefinite critique of the other left groups. Really, comrades?

Red Star adds little more. The banner tells us that the party stands “for socialism, humanism and democracy”. The bulk of the articles in the paper could have appeared without alteration in any one of the multitude of left papers or journals: Gerry Byrne on ‘law and order’ and on the Iraq war, Jeremy Butler on immigration, an interview with Gene Bruskin of US Labor Against the War, David Broder on ‘animal rights’, and reviews of the films Fahrenheit 9/11, Spiderman 2 and Taxi Driver, PJ Harvey’s album Uh huh her, and the comic book The Red Star Collected Edition.

Two articles add something about the nature of the Red Party’s project. Darren Williams’s ‘Socialism, humanism and the fear of tofu’ gives us a two-page potted history of Marxism, including an outline standard-Trot account of the degeneration of the USSR. The anti-Stalinist left in general has been (as the AWL argues) poisoned by concessions to Stalinism. The background argument is that “Socialists accept that there is no interest greater than the common interest of human beings. We never concede any argument that ‘The price of saving, or improving, a life is too high’ ... Socialists are fundamentalist humanists, extremist humanists.” Humanism is not merely for the future: it is to be the guide to escaping the sub-Stalinist practice of the far left. “This must also mean that socialists treat each other in a friendly, comradely way, recognising that political differences over detail or tactics should not hide our common aims.”

Manny Neira’s ‘Another bloody party’ elaborates a little on the critique of the far left in the last two points of the Tiny Red Book. The first part of the article is an amusing recital of what every left activist knows - that there are umpteen bloody groups divided, on the face of it, by small nuances of political and theoretical opinion. Unlike pure cynics, Manny insists that the activists of these umpteen groups in the main do useful work.

From here he turns to the basics: socialism is “the fight for true democracy”, by ... “bringing control and accountability to every aspect of our lives ... our vision is a society truly in the hands of the people who built it and live in it”. The ruling class will not yield power willingly, so “true socialism is revolutionary”. Leadership is needed and therefore a party. However, all the groups imagine that the disagreements on the left can be overcome. They can’t. What’s necessary is to build a party on the basis of the simple idea of “a government of ordinary working people”, on the basis of freedom of debate, unity in action.

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt
The trouble with the comrades’ simple solution is that it has already been tried - over and over again - and it does not work. ‘Marxist humanism’ dates back to the ex-CP ‘new left’ which emerged after the Hungarian crisis of 1956. The idea of a party founded on the most elementary basics, rather than a developed political platform, was attempted by a series of groups in the aftermath of the emergence of Stalinism: most are now remembered only by Trot historians. The Red Party’s use of Maoist imagery suggests nostalgia for the widespread ‘spontaneist’ politics of 1968 and after, which had the same idea. When I was a student back in the early 1970s, probably the majority of student and ex-student left activists had similar ideas. The old International Marxist Group during the 1970s spun off at least three groups which split from it with similar ideas to the Red Party’s. All of them are history. Ex-IMGer Hilary Wainwright has been involved in initiating a series of broader attempts to create a movement along these lines. All came to nothing.

The interesting question is why it does not work. At one level the answer is simple. Leninist groups outweigh ‘humanist’ groups in practice because they are less ‘humanist’ in the sense discussed on page six of the Tiny Red Book. That is, they make more demands on their members’ time, energy and discipline - “their time, their privacy, and their life”. They also have a more elaborated division of labour: not just reflected in “self-proclaimed ‘theorists’”, but also in full-timers and so on. As a result they act more coherently and get more active output from, often, smaller numbers of members and supporters.
It is not rocket science. Political activism is work. More work gets done if people are strongly motivated to do it at the expense of other things. Work gets done more efficiently with a division of labour.

Similarly, doing theoretical work is work. Hence theorists are necessarily “self-proclaimed”. The way to overcome the problem of disagreement with leading theorists is to do the theoretical work yourself and criticise them. Otherwise we would be passing resolutions (eg, instructing comrade John Doe to go away and read Capital and a load of other Marxist economics and write a critique of the Carchedi/Freeman ‘temporal single system’ approach to Marx’s theory of value).

A second level is that a political party necessarily comments on everything - or at least, everything which is a live issue in politics. What about Respect, for example? Should we call for a vote for Respect candidates? Suppose we vote that we should. Assume, for the sake of argument, that the decision-making process was as democratic as can be achieved. Opponents of supporting Respect candidates are then faced with a choice. Which is more important: staying in a united group, or identifying yourselves with all the thousands of opponents of Respect and the millions who don’t give a damn about it outside the group? A similar problem faced opponents of Respect in the CPGB this summer. Manny and his Red Party co-thinkers - not all the opponents of Respect in the CPGB - decided to split. Perhaps they think that the decision to support Respect was taken undemocratically or something of that sort. But they have not said so in explaining why they have formed their own ‘party’.

The problem does not just affect small groups like the CPGB. Should opponents of the Scottish Socialist Party’s independence campaign stay in the party or oppose the campaign from outside? Should supporters of Respect in the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain stay in the party and fight to reverse its decision not to support Respect, or should they split? Should opponents of Blairism and the Iraq war stay in the Labour Party and fight, or try to create an alternative?

The problem which leads to the ‘57 varieties’ of the far left Manny discusses in his article is that comrades decide too easily to split, whether by majorities expelling minorities or minorities walking out. Now there is a problem behind that problem, with the practice of democracy in the movement. But the underlying issue of judgment remains. Is it more important to go on working with people in the same organisation, or to reach out to the ‘uncorrupted’ people outside? The essence of the dynamic of unjustified splits is the decision to go for what the Tiny Red Book calls the “millions to be won to a cause so just that only the nonsense of the left could obscure it”.

Millions out there?
Red Party comrades presumably imagine that the style of the Red Star is - unlike, at the opposite extreme, the Weekly Worker - aimed at these millions. It is not. If anything, it seems to be aimed at Guardian readers, and perhaps at those people on the periphery of the far left who have not thought deeply about far-left political ideas. It has some similarity to the style of Socialist Resistance, whose project is in some ways similar. The reader is expected to be interested in film (three films reviewed in one issue), the music of PJ Harvey, and leftish graphic novels/comic books. Maoist imagery is expected to appeal to them.

Again there is an underlying problem. For broad millions of people in this country, ‘politics’ is something ‘politicians’ do. These millions prefer, most of the time, to get on with their own lives - home improvement, days out for the kids, fly-fishing, train-spotting, swinging, clubbing, sports, ballroom dancing … or whatever other pastime takes their fancy. Periodically they get to choose at elections between competing political products: Conservative, Labour, Lib Dem, Green ... Even more periodically, some of them become involved in a strike, a tenants’ movement, or a single-issue campaign, and for a short period start thinking about politics as something they might do. But once the immediate struggle is over most people go back to their ‘real lives’. It is not stupidity or ‘false consciousness’ but perfectly rational behaviour: why bust your arse on politics when at the end of the day the thing is sewn up by the politicians and the people who bribe them? At least when you bang your head against a brick wall it feels better when you stop!

For something under a million people politics is something we devote at least a part of our time free from work to, something we make ourselves rather than simply consume occasionally. For a variety of reasons these people have decided that with all its frustrations political activity is a worthwhile life project. Perhaps a quarter of a million of us are the activists of the labour movement: Labour Party, trade union and campaigns activists and the militants of the far left. The far left on its own can turn out numbers ranging between 5,000 and 15,000 on demonstrations which do not have much wider resonance; the actual organised far left (including the Morning Star’s CPB here) is smaller, perhaps around 4,000 in total. The proportionality among the political activists is reflected in far-left votes at elections ranging between 2% and 5%.

The people who actually pay any sustained attention to the far left - the people who read the left press or read, as opposed to binning, left leaflets - are the political activists. And these people are not political virgins. They have hard questions to ask of the far left - Why didn’t the Russian Revolution work? What do you mean by democracy? What should we do about the Labour Party? and many others. Of course, when there is a big mass movement like a strike or the anti-war movement new people get drawn into long-term political activism. But the evidence of nearly 60 years’ history since 1945 is that in general they go into the existing activists’ organisations in roughly their existing proportions, with - if anything - the larger existing organisations recruiting more than their ‘share’.

Suppose we had a unified and democratic party of the Marxist left. Part of our time would be spent talking to ‘the world outside’: political campaigns, trade union activity, and so on. Another part of it would be spent ‘talking to ourselves’: that is, debating issues disputed on the left. In doing so we would unavoidably “speak a language no-one else understands, in a voice no-one else can hear”. Exactly the same thing is done by fly-fisher people, motor mechanics enthusiasts, and even swingers. The Labour Party - a pretty big party - equally has its own internal jargon and code. In this respect the Red Party’s critique of the existing left is the same as ... the Socialist Workers’ Party’s critique of the ‘old left’.

The Red Party comrades have set up a new group. What that means is that they are “self-proclaimed ‘theorists’”: they think that they are right on the nature of the party that is needed and the other available varieties are wrong. So they want to change the relationship of forces within the broad layer of activists. That means, in practice, persuading other existing activists of their views. They have quite rightly elected to work within the Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform, with all its limitations. They will find rapidly that they need to say something much more concrete and specific than either the Tiny Red Book or Red Star No1 has to offer. They may, of course, follow the path which has been trodden by the SWP and Workers Power and seek to find new, better and more politically virginal activists out there somewhere. In this case they will become a sect. Or they will start trying to get to grips with other activists’ concrete politics. In this case they will become a variant clone of the CPGB and abandon the illusion of talking to “millions to be won”. They will, in other words, become yet another of the competing groups - or fade away, as most Marxist-humanist groups have.

‘Humanism’, the CPGB and the Red Party
The majority of the Red Party’s founders are ex-CPGB. There has been a Red Platform within the CPGB, which for a short time had a regular column in the Weekly Worker and had a website linked to the CPGB’s. Some, not all, of the Red Platform supporters have gone to the Red Party. The CPGB, like the Red Party, insists that socialism means real democracy. We have also insisted on liberty to form tendencies and the ability to disagree in public - while acting together - as the key to forming an organisation which can avoid the endless dynamic of splits and fragmentation of the far left. The formation of the Red Party seems to suggest that we are wrong: this approach cannot solve the problem.

On the other hand, the comrades’ inability or unwillingness to give any clear explanation of why they have split from the CPGB suggests that the problem may be on their side. From the emphasis on ‘humanism’ in the Red Party’s texts, the split seems to be something to do with the conduct of debate in the CPGB and the relation of politics to comrades’ personal lives. Did the CPGB as an organisation really fuck comrades over in this way?

The formation of the Red Party thus unavoidably forces us to wash in public a certain amount of CPGB dirty linen which would not normally find its way into the Weekly Worker. We would not normally print it because, contrary to popular belief among the far left, the Weekly Worker is not a left scandal-sheet: we are interested in publicising political differences in our own and other organisations, not the stupid mistakes and personal abuse comrades of any organisation are prone to fall into in pubs and on e-lists.

It will not be news to any regular reader of the Weekly Worker that there have been and still are differences in the CPGB about what to do about Respect. The dispute which eventually led to Manny and other Red Party comrades’ resignation from the CPGB began when our March 21 2004 aggregate meeting passed a resolution which stated: “Recognising the need for the anti-war, pro-working class opposition to Blair to take on partyist form, the CPGB will work to ensure the biggest possible vote for Respect on June 10.”

The resolution was put at a late stage of the discussion at a poorly attended aggregate, and comrade Manny seems to have taken the view that it did not express the actual majority opinion in the CPGB. He more or less immediately attempted to organise the production of a collective article which would express opposition to it. This took the form of an article by Manny, with statements appended to it from other comrades, which also expressed opposition to the decision. The Provisional Central Committee, however, refused to publish the article with the appendages attached (the attempt to include other anti-Respect views before the majority position had been elaborated in the paper was described by one comrade as an “anti-democratic manoeuvre”) and a revised version was published on April 8 - now solely Manny’s article with some additional signatures. The PCC did, however, convene an early aggregate to re-discuss the issue. This took place on April 24, and at a better attended meeting the original decision was confirmed by a clear majority.

Comrade Manny and comrade Cameron Richards (who has not left the CPGB) now launched the Red Platform of the CPGB to fight for three positions. The first was that support for Respect candidates should be made conditional on their support for republicanism, MPs or MEPs being limited to a worker’s wage, and open borders. The second was that the CPGB should rejoin the Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform. The third was that the CPGB should do more to build itself as an organisation by recruiting new members.

During the period between April 24 and the June 10 elections, the Red Platform had a regular column in the Weekly Worker. There was, however, a dispute about what and how much of the platform’s material should appear in the paper. This was somewhat complicated by the fact that comrade Manny was working as a layout artist for the paper.

A particular flashpoint was the May 13 issue, which carried an article by comrade Manny imagining George Galloway becoming pregnant, complete with a photomontage. Comrade Ian Donovan argued that Manny was deliberately sabotaging the majority’s policy towards Respect by a personalised attack on Galloway. Comrade Manny stated (correctly) that, although the article was his, the photomontage was done at the request of the Weekly Worker editorial team. He demanded that the PCC should make comrade Ian withdraw the claim that he was responsible. His resignation from the CPGB was triggered by the PCC’s alleged refusal to do so. Ironically, comrade Ian has now also resigned, claiming that the PCC did attempt to force or persuade him to withdraw the allegation.

After the June 10 elections the PCC discontinued the Red Platform’s column in the paper, on the ground that the Red Platform had run out of things to say. This was followed by the resignations of some other comrades who have participated in founding the Red Party. Again ironically, at our June 19 aggregate we voted by a narrow majority for one of the Red Platform’s original proposals: to rejoin the Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform.

Did the CPGB act in an undemocratic and anti-humanist manner in this discussion and thereby force the Red Party comrades to split? In my opinion the PCC made some mistakes in handling the discussion. It is not clear either that the right initial response to comrade Manny’s supposed undemocratic manoeuvre in late March was to have a fight about what could be published, or that the PCC was right to stop the Red Platform column on its own initiative without discussion in an aggregate. The reasoning may have been sound, but the actions were bound to be taken as provocations and confuse the political discussion.

That said, none of these mistakes actually amount to conducting the discussion in an undemocratic manner or suppressing dissent. This discussion was conducted in an open manner and the votes at two successive aggregates established that there was a clear majority in favour of the agreed position on Respect.

So why did the comrades split? The answer is given by the characteristics of the Red Party which I have already discussed. They thought that there were fresher fields outside the CPGB - “millions to be won to a cause so just that only the nonsense of the left could obscure it.” For all their ostensible non-sectarianism, their actual decision to split and set up a new party was ... sectarian. It disproves not the CPGB’s approach to differences, but their own.