13.07.2005

Bolshevik flexibility

Our Marxism Fringe meetings were held just around the corner from the British Museum - a brisk 10-minute walk from the main venues. About 30 people, from a variety of groups, gathered to hear John Bridge and Mike Macnair speak on the topic, 'Is Respect a popular front? Should communists be in it if it is?' Comrade Bridge opened the meeting arguing that, yes, Respect is a popular front. Its working class majority is in alliance with what is admittedly a largely phantom rightwing minority, but it is this (petty bourgeois) minority which effectively sets the political parameters. This can be illustrated through a whole plethora of examples, not least the key questions of abortion and secularism. However, in no way does this mean that communists should not engage with Respect, since it is an important site for struggle to achieve the type of organisation the working class actually needs. Comrade Bridge went on to argue that Respect, the 'unity coalition', as the publicity material states, is in fact Respect, the political party. It stands in elections; it is officially registered as a party with the election commission; its aim is to form a government. The Socialist Workers Party, in throwing itself into this reformist project, appears to be suggesting that what we need is a 'Respect stage' on the road to a socialist society. Mike Macnair opened with a brief history of the Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform, using it to illustrate the theme of his opening, which was the fragmentation of the left. The SWP's conclusion that the Soviet Union was state-capitalist meant that it had spent two to three decades refusing to engage with 'official communism'. Yet now, when at last it begins to work with the 'official' Communist Party of Britain, the result is that it collapses into popular frontism. What communists should be doing is fighting to split popular fronts, as argued by Trotsky in the 1930s, when he instructed his followers to enter the socialist parties at the very time they were taking part in popular fronts with the 'official communist' and a few small bourgeois parties. Whilst political distance is essential, moral distance is entirely counterproductive, concluded comrade Macnair. When the meeting was opened up to debate, Alan Davis from the International Bolshevik Tendency argued that Marxists should "cleave a line" on the question of class, and thus should not participate in and refuse under any circumstances to vote for those participating in cross-class organisations such as Respect. For him, it was inadmissible to try and split the popular front by voting only for representatives of its working class components. In reply, comrade Bridge likened the comrade's approach to a religious dogma - our tactics should be infinitely flexible, he said, provided we adhered to communist principle. He referred comrades to Lenin's 'Leftwing' communism, an infantile disorder, which in 1920 precisely recommended such flexibility to the newly formed Communist International. In this work Lenin approvingly described how the Bolsheviks could at one moment boycott the tsarist duma and at another strike up a deal with the bourgeois Cadets in order to ensure its members were elected to the duma. That, said comrade Bridge, is Bolshevism and suggested that comrade Davis's organisation should change its name to the Infantile 'Leftwing' Tendency l Anthony Rose