10.11.2005

Communists tell it as it is

We fight not for some halfway house, for diplomatic peace or for a federal non-aggression pact, writes Ian Mahoney. We fight for principled unity

This is the 600th issue of the Weekly Worker. When we launched the title back in 1993, our declared intention then was to systematically build upon the polemical and theoretical achievements of our fortnightly-cum-three-weekly, The Leninist. We quickly made the transition from a single-sheet paper to a four-pager and then to an eight-pager. Finally, in April 2001, with issue No369, we moved to our present 12-page format. CPGBers are proud that our organisation has been able to sustain a weekly publication of such consistent quality. Most other left groups - some numerically larger than ours - appear content with a monthly or an even dozier tempo. Although, given the parlous state of journalism on the contemporary revolutionary left, this is perhaps a blessing. We were once told in an especially philistine letter by Socialist Party comrade Timothy Lessells that our paper was largely composed of the "stupid petty bourgeois academics playing a game in their own world, where everyone knows about and cares about the most academic, petty, pathetic, insignificant left event ever". Instead, he wrote, we should "start with what people understand, then develop them politically, raise their consciousness" (Weekly Worker March 8 2001). It was an odd, yet extremely telling, letter for a Marxist to write. Presumably, comrade Lessells - and those who think like him in the SP and its ilk - think we should stuff our paper with the type of insipid fare that our weekly rivals such as The Socialist, Socialist Worker or Scottish Socialist Voice serve up for our class. That is, repetition of news people will have already read in the mainstream bourgeois press - with the benefit of profound 'Marxist' insights of the calibre that (a) Tony Blair is clearly no socialist, (b) the Labour Party is not the workers' friend, (c) imperialism is nasty and (d), reassuringly, everything in the nano-sized snippet of the workers' movement lorded over by the sects that produce this or that rag is going swimmingly - no problems, no disputes, nothing for us to fundamentally question or think about. This is shameful. A communist newspaper should strive to tell the truth, brutal though this may be on occasion. For example, what is the genuine state of the left in this period? It is clearly organisationally and ideologically fragmented. Thus, what the advanced section of our class urgently needs is revolutionary unity - not unity on the basis of a Labour Party mark two, or a backsliding coalition with islam, let alone so-called unity around petty nationalism which inevitably acts to weaken and divide our existing forces. Our paper exists first and foremost to wage a war for the cause of revolutionary unity. We are faced with the task of defeating capital and the state that serves it. It follows from this that we need to achieve the organisation of all genuine communists, revolutionary socialists, progressive anti-capitalists and advanced working class militants into a single party - a Communist Party. To aim for anything less is to invite defeat. And any 'communist' who wants to unite Marxists, not in a Marxist party, but an undefined broad workers' party - or something else that sneakily fudges the fundamental difference between reform and revolution - has to all intents and purposes deserted Marxism. Many examples spring to mind. But let us limit ourselves to just three. l John Rees uses the big Socialist Workers Party majority in Respect to impose the blandest of politics - non-socialist politics that are designed to be acceptable to "muslim activists": ie, bourgeois organisations such as the Muslim Association of Britain. So no to open borders, no to secularism, no to proletarian socialism and no to free abortion on demand. In other words, Respect is a popular front taken to party form. l Peter Taaffe, general secretary of the Socialist Party in England and Wales looks forward to a "loose federation" along the lines of the early Labour Party (The Socialist November 3-9). Of course, he demands the right to form a special SPEW platform in such a formation - naturally a right he refuses to grant dissenting minorities within his own set-up. l Dave Craig of the Revolutionary Democratic Group calls for a republican socialist party, in which Marxism is "seen as a legitimate part" (Weekly Worker November 3). A Marxist party with a Marxist programme is, though, condemned by comrade Craig as premature. His is a Marxism delayed, a Marxism on credit - always a Marxism for tomorrow, never for today. Marxism is to be tolerated as long as Marxists do not form the majority. He, along with all manner of anti-sectarian sectarians, especially the flotsam and jetsam who survived the sinking of the SA, earnestly recommend the model of the Scottish Socialist Party - organisationally. However, organisation and programme, form and content, cannot be separated. The SSP is not only nationalist and reformist; it is federal and thoroughly bureaucratic. We openly and consistently fight for what is historically needed. A Marxist party, a combat party of the working class - its scientific name, according to Lenin, being a Communist Party. In short we fight for a full Marxist programme and the corresponding Marxist forms of organisation: ie, democratic centralism. Of course, life does not always produce what is required "¦ certainly straightaway. So we communists must, and will, deal with, and join, all manner of halfway houses, temporary unifications, false starts and unstable lash-ups - Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party, the Socialist Alliance, SSP, Respect, etc. But - and this needs stressing - at all times we fight for a Communist Party and communist politics. The journalistic method we employ is inextricably connected to that aim. To produce a Communist Party we do not employ dull diplomacy or mealy-mouthed official optimism in this paper. Often what we say is deeply unpopular. This is hardly surprising. We confront and seek to deconstruct often dearly held ideas on the left that are nonsense from the point of view of Marxism and whose only practical result in the real world is that they continue to divide and blunt the effectiveness of the revolutionary left - not only in Britain and Europe, but globally. We want our thousands of readers not to be told comfortable truths, but to be challenged and educated to meticulously follow high politics, study factional manoeuvres and theoretical arguments. To think for themselves, in other words. This, of course, is why we appear 'rude'. And also why people want to read us. In this context, it is instructive that the very first motion to be presented at this weekend's little conference to relaunch the Socialist Alliance wags a finger and tells us: "Personalised insults, baiting and shouting down of those comrades we do not agree with are unacceptable forms of behaviour within the Socialist Alliance at meetings or on email lists. It is a democratic principle that comrades should be allowed to put their point of view and be listened to with respect." Frankly, that depends on the content of that point of view. Of course, we favour reasoned argument and abiding by the democratic norms of debate. However, we also oppose censorship. We therefore demand the free exchange of views - even if some easily offended individuals or easily offended majorities find what is being said hurtful or offensive. When it comes to polemics, we claim as an example of our method that which the dull journals of the rest of the left cannot. We consciously stand in the tradition of Iskra, the paper that laid the basis for the revolutionary unity of all Marxists in the Russian empire (including those in Latvia, Poland, etc). Future Menshevik Martov - a 'soft' Iskraist - neatly captured its blunt, no-nonsense expositional style when he commented that the editors "strove to make sure that 'all that is ridiculous' appears in 'a ridiculous form'" and to "expose 'the very embryo of a reactionary idea hidden behind a revolutionary phrase'" (cited in Liebman Leninism under Lenin London 1985, p29). And how was this greeted in the workers' movement in Russia? Marcel Liebman writes: "On all sides, Iskra's opponents condemned the polemical methods of this journal, which was accused, to quote Trotsky' testimony at the time, of 'fighting not so much against the autocracy as against the other factions in the revolutionary movement'" (ibid). In other words, this paper did not tell people (a) what a bad man the tsar was, (b) that the Cossacks were not the workers' friend "¦ (you can fill in the rest from the above template) And here is Liebman on Lenin's infamous 'rudeness': "Unconcerned with those preoccupations about unity which almost inevitably lead to the making of compromises, Lenin was able to give a sharp outline to his doctrine, using the incisive language that he preferred and, as he often stressed, aussprechen was ist ('to say what is': ie to describe things frankly, as he saw them), without having to worry about the feelings of any partners. This absence of ambiguity not only helped separate the revolutionary trend from the reformist one; it also maintained and reinforced the distinction between the Russian socialist movement and bourgeois ideology. No doubt the weakness of liberalism in Russia limited its power of attraction: not sufficiently, though, to prevent the Mensheviks from becoming susceptible to it. Leninism, however, by its twofold opposition to bourgeois liberalism and socialist reformism, accentuated the split between the world of the bourgeoisie and that of the proletariat ..." (my emphasis ibid p107). Thus, Trotsky commented that "Leninism is warlike from head to foot" (L Trotsky On Lenin p194). This is not simply for the sake of upsetting people, of course. It is framed thus in order to draw implacable lines of political distinction between proletarian politics and those of our class enemy. That is what this paper is in business to do and that explains its style and content. We set out to call things by their proper names - and there is little that infuriates an opportunist more than being correctly labelled. As Lenin puts it, "Very often this word [opportunist] is wrongly regarded as 'merely a term of abuse' and no attempt is made to grasp its meaning. The opportunist does not betray his party, he does not act as a traitor, he does not desert it. He continues to serve it sincerely and zealously. But his typical and characteristic trait is that he yields to the mood of the moment, he is unable to resist what is fashionable, he is politically short-sighted and spineless" (VI Lenin CW Vol 11, Moscow 1977, p239). Launched in December 1900, edited by Lenin and five others who were to become Mensheviks in the future, Iskra set itself the central aim of an open ideological struggle to purge the Russian revolutionary movement of political strands alien to Marxism. To this end "it mocked and flayed [the economists] cruelly for their desire at all costs to lay the workers upon the Procrustean bed of peaceful economic demands ... the newspaper waged a campaign against the Socialist Revolutionaries ... Iskra's campaign against the SRs, however, produced deep disquiet among ... a certain section of workers, who said: why fight amongst ourselves?" (G Zinoviev History of the Bolshevik Party p74). Thus, many of the pages of Iskra were filled with seemingly esoteric arguments, far beyond the understanding of the mass of the class, or even of many advanced workers who sincerely believed in revolution and socialism. Again, as Lenin's deputy, Zinoviev, notes, "The psychology of workers living under the yoke of tsarism was such that they said: let all revolutionaries irrespective of party and their differences unite closely together and teach us how to fight against the autocracy" (ibid p74). Yet the vital theoretical and ideological preparatory work undertaken by Iskra - work that made it read like a "trade journal" of the Russian revolutionary left - just as we have been accused of being the "trade journal" of the British left - laid the basis for publications like the mass-circulation revolution daily, Pravda, launched in 1912 with a circulation of 60,000, rising to 130,000 by the time of its second anniversary. Pravda "gradually wrested one factory after another from the Mensheviks. Workers would send tens and hundreds of dispatches into the newspaper, which had become a sort of general staff of the movement and an organising centre ... The Mensheviks, who were suffering defeats everywhere, in their newspaper explained them by the 'Pravda epidemic' which was raging through the working class of St Petersburg and the main cities ... Pravda became the best friend of any working class family ..." (ibid pp180-81). The ability of Pravda to become the paper of the Russian working class as it reached out for democracy and revolution, to merge itself with its movement and in a sense to become its own voice, was not in contradiction to the harsh and painstaking work of theoretical clarification and struggle undertaken by Iskra - it was a brilliant confirmation of its validity. Our paper is clearly still in its Iskra rather than its Pravda phase. But we take the occasion of our 600th issue to commit ourselves once again to the political task of building a mass Communist Party with a mass circulation press.