09.11.2006
Programme and its structure
Why do communists give their programme such importance and go to such pains to develop, guard and enrich it? Jack Conrad begins a short series by examining the background to the CPGB's Draft programme
Socialism is won from below, never delivered from on high. No road to socialism via the bureaucratic state, some confessional socialist sect or benign army colonel. Yet, though it may appear paradoxical, the Marxist party is built top-down.
Does that mean our party, the Marxist party - its proper title being Communist Party - is ruled without a shred of democracy or honest, open debate by some self-perpetuating central committee or the all-knowing general secretary? No, where that happens (and it has - eg, Stalin's Soviet Union), the party becomes Marxist in name only. In truth a barrier to revolution and human freedom. Hence we can only but protest when Stalinite parties and their Maoist, Catroite and Trotskyite imitators call themselves Marxists or communists.
What we are talking about when we refer to 'our party' is the sort of mass organisation envisaged by Karl Marx when he moved the resolution amending the 1st International's rules, calling for the working class to constitute itself "into a political party", at the Hague congress in September 1872. Otherwise the "working class cannot act as a class".1 The most valuable examples of this being the German Social Democratic Party of August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht and Karl Kautsky and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) led by Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev
Both these parties grew to possess deep, organic roots, however, and this is the point: they were built top-down in terms of theory and programme. A fact of the utmost importance, which is hardly lost on those of us who look upon, with a combination of pity, horror and disdain, those 'Marxists' whose prime focus, loyalties and hopes lie with Respect, the Labour Representation Committee, Socialist Alliance, Campaign for a New Workers' Party and other such halfway-house projects.
Communists proudly announce that we aim for nothing short of an explicitly Marxist party, a Communist Party fit for the burning tasks of the 21st century: putting the working class into power and positively superseding the moribund system of capitalism.
Incidentally, it is useful to stress here that, though there are members of the CPGB, there is no CPGB. In our Weekly Worker 'What we fight for' column we carry the statement that, while there are "many so-called 'parties'", there "exists no real Communist Party". Indeed "our central aim" is the "organisation of communists, revolutionary socialists and all politically advanced workers into a Communist Party". Another one of those paradoxes that causes endless confusion for those whose understanding is limited to formal logic, but who fail to master dialectical logic.
While necessarily fully taking into account the many changes that have occurred in the capitalist global system in the intervening years - the end of the European empires, the triumph of America, the fall of Stalinism, the death of social democratic reformism, etc - to succeed in the aim of establishing a Communist Party, we must, when it comes to theory and programme, follow the top-down approach of the German SDP and the RSDLP.
The basic propositions of Marxism are simple and straightforward - exploitation is real and international, and the class struggle must move, inexorably, towards the rule of the majority in a democratic republic, abolishing the market and the turn to production based on the principle of need. The fundamental propositions of Marxism will be made into an unstoppable physical force when millions upon millions across the planet are organised to achieve self-liberation. In 1932, in the famous words for one of his marvellous cabaret songs, 'In praise of communism' (music by Hans Eisler), Bertolt Brecht put it like this:
It's sensible, anyone can understand it.
It's easy.
You're not an exploiter, so you can grasp it.
It's a good thing for you, find out more about it.
The stupid call it stupid and the squalid call it squalid.
It's against squalor and against stupidity.
The exploiters call it a crime but we know:
It is the end of crime.
It is not madness, but the end of madness.
It is not the riddle, but the solution.
It is the simplest thing, so hard to achieve.
However, Marxism is rightly spoken of as a science. Another term for it is scientific socialism. Marxism richly deserves that title because it has been painstakingly developed and in its own way tested in practice like other sciences. The labour theory of value, alienation, the wages system of capitalist exploitation, the limits of spontaneity, imperialism, the arms economy, the production of waste and artificial wants, capitalist decline and finance capital are "¦ well, neither "easy" nor the "simplest thing".
Such phenomena have to be studied, grasped in all their complexity and transmitted, top-down, with even more energy, hard work and creativity than displayed by physicists, evolutionary biologists and mathematicians. I emphasise the term 'even more', because Marxism is dedicated not simply to discovering what is: we aim to completely transform what is. A task which Brecht, once again with characteristic sharpness, called "so hard to achieve", because it means politically mobilising and organising billions of people to overthrow global capitalism. Hence, there is nothing ethereal, platonic or academic about Marxism.
It took Marx a lifetime to be able to write Capital (a task he was, in fact, unable to complete - Capital itself being part of a much bigger, multi-volumed project that would encompass 'wage labour', 'international trade', 'the state', etc). He had to, and did, penetrate through the outer appearance of the capitalist mode of production, reveal its inner laws of motion and historical tendencies and throughout all that find a suitable method of both investigation and presentation. While Marx and Engels were undoubtedly geniuses of the first order, they also had to put in endless hours of study (not forgetting their leading role as practical organisers and revolutionaries, which immensely enriched their theory). Like Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin and Einstein, their genius was 99% sweat.
Purpose and form of programme
There is a vital interrelationship between the working class party and its programme. The programme is no afterthought - neither a long list of unfulfillable Keynesian election promises: eg, the Socialist Alliance's People before profit and Respect's 2004 general election manifesto. Nor is it an appeal for the bureaucratic state to introduce a downsized green capitalism. Nor it is a plan to return humanity to some past golden age.
The need for a communist programme arises from the needs of the movement itself. The working class requires universal freedom if it is to liberate itself and it can only achieve that end by way of the communist programme. Hence the importance which we attach to it. Indeed the main content of the struggle being conducted by the Weekly Worker could be described as the struggle for the communist programme. So what is the communist programme?
The communist programme is a guide to revolutionary action: ie, how to go about organising the working class into a political party. The programme represents the crystallisation of our principles - which are not spun out of thin air, but derived from the accumulated theoretical knowledge and practical experience of the world's working class.
The programme is thereby the foundation for the Marxist party, the Communist Party, from which its tactics flow. The programme links our everyday work with the ultimate goal of communism and full collective and individual human development.
Hence the programme represents the dialectical unity between theory and practice. The programme establishes the basis for agreed action and is the standard, the reference point, around which the voluntary unity of communists can be built and concretised. In turn that practice verifies or disproves aspects of the programme.
The Communist Party - being the advanced part of the working class - formulates, agrees and changes the programme. But in many ways the Communist Party is itself a superstructure growing from the programme. Recruits are motivated by its inspiring and theoretically proven goals. They are trained and encadred by the struggle to realise its demands. In that sense the programme is responsible for generating the Communist Party. The main determination runs not from the needs of the organisation, but from the programme and its principles to the organisation and its membership.
Our programme has a twofold function. On the one side, it represents chosen demands, principles and aims. On the other side, it charts our overall strategic approach to the conquest of state power based on a concrete analysis of today's objective socio-economic conditions. We seek to navigate the shortest, least costly route from today's cramped and squalid socio-political conditions to a truly human world.
Clearly then, the programme owes nothing to holy script - it is not fixed, timeless and inviolate. On the contrary, given a major political rupture - eg, overthrow of the monarchy constitution, partition of Britain and its workers' movement by nationalists, establishment of an EU superstate, etc - various demands of the programme ought to be suitably reformulated or new sections introduced.
That does not mean that the programme is a work of 'pure' science. It must become the political compass for millions. Hence, as we explained some time ago, "Every clause of the programme must be easily assimilated and understood by advanced workers. It must be written in an accessible style, whereby passages and sentences can be used for agitational purposes and even turned into slogans".2
In terms of its structure, form and style we have sought to learn from the best that history has furnished us with: eg, in my opinion the Marx-Engels Manifesto of the Communist Party, the Erfurt programme of the German SDP and the first and second programmes of Lenin's Russian communists. Of course, we did not mindlessly copy any of them. Conditions in the United Kingdom and its economic peculiarities, the specifics of its constitution and class structure had to be taken into account.
Communist parties, it should hardly need emphasising (but sadly it does in light of the Socialist Alliance of England and Wales, the Scottish Socialist Party, Solidarity - Scotland's Socialist Movement, the Socialist Party in England and Wales, and Forward Wales), organise on the basis of the principle of 'one state, one party'. No petty nationalism for us. Proletarian revolution reaches from the state to the global, not from the state to the national.
And it was in order to equip the working class movement with the kind of programme it needs that the 4th Conference of the Leninists of the CPGB - our former name - meeting in December 1989, passed the following short, but very important resolution:
"Neither the 1978 edition of the British road to socialism, nor the Communist Party of Britain's updated version, nor the Euros' Manifesto for new times represents any sort of communist programme. All are thoroughly imbued with opportunism and revisionism. Hence none of them can serve as any sort of guide to revolutionary practice.
"The essence of the struggle being conducted by the CPGB (The Leninist) is to equip our party with a Marxist-Leninist programme. The provision of the CPGB with a Marxist-Leninist programme depends on reforging the party and then convening a congress.
"Taking this into consideration, our conference resolves that the Leninist wing of the party must:
l a. Prepare a draft programme.
l b. Establish a commission for this purpose.
l c. Present the draft programme for discussion in party organisations and in our working class.
l d. Present the draft programme in the form of a proposal to the congress of the reforged CPGB".3
Following a lengthy series of special programmatic seminars and dozens of submissions, that resolution was eventually fulfilled "¦ we finally produced our Draft programme in 1995.
Dated?
Writing in the Weekly Worker, John Pearson, leader of the Democratic Socialist Alliance, strongly objected to the idea that the Campaign for a Marxist Party meeting on November 4 should adopt this Draft programme as a "template" for fusion discussions (Letters, November 2). That would amount to a CPGB takeover, an Anschluss, he said.
Childish and rather hysterical (thankfully, unintimidated, an overwhelming majority voted for our motion). Instead of our draft programme, he and his comrades recommended People before profit (2001). The Socialist Alliance supposedly represented the highest level of socialist unity in post-World War II Britain.
Perhaps this reveals something about comrade Pearson's 'Marxism'. The Socialist Alliance fully reflected the economism, national philistinism and Labourism that still blights our movement. That is why we prefer to take as our benchmark the post-World War I unification of Marxists in Britain. The foundation of the CPGB in July 1920 was organisationally and theoretically at a far higher level. During the course of formulating our Draft programme we naturally sought to learn as much as possible from the past, including the chequered history of 'official communism'. But crucially we sought to address the actual organisational and theoretical needs of the working class at this stage of history. Anyway, comrade Pearson argued, doggedly sticking to formal logic, that our Draft programme being rather older than People before profit, it follows, almost ipso facto, that it must be more outdated. And this is the 'argument' I want to concentrate upon.
True, and we readily admit it, the Draft programme needs expanding in this or that respect - the European Union and the ecological crisis being priorities in my mind. Note, we have done some not inconsiderable theoretical work in both fields already. We also want - once again note it - to reach out to other comrades who say they are committed to building a Marxist party. Redrafting our draft provides an excellent framework to explore commonalities as well as differences.
But the question remains: is our Draft programme outdated? When compared to People before profit, the only honest answer must be 'no' and a thousand times 'no'. Hardly surprising in my opinion. Why? Our programme is designed to equip the working class to overthrow the UK state as part and parcel of the historic mission of taking the world from a declining capitalism to an overripe socialism. Consequently, passing facts and figures, prime ministers, presidents and monarchs, demonstrations, opinion polls and episodic alliances have no place in the communist programme.
The Draft programme of the CPGB is as short and concise as possible. Everything that is not essential was consciously kept out. Engels himself urged that approach: "All that is superfluous in a programme weakens it".4 Lenin made a similar observation: "The programme should leave questions of means open, allowing the choice of means to the militant organisations and to party congresses that determine the tactics of the party. Questions of tactics, however, can hardly be introduced into the programme (with the exception of the most important questions, questions of principle, such as the attitude to other fighters against the autocracy). Questions of tactics will be discussed by the party newspaper as they arise and will be eventually decided at party congresses".5
Our programme deals with principles and strategy. No place therefore for tactical tasks or theoretical and historical explanations: that we leave to articles in the Weekly Worker, pamphlets, books, seminars, etc. As we confidently stated in 1991, it should follow that our programme "will therefore not of necessity need rewriting every couple of years, as with the programmes of the opportunists, let alone go out of date even before it has come off the press, as was the case with the CPB's version of the BRS".6
Hence, although nowadays a couple of lacunas are painfully obvious to me, quite frankly our Draft programme remains fresh, relevant "¦ and very powerful. Read it on the web, see for yourself.7
By way of contrast let us briefly examine the fate that befell the subsequent programmes of 'official communism'.
l Class against class. Often thought of as wildly leftist. In reality the 'official' CPGB in 1929 was adapting to the state needs of the Soviet Union. There were plenty of leftist phrases and supposedly it was "so comprehensive" that many regard it as a "party programme in everything but name".8 However, the hand of Soviet diplomacy is clear. Denouncing social democrats as "social fascists" served Stalin's perceived needs in Germany. More importantly, leftism justified Stalin's voluntaristic first five-year plan: the counterrevolution within the revolution.
l For soviet Britain. Adopted in February 1933, this was formally the first programme of the CPGB. In spite of that is reads more like a centrist (revolutionary in words, reformist in practice) election manifesto or the run-of-the-mill centrist congress resolution. Galumphing through the army of facts and figures are detailed schemes for the steel and iron industry, agriculture, fishing and the railways. Hardly surprisingly, given its leftist veneer, the programme was almost immediately dumped. Stalin's diplomatic line had by 1935 changed by 180º.
l Draft programme. Submitted for discussion at the CPGB's scheduled 16th Congress in October 1939, it was scuppered by the outbreak of World War II. It became an anachronism within a month of being published. It envisaged class collaboration with the 'progressive' bourgeoisie against fascism and a labour movement government. A national socialist regime would emerge from a majority in parliament.
l The British road to socialism. There were numerous versions of this, the second 'official communist' programme: 1951, 1952, 1958, 1968 and 1978. Each excused a further shift to the right and was almost instantly made outdated by the mere course of everyday events. None more so, though, than the BRS adopted by the Morning Star's Communist Party of Britain in November 1989. Its Labour Party road to socialism was premised on what was supposed to be the "decisively" shifting international balance of class forces. "Socialism" in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and China would allow a peaceful and Labour Party road to national socialism in Britain. Needless to say, when the CPB rewrote its programme in 1992, though the Soviet Union and the "socialist countries" in eastern Europe had to be crudely airbrushed out, the Labourism remained.
Apologetics inevitably produce such miserable results.
SWP versus Marx
Though communists should treat their programme with the utmost seriousness, talk to any experienced SWP cadre and I guarantee you they will adopt a completely dismissive, even a hostile attitude if you dare suggest that it would be a good idea for the SWP to agree to one. Members of the SWP should be aware of the consequences - I know of at least a couple of comrades who have been expelled for being so bold. But non-members could try it, either as an experiment or simply to provide wry amusement.
What do they typically say? A programme is not needed, a programme is rigid and inflexible, a programme is a danger that must be avoided. To 'prove' the claim the better educated SWPer will invoke the ghost of Marx. After all, in his covering letter, introducing his Critique of the Gotha programme, written to Wilhelm Bracke in May 1875, Marx wrote: "Every step of the real movement is more important than a dozen programmes".9 That quote is meant to clinch the argument. In fact it does no such thing.
Presumably Marx meant by a "step of the real movement" a historic event on the scale of the Paris Commune: it happened only four years previously. I doubt he had in mind something like one of the Stop the War Coalition's Grand old Duke of York marches or a trade union talking shop 'conference'.
More germane still - and this is obvious with even a cursory reading of the whole document - far from batting aside the need for a programme, Marx was frantically attempting to reorientate or rescue the proto-German SDP programmatically. Needless to say, he fully appreciated the role and importance of programme - he authored the Manifesto of the Communist Party and the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany, to name just two, and had a hand in many others. Because of the seriousness he attached to the Gotha programme, disobeying doctor's orders, he took to his desk to compose what were furious criticisms.
Put together jointly by Marx's comrades, the Eisenachers - notably Bebel and Liebknecht - and the followers of the state socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle, their draft programme was to be presented to the unity congress of the two groups meeting in the medieval town of Gotha in Thuringia. However, it was a hodgepodge, a melange of Marxist and Lassallean ideas. Marx's comrades agreed a series of rotten compromises, the result of diplomatic hagglings, not hard politics and polemical victories. Justification: the opportunist holy grail of unity for the sake of unity.
Rightly, Marx objected. He exasperatedly attacked this "deplorable" situation that was bound to prove "demoralising for the party".10 He presented a string of eviscerating criticisms. He also offered the advice that, unless his formulations, or something very much like them, were adopted, then it would be better, far better, to stay as separate organisations and find areas where there could be common actions. Rather disunity and maintaining principle than unprincipled unity.
So Marx was not objecting to the German party equipping itself with a programme, as the SWP and others try to make out. Ignorance. That or downright dishonesty. Marx defended the old Eisenach programme of 1869. Given the unification of a little Germany - which left out Austria and was brought about under the auspices of Prussian state in 1871 - he could not but recognise the need for updating. The Marx-Engels team advocated a big Germany, a single and indivisible German republic won from below. Obviously, the Marxist programme had to take account of the Bismarckian unification and adjust strategically according to the new circumstances.
Neither Marx nor anyone standing in the authentic Marxist tradition has ever denied the necessity of a programme. It was the revisionist Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932) who openly belittled the programme and tried to theoretically justify elevating the organisation of the party into a thing for itself. Unconsciously this was echoed and calcified into dogma by the SWP's founder-leader, Tony Cliff, who routinely warned against adopting a programme. Gaining recruits and factional advantage was his sole guide.
A democratically agreed programme would have created intolerable difficulties for the SWP and its many and sudden about-turns under Cliff. More so under his successor, John Rees, especially with his Respect popular front. Much to the discredit of the SWP opposition, he has met with no disciplined rebellion and open polemical struggle of the kind we conducted against the Eurocommunists and the Straight Leftist and Morning Star opportunists throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s.
Hence, because its leadership subordinates principle to organisation, the SWP has never produced a programme worthy of the name - though it is rumoured that in the early 1970s Chris Harman penned a draft. Needless to say, it still gathers dust - perhaps never to see the light of day.
'Programmatically' the SWP is therefore unencumbered apart from its thumbnail 'What the SWP stands for' column in Socialist Worker and the now almost totally forgotten and thoroughly minimalist Action programme. Except for those totally in thrall to the so-called 'transitional method', it is clear that the 'What the SWP stands for' column contains little more than a few selected SWP shibboleths - there is certainly no overall strategy. On the other hand, the miserable Action programme transcends neither the constitutional monarchy system in the UK nor the system of commodity production. Opportunism is thereby given free reign and the SWP is directed not according to the final aim, but short-term whim, fancy or hunch.
Structure
Let us, in closing - at least in terms of this article - mention the structure of our CPGB Draft programme. The form of every Marxist programme is closely connected with content. Our programme follows an inner logic. Each section, each statement, each demand logically leads to another.
We divide our programme into six distinct, but connected sections. The opening section is a brief preamble describing the origins of the CPGB and the inspiration provided by the October 1917 revolution. We also rightly touch upon the liquidation of the CPGB by its various opportunist leaderships and conclude with the organised rebellion by the Leninist forces and the subsequent struggle to reforge the party.
The next section, the substantive or real starting point, outlines the main features of the epoch, the epoch of the transition from capitalism, by way of socialism, to communism. Then comes the nature of capitalism in Britain and the consequences of its development. Following on from here are the immediate economic, political and democratic measures that are required if the peoples of Britain are to live a full and decent life. Such a minimum or immediate programme is, admittedly, technically feasible within the confines of present-day capitalism. In actual fact though, need can only be genuinely realised in its totality by way of revolution.
From these radical foundations the character of the British revolution and the position of the various classes and strata are presented. Next, again logically, comes the workers' government in Britain and the worldwide transition to socialism and communism. Here is our maximum programme. Finally the necessity for all partisans of the working class to unite in a Communist Party is dealt with. The essential organisational principles of democracy and unity in action are stated and we underline in no uncertain terms why the CPGB must facilitate criticism and the open discussion of differences.
In no small measure, because we drew on the approach recommended by Marx, Engels and Lenin, our Draft programme is by far the best "template" for those who wish to establish a Marxist party. With such an achievement under our belt, it was quite natural for us to reject People before profit as any kind of "template" for unity. So let us be quite clear, we aim to strengthen our Draft programme during the fusion talks that have been agreed by the Campaign for a Marxist Party, not water it down. We reject diplomatic agreements designed to cover up differences and the trading away of principles for the sake of unity. Principled unity is what is needed and what we fight for.