19.02.2009
Militant workers strike against party bosses
The culture of the early CPGB is the last thing on the minds of either side in the Morning Star dispute, writes Lawrence Parker
Following a successful 11 to 3 ballot and a clumsy attempt by management to impose a pay settlement, members of the National Union of Journalists at the Morning Star are set to strike for 24 hours on February 23, with more extended action scheduled to follow should there be no resolution.
True to form, none of this has been reported in the Morning Star, though is has been covered in the bourgeois press. Even Socialist Worker has given it a mention - along with the barbed comment that the paper’s management committee includes “several leading trade union figures”.1 Both the FBU and RMT have automatic representation.
Meanwhile a vicious war of words has continued on the Socialist Unity website. Communist Party of Britain members have implied the strike is threatening the existence of their paper (partly an exercise in hyperbole; the Star’s future is not threatened by the strikers) - which is rather ironic, given the pains that have been taken to present the Star as some kind of labour movement flagship and thus not a specific ‘party’ journal.
While more neutral in tone than recent ‘enemy within’ broadsides from the likes of John Haylett, political editor and chief management spokesperson, the CPB has nailed its colours firmly to the mast of the management’s position:
“As far as the Communist Party of Britain is concerned, we are pleased that Morning Star management are able to offer a real-terms pay increase of three percent plus a three percent one-off supplement. This continues 11 years of above-inflation wage rises at the paper. However, we recognise that the starting wage of just £18,000 in London is still very low.
“An immediate and sustained effort by the labour movement and other Morning Star supporters is needed to expand sales, fighting fund donations and shareholdings for the paper. This, together with capital investment in the future, is the only basis on which the dire problem of low wages will be resolved. A fair and reasonable resolution of this dispute is needed as a matter of urgency. Scurrilous attacks on the Morning Star management, the [Unite] chapel and the CPB do not contribute to such a resolution.”2
The precise status of Anita Halpin’s bumper donation is still a source of bitter dispute between the NUJ and the management committee. It is said to be worth at least £500,000 over three years and is clearly a mixed blessing for the newly installed editor, Bill Benfield.
As far as the journalists are concerned, the money is there. Father of the Morning Star chapel Steve Mather says: “We don’t need one-off bribes, we need a step towards decent pay. We all work hard to bring out a decent paper against all the odds, yet our bosses won’t even pay us £19,000 after the biggest investment in our history.”3
As we wrote previously, we support the Star journalists in the limited sense that we support any group of workers fighting against bad bosses.4 But absent from the discussion thus far is any questioning of the frames in which this debate has been conducted. Most seem to unthinkingly accept that it is the job of people who call themselves ‘communists’ to serve a quite frankly dull publication that acts as a lowest-common-denominator carrier for the trade union movement and its soft-left allies. Most would appear to think it correct that the ‘special’ relationship with the CPB is smuggled away into an editorial acceptance of the parameters of the British road to socialism (ie, the shibboleth of a smallish sect). No one has really got to grips with the fact that this dispute marks the descent of the Star down to the common boss-worker relationships that exists across society - ie, the bosses act like manipulative arseholes and the wage-slaves threaten to withdraw their labour.
However, the brutal fact for CPB and Morning Star supporters is that this culture is quite frankly alien to the traditions of our movement and should not, in any sense, be accepted as communist culture. It is even partly alien to the culture of British ‘official’ communism and the CPGB, to which the likes of the CPB claim fealty. Rather this latest tawdry episode in the history of the Star is the product of political opportunism and the CPB’s inability to confront its past.
The current masthead of the Star reads: “incorporating the Daily Worker - for peace and socialism”. Thus the paper traces its lineage back to the paper launched by the CPGB in January 1930. Here, any similarity ends. No-one in the old CPGB or Comintern (and it was the Russians who bore the financial burden; the CPGB picked up the organisational one) thought of launching a newspaper to ‘serve the labour movement’. No-one gave any thought to notions of professional journalism or even respecting trade union agreements. The Daily Worker was unambiguously a party paper:
“Our party is too slow to mobilise itself in this situation, let alone masses of workers … The Daily is therefore a matter of life or death for the new era of revolutionary struggle … From lagging behind, [it] will bring us abreast of events. It will become the mobiliser, organiser, marshal of the new battalions of struggle who enter the class front … It can and will knit the party into a quickly moving, highly politicised organisation which can, overnight, get together and punch 100% on the central questions of each day.”5
Thus it was that the Daily Worker became a mirror of the CPGB, Stalinist warts and all. Of course, some of these more aggressive notions were a product of third period politics (although not all - the idea of a party-led paper is, I would suggest, a fundamentally healthy one) and, as the CPGB shifted into popular frontism from the mid-1930s, cross-class opportunism found its reflection in the paper in the form of tensions around developing ‘brighter’ content streams (racing tips, beauty features).
The other notion that was central to the Daily Worker of this earlier period was sacrifice. As intimated above, there was no idea that comrades working on the paper should be regarded as wage-slaves or even trade unionists. Before World War II its journalists had been paid a fraction of the going rate. Later workers were technically paid the NUJ minimum, although they were in fact required to give half their pay back to the paper’s fighting fund.6
This is how ex-communist Douglas Hyde recalled his reaction to the CPGB request to move to the Daily Worker in December 1939: “When the party called me to go and work on its paper, I dropped what I was doing and went as any other loyal member would have done. It meant a drop in income and so in my standard of life, but it did not even occur to me that that might be a reason for not going. A large proportion of the paper’s editorial staff, particularly at that time, had made similar or bigger sacrifices. I felt that no greater honour could have been done me as a communist and as a journalist than to have been asked to work there at such a moment.”7
This culture is completely alien to either side of the current Star dispute - which begs the question, how did we get here? There was certainly a loosening of the ties between the CPGB and the Daily Worker in the post-war period. This, of course, is all relative. On one level, it was still very much a party paper, as attested to by its coverage of the opening of the cold war through to the upheavals of 1956. Left voices hostile to the CPGB would generally not be reported.
On the other hand, while the People’s Press Printing Society - the cooperative that owns the Morning Star was founded in 1945 to ensure the CPGB’s control of the Daily Worker, Morgan notes: “… with the formation of the PPPS, King Street’s [the CPGB’s London headquarters] direct interest in the Worker diminished …”8 However, while the PPPS nominally published the paper, its affairs were dominated by the CPGB and assorted tame functionaries. The PPPS only assumed any real importance from the 1980s (although the current Star management and CPB members like to pretend otherwise). The Daily Worker was always politically led by the CPGB.
Despite relative upturns at certain points, it was clear that the CPGB’s inability to deal with the crisis of ‘official communism’ meant that it was itself an organisation in crisis from 1956 onwards. The right-opportunist leadership under John Gollan (and later Gordon McLennan), struggled to make an electoral impact despite a vote that stubbornly declined, while the CPGB’s industrial strength, although still impressive compared to the rest of the far left, was largely frittered away by an ageing group of comrades who adapted to the norms of the labour movement.
They often turned themselves into straightforward trade unionists, in the sense that little of their day-to-day work was hooked up to the strategic aims of the party.
The name change from the Daily Worker to the Morning Star in April 1966 (which had been made without reference to any party congress) was actually intended to dilute the paper’s proletarian identity. As Gollan stated, “We must bear in mind that 46% of the labour force in Britain consists of non-manual workers of various categories.”9 In other words, the CPGB was not intending to relate to these sections as workers; rather it was intending to play up to notions that they were not part of the proletariat in the cause of the ‘anti-monopoly alliance’.
The name change was opposed by the centrist opposition of the time led by Sid French of the Surrey district (as well as other critics such as John Berger). One might tactfully suggest that the current name is given a long-overdue burial, given that the politics that inspired it are those that some CPB members claim to have struggled against at the time.
The status of the PPPS moved centre stage in the 1980s. By this time, the CPGB’s trade union activists were diminished, demoralised and on the defensive. To add insult to injury, they were also under attack inside the CPGB from the Eurocommunists who controlled Marxism Today and were in alliance with then general secretary Gordon McLennan. In September 1982 Marxism Today published a critique of lower union officialdom, including shop stewards. This was damned in the Morning Star by industrial organiser Mick Costello and the article was heavily criticised by the party’s trade union activists.
There was no great communist principle involved. Rather the union wing was concerned at the evaporation of its influence as trade unionists. Costello had formed a bloc with Morning Star editor Tony Chater and increasingly Chater saw the paper as being independent of the CPGB. The party could not remove Chater from his post because the PPPS was formally a self-governing cooperative and it was this technical status, never used in such a manner before, that Chater wielded against the CPGB leadership.
Chater went further on June 1 1983, claiming in the Morning Star that a “powerful outside body” was trying to influence PPPS management committee elections - this “outside body” being the CPGB, of course. Thus, the Chater group’s struggle with the CPGB leadership had developed into a liquidationist one, every bit as potent as the Eurocommunist-led leadership’s collapse into social democracy. Chater’s group, which maintained control of the PPPS after a bitter struggle with the CPGB, now hawked the Star around the labour movement as a specifically non-communist, ‘broad labour movement’ publication. This, of course, had been implicit in the paper’s evolution, but had never before been so brazenly spelt out. Comrade Chater was cautious enough to have also secured advance orders from Moscow, the paper’s financial lifeline.
Strange as it may seem, these tawdry and unprincipled beginnings were the motor behind the formation of the equally liquidationist CPB in 1988, whose launch was brokered by those who had captured the PPPS, essentially as a glorified Morning Star supporters group (which is why we often refer to the CPB as the Morning Star’s CPB). This explains much of the CPB’s haphazard organisation and dozy tempo of work, which was apparent to those around CPGB factions such as The Leninist from day one.
So, while the editorial line of the paper is tied to the British road to socialism, the CPB, precisely due to the dependent nature and backward politics at its formation, is precluded from actively moulding the Star into any kind of communist collective composed of voluntary labour and self-sacrifice. It is even precluded from returning the paper to the way it was organised under the likes of Harry Pollitt and Bill Rust. The PPPS is sacrosanct, as is the Star’s status as a ‘broad’ organ of the labour movement (and its soft-left supporters) in general.
As an example of communist organisation and culture, the paper is a thoroughly rotten one. Instead what has developed is a normalised bourgeois structure (leading ‘communists’ to boast of - gasp! - “11 years of above-inflation wage rises”), and now an almost textbook case of bad management versus militant trade unionism.
However, the paper will always be hobbled by its affiliation to the dogmatic sect shibboleths of the CPB. While this relationship exists in its present form, there is no chance of the paper being adopted by the trade union movement as its own or of it becoming a true “daily paper of the left”. In recent times, this disability has meant that the Star’s existence has always been under threat, as it could only mobilise the backing of those who feel at least a degree of political affinity to the CPB.
In these circumstances the Star could become utterly reliant on the £22 miilion fortune of Anita Halpin - which in turn threatens to narrow its future support base, given Halpin’s own brand of cautious and undynamic ‘official communist’ politics.
However much we might be critical of the ‘official’ CPGB, the current Morning Star is a very poor monument to the spirit of sacrifice that was partly responsible for the launching of the Daily Worker. Judging by the reactions of those CPB members who do sacrifice time to distribute the Star, it seems as if some of the comrades might be dimly aware of this uncomfortable fact l
Notes
1. Socialist Worker Febuary 21.
2. As I write, this “article … published by the CPB” has not been posted on the CPB website. It appears to be available only on the sites of its Welsh section (welshcommunists.org/index.php?id=226) and its Midlands area (www.midlandscommunists.org.uk).
3. www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode =1&storycode=43088&c=1
4. ‘Anita’s Star fails to shine’ Weekly Worker January 29.
5. CP organising department, 1929. Cited in K Morgan, ‘The CP and the Daily Worker 1930-56’ in G Andrews, N Fishman and K Morgan (eds) Opening the books: essays on the social and cultural history of the British Communist Party London 1995, p143.
6. Ibid p152.
7. D Hyde I believed London 1951, p79. Hyde, previously a CPGB member who became the Daily Worker’s news editor, was a convert to Catholicism who published this anti-communist tract during the cold war. The exquisite irony being that the CPGB comes out of the account pretty well.
8. K Morgan op cit p153.
9. Cited in J Callaghan Cold war, crisis and conflict: the CPGB 1951-68 London 2003, p285.