04.03.2010

Left unity, not exclusion

Open letter to the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition from Mark Fischer, CPGB national organiser

The Communist Party of Great Britain welcomed the formation of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. We observed that it might “potentially make a contribution to the fight for principled left unity” (Weekly Worker February 11). Come election day, the CPGB will be recommending an unconditional, but critical, vote for Tusc candidates and our comrades will look to become involved in the preceding campaigning work alongside members of the Socialist Party in England and Wales, the Socialist Workers Party, Tommy Sheridan’s Solidarity and others who have been drawn into its ranks.

This is despite the fact that our offer to stand three candidates under the Tusc banner has been turned down by the steering committee. (Comrade Heemskerk’s letter does not actually make this decision clear - it has been partially clarified in a subsequent series of phone calls with this leading member of SPEW, who acts as a point of contact with Tusc).

Nevertheless, we believe that a good vote for Tusc - despite our disagreements with important elements of its platform and the feeble reasons given for our exclusion - would be a positive boost for our class as it musters forces for the inevitable attacks on rights and conditions which must come from the post-election government, whatever its political complexion.

We take Tusc seriously because we take left unity seriously. We believe that our crippling division into warring bureaucratic sects negates the impact we could make on the working class and wider contemporary society. This is why the CPGB has been the trend in all the unity initiatives over the last 15 years that has consistently called for more democracy to facilitate the overcoming of divisions; for an ever closer coordination of work to end the amateurish duplication of effort the left imposes on itself in the trade unions, the student movement, the anti-war movement, etc and for the cultivation of a partyist esprit de corps to overcome sect divisions.

We are proud of our record of struggle for these basic building blocks of a clean left culture in forums such Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, in the Socialist Alliance and even in Respect, probably the most unconducive environment we had to work in. For the time being, however, sectarianism has won out. It has been a bleak story of 15 years of opportunities squandered. The SLP, the SA and Respect all concretely posed in their different ways the key task - left unity. All had an electoral window of opportunity to establish a beachhead for genuine working class politics, with a rightward-moving Labour Party government confronting a Tory Party that was unelectable.

All were poisoned by petty sectarianism, control-freakery and an opportunist appetite for short cuts to the ‘big time’. All left a legacy of bitterness, demoralisation and impotence.

In this context, the Tusc initiative is positive simply because - despite the federal structure championed by SPEW - it will at least bring comrades from different political trends together again around a common platform. In a dire period of an ever more fractured left, it is once again a recognition in a distorted form of the pressing need for left unity - even if leading members of SPEW are at pains to deny or belittle this.

It must be said, however, that from the very start Tusc was marred by the sadly familiar errors that doomed other projects.

First and foremost is the question of programme. Fundamentally, the organisational bureaucratism and self-serving narrowness that we describe above can be thought of as a ‘superstructure’ arising from this political ‘base’. The main authors of the political platform of Tusc share the same shameful prejudice about the working class as more or less every other section of the ostensibly revolutionary left. This is the truly foul notion that it - the universal class that, unlike other revolutionary classes of the past, remakes society consciously and thus needs the truth - is somehow incapable of understanding Marxism.

Most parts of the Tusc political platform are unobjectionable. But they do not add up to a viable strategy for the working class effectively resisting attacks today, let alone advancing its collective project of running society tomorrow. The left Labourism they espouse is inadequate for our class (actually dangerous in the illusions its promotes) - that is why, presumably we are all Marxists in the first place.

So why won’t the Marxists stand on Marxism?

The elitist conception of almost all the revolutionary left is that the working class can be nudged towards revolution unconsciously. That, via a cascading series of ever more radical demands, starting from the most mundane and ‘realistic’, it can be tricked into taking power. (Or rather, acting as raw, combustible material that will propel the sect into power).

Infamously, this was put most crudely - honestly, one might say - by the then SWP luminary John Rees at the Respect founding conference when he pithily summed up this corrupt method: “We voted against things we believe in, because ... of the millions out there … We voted for what they want” (Weekly Worker January 29 2004). A totally unconvincing attempt to scam our class, in other words.

Instead of measuring up to the tasks of an extended period of patiently building support for the ideas, morality and culture of Marxism in society, the left in Britain have a series of pet projects for the creation of a Labour Party mark two. Workers Power has its ‘Call for a new anti-capitalist workers’ party’; the increasingly disorientated Alliance for Workers’ Liberty once had its campaign for a Labour Representation Committee; SPEW is still promoting the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party; the SWP attempted to tailor the SA’s politics to catch its (largely imaginary) battalions of left Labourites flaking off the Blairite party.

From these dishonest politics, a corresponding structural and organisational ethos flows.

Thus, Tusc has been formed not through an open, democratic debate across the whole left and working class movement. Like its more rightwing parent, No2EU, it has been cobbled together from back-room haggling, primarily between SPEW and Bob Crow. (We even understand that at least one of its ‘public’ launch meetings has been similarly ‘invite only’!). Phil Cartledge, a prominent left blogger who recently resigned from SPEW over the Tusc initiative, makes the connection: “… democracy is lacking. And where there is no accountability, the deliberations of the steering group are likely to remain opaque, just as it was in the secretive lead up to Tusc’s appearance” (averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com, January 15).

The priority given the top trade union apparatchiks, such as Crow and SPEW member Brian Caton of the Prison Officers Association, delineates in advance the self-imposed political limits SPEW has set for the project. Despite the fact that leading trade unionists who participate in Tusc do so as individuals and not as representatives of organised workers (it is, in that sense, a step back from what was involved in No2EU), the politics of the new formation must be made acceptable to the left of the trade union bureaucracy.

This, we believe, was the deciding factor in the exclusion of the CPGB. Our militant internationalist call for workers to organise across the European Union, uncompromising opposition to the existing United Kingdom state, combined with our programme for extreme democracy - in the workers’ movement itself, as well as in wider society - would not please those committed to little British nationalism, Stalinism and Keynesian reformism.

The politics involved has not been honestly addressed by the steering committee. Instead, we have been fobbed off with verbal justifications about our small membership numbers, lack of trade union officials and what has - farcically - been called “social weight”. We have even had the unedifying spectacle of comrade Heemskerk attempting to provide a left cover for this by citing the Bolsheviks in the period 1912-14 - when their membership was between 30,000 and 50,000 and they were able to command the allegiance (and votes) of hundreds of thousands of workers. Who are the modern-day equivalents, comrade? Participating organisations in Tusc such as SPEW? The SWP? Or Socialist Resistance, perhaps?

The entire revolutionary left in today’s Britain is marginal. The membership of all groups (even the claimed membership, let alone real figures) is tiny. Come the count on election night, we should be pleased to retain one or two deposits - we certainly will not be in the position of the genuinely mass Bolsheviks in 1913, when Lenin noted that “a majority” of the class-conscious workers of Russia had rallied around the decisions of the Bolsheviks and bodies they led.

The reason why the unity of the genuinely revolutionary left is key is because this section of the workers’ movement embodies the history of ideas, of crystallised lessons (ie, principles), codified into programme. This is why Lenin makes the point that the Bolsheviks mattered throughout their history, even when their ranks were tiny or actually decimated by tsarist repression following the defeat of the 1905 revolution.

It seems that Tusc may be too little, too late. Even with a platform supposedly tailored for ‘mass appeal’, it will struggle to register statistically.

The CPGB will participate in Tusc’s election campaign to the extent that we are allowed. We will work to maximise its vote and will criticise constructively if - as we hope - it continues in some form post-election.

Let us be clear, if communist candidates had been allowed to stand under the Tusc banner, we would have accepted the official programme of the coalition. But alongside that we would have promoted our own - genuinely Marxist - ideas before the electorate.

On the face of it, this would seem to have been acceptable. In an article in The Socialist of February 3, comrade Heemskerk reports that groups coming under the Tusc “federal ‘umbrella’” would be required to stand their candidates on an “agreed core policy statement”. The sting in the tail seems to be comrade Heemskerk’s comment in the same article that “participating candidates and organisations [will be] accountable for their own campaigns”.

We suspect that the CPGB has been held “accountable” for its politics already, but that the Tusc steering committee - and SPEW in the form of comrades Heemskerk - are attempting to evade a clash over principles and programme they feel ill-equipped to win.

Correspondence

Tusc to CPGB, February 19 2010

Dear Mark

Following my phone call to you yesterday afternoon, I am writing to confirm that the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (Tusc) steering committee met last week and discussed your recent correspondence.

The meeting had before it a number of applications for individual candidates in named constituencies to appear on the ballot paper under the Tusc registered party name. All were approved except for two applications, where the proposed candidacies were to contest seats held by MPs currently members of or attendees at the parliamentary groups of unions involved in the Trade Union Coordinating Group of left-led unions (this group includes the RMT, the FBU, NAPO, the POA and the PCS).

Regarding possible future applications, the meeting confirmed that we would welcome candidates backed by trade union organisations and would also consider endorsing candidates from socialist organisations with demonstrable support in the unions or a record of electoral success.

Yours comradely
Clive Heemskerk
Socialist Party representative on the Tusc steering committee

CPGB to Tusc, February 21 2010

Clive

I am a little puzzled by this reply. As I have to write on this for the coming paper, I wonder if you could help me. You tell us that the committee met and discussed the CPGB’s correspondence, but you don’t actually tell us the decision it took, or its reasoning.

Furthermore, I understood from you when we spoke that you were giving me a verbal précis of what was to be in this written reply. If you recall, you ranged quite widely over a number of relevant topics - the question of quantifying political influence, the Bolsheviks’ approach to what you dub “social weight”, the content of republican democracy and our attitude to No2EU, etc.

Now, you send us this bland and frankly evasive reply. Where are the politics, comrade?

Of course, I can write a critique of your justifications for rejecting us based on my hurried notes taken during our telephone conversation. But, for the sake of my clarity - and to ensure that there is no ambiguity in your own position - I was hoping you could set down in written form the politics behind our exclusion.

With communist greetings
Mark Fischer
CPGB