16.06.2010
Star wars results from decay of political culture
The industrial unrest at the Morning Star, involving the Communist Party of Britain and National Union of Journalists, cannot be put down to unreasonable workers, argues James Turley
Readers of the Morning Star, by and large, are well acquainted with trade union issues and the occasional dispute - the paper being, after all, the trade union bureaucracy’s most loyal mouthpiece. However, they will not know much about the recent re-eruption of hostilities between the paper’s journalists and management. True to form, thus far there has been no report of the dispute in the pages of the Star itself. While its editor, Bill Benfield, routinely calls for David Cameron and Nick Clegg to come clean over this or that, he is determined to keep the industrial relations disaster that threatens to wreck the Morning Star secret. Of course, with the Weekly Worker and the age of ceaseless internet blogging, this is next to impossible.
For readers of this paper, there is a strong sense of déjà vu. Just over a year ago, a very similar dispute ended with a £1,000 pay rise for staff. The resultant wage - £19,000 annually - is still well below the market rate; and, of course, workers on other daily papers (or weeklies, even) are required to put in ‘anti-social’ hours, for which they are typically remunerated. The National Union of Journalists chapel at the Star wants movement on that issue - and another £1,000-a-year pay rise on top.
Though it is formally owned by the People’s Press Printing Society cooperative, the Morning Star is, in effect, published by the Communist Party of Britain, which on this occasion undoubtedly represents a management that has become embroiled in a bitter dispute over pay with its journalists - an almost textbook example of the lowest form of class struggle. Like the worst kind of bullying boss, the Star’s management withdrew from negotiations, provoking a strike ballot. The ballot narrowly came out in favour of a walkout. Unsurprisingly, the 11:10 split in the vote appears to correlate with membership or not of the CPB, with all members voting against strike action.
Management has employed the usual defence, which in this case might be accurate - the money simply isn’t there. Meeting the NUJ demands would lead the Star and the PPPS into administration and even liquidation, it is claimed: worryingly there are rumours of the purchase of “an off-the-shelf company that could conceivably be used in strike-breaking activities or to enable the firing of staff”.
Using such a nuclear option would not only be disastrous for the reputation of the Morning Star: it would discredit the entire left. On the other hand, the closure of the paper is not in the interests of anyone on the left. We get no satisfaction whatsoever from the prospect of a strike and closure. The CPGB wants the CPB to continue being able to publish its views on a daily basis. That provides raw material for our polemics against opportunist theory and practice.
Not that we want the present situation to continue. Under editors John Haylett and now Bill Benfield the Morning Star gives space to some who would have been an anathema to them a couple of decades ago. Now we have articles by Lindsey German, Tommy Sheridan, Colin Fox and John Lister. But their contributions are bland, to say the least … and that is exactly what the editors want. For the Morning Star to really become the “paper of the left” it claims to be, it would have to open up its pages to the entire left and to honest articles.
There have been some silly stories circulating - reproduced in one of The Guardian’s media blogs - of CPB spies in the Morning Star news room. And, of course, if this were not true, one really would have to wonder at the nature of the CPB and the intelligence of its leadership. It is, to all intents and purposes, a CPB paper; its members constitute nearly half the journalistic staff, and the CPB provides the political lead on its content, such as it is. Moreover, a CPB member in any workplace at all, let alone one which produces a ‘labour movement’ paper, would presumably be expected to report back on and discuss union developments as a matter of course.
The CPB has got itself into a fine mess by completely abandoning the notion that a communist paper ought to be produced first and foremost by communists. How they arrived at this point has a long history, of course. The Star began life as the Daily Worker on January 1 1930 and was unambiguously the organ of the ‘official’ CPGB. While there is no doubt that it was supported financially and otherwise by the Soviet Union, it is equally certain that it could not have survived without the selfless dedication of thousands of communist volunteers - all unpaid, doing everything from fundraising to reporting, to distributing and selling the finished product. As for ‘anti-social hours’, local CPGB volunteers were expected to await the day’s delivery at ungodly hours on the platforms of provincial train stations in order to deliver to newsagents and readers (the Worker was boycotted by capitalist distributors and for a period during World War II it was actually banned).
Whatever the failings of the ‘official’ CPGB in the 1930s and 40s - and they were legion, and ultimately fatal - its press was the very model of revolutionary professionalism and dedication, comparable to the ‘red postal service’ that delivered SPD material to the German workers during that party’s time underground. Nor were full-time writers and staff on the Daily Worker paid the going rate for their labour - they did not expect it. After World War II journalists were officially entitled to the NUJ rate - but half of it, on condition of continued CPGB membership, was immediately donated into the paper’s coffers. This went for everyone else too - if you were a party member, you received only a party wage. It was not a life of luxury - but revolution never was.
Legal ownership of the Daily Worker fell to a series of loyal comrades whose job was to act as fall guy whenever the paper was sued. In September 1945, however, ownership was sold for a shilling to the newly established PPPS cooperative (one person, one vote, irrespective of the number of shares held) the overwhelming majority of whose shareholders were party members, of course. This change to “the only daily paper owned by its readers” made it easier for comrades to push for their trade unions to back it. But its status as the voice of the Communist Party was weakened. In April 1966 the Worker was relaunched as the Morning Star.
In the 1980s the so-called Eurocommunists (in reality anti-communists) gradually took control of the party, ousting the right-opportunist old guard - only to find that the party had no means of ensuring the Star’s editorial content was brought into line with the views of the new leadership majority. The paper’s editor, the impeccable Stalinist bureaucrat, Tony Chater, enlisted the support of various pro-Moscow, anti-Euro factions, and notoriously declared the CPGB to be an “outside body” with no right to tell the Star management committee what to do. Its supporters formed the Communist Campaign Group, and eventually constituted themselves the CPB in 1988, just three years before the Euros formally liquidated the CPGB.
However, the fact that ‘the party’ - now under Robert Griffiths - was an “outside body” could no longer be denied. To constitute the Star as an organ with any life apart from its mother organisation, it had to continue further down the path it already trod in the CPGB days - a ‘professional’ publication depending more and more on the support of left trade union bureaucrats rather than the dedication of committed communists. Not only was the ‘official’ CPGB, whose membership topped 50,000 in the immediate post-war years, replaced as the Star’s sponsor by the CPB, with its ageing membership of just a few hundred, but the collapse of the USSR caused an immediate financial crisis. In the old days, at least half of the circulation of the Star was accounted for by the Stalinist regimes in the eastern bloc. Now, the paper is principally propped up by donations from the trade union bureaucracy, which expects (correctly, as it happens) that the paper will provide fawning support in return.
Mainstream media outlets, meanwhile, are funded by advertising subsidies worth many millions of pounds - it is no surprise, therefore, that the market wage rates for journalists are a little out of the Star’s league. This, to be frank, is to be expected; we do not live in a world where even so tame a masthead slogan as “For peace and socialism” is likely to draw in the big bucks from advertisers, and any leftwing publication will find it a matter of considerable sacrifice to simply keep the printing presses rolling (even The Guardian is in trouble these days).
To this was added the uncomfortable fact that Star workers could no longer be recruited as a matter of course from ‘the party’. Even its journalists, while expected to hold vaguely ‘progressive’ views, are not obliged to accept the ‘leading role’ of the CPB, let alone work under its discipline. While many such recruits may regard themselves as leftwing, most are in reality workers trying to make a living and perhaps enhance their careers - certainly not comrades dedicated to the cause. It is hardly surprising when such workers agitate for better wages and conditions. This leaves the management in a bit of a pickle; and we should not completely discount its warnings of administration and worse. On the one hand, the Star’s entire raison d’être limits its income considerably; on the other, the proletarians on the shop floor are understandably restless at what they see as third-rate wages and conditions.
No way out presents itself - a concerted campaign to get more money from the unions (or potential donors elsewhere - perhaps the Chinese could be persuaded to fill the breach) would allow the PPPS to grant the wage rise, but finding an extra £20,000 a year or so would just be the start of it - even as the number of individual Star supporters continues to shrink.
There are suggestions that Anita Halpin, the CPB veteran turned multi-millionaire, might offer up the cash. She controversially part-funded a full-scale revamp of the paper in the run-up to last year’s dispute - without earmarking funds for wage increases. Yet, while being politically beholden to the trade union bureaucracy is one thing and beholden to capitalist advertisers another, being over-reliant on the funds of a single individual is hardly a great stimulus to political initiative either. Besides, even multi-millionaires can eventually run out of money.
All of this is a far cry from the historical culture of communist publications. So what this sorry tale really displays is the consequences of the continued political degeneration of ‘official’ communism. After World War II, the CPGB - along with all the other Moscow-loyal parties - was permanently attached to grand (and largely illusionary, in the British case) coalition-building with forces to its right with the aim of getting into government. It became codified in The British road to socialism, whose different revisions constituted the CPGB’s programme until the party’s demise (the CPB has its own, now retitled Britain’s road to socialism), which saw socialism being peacefully established in Britain via a series of ever more leftwing Labour governments. The CPGB shackled its political initiative to the labour bureaucracy and, the more successful its project, the more completely it relied on the patronage of left officialdom.
So it was with the Morning Star, which upon taking over from the Daily Worker immediately attempted to reposition itself as a paper of the workers’ movement as a whole, beyond the ranks of the CPGB. The material operation of producing it inevitably changed as well - there was no need for hardened, committed cadre to run what amounts to an advertising sheet for the opinions of trade union and Labour grandees. Thus is the ultimate irony of the Star’s predicament: its parasitism on the labour bureaucracy has brought on a long-standing conflict with the NUJ. You can’t please everyone all the time, it seems ...
Producing a paper through the sacrifice of politically committed activists is not something to be unduly romanticised - it is the situation we are forced into by the structure and omnipresence of the bourgeois media. We should demand the end of advertising subsidies to newspapers, which effectively amount to wholesale bribery of public discourse (and, ultimately, politicians); but for demands to have any traction requires us to speak freely and frankly about the society which we inhabit. Allowing our publications to promote the interests of labour bureaucrats makes this impossible. The chickens have come home to roost.
Notes