08.12.2011

Three decades of open struggle

CPGB national organiser Mark Fischer looks back to the founding of the Weekly Worker's forerunner

Thirty years ago, in 1981, the first issue of The Leninist hit the streets and proudly announced its existence as the organ of a revolutionary faction of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Defiantly, it stated its purpose was to “unfurl the banner of revolt against opportunism, to save the Communist Party”. To that end, “The Leninist will wage an uncompromising ideological struggle, will demand the purging of the greatest threat to the party, liquidationism. This struggle has to be and will be open, in front of the masses, not a secret conspiracy hidden from view. Yes, an open ideological struggle!” (The Leninist ‘Founding statement’, winter 1981-82, p7).

Of course, formally the comrades were not to win this decade-long factional battle - the party was officially liquidated in 1991. However, as The Leninist showed in detail over those 10 years of struggle, the organisation had already been politically liquidated as a revolutionary vanguard long before the final coup de grâce was dealt by a special congress convened by the Eurocommunist-dominated leadership - “death by a thousand opportunist cuts”, as TL dubbed it.

This 1981 publication had been preceded by two years of study and political evolution by the small group of comrades that put it together. Naturally, The Leninist group carried the birthmarks of its political antecedents in the left, pro-Soviet opposition of the CPGB of the 1960s-70s. Nor did it try to hide these. Unlike later groups, such as the now-defunct Revolutionary Communist Party and today’s Counterfire, there was no attempt pretend it had ‘no baggage’ and was some squeakily pristine and miraculous new issue of a political immaculate conception.

Similarly, our organisation today is proud to say that essential building blocks of the method that was on display in the pages of TL - some in rudimentary form, it is true - are still part of the political DNA of our group. I will highlight just two.

First, there was a partisan attitude to the workers’ movement as a whole and recognition of the need for a party of the class. The comrades of The Leninist were well aware of the political degeneracy of the CPGB in 1981 - activists from this period still with us recall their “shock” at the extent of the decay that taken hold when they re-orientated back to the party after a relatively brief detour. Comrades from those early days talk of TL emerging at “the last possible moment”: that is, just before it became impossible to make any impact or headway at all.

Yet, despite the parlous state of the CPGB, it remained an historic conquest for the working class of Britain. It was not some “sect which declares itself a party when its membership exceeds the dizzy heights of 100 ... it has an organic relationship with the working class, and thus organises a significant section …” (TL No3, September 1982, ‘A call to all communists’, p2). As such, it was incumbent on all partisans of that class to join the battle to defend, politically cleanse and reforge the CPGB - thus the editorial statement, ‘The call’, agitated for “all genuine communists to join the CPGB” to go toe-to-toe with the opportunist and liquidationist trends that had engulfed it.

Now it is true that some of the groups to whom we specifically directed this call to arms were pretty eccentric in hindsight - to my knowledge, no-one ever heard of the John MacLean Collective again after its fleeting 15 minutes of fame in our pages. However, the approach we adopted here is still our method today. That is, to democratically unite all genuine Marxists into a party formation and thus positively resolve the crises and contradictions of sections of the workers’ movement. (The TL faction was, after all, a positive resolution of the contradictions that were inherent to Stalinism itself. If we could make the journey, we reasoned, so could others). We were not then and are not now the sort of sectarian vandals which ‘The call’ pointed out dismissed the party “with a sneer and a casual wave of the hand” (ibid). Its decline and disappearance would be a setback for every section of the movement, we declared - and subsequent events have proved this unfortunately accurate.

We take the same partisan attitude to the crises of other sections of the left, and recognise that it is not a good thing that the Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party imploded in the way that it did in 1985; that it would not be a good thing if the Morning Star simply folded for lack of cash, as seemed possible recently; it would not be a good thing if organisations such as the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Party in England and Wales or any other viable group simply blew up, scattering cadre to the winds, spreading demoralisation and intensifying the poisonous cynicism with which many advanced workers regard the sects. The barriers between them and the Marxists would be reinforced, to the detriment of both.

The second aspect of the method of TL which still holds today is that we are about uniting the revolutionary left under a genuine regime of democratic centralism - not as a set of organisational norms, but as an open process of winning and continually consolidating communist unity around a revolutionary programme. From our very first issue, we blasted the regime of bureaucratic centralism that then prevailed in the CPGB (although, ironically, the party actually had more operative democracy and openness for members than a group like today’s ‘anti-Stalinist’ SWP!). In a passage that speaks volumes about the state of the contemporary left, our founding statement of 30 years ago positively cited Lenin’s polemics - “all open in front of the masses” - and concluded that “it is not open ideological struggle that is alien” to democratic centralism, “but ‘pub room conspiracy’”. We concluded: “Open struggle develops the understanding of theory in cadres, it steels them and in truth is the only way to achieve a genuinely united party. Plotting and conspiracy in matters of ideology only lead to the stultification of comrades, it isolates them from the masses and in the end can only result in bitterness and disillusionment” (TL No1, p5).

It gives us no pleasure that these words ring so true when we survey today’s stultified, isolated and disillusioned revolutionary left today.

The Leninist was to make the transition from a quarterly theoretical journal (in truth its frequency had been more like three times a year) to a monthly newspaper in 1984 to meet the demands of the miners’ Great Strike, to a fortnightly in 1986 and was superseded by the Weekly Worker in 1991 when, in the aftermath of the dissolution of the official party, the tasks of our organisation broadened and the format of what was, after all, essentially a factional journal no longer fitted.

Looking over old copies of TL now can be fun. It was often a thumping good read - lively, controversial, sometimes genuinely funny and always pertinent to the needs of what it identified as it target audience - those actually interested in Marxist ideas and the travails and triumphs that purported to serve them. Given our relative youth and the undeveloped nature of some of our ideas, there were obviously some cringe-worthy moments. But not too many all in all. These kids looked like they might make something of themselves and their organisation later down the line.

The sooner we can get the back archive of The Leninist onto the party’s website - either the revamped model or the current makeshift version - the better.