11.05.1995

A liberal adrift

In January of this year, Mark Fischer spoke to Francis Beckett

Histories of the Communist Party are always written from a particular perspective. What preconceptions did you bring to the work?

I approached the work with positive feelings towards the Party and in particular towards the communists I knew. The communists I have worked with were always the people who I relied upon, the easiest to communicate with, the most disciplined. That is not a political judgement; it is a ‘personal’ judgement with political overtones.

I became less positive about the Party as I looked more closely at some of its darker sides. Its unnecessary secretiveness, for example. Its self-delusion. What Party leaders had to do in the late 1930s to try to convince themselves that what was happening in the USSR was either not happening or that it was not as bad as all that - or even that it was justified.

You suggest that the demise of the Party in Britain was not an automatic reflection of the problems in the USSR. So what was the key factor?

I think the sectarianism that flooded the British left from the late 1960s onwards. From about 1979 on you saw a series of bitter disputes - largely about ‘angels on pinheads’ in my view.

Certainly the Establishment equipped itself with a team of class warriors in 1979. The question is why the response of the left was to fragment. I don’t know the answer.

Surely one of the explanations for the demise of the Party is the fact that once it had renounced its revolutionism, there was really no ‘room’ left for it on the British left?

I think that is probably true. My difficulty with some of your questions is that I am not a political theorist. I have written a history of the Party in a popular form. The book itself is only 100,000 words, so there is a lot I have had to leave out.

There is a prima facie argument for what you are saying. The Communist Party started to move down that ‘reformist’ road from the mid-1930s, from the abandonment of Class against class.

 I notice you have divided the Party into “class warriors” and Eurocommunists.

Because I basically needed some sort of shorthand, although I say that these are gross simplifications. Shorthand is bound to distort the real division and alignments in the Party, which were of course extremely complex. But the book is not really written with informed communist politicians in mind. It’s a sort of popular introduction for people who know next to nothing about the history of the Party.

Historically, this century has been a terrible time. Yet in this country we have never been through a time of such despair as in the 1980s, a time when every bit of hope you had was torn up. When my father was active in politics in the 1920s and 30s, you could see little moves forward on the left and in society.

All you saw in the 1980s was the triumph of cynicism, of everything that was most unpleasant about human beings. I don’t think we come out of that suddenly, not unless you think we are ripe for another Bolshevik revolution. I don’t think that would necessarily be a good thing.

I see a place for communists, but I’m not sure that I see very much hope for their organisations in the short term.

Possibly the best we can hope for is a period of government by Tony Blair, moving rightwards at a slightly slower speed than the present government.