Letters

Anatomy of an anti-Party clot

Tom Cowan, sole spokesperson for the ‘Independent Communists’, has replied to Mark Fischer’s criticisms (Weekly Worker 95). Tom’s reply has not been sent to us, is not for publication and has only been circulated to selected members, supporters and ex-members of our organisation.

WE HAVE had no formal reply from the Independent Communists (a small group of ex-members/supporters of our organisation) to the principled offer to join the Party as a group, with full factional rights. Instead, we have read in their contributions to other publications that “some of us are not against entry” into the Party “on principle” (Open Polemic March 1 1995).

In fact, the only piece of recent correspondence we have received from anyone associated with the IC was a letter by Tom Cowan featured in Weekly Worker 94 and replied to by Mark Fischer in Weekly Worker 95. This letter was criticised for the charity-mongering stance it took on aid to Cuba.

We have received a circular, dated May 30, bearing the Independent Communist’s heading, although again written exclusively in the first personal singular and signed ‘Tom Cowan’. This circular - it is clear - was never meant to be seen by our organisation. It has been surreptitiously circulated.

The circular says that the original charity-mongering letter of Cowan was also a “private circular letter” sent to possible individual sympathisers of Cuba. Cowan was therefore “surprised” to see it in the Weekly Worker.

We can hardly comment. The letter arrived at our postal address. It had no covering note indicating any alternative source than Cowan himself. We therefore published in good faith.

Cowan’s new circular makes it clear that he is advocating pious charity-mongering. The amount does not matter, Cowan suggests: “However small the contribution, just as long as it assists in their daily lives and struggles ...” (Circular, May 30)

Cowan blithely admits he is talking about the equivalent of “pennies”, but to the poor suffering Cuban masses these pathetic amounts actually are “most precious”. What distasteful, patronising liberalism!

The circular moves on to reply to our calls for rapprochement and a defence of Cowan’s individual position. It is a most unprincipled and dishonest attack on our organisation.

First, Cowan’s individual record. Jack Conrad wrote in his ‘Notes on Rapprochement’ supplement in the Weekly Worker (April 27 1995) that Cowan joined our ranks briefly, resigning some three months later “due to business priorities”.

Cowan retorts that he was an “active supporter of the Leninists for about five years”. He “did not resign because of ‘business priorities’”. This, he alleges, is to suggest he had “no political differences” - which he most certainly did.

True, Cowan continues, whilst a supporter he was invited by Fischer and Conrad “to join the Party inner circle”. Yet three months later he was curtly informed that he had been “excluded” because of irregular attendance at our London seminars (Circular, May 30).

In truth, Cowan, after being a supporter for a number of years (sometimes close, sometimes more distant, depending on his whim) joined the Party for three months but was unable to attend cell meetings or work in a disciplined way. He left after discussion and by mutual consent. He even promised that, come his retirement, he would be able to work for the Party full time. He remained a supporter and was not excluded from some conspiratorial “inner circle”, as he disgracefully labels membership in his circular.

Membership of the Communist Party is open to anyone who accepts our basic principles and works under the discipline and direction of a Party organisation or committee. This is something that Cowan agreed he could not do.

Cowan did indeed voice many criticisms of the politics of the organisation. These were widely debated and replied to many times in written form and in Party seminars, meetings and cells. Cowan’s problems during membership however were never ascribed to these political differences - neither by us, nor by him at the time.

Lastly, on the “opposition” - the Independent Communists. Cowan suggests that our “lies” are designed to “belittle” and “denigrate” this “opposition” which might otherwise attract “members disillusioned and frustrated by bureaucratic methods”.

In fact, the IC has no political coherence whatsoever other than a growing, morbid hostility to the Communist Party. Given the political heterogeneity of the individuals who comprise it, it is far more correct to call it a ‘clot’ than an organisation.

Cowan’s politics are a strange brand of left economism and a version of the positions of Ohler, an early - and obscure - critic of Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International. True to these petty-bourgeois leftist antecedents, Cowan still refers to the “despicable traditions” of the “old Stalinist CP”, mocking the fact that “Fischer and Conrad” are “proud to be associated” with it.

Also in the Independent Com-munists are two ex-members of our organisation who left - again with no alternative political platform - but who have subsequently become born-again Stalinites, fans of the purges, authors of hate-mail to our organisation (denounced as “mad” by Cowan himself) and sellers of Lalkar, paper of the Indian Workers Association led by avowed Stalin fan, Harpal Brar. One wonders how they feel about Cowan’s derision of the “old Stalinist CP”.

The fourth element of the clot that we are aware of is again an ex-supporter. This older person left our organisation because of his localism - the opportunist tendency to chase local campaigns at the expense of conducting national Party tasks and priorities.

Now he appears on the public platforms of the Communist Action Group, another set of born-again Stalinites.

So what keeps this opposition together - if indeed they still are? Anti-Partyism, the struggle against the work of the Provisional Central Committee of the Party to conduct Party work and recruit others to the task of reforging the CPGB. The fight for revolutionary rapprochement launched by the PCC is now cynically denounced as a “get-rich-quick gimmick” (Circular, May 30).

As we have stated, time and politics move on. The CPGB has made an honest and principled call for organisations to join us in the central task for communists - reforging the Party. People and organisations define themselves positively or negatively in relation to this real process of communist rapprochement. As evidenced by Independent Communists’ clandestine publications, they are defining themselves as a low-level anti-Party clot.

That’s up to them. To the extent that it deals with them at all, history will know how to judge them.

Phil Kent & Mark Fischer
London

Main enemy

‘Opportunism’s slippery slope’, by Ian Mahoney (Weekly Worker 97), says the Socialist Workers Party is making concessions to imperialist propaganda about World War II. I have not read the SWP statements cited by Mahoney, but he accuses them of forgetting Lenin’s dictum that “the main enemy is at home” when it comes to wartime.

My problem with Mahoney is his apparent assumption that World War II was a rerun of World War I. It was not. For example, Nazi occupation of the country you live in was not just any military occupation, especially if you happened to be a Jew, a gypsy or a member of a number of other groups (communists included, actually).

In September 1939 a Polish worker (a Jew, perhaps? - 10% of Poles then were) who thought that his main enemy was the Polish bourgeoisie rather than the invading Nazi German army would have been in the grip of a delusion. As for delusions, there were in fact hundreds of Polish rabbis who let themselves be shot by the Nazis rather than perform forced labour on the sabbath. Adherence to sacred texts - the Torah or Lenin’s collected works - can make you do brave, but stupid things.

Mahoney tries to associate the SWP’s attitude with Trotsky, who allegedly “made important opportunist concessions to the mass illusions in the democratic capitalist states”. It is worth quoting the chapter ‘Historical perspectives’ in the second edition of the Communist and Marxist Parties of the World, published by Longmans in 1990. This notes that “during World War II [Trotskyists] advocated a policy of revolutionary defeatism, modelled on that of the Bolsheviks in 1914-17”. This sounds very much like what Mahoney wants, so why is he condemning Trotsky?

Unlike the Stalinists, the followers of Trotsky did not think World War II lost its imperialist colouring once Hitler attacked the USSR.

I personally think Trotsky’s followers cut themselves off from the masses during the war by following the line they took, but they did that by following the line Mahoney advocates. They did not engage in “opportunism”.

Steve Kay
Berkshire