13.02.2014

What might have been

The Communist Platform meeting showed what the Socialist Platform could have been, says Ian Donovan

The February 8 meeting of the Communist Platform was modestly attended. Not only that, but the majority of the signatories of the platform are members of the CPGB, and thus at least potentially subject to the kind of party discipline that many on the left fear, based on the experience of being outvoted by organisations such as the Socialist Workers Party, which treats the members of ‘broader’ formations that they are involved in with a degree of cynicism.

One thing the CPGB comrades did insist on as an organisation was replacing the original Communist Platform with a new, more concise draft, whose style and thrust was more in tune with the CPGB’s own ‘minimum-maximum’ programme concept. However, in real terms there was no great principled difference between them. The vote was therefore overwhelming to replace the initial draft with the new version. But it was made clear that, once that substitution was made, the new draft would be open to amendment in exactly the same manner as the old one.

Since the new draft had been circulated well in advance and amendments invited to both drafts, this made for a genuine democratic discussion, as the CPGB comrades did not vote as a bloc on the amendments. For them to have done so in fact would have been a sectarian error, as in a sense the platform had already self-selected on the basis of some basic communist principles. The CPGB comrades, to their credit, did not make that error.

As a result we saw a meeting with a completely different atmosphere and ethos to the ill-fated meeting of the Socialist Platform of Left Unity last September, which only underlines what might have been if the founders of that platform had stuck to their original pronouncement and not short-circuited the democratic process by the device of ‘indicative votes’ on amendments.

At the CP meeting a genuine debate took place, with real differences of opinion, disputed votes, and on some questions the most senior comrades in the CPGB did not win the vote. Not that this is something to gloat about in any sectarian sense: rather it is an indication of something that should be normal. It is my view very good that a reference to the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution, as examples of the first attempts of the working class to overthrow capitalism, was included in the amended platform.

What was also pleasing is that my own motion on governmental power was passed unanimously. This was partially based on formulations from the Socialist Platform, but went much further in rejecting not only all forms of coalitionism with parties of the ruling class, but also both old and New Labour-type non-coalition governments, in favour of the strategy of creating a genuine workers’ government. Such a government might itself be a coalition of workers’ parties, or more homogenous. However, the key point is that, in coming to power, it must be based on independent, armed, working class, mass organisations, in order to defeat the threat of counterrevolution that comes from the existing capitalist state, whose machine must be destroyed.

Not all my own amendments and motions were passed, of course. I reject the third-camp methodology that is an important aspect of the CPGB’s politics, and proposals that expressed that rejection did not fare so well. That is life: the task of political clarification is long and complex, and not in any sense a one-way street.

But there was a healthy aspect to the way this meeting was run, which others could do worse than try to emulate. One wonders what might have been if Nick Wrack and the Socialist Platform had done something similar last September.