Papers: Weekly Worker: IntroductionPapers: Weekly Worker: Introduction
In early days of 2003, the US and UK governments were laying their plans for war on Iraq.
The British people were sharply divided. Some, who quite naturally loathed the murderous dictator Saddam Hussein, were supportive, or at least sympathetic: but an ever growing number were not.
A global day of protest was planned for 15th February 2003. The British Stop the War Coalition began to organise events around the country, the largest of which would march through London to Hyde Park. As the date approach, it appeared that opposition to the war was stregthening, and an air of expectation was growing around the planned London demonstration.
I have been a socialist since my teens, and the forthcoming demonstration forced me to recognise that I had taken no active part in politics for a long time. First raising a young family, and then a career which took me abroad much of the time, had distracted me and left me out of touch. I determined that if I was going to join the march, it should be with fellow socialists, and I took to the web to find out which groups had laid plans to travel to London.
I discovered that the organisation I had been a member of in the 1980's, the Militant tendency within the Labour Party, had split between the two leading figures I had first met as a teenager: Ted Grant and Peter Taaffe. Ted Grant now led a small group called Socialist Appeal, still within Labour. Peter Taaffe led the rather larger Socialist Party outside it. This was sad news, and it began to dawn on me just how long it had been since I had followed the labyrinthine patterns of the British left. Sadder still, the combined membership of both groups was estimated to be around 500. At its peak, Militant had claimed over 10,000 members.
I followed pages of 'left links' to the websites of other socialist groups, and it was worrying to recognise so few. So much so that, for the first time in my life, I had the experience of being pleased to see the banner of the Socialist Worker, and to find it almost unchanged. Reading this paper still gave me the impression that I was peering through a layer of dust: the tone of relentless party-approved dreariness, desperately poked into life through the overuse of exclamation marks, held that curious mixture of familial comfort and revulsion, which mum's apple pie must hold for those who, as children, had mums who baked them bloody awful apple pies.
But it was through the Socialist Workers Party site that I discovered the Socialist Alliance, and was delighted to see that this united front was now being supported by a number of left groups. Sadly, the Socialist Party was not one of them, having left after a squabble with the Socialist Workers Party. I wanted to find a group, or rather a group other than the SWP, who were supporting this unity-minded alliance. I looked down the list of members: Workers Power, the Alliance for Workers Liberty, the Communist Party of Great Britain...
From the top down, websites of:
The Communist Party of Britain
The Communist Party of Great Britain (PCC)
The Communist Party of Great Britain (ML)The Communist Party of Great Britain? That bunch of bastards who had continued to support the Russian dictator Joseph Stalin through his murderous purges? Who had publicly equated socialism with his dictatorship of the Soviet Union, and set our cause back a century? The cousins of those who had held back the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War from revolution, and had so eventually betrayed Spain - and my family - to forty years of fascism? In the Socialist Alliance, with actual socialists?
I logged into their website, and began reading the Weekly Worker, and it quickly became apparent that something was seriously wrong. Whoever these guys were, they were not Stalinists, and they were not the Communist Party of Great Britain. In fact, they showed more signs of allowing open debate than any Leninist group I had yet encountered.
From the top down, websites of:
The New Communist Party of Britain
The Communist Party of Britain (ML)
The Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (ML)In fact, the Communist Party of Great Britain that I knew and hated had been dwindling for years. Increasingly embarrassed with its own political heritage, it was losing its identity: a loss which was entirely to its benefit, but nevertheless moved it from identifiable Stalinism to a fart floating in the wind (give me the fart any day). Unhappy with this course, harder-lined groups had already broken away: National Car Parks [editor's comment: we believe this should read New Communist Party] in 1977, and the Communist Party of Britain in 1988. In 1991, the CPGB announced that it was to become the Democratic Left, and abruptly and somewhat suprisingly disappeared in a puff of irrelevance.
Amongst those who had left to form the National Car Parks in 1977 was a tiny group which then rejoined the CPGB in the early 1980's. They formed links with the Communist Party of Turkey, and published a factional paper within the CPGB called The Leninist. When the name Communist Party of Great Britain was vacated by the previous tenants, they leapt in like squatters, declaring their intention to reforge the Communist Party, and forming the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee).
The group ran an open paper not just by the standards of the CPGB, but by the standards of the left in general, and the collapse of the previous CPGB left them little option but to talk to their old enemies on the Trotskyist left, which had long since denounced Stalin's Soviet Union as a dictatorship. John Bridge, the group's de facto leader, openly accepted that somewhere down the line, his position on the key question of the Soviet Union changed. Whereas previously he had considered it a socialist state, he later came to accept that the lack of democracy made it merely bureaucratic collectivist. In plain language, a dictatorship without capitalism.
The more I read, the more impressed I was. This new CPGB was by far the most enthusiastic supporter of the new Socialist Alliance, and campaigned for it to become a unified party: a position I strongly agreed with. Their paper was also unusually readable for the revolutionary left, and contained genuine (and indeed spluttering) letters of criticism, and articles in which non-members challenged CPGB positions. It is a sad sign that these very basic concessions to democracy should be so unusual for the left groups.
The only other group which interested me was the Alliance for Workers Liberty, and it took me a little time to realise that this was Soggy, or the Socialist Organiser entrist group overshadowed by Militant in the Labour Party back when I had been a member in the 1980s. I'd never taken them entirely seriously at the time, and remembered them mainly for their rather bizarre strategy of calling Militant supporters sexist and reactionary, and having so buttered us up, trying to recruit us. They too ran a relatively open paper called Solidarity, and I was heartened to discover that some kind of unity negotiation was underway between them and the CPGB.
I wrote to both the CPGB and the AWL advancing the case for socialist unity in general, and their unity in particular, and on February 15th I joined the anti-war demonstration in London, spending time first with comrades from the Alliance for Workers Liberty, and then from the Communist Party of Great Britain. I doubt anyone who was there will ever forget that day. Even the police estimated 750,000, and even the bourgeois papers conceded that this estimate was far too low. The true number was closer to 1.5 million. This was no turn out of the usual suspects, but a truly mass demonstration. The British people did not want to go to war, and had communicated that in the most dramatic possible way.
That Tony Blair ignored them was a demonstration that our democracy would always come second to the interests of governments and business: and that huge numbers were not won to the cause of socialism in protest was a demonstration of the sheer confusion of the so-called vanguard parties of the left.
I went on to join the CPGB, and in the main my early impressions of them proved sound. They were a bright and interesting group. I was astonished that with only a couple of dozen members, their work and sheer professionalism enabled them to convey an impression of an organisation far larger. It was a standing joke that the response to any enquiry about the number of members in the CPGB was less than a thousand.
And they were not Stalinists. Genuinely not. Any confusion on this point would be enormously unfair: they really didn't refer to the world's notorious and bloody dictatorship as socialist, and I do not wish anything I say to be read as an accusation that they did. My quibble is much less serious.
Perhaps I can explain by analogy. I was raised a catholic. I am an atheist, and regard catholic dogma as, well, so much catholic dogma. I have no inclination to oppose a woman's right to an abortion, or to feel anything but a militant hatred of homophobia. And yet, when Celtic play Rangers I cheer for Celtic. I can't help it. It is still them and us. I may be a godless revolutionary, but in some engrained, tribal, unconscious sense, I am a catholic godless revolutionary.
Similarly, though the leadership of the CPGB is not Stalinist, it retains a curious partisanship with those who were. Its writers frequently failed to use the neutral term 'Trotskyist' and preferred the perjorative, whining Trotskyite, for years the hall-mark of Stalinist language in propoganda against those who stood with Trotsky in his opposition to dictatorship and the myth of socialism in one country. It is probably now difficult for anyone not familiar with the history of the division of the left over the Soviet Union to realise quite what a dark, insulting, and even sinister flavour this word carries.
The CPGB formally argued that, in fact, there was no such thing as Trotskyism, because, according to National Organiser Mark Fischer, Trotsky's contribution to the revolutionary workers' movement did not constitute a qualitative development of the theoretical categories of Marxism, an extension according to its own logical laws of development. In this sense therefore, there is no 'Trotskyism' in the same way there is a 'Leninism'. But, and most sadly of all, that same piece continues Trotskyists committed to the creation of a mass revolutionary workers' party should begin immediate discussions with the Provisional Central Committee with a view to the reunification of Trotskyism with the Communist Party of Great Britain.
It's all nonsense. The division was never between Trotskyists and Leninists, but between Trotskyists and Stalinists. The term Trotskyist described not a move away from Lenin, but a rejection of the murderous dictatorship of Stalin - and his successors - which the original CPGB defended for decades. Mark Fischer, and the new CPGB (PCC) group, understood this perfectly well: and this laughable misrepresentation of history was primarily a matter of vanity. These comrades had, finally, broken with their defence of Stalin, but they wanted to feel that - somehow - it was the left who had never supported him in the first place who had drifted away, and should be brought back into the fold.
It was still them and us, and even those of us who joined the party from Trotskyist backgrounds were never really us. Ultimately, it has never quite accepted that the CPGB of the 1970s and 1980s was no place for a revolutionary!
What we said about the group we then
recommended everybody vote for. Clear now?The group did prove to be genuinely more open than most, but such was the standard of bureaucratic centralism on the left, this is perhaps not the compliment it should be. When the CPGB bizarrely adopted a policy of recommending unconditional electoral support for the unprincipled Respect coalition - largely a coalition between the SWP, George Galloway, and some political islamicists - I organised opposition. Eventually, we created a Red Platform, arguing that we should only support socialist Respect candidates, and that we should rejoin the Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform (or SADP), which we had left in our enthusiasm for Respect. In doing so, though, I quickly banged my head on the limit to the CPGB's openness.
In reality, opposition was allowed up to the moment it showed a real prospect of subjecting the leadership to serious defeat. Any account I give will doubtless be thought biased, so instead I'll quote from a description of events written by CPGB comrade Mike Macnair and published by the Weekly Worker themselves:
The dispute which eventually led to Manny and other Red Party comrades' resignation from the CPGB began when our March 21 2004 aggregate meeting passed a resolution which stated: "Recognising the need for the anti-war, pro-working class opposition to Blair to take on partyist form, the CPGB will work to ensure the biggest possible vote for Respect on June 10."
(Above) George Galloway pretending to be a cat
with his face in Rula Lenska's hands
(Below) George Galloway pretending to be a democrat
with his nose up Saddam Hussein's bottomThe resolution was put at a late stage of the discussion at a poorly attended aggregate, and comrade Manny seems to have taken the view that it did not express the actual majority opinion in the CPGB. He more or less immediately attempted to organise the production of a collective article which would express opposition to it. This took the form of an article by Manny, with statements appended to it from other comrades, which also expressed opposition to the decision. The Provisional Central Committee, however, refused to publish the article with the appendages attached...
After the June 10 elections the PCC discontinued the Red Platform's column in the paper, on the ground that the Red Platform had run out of things to say. This was followed by the resignations of some other comrades who have participated in founding the Red Party...
In my opinion the PCC made some mistakes in handling the discussion. It is not clear either that the right initial response to comrade Manny's supposed undemocratic manoeuvre in late March was to have a fight about what could be published, or that the PCC was right to stop the Red Platform column on its own initiative without discussion in an aggregate. The reasoning may have been sound, but the actions were bound to be taken as provocations and confuse the political discussion.
(You can read the whole article on the CPGB's own site, here.)
In the end, as Mike says, I resigned, and a number of others followed me. We went on to found the Red Party.
In a curious footnote, the CPGB was eventually so embarrassed by the degeneration of Respect into populism and political islam - it's refusal to speak out on abortion or gay rights, it's refusal to defend the freedom to criticise religion - that it was eventually forced to do as the Red Platform had argued, and refuse support to candidates who were members of the Muslim Association of Britain: and to rejoin the SADP too! Of course, they offered endless arguments to the effect that while this might look like adopting the politics of the Red Platform, it wasn't really.
Bollocks.
(And I defy anyone anywhere to claim they wouldn't feel smug too.)
The workers' vanguard?Looking back, I think I allowed myself to accept that any organisation which based its politics on the demand for consistent democracy must be, itself, consistently democratic, and this was just too simple. The CPGB is trapped in its own past. Where revolutionaries should be philosophical materialists and therefore desecrators of tradition, where reason should be in revolt, the British revolutionary left is busy quoting bits of Lenin's holy writ at each other in debates which make rabbinical scripturalism sound like free-thinking.
Revolutionary plans for modern Britain are being based on those Lenin developed for a Russian backwater state a century ago. Rather than studying Lenin's writing and practise as part of material history, they are being applied as if written yesterday and for the modern world. When a member of the Red Party dared to suggest that the phrase dictatorship of the proletariat might be more usefully changed to rule by working people (which is all it means, as even the CPGB agree), one CPGB comrade said he was so shocked, his jaw dropped.
Such revolutionaries begin to resemble a historical re-enactment society like the Sealed Knot, which refights the English Civil War complete with costume and archaic speech: not because socialism is out of date, but because some socialists perhaps are.
Among the more polite labels my opposition in the CPGB won me was that of anarchist, and I am beginning to wonder if, at least in their terms, it wasn't correct even then (I wouldn't deny it now). What I took to the group's inconsistent application of Lenin's consistent democracy, may rather have been a consistent application of Lenin's inconsistent democracy. In other words, Lenin may have been wrong, and if the poor comrade's jaw dropped before, presumably he has now passed out.
My advice? Don't be a Leninist. Indeed, don't accept any label which consists of a person's name followed by ist. If our politics are based not on an analysis of the world, but an analysis of the ideas of a particular person, then we are ultimately not revolutionaries of any kind, but just more cultists.
Nothing I have said should be taken to mean that the group was not, or is not, studded with stars. If the comrade who, when I thanked him for his advice and encouragement, told me that his friends told him he should have been a priest is reading; or the comrade who sent me an private message sympathising with me over some rough treatment and advising me to tell the culprits 'fuck you'; or the comrade who expressed his regret at my resignation, advised me to reapply when I was ready, and said he would resign himself if it were not accepted; or any of those who expressed support but who probably wouldn't thank me for being named, then let me record how much your support meant at various difficult times.
This page lists the fifty or so articles I wrote for the Weekly Worker during my year's membership. As the maths have it, this means I wrote a page or two of most issues during this period, and I must confess that in the main I enjoyed it enormously. For much of this time I also worked as a volunteer at the party's office, laying out the paper on the computer while the editor, Peter Manson, and the party secretary John Bridge, edited copy. These evenings too were often rewarding, as the talk ranged over the political, and the decidedly non-political.
As is hinted at above, my politics have changed somewhat since I left the CPGB, and so there are arguments I develop in these pieces which I would no longer make, or would at least qualify. No shame in an honest change of mind. There is some shame, though, in noting those occassions where the position I presented was closer to party's orthodoxy than I really believed. It's strange, as I was never conscious of bending my politics, and the effect is not gross, but there is no question that human and psychological pressures operate in any group, which we are foolish not to guard against.
In fighting to live freely, we must first ensure we fight freely.