CPGB/WW: snap out of it!

Submitted by martin on 7 October, 2002 - 1:49

Oh dear. I don't fully understand it myself, and I'm sure others viewing AWL-CPGB relations from a greater distance must be even more baffled.
The AWL and CPGB/WW have had extensive discussions in recent years. The very fact of those discussions indicates some political common ground: a commitment to open debate, a desire to win revolutionary unity through that debate. Our positions on many important questions have also converged through those years - on the Stalinist states, on Ireland, on Israel-Palestine, on Islamic fundamentalism and "reactionary anti-capitalism", on the Afghan and Iraqi wars, on the euro, even on the Labour Party.
Now, without any great new political issue emerging, the pages of the Weekly Worker are full of casual abuse of us, and arbitrary speculations about us being secretly split into "economistic" and "political" wings.
Vicki Morris has dealt with some of the odd comments in your CPGB aggregate report (last WW). I will not try here to cover all the other issues raised in that report.
A few weeks ago, when Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks at last criticised Sharon, the WW exclaimed that the AWL would be denouncing Sacks as anti-semitic! And now - our trade union work "apes the sectarian methods of the SWP at a lower level"? Our argument that the SWP's denunciation of "Zionists" as akin to racists and imperialists leads to de facto anti-semitism (for example, support for banning student Jewish Societies) is "ranting" of a Healyite or Spartacist species? Our only use for the Socialist Alliance is "the opportunity to attack the SWP"?
At least we are in good company. Leon Trotsky received from your aggregate this lordly rebuke - "a sect mentality adopted as orthodoxy as a consequence of... lack of a partyist perspective".
Silly. And with an unpleasant touch of the toady about it. In a Socialist Alliance dominated by the SWP which really does "rant" against us as "Islamophobic", here we have the WW signalling: "Hey, boss, we're not like those troublemakers who are only here to attack you!" This only nine days after the CPGB (on a request from an ally of the SWP) organised our "no-platforming" from a political debate on grounds of our support for Israel's right to exist alongside an independent Palestinian state.
How did we come to this? AWL-CPGB discussions proceeded more or less reasonably - though with some points where we seemed "stuck", to which I'll return - until late February this year.
Following the Socialist Alliance conference of December 2001, which had rejected a call supported by both AWL and CPGB for an official SA paper, we had been pursuing the idea of an unofficial SA paper. We in the AWL concluded that there was insufficient active support from unaffiliated SA members to create a really broad unofficial SA paper, so any new paper would be essentially a merger of Solidarity and Weekly Worker, with some wider backing. After meeting CPGB members to talk about how such a merged paper could function, we concluded that there were real difficulties of divergent approaches.
The CPGB, as your aggregate report says, sees its task as "to bring together the revolutionary left in a single democratic-centralist organisation" via the Socialist Alliance. It wanted the merged paper to approach every question through that prism. We think we have to start from real class struggles, and the real issues of transforming the labour movement, to some of which the Socialist Alliance in its present form cannot respond even one-tenth adequately; we must respond ourselves, as best we can, and simultaneously fight to regroup the Socialist Alliance around more adequate politics. Politics, for us, is the axis, the essence, of building the revolutionary party. To centralise the Socialist Alliance around SWP politics would abort, not advance, the potential of the Alliance.
We wrote a short letter to the CPGB saying, without any great polemic, that we thought a broad unofficial SA paper was not immediately practicable. A Solidarity/WW merger would require some further substantial political discussions. We wanted to organise those discussions. Jack Conrad of the CPGB responded with an extravagant tirade against us. I counter-tiraded. Jack Conrad counter-counter-tiraded. I left it there. (The texts, and some other relevant material, are at http://archive.workersliberty.org/activity/fractions/socall/index.html).
Since then we have found it pretty much impossible to get organised political discussion with the CPGB. There's never time; or, we're told that we only want to discuss politics as an evasion of the imperative to produce a joint paper.
If you want a joint paper, you have to discuss politics, and observe some standards of comradeship in your public diatribes against your partners. If you don't have time for substantial discussions, and are willing to "no-platform" us on request from the SWP's allies, then you don't want a joint paper.
One or the other. Which does the CPGB want? All this looks like, not an actual attempt to get a joint paper, but a "unity offensive" in which the proposal for a joint paper is used as a convenient lever to create your desired AWL division into different "wings". Only, effective "unity offensives" have to be a bit more plausible.
There are significant differences between AWL and CPGB in attitude to the Socialist Alliance. Arguments at the last two Alliance conferences encapsulate them conveniently.
At the manifesto conference in March 2001, the CPGB proposed, as the "priority points" for the Alliance, a list of political-democratic demands deliberately chosen to omit all "economic" issues. AWL was in favour of including the demand for a democratic republic as a priority point. But we argued for a political axis based on class, not just abstract democracy - for independent working-class representation, for a workers' government, for the political economy of the working class (social provision for social need), for full trade union rights.
At the constitution conference in December 2001, the CPGB emphasised centralising the Alliance (supporting the SWP's draft constitution; supporting some minority safeguards, but none in the election of the Executive). We emphasised maximising the political life of the Alliance (and our effort to keep the door open the Socialist Party was part of that).
Behind those differences, I think, is the essential sticking-point in our previous discussions - the notion of "reforging the Communist Party of Great Britain", and the issues that go with it: the Stalinist CPGB as having been despite everything "your party"; the "party" as something provided (or not provided) to the working class by some outside agency; "Leninism" as signifying that the task of such a party is to bring demands to the working class which the logic of working-class struggle itself would never generate; stress on political-democratic demands as the key such to-be-brought-from-outside slogans; rejection of transitional demands in the name of "minimum/maximum", of permanent revolution in the name of "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry", and of Trotskyism in general.
I will make no attempt to unravel those issues here, but refer readers to Sean Matgamna's discussion of them at http://www.workersliberty.org/files/tour.pdf (to be published in due course as part of the Weekly Worker's preoccupation with the AWL? I hope so).
AWL and CPGB have been able to work together often because, despite all that, we have the common ground on important large-scale political issues which I referred to at the start of this comment. The way I see it, the CPGB's progress on all those issues represented welcome movement away from its Stalinist roots. That the words "reforging the Communist Party of Great Britain" have now gone from your "Where We Stand" is also progress. It must reflect awareness, on some level, that the actual politics to which you have moved, through thinking about and discussing the world around you, contradict the fetishes of what you call "partyism".
Yet, like the elastic pulling back a bungee-jumper, your attachment to those roots evidently remains, and can hurl you backwards in startling fashion. Thus, I surmise, the reversion to a mode where "the party" (to be achieved by centralising us under the SWP?) and "the paper" are touchstones, in abstraction from political content. Snap out of it!

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