New Workers Party Conference
Uncle Joey | 16.03.2006 18:24
“Our campaign for a new mass workers’ party must be shaped by the type of politics such a formation needs if it is to be a genuine workers’ party. Thus, we will campaign for a workers’ party based on the theory and practice of revolutionary Marxism.”
Frankly, we are not expecting support from the organisation that will field the majority of delegates, the Socialist Party in England and Wales. On its CNWP website the comrades argue that, while “broader questions, such as the programme of a new party, are undoubtedly important, we think it would be premature to take decisions on those issues at an initial conference” (www.cnwp.org.uk).
But ends determine means, and vice versa - if the CNWP were to set its sights on creating a Marxist party, then the type of propaganda we would produce, the trends in the workers’ movement and groups in wider society we would now approach would flow from this perspective.
Of course, if we were talking about tweaking the details of a programme, then delaying things to another conference would be perfectly valid. But why is it “premature” to make explicit what sort of party the comrades have in their collective mind’s eye? Actually, this talk of programme being “premature” is a procedural attempt hide the fact that CNWP has been designed from the beginning to have a reformist programme. Leading SPers have made this abundantly clear.
In the November 2005 issue of Socialism Today, SP general secretary Peter Taaffe wrote an article which purported to outline the historic struggle for independent working class political representation in this country. Keir Hardie’s Labour Party is the central leitmotif. Not once did he even mention the 1920 formation and substantial influence of the Communist Party of Great Britain, the party of Albert Inkpin, Harry Pollitt, Tom Mann and Tom Bell, the British section of Lenin’s and Trotsky’s Third International. In itself, this ringing silence qualifies the article to be dismissed as inept. However, in its way, the piece is instructive. Clearly, Labourism clouds and limits the comrade’s field of political vision.
Thus, both in what he chooses to speak about and what he chooses to try to blot out, comrade Taaffe’s article speaks volumes about the SP leadership’s cramped reformist vision of our movement. It betrays desperately unambitious perspectives.
For the sake of consistency, the SP leadership really should respond to our call for a Marxist party on March 19 with a counterposed motion for a non-Marxist workers’ party - for a variety of Labourism, in other words.
It will not, of course; and it is easy to understand why. It would be a simple task for us to produce quote after quote from the giants of our movement denouncing social democracy’s treacherous role. But theory tells us what life has confirmed: Labourism is a bourgeois ideology. And from the Scottish Socialist Party to Respect, all the half-way houses we are presented with today represent the programmatic disarming and betrayal of the working class.
The theory of the revolutionary working class is Marxism. However, amongst a whole swathe of so-called ‘Marxists’ nowadays it passes for common sense that for Marxists to actually argue for a Marxist party is pop-eyed ultra-leftism. To show why these comrades are so sadly mistaken, let us explain our case for a Marxist party in a little more detail.
What is a party?
In his Socialism Today article, comrade Taaffe insists that “any new formation or party” must be initially established “with a basic programme, which can unite significant left forces”. A “basic programme” for comrade Taaffe, of course, actually means a minimalist set of reformist demands. Another code word is “significant left forces”. What he means is refugees from New Labour who are still Labourites. They, however tiny in number - or even if they exist only in comrade Taaffe’s imagination - will set the programmatic parameters of CNWP.
This concern, in the minds of leaders such as comrade Taaffe, for ‘broadness’ paradoxically reveals their practical political surrender to the right. Marxism is all very well for the initiated few in his SP, but not when it comes to winning “significant left forces”. John Rees of the Socialist Workers Party showed that he works from the same template in a Marxism 2002 opening, instructively titled ‘Do we need a broad socialist party or a revolutionary party?’ (my emphasis). The common assumption of such misleaders is that what are dubbed revolutionary parties are narrow entities built using the same organisational plans as today’s SWP or SP - sects writ large, in other words.
The first point is to ask ourselves precisely what a party is. The origins of the word give us a strong hint: ie, from the Latin pars, or part. Our party must be part of the working class. Not just any part though, but the voluntary union of its most determined fighters, the vanguard. The organic unity of this political/social entity with the class distinguishes it from the organisational nostrums of left social democrats who perceive of their parties as representing the workers. In contrast, a Marxist party strives to merge itself with the class.
Such an understanding underlines the considerable distance of the Militant/SP tradition from genuine Marxism. Essentially, this trend was/is committed to the achievement of ‘socialism’ “through an enabling bill in parliament”, not the revolutionary democratic struggle of the masses themselves (P Taaffe What we stand for June 1990, p8). In such a schema, the revolutionary initiative and creative genius of the class itself is replaced by a Commons vote. The proletariat is assigned exactly the same ‘walk on, walk off’ role reformism has historically allotted to the action of the masses - and with the same treacherous logic.
Understanding the Marxist method tells us a great deal about the reciprocal relationship between party and class. When Marx and Engels write in the Communist manifesto that communists “have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole”, they immediately go onto explain this by emphasising that communists “do not set up sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement”. On the contrary, they insisted, our aim is to seek out and always to bring to the fore common interests, the “interests of the movement as a whole” (K Marx, F Engels Manifesto of the Communist Party 1973, p61). Common interests - that is what informs the programmes of Marxist parties.
Therefore, calling for a Marxist party is not to demand instant revolution or adherence to a set of obscure, antiquated commandments inherited from 1848, 1871 or 1921. In today’s conditions a Marxist party would, of course, fight for reforms. However, it would fight for more than the pinched and cramped wages, conditions and services stuff that is usually listed by the economistic left.
A Marxist party would boldly take up the battle for democracy in every area of life. Crucially, though, in terms of strategy, Marxists fight for a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales and a social European Union realised under the leadership of the working class - which, if gains are to be protected and taken further, must of necessity be armed. Only such a road leads to socialism and universal human liberation.
Culture
What I have written so far clearly has important implications for the type of discipline and culture a Marxist party must have. The fact that the majority of what calls itself the ‘Marxist left’ organises regimes of bureaucratic centralism - where debate is stifled, and open disagreement regarded as tantamount to treachery - is an intolerable disgrace.
The likes of Peter Taaffe are as guilty in perpetuating this abominable state of affairs as the SWP’s John Rees, frankly. Both - in contrast to the type of Marxist party I outline above - propagate sectarianism in the ranks of the workers’ movement. Now this word is often crassly misused, so it is worthwhile reminding comrades exactly what it is.
Sectarianism entails putting the narrow interests of your particular group - whatever its size - above the general interests of the working class, or, as Marx and Engels put it, of “the movement as a whole”. Communism is the product of the conscious activity of the class itself; it is not the outcome of the victory of some little group organised around this or that ideological article of faith.
As sects, however, most of these groups treat their own organisational integrity, bureaucratically cohered around a frozen theoretical insight or what amounts to a shibboleth, as the key determinant. Thus, politics is treated as conspiracy, something that takes place behind the backs of workers. For example, most groups do not therefore report the political debates that take place in their ranks.
I was once actually informed by a member of the SP that this would only “confuse the workers”, the poor dullards. Indeed, Peter Taaffe himself has blasted such an approach as making a “talking shop” of the revolutionary party - a philistine comment for someone who touts himself as a Marxist leader. Resulting from this degenerate method, it becomes a matter of discipline for sect members to defend the views of the majority in public, whether they believe them or not, whether they are on an agreed action that would require a degree of self-effacing discipline or simply having a private conversation.
In contrast, we agree with that well known ‘sectarian’, Lenin, when he said that “there can be no mass party, no party of the class, without full clarity of essential shadings, without an open struggle between the various tendencies, without informing the masses as to which leaders are pursuing this or that line. Without this, a party worthy of the name cannot be built …” (‘But who are the judges?’ CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p159).
Again, the link between the party and the class of which it is the advance contingent is key in all of this. The transparency of the party, its openness about the differences and arguments that animate its ranks, is inextricably tied up with how genuine Marxists view the struggle for socialism itself. A socialist revolution is the work of the class formed into a political party, not of a party operating as some enlightened elite, a locum for the workers. Lenin made this fundamental point repeatedly, here in a comment on a battle amongst the Swiss social democrats:
“The choice is not between ‘internal peace’ and ‘inner party struggle’. The real choice is this: either the present, concealed forms of inner-party struggle, with their demoralising effect on the masses, or open, principled struggle between the internationalist revolutionary trend and the [social-chauvinist] Grutli trend inside and outside the party. Such a struggle is both necessary and useful, for it trains in the masses independence and the ability to carry out their epoch-making revolutionary mission” (my emphasis, ‘Principles involved in the war issue’ CW Vol 23, Moscow 1977, pp159-160).
In sects such as the SP or SWP, members are forbidden under the edicts of so-called ‘democratic centralism’ (in reality, bureaucratic centralism) to voice criticism in public. This reaches such a level of bureaucratic absurdity that the sect leaders conspire against the rank and file of their own organisation. Incredibly, the vast majority of the membership of Militant were totally unaware of the 1991 schism on its central committee over Labour Party work between the majority and three eminent leaders, including Ted Grant, the trend’s founder and most prominent theorist - until they, like the rest of us, read the documents leaked to The Guardian by both sides!
This is farce. What fundamentally matters for communists is unity in action, not in thought. Beyond those bounds there must be the broadest and freest discussion and the open fight against all harmful decisions and tendencies. Members should be obliged to accept (not necessarily agree with) party principles and must abide by majority decisions on practical actions. Members are, however, by no means necessarily unanimous over theoretical questions, including matters of strategy and tactics. If disagreement is natural, then so must be its expression.
Programme
Lenin stressed time and time again the “tremendous importance of a programme for the consolidation and consistent activity of a political party” of Marxists (VI Lenin CW Vol 4, Moscow 1977, p229). Why? Was he just anal about getting stuff down on paper? And isn’t there a contradiction between his insistence on free, open debate in the party and the painstaking care he and his co-thinkers put into attempting to codify the strategy and principles of the organisation in a single, concise document?
In fact, there is no contradiction. The party programme is the party’s spinal column, designed to firmly link our “continuous and all-encompassing agitational work with the ultimate aim of communism … it represents … the standard, the reference point, around which the voluntary unity of party members is built and concretised” (J Conrad Which road? London 1991, p235).
It keeps us on course, in other words. It allows the membership - and the wider workers’ movement, of course - to constantly judge its own party’s work against a “standard”, a “reference point” and thus to hold its leadership to account for the perspectives it fights for. No wonder, then, organisations such as today’s SP and SWP are so wary about presenting their principles and strategic vision for revolution in a programme (the SWP positively trumpets its lack of a programme as a virtue).
The advantage of the Marxist approach of taking the programme seriously is again illustrated by the history of our movement. The Bolsheviks were able to operate under an extremely wide variety of political conditions which tested both the flexibility and durability of the organisation. In their different ways, the periods of underground work, of mass agitation, of highly successful parliamentary intervention and of insurrectionary struggle imposed very different stresses and strains.
While there were splits and defections, the programmatic ‘spine’ of the party allowed it to link its ongoing agitational work with the ultimate goal, ensuring that comrades never simply lost themselves to the form of the politics of the day.
In stark contrast, for the SP any success in connecting with wider society - even when extremely modest compared to that of the Bolsheviks - tends to trigger crises. Over and over again, groups of comrades have been lost - to feminism, black nationalism, Scottish nationalism, trade union apparatus politics, to a host of sectional concerns. While the elaboration of a programme and the training of the party cadre in its method is no guarantee against comrades being sidetracked, historically this has proved the best way of preventing it.
Thus, the call for a Marxist party under present-day conditions is not a sectarian twitch peculiar to the CPGB, an ‘ultimatum’ calculated to disrupt the unity of the workers’ movement. On the contrary, it is a call to overcome the state of poisoned disunity, crude amateurism and pathetic ineffectiveness that characterise all of the left and to rearm the broader workers’ movement with an effective fighting strategy.
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Frankly, we are not expecting support from the organisation that will field the majority of delegates, the Socialist Party in England and Wales. On its CNWP website the comrades argue that, while “broader questions, such as the programme of a new party, are undoubtedly important, we think it would be premature to take decisions on those issues at an initial conference” (www.cnwp.org.uk).
But ends determine means, and vice versa - if the CNWP were to set its sights on creating a Marxist party, then the type of propaganda we would produce, the trends in the workers’ movement and groups in wider society we would now approach would flow from this perspective.
Of course, if we were talking about tweaking the details of a programme, then delaying things to another conference would be perfectly valid. But why is it “premature” to make explicit what sort of party the comrades have in their collective mind’s eye? Actually, this talk of programme being “premature” is a procedural attempt hide the fact that CNWP has been designed from the beginning to have a reformist programme. Leading SPers have made this abundantly clear.
In the November 2005 issue of Socialism Today, SP general secretary Peter Taaffe wrote an article which purported to outline the historic struggle for independent working class political representation in this country. Keir Hardie’s Labour Party is the central leitmotif. Not once did he even mention the 1920 formation and substantial influence of the Communist Party of Great Britain, the party of Albert Inkpin, Harry Pollitt, Tom Mann and Tom Bell, the British section of Lenin’s and Trotsky’s Third International. In itself, this ringing silence qualifies the article to be dismissed as inept. However, in its way, the piece is instructive. Clearly, Labourism clouds and limits the comrade’s field of political vision.
Thus, both in what he chooses to speak about and what he chooses to try to blot out, comrade Taaffe’s article speaks volumes about the SP leadership’s cramped reformist vision of our movement. It betrays desperately unambitious perspectives.
For the sake of consistency, the SP leadership really should respond to our call for a Marxist party on March 19 with a counterposed motion for a non-Marxist workers’ party - for a variety of Labourism, in other words.
It will not, of course; and it is easy to understand why. It would be a simple task for us to produce quote after quote from the giants of our movement denouncing social democracy’s treacherous role. But theory tells us what life has confirmed: Labourism is a bourgeois ideology. And from the Scottish Socialist Party to Respect, all the half-way houses we are presented with today represent the programmatic disarming and betrayal of the working class.
The theory of the revolutionary working class is Marxism. However, amongst a whole swathe of so-called ‘Marxists’ nowadays it passes for common sense that for Marxists to actually argue for a Marxist party is pop-eyed ultra-leftism. To show why these comrades are so sadly mistaken, let us explain our case for a Marxist party in a little more detail.
What is a party?
In his Socialism Today article, comrade Taaffe insists that “any new formation or party” must be initially established “with a basic programme, which can unite significant left forces”. A “basic programme” for comrade Taaffe, of course, actually means a minimalist set of reformist demands. Another code word is “significant left forces”. What he means is refugees from New Labour who are still Labourites. They, however tiny in number - or even if they exist only in comrade Taaffe’s imagination - will set the programmatic parameters of CNWP.
This concern, in the minds of leaders such as comrade Taaffe, for ‘broadness’ paradoxically reveals their practical political surrender to the right. Marxism is all very well for the initiated few in his SP, but not when it comes to winning “significant left forces”. John Rees of the Socialist Workers Party showed that he works from the same template in a Marxism 2002 opening, instructively titled ‘Do we need a broad socialist party or a revolutionary party?’ (my emphasis). The common assumption of such misleaders is that what are dubbed revolutionary parties are narrow entities built using the same organisational plans as today’s SWP or SP - sects writ large, in other words.
The first point is to ask ourselves precisely what a party is. The origins of the word give us a strong hint: ie, from the Latin pars, or part. Our party must be part of the working class. Not just any part though, but the voluntary union of its most determined fighters, the vanguard. The organic unity of this political/social entity with the class distinguishes it from the organisational nostrums of left social democrats who perceive of their parties as representing the workers. In contrast, a Marxist party strives to merge itself with the class.
Such an understanding underlines the considerable distance of the Militant/SP tradition from genuine Marxism. Essentially, this trend was/is committed to the achievement of ‘socialism’ “through an enabling bill in parliament”, not the revolutionary democratic struggle of the masses themselves (P Taaffe What we stand for June 1990, p8). In such a schema, the revolutionary initiative and creative genius of the class itself is replaced by a Commons vote. The proletariat is assigned exactly the same ‘walk on, walk off’ role reformism has historically allotted to the action of the masses - and with the same treacherous logic.
Understanding the Marxist method tells us a great deal about the reciprocal relationship between party and class. When Marx and Engels write in the Communist manifesto that communists “have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole”, they immediately go onto explain this by emphasising that communists “do not set up sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement”. On the contrary, they insisted, our aim is to seek out and always to bring to the fore common interests, the “interests of the movement as a whole” (K Marx, F Engels Manifesto of the Communist Party 1973, p61). Common interests - that is what informs the programmes of Marxist parties.
Therefore, calling for a Marxist party is not to demand instant revolution or adherence to a set of obscure, antiquated commandments inherited from 1848, 1871 or 1921. In today’s conditions a Marxist party would, of course, fight for reforms. However, it would fight for more than the pinched and cramped wages, conditions and services stuff that is usually listed by the economistic left.
A Marxist party would boldly take up the battle for democracy in every area of life. Crucially, though, in terms of strategy, Marxists fight for a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales and a social European Union realised under the leadership of the working class - which, if gains are to be protected and taken further, must of necessity be armed. Only such a road leads to socialism and universal human liberation.
Culture
What I have written so far clearly has important implications for the type of discipline and culture a Marxist party must have. The fact that the majority of what calls itself the ‘Marxist left’ organises regimes of bureaucratic centralism - where debate is stifled, and open disagreement regarded as tantamount to treachery - is an intolerable disgrace.
The likes of Peter Taaffe are as guilty in perpetuating this abominable state of affairs as the SWP’s John Rees, frankly. Both - in contrast to the type of Marxist party I outline above - propagate sectarianism in the ranks of the workers’ movement. Now this word is often crassly misused, so it is worthwhile reminding comrades exactly what it is.
Sectarianism entails putting the narrow interests of your particular group - whatever its size - above the general interests of the working class, or, as Marx and Engels put it, of “the movement as a whole”. Communism is the product of the conscious activity of the class itself; it is not the outcome of the victory of some little group organised around this or that ideological article of faith.
As sects, however, most of these groups treat their own organisational integrity, bureaucratically cohered around a frozen theoretical insight or what amounts to a shibboleth, as the key determinant. Thus, politics is treated as conspiracy, something that takes place behind the backs of workers. For example, most groups do not therefore report the political debates that take place in their ranks.
I was once actually informed by a member of the SP that this would only “confuse the workers”, the poor dullards. Indeed, Peter Taaffe himself has blasted such an approach as making a “talking shop” of the revolutionary party - a philistine comment for someone who touts himself as a Marxist leader. Resulting from this degenerate method, it becomes a matter of discipline for sect members to defend the views of the majority in public, whether they believe them or not, whether they are on an agreed action that would require a degree of self-effacing discipline or simply having a private conversation.
In contrast, we agree with that well known ‘sectarian’, Lenin, when he said that “there can be no mass party, no party of the class, without full clarity of essential shadings, without an open struggle between the various tendencies, without informing the masses as to which leaders are pursuing this or that line. Without this, a party worthy of the name cannot be built …” (‘But who are the judges?’ CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p159).
Again, the link between the party and the class of which it is the advance contingent is key in all of this. The transparency of the party, its openness about the differences and arguments that animate its ranks, is inextricably tied up with how genuine Marxists view the struggle for socialism itself. A socialist revolution is the work of the class formed into a political party, not of a party operating as some enlightened elite, a locum for the workers. Lenin made this fundamental point repeatedly, here in a comment on a battle amongst the Swiss social democrats:
“The choice is not between ‘internal peace’ and ‘inner party struggle’. The real choice is this: either the present, concealed forms of inner-party struggle, with their demoralising effect on the masses, or open, principled struggle between the internationalist revolutionary trend and the [social-chauvinist] Grutli trend inside and outside the party. Such a struggle is both necessary and useful, for it trains in the masses independence and the ability to carry out their epoch-making revolutionary mission” (my emphasis, ‘Principles involved in the war issue’ CW Vol 23, Moscow 1977, pp159-160).
In sects such as the SP or SWP, members are forbidden under the edicts of so-called ‘democratic centralism’ (in reality, bureaucratic centralism) to voice criticism in public. This reaches such a level of bureaucratic absurdity that the sect leaders conspire against the rank and file of their own organisation. Incredibly, the vast majority of the membership of Militant were totally unaware of the 1991 schism on its central committee over Labour Party work between the majority and three eminent leaders, including Ted Grant, the trend’s founder and most prominent theorist - until they, like the rest of us, read the documents leaked to The Guardian by both sides!
This is farce. What fundamentally matters for communists is unity in action, not in thought. Beyond those bounds there must be the broadest and freest discussion and the open fight against all harmful decisions and tendencies. Members should be obliged to accept (not necessarily agree with) party principles and must abide by majority decisions on practical actions. Members are, however, by no means necessarily unanimous over theoretical questions, including matters of strategy and tactics. If disagreement is natural, then so must be its expression.
Programme
Lenin stressed time and time again the “tremendous importance of a programme for the consolidation and consistent activity of a political party” of Marxists (VI Lenin CW Vol 4, Moscow 1977, p229). Why? Was he just anal about getting stuff down on paper? And isn’t there a contradiction between his insistence on free, open debate in the party and the painstaking care he and his co-thinkers put into attempting to codify the strategy and principles of the organisation in a single, concise document?
In fact, there is no contradiction. The party programme is the party’s spinal column, designed to firmly link our “continuous and all-encompassing agitational work with the ultimate aim of communism … it represents … the standard, the reference point, around which the voluntary unity of party members is built and concretised” (J Conrad Which road? London 1991, p235).
It keeps us on course, in other words. It allows the membership - and the wider workers’ movement, of course - to constantly judge its own party’s work against a “standard”, a “reference point” and thus to hold its leadership to account for the perspectives it fights for. No wonder, then, organisations such as today’s SP and SWP are so wary about presenting their principles and strategic vision for revolution in a programme (the SWP positively trumpets its lack of a programme as a virtue).
The advantage of the Marxist approach of taking the programme seriously is again illustrated by the history of our movement. The Bolsheviks were able to operate under an extremely wide variety of political conditions which tested both the flexibility and durability of the organisation. In their different ways, the periods of underground work, of mass agitation, of highly successful parliamentary intervention and of insurrectionary struggle imposed very different stresses and strains.
While there were splits and defections, the programmatic ‘spine’ of the party allowed it to link its ongoing agitational work with the ultimate goal, ensuring that comrades never simply lost themselves to the form of the politics of the day.
In stark contrast, for the SP any success in connecting with wider society - even when extremely modest compared to that of the Bolsheviks - tends to trigger crises. Over and over again, groups of comrades have been lost - to feminism, black nationalism, Scottish nationalism, trade union apparatus politics, to a host of sectional concerns. While the elaboration of a programme and the training of the party cadre in its method is no guarantee against comrades being sidetracked, historically this has proved the best way of preventing it.
Thus, the call for a Marxist party under present-day conditions is not a sectarian twitch peculiar to the CPGB, an ‘ultimatum’ calculated to disrupt the unity of the workers’ movement. On the contrary, it is a call to overcome the state of poisoned disunity, crude amateurism and pathetic ineffectiveness that characterise all of the left and to rearm the broader workers’ movement with an effective fighting strategy.
Print this page
Uncle Joey