Category Archives: Labour structures and programme

History

Jeremy Corbyn’s staff: What was Straight Left?

Lawrence Parker investigates the political origins of Jeremy Corbyn’s director and deputy director of strategy and communications

When Jeremy Corbyn’s campaigns chief Simon Fletcher quit last month, it was widely interpreted as a victory for Seumas Milne. Fletcher was known to have heated exchanges with Corbyn’s director of strategy and communications on a range of issues, including Brexit. Now, Corbyn has signed up Steve Howell to be Milne’s deputy. Howell’s official job description is to help “oversee the leader’s media strategy and to implement the communications grid”. He is taking an indefinite leave of absence from his lobbying agency, Freshwater, to take up his role in the Labour leader’s office.1)Howell founded Freshwater in Cardiff in 1997 after working as a news reporter and producer for BBC Radio Wales. The 19-strong public affairs and PR agency now has offices in Cardiff and London. According to the APPC register, the firm’s most recent clients include the multinational building materials company Tarmac and the personal injury lawyers Thomsons.

There are unlikely to be heated exchanges between Milne and Howell not least because they are old friends and old Straight Leftist comrades. Andrew Murray, chief of staff for Unite and yet another former SL member, recently left the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain to join Labour and is also thought to be in Corbyn’s inner circle.

Origins

Straight Left’s origins lie in the left, pro-Soviet oppositions that emerged in the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1960s. In this period, a definite ‘party within a party’ existed, with figures such as Sid French, district secretary of Surrey CPGB, becoming key leaders. The general critique that came from this faction was a concern over the CPGB leadership distancing itself from the Soviet Union (such as around the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968) and other ‘socialist’ countries; a preference for a more ‘workerist’ identity (for example, the faction would have been happy with the CPGB’s paper remaining as the Daily Worker in 1966) and a concentration on workplaces/trade unions; and a sense that the party was squandering its resources in futile election contests and alienating the left of the Labour Party, with whom it was meant to be developing a close relationship on the British road to socialism (BRS), the CPGB programme.

However, a significant part of the faction felt that the BRS was ‘reformist’ and ‘revisionist’ in all its guises from 1951, counterposing a revolutionary path to the parliamentary road to socialism envisaged in the CPGB’s existing programme. This stance was clouded in ambiguity in many sections of the CPGB’s left, with the default position usually being expressed in a preference for the 1951 version of the BRS that had been overseen by Stalin, as opposed to later versions modified by a ‘revisionist’ CPGB leadership. This opposition suffered a major split in the run-up to the CPGB’s 1977 congress, with Sid French taking away 700 or so supporters to form the New Communist Party (after French realised that the CPGB’s leadership was intent on a reorganisation of his Surrey district, which would have deprived him of his organisational bridgehead).

The rump left opposition in the CPGB coalesced around Fergus Nicholson (other key figures were John Foster, Brian Filling, Nick Wright, Susan Michie, Pat Turnbull and Andrew Murray), who had been the CPGB’s student organiser until 1974. The Straight Left newspaper was launched in 1979, it was edited by Mike Toumazou and had Seumas Milne as business manager. Later a theoretical magazine, Communist, appeared. Membership figures are impossible to guess. However, judging from Communist, the faction did have a wide national infrastructure beyond London through the 1980s and was certainly on a par with, if not in some places more deeper rooted than, the other oppositional stream around the Morning Star (see below).

Factional infighting

The Straight Left group provoked a lot of enmity from its factional rivals in the CPGB. Thus, Mike Hicks, who was involved in the Communist Campaign Group (CCG), set up after the rebellion of Morning Star supporters against the CPGB leadership in the mid-1980s, and later the first general secretary of the 1988 Communist Party of Britain split (both criticised and opposed by the Straight Leftist faction), said in the late 1990s: “Straight Left was neither straight nor left.”2)F Beckett Enemy within: the rise and fall of the British Communist Party London 1998, p234. The accession of a group of ex-Straight Leftists (including Andrew Murray and Nick Wright, who had split from Straight Left to form Communist Liaison in the early 1990s) into the ranks of the Communist Party of Britain contributed to a bitter faction fight in the organisation, in which Hicks was eventually deposed as general secretary, and a strike by Morning Star staff.

Similarly, a CCG document complained: “The individuals grouped around Straight Left have their own newspaper, their own organisation and their own objectives.”3)Communist Campaign Group The crisis in the Communist Party and the way forward (no date but circa 1985). I have been told anecdotally by CPGB activists of the time that Straight Left was thought to have three circles: an inner ‘Leninist’ core; a broader circle of sympathisers in the CPGB; and the ‘softer’ Labourite and trade unionists grouped around the Straight Left newspaper (non-CPGB trade unionists such as Alan Sapper and Labour MPs such as Joan Maynard were on its advisory board). Certainly, the majority of the content of the newspaper was hewn from the same, dry ‘labour movement’ template used by the Morning Star, with little indication that it was the work of communists, apart from its commentary on the Soviet Union and other international matters. (The Communist journal, obviously aimed at CPGB sympathisers, was much more orthodox and harder Marxist-Leninist in tone, with a lot of very interesting commentary on inner-party CPGB matters.)

So Straight Left was a faction and did indulge in political camouflage, but in this it was merely of its time. For example, the CCG’s disavowal of Straight Left’s factionalism was merely an attempt to throw people off the scent from the CCG’s own factionalism (the CCG unconvincingly complained it was not a faction at all; just a group that wanted to follow the CPGB’s rules – which fooled nobody). The CPGB was riddled with factions in the 1980s, not least those grouped around Marxism Today and the party machine.

Similarly, on Straight Left’s broad left camouflage in its newspaper and other forums, this was the modus operandi of nearly the whole far left, from the Morning Star to various Trotskyist groups: ie, communists clothing their politics in everything from trade unionism to feminism and concealing their true aims in the pursuit of mass influence. Again, in hindsight, Straight Left does not strike one as very exceptional in this regard. In retrospect, the enmity aimed at it on these counts stands revealed as the product of mere factional rivalry.

However, another area of criticism aimed at Straight Left may have more mileage in terms of a lasting judgement. The group was deemed by its CPGB factional rivals (both in the CCG and the small group around The Leninist, forerunner of the Weekly Worker) to have a ‘heads down’ approach to CPGB work. In the words of the CCG, such an approach

counsels caution and compliance with the authority of the [CPGB’s] executive committee. It says that if there is disagreement and dissatisfaction with the Eurocommunists [the faction then dominating the party’s leadership], then opposition must be expressed and conducted via the normal party channels. That is to say, we must try at successive congresses to defeat and remove the Eurocommunists.4)Communist Campaign Group The crisis in the Communist Party and the way forward (no date but circa 1985).

This led to such notorious moves as Straight Leftists walking out with the CPGB leader, Gordon McLennan, when he closed down a London district congress in November 1984 that threatened to become a point of opposition to the party leadership. Mike Hicks, in the chair of this meeting, later contemptuously observed that Straight Left “ended up selling Marxism Today [the CPGB theoretical journal much despised by the party’s left in the 1980s for its Eurocommunist proclivities] instead of the Morning Star because the executive told them to”.5)F Beckett Enemy within: the rise and fall of the British Communist Party London 1998, p234

However, what this Straight Left strategy of avoiding open conflict eventually led to, in the context of a CPGB that was being set on a liquidationist course, was it being left somewhat high and dry. SL had built a considerable base in London by the end of the 1980s “by showing a willingness to take on responsibilities at a time when few candidates were to be found”.6)W Thompson The good old cause: British communism 1920-1991 London 1992, p205. This was to be a very hollow victory indeed, given that the CPGB was soon to pass into oblivion and the succession of congresses to win was coming to an end.

Labour Party

In terms of the Labour Party, Straight Left took the BRS injunction of developing an alliance with Labour to effect radical changes to its logical conclusion by arguing that the CPGB should affiliate to the Labour Party and – more controversially for both the left and right of the CPGB – that the party should end its independent electoral work. Thus a typical article in Communist argued:

… it is difficult to see there being much movement against the exclusion of communist trades unionists from the Labour Party until our electoral strategy is based on non-sectarian principles and imbued with a thoroughly consistent and positive attitude to the Labour Party.7)‘40th congress of the Communist Party’ Communist September 1987

Thus Straight Left picked up clearly on the attitude of the pro-Soviet CPGB opposition of the 1960s, which consistently drew attention to the political impact of declining electoral votes on the avowed Labour-communist strategy of the party. However, this opened up Straight Left to jibes of ‘liquidationism’ from both left and right in the CPGB8)For the right wing of the CPGB, see Dave Cook in the pre-congress discussion of 1981(Comment October 17 1981); and, for the left, see Alan Stevens in the same context (ibid). and, in retrospect, isolated the group further.

Soviet Union and ‘socialist’ countries

The Straight Left group, again showing its origins in the CPGB’s pro-Soviet left of the 1960s, took an extremely uncritical view of the Soviet Union and other ‘socialist’ countries, and regarded the actions of the CPGB as a ‘national’ sin against the ‘internationalist’ probity of the Soviet Union’s camp. Straight Left publications were filled with reprints from Soviet agencies such as Novosti and other agencies from the eastern bloc.

Thus, an article in Communist argued:

Communists in the capitalist world are not, in general, in a position to make the judgements that the CPSU is obliged to. Was it right or wrong to intervene in Afghanistan in 1979 to block the spread of counterrevolution? Is it right or wrong to withdraw the Soviet army from there today? The CPGB does not have to answer those questions. Our views are unimportant, and we do not have to live with the sharp consequences of the answers. The CPSU has to make those judgements, and it has the right to expect support and understanding in making them.9)H Sanderson, ‘Socialism today’ Communist September 1988

Neither did this stance seemingly allow criticism of even the most crisis-stricken and sickly military dictatorships of countries such as Poland in the early 1980s. Straight Leftist Charlie Woods, complaining bitterly of CPGB criticisms of the Polish regime in 1983, said:

After all, how would our [CPGB] leadership take it if the over two-million-strong Polish United Workers Party took time off from trying to solve the problems of socialism to remonstrate with our 16,000-member party’s failure to achieve it at all?10)C Woods The crisis in our Communist Party: cause, effect and cure 1983. Woods was a miner and party veteran from county Durham, who was expelled for writing this pamphlet – although he was very much viewed as a ‘fall guy’, with Fergus Nicholson or Brian Topping thought of as the more likely authors

The implication of this little homily being, of course, that those British communists really should not venture to criticise their Polish brethren at all.

Straight Left and gays

The group does not appear to have produced any significant material or statement on what would now be called LGBT questions (and an appeal from myself to its members to produce such a statement to clear this issue up, when this article originally appeared online, yielded nothing).11)This article originally appeared on the Hatful of History blog in October 2015. We are reproducing it here – in slightly amended form Members of the group have claimed that calling their newspaper Straight Left was a boxing metaphor (and some of its members certainly knew a thing or two about physical tussles with gay protestors); while others have suggested that it was recycling an old Sunday Worker slogan from the mid-1920s, when the CPGB was involved with the National Left Wing Movement: ‘Labour’s Straight Left’.

If it was the latter, it was a significant abuse of the slogan. The CPGB had this slogan to differentiate itself from traditional Labour lefts such as George Lansbury and the like: ie, those who were not ‘straight’, who would potentially disown communist allies and cosy up to the Labour right. It was not a slogan that covered the kind of homogenous ‘broad left’ that the likes of Straight Left advocated.

However, slogans can change their meaning with time. To call a newspaper Straight Left when your main factional opponents in the CPGB, the Eurocommunists, are keen on promoting gay rights, only invites some uncomfortable questions about your modus operandi on such issues. It is quite inconceivable that Fergus Nicholson and company were not aware that the name would be interpreted in this negative sense, particularly when it was the production of staunch advocates of the Soviet Union – a state with a problematic relation to homosexuality, to put it mildly.

To call all Straight Left members homophobic would be over-egging the pudding; to state that this group was one that had pronounced problems with homosexuality would not be stretching the truth l

 

References

References
↑1 Howell founded Freshwater in Cardiff in 1997 after working as a news reporter and producer for BBC Radio Wales. The 19-strong public affairs and PR agency now has offices in Cardiff and London. According to the APPC register, the firm’s most recent clients include the multinational building materials company Tarmac and the personal injury lawyers Thomsons.
↑2 F Beckett Enemy within: the rise and fall of the British Communist Party London 1998, p234. The accession of a group of ex-Straight Leftists (including Andrew Murray and Nick Wright, who had split from Straight Left to form Communist Liaison in the early 1990s) into the ranks of the Communist Party of Britain contributed to a bitter faction fight in the organisation, in which Hicks was eventually deposed as general secretary, and a strike by Morning Star staff.
↑3 Communist Campaign Group The crisis in the Communist Party and the way forward (no date but circa 1985).
↑4 Communist Campaign Group The crisis in the Communist Party and the way forward (no date but circa 1985).
↑5 F Beckett Enemy within: the rise and fall of the British Communist Party London 1998, p234
↑6 W Thompson The good old cause: British communism 1920-1991 London 1992, p205.
↑7 ‘40th congress of the Communist Party’ Communist September 1987
↑8 For the right wing of the CPGB, see Dave Cook in the pre-congress discussion of 1981(Comment October 17 1981); and, for the left, see Alan Stevens in the same context (ibid).
↑9 H Sanderson, ‘Socialism today’ Communist September 1988
↑10 C Woods The crisis in our Communist Party: cause, effect and cure 1983. Woods was a miner and party veteran from county Durham, who was expelled for writing this pamphlet – although he was very much viewed as a ‘fall guy’, with Fergus Nicholson or Brian Topping thought of as the more likely authors
↑11 This article originally appeared on the Hatful of History blog in October 2015. We are reproducing it here – in slightly amended form
Democracy and the Labour Party, Labour structures and programme, Momentum

Don’t be a fan club

William Sarsfield of Labour Party Marxists calls for a serious fight to transform Labour

The dramatic events in Momentum over the past few months have revealed the crassly undemocratic ethos that informs the approach of Jon Lansman – effectively the ‘owner’ of the organisation. Predictably, the right’s victory in the Februaryopinion poll-turned-plebiscite, used to justify the imposition of a bureaucratic constitution, has prompted a wave of demoralisation, falling numbers at Momentum meetings and a growing atmosphere of denunciations and restrictions on debate directed against “the enemy”, as the Momentum left is now being dubbed by some – with the blessing of the national centre, it seems.

This anti-democratic farce has been well documented in the pages of this paper, plus in the bulletins and general commentary of Labour Party Marxists. The question now is: what does the left do about this? How do we fight back?

The omens do not look good, if we are to judge from the agenda and discussion papers produced for the dissident gathering of the Momentum left in London on March 11 – convened as the “Momentum Grassroots networking conference”. The comrades organising this national meeting appear utterly clueless about what to do next in relation to Momentum and – like the ‘official’ Momentum – the work that needs to be undertaken in the Labour Party itself. So the organisers (the previous conference arrangements committee, plus the old steering committee majority before both committees were abolished by Lansman) have issued a document “as a starting point” for the discussion on what the Grassroots of Momentum is and what it should fight for.

Sensibly, it recognises it would be wrong to “split from Momentum”, but equally it would be a mistake to “waste unnecessary energy fighting a battle that can’t be won”, given the Lansman clique’s stranglehold over the apparatus and the backing he enjoys from the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott. There is also a nod in the direction of the tasks of “democratising and transforming the labour movement” and “fighting … unjust suspensions/expulsions/exclusions” from the Labour Party.

However, the meat of the campaigning work that this draft sets out for Grassroots is the standard left fare of:

  •  Fighting austerity.
  •  Defending the NHS – “including supporting national demos” and “Labour days of action, local campaigns and industrial action by health unions to smash the pay cap”.
  •  “Defending migrants’ rights”.
  •  Supporting “workers in struggle”, joining picket lines, etc.
  •  Supporting the popularisation of Corbyn’s “10 pledges”.
  •  Mass council house building and renovation.

In other words, precisely the sort of activities that the local units of the Labour Party itself should be (and often are) involved in. What exactly would be the point of the small Grassroots campaign if it tried to substitute itself for the campaigning life of a mass party?

Ironically, the same sort of surrogate impulse hangs around the Lansman organisation. After all, the Grassroots founding document cited above makes clear that the campaigning work it commits to encompasses “all previous campaigns” agreed to by the official organisation, including the ones listed above.

In this context, there is an interesting Guardian article by Momentum/‘The World Transformed’ organiser Deborah Hermanns that notes that Momentum branches around the country have been “making an effort to build community” in areas devastated by cuts. She cites film screenings in “halls and community centres”, donating the proceeds to local food banks and homeless shelters, etc. Far more needs doing, she concedes – “social spaces, cinema clubs, food banks and sports centres … providing the space and security people need to build their own, unique political and cultural identities”.

But it is on a “limited scale” due to the “shoestring” budgets local Momentum organisations are able to deploy. The real point is the Labour Party itself, she correctly writes:

Corbyn’s Labour, with thousands of branches across the country, millions of pounds in its coffers and a membership of more than half a million, could flood key areas with resources, ideas and activists to support and get projects going that actually help out the community.1)The Guardian March 7

Quite right, and a vision this paper has championed for some time. But, for that to happen, Labour itself must be radically transformed – the parliamentary party subordinated to the mandate of the membership as part of a democratic revolution within Labour; the pro-capitalist right wing excluded; bans and proscriptions on working class political organisations overturned, etc. In short Labour must be transformed into a mass movement for socialism that unites the trade unions, co-ops, leftwing societies, socialist and communist groups and parties.

This is the key, defining task that Grassroots comrades should commit to. An uncritical ‘support Jez’ stance is worse than useless, because Corbyn’s game plan is useless. Unsettlingly, the right honourable Lord Daniel Finkelstein, Tory peer and associate editor of The Times, appears to have a more realistic grasp of what is required than Grassroots, the official Lansman organisation or the Labour leadership team itself:

His only hope must be as a subversive challenger, relentlessly organising to take over the party and talking about his efforts to do so. He should come out with huge, earth-shaking, radical leftwing policies and not care that Yvette Cooper and I both think that they are bonkers … He should organise to deselect critics and win selection contests for his people.2)The Times February 28

This internal battle for the heart and soul of the Labour Party is the key link to grasp in this period. As Corbyn supporter Matthew Turner notes in a March 6 posting on TheIndependent website, “an authoritative and relentless streak” needs to be developed and “the democratic right of CLPs to reselect and deselect their parliamentary candidates” is crucial “to ensure that young, up-and-coming, ‘fire in the belly’ leftwingers replace those who are actively seeking to undermine the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.”

The shared weakness of the Turner and Finkelstein commentaries is that both make this change reliant on a change of heart on the part of Corbyn himself as an individual politician. In fact, the real starting point for the left of the party is to organise on the basis of a bold, principled and strategically clear perspective … and to refashion the Labour Party from top to bottom on that basis. That is what Momentum Grassroots needs to discuss and vote on.

References

References
↑1 The Guardian March 7
↑2 The Times February 28
History, Labour structures and programme

‘Progressive alliance’ adds up to defeat

Bad opinion polls have encouraged retrogressive thinking, argues James Marshall

Dismissing the Jeremy Corbyn leadership as less important than the latest ephemeral street protest, or urging comrades to stay aloof from the battle raging in the Labour Party, is the worst kind of sectarianism. Unfortunately, we have seen that from too many on the left: eg, Socialist Party in England and Wales, Socialist Workers Party, the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain and Left Unity.

On the other hand, adopting an uncritical approach to Corbyn, refusing to condemn the ‘anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism’ smear campaign, attempts to appease the Labour right, abandonment of one principle after another – that is the road to disaster; a road foisted on Momentum with Jon Lansman’s cynical, anti-democratic coup (with the active connivance of Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and Clive Lewis).

Frankly, the Labourite left has no viable strategy for socialism. Even the thought of it has become vanishingly small. Just like the Labourite right, the Labourite left is committed to a Labour government for the sake of a Labour government. ‘The worst Labour government is better than any Tory government’ runs their mutual slogan. In other words, managing capitalism, though it may entail vicious attacks on the working class, is preferable to resisting capitalism and organising the working class for the struggle for socialism.

On the contrary, as Kier Hardie famously said in 1910, we need Labour MPs, “not to keep governments in office or to turn them out, but to organise the working class into a great, independent political power to fight for the coming of socialism”.1)Independent Labour Party 1910 annual conference report, p59 That should be our motto; that should be our strategic objective. Hardie, note, was clearly influenced here by the likes of Karl Kautsky, August Bebel, Vladimir Lenin and the Second International majority. True, organising the working class into a political party committed to socialism, enlightening millions with the theory of Marxism, coordinating our actions internationally – means that the immediate prospect of a Labour government recedes. However, that is the only sure way to achieve working class rule and the global transition to communism.

Labour’s (eminently predictable) bad poll ratings under Corbyn’s leadership have catapulted disorientated leftwingers – eg, Paul Mason and Owen Jones – far to the right. Any kind of majority Labour government appears impossibly remote – especially with boundary changes, the continued UK Independence Party threat in the north of England, the near Scottish National Party monopoly in Scotland and the bulk of Labour MPs still in open conflict with Corbyn.

Polls can be wrong: eg, David Cameron’s May 2015 general election victory, the Brexit vote and Donald Trump. Nevertheless, the Tories are so far ahead, the margin is so wide, that, barring some unforeseen accident, we are surely heading for a Labour defeat of 1931 proportions. The most recent ICM poll for The Guardian shows the Tories extending their lead to 18 points (the Tories being on 44% and Labour on 26%).2)The Guardian February 20 2017

Corbyn’s lame response was to say that the Labour Party was “better” at getting its message across online and blaming the media for the poor ratings. As if the Labour Party can rely on the capitalist press, radio and TV. Obviously, Labour cannot get anywhere just through tweeting. It needs a full-spectrum alternative media.

Indeed Marxists – genuine Marxists, that is – are committed to a root-and-branch transformation of the Labour Party. Instead of the ‘next Labour government’, the priority must be a sovereign conference, a meaningful clause four, commitment to a programme of international socialism, automatic reselection of MPs, the subordination of MPs to the national executive committee, MPs on an average worker’s wage, the closure of the compliance unit, rooting CLPs in workplaces and communities, new trade union affiliates, ending the bans and transforming the Labour Party into a united front open to all socialist organisations.

It is not only the wretched Paul Mason and Owen Jones who have undergone a full-scale political collapse. Comrades in Socialist Resistance and the Labour Representation Committee are in effect advocating the slogan, ‘Any government is better than a Tory government’. Naturally, this is done under the banner of ending the ‘age of austerity’. Hence the siren call for “forming a government through a progressive alliance with other parties”: ie, a Labour-Green-SNP-Plaid Cymru alliance.3)Socialist Resistance October 15 2016 Writing in the Labour Representation Committee’s monthly journal, John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, echoes this council of despair. He says we must “start the work” of building the “progressive alliance”.4)Labour Briefing November 2016 Some even want to give an invite to the Liberal Democrats. The LRC’s Peter Bowing too calls for a “progressive coalition” and in that spirit urges Labour to “lead the Liberal Democrats, Greens and SNP in opposing Brexit”.5)Labour Briefing February 2017

A clear case of political regression. A return to Millerandism, Menshevism or the popular fronts of ‘official communism’. And, be warned, in the oft quoted words of George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
Millerandism

In 1899 the French socialist, Alexandre Millerand, agreed to become a minister in Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau’s coalition government of ‘republican defence’ – this was at the height of the Dreyfus affair. Millerand took his cabinet seat alongside general Alexandre de Gallifet, the butcher of the 1871 Paris Commune. Inevitably, this provoked widespread indignation, both in France itself and internationally.

Yet the advance of the baying Catholic, royalist and military right was stopped and Millerand steered through a wide range of reforms, including the reduction in the maximum working day from 11 to 10 hours, the introduction of an eight-hour working day for postal employees, the prescribing of maximum hours and minimum wages for all work undertaken by public authorities, the establishment of arbitration tribunals and inspectors of labour.

Millerandism became the subject of heated debate at the congress of the Socialist International held in Paris over September 23-27 1900. Previously any participation in a coalition government with bourgeois parties had been regarded as a gross violation of elementary principle. Millerand was, of course, part of a growing trend, which included Peter Struve in Russia, Eduard Bernstein in Germany and Sidney Webb in Britain. This revisionist opportunism erupted into outright social chauvinism in August 1914.

In an attempt to smooth over divisions, Kautsky tabled a rotten, though successful, compromise motion. Class collaboration was roundly condemned … but there was a get-out clause: “Whether in a particular case, the political situation necessitates this dangerous experiment [of joining a coalition government with bourgeois parties – JM] is a question of tactics and not principle.”

Lenin sarcastically dismissed the resolution as being made from “caoutchouc” – that is to say, India rubber: it could be stretched in any direction. Hence, outrageously, Millerand could claim to be a good socialist, differing with other good socialists only in terms of tactical considerations.

Understandably then, Millerandism continued to be a source of fierce controversy. At the 1903 (Dresden) Congress of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, Kautsky supported the resolution condemning revisionism and, implicitly, Millerandism. So, while in Paris Kautsky was “running with the hares”, at Dresden he was “again to the fore, now ‘barking with the hounds’” (Daniel De Leon, 1904).

With a minor amendment, the SDP’s Dresden resolution was agreed at the Socialist International’s 1904 congress in Amsterdam. It deserves the closest attention:

The congress repudiates to the fullest extent possible the efforts of the revisionists, which have for their object the modification of our tried and victorious policy based on the class war, and the substitution, for the conquest of political power by an unceasing attack on the bourgeoisie, of a policy of concession to the established order of society.

The consequence of such revisionist tactics would be to turn a party striving for the most speedy transformation possible of bourgeois society into socialist society – a party therefore revolutionary in the best sense of the word – into a party satisfied with the reform of bourgeois society.

For this reason the congress – convinced, in opposition to revisionist tendencies, that class antagonisms, far from diminishing, continually increase in bitterness – declares:

1. That the party rejects all responsibility of any sort under the political and economic conditions based on capitalist production, and therefore can in no wise countenance any measure tending to maintain in power the dominant class.

2. The Social Democracy can accept no participation in the government under bourgeois society, this decision being in accordance with the Kautsky resolution passed at the International Congress of Paris in 1900.

The congress further condemns every attempt to mask the ever growing class antagonisms, in order to bring about an understanding with the bourgeois parties.

The congress relies upon the socialist parliamentary group to use its power, increased by the number of its members and by the great accession of electors who support it, to persevere in its propaganda towards the final object of socialism, and, in conformity with our programme, to defend most resolutely the interests of the working class, the extension and consolidation of political liberties, in order to obtain equal rights for all; to carry on more vigorously than ever the fight against militarism, against the imperialist and colonial policy, against injustice, domination and exploitation of every kind, and finally to exert itself to the utmost to perfect social legislation and to enable the working class to fulfil its political and civilising mission.6)www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1900s/1904/no-1-september-1904/international-socialist-congress-1904

The positive reference to the 1900 resolution was an obvious attempt to correct Kautsky without criticising Kautsky. Not a good omen.
Popular fronts

The popular fronts of ‘official communism’ are in essence a continuation of Millerandism. In the name of combating fascism, fighting for peace, uniting against Thatcherism, ending austerity, etc, etc, the parties of the working class are urged to seek a ‘broad democratic alliance’ with the ‘progressive’ parties of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie.

The result? The bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties set the limits of the political agenda and the parties of the working class are driven to the right … to the point of being prepared to suppress the working class. Of course, this leads, not to opening up the road to socialism, but to demoralisation and defeat. Why vote for those who refuse to support you against employers? Why vote for those who want to keep the capitalist state intact? No wonder Trotsky branded the popular fronts as a “strike-breaking conspiracy”.

This is what we saw in practice with popular front governments from Spain and France in the 1930s to Chile in the early 1970s. The socialist working class was constantly held back by the need to keep allies on board. Then it was betrayed. Mass strikes were sabotaged, manifestations of dual power wound down, militias disarmed.

The most disappointing thing about today’s calls for a “progressive alliance” is the sheer philistinism involved. In early 20th-century Russia, the idea of stages made a certain kind of sense. Eg, first an anti-tsarist revolution that unites all democratic forces; then, after a considerable historical delay, when capitalist economic development had finally created a working class majority, socialism comes onto the agenda. Such was the Menshevik reasoning. Though their strategy appeared to have a degree of logic, it assumed a Russia in isolation from the socialist revolution in Europe. Hence in 1917 the Mensheviks wanted state power not in the hands of the soviets, but a bourgeois-dominated provisional government, a “progressive alliance”, which would, by its very nature, continue Russia’s war against Germany.

In 2017 this caricature of Marxism has degenerated into a caricature of itself. Things are reduced to simple arithmetic – that is, addition: Labour, plus the SNP, plus Plaid, plus the Greens add up to a voter base that might beat the Tories in 2020. Such is the sum of their wisdom. However, arithmetic alone cannot suffice. At the very least we need to apply mechanics. Political parties move according to different trajectories, rely on different class forces and possess different social weights. Eg, Labour needs to rewin its traditional base in the central belt of Scotland, meanwhile the SNP is committed to a second referendum and Scottish independence. Hence either the Labour Party fights the SNP and its nationalist programme or, in the name of the ‘progressive alliance’, Labour dilutes its criticisms and reconciles itself to the loss of its MPs in Scotland and the permanent disunity of the British working class.

We do not oppose marching on protest demonstrations alongside members of the SNP, Plaid, the Greens, etc. Nor do we oppose rebuilding trade unions alongside members of the SNP, Plaid, the Greens, etc. Cooperation around single-issue campaigns and workplace terms and conditions can only be beneficial. But, obviously, a ‘progressive alliance’ based on the hope of forming a coalition government that manages capitalism stands in flat contradiction to the strategy of organising the working class into a “great, independent political power to fight for the coming of socialism”.

References

References
↑1 Independent Labour Party 1910 annual conference report, p59
↑2 The Guardian February 20 2017
↑3 Socialist Resistance October 15 2016
↑4 Labour Briefing November 2016
↑5 Labour Briefing February 2017
↑6 www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1900s/1904/no-1-september-1904/international-socialist-congress-1904
Anti-Semitism, History

Jackie Walker, Norman Finkelstein and the new definition of anti-Semitism

Jackie Walker wandered into a political minefield when she innocently asked at a training workshop on anti-Semitism at Labour Party conference 2016: “In terms of Holocaust Day, wouldn’t it be wonderful if Holocaust Day was open to all people who experienced Holocaust?” She was robustly corrected by some right wingers in the room that formally the supposed ethos of the 46 governments who came together to create the Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27 2000 was to “remember the victims of Nazi persecution and of all genocides” (our emphasis). However, she really got into trouble with additional, uncontroversial observation that “In practice, [HMD] is not actually circulated and advertised as such.”

Ken Livingstone, another comrade who is also in trouble for making clumsy comments with a kernel of truth, made the incontrovertible observation that “I suspect you’ll find the majority of people in Britain didn’t know the Holocaust Memorial Day had been widened to include others,” he said.

Norman Finkelstein’s 2000 polemic described how the Nazi holocaust and the destruction of European Jewry became the “The Holocaust”: an “ideological representation” of this real historical event, that has is now presented as “categorically unique historical event” which “cannot be rationally apprehended … Indeed, The Holocaust is unique because it is inexplicable, and it is inexplicable because it is unique” (pp41-45).

And which, it must be added, via the ruthless battle for the ‘memory’ of the holocaust becomes a form of the class struggle itself. That, not the bilge about ‘anti-Semitism’ is the political significance of the attacks on comrades Walker, Livingstone and many others in the Labour Party.

LPM recommends Norman G Finkelstein, The holocaust industry: reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering (Verso 2000)

Norman Finkelstein
The new Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust Industry

A video of Norman speaking at Communist University 2016 on the issue is available here.

When Norman Finklestein’s The Holocaust Industry first hit the shelves in 2000, he must have anticipated that his punchy little polemic would stir the pot a little. You wouldn’t imagine he anticipated the shit storm that was about to break over him:

  • This book “provides considerable comfort to every holocaust denier, neo-Nazi and anti-Semite on the face of the planet” (Tobias Abse New Interventions autumn 2000).
  • Finkelstein comes “dangerously close to giving comfort to those who dream of new holocausts” (Alex Callinicos Socialist Worker July 22, 2000).
  • “How different is [Finkelstein’s] assertion that ‘the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not plain fraud’, from the holocaust revisionist David Irving’s rantings …?” (Socialist Worker July 22).
  • Finkelstein was “a Jew who doesn’t like Jews” and who “does the anti-Semites’ work for them” (Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian July 14, 2000),
  • “He’s poison, he’s a disgusting self-hating Jew, he’s something you find under a rock” (Leon Wieseltier, Zionist intellectual and literary editor of New Republic).

Holocaust industryOn the surface, Finkelstein has impeccable credentials to write on the horror of that broke over European Jewry in WWII. Both his mother and father were survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. Apart from his parents, every family member was exterminated by the Nazis. In the words of Finkelstein, “My earliest memory, so to speak, of the Nazi holocaust is my mother glued in front of the television watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann (1961) when I came home from school” (p5).

It is also very ironic that Finkelstein’s project is rather moderate in its scope and its intentions – essentially, all he wanted to do is make the holocaust a subject of rational inquiry. This entails rescuing real history from the clutches of “holocaust correctness” (p65) and so-called ‘holocaust awareness’, which, to use the words of the Israeli writer, Boas Evron, is actually “an official, propagandistic indoctrination, a churning out of slogans and a false view of the world, the real aim of which is not at all an understanding of the past, but a manipulation of the present” (p41).

Finkelstein’s project is to strip away all the self-serving myths and falsehoods which envelop the holocaust, which can only mean stepping on a lot of very sensitive toes – some powerful, some just desperate for a crumb of ideological absolutism in an uncertain and disturbingly relativistic world. As he clearly puts it in his mission statement, “In this text, Nazi holocaust signals the actual historical event, The Holocaust its ideological representation … Like most ideologies, it bears a connection, if tenuous, with reality. The Holocaust is not an arbitrary, but rather an internally coherent, construct. Its central dogmas sustain significant political and class interests. Indeed, The Holocaust has proven to be an indispensable ideological weapon” (original italics – p4). In other words, Finkelstein wants to understand how the Nazi holocaust became “the Holocaust” – a “categorically unique historical event” which “cannot be rationally apprehended … Indeed, The Holocaust is unique because it is inexplicable, and it is inexplicable because it is unique” (pp41-45).

As a graphic example of the “sacralisation of the holocaust”, as the liberal scholar Peter Novick dubs it, some have been infuriated by Finkelstein’s blunt statement that “much of the literature on Hitler’s ‘final solution’ is worthless as scholarship. Indeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not sheer fraud” (p55).

Finkelstein’s remit is to explain the way in which the ruling class and reactionary forces in general have managed to expropriate the ‘memory’ and discourse of the holocaust – to the extent that the almost unimaginable suffering endured by the victims of Nazi rule has become the virtual political-moral property of the reinvented, post-World War II bourgeoisie, which never tires of parading its new-found anti-racism/fascism.

The semi-hysterical reaction to Finkelstein’s birth described above illustrates the alarming climate of censorship that has grown alongside this ideological appropriation. It says it all that the Socialist Workers Party, former Finkelstein fans, issued a call for the works of David Irving to be prohibited from public libraries. If Finkelstein’s views also come “dangerously close” to Irving’s, as Alex Callinicos wrote in Socialist Worker (July 22 2000), then why not demand that The holocaust industry also be removed from public libraries? A very slippery slope.

‘The Holocaust’ – as opposed to the Nazi holocaust – is largely a retrospective construction by those with various (and sometimes rival) ideological and ‘special interest’ axes to grind. Indeed, ‘The Holocaust’ would not have been recognisable to most people who went through World War II and Nazi rule. In some respects, an anachronism (‘The Holocaust’) is being introduced as an alternative to understanding contemporary responses to real events. Substituting for a rational examination of the specific historical dynamics that led to the Nazi holocaust, we have the mystifying fog of ‘holocaust awareness’.

This is easily observed by the way that Martin Niemöller’s famous mea culpa (“First they came for the communists …”) has been radically doctored for political reasons. Infamously, Time magazine’s ‘new’ version promoted the Jews to first place and dropped both the communists and the social democrats. Al Gore publicly did the same too – and for good measure he dumped the trade unionists as well. Gore, Time and others have all added Catholics to Niemöller’s list – even though he did not mention them. In the heavily catholic city of Boston, they were added to the ‘quotation’ inscribed on its holocaust memorial.

Naturally, the establishment-sanctified US Holocaust Museum airbrushes out the communists from its roll call of official victimhood (but, interestingly, the holocaust bureaucrats decided to retain the social democrats as authentic, bona fide victims). Others have decided to include gays – the fact that Niemöller did not was obviously a mere ‘oversight’ on his part.

This footloose and fancy-free attitude to what should be a basic, easily verified and hence non-contested truth clearly demonstrates that the ruthless battle for the ‘memory’ of the holocaust is a form of class struggle – and a handy indicator of the current balance of class forces. Once upon a time, at least in the US, to ‘harp on’ about the Nazi holocaust was a sign of dangerous pinko-commie leanings. Now it is a badge of moral and bourgeois uprightness. Niemöller himself symbolises this shift in bourgeois ideology.

In the 1940s and 1950s the protestant pastor, who spent eight years in Nazi concentration camps, was regarded with grave suspicion by American Jewry in the shape of organisations like the American Jewish Committee and the Anti Deformation League. Niemöller’s instinctive opposition to the McCarthyite witch hunts made him persona non grata for America Jewish leaders who were desperate to boost their anti-communist credentials – to the point of joining, and partly financing, far rightist organisations like the All-American Conference to Combat Communism and even turning a blind eye to veterans of the Nazi SS entering the country. Indeed, the AJC enthusiastically joined in the establishment hysteria whipped up against the Rosenbergs, and its monthly publication, Commentary (November 1953), actually editorialised about how the couple – executed as Soviet spies – were not really Jews at all. (This tradition of toadying before the US establishment continues – the Simon Wiesenthal Centre made Ronald Reagan the winner of its ‘Humanitarian of the Year’ award in 1988.)

Another significant aspect to the debate is the so-called uniqueness of the holocaust, an idea heavily pushed in schools, colleges/universities, books, TV documentaries, films, etc. Banally speaking of course, every single event that has ever happened, and ever will happen, is ‘unique’. The evangelists for ‘uniqueness’ have a different agenda though.

Take Deborah Lipstadt, occupant of the holocaust chair at Emory University, an appointee to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and author of the widely lauded, Denying the holocaust: the growing assault on memory and truth. Lipstadt became a liberal hero for successfully slugging it out with David Irving last year in the British courts, after the Hitler-admiring historian filed a doomed libel suit against Lipstadt for branding him “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for holocaust denial”.

What was not mentioned in the mainstream press coverage of the time, and which throws a different and less salutary light on Lipstadt’s motivations, is that she is on record declaring that if you do not accept the ‘uniqueness’ theory, you must be effectively classed alongside those who deny the very historical fact of the Nazi holocaust itself. We are all potential Irvings then. Thus, in Denying the holocaust, Lipstadt rages against the drawing of “immoral equivalences” with the Nazi holocaust – like the Armenian genocide. This has “intriguing implications”, according to Finkelstein, who observes: “Daniel Goldhagen argues that Serbian actions in Kosovo ‘are, in their essence, different from those of Nazi Germany only in scale’. That would make Goldhagen ‘in essence’ a holocaust denier. (The holocaust industry: reflections on the exploitation of Jewish sufferingLondon 2000, p71).

Inconsistencies, contradictions and paradoxes may abound in the ‘uniqueness’ school of Wiesel, Goldhagen, Lipstadt et al – but it is strongly recommended that you make loud, approving noises if you want to find yourself with your feet well under the table, and if you are non-Jewish it could also mean that you are actually feted (always nice). Reject the doctrine, however, and purdah beckons – doubly so if you are Jewish and thus an abominable ‘self-hater’.

History

Rattling the Labour right

Lawrence Parker spoke at Communist University 2016 on the National Left Wing Movement – an organisation that was active in the Labour Party during the 1920s. Chris Hill of Labour Party Marxists spoke to him

Labour Party Marxists has raised a flag in the Labour Party – a modest start. The comrades who have taken this initiative have drawn a lot of inspiration from the National Left Wing Movement, promoted by the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1920s. Today rightwingers from Tom Watson down are talking of a ‘Trot plot’ to swamp the party, and the associated return of entryism. Was the NLWM an ‘entryist’ initiative by the CPGB of that time, in the way we have later come to understand the term?

The short answer is no. Obviously it did involve members of a specific Marxist organisation in the shape of the CPGB working in the Labour Party, although many of them would have been members prior to the NLWM’s formation in 1925, given the initial structure and culture of the party.

That is about as far as the similarities go with the generalised Trotskyist understanding of work inside the Labour Party. To my mind, the tactics advocated by the old Militant Tendency – and smaller competitors to its left inside the party in the 1980s and earlier – were a debased form of the work of the NLWM. This can be usefully illustrated by considering a Militant article by Tony Aitman published in 1986, looking at the CPGB’s role in the Labour Party in the 1920s. 1)‘Labour’s purge of the 1920s’ Militant April 18 1986

It is very interesting, of course, that the Militant grouping was trying to draw parallels between its experience of attacks and purges in the Labour Party of the mid-1980s and the CPGB’s from an earlier period. The article is broadly supportive of the NLWM initiative. However, it portrays the Militant group merely as a trend inside Labour and suggests the problem with the CPGB was its distinctness and separateness from the Labour Party of the time. Although Aitman’s article is pretty unsophisticated and cannot address the real historical dynamics of the NLWM, he did at least suggest the difference between the NLWM and a more debased ‘entryism’.

Militant felt it had to adapt itself to Labourism. This necessarily entailed a denial of its own independent existence as a specific formation with a distinct ideological and structural dynamic. The CPGB – although it occasionally seemed to want to pretend that non-CPGBers were running the NLWM show and was susceptible to some ‘rightist’ pressures – did not deny its own distinct organisation. Indeed, that separateness was the precondition for initiatives such as the NLWM. That logic also expressed itself programmatically.

I have many criticisms of the NLWM, but it was at least an attempt by the CPGB to bolster the Labour left and arm it with politics that cut against the grain of the militarism, monarchism and imperialism that had infected Labour. It could also be tough and uncompromising in its rhetoric. At the NLWM’s 1928 conference, non-communist chairman Will Crick promised: “We will purge the movement of every vestige of capitalism … and those who spend much of their time exploring the Sahara and cruising around the world, wining and dining with the most pronounced enemies of our class …”

To that end, it was very different to the type of Labour Party operation that I have been familiar with from my background in Trotskyism. Even in the mode of ‘shallow entry’ that I was exposed to, this involved an inability to tackle the thorny issues of ‘high politics’ relating to how we are ruled. Instead, there was an emphasis on lower-level campaigns, ‘struggles’ and actions – most with a set template of desiccated ‘transitional’ demands thrown in. Another example of ‘revolutionaries’ adopting the politics of left Labourism, in other words.

It is also worthwhile bearing in mind that the NLWM organised significant forces in the Labour Party. At its formal national launch in September 1926, it had official delegates from 52 local Labour parties, delegates from 40 other leftwing minority groups inside Labour and a weekly paper in the form of the Sunday Worker, with a claimed circulation of 80,000. It severely rattled the Labour right, which stepped up its persecution of leftwing activists, particularly those willing to associate with communists.

Why take on this project in the first place? You have looked in particular at the CPGB’s relationship to the first Labour government in 1924 – over 90 years ago now. Rather a lot has changed in political terms. The CPGB as was does not even exist any more. Is this project anything more than a historical curio?

That is a very difficult question to answer in some ways.

Direct parallels between then and today are mostly facile, and I am not very interested in that as a general method (although it is fine to draw certain limited parallels if the historical evidence warrants it). It seems to me that many on the left start from the opposite dimension. They begin with a parallel they wish to draw and try to find the evidence to support it.

Yes, a lot has changed in 80 years, but then a lot has not – the struggle between left and right in the Labour Party keeps recurring, for example. I suppose I am somewhat notorious in some circles for stubbornly chewing on historical curios, such as the CPGB’s post-war anti-revisionist movement. 2)See L Parker The kick inside: revolutionary opposition in the CPGB, 1945-1991 London 2012. So the ‘curio’ charge does not really bother me!

In a sense, the NLWM does have the status of a relative ‘novelty item’ in the history of the CPGB. If people are aware of anything about the CPGB in the 1920s, they know of Lenin’s ‘hanged-man’ advice on affiliation to the Labour Party;3)www.marxists.org/archive/paul-william/articles/1920/12/02.htm the party’s role in the General Strike of 1926;4)See http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/623/80-years-since-the-general-strike-from-world-war-t and its adoption of disastrous ‘third period’ tactics in the late 1920s.5)http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/748/third-period-pains Among Trotskyists there will also be a general narrative about ‘Stalinisation’ and the degeneration of the Comintern – some of which I share. Compared to this, the NLWM – and perhaps to a lesser extent the CPGB’s reaction to the first Labour government of 1924 – are relative blind spots.

I can understand this. On the surface, the General Strike and the debate inside the party over the third period are very dramatic. But, even where the NLWM does feature, it seems overshadowed by the ‘grander’ events around it. The Trotskyist, Brian Pearce – in many ways a pioneer of this kind of writing – authored The British Communist Party and the Labour left, 1925-1929 in 1957.6)www.marxists.org/archive/pearce/1957/04/cpgb-labour-left.htm In it, Pearce does not really deal with any of the practical difficulties the NLWM was clearly facing by 1928. These practical problems were distinct from the trajectory a minority of CPGB members around Harry Pollitt and Rajani Palme Dutt were on – this group began to tack leftwards, away from the NLWM and its perspective, at this time.

Instead, Pearce seems to paint the NLWM white to set against the looming darkness of the third period. Don’t misunderstand me: the NLWM was undoubtedly a healthier phase of CPGB activity than the idiocies of the third period. However, this approach scarcely allows the historian to reach an informed assessment of the real strengths and weaknesses of the NLWM. Similarly, Aitman, in the previously mentioned Militant article, suggests that some CPGB members were opposed to the NLWM in virulent, sectarian terms from the outset. I have not found any real evidence for this, although Dutt certainly tried to put a strong CPGB ‘stamp’ on the organisation from the start. This, in Aitman’s world at the time, would have been ‘sectarian’, because independent Marxist organisation outside the Labour Party was impermissible, according to Militant orthodoxy in the mid-1980s.

Aitman seems, in fact, to have been primarily concerned with guilt by association. He makes efforts to associate the NLWM with third-period sectarian lunacies. So the NLWM definitely has an element of curio, or the relative unknown, about it. I aim to fathom out the reason behind that.

You mentioned the programme of the NLWM. Could you expand on what the movement stood for?

The NLWM adopted a programme in 1926 that was not limited to the sort of tedious shopping list of narrow economic and minimal demands we have become used to from today’s left. Instead, it had a highly focused set of principled, ‘high politics’ demands. These would clearly delineate the Labour left from the monarchist and pro-imperialist practice of the right.

For example, the NLWM called for the abolition of the British empire and support for the struggles of the colonial masses; opposition to capitalist war credits; nationalisation of the banking and credit system; full political rights for police officers and those in the armed forces; full adult suffrage for both sexes; and the abolition of the House of Lords and monarchy. This was clearly an attempt to politically embolden the left of the Labour Party, not the CPGB adapting itself to the characteristic flakiness of Labour lefts. Also bear in mind that these would not exactly have been easy politics to fight for in the deferential and militaristic atmosphere of 1920s Britain.

Interestingly, I found a reference just the other day to Dutt in early 1929 characterising the programme of the NLWM as ‘centrist’. I had to laugh, considering how many ostensible revolutionary socialists today would consider such a programme to be wildly ultra-left!

What impact did the Comintern have on the CPGB in this period?

A fundamental one: I am not one of those revisionist historians seeking to prise apart the CPGB from its links to the Communist International and Moscow. If you do that, the history of the CPGB becomes largely inexplicable; it very obviously kept in broad step with shifts in the Comintern.

Also, there is clearly a process of Stalinisation going on from the mid-1920s. However, I do not have much patience with the idea – which has become a kind of unconscious common sense for many activists on the left – that things instantly went to pot after Lenin’s death in 1924. ‘Socialism in one country’ was a defining moment for the revolutionary potential of the Comintern; however, it took time for this degeneration to work itself through.

So, as I have written before, it is a positive thing that Zinoviev and the Comintern took the CPGB to task for its rightist and conciliatory attitude to the minority Labour government in 1924. This is true even if that advice may have been the result of other factors less directly related to keeping the CPGB on the straight and narrow, and more to do with factional manoeuvring in the Soviet party – eg, Moscow’s own disappointment with the MacDonald government; the fact that Trotsky had apparently been guilty of a right deviation in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and so on.

In a similar vein, I have found material in the Russian archives from the minutes of what it called the English Commission, where you can find Bukharin, as late as 1928, giving CPGB comrades reasonably sound advice on their relations with the Labour Party and the broader movement. I think this underlines a point about figures such as Zinoviev and Bukharin. Whatever disastrous choices they had made in the CPSU inner-party struggle of the 1920s, they were more than mere bureaucrats. Both had serious careers as revolutionaries. And, as far as I understand it, Zinoviev was a theoretical opponent of ‘socialism in one country’. However, this obscures a broader point.

The CPGB’s most disastrous inheritance from the Comintern in terms of its work in broader formations such as the NLWM actually came prior to Stalinisation. Specifically, the militarised and hyper-centralised conceptions of the party regime in the infamous ‘21 conditions’ agreed at the Comintern’s Second Congress in 1920.

How did this impact upon the NLWM?

Well, such martial conceptions of a political party are highly unlikely to breed organisations with a critical culture. Thus, when a party such as the CPGB interacted with the broader workers’ movement under the aegis of the united front in the 1920s, it was not able to sustain a consistent critical culture of ‘unity in diversity’ in relation to its prospective alliance partners. Attempts to do so would perforce destabilise its own party regime.

Therefore, early opportunist adaptation to the 1924 Labour government led to an ultra-leftist reaction from some members. Close proximity to the Labour Party disorientated CPGB members – spinning them in both rightist and leftist directions.

Unsurprisingly, this culture was transposed into the NLWM. For example, the minutes of the CPGB’s Holborn Labour Party fraction from February 1926 stress that CPGB members must maintain unanimity in Labour Party discussions. There were even arguments suggesting it was a problem if there was any disunity among the broader left wing at Labour Party meetings.

Keep in mind that in both cases we are probably only talking about discussions. Also that there would definitely have been political differences between CPGB members and other leftwingers in the NLWM. So we can see how problematic the CPGB found the practice of ‘unity in diversity’. The whole tendency was, ideologically at least, towards abstract unity, both internally and externally. Of course, the major dialectical irony was that these ultra-centralised concepts of party organisation engendered fragmentation and constant left/right flip-flopping. Plus endless bouts of corrective intervention from the CPGB leadership and the Comintern.

How did this flip-flopping concretely manifest itself in the ranks of the NLWM?

While the CPGB’s leadership was still arguing for the NLWM’s continued existence before its 10th congress in early 1929, it admitted that it had been difficult to counter the reformist illusions of non-CPGB members. In a similar vein, a huge debate in the Sunday Worker before and after the liquidation of the NLWM in 1929 shows that, while many Labourites had been prepared to work with the CPGB, some were actually quite prejudiced against the CPGB party organisation.

The original secretary of the NLWM, Tom Colyer, resigned with five others from the national committee at the end of 1926. They opposed the NLWM being tied to a CPGB-dominated Sunday Worker; so there were clear rightist pressures. When the NLWM was a fledgling movement in November 1925, a London meeting of Labour Party reps met to “discuss ways of bringing the Labour Party back to the idealism and fighting spirit of Keir Hardie”.

Now, clearly that could mean different things to different strands in the Labour Party. CPGB members could remember Keir Hardie primarily as an apostle of independent working class politics, while non-communist Labour members could read it as a more fundamental statement of identity. An instruction from the party’s London Trades Council and Labour Department in January 1926 told members working in the NLWM that they should be prepared to give and take on detailed matters of policy with non-communists. Also, that it was better for non-CPGB leftwingers to take the lead and that the communists should make them, the leftwingers, feel that they were running the whole show. So there was a certain tendency to soft-pedal CPGB politics and remain ‘hidden in plain sight’ so to speak.

The report in Workers’ Life – a CPGB weekly paper – of the NLWM’s September 1927 conference was keen to emphasise how few of the delegates were communists, which is actually quite delusional. There were also a number of complaints from inside the CPGB that its NLWM work was somewhat haphazard, and opposition to the right in the Labour Party was effectively being left to chance. Again, this kind of behaviour led to a leftist reaction from Dutt, in particular. Rather than sparing the NLWM the nuances and details of the CPGB, in 1925 he called for a far more ruthless approach to the left of the Labour Party and was obviously much more keen to emphasise a specific communist identity.

By October 1927, in a book entitled Socialism and the living wage, Dutt was predicting the imminent collapse of any basis for social democratic reforms and leadership. This posed, as he no doubt intended, questions for the future of the CPGB’s work in the NLWM. Also, I have found fragments of evidence that suggest some CPGB members did not bother themselves with the NLWM – a passive boycott. It is easy to imagine that these activists had the leftist sentiments of earlier unofficial tendencies in the CPGB, which reacted to rightwing deviations by disparaging work in the Labour Party. So there is a certain amount of evidence to suggest this classic right/left dichotomy.

To what extent would these political differences have been the common property of the movement as a whole? LPM believes in transparency and openness on political disagreements – it plays a role in the self-education of a working class that we want to see running society. What was the CPGB’s practice in this period?

I have talked about the negative consequences of the militaristic, top-down model of organisation in the Comintern and its affiliate parties. However, there was another trend operating in the CPGB – a relative openness towards the broader workers’ movement in terms of its ideological divisions. Of course, this could never be presented in terms of factional differences after the banning of factions in Soviet party in 1921, but rather as a matter of individual disagreements or those of small episodic groupings.

I am unsure as to the precise source of this healthier strain, although I was struck in this regard by Mike Macnair’s observation in his book Revolutionary strategy7)http://cpgb.org.uk/pages/books/30/revolutionary-strategy-2008 that much of what the Russians attempted to teach the Comintern in the 1920-23 period was orthodox Kautskyism. Also there were, of course, plenty of healthy examples from the history of Bolshevism to draw upon in this regard.

What this meant was that you could often read about the CPGB’s internal differences in its various open journals and, although this was less present in weekly papers such as Workers’ Weekly and Workers’ Life, you can occasionally see reports there of inner-party meetings and political differences being referred to. This was the case throughout the period of the 1920s. The broader, although still clearly communist, Sunday Worker also had major open debates, not least on the future of the NLWM in 1928-29, and had a genuinely lively letters page. This was not just filled with anecdotal observations to back up whatever the CPGB’s line was – in vivid contrast to the deathly dull letters pages in publications such as The Socialist and Socialist Worker, which one would only read out of mild desperation.

So, a rank-and-file CPGB member, or an interested reader in, say, the Labour Party, could fairly easily understand, with a little close reading, the political differences in the organisation and in the leadership at particular junctures. A few years ago, I think it was Ian Birchall, during his debate with the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party in the aftermath of the Martin Smith imbroglio, who raised the point that the CPGB had allowed open debate in its publications in its year of big crisis in 1956. If the Stalinist CPGB could allow this, why couldn’t the SWP?

However, this obscures the fact that the CPGB hosted open debates in its publications not just in 1956, but throughout the 1920s and in the post-World War II period. It was something normal for the CPGB, albeit such debate was hosted on the leadership’s terms and within its terms of reference. Either comrade Birchall was genuinely unaware of this or he wanted to save the SWP tradition from being even more compromised than it already was. Certainly, the CPGB in its ‘Leninist’ mode was much more open than the ‘Leninist’ SWP has been since the late 1980s.

Moving back to the NLWM, you talked at Communist University about how the orientation became something of a trap for the CPGB. How did the movement develop?

As I have suggested already, you did have various leadership figures such as Dutt reading smoke signals from Moscow and tacking left. But even if that pressure had not been there, I am extremely doubtful that the CPGB’s line on Labour Party work would have been unchallenged or unchecked, although I suspect it would not have taken the eventual absurd form of calling Labour members ‘social fascists’.

The NLWM, in particular, was turning into a partial trap for the CPGB. Conditions inside the Labour Party itself were pushing the CPGB to the left. At the beginning of 1928, the CPGB, as far as I can see, attempted to draw up a balance sheet of its activities in the Labour Party and the NLWM. When it did so it was obviously confronting a radically different terrain from, say, 1923. The right had been on the offensive since the mid-1920s. This meant, concretely, that CPGB members could not run as Labour election candidates without the sanction of the national Labour leadership – which was very unlikely; they could not enter the Labour Party openly as communists; CPGB trade unionists could not sit on the executive of a divisional or local Labour organisation; and no communist trade unionist could go to conference as a delegate from a local Labour Party.

However, CPGB members could go to the national conference as delegates from their trade unions – Harry Pollitt went to the 1928 Labour Party conference under the aegis of the boilermakers’ union; and CPGB trade unionists could attend general council meetings and conferences to select parliamentary candidates.

This was a much more difficult terrain for the CPGB to be working in to expand its influence. Also in the CPGB’s literature of the time appears the complaint that those local Labour organisations prepared to implement the decisions of its 1925 conference and exclude communists were having trouble mobilising their most active members due to demoralisation after the removal of the ‘best fighters’ (ie, the CPGB).

When I first came across this I was sceptical, but the complaint recurs on a number of occasions. I think that what it really suggests is that the CPGB was having problems mobilising its closer sympathisers in Labour. Witch-hunts are strange phenomena though – the examples I have personally experienced seem sometimes to have had a deflating and demoralising effect on the people doing the actual witch-hunting; and often the only thing uniting witch-hunters is hatred of witches. So after the witches are burned …

What specific impact did the right’s drive to disaffiliate those local Labour Party organisations that refused to expel communists have on the NLWM?

A very profound one, I think. By September 1927, the great bulk of the membership of the NLWM came from precisely those disaffiliated Labour locals who were unwilling to countenance the removal of communists from their ranks. There is a rider to this though, in that the NLWM, by its September 1928 conference, still represented, on paper, 21 official Labour parties, as against 15 disaffiliated parties, and 45 leftwing groups presumably existing as minorities in local Labour parties. Although the CPGB and thus the NLWM were formally determined to support the disaffiliated groups in remaining active and organised ­- in some cases they stood against scab candidates of the Labour right in London elections, for example – they were not internally gung-ho about this.

Evidence from the London district sees the CPGB talking about the disastrous consequences for certain branches caused by disaffiliation. Also there was a clear impatience shown with those in the Labour Party who seemed unprepared to do some basic manoeuvring to stay inside the official Labour structures. CPGB members also seem to have drifted away from disaffiliated leftwing groups on occasion. These disaffiliated branches were refused readmission to the Labour Party proper.

So inevitably the NLWM had become something of a political trap for the CPGB, meaning a large section of its militants were siloed off from the Labour Party proper. Because of this, it came to be seen by CPGB members on the left of the party as a kind of ‘shadow’ Communist Party, with its own leadership, structures and organisation. Idris Cox, himself a vice-chair of a disaffiliated Labour branch in Maesteg and CPGB South Wales organiser, called it, negatively, a kind of “special lane” and preparatory school for the CPGB – clearly implying that it was actually an impediment. Cox was arguing at the CPGB’s January 1929 congress and his words do have a leftist taint – but he had a point in relation to the circumstances of the NLWM at that time.

By early 1928, the CPGB clearly saw the NLWM as a problematic formation. If you read between the lines of a thesis from the central committee called ‘Ourselves and the Labour Party’ from February 1928, you can see the CPGB essentially conceding that the NLWM was an organisation of communist sympathisers and, in some ways, a ‘shadow party’. However it might be defined, it certainly was not thought of as a genuine mass organisation in the Labour movement. JR Campbell also wrote that, in relation to the 1927 Labour Party conference, the NLWM was not strong enough to get its own resolutions onto the conference floor; rather it was mostly fighting and reacting against the resolutions of the right.

So how did the end of the NLWM come about?

The NLWM looked to be a dead duck by 1928, with the rider that its paper, the Sunday Worker, was still an effective means of engaging a bigger Labour audience.

However, the struggle to reaffiliate the branches would have felt like banging your head against the wall. It was not plausible to simply carry on and loyally support and vote for all the scab Labour candidates in the circumstances of the Labour right’s offensive against the left. As JT Murphy rightly pointed out at the time, to carry on in an impassive, business-as-usual manner in those particular circumstances was not any sort of true united front – not that the CPGB would have been able to take part in any principled united front, of course. Rather, it just amounted to the subjection of the left and the CPGB to the right’s offensive.

The CPGB needed to continue its work in the Labour Party in 1929 in my estimation, but the NLWM as it existed by then had become a partial block to such activity. However, at the party’s January 1929 congress the CPGB’s executive committee recommended that the NLWM should continue as an organisation, but the rank and file defeated the resolution by 55 votes to 52. This was mainly, according to reports, on the grounds that the NLWM was thought of as redundant and the idea that it did nothing the CPGB could not do itself.

The national committee of the NLWM formally wound the body up in March 1929. There was, however, a significant coda to this outcome in the form of a major debate in the Sunday Worker, with many letters of complaint being printed against the NLWM liquidation. What this reflected was that there had been a significant number of left Labour activists who had been prepared to cooperate with the CPGB to fight the right. Although they were not likely to join the party, these comrades had been defined by their struggle alongside the NLWM. The CPGB was now effectively marooning this group, and confusing it at the same time. So one should not run away with the idea that the NLWM was merely the CPGB in another guise. It was more than that l

Notes

  1. ‘Labour’s purge of the 1920s’ Militant April 18 1986.
  2. See L Parker The kick inside: revolutionary opposition in the CPGB, 1945-1991 London 2012.
  3. www.marxists.org/archive/paul-william/articles/1920/12/02.htm.
  4. See http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/623/80-years-since-the-general-strike-from-world-war-t.
  5. http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/748/third-period-pains.
  6. www.marxists.org/archive/pearce/1957/04/cpgb-labour-left.htm.
  7. http://cpgb.org.uk/pages/books/30/revolutionary-strategy-2008.

 

Tottenham Labour Party, May Day 1928

 

 

References

References
↑1 ‘Labour’s purge of the 1920s’ Militant April 18 1986
↑2 See L Parker The kick inside: revolutionary opposition in the CPGB, 1945-1991 London 2012.
↑3 www.marxists.org/archive/paul-william/articles/1920/12/02.htm
↑4 See http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/623/80-years-since-the-general-strike-from-world-war-t
↑5 http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/748/third-period-pains
↑6 www.marxists.org/archive/pearce/1957/04/cpgb-labour-left.htm
↑7 http://cpgb.org.uk/pages/books/30/revolutionary-strategy-2008
Democracy and the Labour Party, Inside the Labour Party, Witch-hunts and expulsions

Labour Party branches/CLPs in support of Jackie Walker and free speech

 Kilburn (Brent), which is part of Hampstead & Kilburn CLP

This Branch/CLP notes that Jackie Walker has been suspended from Labour Party membership following remarks she made at a Party training session at conference.

We also note;

The Chakrabati report advised against specific training sessions in anti-racism;

The Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) was given the task of running the training session, despite it being known that its views are contested by many Jewish members of the LP;

That contrary to Data Protection – without any notice to participants – the training session was secretly filmed by a JLM member and released to the media.

That, in the view of this Branch/CLP none of the remarks made by Jackie Walker at the training session constituted anti-Semitism;

That Jackie Walker is a Black Jewish anti-racist campaigner.

That Jackie Walker’s suspension by the Party is contrary to the recommendations in the Chakrabati report and the requirements of natural justice.

We therefore call on the Party to reinstate Jackie Walker to full membership of the Party

[Resolution to be sent to Ian McNichol, general secretary of the Party and all members of the NEC]

 

Henley Labour Party

This branch believes that there should be no infringement on the rights of free speech and free criticism within the Labour Party. The thousands of suspensions of Labour members during the 2016 leadership election, based often on one-off comments on social media, unsubstantiated claims or association with left wing organisations, appears to have been politically motivated.

This process was an affront to democracy and this CLP condemns the entire process. Legitimate grievances should be dealt with according to the principles of fairness, with suspension as a last resort not a primary action. We demand the reinstatement of all those still suspended without a hearing.

Regarding expulsions, there should be no ban on memberships of campaigns or organisations as long as they are not campaigning against the election of a Labour government or Labour councils.
The only acceptable political limitation on membership of the Party, other than the exclusion of proscribed organisations, is that people who join or are members or supporters, commit to support Labour candidates in future elections. Earlier electoral activity is of no importance.

We call on the CLP to welcome in any supporter and member prepared to make such a commitment.

We call on the National Executive Committee to ensure that these principles are reflected in the membership application process, so that all party units will welcome in any supporter and member prepared to make such a commitment.

We demand the Party implement the proposals in the Chakrabarti report.

Inside the Labour Party, Witch-hunts and expulsions

Model resolutions on the Labour purges

This branch/CLP/Conference:

  1. Condemns the lack of due process in the suspensions and expulsions of Labour Party members, particularly in the last twelve months. The failure to apply the principles of natural justice brings the Labour Party into disrepute.
  1. Calls for the immediate restoration of full membership rights to all those suspended or expelled.
  1. Calls for the abolition of the Labour Party Compliance Unit and for the establishment of democratic, transparent disciplinary procedures, which follow the principles of natural justice.

This motion is based on the Labour Representation Committee’s statement on the purges

This branch/CLP/conference opposes the widespread suspensions and expulsions of Labour members and the disqualification of members and supporters from voting in the Party’s leadership contest. As Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell MP has noted, this smacks of a “rigged purge”.

These suspensions and expulsions are disproportionately affecting known Corbyn supporters. So zealous are those working in Labour’s Compliance Unit that those affected include leading labour movement figures such as Ronnie Draper, General Secretary of BFAWU – a Labour affiliate. Jeremy Corbyn has rightly called for “the strongest principles of natural justice” to be implemented. These are being systematically ignored at present.

We demand that these basic principles be extended to Labour members and supporters:

  • To be told in clear and specific terms why they are suspended or expelled, or why their voting rights have been withdrawn.
  • Notification of the name of their accuser, unless there is a real risk to safety.
  • Setting a strict time limit on all provisional suspensions; e.g. thirty days.
  • Allowing appeals against suspensions and expulsions, making the procedure clear and publicly available.
  • Extending the right of appeal to registered supporters who have had their right to vote withdrawn.
  • Setting a strict time limit on the retrospective consideration of ‘offences’; e.g. when specifying particular terms of so-called abuse, Labour members’ past actions should only be reviewed for a maximum of two years.
  • No member of the Labour Party should be disciplined for supporting parties other than the Labour Party if they weren’t Labour Party members at the time (ie, the rule cannot be applied retrospectively). Winning over supporters of over parties is a crucial part of winning the whole of the working class to the Labour Party.
  • Suspensions and expulsions that do not adhere to these basic principle should be overturned and full membership rights restored without delay.

Suspensions and expulsions are being carried out in the name of Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC), but this is a fiction. The NEC is in no position to investigate or even review the cases of potentially hundreds or thousands of Labour members. It is not in continuous session. We believe the unelected General Secretary, Iain McNicol, and the unelected Compliance Unit are responsible for the present outrages. On taking office, priorities for the newly-elected NEC must be to:

  • Hold an inquiry into Iain McNicol’s role in relation to the suspensions and expulsions of Labour members and supporters
  • Propose rule changes to make the Labour Party’s General Secretary an elected post.

Disciplinary procedures within the Labour Party must be changed to allow due process and implementation of the principles of natural justice.  The broad principles of the report compiled by Shami Chakrabarti should be implemented:

  • A legally qualified panel should be available to advise the Labour Party on the justice of disciplinary procedures.
  • The National Constitutional Committee (NCC) should take over the handling of disciplinary procedures from the NEC. The NCC should be bound by strict rules.
  • The power of interim suspensions should be removed from officials acting on the instructions of Labour’s General Secretary.
  • No section of the Labour Party should be kept under special measures for more than six months without a review. Suspension must not be allowed to be repeatedly rolled over.”