The CPGB (Weekly Worker) is a small group which originates in a left-Stalinist faction of the old Communist Party of Great Britain ("The Leninist"), formed under the influence of a section of the Turkish Stalinist movement. In recent years they have moved a long way politically towards Trotskyism. In line with our general policy of maximum dialogue on the revolutionary left, the AWL has pursued discussions and debates with the CPGB/WW for many years now.
In more recent times, we have been able to collaborate with the CPGB/WW on many issues in and around the Socialist Alliance. Lately problems have arisen in AWL-CPGB relations. Feeling it appropriate to make an interim summing-up of how we see the basic political common ground and differences, the Alliance for Workers' Liberty National Committee on 14 September 2002 adopted the broad outline of the following resolution on the CPGB/WW, mandating the AWL's Executive Committee to finalise the text, which the EC did at its meeting on 1 October.
The polemical points summarised here are argued through and explained in discussion documents available on the AWL website, notably "Critical Notes on the CPGB/WW",, by Sean Matgamna.
Despite devoting much space to polemic inside the Socialist Alliance and especially with the AWL, the Weekly Worker has so far declined to publish those "Critical Notes" - but we'll see. More material here and here.
Resolution on CPGB/WW
From AWL National Committee 14/09/02: amended and reworked by AWL Executive Committee, as mandated by National Committee.
1. We recognise that the CPGB/WW has moved a great distance closer to Marxist politics in recent years, notably on the Stalinist states, Ireland, Israel-Palestine, Islamic fundamentalism, Europe, and the Labour Party. To the average watcher of the left, the CPGB/WW seems very close to Workers' Liberty and Solidarity. In line with our general advocacy of maximum revolutionary unity where there is agreement, maximum dialogue where there is disagreement, we want to pursue links with the CPGB/WW. We should state that we want to discuss the possibilities of unity, and, therefore, discuss the key issues on which unity would depend.
2. The fact that the CPGB/WW has moved on so many issues indicates an ability to think and reassess on the part of at least its leading people. Such ability is not a common thing on the left.
3. However, there remain important political differences between us and the CPGB/WW.
a) We fight for a workers' government. They propose, as their highest political demand, only "a federal republic". We are for a democratic federal republic. We are against pretending that republicanism, or federalism, are the key issues (or even the key democratic issues) in Britain today. We are against limiting revolutionaries' summary political demands to political-democratic issues alone.
b) We fight to transform the labour movement, and for the building of a revolutionary party as the instrument to transform the labour movement. The CPGB/WW promotes "building a Communist Party" ("without such a party the working class is nothing; with it, everything"), as if the existing labour movement were a brainless nullity. They have dropped the old baroque formula of "reforging the Communist Party of Great Britain", but some of the old thinking evidently remains.
c) We follow Trotsky's idea that revolutionaries should "base their programme on the logic of the class struggle". The CPGB/WW interprets opposition to "economism" to mean that revolutionaries' task is to push into the working class "political" demands which otherwise would scarcely arise at all and to consider all "economic" concerns strictly secondary. Logically, that means that they base themselves on counterposing democracy to the state, whereas we base ourselves on counterposing the working class to capital (and fighting for consistent democracy in that framework).
d) We believe that responsiveness to the direct class struggle is the first duty of revolutionaries, and accordingly give much of our attention to workplace and trade-union work. Even a small group can make a sizeable difference (examples: our PCS comrades in the Mark Serwotka campaign; our Tube comrades). And even where and when we are too small to affect events on any large level, such work is vital simply for what we learn from it - for the training it gives us in addressing bedrock working-class concerns. The CPGB/WW considers it permissible to neglect such work simply on grounds of resources.
e) We are for developing a higher level of political life in the Socialist Alliance, i.e. developing it towards a party, but for us that policy remains in the context of our general orientation to the labour movement. The CPGB/WW interprets its stance "for an SA party" to mean that the trade unions, for example, should be addressed essentially by way of advocating that the Socialist Alliance does trade union work. If the Socialist Alliance can be got to do useful activity in the trade unions, that is excellent; but it is irresponsible to wait (a long time!) for the Alliance to develop rounded revolutionary trade union work under pressure of our urging, rather than directly discharging our duties ourselves.
4. Those political differences do not exhaust the matter. There are other political differences. Tied up with the CPGB's line "for an SA party" is much wishful thinking about the SWP changing for the better. The CPGB/WW has only moved half way on Israel-Palestine, thinking that they can couple "two states" with continued vague venom against "Zionism" and support for the Palestinian "return".
Their claim that the 1979 Afghan coup was "a real revolution" indicates continued confusion on Stalinism. There are theoretical differences. The CPGB/WW rejects transitional demands and upholds the old Stalino-social-democratic notion of minimum and maximum programmes. It rejects permanent revolution and upholds the old cod-Leninist notion of "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry". And, very immediately, there are "procedural" difficulties.
a) The CPGB/WW said plainly, in a recent private perspectives document, that their aim in pursuing relations with us was to split us. They prosecute that aim, not by open polemic on the big principled questions - which would be entirely their right - but by chickenshit agitation based on scraps of private conversation. (Thus, Mark O being rude about an SWP leader, and Jill saying that she is "cool" about the Socialist Alliance, in private conversation, becomes material for long articles in the WW about the AWL being internally divided on the question of the Alliance. Meanwhile the CPGB/WW makes no attempt at all to engage with or discuss our rather copious conference and public documents on the Alliance).
b) This indicates that they preserve from their Stalinist past not just some theoretical ideas (minimum/ maximum programmes, "democratic dictatorship", real revolution in Afghanistan) and repulsive idioms (the use of the Stalinist word "Trotskyite" to refer to the Bolshevik-Leninist-Fourth-Internationalist tradition), but conceptions of political morality too.
c) The CPGB/WW are not as open and democratic as they make themselves out to be. Thus, while we invited them to our conference, and all our conference documents are available to all to read, the CPGB/WW's perspectives document is a private text and their discussions around it were private. That the document came into our hands caused them great chagrin. They do sometimes run internal debates in their paper, but not, it seems, whatever debates they have among their inner core.
d) The CPGB/WW's appearance of being a highly ideologically-trained and compact group selected around a definite set of ideas is also partly illusory. What holds them together is also certain buzzwords, a certain "style", and a rather cultist authority granted to their "theoretical compass", namely, the "one comrade" whom they describe in their internal documents as the sole person among them doing serious theoretical work.
5. That the CPGB/WW refuse to call themselves Trotskyist - that, indeed, they choose to use the old insult-word "Trotskyite" - is significant. To call oneself Trotskyist today does not carry much positive meaning. But to insist that one is not Trotskyist means a lot - just as insisting that one is not a Marxist, or not a socialist, or not a democrat, means a lot. In the case of the CPGB/WW, the "not Trotskyist" label serves essentially as a claim to proprietorial rights over ideas which they have in fact learned from the Trotskyist, Bolshevik, Marxist tradition - a claim, in fact, ludicrous though it is when spelled out explicitly, that genuine Marxism somehow "reincarnated" itself (as in Buddhist mythology) in them after 60 or more years' absence from this unhappy planet.
6. We should pursue discussions with the CPGB/WW, making them as open and public as possible, and drawing in as much of the CPGB/WW membership and periphery as possible. Our aim here, whatever the outcomes as regards practical collaboration, is to educate and clarify. We listen and we are ready to learn new things, of course, but we go into the discussions not empty-handed but with a clear purpose to win people to "Third Camp" Trotskyist politics.
