An open letter to CPGB members

Submitted by martin on 16 May, 2003 - 9:24

Recent changes in the so-called Communist Party of Great Britain have forced us to conclude that it is not a vehicle for the building of a revolutionary movement in Britain today. Many of these changes are abrupt and radical departures from the direction in which the organisation seemed to be going after its break in the mid-1990s from old-style Stalinist attitudes on what it called the "bureaucratic socialist" states and from vulgar "anti-imperialist" positions on Ireland and Israel-Palestine.
Before and during the war in Afghanistan which followed September 11, the CPGB took a principled position of opposition both to imperialism and to the forces of militant Islamism - the reactionary Taliban regime in Kabul, and its allies in al-Qaeda - opposing the victory of both. It condemned the September 11 attacks as the work of a reactionary movement, and warned the anti-war movement against alliances with such forces.
Such positions have been abandoned in recent months. The CPGB supported the decision by the Stop the War Coalition to give the status of co-sponsor of the big anti-war marches to the Muslim Association of Britain. MAB is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest, richest and perhaps best-organised Islamist movement in the world, which until recently had little presence in Britain.
At first, on Iraq, the Weekly Worker advocated views in consonance with the 'third camp' on Afghanistan, but those gradually disintegrated as war break out. From describing Saddam Hussein's Iraq as "proto-imperialist", the CPGB moved to demand of its readers "which side are you on?", to insist that a victory for Saddam Hussein's regime would be preferable to victory for the US/UK, and to call on Iraqi workers to "bring to the fore" the struggle against the US/UK rather than against Saddam. The arguments put forward were in flat contradiction to those developed, little over a year earlier, regarding Afghanistan, but there was no political accounting for the contradiction.
This marked a more general lurch towards popular-front-style politics. The Stop the War Coalition's "People's Assembly" was hailed as an alternative democracy to the Westminster Parliament (although it functioned through no clear democratic mandate at all, and was billed to include representatives of churches, mosques, etc).
For years the CPGB's main argument had been for transforming the Socialist Alliance into a "party" Suddenly, the Alliance was declared "liquidated", and the Weekly Worker started to couch its "partyism" in terms of "the anti-war party" (though in sober fact politics included many anti-war parties, the Greens, SNP, Plaid Cymru, MAB...). Again, there was no clear accounting for this abrupt political lurch, and seems to have been precious little internal democracy in deciding it.
Most recently, the Weekly Worker has rallied to the defence of George Galloway. Its headline "innocent until proved guilty" serves only to obscure the political issues. Of course Galloway should have the benefit of due process in the libel courts and in any disciplinary proceedings that New Labour may start against him. That does not resolve the question of what political assessment the left should have of Galloway.
Galloway has freely admitted having his political activities financed by the governments of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and by a Jordanian businessman with strong links to the former Ba'athist regime in Iraq. He has not disputed that the newspaper East which he published in the 1990s was financed by the Pakistani government as a political venture. He says he was Tariq Aziz's Christmas house guest recently. We do not know whether the Daily Telegraph's charges against him of taking Iraqi government money are true. As Dave Osler wrote in the Weekly Worker, "this man's past record of Saddam-schmoozing makes it impossible even for his strongest supporters simply to dismiss the charges as preposterous or inconceivable".
Even if we assume that the Telegraph's charges are all false, Galloway should have been shunned by socialists for the last decade, because of his politics on Iraq, and should now be doubly shunned for his relations with the UAE, Saudi and Pakistani governments.
These frantic zig zags have gone hand in hand with increasingly reckless denunciation of the CPGB leadership's opponents, both within the organisation and externally - in particular the Alliance for Workers' Liberty. No doubt with an eye to resonance in the milieu round the SWP, CPGB members have, for example, denounced the AWL in writing as "on a wrecking mission in the Socialist Alliance" and claimed that its "no to war, no to Saddam" position on Iraq was motivated by anti-Arab racism.
And then the Weekly Worker reproaches the AWL for "mindless bellicosity"!
For these reasons we have ended our relationship with the CPGB. We do so with some sadness, because we remain committed to unity on the left, and used to believe that the CPGB took seriously the project of unity.
We believe that the best contribution towards achieving that end can currently be made through the Alliance for Workers Liberty.
Martyn Hudson, Lawrie Coombs

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