How not to break from Stalinism

Submitted by martin on 28 January, 2003 - 9:46

Paul Hampton reports on the AWL-CPGB (Weekly Worker) day school on 25 January
Opening the discussion for the AWL, Sean Matgamna said that the AWL wants a rational Marxist politics based on saying what is - facing reality squarely, calling things by their right names, basing ourselves on the logic of the class struggle. It is the tradition of Marx and Engels, continued by Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky. It is a tradition largely lost and forgotten after 1940, carried on halfway consistently by only a handful of Trotskyists around Shachtman and Draper.
The "CPGB", which began 20 years ago as a subjectively revolutionary breakaway from the ultra-Stalinist New Communist Party, itself a split from the real CPGB, appears to have much in common with the AWL. But the appearance is deceptive. There are deep-seated differences of political method, making agreement a matter of accident rather than something fully reasoned and understood. The purpose of the day school was to hammer out these differences - to gain political clarity on our respective politics and methods of work. Without clarity, collaboration on a joint paper, or a common organisation, even intervention in the Socialist Alliance, will be stillborn.
Three issues sharply drew out these differences. The first was the Leeds incident in September, where the Weekly Worker group organised the "no-platforming" of the AWL's Sean Matgamna (see Solidarity 3/13 and 3/15). As Mike Fenwick explained, for the AWL it is a straightforward question of principle. We are against no-platforming.
The CPGB's response continued to be entirely evasive. John Bridge offered mealy-mouthed defence of the no-platforming, while denying any responsibility for the affair though it was organised by and through their central leadership. The AWL expected the leading committees of the CPGB to register the political questions involved in the no-platforming. But the best on offer from the people who organised it, John Bridge and Mark Fischer, was the argument that Mike Marqusee (another speaker, on whose request the "no-platforming" was organised) had been invited first...
Peter Manson and Mike McNair claimed that to refuse Mike Marqusee the right to ban fellow-speakers was to "no-platform" Marqusee himself, because it implied that Marqusee could speak nowhere without fellow-speakers with whom he would refuse to speak... Manson is the editor of the Weekly Worker.
The second issue was the attitude to the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB). Matt Cooper set out why the AWL denounces the Stop the War/SWP alliance with Islamic fundamentalism. After the 28 September demonstration the Weekly Worker's front page welcomed the MAB's participation, basing themselves on the claim that our description of the MAB as fundamentalists was wrong.
Now MAB have openly admitted they are the Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest Islamic fundamentalist party in the world. The CPGB still has the same conclusion - but now a different argument: that MAB brings a constituency to demonstrations the left can't reach. The political conclusion remains the same - and a new rationalisation is adopted to suit it. This is the SWP's method - and it's a long way from Marxist politics. Unfortunately no one from the CPGB was prepared to defend their position on MAB at the school.
A third issue is Afghanistan and Stalinism. When they were unashamed Stalinists, the CPGB passionately supported the April 1978 Stalinist-led army/airforce coup in Afghanistan claiming that it was a real (workers') revolution. They identified with the Khalq segment of the Afghan Stalinist movement, those who in the 20 months before the Russian invasion, conducted a savage reign of terror against the peoples of Afghanistan. They supported the Russian invasion, and Russia's terrible "Vietnam War" there, in which one and a half million people died (and six out of about 18 million Afghans were driven across the borders as refugees).
Now, having supposedly broken with their Stalinism, they think that was a mistake on their part? Not at all. They have just published a 6,000 word article defending the idea that the Stalinist/army coup was a real revolution and not a coup. They are now both fashionably anti-Stalinist - and passionate defenders of the bloody-handed Afghan Stalinists!

Mark Fischer said that as far back as the early 1980s his group had rejected the doctrine of "socialism in one country", expressed sympathy with the historic Left Opposition, rejected Khrushchevite "peaceful coexistence", etc. How could it have been Stalinist?
How? By siding consistently with the Stalinist ruling classes against the "economistic" workers - Russia 1991, Poland 1981, Czechoslovakia 1968, Hungary 1956. The Weekly Worker group changed that alignment only some years after European Stalinist rule collapsed and was no longer there to be sided with. If Mark Fischer thinks the old alignment was not Stalinist, then his present anti-Stalinism is scarcely reliable or thought-through.
The Weekly Worker carries a regular advertisement for John Bridge's 1992 book From October To August, a manual of their pre-1994 "tankie" politics. And what does the blurb highlight as the book's special merit, against the many others dealing with the rise and demise of the USSR? That "throughout there is a stress on the necessity of democracy"!
It is a book which denounces "Trotskyite" support for the struggles of workers in the Stalinist states as "counter-revolutionary" - one in which the SWP, for example, has its agitation and activity in support of those workers earn it the charge of being too attached to "abstract democracy"! While solidarising consistently with the ruling "communist" parties against uppity workers, the book calls on those parties, and particularly the "genuine communists" within them, to institute democracy and even a "political revolution". If the Weekly Worker's blurb-writers think that that sort of advice to despots qualifies the book as splendidly democratic, then they still have a lot to rethink about Stalinism.
Here as elsewhere, the CPGB changes its line, but underneath nothing is reassessed. New positions are added, but nothing is jettisoned. Change is only on the surface. The old Stalinist baggage remains. Everything can be rationalised. Again, it comes back to how Marxists proceed. Instead of recognising they were wrong on Afghanistan, and drawing the necessary conclusions, the CPGB heap a new position on top of the old. A real Marxist party cannot be built without an altogether higher standard of political accounting.
The same is true on Israel, where the CPGB's apparent agreement with us on two states masks their continuing fetish of the right of return - which historically has never been other than code for a single state and the elimination of Israel.
The school was centrally about what kind of party we need. For the AWL, the significance of the party is the significance of the programme. For us, the fight on the ideological front of the class struggle is central. The working class has innovated methods of organisation - unions, factory committees, soviets. What our class needs is Marxist ideas, and a fight to transform the labour movement along the lines of those ideas.

The CPGB, despite having scarcely two dozen members rather than a large old-style Stalinist machine, still holds to a Stalinist-substitutionist conception of the party as the agency of "communism" on behalf of, but if necessary against, the working class. That, for example, is what lies at the base of their factually nonsensical argument that the tiny Afghan Stalinist party, which took power through the officers of the armed forces (they had been educated and trained in the USSR and wanted Afghanistan to develop into a replica of the USSR) was actually the working class in power. The "party" can substitute for the working class. The statement of principle in their paper bluntly proclaims it: "Without such a (communist) party the working class is nothing; with it, everything".
Other issues - the "Federal Republic" slogan versus the workers' government, trade union work, and the Socialist Alliance - were only touched on at the school. It was pointed out that the CPGB's insistence on limiting their central political slogan to a Federal Republic within capitalism, and their dogmatic rejection of the call "for a Workers' Republic" means that in their operational politics they are not socialists at all, but petty bourgeois radicals. Sean Matgamna argued that this was the necessary consequence of their rejection of transitional slogans, and adherence to the old social democratic idea that the socialist programme must be rigidly divided into a minimum and a maximum segment - something the Communist International rejected (see for example, the decisions of the Fourth Congress on the workers' government slogan, etc). Their focus on the demand for a federal republic within capitalism puts them, despite their love of such iconography as the hammer and sickle, on the far right of the spectrum of nominally socialist politics.
The contrast between AWL contributions and those of the CPGB was stark. John Bridge failed to argue with us at all, preferring autobiographical reminiscence and soft-soap anecdotes to political argument. In person, John Bridge is a somewhat unfocused, affable, middle-aged, upper middle class man. In efforts like his recent 40,000 word seven-part series in Weekly Worker about AWL he comes across as a crazy oracle who needs to believe that his every stray thought is the authentic voice not only of himself, but of "Marxism" and "communism". The contrast is, I suppose, just another example of the organic incoherence of this group, which seems intent on erecting political oxymoronism into the first principle of what, for sentimental, rather than political reasons, they quaintly call "communist" politics.
Further discussion will be worthwhile - but only if the CPGB/WW comes out and actually argue for their politics, and try to spell out clearly what they accept and what they reject in the communist tradition of which, ludicrously, they claim to be the only embodiment. In other words only if they stop rationalising and start behaving like rational Marxists.
An AWL pamphlet, Trotskyism and Stalinism: The Politics of 'Militant' (volume 2), deals with the question of Afghanistan in detail, in an article written in 1985. Available, price £2.50 post free, from AWL, P O Box 823, London SE15 4NA.

Rouge, the paper of the French Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, has just published a special supplement to celebrate their 2000th issue. It is unashamedly a celebration, not a rigorous accounting. Even there, though, the LCR, influenced by a Trotskyist tradition, feels a need to acknowledge major errors. The biggest? "That on Afghanistan in 1980, when we rejected a campaign for the withdrawal of Soviet troops for fear of playing into the hands of imperialism... This errancy... revealed more profound failings, and the difficulty of taking account of the changes in the world situation". They made a mistake: they say so and draw conclusions. That is the Marxist way of doing things.

Comments

Submitted by martin on Tue, 04/02/2003 - 10:54

Wow! Check out those earplugs!

Mark Fischer writes a long report (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/465/awl.html) of the AWL-CPGB/WW debate on 25 January which mentions not a single political point from any of the CPGB speeches there, and a weirdly tiny selection of points from AWL speeches.

Mark was all attention to the body language of the day. He is highly satisfied with the CPGB's performance because it included "howls of laughter", "derisive laughter" and "cutting heckles" - who needs politics when you have such assets? He discerns that AWL members had prepared speeches in advance, and is vexed by it; thinks he saw us in "embarrassed squirming", and is gleeful about it.

But, Mark, other things besides embarrassment can make us squirm.

What did the CPGB say, politically? They produced a new argument to justify their action, in September last year, of banning Sean Matgamna of the AWL from the platform of a meeting about "Marxism and religion" which they controlled in Leeds because another speaker, Mike Marqusee, objected to the AWL's views on Israel. Previously - for example in John Bridge's October 2002 statement on the basis of which the Weekly Worker declared that 'the discussion was closed' - the CPGB had said that the ban was excusable because Marqusee was a "star draw". Now the reason was that Marqusee had been invited first.

Having been invited first may bring some veto rights in personal matters, a dinner party say. At a stretch, you could say it gave Marqusee rights in personal aspects of the meeting. For example, if he had objected that a third speaker, and the introduction of a third point of view, would destroy his prepared speech by restricting his available time, that might be fair enough. He did not. He accepted an alternative third speaker (John Bridge himself). It was a political issue, of a political ban or proscription, and the politics ranks infinitely higher than the decorum of who was invited first.

When, at a Stop The War meeting at University College London in December, George Galloway MP and Lindsay German declared that our comrade Faz Velmi, as a "Zionist" (a supporter of Israel's right to exist) was "not welcome" on the platform, the rights and wrongs of it did not depend on who had been invited first, Galloway or Velmi. In the event, Galloway and German confined themselves to dark comments and made no actual move to eject Faz Velmi from the platform. The UCL students responded with a much livelier sense of democracy than the CPGB in Leeds.

When, at the Palestine demonstration last May, the Israeli socialist Tirza Waisel faced an attempt to drive her off the platform, and was not defended by the organisers (Palestine Solidarity Campaign), the politics of it did not depend on whether Tirza was a late or early addition to the platform.

On a trade union committee, if some right-wing stalwart wants a left-winger excluded because, he says, he will not sit alongside a Trotskyist, then the rights and wrongs are not decided by whether or not the right-winger has been on the committee longer.

The argument that Marqusee was invited first, like the one about him being a "star draw", indicates that some CPGB members have the same magic earplugs as Mark: they hear none of the political arguments of principle, but perceive only the factional atmospherics. For them to "no-platform" us is OK; for us to protest about the CPGB's role in the banning (which, as it happens, we did only after ample delay to allow them to reconsider, and then only within restricted email lists) is "a provocation against the CPGB".

Only a couple of political points from the AWL got through Mark's earplugs, and in somewhat mangled form. Sean Matgamna argued that the difference between the AWL and the CPGB is, in the last analysis, a difference between the Trotskyist tradition and the Stalinist tradition. Mark huffs: "Absurd".

What of Afghanistan? In October 2001 the Weekly Worker reprinted material that they had circulated in 1982 on Afghanistan, with a full and enthusiastic political identification with the Khalq faction of the Afghan Stalinist party. Mark himself wrote a long introduction, praising the article as excellent proof that Afghanistan's Stalinist military coup of April 1978 had been "a genuine democratic revolution", deriding the analyses of others on the left (SWP, Workers' Power, us), and making only a brief and unspecific reservation that the article had some of the "flaws of official communism".

In short, in 2001 the Weekly Worker still did not see that they had been wrong in 1979-88 to align themselves with the Russian imperialist butchers against the peoples of Afghanistan. Despite odd mutters about their views having "developed further", they still don't. No CPGB member at the school made any substantive answer to Sean's discussion of this issue in his opening speech on 25 January.

Mark himself did say something on the more general question of Stalinism. He thinks what he said not worth reporting; however, I will report it. He said that as far back as the early 1980s his group had rejected the theory of socialism in one country, expressed sympathy with the historic Left Opposition, reject Khrushchevite "peaceful coexistence", etc. How then could they be Stalinists?

Answer? By siding consistently with the Stalinist ruling classes against the "economistic" workers - Russia 1991, Poland 1981, Czechoslovakia 1968, Hungary 1956. The Weekly Worker group changed that alignment only some years after European Stalinist rule collapsed, and was no longer there to be sided with. If Mark still thinks that the CPGB/WW was not Stalinist before 1994, it must mean that he is nowhere nearly fully understanding what was wrong in their previous positions and what must be learned from it.

Four pages on in the Weekly Worker from Mark's report, there is the Weekly Worker's standard advertising panel for books circulated under its auspices. "From October To August", a manual of the CPGB's pre-1994 "tankie" stance, still figures there, and with a bizarre write-up.

The book "charts the rise and demise of the USSR..." Fair enough. And what is special about its angle on that, as compared to all the many other books on the same question? "Throughout", the Weekly Worker proudly claims, "there is a stress on the necessity of democracy"!

This is a book which aligns itself solidly with the bureaucratic ruling "communist" parties, and denounces "Trotskyite" support for workers' revolts as "counter-revolutionary". The SWP, for example, has its agitation and activity in support of workers in the Stalinist bloc earn it the complaint that it is too attached to "abstract democracy"!

There is a weird, convoluted way in which the claim that "From October To August" "stresses the necessity of democracy" is true. While repeatedly insisting on its solidarity with the ruling "communist" parties, and particularly the "genuine communists" within them, against uppity workers, the book also calls on those "communists" to install democracy (and not only democracy: free from the CPGB's latter-day insistence that immediate agitation must be limited to a "minimum programme", the book also wants the bureaucrats to carry out economic measures to advance socialism). Democracy-as-advice-to-despots is, however, something very different from socialist democracy. If the Weekly Worker's advertising-panel-writers cannot yet see the difference, they have a lot to learn.

Let's hope that Mark's magic earplugs are his own personal property, and not standard issue to CPGB members.

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