Taking ourselves seriously

CPGB speaking tour - 'The Socialist Alliance and the fight for a new workers' party'. Speaker: Jack Conrad

December will be a busy month for Communist Party members and supporters around the country. New comrades will be working with longer established cadre to build a series of meetings to be addressed by leading CPGB comrade Jack Conrad.

The meetings confront the key question facing the left in contemporary Britain - the question of the unity of revolutionaries, the question of Party.

The growth of the Socialist Alliance has thrown the previous perspectives of much of the left into profound crisis. What is posed - whether or not it is acknowledged by the various leaders of these hermetically sealed ideological trends - has profound implications for the way we organise and on what programme. As we have been saying for some time, the age of the sect is dead.

Despite the bluster of others, the Communist Party has been unique on the left in being unambiguously in favour of the SAs since the beginning. This is because we believe that - despite their obvious limitations and the faults we expose weekly in our press - they point a path out of the sectarian impasse that held back the left in the 20^th century. Their logic implies the unity of revolutionaries in a single organisation, with a revolutionary programme and organised on democratic centralist lines - full freedom for open criticism and factional rights, alongside unity in action.

Such a party would not simply mean a more 'civilised' arrangement amongst revolutionaries. More importantly, it would mean that revolutionaries would have to take their obligations to the class itself seriously: to begin the business of building a workers' party worthy of the name.

Mark Fischer