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Weekly Worker 542 Thursday September 2 2004
Yet another bloody
non-sectarian sect
The Red Party Tiny Red Book (July 2004) http://www.redparty.org.uk/tinyredbook.html
The Red Party Red Star, No1, August 2004, £1
Yet another new leftwing ‘party’ has been launched. On July
18 a small group set up the ‘Red Party’ and adopted a very short
platform under the name Tiny Red Book. The first issue of their journal
Red Star appeared in early August. The group is mainly composed of comrades
who had recently resigned from the Communist Party of Great Britain, with
a leading role played by Manny Neira, but also includes a former member
of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Gerry Byrne. So how do the
comrades justify setting up one more ‘party’? Their Tiny Red
Book and the first issue of Red Star provide only limited answers.
The Tiny Red Book is genuinely tiny. It is presented as an eight-page
pamphlet, but the text totals only 783 words - slightly longer than the
Weekly Worker’s ‘What we fight for’ column. It is spun
out over eight pages by being illustrated with imagery of a broadly Maoist
character. The six pages with substantive text on them contain six points:
(1) The world is “crippled by oppression, poverty and war”.
This is because society is capitalist and power is in the hands of a capitalist
ruling class.
(2) “The majority, the working class, have won important reforms
through struggle.” We have to defend these and support demands for
more reforms. But “we are still not a democracy: we are not governed
by the whole people … socialism is simply the struggle for real democracy.”
(3) To win democracy we need a revolution. Peasants and slaves have rebelled
before, but the modern working class is strong. “All we need is to
spread the knowledge of that power, and organise ourselves to use it.
In short, all we need is political leadership.”
(4) The Labour Party was historically pro-capitalist and has now “abandoned
even the pretence of socialism”; the old Communist Party defended
bureaucratic rule and is now “a spent force”. The left groups
“demand ideological purity. They suppress disagreement in their own
ranks. They refuse to unite until they agree. Above all, they reduce socialism
to an arcane secret possessed by the few, not the plainly just demand
for real democracy. They speak a language no-one else understands, in
a voice no-one else can hear.”
(5) There are real socialists both within and outside the groups. The
Red Party is merely an instrument for creating a real party.
Pages (1) to (5) can be seen to be muddled and watered down versions of
views held by the CPGB.
Page (6) asserts the particular character the Red Party aims at, and deserves
to be quoted almost in full:
- “Our party must not silence anyone in the name of ‘discipline’:
we need every dissenting voice to find the right way.”
- “Our party must not demand ideological conformity: we represent
our class, not some 10-a-penny opinion.”
- “Our party must not conspire against itself: once the majority
have decided to act, we must all act together.”
- “Our party must not have gurus: neither the leaders of the past
nor the self-proclaimed ‘theorists’ of the present.”
- “Our party must not abuse its members: each has a right to their
time, their privacy, and their life.”
- “Our party must not lie: about its strength, its achievements,
its past, or its mistakes.”
- “Our party must not preen: it must talk in plain language, and
listen as much as it talks.”
These points are almost wholly negative. The underlying message of the
whole text seems to be expressed on page (5): “There are millions
to be won to a cause so just that only the nonsense of the left could
obscure it: we must reach them.” The only problem of winning the
millions to socialism is that the far left is fucked up. And what this
fucked-up-ness might be is expressed in a vague and indefinite critique
of the other left groups. Really, comrades?
Red Star adds little more. The banner tells us that the party stands “for
socialism, humanism and democracy”. The bulk of the articles in the
paper could have appeared without alteration in any one of the multitude
of left papers or journals: Gerry Byrne on ‘law and order’ and
on the Iraq war, Jeremy Butler on immigration, an interview with Gene
Bruskin of US Labor Against the War, David Broder on ‘animal rights’,
and reviews of the films Fahrenheit 9/11, Spiderman 2 and Taxi Driver,
PJ Harvey’s album Uh huh her, and the comic book The Red Star Collected
Edition.
Two articles add something about the nature of the Red Party’s project.
Darren Williams’s ‘Socialism, humanism and the fear of tofu’
gives us a two-page potted history of Marxism, including an outline standard-Trot
account of the degeneration of the USSR. The anti-Stalinist left in general
has been (as the AWL argues) poisoned by concessions to Stalinism. The
background argument is that “Socialists accept that there is no interest
greater than the common interest of human beings. We never concede any
argument that ‘The price of saving, or improving, a life is too high’
... Socialists are fundamentalist humanists, extremist humanists.”
Humanism is not merely for the future: it is to be the guide to escaping
the sub-Stalinist practice of the far left. “This must also mean
that socialists treat each other in a friendly, comradely way, recognising
that political differences over detail or tactics should not hide our
common aims.”
Manny Neira’s ‘Another bloody party’ elaborates a little
on the critique of the far left in the last two points of the Tiny Red
Book. The first part of the article is an amusing recital of what every
left activist knows - that there are umpteen bloody groups divided, on
the face of it, by small nuances of political and theoretical opinion.
Unlike pure cynics, Manny insists that the activists of these umpteen
groups in the main do useful work.
From here he turns to the basics: socialism is “the fight for true
democracy”, by ... “bringing control and accountability to every
aspect of our lives ... our vision is a society truly in the hands of
the people who built it and live in it”. The ruling class will not
yield power willingly, so “true socialism is revolutionary”.
Leadership is needed and therefore a party. However, all the groups imagine
that the disagreements on the left can be overcome. They can’t. What’s
necessary is to build a party on the basis of the simple idea of “a
government of ordinary working people”, on the basis of freedom of
debate, unity in action.
Been there, done that, got the T-shirt
The trouble with the comrades’ simple solution is that it has already
been tried - over and over again - and it does not work. ‘Marxist
humanism’ dates back to the ex-CP ‘new left’ which emerged
after the Hungarian crisis of 1956. The idea of a party founded on the
most elementary basics, rather than a developed political platform, was
attempted by a series of groups in the aftermath of the emergence of Stalinism:
most are now remembered only by Trot historians. The Red Party’s
use of Maoist imagery suggests nostalgia for the widespread ‘spontaneist’
politics of 1968 and after, which had the same idea. When I was a student
back in the early 1970s, probably the majority of student and ex-student
left activists had similar ideas. The old International Marxist Group
during the 1970s spun off at least three groups which split from it with
similar ideas to the Red Party’s. All of them are history. Ex-IMGer
Hilary Wainwright has been involved in initiating a series of broader
attempts to create a movement along these lines. All came to nothing.
The interesting question is why it does not work. At one level the answer
is simple. Leninist groups outweigh ‘humanist’ groups in practice
because they are less ‘humanist’ in the sense discussed on page
six of the Tiny Red Book. That is, they make more demands on their members’
time, energy and discipline - “their time, their privacy, and their
life”. They also have a more elaborated division of labour: not just
reflected in “self-proclaimed ‘theorists’”, but also
in full-timers and so on. As a result they act more coherently and get
more active output from, often, smaller numbers of members and supporters.
It is not rocket science. Political activism is work. More work gets done
if people are strongly motivated to do it at the expense of other things.
Work gets done more efficiently with a division of labour.
Similarly, doing theoretical work is work. Hence theorists are necessarily
“self-proclaimed”. The way to overcome the problem of disagreement
with leading theorists is to do the theoretical work yourself and criticise
them. Otherwise we would be passing resolutions (eg, instructing comrade
John Doe to go away and read Capital and a load of other Marxist economics
and write a critique of the Carchedi/Freeman ‘temporal single system’
approach to Marx’s theory of value).
A second level is that a political party necessarily comments on everything
- or at least, everything which is a live issue in politics. What about
Respect, for example? Should we call for a vote for Respect candidates?
Suppose we vote that we should. Assume, for the sake of argument, that
the decision-making process was as democratic as can be achieved. Opponents
of supporting Respect candidates are then faced with a choice. Which is
more important: staying in a united group, or identifying yourselves with
all the thousands of opponents of Respect and the millions who don’t
give a damn about it outside the group? A similar problem faced opponents
of Respect in the CPGB this summer. Manny and his Red Party co-thinkers
- not all the opponents of Respect in the CPGB - decided to split. Perhaps
they think that the decision to support Respect was taken undemocratically
or something of that sort. But they have not said so in explaining why
they have formed their own ‘party’.
The problem does not just affect small groups like the CPGB. Should opponents
of the Scottish Socialist Party’s independence campaign stay in the
party or oppose the campaign from outside? Should supporters of Respect
in the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain stay in the party
and fight to reverse its decision not to support Respect, or should they
split? Should opponents of Blairism and the Iraq war stay in the Labour
Party and fight, or try to create an alternative?
The problem which leads to the ‘57 varieties’ of the far left
Manny discusses in his article is that comrades decide too easily to split,
whether by majorities expelling minorities or minorities walking out.
Now there is a problem behind that problem, with the practice of democracy
in the movement. But the underlying issue of judgment remains. Is it more
important to go on working with people in the same organisation, or to
reach out to the ‘uncorrupted’ people outside? The essence of
the dynamic of unjustified splits is the decision to go for what the Tiny
Red Book calls the “millions to be won to a cause so just that only
the nonsense of the left could obscure it”.
Millions out there?
Red Party comrades presumably imagine that the style of the Red Star is
- unlike, at the opposite extreme, the Weekly Worker - aimed at these
millions. It is not. If anything, it seems to be aimed at Guardian readers,
and perhaps at those people on the periphery of the far left who have
not thought deeply about far-left political ideas. It has some similarity
to the style of Socialist Resistance, whose project is in some ways similar.
The reader is expected to be interested in film (three films reviewed
in one issue), the music of PJ Harvey, and leftish graphic novels/comic
books. Maoist imagery is expected to appeal to them.
Again there is an underlying problem. For broad millions of people in
this country, ‘politics’ is something ‘politicians’
do. These millions prefer, most of the time, to get on with their own
lives - home improvement, days out for the kids, fly-fishing, train-spotting,
swinging, clubbing, sports, ballroom dancing … or whatever other
pastime takes their fancy. Periodically they get to choose at elections
between competing political products: Conservative, Labour, Lib Dem, Green
... Even more periodically, some of them become involved in a strike,
a tenants’ movement, or a single-issue campaign, and for a short
period start thinking about politics as something they might do. But once
the immediate struggle is over most people go back to their ‘real
lives’. It is not stupidity or ‘false consciousness’ but
perfectly rational behaviour: why bust your arse on politics when at the
end of the day the thing is sewn up by the politicians and the people
who bribe them? At least when you bang your head against a brick wall
it feels better when you stop!
For something under a million people politics is something we devote at
least a part of our time free from work to, something we make ourselves
rather than simply consume occasionally. For a variety of reasons these
people have decided that with all its frustrations political activity
is a worthwhile life project. Perhaps a quarter of a million of us are
the activists of the labour movement: Labour Party, trade union and campaigns
activists and the militants of the far left. The far left on its own can
turn out numbers ranging between 5,000 and 15,000 on demonstrations which
do not have much wider resonance; the actual organised far left (including
the Morning Star’s CPB here) is smaller, perhaps around 4,000 in
total. The proportionality among the political activists is reflected
in far-left votes at elections ranging between 2% and 5%.
The people who actually pay any sustained attention to the far left -
the people who read the left press or read, as opposed to binning, left
leaflets - are the political activists. And these people are not political
virgins. They have hard questions to ask of the far left - Why didn’t
the Russian Revolution work? What do you mean by democracy? What should
we do about the Labour Party? and many others. Of course, when there is
a big mass movement like a strike or the anti-war movement new people
get drawn into long-term political activism. But the evidence of nearly
60 years’ history since 1945 is that in general they go into the
existing activists’ organisations in roughly their existing proportions,
with - if anything - the larger existing organisations recruiting more
than their ‘share’.
Suppose we had a unified and democratic party of the Marxist left. Part
of our time would be spent talking to ‘the world outside’: political
campaigns, trade union activity, and so on. Another part of it would be
spent ‘talking to ourselves’: that is, debating issues disputed
on the left. In doing so we would unavoidably “speak a language no-one
else understands, in a voice no-one else can hear”. Exactly the same
thing is done by fly-fisher people, motor mechanics enthusiasts, and even
swingers. The Labour Party - a pretty big party - equally has its own
internal jargon and code. In this respect the Red Party’s critique
of the existing left is the same as ... the Socialist Workers’ Party’s
critique of the ‘old left’.
The Red Party comrades have set up a new group. What that means is that
they are “self-proclaimed ‘theorists’”: they think
that they are right on the nature of the party that is needed and the
other available varieties are wrong. So they want to change the relationship
of forces within the broad layer of activists. That means, in practice,
persuading other existing activists of their views. They have quite rightly
elected to work within the Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform, with
all its limitations. They will find rapidly that they need to say something
much more concrete and specific than either the Tiny Red Book or Red Star
No1 has to offer. They may, of course, follow the path which has been
trodden by the SWP and Workers Power and seek to find new, better and
more politically virginal activists out there somewhere. In this case
they will become a sect. Or they will start trying to get to grips with
other activists’ concrete politics. In this case they will become
a variant clone of the CPGB and abandon the illusion of talking to “millions
to be won”. They will, in other words, become yet another of the
competing groups - or fade away, as most Marxist-humanist groups have.
‘Humanism’, the CPGB and the Red Party
The majority of the Red Party’s founders are ex-CPGB. There has been
a Red Platform within the CPGB, which for a short time had a regular column
in the Weekly Worker and had a website linked to the CPGB’s. Some,
not all, of the Red Platform supporters have gone to the Red Party. The
CPGB, like the Red Party, insists that socialism means real democracy.
We have also insisted on liberty to form tendencies and the ability to
disagree in public - while acting together - as the key to forming an
organisation which can avoid the endless dynamic of splits and fragmentation
of the far left. The formation of the Red Party seems to suggest that
we are wrong: this approach cannot solve the problem.
On the other hand, the comrades’ inability or unwillingness to give
any clear explanation of why they have split from the CPGB suggests that
the problem may be on their side. From the emphasis on ‘humanism’
in the Red Party’s texts, the split seems to be something to do with
the conduct of debate in the CPGB and the relation of politics to comrades’
personal lives. Did the CPGB as an organisation really fuck comrades over
in this way?
The formation of the Red Party thus unavoidably forces us to wash in public
a certain amount of CPGB dirty linen which would not normally find its
way into the Weekly Worker. We would not normally print it because, contrary
to popular belief among the far left, the Weekly Worker is not a left
scandal-sheet: we are interested in publicising political differences
in our own and other organisations, not the stupid mistakes and personal
abuse comrades of any organisation are prone to fall into in pubs and
on e-lists.
It will not be news to any regular reader of the Weekly Worker that there
have been and still are differences in the CPGB about what to do about
Respect. The dispute which eventually led to Manny and other Red Party
comrades’ resignation from the CPGB began when our March 21 2004
aggregate meeting passed a resolution which stated: “Recognising
the need for the anti-war, pro-working class opposition to Blair to take
on partyist form, the CPGB will work to ensure the biggest possible vote
for Respect on June 10.”
The resolution was put at a late stage of the discussion at a poorly attended
aggregate, and comrade Manny seems to have taken the view that it did
not express the actual majority opinion in the CPGB. He more or less immediately
attempted to organise the production of a collective article which would
express opposition to it. This took the form of an article by Manny, with
statements appended to it from other comrades, which also expressed opposition
to the decision. The Provisional Central Committee, however, refused to
publish the article with the appendages attached (the attempt to include
other anti-Respect views before the majority position had been elaborated
in the paper was described by one comrade as an “anti-democratic
manoeuvre”) and a revised version was published on April 8 - now
solely Manny’s article with some additional signatures. The PCC did,
however, convene an early aggregate to re-discuss the issue. This took
place on April 24, and at a better attended meeting the original decision
was confirmed by a clear majority.
Comrade Manny and comrade Cameron Richards (who has not left the CPGB)
now launched the Red Platform of the CPGB to fight for three positions.
The first was that support for Respect candidates should be made conditional
on their support for republicanism, MPs or MEPs being limited to a worker’s
wage, and open borders. The second was that the CPGB should rejoin the
Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform. The third was that the CPGB should
do more to build itself as an organisation by recruiting new members.
During the period between April 24 and the June 10 elections, the Red
Platform had a regular column in the Weekly Worker. There was, however,
a dispute about what and how much of the platform’s material should
appear in the paper. This was somewhat complicated by the fact that comrade
Manny was working as a layout artist for the paper.
A particular flashpoint was the May 13 issue, which carried an article
by comrade Manny imagining George Galloway becoming pregnant, complete
with a photomontage. Comrade Ian Donovan argued that Manny was deliberately
sabotaging the majority’s policy towards Respect by a personalised
attack on Galloway. Comrade Manny stated (correctly) that, although the
article was his, the photomontage was done at the request of the Weekly
Worker editorial team. He demanded that the PCC should make comrade Ian
withdraw the claim that he was responsible. His resignation from the CPGB
was triggered by the PCC’s alleged refusal to do so. Ironically,
comrade Ian has now also resigned, claiming that the PCC did attempt to
force or persuade him to withdraw the allegation.
After the June 10 elections the PCC discontinued the Red Platform’s
column in the paper, on the ground that the Red Platform had run out of
things to say. This was followed by the resignations of some other comrades
who have participated in founding the Red Party. Again ironically, at
our June 19 aggregate we voted by a narrow majority for one of the Red
Platform’s original proposals: to rejoin the Socialist Alliance Democracy
Platform.
Did the CPGB act in an undemocratic and anti-humanist manner in this discussion
and thereby force the Red Party comrades to split? In my opinion the PCC
made some mistakes in handling the discussion. It is not clear either
that the right initial response to comrade Manny’s supposed undemocratic
manoeuvre in late March was to have a fight about what could be published,
or that the PCC was right to stop the Red Platform column on its own initiative
without discussion in an aggregate. The reasoning may have been sound,
but the actions were bound to be taken as provocations and confuse the
political discussion.
That said, none of these mistakes actually amount to conducting the discussion
in an undemocratic manner or suppressing dissent. This discussion was
conducted in an open manner and the votes at two successive aggregates
established that there was a clear majority in favour of the agreed position
on Respect.
So why did the comrades split? The answer is given by the characteristics
of the Red Party which I have already discussed. They thought that there
were fresher fields outside the CPGB - “millions to be won to a cause
so just that only the nonsense of the left could obscure it.” For
all their ostensible non-sectarianism, their actual decision to split
and set up a new party was ... sectarian. It disproves not the CPGB’s
approach to differences, but their own.
Mike Macnair
