Weekly Worker 571 Thursday April 7 2005

Communists and open polemic

Our tradition of debate and polemic is utterly alien to both the grey unanimity of the bureaucratic centralist sects and the seemingly tolerant regime of the kind that operates in the Scottish Socialist Party. In actual fact the SSP’s ‘democracy’ owes nothing to Marxism and everything to bourgeois socialism. The whole structure and ethos favours the right and the maintaining of accepted notions and prejudices; certainly the banning of “unacceptable” words or seemingly innocent clauses ruling against ‘sectarian’ attacks always work against left critics.

The approach we take is very different and can be encapsulated under four headings:

• Openness: The first rule of communist polemics is rigour and openness. Unlike the SSP, which refuses to give critical minorities space in Scottish Socialist Voice and guiltily hides debates away on a closed and censored e-list, we strive to make transparent all political relationships between organisations, people and their actions. Our aim is always to educate and to organise - specifically in current circumstances to organise a mass Communist Party.
  This means trying to accurately represent the views of opponents, but pulling no punches when we respond. We call a spade a spade. The target of criticism, the angularity and sharpness of our language, is determined by our aims.
  
  Jules Martov - the future leader of the Mensheviks and judged rather ‘soft’, compared to Lenin - neatly captured this approach. He, Lenin and the other editors of the famous paper Iskra “strove to make sure that ‘all that is ridiculous’ appears in ‘a ridiculous form’” and to “expose ‘the very embryo of a reactionary idea hidden behind a revolutionary phrase’” (quoted in M Liebman Leninism under Lenin London 1985, p29).
  
  
• Struggle: Therefore truth for communists - engaged as we are in the class struggle - is not arrived at by some mushy process of exclusively polite, ‘constructive criticism’ that eschews phrases deemed to be “out of order”, “negative” or “not acceptable”. The search for truth is an active process of sharp, sometimes harsh, conflict.
  
  But Iskra’s ruthless exposure of “the very embryo of a reactionary idea hidden behind a revolutionary phrase” - a “polemical style that was destined to enjoy a brilliant future in the Bolshevik Party” (ibid) - was damned by many: “On all sides, Iskra’s opponents condemned the polemical methods of this journal, which was accused, to quote Trotsky’s testimony at the time, of ‘fighting not so much against the autocracy as against the other factions in the revolutionary movement’” (ibid). The same sort of thing has been said about the Weekly Worker on more than one occasion.
  
  Another observer notes that, far from causing disunity, however, this frank and occasionally very violent exchange of views helped fuse those who were actually revolutionaries: “During Lenin’s lifetime, political life among the Bolsheviks was always very animated. At the congresses, in the plenums, at the meetings of the central committee, militants said frankly what they thought. This democratic and often bitter clash of opinions gave the party its cohesion and vitality” (my emphasis, L Trepper The great game London 1977, p44).

• Science: What distinguishes our political theory is its scientific foundation and - paradoxically - it is this that introduces the sharpness, the conflict into its expression. Science consists in the practice of moving beyond the observation of relatively simple, cause-consequence relations and surface connections to the formulation of more profound and fundamental laws of social being and thinking. It is in this context that Marx commented that if the surface appearance of things and their inner essence coincided, then there would be no need for science.
  
  Given that the fundamental laws of science are thus hidden behind what is ‘accidental’ and ‘chaotic’, how does it come into the world? Always and everywhere as the viewpoint of either individuals or extreme minorities. The majority of the earth’s population did not spontaneously arrive at conclusions about the position of the planet in the solar system or the evolution of the species. The minorities or individuals that came to these understandings often had to fight a life-or-death battle (sometimes literally) against established orthodoxies, the regimes and institutions that gained sustenance from conventional beliefs and the mass ‘common sense’ that accepted them.
  
  It is axiomatic that Leninist politics - as scientific truth - come first into the world as minority politics, fighting, clawing for survival. Thus, our politics are not for the squeamish or faint-hearted. MN Pokrovsky, a Russian historian of the revolution, comments that an “essential quality of Ilyich [Lenin], when you look back at the past, is his colossal political courage ... The characteristic trait of Ilyich was that he was not afraid to assume the responsibility for political decisions of any size. In this respect he did not retreat in the face of any risk; he took upon himself the responsibility for steps on which hung the fate not only of his own person or of his party, but that of the whole country and to some extent the world revolution. Because this was such an unusual political phenomenon, Ilyich always launched all his actions with a very small group, in as much as there were very few people to be found who were bold enough to follow him” (my emphasis, MN Pokrovsky Russia in world history Michigan 1970, p189).
  
  Why were Lenin’s politics always in a minority when they began? Because he was ‘rude’? No - precisely because they were characterised by scientific exactitude, by a striving to grasp what was essential to a political phenomenon, not to be diverted by “all that was external, accidental, superficial”. Lenin insisted on the need to arrive at conclusions that “reached to the heart of the matter and grasped the essential methods of action” (L Trotsky On Lenin p194).
  
  While ultimately Leninism is verified and made more precise by the practical experience of society itself, because it is a species of political life, it cannot expect its victory to simply materialise through the unfolding of the objective laws of history’s development. In other words, it is not like waiting for the seasons to change or for a solar eclipse. To be a successful Leninist politician, one must master the art of politics, an essential aspect of which is polemic.

  Art: Thus, it has to be the ABC of Leninist polemics that they are almost always required to carve out an audience for themselves, to make other, larger forces pay shocked attention. To do battle against the prevailing flow of political ‘common sense’, they must be expressed in stark, angular political terms. And if in the course of such a tussle, a word, phrase or idea hits home, then keep repeating it - drive it into the heart of your opponents.
  
  It should be obvious to us as Leninist politicians that when a political opponent starts at our use of a particular phrase, when they make demands that we ‘withdraw’ these accusations or try to stop us expressing them, the likelihood is that we have touched a raw nerve. Williamson and Truman do not like being called a “scab” because the word is accurately employed - not just in connection with Williamson’s ridiculous “boycott”, but in relation to the British working class itself. They openly scorn our united struggle against the UK state, preferring to join forces instead with Alex Salmond’s party in the pursuit not of working class power, but Scottish independence and the Scottish ‘national interest’.
  

Does this mean all our polemics must as a matter of principle consist of nothing but a string of insults? No, it does not. The form of the polemical struggle is framed within our understanding of our political tasks. We operate in a world saturated with the ideas of an enemy class. Bourgeois consciousness and its political form within the working class movement - opportunism - is constantly reproduced as a spontaneously generated poison within our ranks.

The struggle of our party is for proletarian independence. Fundamentally, this is not an organisational attribute - it is political/theoretical. The fight for our politics thus takes the form of drawing clear lines of demarcation. The tendency to blur such lines, to be coy about political differentiation, to let opportunists off the hook, is an expression of a slide away from Leninism, towards bourgeois politics in the workers’ movement.

Here is Liebman on the political basis of Lenin’s renowned ‘rudeness’: “Unconcerned with those preoccupations about unity which almost inevitably lead to the making of compromises, Lenin was able to give a sharp outline to his doctrine, using the incisive language that he preferred and, as he often stressed, aussprechen was ist (‘to say what is’: ie, to describe things frankly as he saw them), without having to worry about the feelings of any partners. This absence of ambiguity not only helped separate the revolutionary trend from the reformist one: it also maintained and reinforced the distinction between the Russian socialist movement and bourgeois ideology. No doubt the weakness of liberalism in Russia limited its power of attraction: not sufficiently, though, to prevent the Mensheviks from becoming susceptible to it. Leninism, however, by its twofold opposition to bourgeois liberalism and socialist reformism, accentuated the split between the world of the bourgeoisie and that of the proletariat ...” (my emphasis, M Liebman Leninism under Lenin London 1985, p107).

Trotsky commented that “Leninism is warlike from head to foot” (L Trotsky On Lenin p194). This is not simply for the sake of upsetting people, however, but in order to draw implacable lines of political distinction between proletarian politics and those of our enemy class. By contrast, the failure to state what is allows anti-working class politics a clear run.

The polemical assault conducted by the Communist Party and the Weekly Worker on the explicit embrace of nationalism by the SSP has been designed to shock, outrage and engage comrades in its ranks. Doubtless we remain a small minority for the time being. However, we have to ensure our voices are heard in the first place. If the positions were reversed and we were the size of SSP, we could perhaps smother its rightism with politeness if we thought it worthwhile.

But this is not the case - the SSP is the main leftwing force in Scotland, yet it is hurtling down the road to disaster. We want it to be saved as an organisation if possible; if not, it must be split, destroyed and a majority orientated to genuine working class politics.

See also: The right to say what is
Communists have fiercely opposed the Scottish Socialist Party’s complete surrender to nationalism, writes Peter Manson. We are equally opposed to the SSP’s intolerance - shared with much of the left - of anything resembling sharply expressed polemic

Print this page