Weekly Worker 667 Thursday April 5 2007 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

Party and programme

The Campaign for a Marxist Party held its first meeting in Sheffield in the form of a day school on March 31. Phil Walden reports

The opening speech was delivered by Hillel Ticktin of Critique, who said that the main questions that face the CMP are ‘What kind of party?’ and ‘What kind of programme?’ It is imperative that our party be internally democratic and in building it we must make strenuous efforts to compensate for different levels of education, income and opportunity.

Comrade Ticktin stated that no defences of Stalinism, “including the ones that the CPGB are putting up”, could be accepted - “What is it about bourgeois democracy that people are still attached to?” We stand for socialism, no matter where. Turning to the kind of programme that is needed, comrade Ticktin said he was “against a merely action programme”. The emphasis must be on debate and theoretical discovery. He concluded that it was “better to sit at home reading than to act with ill-thought out purpose”.

In contributions from the floor, Phil Sharpe said we need to “say goodbye to democratic centralism”, which was really finished when Lenin expelled Bogdanov from the Bolsheviks in 1912. Under Stalin democratic centralism was made into a shibboleth, but we must be tolerant of different points of view within the party and develop a democratic relationship between the party and the class - the equation of the class with the party was “the worst thing that ever happened”. In other words, we need to accept that Leninism as a party organisational model has gone, so we now need a Marxist, not a Leninist, party.

Comrade Sharpe stated that the CMP needed to “debate very assiduously” whether there could be a plan without any market. In his view, we should “possibly accept that we will initially need the market as an allocator of resources”. We now have sufficient historical experience to go beyond Marx’s Critique of the Gotha programme, he concluded. The point about workers’ control is it is “a mediating link to communism” and should not become a fetish.

Ben Lewis of the CPGB said we have to intervene in what is moving on the left, but Barry Biddulph said the CPGB took its position on the party form from one particular period: 1905-06, when there was unity between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Comrade Biddulph thought that democracy must take priority over centralism and that we “need to get away from the concept of the Marxist party as some sort of army” - any party will be full of rebels. We definitely do not need an action programme that is “merely a manual for party members, as proposed by Peter Manson,” he said. “This is elitism.”

Phil Walden said we need to resuscitate Bukharin, who, with Preobrazhensky, drew up The ABC of communism, which is one important template for us to consider in drawing up our own programme. Another person who needs to be resuscitated is Bogdanov - in 1912 Lenin “bureaucratically organised the expulsion of Bogdanov’s faction from the Bolsheviks, fearing a proper debate”. The Bogdanov faction was not disrupting a party action when “all it was doing was ignoring the duma elections”, which the Bolsheviks had decided to contest - surely this position had every right to be accommodated within the Bolshevik faction.

In his second intervention Phil Sharpe reiterated his view that the party programme has to have both a propaganda and an analytical element - the CPGB implicitly recognises this because it is “revising its programme in order to arrive at new conclusions”. As for the Socialist Party’s Campaign for a New Workers’ Party, the problem is not the CNWP itself, but the fact that it has been wound down. We should struggle within it for a revolutionary programme, he said. Whereas the CPGB “seems to want to reproduce the growth of the first CPGB”, this is impossible because of the very different conditions. The right tactic was shown by John Maclean in 1910, when he called for the fusion of the Social Democratic Federation with the Independent Labour Party.

In his summing up Hillel Ticktin stressed the importance of overcoming personality clashes democratically. In a period where the laws of transition, decline and revolution are all in operation, we need to develop theory more than ever.

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