Weekly Worker 671 Thursday May 3 2007 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

No more freaks and halfway houses

The Campaign for a Marxist Party was from the outset based on the rejection of the notion of yet another confessional sect operating through a halfway-house front, argues Mike Macnair. The CMP should firmly rebuff any attempt to reverse this

Comrade Phil Sharpe has responded at length¹  to my brief critique²  of the method he uses in his draft programme for the Campaign for a Marxist Party. Comrade John Pearson has also responded in a letter (April 26), which mistakenly suggests that my argument implies the CPGB is drawing back from the method of open ideological struggle within the framework of practical unity.

There are a number of respects in which comrade Sharpe’s article represents a step forward on his 95-page Democratic Socialist Alliance draft programme.³  But he continues to cling to the sectarian method of this document, and his and comrade Pearson’s responses to my brief critique are evasive on certain very fundamental issues - the issues of party and programme.

What sort of party?

The first of these is our old friend, the ‘what sort of party?’ question. Like comrade Dave Craig, comrade Sharpe defends the standard British Trotskyist view that the task of the day is not to fight for the creation of a Marxist party: rather the task of the day is to fight for the creation of a new “mass workers’ party” or ‘broad left party’ with an (inevitably small) Marxist - ie, Trotskyist - tendency within it.

Of course, there is already more than one such project: to take only the politically significant ones, the various Trotskyist grouplets within the real existing mass workers’ party, the Labour Party; the Socialist Workers Party within Respect; the Socialist Party (England and Wales) within the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party.

The fundamental step forward represented by the November 2006 conference which launched the Campaign for a Marxist Party was to reject this sort of ‘sect plus halfway house’ project in favour of an open struggle for a Marxist party.

Comrade Craig is perfectly open in asserting that the campaign should turn itself into a ‘revolutionary Marxist’ sect based on the Revolutionary Democratic Group’s ‘democratic permanent revolution’ theory working within a broader campaign for a ‘republican socialist party’. Comrade Sharpe offers us another sort of ‘revolutionary Marxist’ sect operating within a broader campaign for a ‘mass workers’ party’. But he is less open about it than comrade Craig. His April 26 article tries to evade the issue.

What he really says

In the DSA draft programme comrade Sharpe writes the following:

“Basing themselves upon the correct view that it would be wrong to present a revolutionary platform as an ultimatum to an emerging movement for a workers’ party, they then make the assumption that it would be wrong to consciously struggle for the future workers’ party to adopt a revolutionary perspective. What is not apparently understood by the Socialist Party is the soundness of Trotsky’s approach: namely that the struggle to develop a workers’ party is a creative process, and therefore the question of whether it has a revolutionary or reformist standpoint is an algebraic expression of the political conflict between emergent reformist and revolutionary tendencies.”

And:

“Nevertheless, the important and primary issue is still to develop an independent workers’ party in opposition to the pro-bourgeois politics of the Labour Party and Conservative Party because of the necessity to provide the working class with a political voice, and in this context the struggle for the development of the workers’ party occurs. Without the workers’ party, the working class lacks political representation, and this is why the struggle to popularise the revolutionary programme goes alongside the formation of the workers’ party. Hence the standpoint of the revolutionary programme is not necessarily undermined by the support for the development of the workers’ party: on the contrary the struggle to develop a workers’ party can provide a mass basis to vindicate the perspective of a revolutionary platform.”

And:

“In contrast, the approach of the CMP assumes that only within the organisational form of a revolutionary party will it be possible to develop the validity of a revolutionary programme. This is why the standpoint of a workers’ party is considered to be an opportunist tactic. In other words, the view of the Socialist Party is considered to be the standpoint most appropriate to the inherent reformist logic of the workers’ party. What is not asked by either the proponents of the reformist conception of the workers’ party or the pure revolutionary party is whether the organisational form that is being advocated can advance class-consciousness.”⁴ 

These passages are perfectly clearly defending the two-track line: mass party - in some way not Marxist - now, with a small ‘revolutionary’ tendency within it.

In his April 26 article, comrade Sharpe backs off to some extent from these formulations. We are told:

“The perspective attempts to address the lack of political representation of the working class at this present moment in time, but what happens in empirical reality may well result in a situation that contradicts this perspective. For example, previous attempts to develop some sort of workers’ party - the Socialist Labour Party, Socialist Alliance, Scottish Socialist Party - have ended in failure, and the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party is floundering because of the misleadership of the Socialist Party.”

And:

“On the other hand, we have established the CMP, which although small has important cadres with much political experience and theoretical knowledge. It may be possible to build a revolutionary party that is not confronted with the issue of what to do about a workers’ party. In this sense reality would significantly diverge from the standpoint of the draft programme.”

But in fact this is still within the framework of the two-track theory: the long-term goal is, and the CMP is to aim for, a ‘revolutionary’ party based on agreement to a theory: ie, a Trot sect. This is what comrade Sharpe’s 95-page DSA draft programme offers us. It is only in what are, frankly, unlikely contingent circumstances that this Trot sect could build itself directly among the masses: according to comrade Sharpe, present circumstances - ie, “the lack of political representation of the working class at this present moment in time” - demands a ‘workers’ party’ orientation.

Debate and campaign

Now it is perfectly proper that we should debate this question, and - as we have shown with comrades Craig and Sharpe - the pages of the Weekly Worker are open to this discussion. The question is whether we should devote time and energy to debating this question within the Campaign for a Marxist Party. What comrades Craig and Sharpe have in different ways defended amounts, in substance, to a proposal that the campaign should cease to exist by turning itself into a standard far-left groupuscule which campaigns - in the here and now - for a standard far-left-sponsored fake-reformist halfway-house front. It amounts to a proposal that the decision to launch the campaign in November 2006 was wrong. Well, the decision may turn out to have been wrong. But the surest way to make it be wrong is to waste time debating over and over again whether the campaign should exist at all.

As far as the CPGB is concerned, we remain of the opinion that the present task is to campaign, not for a ‘revolutionary party’ which is code for yet another sect, but for a party based on the fundamentals of Marxist politics: that is, for working class political independence, for extreme democracy both in the state and in the class movement, and for the international unity of the working class.

If the campaign were to choose to go down the road comrade Sharpe proposes in the matter of campaigning for a ‘workers’ party’, it would become a complete waste of space. We would certainly regard this as a split question: it would be to go back on the original decision to launch the campaign.

I stress in the matter of campaigning for a ‘workers’ party’. There are a good many other differences between the CPGB’s views and comrade Sharpe’s 95-page DSA draft programme which are not split questions. We would be happy to debate these out within the framework of a united campaign and if this was how it turned out, to continue to fight for our views as a minority grouping. But rejection of the sect/front two-track approach, proposed in different ways by comrades Craig and Sharpe, is from our point of view non-negotiable.

I should perhaps also state in passing that the CPGB does not propose what comrade Sharpe seems to think the CMP position is: ie, that a ‘revolutionary party based on a revolutionary programme’ should be counterposed to the actual existing class movement. On the contrary, we favour fighting for a Marxist programme in the existing class movement - which at present means the trade unions, the Labour Party and the existing organised far left and its ‘independent’ periphery. If, by some contingency, a ‘new mass workers’ party’ based on a programme which was less than Marxist was formed, we would argue for fighting within it: this was our approach in regard to the left-nationalist, statist and bureaucratic-centralist Socialist Labour Party and to the left-nationalist Scottish Socialist Party, neither of which was close to being a mass party. The point is that it is not the job of the Marxists to campaign now for a new and more leftwing version of the Labour Party. Our job is to campaign for a Marxist party.

What sort of programme?

The point of my April 19 article was to argue, briefly, that the CMP should not adopt the sort of programme comrade Sharpe proposes: that is, a ‘propaganda’/‘polemical’/‘theoretical discovery’ programme. Comrade Sharpe’s 95-page DSA draft programme text, I argued, is a splendid example of why this sort of programme is undesirable.

In this context, the first point I made was that comrade Sharpe’s proposal is that the CMP should adopt as its programme a document which includes substantial formal denunciation of the theoretical ideas put forward by (in the order in which they appear in comrade Sharpe’s text) myself, comrade Jack Conrad and comrade Hillel Ticktin. I said that “if the campaign is to define itself by [such] a programme ... it might as well proceed immediately to a formal split with us [ie, the comrades whose ideas are denounced].”

Comrade Pearson says that DSA comrades were “shocked” by this suggestion. He says that the DSA has “made it clear that what Phil has written is a document for discussion”. He concludes: “The CPGB used to proclaim its support for the principle that a Communist Party would be built through open ideological struggle. Surely then, unless there has been a change of thinking, the programme of the Communist Party will be arrived at through open ideological struggle.”

In similar vein, comrade Sharpe says: “If these issues are a not a matter of legitimate debate for the CMP, could Mike tell me what the CMP can actually discuss? ... surely an open and public discussion of this vitally important issue will attract rather than repel support for the CMP?” and “how can discussion of this question and its relation to programme be a splitting issue, unless it is artificially and arbitrarily turned into a question of a split in the form of ultimatums by one or more sides in this dispute?”

These arguments are nonsense. Of course these are legitimate issues for discussion. But a programme is not a discussion document. It is the basis of the identification of a political organisation and of membership in that organisation. A draft programme, therefore, needs to be something which can be amended and voted on and published as the collective position of the organisation.

The question is simple. Is comrade Sharpe’s document presented as a draft programme? If so, the proposal is that this document or an amended version should be presented for a vote as the draft programme of the CMP. If it is adopted, it will then be the basis of the political identification of the CMP and of membership in the campaign.

And, yes, it is simply true that if the CMP adopted a programme - a basis of political identification of the campaign and of membership in it - which included denouncing the supposed errors of CPGB authors and of comrade Ticktin, the comrades denounced would need at the very least to consider seriously whether to split immediately.

Moreover, as far as I am concerned, I want to see a Marxist party in which in principle several of the people whose ideas are denounced in the DSA draft programme and who are not currently members could become members: just for example, Andrew Glyn and Rob Sewell. I certainly do not want rejection of ‘Glynism’ and ‘Sewellism’ to be part of the basis of the campaign.

In fact, hidden in this issue is a much larger one. If the programme is to be of the type comrade Sharpe proposes, the campaign would actually turn itself into a confessional sect defined by agreement on questions of theory. We cannot expect that the denunciations of the Macnairite, Conradite, Cornforthite, Sanchez-Vazquezite, Glynite, Sewellite, Boggsite, Gilroyite, and Ticktinite deviations which make up the substance of the 95-page DSA draft programme would be the end of the story. In due course, new deviations and new denunciations voted through as part of the basis of the campaign would inevitably follow, and there would be added to the programme denunciations of the Jonesite, Spencerite, Pearsonite, Biddulphite and so on deviations. This is not a fantasy. It is the uniform pattern of the evolution of the programmes of the Trotskyist and Maoist sects.

Comrade Pearson says that the DSA has “made it clear that what Phil has written is a document for discussion”. In contrast, on the DSA website it is presented as a draft programme, and comrade Sharpe characterised it in his April 26 article as “the draft programme written by me”. Comrade Sharpe has argued, in his piece in Marxist Voice which forms the first part of the DSA draft programme text, for a programme of this type.

So which is it to be, comrades? Discussion text, not for voting, not presented as the political basis of the campaign, and therefore not a draft programme? Or draft programme for a confessional sect - which means, if it was adopted, not merely a short-term split, but an endless dynamic of splits into smaller and smaller pieces?

I very much hope that DSA comrades will go with the apparent line of comrade Pearson’s letter: that comrade Sharpe’s 95-page DSA draft programme is a discussion document not presented for voting and not presented as the possible political basis of the campaign.

But it has to be recognised that to go with this approach is also, inherently, to reject not merely comrade Sharpe’s current draft text, but also the method by which it is constructed and the sort of programme it seeks to be.

The Campaign for a Marxist Party was faced at the outset with the question: is this to be a campaign for an open Marxist party or for a new confessional sect which operates through halfway-house fronts? The November 2006 conference rejected the sect-and-fronts option. Phil Sharpe, like Dave Craig, seeks to reopen that decision. The next conference of the campaign on June 23 needs to make sure that we do not reopen it, in order to allow the campaign to move forward.

Secondary issues

Comrade Sharpe’s April 26 article takes up a number of further issues which I regard as secondary, and concludes with a substantive argument for the sort of ‘programme’ - ie, propaganda tract - he is proposing.

Among the secondary issues, the material on ‘peace campaigning’ and ‘anti-imperialism’ is welcome, because in both areas comrade Sharpe’s article contains major improvements on the formulations in the DSA draft programme text. Since these issues are genuinely secondary as far as the present debate is concerned, I will not trace out the way in which the article differs from the DSA draft programme text.

A more substantial issue is that I said that comrade Sharpe’s method produces the result that “What we have instead is polemics against a small number of authors whose work comrade Sharpe has recently read” and that, since a number of these authors belong to debates of the 1970s-80s, “The polemical method of constructing a programme, in fact, has the consequence that the draft is immediately and violently dated.” Comrade Sharpe in reply charges me with “a crude type of intellectual snobbery” (a charge which is dead easy to make as a smear on someone who happens to be, as I am, employed as an academic).

Nothing of the sort is intended. A draft programme based on polemics against a number of authors I had recently read would be as arbitrary as comrade Sharpe’s draft, if not more so. The point is that a draft party programme is necessarily a collective effort. It may borrow, as the CPGB’s Draft programme does, from the historical programmes of the movement. But it is, of course, necessary to go beyond this. And to do so requires collective work, drawing on the full range of the experience of the participants in the organisation which is working up the draft programme. Any single individual’s reading will be an insufficient basis. No doubt someone will have to provide a summary draft when we get to the stage at which a text is being prepared for amendment and voting; but this person will rely on the collective work, the work of a number of individuals, which has enabled the organisation to collectively identify the relevant issues.

A programme which was both constructed of extended polemics of the sort comrade Sharpe conducts, and took into account a full grasp of the current state of political ideas in the full range of the political issues a party confronts - or even the narrower range covered by comrade Sharpe - would not be 95 pages long. It would be at least 950 pages long.

It would also - even if it addressed current trends - rapidly become dated. Let us take a single example from comrade Sharpe’s text: philosophy. Comrade Sharpe addresses two books, Maurice Cornforth’s Communism and philosophy (1980) and Alfredo Sanchez Vazquez’s The philosophy of praxis (1977).

Philosophy

Cornforth (1909-1980) was an ‘official communist’ hack-philosopher; Communism and philosophy represents his attempt, at the end of his life, to fit his philosophical ideas to Eurocommunism. Comrade Sharpe follows Cornforth (and the then-orthodox critics of Engels) in denying ‘dialectics of nature’; it is then necessary to reinterpret dialectic, not as a method which must be used in order to theorise because of the nature of the world, but as a method which is somehow self-standing: “the role of philosophy is vital to the process of developing and enriching Marxist theory” (DSA draft programme p31).

Since 1980, however, mathematicians and physical scientists have reinstated through ‘chaos’ and ‘complexity’ theories much of the effects proposed in Engels’s Dialectics of nature: for an early example, see Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers’ Order out of chaos (1984). So the arguments against ‘dialectics of nature’ are effectively dead and gone. Moreover, in the philosophy of the social sciences there has been and gone a temporary trend in favour of the ‘dialectical critical realism’ of Roy Bhaskar: comrade Sharpe must be aware of this, since not so long ago he and comrade Phil Walden were fans of the Bhaskar school. Equally, since 1980, the authors who were Eurocommunists then have moved way beyond Cornforth into ‘analytical Marxism’ (the trend started by GA Cohen’s 1978 work, Karl Marx’s theory of history: a defence) and then into acceptance of methodological individualism, marginalist economics and so on. Marxism becomes replaced by an ethical socialism.

By 1985 it would already have been clear, therefore, that a polemic based on Cornforth no longer addressed a live political-theoretical trend.

This is less true of Sanchez Vazquez. The philosophy of praxis was originally written in 1967 and formed part of the current of ideas of the 1950s-70s ‘new left’, which still has wide, albeit very dilute, influence. Paradoxically, however, comrade Sharpe’s critique of praxis theory leads him to the same conclusion as the ‘analytical Marxists’: that is, the dominance of ethics - “without the highest ethical standards the struggle for communism is politically undermined, as has been shown by the ethical inconsistencies of various forms of opportunism, such as social democracy and Stalinism” (DSA draft programme p36).

Suppose that we were now to write a polemical draft ‘programme’ which included an elaborate critique of currently ascendant philosophical ideas. It would probably have to focus extensively on the critique of ethical ideas based on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and the ‘human rights’ ideology, which is currently ascendant. But within a couple of years, it is likely that we would find that this ideology had been displaced by some other - and with it some other philosophical school. At the moment traditional-religious ideas look like a likely contender: what in politics takes the form of the promotion of faith schools, in the domain of philosophical ideology takes the form of a revival of Thomas Aquinas (c1225-1274).

Comrade Sharpe’s method thus produces a text which is either already out of date (the existing text) or, if it were up to date, would very rapidly become out of date. A programme which is to have any long-term value will not be a statement primarily of what we are against, but of what we are for.

Class struggles and programme

The final section of comrade Sharpe’s article repeats the arguments for the ‘propaganda’/‘polemical’/‘theoretical discovery’ type of programme and against what he calls an ‘action programme’, which are also found in his article in Marxist Voice and the first part of the DSA draft programme text.

The core of the argument is that proposing what comrade Sharpe calls an ‘action programme’ - ie, a summary of what the party we seek to build should stand for - according to comrade Sharpe presupposes “that the working class is merely waiting to be mobilised in the class struggle” (April 26). As an example, comrade Sharpe asks why the 2003 mass anti-war movement did not lead to the overthrow of New Labour. He answers that the cause is “the lack of any consistent anti-capitalist and left-inclined trend within the mass movement, which was limited to ethical and moral protests about war. This was the ideological effect of Thatcherism, serious defeats of the working class and the absence of any effective revolutionary party. In general people have great difficulty in grasping the communist alternative because their present ideological and political horizon is limited to capitalism.” Hence, comrade Sharpe argues, “We have to seriously put the arguments for communism to a generation that has lost any political relation to the potential for an alternative society.”

So for comrade Sharpe what is central is propaganda for workers’ control like (yet unlike) the Institute for Workers’ Control launched by the International Marxist Group with some trade union and Labour lefts in the 1960s: “what is being elaborated is propaganda for workers’ control in order to make propaganda for communism. The question of the role of workers’ control only becomes meaningful if a theoretical attempt is made to indicate why it can be the mediating mechanism between overcoming the limitations of the present and the promoter of an alternative historical future, a future known as communism.”

At one level this is true. We do have to put forward the basic arguments for communism. In point of fact, CPGB does a fair amount of this - for example, in material we have published on green politics and environmental issues.⁵  Individual authors can also do it, whether in the form of theoretical writing, polemic or utopian fiction. It is just that this is not a task which can be done in the form of a programme. What is needed to do it is as many active writers as possible, a public press, a publishing house and so on.

At a second level it is utterly misleading. In my own past experience, similar arguments based on similar premises were put forward by leaders of the IMG/Socialist League in 1977-78 and 1983-84: no mass class struggles could arise, the comrades said, because of the absence of any perceived alternative to the existing order. On both occasions, the claims were promptly followed by the outbreak of large mass class struggles: the 1978 Fords strike and 1978-79 Winter of Discontent, and the 1984-85 miners’ strike.

Mass class struggles, in other words, do not depend on the prior strength or weakness of the far left or understanding of the ideas of communism. If they did, they would never have started at all. They depend on the underlying objective dynamics of the relation of capital and labour.

Why have no large-scale mass class struggles broken out in the recent past? In part, this is certainly the result of the defeat of the miners’ strike. But there is also something much more fundamental. Since the defeat of the miners’ strike, Britain has played for the US-led world order the international role of a poster-child for neoliberalism, deregulation, privatisation and financialisation. Everyone everywhere is urged to see Thatcherism as the road to economic success (most recently the French).

But in order for this to be the case Britain has to appear as an economic success story. How this has actually been done is in the first place that Britain has exemptions from the US which allow London to operate as an offshore financial centre, and secondly that, while everyone else is urged or forced to pursue a hard-money policy, Britain has been allowed to pursue a soft-money policy.

The net result is that in the first place, while a good deal of unemployment is hidden by statistical methods, there is genuinely relatively low unemployment compared to the main continental countries; and secondly, average real earnings excluding City bonuses rose continuously from 1998 to 2006.⁶  Under the Blair government too, there have been genuine, if limited, reforms: increases in jobs and wages in the public sector, and some significant improvements in the benefits available to the poorest. These are not the sort of conditions - of perceived open attacks on wages and living and working conditions - which produce large-scale mass class struggles. When the conditions change, the mass struggles will emerge, however weak the far left is.

The shadow of Stalinism

It is also misleading in another sense. The far left is currently marginal for a simple reason. We are still in the shadow of bureaucratic ‘socialism’ and its failure. Even among those who are too young to remember the fall of the USSR, its echoes live on. One of the primary ways in which they live on is in the fragmentation and petty bureaucratic dictatorships of the far-left groups, which constantly remind people of Stalinism.

To overcome this problem requires us to show that we are fighters for more democracy than capitalism offers us, not for the less democracy than capitalism of bureaucratic ‘socialism’ and the far left groups. It means fighting for extreme democracy in today’s capitalist politics, in the broad workers’ movement and in our own organisations.

Raising workers’ control ideas is part of that struggle. It cannot be a substitute for fighting for extreme democracy, because (as the Yugoslav experience showed) control at the workplace level is no substitute for subordination of the managers to the managed in decision-making for the state and economy as a whole. That subordination requires democratic-republican principles and institutions across the board - in workers’ parties and in the state, not just in the workplace.

Full circle

This brings us back in a sense full circle. Comrade Sharpe clings to what is in substance a traditional new-left Trotskyist conception of ‘revolution’: hence his polemics against Macnair and Conrad in the first part of the 95-page DSA draft programme text. But this conception is utterly utopian, because it fails to engage effectively with the question of political democracy at state level, which is the key to the working class taking over the means of production as a whole.

The result of this utopianism is that comrade Sharpe accepts the marginality the far left currently finds itself in: the only way out he can see is better theoretical propaganda. This, in turn, leads us back to the standard far-left twin track of confessional sect (a ‘Sharpeist’ group based on a ‘propaganda’/‘polemical’/‘theoretical discovery’ type of programme) working within a campaign for a halfway-house ‘mass workers’ party’.

This may not be inevitable. But comrades who wish to propose a ‘workers’ control strategy’ or ‘transitional’ programme as an alternative to the CPGB’s maximum-minimum approach need to use a different method and a different type of programme to comrade Sharpe’s. Comrade Sharpe’s method and type of programme can only be a proposal for a new confessional sect.

Notes

 1. ‘Propaganda for a lost generation’ Weekly Worker April 26.

 2. ‘Programme, or ad hoc reflections?’ Weekly Worker April 19.

 3. http://sademocracy.org.uk/Programme%20forum.htm.

 4. pp8-10, emphases added.

 5. Collected at www.cpgb.org.uk/theory/ecology.htm.

 6. Hamish McRae The Independent April 26.

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