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John Sullivan on British Trotskyism
As Soon As This Pub Closes
THE Communist Party was until recently easily the largest group on the British left. It quickly shook off its revolutionary origins and became a model Stalinist party which enthusiastically cheered on the Moscow Trials in the 1930s and the murder of their own comrades in Eastern Europe in the 1950s. The core of the party was formed by trade union bureaucrats, who, once helped to power by the party machine, behaved much like other bureaucrats, to the puzzlement of the more naive party members. Why should an established pillar of the labour movement now be disintegrating because of disagreements which seem minor compared to the storms it has weathered in the past?
The party never really recovered from the effects of Khrushchev’s speech spilling the beans on Uncle Joe. Since then it has been like a clock slowly running down. As it lost its appeal to militant workers and rebellious youth, its search for a domestic market led it, in clear breach of its franchise, to make cautious criticisms of the Soviet Union. Such apostasy produced a pro-Moscow faction, half of which split away in 1977 to form the New Communist Party (NCP). The other half of the faction did not agree with that action and stayed within the party, while publishing a fortnightly journal, Straight Left, which advocates entry into the Labour Party. The monolith had begun to crumble. The NCP’s bid for the Moscow franchise was not accepted, but it has been recognised by Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Czechoslovakia. The CPGB leadership, emboldened by the NCP’s failure to grow, continued to take their distance from Moscow, but that led the faction which controlled the party’s newspaper, the Morning Star, to break away in 1985 and begin to form a new party.
Outsiders are puzzled by the contrast between the violent factional hatred expressed by the participants in the dispute and the absence of any clear political differences, but this is traditional in the Communist Party. Although discussion focused on finance and interpretation of party rules, the dispute concerned the party’s whole marketing strategy and therefore its survival. By gently criticising specific actions of the Russian bureaucracy, while still trying to retain the franchise, the party’s leadership had avoided a serious split, but at the cost of losing any clear profile. Market analysts, when asked to evaluate rival survival plans, favoured the one produced by the party’s theoretical journal Marxism Today, which proposed to dump class struggle in favour of a broad alliance of feminists, Gays and community workers, and a friendly relationship with Dr Owen’s SDP, which was then riding high. As Marxism Today was the party’s only success story, its faction got the support of the leadership, including the General Secretary Gordon McLennan, a pragmatic Scotsman who would not recognise a principle if it came up and pissed in his shoe. The journals contributors include Professor Hobsbawm, who cut his teeth under Zhdanov, went on to become one of Hampstead’s leading advocates of guerrilla war (in Latin America) and eventually a major influence on Neil Kinnock, who finds his ice-pick an invaluable addition to the traditional arsenal of bans and proscriptions in hammering the Labour Left. However, some leading party members argued that the party should stick to the traditional trade union market.
Morning Star editor Tony Chater sneered at the veteran bureaucrats who had switched from Soviet Weekly to the New Musical Express, and argued that while the market for a pro-Kremlin paper might be small it was steady, while the pop culture scene was overcrowded.
Once free from party control, the Morning Star dropped its flirtation with liberalism, and its pages are once again full of charming articles about the successes of Bulgarian agriculture and the delights of Soviet child care provision. It benefits from the 1950s nostalgia boom, and sales in pensioners clubs have shot up. In 1985, it seemed that the Morning Star faction would soon fill the space vacated by the Eurocommunists, but Gorbachev’s promise of reforms in Russia scared them shitless. If Gorbachev was not on their side, perhaps history was not either. Nevertheless the faction pressed on and formed an organisation called the Communist Charter as a holding operation until the CPGB could be ‘reconstituted’. The launching date, set for August 1988, the twentieth anniversary of the entry of Russian tanks into Prague, had to be brought forward to April because of ‘Euro’ harassment. However, independence revealed disagreements which had been obscured by the fight against the ‘Euros’. The new party is much smaller than Militant or the SWP, and is forced to compete in the same market. The Morning Star began to take a much less hostile line towards the IRA, although the Russians are not really keen on that body. The numerous pensioners in the faction were disappointed that Gay Lib was not abandoned once the break with the ‘Euros’ was made. However, the major disagreement was with the camarilla around trade union baron Ken Gill, the boss of TASS. The new party was clearly going to be a very small platform, and so Gill decided not to join it, a decision which was bound to be followed by most of his underlings. Some faction members, eager to regain a tradition of trade union militancy, were glad to see Gill depart. The Morning Star’s extreme sensitivity to the feelings of the trade union bureaucracy makes it a very dull read.
The evolution of the new Labour Left caused problems for all factions of the CPGB. Marxism Today is by far the biggest influence on such people, but its touting for the Social Democrats caused a lot of ill feeling. The ‘Tankies’ want to re-establish their traditional alliance with the Labour Left, but find it difficult to communicate with people who take holidays in Nepal, instead of going to the Black Sea like ordinary people. The CPGB leadership were heartened by the ‘Tankies’’ confusion, but their departure revealed divisions in its own ranks. In the 1987 election, the party encouraged tactical voting, while simultaneously running its own candidates! The poor showing and subsequent split in the SDP was bad news for those who had seen themselves as marriage brokers between Owen and Kinnock, and prompted some ‘Euros’ to move half a step back towards the labour movement. Others want a loose discussion group set up which will not be tied towards any particular social class, while the harder right-wing Mercador faction, have not given up on Dr Owen and long for their departed leaders Sue Slipman and Jimmy Reid to return to them.
The divisions among the ‘Tankies’ are even more complex. Straight Left, once the largest such faction, resolutely declares itself to be party loyalist and hostile to the Morning Star, although once the split is finalised, the party leadership will no longer need their services and will give them the bum’s rush. The new pro-Moscow party cannot possibly attain a membership of 2,000 unless Straight Left and the NCP sign up, and negotiations are currently at a delicate stage. The Leninist, which split from the NCP to re-enter the CPGB in the early 1980s, is not being offered a seat at the negotiating table as it has criticised both Stalin and Gorbachev. The group is the British affiliate of a split from the Turkish Communist Party, an interesting reversal of the pattern where agencies from the advanced countries set up shop in the undeveloped world. Alone among the ‘Tankie’ factions, it opposes the Popular Front, except in Turkey, where, apparently, special conditions apply. I fear this dish will prove too spicy for the British palate. Proletarian, a much smaller faction, has more limited ambitions, and bases its entire claim to leadership on the fact that Russian officials have appeared on its platform. It would no more dream of doing its own thinking than a MacDonald’s concessionaire would devise his own menu. Now weakened by the defection of the Partisan faction, it is in poor shape to face the newly-competitive world of modern communism, and will be excluded from the lash-up headed by Communist Charter. There is only one certainty about that organisation. No serious political discussion will be allowed, as the participants are deeply divided on many issues and have no experience of, nor taste for, an open discussion. Disagreements about economic strategy, attitudes to the Labour Party or the trade union bureaucracy will be settled by discreet horse trading: old habits die hard.
Current difficulties have moved Yevgiev Legaton, head of the British desk at the International Department of the CPSU, to consider withdrawing from the quicksand and placing a contract with Saatchi and Saatchi, but Stonewall, the most discreet of the CPGB’s factions, is trying to persuade him not to do so. It argues that neither the leading bureaucrats nor the great majority of party members are ‘Euros’: they have merely been panicked into embracing a fashion which is already fading and can by silence, patience and cunning be won back to the party’s traditional place on the centre left. Stonewall believes that Gorbachev’s popularity makes the polarisation between anti-Kremlin elements and British Brezhnevites unnecessary and outdated. If the core of the party bureaucracy can be persuaded to break with Marxism Today, a reconciliation can be arranged with the Morning Star, Straight Left can be seen off and representations made to the Afghans and Ethiopians to have the NCP’s franchise terminated. Stonewall would also like to get rid of the Furies, the boiler-suited radical feminists who demand a curfew for men and whose systematic harassment of Arthur Scargill has caused great offence to party members of both sexes. Stonewall claims to represent the great majority of party members, although the ‘Euros’ dismiss them as a bunch of pensioners out of touch with modern life. Both may be right: if a referendum were held it is likely that Stonewall’s view would prevail, but the whole momentum of the party is provided by active minorities intent on a split, which the faction is powerless to prevent.
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Last updated on 28.7.2007