And the distance seemed short enough from Point A to Point B
Your favourite feeling was the ground falling out from beneath your feet
You don’t have to say sorry
For all the things you failed to do
You don’t need to say sorry
For all the times when everything fell through
From Preoccupations/Memory
Pro-partyism, in the sense of an attachment of Marxists towards the idea of a multi-faction Communist Party (i.e., not a confessional sect around dogmas or leaders; or a Labour Party mark two), has started to be espoused by small groups of comrades in Britain. This is at a stage of tentative small circles in the shape of Communist Future in Manchester, blogs such as The Partyist and a relaunched Prometheus journal, but, nevertheless, is still a promising development.
Where did these groups come from? To answer that question means unpicking some history and tracing an unexpected outcome whereby the ideas of Mike Macnair travelled to the USA to get traction and then returned to the UK via the orbit of the Cosmonaut website and the Marxist Unity Group to influence British comrades. (I guess I may be an example of that trend given that I also write for Cosmonaut as a general preference when not writing here.)
Up to 1991, we had the official CPGB, which was liquidated by the Eurocommunists. This multi-factional group comprised an important section of the advanced part of the class until perhaps the mid-1980s. However, this organisation was hamstrung by a long history of liquidationist politics, where it envisaged its role as a ginger group to the Labour Party and the trade union movement. It tried to hide its factionalised existence with the operation of bureaucratic centralism where nearly all factions were spellbound by a chimera of formal unity. Despite internal divisions, most sections of the CPGB held on to a mythical view of its past where sentiment always trumped rationality. This was an extremely weak pulse of pro-partyism and the CPGB’s old left oppositions had a very slow maturation in the post-war period.
The CPGB left
By the 1980s, the CPGB’s left was in a parlous state. The 1977 New Communist Party (NCP) split had marooned itself outside the main party, taking a slice of younger CPGB revolutionaries with it. Its politics were a less-developed version of the decrepit ones taking the CPGB to its grave. The Communist Campaign Group (CCG), forerunner of the 1988 Communist Party of Britain (CPB) split, limited itself to technical/bureaucratic manoeuvres (control of the Morning Star, the CPGB’s daily paper; and claiming it was not a faction but merely upholding the CPGB’s rulebook). This meant that the CPB saddled itself with a version of the liquidationist and pro-Labour Party British road socialism of the CPGB. This low-level split compounded the unpopularity of the CPB’s leaders who were seen by many CPGB activists as being responsible for stripping their party of its paper. The clannish Straight Left group was also mistrusted by the rest of the CPGB left for its toadying towards the Eurocommunists and for advocating Labour as a ‘federal’ party of the working class in preference to the CPGB. The Leninist faction did have the beginnings of a pro-party strategy in that it took on Lenin’s tactic of appealing to pro-party Mensheviks in the cause of struggling against liquidationist tendencies. Unfortunately, The Leninist had the devil’s own job in the 1980s CPGB to identify precisely whom its pro-party Menshevik constituency might be. Added to this, The Leninist was a miniscule grouplet that often only had single-figure membership; it was unpopular in CPGB circles due to its leaders having split with the NCP in 1977; and had alienated a key part of its target audience among Morning Star/CCG types by having voted for Eurocommunists when the struggle for control of the paper was underway.
Post-liquidation
Matters got rapidly worse after the old CPGB was liquidated in 1991. Straight Left limped on as a newspaper for some years but disintegrated as a faction. The CPB was effectively stillborn for its first decade and engaged in internal strife from the mid-1990s. The NCP had disintegrated into near extinction. The old Leninist faction rebranded itself as the CPGB-PCC; while it took very few activists from the old CPGB it had managed to gain around 30 active supporters. It attempted to spread beyond the confines of London and skirt the milieux of the old CPGB, positioning itself as a ‘combat party of a new type’ that could directly recruit what it called advanced workers and project itself as a proto-Communist Party. This phase of hyper-activism had largely run out of rope by the mid-1990s and attempts to cast the CPGB-PCC as a national organisation had failed by the close of the decade, cells in areas such as Manchester and Dundee having disintegrated over low-level differences. From around 1994, the CPGB-PCC had shifted to a policy of rapprochement towards far-left groups. This moved through a few phases: a) engagement with other micro-splits from the NCP (Communist Action Group, Open Polemic b) engagement with some of the micro-detritus of Trotskyism (International Bolshevik Tendency, Revolutionary Democratic Group) and c) involvement with projects that involved regrouping a reformist, socialist left with far-left factions (Socialist Labour Party [SLP], Socialist Alliance [SA]).
The problem with the unity projects under c) for the CPGB-PCC was they were never in favour, even formally, of a Communist Party but, rather, in the age of Tony Blair, of a reconstituted Labour Party that could re-enact the programme of the 1945 Attlee government. Trotskyist groups even connived in the Thatcherite rhetoric of the ‘death of communism’ and had adopted reformist and ‘left socialist’ politics that easily fed into the goal of a Labour Party mark two. By the time we reached Respect in the mid-2000s, the Socialist Workers Party’s then leadership of Lindsey German and John Rees were on a clear liquidationist heading in favour of the popular front and distinctly non-socialist Respect. More recently, Left Unity saw ex-Trots and ex-communists openly pining for the ‘spirit of 1945’ before their sordid little grief hole was destroyed by Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘spirit of 1995’ project in the real Labour Party.
This was an unpropitious environment for partyism, to put it mildly. Even in the SLP and SA, where the Weekly Worker became an unofficial news organ, the CPGB-PCC was strongly disliked and consistently subjected to anti-democratic witch-hunts. It made few recruits and won very few to the idea of a reforged multi-faction Communist Party. When the growth of the internet meant the Weekly Worker lost its monopoly of unofficial far-left news, activists from other trends quickly moved away from it and now the paper has precious little that is distinctive from other left publications.
Books and bookmen
But a faction that had obviously run out of puff by the mid-2000s did eventually provide significant inspiration for new pro-party forces by bypassing the British Trotskyist/post-Trotskyist milieux that had proven infertile. Ben Lewis and Mark Fischer (who deserve most of the credit for this venture) of the CPGB-PCC were determined by the late 2000s their faction should get serious again about producing books (an earlier series of books in the 1990s by Jack Conrad hadn’t sold well). This resulted in Mike Macnair’s Revolutionary strategy (2008), which ended up becoming a major re-statement of partyism. It coincided with the burgeoning popularity of the works of Lars T Lih on the history of Bolshevism. While Lih is not a communist, his picture of Russian Bolshevism dovetailed with that drawn by The Leninist in the 1980s, where Lenin’s struggle against liquidationism in the RSDLP was intended to be a multi-factional affair and not presaged on a monolithic ‘party of a new type’ of the Stalinist/Trotskyist imagination. Macnair refashioned the CPGB-PCC’s pro-partyism, placing it inside a more effective historical narrative (he tells a clear story of the far left’s unambiguous failure), combining it with a radical critique of Bolshevism and the early politics of the Comintern. As might have been expected, the book initially made zero impact on British Trots and ex-Trots. But Revolutionary strategy eventually spread to other parts of the world (the Netherlands and the USA, in particular) where leftism hadn’t been quite so heavily funnelled through a desire to re-create forms of reformist labourism.
In the USA, the book partly inspired the Cosmonaut website and the subsequent formation of the Marxist Unity Group. This has perked the interest of those communists back in the UK who are very unlikely to get seriously involved in the CPGB-PCC. Hence the current phenomenon of blogs and small circles with similar pro-partyist ideas.
In Britain, the Morning Star’s CPB, alongside its Young Communist League (YCL), has recently shown signs of life. Some of this is about the dynamics of a post-Corbyn left where the CPB has picked up young people who, back in 2017, would have been pulled into the Labour Party. Attempts to re-adopt a more formal communist identity (the hammer and sickle, using Stalin as a symbol of anti-capitalism and so on) are undoubtedly a crude attempt to critique the innate reformism of the CPB. However, recent appearances of the YCL on London pro-Palestine demos suggest the comrades have started to become incorporated into the turgid politics of their CPB parents. The more militant communist appearance of two years previous seems to have been diluted. CPB leaders such as Rob Griffiths (in his recent The gleam of socialism book) insist that there will be no change to the faction’s strategic goal of a ‘Labour government of a new type’ (i.e., a left-wing Labour administration assisted by the CPB). This despite the Corbyn debacle proving that the Labour left has an umbilical cord to the pro-British state Labour right. It is thus doubtful whether we could even class the CPB as ‘pro-party Menshevik’ in the sense that it poses no alternative to Labour’s state-loyalism such as that found in the Erfurt-type programmes that even the official CPGB was espousing (in mutilated form) in 1939. The International Marxist Tendency’s Revolutionary Communist Party has swerved a minor rhetorical dalliance with the foundation of the CPGB in 1920 in favour of an RCP 1944 vintage – a Trotskyist confessional sect.
Britain thus has a highly tortured history of partyism, which emerged late as an oppositional idea in the old CPGB. While we have remarked that the CPB split was essentially stillborn, that could be said of all the factions mentioned in this piece. Britain didn’t even develop a viable Maoist movement in the 1960s and 1970s, unlike its more substantive US brethren, and there has never been any true pro-party Menshevik trends to relate to. The liquidationism afflicting the old CPGB has become endemic across the British left and pro-party trends are still marginalised. The only means of breaking this cycle is to unite our current small circles and publications, and found a Marxist Unity Group to become a serious pole of attraction in the wider left. For the first time I can remember, pro-party ideas are becoming more popular because they represent the true history of Bolshevism. It would be criminal to waste such an opportunity.
Lawrence Parker 