Notes on the recent crisis in the CPGB-PCC

The recent dispute in the CPGB-PCC (publishers of the Weekly Worker), ostensibly over tactics and principles when working with the Labour left, must still seem relatively opaque to outsiders.

Just to make things clear from the get-go, I sympathised with ‘Comrade X’ in this argument, after it was inferred by the Provisional Central Committee (the CPGB’s leadership body) that she was in some way guilty of sabotaging the organisation’s work in the Labour Left Alliance (LLA). I thought this was a perfectly ridiculous notion that seemed to be setting the CPGB on a path to sect madness. Comrade X resigned her position in the organisation and has, to the best of my knowledge, not returned. There have been other departures since then and it is clear that other comrades are disaffected in one way or another and in a process of phased withdrawal.

I don’t think anyone on the left should take any particular pleasure as to the current travails of the CPGB-PCC. I am not a supporter of the Socialist Workers’ Party or the Socialist Party in England and Wales, or of anything much in their particular traditions, but I do understand if those organisations move into crisis then that has a harmful impact on everyone in and around the left. Similarly, if the CPGB continues its descent into darkness, or the Weekly Worker winks out of existence, then that would damage all of the left. So, to those who would use this article as an excuse for sectarian gloating: do please grow up.

A matter of principle?
I must also make it clear that I don’t accept the CPGB-PCC’s interpretation of this dispute: that it is about the dereliction of principles in relation to Labourism, which has been the charge laid at Comrade X’s door. In PCC member Peter Manson’s words in the Weekly Worker: “A long-standing former member of ours ended up effectively running the new [LLA], once the [Labour Representation Committee] pulled out, and as LLA secretary she felt obliged to reflect the views of the ‘broad’ majority on the organising group in bulletins, website statements, etc.”[1] Comrade X has rejected any such charges. But why is this PCC line (or cover-up) wrong?

The PCC argued in February 2020: “We attempted to draw out the political differences at the 25 January AGM [of the CPGB]. We presented a clear set of formulations. E.g. 22 theses and our proposals for the Labour Left Alliance. Our intention was to allow for a full, frank and honest debate. But no serious, frank or honest debate took place.”[2] But this was news to Comrade X and other CPGB members. As Daniel Harvey argued: “… as I remember in our [25 January] AGM only two months before the same leader [Jack Conrad] complimenting our comrade [X], calling our comrades’ work in the Labour Left Alliance ‘brilliant’, and that they were in no way being ‘singled out’ with the set of theses that were presented at that meeting. But at the same time, the PCC said in a later statement that those theses were presented so that there could be a ‘frank, open and honest debate’, which, they continued, ‘never in fact occurred’. As our comrade said afterwards, how could there be: ‘How was I supposed to know that the theses were all meant as a criticism of me?’ Especially, you might add, when they tell you the complete opposite at the time.”[3]

So, there is the strong suspicion that these so-called ‘departures from political principle’ on the part of Comrade X have been added post festum as a justification for her resignation, which blew up over a yawn-inducing squabble over the submission, or non-submission, of a constitution to the Labour Left Alliance founding conference. Comrade X was expected to take the rap and the dispute seemingly got angry and personal very quickly, with Comrade X then resigning. Adding to the impression of extreme artificiality and having to dig themselves out of a very deep hole (Comrade X was widely admired in the CPGB for her organisational and technical skills), the PCC then attempted to move the issue into overdrive.

A PCC motion to its March aggregate said: “The future of the organisation is at stake. Either we determine to work as a disciplined collective or we drift into becoming a mere collection of individuals, each anarchistically doing their own thing.”[4] This motion also clumsily attempted to defend the insinuation against Comrade X that she had sabotaged the work of the organisation: “The demand that the PCC ‘withdraw the strong implication – made without evidence – that the late submission of the draft constitution motion to the Labour Left Alliance was a result of conscious sabotage’ is not only a muddled formulation. How can you ‘withdraw’ an ‘implication’, even a ‘strong implication’? The demand is completely misplaced. The PCC has made no such statement. On the basis of the evident failure to submit our unadulterated motion to the LLA, an individual PCC member did write of ‘an act of sabotage’ – a comment made at the start of a brief report on the PCC’s closed email list. No one can ‘withdraw’ the comment. It was presented to the membership for information purposes as part of a moment-to-moment chronology of recent events.”[5] (After it became clear at the March aggregate that Comrade X had the support of the majority of members, the PCC withdrew this toxic motion and the meeting also forced the PCC to withdraw this suggestion of sabotage. It turns out that you can withdraw an ‘implication’ after all.[6])

All of these actions and outcomes strongly suggest that the idea of Comrade X behaving opportunistically was an attempt at a retrospective justification for her resignation. Members weren’t aware of the issue at the January aggregate and the quick jump between Comrade X doing ‘great work’ one month and turning into an existential threat the next over an unsubmitted motion simply beggars belief. Since March, the PCC has attempted to carry on this ‘owl of Minerva’ operation, stressing this ‘desertion of political principles’ line, including in its report of its June aggregate, where the necessity to follow principles when operating in the working-class movement was affirmed, alongside a sometimes coded and sometimes not-so-coded critique of Comrade X’s apparent heresies.[7]

I am aware that this is a very hasty, thumbnail sketch of the debate (and I have nothing against emphasising, even over-emphasising, political principles) but that is precisely because I don’t believe the appearance that the dispute has taken in the Weekly Worker is of lasting significance to understanding this internal episode. Certainly, in shade and tone, some of the manner in which Comrade X framed her arguments could be said to have suggested the inklings of political differences with her CPGB comrades. However, the hysterical manner in which this was ramped up by the PCC occluded rational debate and set the seal on the departures and disaffection that the CPGB has suffered. It is perfectly true that tiny shades of emphasis can lead to more serious disputes; but the way the PCC acted made this almost inevitable.

Historical trajectory of the CPGB-PCC
One can view this dispute through an entirely different lens that situates it in the trajectory of the CPGB-PCC’s historical development since it emerged as The Leninist faction inside the old official CPGB in around 1980. (I have written about this before in The kick inside: revolutionary opposition in the CPGB, 1945-1991 if anyone is desperate enough to find out more.)

The Leninist faction emerged at perhaps the last possible moment inside the old CPGB. Tendencies that shared some of the faction’s political antecedents had been around for years, but the founding members of The Leninist spent time in the CPGB’s largely subterranean left opposition from the late 1960s, until joining with the split that formed the New Communist Party in 1977 and then having to re-route themselves back to factional work inside the official party. This late emergence meant that the group was tiny, relatively youthful and largely confined to the London area. The faction was also fairly hamstrung in its relations with other CPGB factions. The Straight Left group occasionally lurched into more revolutionary rhetoric but was liquidationist in its preference for the Labour Party as the natural home of the working-class movement. The other main faction, grouped around the Morning Star, which had been the CPGB’s daily paper, had been alienated by some of the tactics used by The Leninist group in the inner-party struggle. To cut a very long and complicated story short, The Leninist faction began the 1990s with the CPGB name (after renaming itself the Communist Party of Great Britain Provisional Central Committee; ‘Provisional’ as there was no party to speak of) but was still fundamentally a tiny group that hadn’t been a big player during the destruction of the official CPGB organisation up to 1991. The Leninist publication (first a magazine, then a newspaper) was more of a success and gave the organisation a certain status as a ‘school of thought’ on the left due to its emphasis on sharply written and presented long-form propaganda.

This was offset by a decided activist/agitational bent and both The Leninist group and the fledgling CPGB-PCC were involved in fostering a number of campaigns that drew in broader numbers (Hands off Ireland; the Unemployed Workers’ Charter; and the Workers’ Theatre Movement redux). Reading Notes of the Week (which functioned as a kind of internal bulletin for members and close sympathisers) from the early years of the CPGB-PCC, one is definitely given the impression of an organisation that took its activity and organisation very seriously, with a tone that was pleasant yet mildly hectoring.

‘Bolshevik party of the new type’
By 1993, the CPGB-PCC had a fair amount of activity and commitment already under its belt, including standing four candidates in the 1992 general election and one in the 1993 Newbury by-election; two trial relaunches of the Daily Worker; activity in and around the Timex strike; and the launch of a single-sheet weekly newspaper: the fledgling Weekly Worker. The CPGB-PCC described itself in this period as standing in the tradition of the “Bolshevik party of the new type”.[8] In retrospect, this was a mixture of what we now have come to think of as classical Stalinist formulations (“Members must act as one under a leadership which can change direction at a moment’s notice according to new circumstances”[9]), alongside a transparently sincere commitment to open discussion and debate, thus stepping beyond the traditional ‘Leninist’/Stalinist mantle of democratic centralism (in fact, bureaucratic centralism).[10]

An advert to join the CPGB-PCC that was published at the time reveals something about the activist culture of the organisation: “I want to get active and fight back. Send me details of the CPGB, quick!” It does appear that there was a feeling in the organisation in 1993 that this may have gone a little bit too far, in the sense that the new Weekly Worker and the issues of the Daily Worker that had been produced were mostly agitational in their scope (and sometimes guilty of economism in my eyes). This is presumably what lay behind talk of “measures to ensure that the Weekly Worker becomes a real organiser, educator and agitator [notice the combination of the three], i.e. a full-sized paper that combines the achievements of The Leninist and the Daily Worker”.[11]

By the time I came across the Weekly Worker in 1996, when Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party (SLP) was launched, the dialectical interplay between those elements had begun to work with long-form educational arguments existing alongside shorter informational pieces, with a clear narrative expressed in leader articles and the ‘Party notes’ op-ed column, so that the week’s news and discussion (from inside the SLP and other organisations) was clearly contextualised by the CPGB-PCC’s political project. Longer pieces and analysis were agitationally leavened by being presented in a sharp, angular fashion. The Weekly Worker did have aspirations to organise, educate and agitate. A ‘school of thought’ it certainly was, but one that was also sharply interventionist.

Now, of course, some of the theory behind this ‘Bolshevik party of the new type’, a military-type centralised group capable of sharp agitational turns, has been heavily critiqued by the CPGB-PCC and is latterly seen as being only really fit for the production of sects. It obscures the bigger strategic goal of building mass parties, composed of numerous shades of opinion fighting around a commonly accepted programme; and it underplays the importance of theory, propaganda and education. That is all to the good. But this critique has also taken out, in its wake, a disciplined activist culture that, for all its associated idiocies, did keep tiny organisations such as the CPGB-PCC alive. No such alternative organisational culture has been elaborated, which can only ultimately lead to atrophy. This is what I think the recent dispute in the CPGB-PCC has been partly about.

From interventionism to passivity
The CPGB-PCC’s current internal culture revolves around passivity and, unlike in the 1990s, an acceptance of its role as a ‘school of thought’, what its historical trajectory had fitted it up for but which it had previously struggled against. This can be illustrated by two examples: Labour Party Marxists and the present-day Weekly Worker.

Labour Party Marxists (LPM) was launched prior to the Labour membership upsurge around Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 but has kept its status as essentially another badge for the CPGB-PCC. LPM has no membership or means for anyone outside the CPGB-PCC to join it. The only way to influence it is to join the CPGB-PCC. Fundamentally, it’s a passive organisation that produces an occasional freesheet that mostly reproduces ‘timeless’ articles that have already appeared in the Weekly Worker. The whole thing has a vague air of ‘going through the motions’ and beyond being a fairly pointless front it’s difficult to see the motivation behind it. Comrade X did try to organise a broader group of non-CPGB Labour supporters to get involved in LPM at Communist University in 2016.[12] This meeting was attended by Jack Conrad for the PCC, who was extremely suspicious and defensive, being concerned to pooh-pooh any attempt to launch LPM properly to any outsiders. One could see that Conrad had very conservative goals for the LPM and that it was going to be kept firmly on his leash.

Similarly, the Weekly Worker has been in decline now for a number of years. There’s no real editorial narrative in the paper and it has stopped being any kind of organiser for the CPGB-PCC and its project, taking the form, at times, of a rather passive discussion journal. Its intakes from the wider movement vary in quality and the frequent suspicion is that articles have been included to fill space rather than because of any deep-seated editorial desire. Almost without exception, articles are presented in a flat, conservative manner, often with plodding imagery, banal page furniture and editing that borders on illogical and eccentric (nouns and adjectives seem to be a perpetual source of confusion, as do humble commas). In other words, it is the very obverse of a lively, interventionist paper, being rather in the ‘school-of-thought’ mode. Some of this is not actually the comrades’ fault in that the paper has struggled to find a role since the internet killed its previous iteration as a means to find out the internal goings-on in other left groups. Consensus on the left says that the Weekly Worker has evolved from ‘must read’ to ‘might read’, although it does still generate some excitement from a small group of homeless leftists.

Ageing conservatives
Overlaying this shift in the culture of the CPGB-PCC has been a chronic inability to integrate talented people with technical and political skills into the party centre in London (this is distinct from the PCC body itself). There has been a steady drift away of such people from the centre down the years, partly because of other non-political commitments and partly because, as everybody in and around the CPGB knows, the party centre, particularly in relation to the production of the Weekly Worker, is a very difficult place to work for communists because of the extreme conservatism of the team working on the paper, which, at times, seems to border on irrationality. (The irony of this, as told to me by someone who worked alongside them for years, is that the daft working practices that get set in stone are usually the result of some past adaptation to crisis.) This has meant that the team left is ageing and is there as a result of endurance rather than any particular skillset. In terms of its general dynamism and capacity to meet the demands of the 21st century, think of Dylan, the stoned rabbit on The Magic Roundabout, on one of his less-soporific days and you’ll get the general picture.

Of course, it wasn’t long before Comrade X and others around her began to get impatient at this state of affairs and try at least to overlay some of the CPGB-PCC’s older activist culture back onto the party as a whole. (She had left the group’s leadership body in 2007, partly due to her frustration with Jack Conrad’s conservatism.) This group took on tasks in relation to fundraising, making significant amounts of money for the party and, more significantly, has for the last few years produced a daily bulletin (Red Pages) for the Labour Party conference with seemingly minimal involvement from London comrades or the PCC. This is the type of interventionist venture that the CPGB-PCC of old would have excelled at (interacting journalistically and politically with a live conference) but that is now simply beyond the capabilities of the comrades working at the London centre. I suspect that this venture has been seen as a threat to the political authority of Jack Conrad. Comrade X argues: “[Conrad] proudly confesses to not reading Red Pages, the daily bulletin we have been producing at LP conference for the last three years. That just about sums up the PCC’s approach to work in the Labour Party more generally. It is almost non-existent.”[13] The underlying cause of the recent dispute is the organisation’s activism, or the lack of it, and the historical evolution of its internal culture more generally.

Comrade X has also raised up other interesting activist questions about how individuals from the CPGB-PCC work inside organisations to its political right, where pressures to conciliate and weaken principled politics undoubtedly exist. Peter Manson of the PCC stumbled onto an answer at the group’s June aggregate: “I warned of the dangers of our comrades actually leading such bodies, which is what happened with the LLA… In my view, we must avoid taking up such senior posts within broad groupings.”[14] Apparently, this timeless solution was critiqued at the meeting but, in a sense, Manson has articulated the reality of his organisation’s decline. Presumably, in his mind’s eye, he sees himself turning up to a meeting with the truth written down and ready to speak the truth but if that truth takes root and becomes popular with people who don’t share all his politics then he couldn’t possibly lead them because of the ‘dangers’ involved. This, surely, is an utter parody of the rich propagandist culture of the Second International that the CPGB-PCC hopes to emulate.

[1] P Manson ‘Broad not mass’ Weekly Worker 11 June 2020.

[2] CPGB-PCC statement 8 February 2020.

[3] Letters Weekly Worker 19 March 2020.

[4] PCC motion to 7 March membership aggregate of CPGB members.

[5] Ibid.

[6] The meeting agreed to this formulation: “This aggregate does not believe that [Comrade X] committed a conscious act of sabotage. It rejects any such implication or insinuation.” See P Manson ‘Put principles first’ Weekly Worker 12 March 2020. This article has a heavy PCC spin on it. While it captures the decisions of the meeting it does not accurately record the highly sceptical manner in which PCC members and PCC supporters such as Stan Keable were received by the meeting. This is my observation as an attendee.

[7] Manson op cit.

[8] J Conrad Problems of communist organisation London 1993 p8.

[9] Ibid p9.

[10] The Problems of communist organisation pamphlet recorded a factional debate conducted in 1993 and was available to anyone interested enough to buy it.

[11] Conrad op cit p15.

[12] This is based on the notes that I took at this meeting on 7 August 2016.

[13] Comrade X’s notes on PCC motion to 7 March membership aggregate of CPGB members.

[14] Manson ‘Broad not mass’ op cit.