Socialist Appeal’s ‘Are you a communist?’ campaign has caught the eye. I have found it mildly heartening when traipsing around in the rain in towns such as Halifax and in the sun on the east Lincolnshire coast to see this group’s stickers. This hasn’t appeared in a vacuum, of course, and there has been a small uptick in groups and individuals talking of the need for a new Communist Party and calling themselves communists. Much of this has followed in the wake of the Young Communist League (YCL, aligned with the Communist Party of Britain) colourfully asserting its specific communist identity on the streets of Britain. While I have differences with many of these groups and individuals, I am not a sectarian, and this has been a positive change. We need to cleanse terms such as communist, Bolshevik and Leninist of the assorted muck that got attached to them in the 20th century and the best way to begin is a vigorous process of reappropriation along with a serious study of our forebears that moves beyond silly labelling.
At root, the demand to call ourselves communist is a claim on unity in diversity. Once you make a positive demand that you are a communist, you are signalling a difference with the working-class movement as a whole in a way that defining yourself as ‘socialist’ (which the Labour right also has a claim on), ‘trade unionist’ or ‘activist’ does not. Being a communist or in the Communist Party does not mean that you are instantly set aside from the class as a whole, but it does imply a separation, a difference, which is the only practical foundation for any lasting unity. If a so-called united movement frowns on communists, and the communists thus feel impelled to soften or hide their identity, then that unity is not worth having.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the response of many comrades, ‘official’ communist and Trotskyist, has been to soften their identity and cast out communism, the hammer and sickle and so on. The Eurocommunist/Marxism Today reactionaries quickly junked the CPGB name and the old party symbols (although they were quite happy to hang on to party assets that belonged to communists). The Morning Star’s Communist of Party of Britain (CPB), under its original leadership of Mike Hicks and Tony Chater, desecrated the hammer-and-sickle logo to incorporate a peace dove to show the world that, hey, it had a softer side. (It was only much later, under the leadership of Rob Griffiths, that some of its comrades began to use the hammer and sickle again, although the pacifist dove from above still adorns its website, although not YCL banners.)
Not even hiding in plain sight
Disgustingly, some Trotskyist groups even connived in the ‘collapse of communism’ rhetoric emoted by the bourgeois media. In the 1990s, Trotskyist activists, who had never been very sound on projecting a communist identity, habitually introduced themselves to meetings as self-appointed guardians of this or that campaign, often fronts for Trotskyist groups. Not even hiding in plain sight. Of course, this type of opportunism revealed a truth about the rotten method that most leftists still employ in Britain. Even the ones in group regimes supposedly based on a bastardisation of Lenin in the form of a ‘party of a new type’ generally defend soft politics in the movement that are far to the right of the old Russian Mensheviks. This process reaches its apex with the wretched social-imperialist demand to ‘arm Ukraine’. Liquidating symbols had a logic that liquidated principles and, in many cases, liquidated organisations. Readoption of cast-aside symbols, even the more dubious ones such as ‘comrade Stalin’, represents a protest, garbled and inchoate in many cases, against this liquidationist logic.
This is perfectly apparent to longstanding opportunists inside groups such as the CPB. It recently employed Nick Wright in the Morning Star to make some generally soothing noises towards YCL comrades who have been wearing masks (often for security reasons) and flying hammer-and-sickle flags on demos. But there are some distinct dregs at the bottom of Wright’s beaker of froth and nothingness that encode a warning to his young comrades. For example, in relation to wearing masks: “It is difficult to see how measures to preserve anonymity can be taken during the patient work of organising a building site.”[i] In code, this says to the YCL that it won’t be doing such “performative” politics in the ‘real’ world of trade union work. Similarly, Wright argues: “If the criteria for evaluating any tactic is always whether and how it strengthens the unity and progress of the mass movement then we have a ready-made metric to measure what we do against the creative chaos of the crowd.”[ii] The problem is that outside critics have made precisely this critique of YCL actions i.e. that asserting communist identity puts ‘normal’ people off demos and strike pickets and deflates unity. We can put this straight back at Wright by stating that any so-called unity that suffocates the rights and expression of communist forces isn’t worth shit.
This exemplifies the problem that the current small ‘back-to-communism’ wave is propounded by sects such as Socialist Appeal and the CPB that are organised internally around shibboleths and certain interpretations of history and externally around a series of opportunist gambits that mean their communism is only skin deep. Now, the CPB is in a slightly better position here given that it was a faction of the old CPGB and thus, whatever we think of its politics, its roots are in ‘official’ communism. Socialist Appeal doesn’t even have that slight advantage and, if we dig deeper into its ideology, it has generally been hostile to the whole notion of communism as filtered through partyism, that is communists accepting the need for a Communist Party.
Socialist Appeal, mirroring its parent group Militant, has always claimed that Marxism has been a constituent part of the Labour Party and thus its own faction is a legitimate section of Labour. To bolster that argument, Socialist Appeal has drawn on the fact that the Labour Party reproduced the Communist manifesto, i.e., the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1948, on its 100-year anniversary, with an introduction by Harold Laski.[iii]
In 1998, Socialist Appeal made the amazing opportunist claim that: “The Labour Party didn’t see the Manifesto as just another historical document, as can be seen clearly in the text. It was a document vitally relevant to the policies of the 1945 Labour government.”[iv] It is certainly true that in its foreword to Laski’s introduction, the Labour Party drew attention to the practical measures that Marx and Engels outlined at the end of the second section of the Manifesto, entitled ‘Proletarians and communists’ and claimed these had been a source of inspiration for the 1945 government. But commentators at the time, such as historian EH Carr, immediately saw through this nonsense. He said: “As regards to the British Labour Party, has Professor Laski seriously measured the gulf which separates its way of thinking from that of the Manifesto?”[v] One would pity Socialist Appeal if it really thought the 1945 Labour government was Marxist in its policy, although the mealy-mouthed statement above stops just short of that, as did Laski in 1948.
What this actually shows is, of course, is Militant/Socialist Appeal’s Labourism in almost chemically pure form. But its positive appreciation of Laski’s work has an even more problematic implication for its contemporary espousal of communist identity. In a few articles that I have seen,[vi] Socialist Appeal’s Rob Sewell simply accepts the Labour Party republishing the Manifesto of the Communist Party with Laski’s introduction as good coin, with no word of criticism uttered.
Quack argument
Laski’s main polemical thrust in this work was against the parties organised by the world communist movement and he used a famous passage from the ‘Proletarians and communists’ section of the Manifesto: “The communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.” Laski made use of this section no less than nine times in his introduction as a stick to beat the CPGB and the world communist movement with. Laski’s argument was a quack one and it has been fairly easy for critics in 1948 and after to demonstrate that Marx and Engels were not laying down a historical law against the formation of specific communist organisations (the Manifesto was, after all, the product of the Communist League) and writers such as Hal Draper have argued that the passage was based on a mistranslation into English.[vii]
Laski’s rather desperate interpretation may have suited the Socialist Appeal of years gone by, with its congenital Labourism and habitual denunciation of those who organised outside the Labour Party. But does it suit the Socialist Appeal of 2023, chasing after young communists, engaged in a turf war with the YCL and bravely heralding our communist future? The next time a Socialist Appeal member asks if you are a communist, a question back to them asking if they agree with the idea of a reforged Communist Party might be just as pertinent. That, after all, is what real communists sound like.
[i] https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/building-revolutionary-outfit-security-and-socialist-aesthetics
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] HJ Laski Communist manifesto: socialist landmark London 1948.
[iv] https://www.marxist.com/150yearslpintrohtml.htm
[v] EH Carr ‘Revolutionary document’ The Times Literary Supplement 26 June 1948.
[vi] For example, https://socialist.net/marxism-labour-party-witch-hunt/ (2021) and https://socialist.net/marxism-in-the-labour-party/ (2017).
[vii] For more on this see: https://communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2021/03/16/labour-party-communist-manifesto-1948/
Lawrence Parker 