Pravda reproduces the CPGB’s British road to socialism in 1951

I had heard about the Soviet daily newspaper Pravda reproducing the CPGB’s British road to socialism (BRS) programme in 1951. For example, historian Kevin Morgan argues it was clear “from the day it was splashed all over Pravda that the programme bore the imprimatur of the Kremlin”.[i] But Morgan provided no reference for the Pravda piece, and I’d never seen a copy of the actual text.

As I pointed out in the previous article, there are historical reasons for this, given the programme’s difficult birth.[ii] The old CPGB itself was never too keen to broadcast the centrality of Stalin and the CPSU to what was meant to be an independent, national road to socialism through native bourgeois institutions such as the Labour Party and parliament. The pro-Soviet CPGB left largely treated the BRS as a joke, while its Maoist left saw Stalin’s involvement in the programme as an embarrassment to his otherwise revolutionary, ‘anti-revisionist’, credentials.

But on top of Vijay Singh and Revolutionary Democracy’s well-known work in uncovering the various recorded discussions between Stalin and CPGB general secretary Harry Pollitt,[iii] we now have access to the Pravda article through the wonders of the internet.[iv]

The article (see picture above), which was headed ‘The road of Britain to socialism: programme of the Communist Party of Great Britain’, appeared on 3 February 1951 and took up nearly two pages of what was usually a four-page paper. I am not a Russian linguist, but I have been able to translate some parts. It appears to be a straight reproduction of sections of the version produced by the CPGB.[v] The text in the top left-hand corner is Pollitt’s original foreword. As far as I can see, the CPSU did not add its own editorial preface but, as I say, my Russian isn’t great so I’m willing to be corrected on that score.

So, for those familiar with the British text, this won’t be a wildly exciting read. It’s the fact that it exists that is the most significant thing about it. For example, Harpal Brar of the CPGB-ML is on record as saying he has “no evidence to suggest that the BRS had the approval of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and of Stalin”.[vi] This is obviously nonsense. The CPSU under Stalin liked it so much they did indeed splash it all over Pravda. But we already knew the truth about all this. Pravda’s excitement at the BRS only underlines it. Unless of course Pravda was a nest of revisionist counter-revolutionary vipers in 1951. But let’s not go there, eh?

Amended on 15 December to add a more accurate rendering of the Russian headline.

If anyone would like an electronic copy of the original article, drop me a line.

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[i] K Morgan Harry Pollitt Manchester 1993 p169.

[ii] https://communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2022/12/13/british-road-socialism/

[iii] https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/uk.postww2/stalin-pollitt.pdf

[iv] https://www.eastview.com/resources/gpa/pravda/

[v] https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/britain/brs/1951/51.htm

[vi] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePsqU1AhlyY

The British road to socialism: friends and enemies

It would be fair to say that the Communist Party of Great Britain’s (CPGB’s) 1951 programme, the British Road to Socialism (BRS), has had a very difficult history and reception, including its subsequent revisions in the CPGB and adoption by the 1988 Morning Star/Communist Party of Britain (CPB) split. Even the CPGB-PCC faction, which has no sympathy with either the BRS or any of its British or Soviet historical co-sponsors, failed to generate much external interest in a book-length critical analysis of the BRS back in 1991.[i] The CPGB-ML has recently embarked on a similar project to analyse the CPB’s Britain’s road to socialism that I suspect will also fall on stony ground.[ii] Some of this, of course, is due to factional rivalries but it is partly the result of the fact that the BRS was never enthusiastically adopted by the CPGB.

The BRS was simply imposed on the CPGB by its leadership in 1951 (as was subsequently admitted by Rajani Palme Dutt), after general secretary Harry Pollitt had taken the advice of Stalin in Moscow. Pollitt voiced his own doubts about how inspiring or otherwise the programme had been for his activists. In relation to the party’s 22nd congress in April 1952, in which the rank and file was given the dubious opportunity of rubber-stamping a programme adopted a year before, leadership figures quickly twigged that this had led to an absence of debate. Certain CPGB members such as Fred Westacott (in his Shaking the chains autobiography) have made claims about lively local meetings discussing the BRS in 1951 but there is precious little evidence to back this up.[iii]

The BRS always had a measure of unreality inside the CPGB. Members of The Leninist faction told me how the party’s pro-Soviet left in the 1960s and 1970s (i.e., they thought of the Soviet Union and the CPSU as morally upright revolutionary leaders of the world communist movement as against the British deviations of the CPGB) saw the BRS as a piece of silly reformist window dressing wheeled out during election time, with the real business of revolution being something that involved taking up arms and the use of force (I’ve heard oral reminiscences of this type from comrades in areas such as Luton, Hants and Dorset and Wales; and it’s a common theme in criticisms of the BRS of this era). There was extreme scepticism as to the likelihood, as imagined by the BRS, of the patriotic Labour left leading the struggle towards the first steps of socialism through parliament (an idea now in even more rapid retreat after Corbyn’s demise).

In the inner-CPGB parlance of its leadership in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, such people were dubbed ‘sectarians’ and hostile to the reformist project of the BRS. (Although, in fact, the leadership’s identification of ‘sectarian’ anti-Labour trends went back much further to the 1930s.) But the right-opportunist leadership was prepared to collude with the CPGB’s left because those elements were, at the very least, a large minority of the membership and, in some areas, most of the dues-paying activists. By the late 1960s even the Labour Monthly journal had started to exude certain themes dear to the CPGB’s left, albeit in very soft focus, after editor Palme Dutt went into opposition over the CPGB leadership’s unwillingness to back the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. So, the leadership acted with caution and was forced to enlist the ideological support of its left around events such as the fallout in 1956 from Khrushchev’s secret speech and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. The leadership’s language was of a struggle against revisionism; for the leading role of the CPGB and the Soviet Union; and for democratic centralism (i.e., those concepts as they had been rendered under Stalin). Those on the party left went along with this and took up ideological cudgels with the leadership against its ‘revisionist’ critics. But re-stating the pre-eminence of the CPGB’s vanguard role could only but undermine the BRS, which was premised on the Labour Party leading Britain’s socialist revolution.

As late as 1964, one can find then CPGB general secretary John Gollan making obvious appeals to the inclinations of his party’s left wing (at that point containing both pro-Soviet and pro-Mao elements). He sets out a process of “socialist-communist united action” (socialist means Labour Party in this instance) focused on an anti-monopoly alliance inside and outside parliament. According to Gollan: “This, in British terms, is what the dictatorship of the proletariat means.”[iv] But dictatorship of the proletariat, as Gollan well knew, had an entirely different appeal to the CPGB left, based around the forcible suppression of the bourgeoisie and the more dramatic military events of the Russian Revolution. But Gollan almost makes the BRS a mere form of the proletarian dictatorship and this is partly the root of how the CPGB left treated the BRS as mere window dressing. There’s also a sub-theme here of what took place in Eastern Europe after the Second World War, when communist parties took power, at least in theory, under multi-party ‘people’s democracies’.

And the CPGB left wanted to believe that figures such as Pollitt, Dutt and Gollan were genuinely on the side of the angels and to make the ‘anti-revisionist’ canon as broad as possible. As Sid French, leader of Surrey CPGB and future New Communist Party leader, said in 1977: “Didn’t the party leadership in this country abandon the whole idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the first edition of the British road to socialism in 1951? Did they?… I don’t think they did but, if they did, they didn’t tell John Gollan who in [1964] was the general secretary of the party writing on behalf of the executive committee in a booklet called very appropriately Democracy and class struggle…” The left wanted to believe party leaders were ‘anti-revisionist’; and the party leadership wanted its left to believe it was ‘anti-revisionist’. So, the BRS was being undermined because of the CPGB having no true mechanism for dealing with factional struggle other than opportunist manoeuvre.

This spilled over into the Morning Star/CPB split’s adoption of the BRS, which it later renamed Britain’s road to socialism. The CPB’s history has been one of it making small groups of communists at least accept the BRS as a basis of action but nevertheless the historical record shows that several of its leading members (Rob Griffiths, Mary Davis and Andrew Murray, for example) cut their political teeth struggling against the method of the BRS, both in the old CPGB and the CPB.[v] More recently, there has been a palpable unease about Stalin’s role in overseeing the CPGB’s adoption of the BRS. This is a hard sell to some of the CPB’s broad-left constituency and the leadership does not want to oversell the virtues of Uncle Joe to its Young Communist League, which is much less uneasy about being associated with Stalin.  

The Maoist movement is another that has an odd relationship with the BRS. Most Maoists have revered Stalin as a revolutionary icon and branded the BRS as a counter-revolutionary programme. Which became embarrassing as long ago as 1964 when Gollan told the world that the BRS had Stalin’s approval. More recently, Stalin’s correspondence with Pollitt on the matter has come to light.[vi] The CPGB-ML has been unable to face up to Stalin’s role here as it celebrates his general revolutionary probity in line with leader Harpal Brar’s origins in the Maoist movement. Its recent publication on the CPB’s Britain’s road makes no reference to Stalin’s involvement in the 1951 original. In private, Brar has apparently stated that he thinks the documents showing this are forgeries, despite their being uncovered and translated from the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History by Indian comrades supportive of Stalin’s legacy. The Indian comrades are not being blamed for this, but such tales of forgery are a fantasy to save CPGB-ML blushes.   

Brar’s public position is much better. When speaking to CPB members 11 years ago, he said: “Our position on the subject is that we have no evidence to suggest that the BRS had the approval of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and of Stalin but on the worst-possible assumption that it had such approval, our basic position is that the BRS is a wrong programme; it’s not a programme of revolution, it’s a programme of subjugation of the communist movement to social-democracy. That’s more important to me than whether it had the approval of Stalin or Saint Paul or Jesus Christ, it doesn’t really matter to me…”[vii] But comrade Brar’s “worst-possible assumption”, that Stalin did sponsor the BRS, is the truth. So, what does that mean for Stalin’s status as a revolutionary icon?

The BRS was the unloved bastard child of ‘official’ communism in Britain. Nothing screams that more clearly than the conflicted relationship supporters and opponents have had with it down the years.

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[i] https://archive.cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/resources/Which%20Road.pdf

[ii] https://shop.thecommunists.org/product/britains-road-to-socialism/

[iii] For more on the non-debate around the BRS, see L Parker The kick inside: revolutionary opposition in the CPGB, 1945-1991 London 2012, pp35-36.

[iv] J Gollan Democracy and class struggle London 1964, p37.

[v] https://academic.oup.com/manchester-scholarship-online/book/16022/chapter-abstract/170998382?redirectedFrom=fulltext

[vi] https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/uk.postww2/stalin-pollitt.pdf

[vii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePsqU1AhlyY

Young Communist League attacks Khrushchev’s ‘revisionism’

At the end of last year, 18 December 2021 to be precise, the Instagram account of the Young Communist League’s (YCL’s) Challenge magazine posted to celebrate JV Stalin’s birthday. The post states: “It is crucial, as Marxist-Leninists, that we study all [Stalin] did and wrote, and investigate the successes and shortcomings for ourselves, as we follow in the same path he once did, struggling and marching onward to our victory.”[i] While it is clear that the writer is a Stalin fan this is obviously an attempt to be fairly judicious within the ideological confines of the YCL’s parent organisation, the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain (CPB).

A coded two-fingers?
Perhaps less judicious, considering the YCL’s recent relations with the CPB, is the quote from Stalin that then followed from a speech given in July 1928. Included is this passage: “It never has been and never will be the case that a dying class surrenders its positions voluntarily without attempting to organise resistance. It never has been and never will be the case that the working class could advance towards socialism in a class society without struggle or commotion. On the contrary, the advance towards socialism cannot but cause the exploiting elements to resist the advance, and the resistance of the exploiters cannot but lead to the inevitable sharpening of the class struggle.”[ii] This, I think, is a coded two-fingers towards certain CPB ‘adults’.

Regular readers of this site will remember that in August 2021, the CPB issued a set of social-media protocols that warned its members against “adulation of Stalin and support for the substantial abuses of state power which occurred under his leadership”.[iii] The CPB, it will be recalled, in its analysis of the Stalin period, follows that of the old CPGB, which, in turn, repeated Khrushchev’s line approving Stalin’s construction of ‘socialism in one country’, while expressing criticism of what became known as “violations of socialist democracy” in the 1930s and beyond.[iv] One of Khrushchev’s complaints against Stalin’s repression of loyal Soviet functionaries was the Stalinist line that resistance of pro-capitalist enemies increases as a country advances towards socialism was but a false embroidery of Stalin’s repression.[v] The YCL is thus content to reproduce one of Stalin’s ideological justifications for terrorising his enemies as a means of circumventing the CPB’s social-media protocol. Technically, the YCL comrades are not directly supporting Stalin’s abuses. But, contextually, it is not difficult to see what such posts are getting at.

If, dear reader, you think this is all slightly oblique, a recent post on the YCL Challenge website by Ben Ughetti pulls even less punches. Explosively for the CPB at least, Ughetti argues: “Khrushchev after Stalin started a process of what he saw as the ‘de-Stalinisation’ of the Soviet Union. What this actually meant was erasing the revolutionary history of the Soviet Union. When discussing the fall of the Soviet Union it is clear to understand that it starts with Khrushchev. Under Khrushchev is a clear ideological distancing from Marxism-Leninism in an opportunistic attempt to establish de-Stalinisation. After Khrushchev, being a party member wasn’t about holding the ideological values of Marxism-Leninism, it suddenly became about advantages of being a party member. Revisionism had taken over in place of Marxism-Leninism.”[vi] This is in direct contradiction to the CPB’s past writings on the Soviet Union, where, as stated above, Khrushchev’s critique of Stalin was largely adopted and Khrushchev himself was pictured somewhat neutrally as a reformer of the Soviet Union.[vii]

So, Ughetti’s argument is not apparently influenced by the CPB. Rather, it is a recycling of the old Maoist line of ‘Khrushchevite revisionism’ being the downfall of the Soviet Union. It is unsurprising that, given the YCL is keen on Stalin’s legacy, some of its members would start expounding a theory that enshrines the idea of ‘Stalin the anti-revisionist’, an old Maoist battle-cry and, in Britain, propounded more recently by the likes of Harpal Brar’s CPGB-ML. The CPB as a trend has never been attracted to Maoism (its nailing of its colours to China’s mast has been a process that has unfolded long after Mao) and some of its older generation of members will have cut their political teeth in the CPGB’s pro-Soviet opposition of the 1960s and 1970s, which did battle with Maoist elements precisely on the issue of salvaging the revolutionary credentials of the post-Stalin Soviet Union. The Irish Connolly Youth Movement, which recently split from the Communist Party of Ireland, links to some more recent sources (by the likes of Grover Furr and Ludo Martens) upholding the idea of ‘Khrushchevite revisionism’ in its educational material.[viii]

On the use of ‘Stalinism’
I have some sympathy for the overall theme of Ughetti’s article on the use of the label ‘Stalinism’. Members of the YCL have clearly encountered this term recently from opponents on the left, although, given some of their members’ fondness for Stalin’s legacy, this isn’t a shattering revelation. But, as Ughetti suggests, most of this usage amounts to little more than pejorative name-calling and avoidance of serious debate. In modern Trotskyism’s case it does have “to be understood as a state of mind of total defeat”.[ix] Let us not forget that even Gordon Brown was once abused as a ‘Stalinist’ by Tony Blair’s camp followers. As with ‘fascist’ (and ‘Trotskyite’, we might add), such terms end up expressing nothing about the phenomena they are meant to define.

Despite having a somewhat lower profile than Gordon Brown, I myself have had to face recent moronic allegations that I am a Stalinist because I write on the history of the CPGB and its leading figures, so, naturally, I must be a Stalinist. Leon Trotsky did use the terms Stalinist and Stalinism but, in his case, that was the outcome of a serious analysis of the Soviet Union and its ruling bureaucratic caste. Whatever the flaws in Trotsky’s The revolution betrayed, one cannot fault his method of grounding categories (which in his thought were always provisional), in a serious study of the world around him. This is not the age of Trotsky. And, boy, does it show. 

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[i] https://www.instagram.com/p/CXooaweI4Lr/

[ii] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1928/07/04.htm

[iii] https://communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2021/10/16/communist-party-of-britain-stalin/

[iv] https://communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2021/10/20/cpb-squeamish-about-stalin/

[v] https://www.marxists.org/archive/khrushchev/1956/02/24.htm

[vi] https://challenge-magazine.org/2022/04/01/what-is-stalinism/

[vii] See, for example, https://issuu.com/southdevoncommunists/docs/assessing_the_collapse_of_the_soviet_union

[viii] https://cym.ie/education/#ussr

[ix] https://challenge-magazine.org/2022/04/01/what-is-stalinism/

Why is the Communist Party of Britain squeamish about Stalin?

I have recently commented on the Communist Party of Britain’s (CPB’s) social-media protocol that its members should not indulge themselves in “adulation of Stalin and support for the substantial abuses of state power which occurred under his leadership”. It has become subsequently clear that this bureaucratic-centralist injunction is primarily aimed at the Young Communist League (YCL) associated with the CPB. The YCL comrades stand in a long line of oppositionists inside the old ‘official’ CPGB (going back to Edward Upward, Eric Heffer and Arthur Evans in the 1940s) that combine militant class-struggle politics with support for Stalin as an ‘anti-revisionist’ icon.

It’s quite clear that the solution to the friction being caused by this protocol is for the CPB and the YCL to have a lengthy, frank, rational and well-informed debate on Stalin. Such a debate would be open to all partisans of the working-class movement in the best democratic traditions of Lenin and Bolshevism. In its social-media protocols, the CPB claims to support the traditions of research, inquiry and discussion on historical matters and CPB/YCL members should be testing those limits to the hilt, regardless of whether that involves adulation or critique of Stalin. (The CPB’s absurd protocol on Stalin would mean that, technically, no one could post on social media Lenin’s comment of 1913 about the “marvellous Georgian”, i.e. Stalin, who had worked with him on the national question.)

Unfortunately for the YCL comrades (some of whom will be members of the adult CPB organisation) they are alongside an organisation that only has a very attenuated relationship with the ‘anti-revisionist’ pro-Stalin opposition so clearly visible in the CPGB’s post-Second World War history. Some of the older CPB leaders, most obviously general secretary Rob Griffiths, were involved in this opposition (which had varying degrees of enthusiasm for Stalin; Griffiths seems to have been at the lukewarm end).

However, what was the Communist Campaign Group, which controversially split from the CPGB to form the CPB in 1988, also incorporated a section of the CPGB’s right-centrist bureaucracy, exemplified by a veritable patron saint of paper clips: Morning Star editor Tony Chater. Chater (who had historically opposed the CPGB’s pro-Soviet left opposition at congresses in the 1970s and was not remembered at all fondly by old supporters of The Leninist in Luton) and his allies were always at pains to express continuity with the pre-Eurocommunist CPGB of the mid-1970s, although Chater and company were rightly hesitant at claiming their 1988 split was the party. This meant adopting the CPGB’s rules, its pre-1977 British road to socialism programme (initially sponsored by Stalin in the 1950s, of course) and the received wisdom of the CPGB’s right-centrist leadership on Stalin and Soviet historical questions in the 1960s and 1970s (its inheritance from the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras). The CPB was thus essentially a conservative operation that broke with the odious Eurocommunists in order to preserve the post-1956 cultural mores of the old CPGB.

‘A shameful blot’
Griffiths was perfectly open about this operation shortly after becoming leader of the CPB in 1998. In introducing a 1992 CPB congress resolution on the Soviet Union, Griffiths assessed this as a “qualitative development in our analysis” from a 1956 resolution of the CPGB’s executive committee about the Stalin period and an article by former CPGB general secretary John Gollan, ‘Socialist democracy – some problems’ (1976). Griffiths referred to “violations of socialist democracy during the Stalin period”, which were “a shameful blot on the proud history of the communist movement”.[1] But this existed alongside a contradiction: the Soviet Union, despite these abuses of democracy, was still adjudged to be a socialist society and one where the “positive features of the socialist experience would far outweigh the negative ones”.[2] It was, of course, under the Stalin faction’s leadership that ‘socialism’ was established and it was largely his bureaucratic command system, in rapid decay under Brezhnev and Gorbachev, that ignominiously collapsed in 1991. In fact, this method of analysis adopted by the CPB had a similar impact on it to those Trotskyist groups that dogmatically reproduced Trotsky’s formulas of the 1930s about the Soviet Union being a ‘degenerated workers’ state’): such groups are simultaneously repelled and attracted by the subject matter. In public, CPB leaders have become coy about pronouncing on issues such as the legacy of Stalin, seeing it as a divisive matter. (Private conversations were always another matter, at least until recently.)

It is important to understand that the developed position of the CPB in the late 1990s was not a major or qualitative development of the old CPGB’s musings on the Stalin period in the 1960s and 1970s. These show the same mix of empathy and criticism subsequently emoted by the CPB. Betty Reid, in 1969 concerned to combat a proliferation of Trotskyist and Maoist groups, said: “It was thus not the principal policies developed by the CPSU while Stalin was its general secretary which we believe are at issue. On the contrary it was these policies which inspired a whole generation, gave a hope to mankind, and when the crunch came provided the major obstacle (at the cost of 20 million Soviet lives) to the advance of fascism. What is involved here are those policies which arose from Stalin’s theory that with the advance of the Soviet Union to socialism the class struggle would sharpen, and the multiplicity of its enemies would increase. In this way any opposition on policy became equated with treachery, against which every weapon was permitted and justified; and the sharp edge of the security forces was then turned against leading and loyal comrades.”[3]

These themes were repeated in the 1976 article from John Gollan (pictured above) mentioned by Griffiths, which largely repeated the Khrushchev critique of the Stalin personality cult and the latter’s rigid centralisation of the party, allied to an approval of Stalin’s role in initiating ‘socialism in one country’ in the Soviet Union. (It led to a long-running debate in the party during that year where Gollan and the CPGB leadership were ranged against the party’s ‘anti-revisionist’ opposition.)

Gollan argued: “Stalin’s role and that of his supporters in routing the Trotskyist and right opposition was undoubtedly of great historical significance. The key issues of the controversy for our consideration here are the building of socialism in one country and whether the revolution was socialist or not; the vital nature of the bloc between the workers and the peasantry; and the unity of the party. While argued out in theoretical terms, these were, in fact, supreme issues of practical political and economic policy, which had to be operated. They involved the whole question of socialist industrialisation, the first and succeeding five-year plans, the socialist transformation of the country, the creating of the modern Soviet working class and technical, specialist and administrative cadres, and the collectivisation of agriculture. That the opposition line was defeated, the decisive social basis of the revolution was continued, a great socialist industry was created and collectivisation carried through, was, as the resolution correctly observed, an historic achievement without which the victory in the Second World War would have been impossible. It has proved decisive for world development ever since.”[4]

Post-1956, the CPGB was thus cautious, under Soviet influence (where Stalin had become a relative ‘unperson’), about anything that reeked of ‘personality cult’, while not wishing to undermine Stalin’s role in the initiation of ‘socialism’ in the 1920s. It is this cautious, conservative, critique that still controls the ideological boundaries of the CPB and its attempts to police pro-Stalin YCL members. It is all part of the fantasy that the CPB is the continuation of the CPGB under the leadership of John Gollan.

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[1] https://issuu.com/southdevoncommunists/docs/assessing_the_collapse_of_the_soviet_union

[2] Ibid.

[3] https://splitsandfusions.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/betty-reid-ultraleftism-in-britain.pdf

[4] J Gollan ‘Socialist democracy – some problems: the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in retrospect’ Marxism Today January 1976.

Correspondence – the Communist Party of Britain, the YCL and Stalin

I received this interesting response in relation to my short article on The Communist Party of Britain’s (CPB’s) recent social-media protocol that members should not indulge in adulation of Stalin. The letter below is perfectly self-explanatory. I would only note that my correspondent’s arguments line up with other responses to the original piece: the CPB’s leadership seems to be mainly concerned at the policing of militant pro-Stalin voices in its Young Communist League.

I thought you might be interested in knowing about the friction being caused between the Young Communist League (YCL) and the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) by the policy that your article addresses. I’m a YCL and CPB member. Obviously, I can’t tell you who I am, or which branch I’m in or anything like that, but having had a look at your blog I thought that you might be interested in the impacts of this [CPB social-media protocol].

When it was first distributed to members a few weeks ago, it caused a massive amount of upheaval, particularly within the YCL, where multiple members in most of the large branches had to be convinced not to leave. I also know that the majority of the newly elected YCL Central Committee is dead opposed to it. The CPB and the YCL are experiencing a bit of a membership boom at the moment, with the YCL in particular attracting loads of people – hundreds, across the country – who have a very anti-revisionist, pro-Stalin, position.

This policy of no talking about Stalin – which is what this is, in practice – is the knee-jerk reaction of the older generation of the CPB leadership. They’re seeing a new generation of educated Marxist-Leninists come into the party and are laying the ground for expelling the ones they think might show them up. Part of this is rational and understandable – they want to avoid becoming a strange, cultish sideshow like the CPGB-ML – but most of it is simply fear of change. They’re terrified that they may have to accommodate a new generation of Marxist-Leninists who won’t be content with circular branch meetings and acting as unpaid labour for the Morning Star.

This is just the latest in a building tension between the CPB and the YCL. Many in the YCL see the party’s model as stale and not in line with proper communist organisation. I’ve heard the same joke dozens of times about the older generation of the CPB being “Trots without Trotsky”: buy the books, sell the paper, attend branch meetings, repeat.

And there are also growing policy differences between the league and the party too. The YCL recently voted at its congress to change the position on Palestinian liberation from a two-state solution to a single-state solution. That motion specifically attacked the CPB line: “Congress notes that the state of Israel’s continuing aggression towards the people of Palestine is creating a new wave of politicised young people in Britain, who are engaging in anti-imperialist politics for the first time. Congress notes that the vast majority of these new pro-Palestinian activists support a single-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Congress recognises that the currently held position of the Communist Party supports a two-state solution (but that the YCL technically has no position). Congress acknowledges the unique strategic significance of Israel to imperialist interests in the region, and notes that this significance dictates the nature of Israel’s domestic political landscape. Congress recognises that because of this imperialist interest, the international community will never be able to force the Israeli state to accept the existence of a sovereign nation of Palestine. Congress also acknowledges that the Israeli state will never accept the existence of a sovereign Palestine of its own accord, and that the conditions that would enable it to do not exist, and could not exist. Congress rejects the argument that a two-state solution is the only practically achievable outcome of the conflict as a defeatist and inaccurate assessment that fails to properly consider the role of Imperialism.

“Congress notes that the current Communist Party policy is not only out of step with the current mass of pro-Palestinian youth, but that it is also out of step with the material realities of the conflict and its likely resolution. Congress therefore calls on the incoming Committee to develop a League policy supporting a single-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict that endorses a single multi-ethnic, socialist state of Palestine in the territories currently occupied by Israeli and Palestinian authorities.”

And there’s more of that kind of thing in the pipeline too.