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Radical Roots
Some notes on this day of discussion may be of interest to readers of the Newsletter. 'Radical Roots' was not an academic conference, attempting objectivity. Rather it reflected and fed into current debates about the ways forward taking place within the organisation Democratic Left (DL), set up by those who carried the day at the final congress of the CPGB in 1991. The idea was to consider aspects of the post-war history of the CPGB in such a way as might help develop and sharpen understanding around some current issues which the left needs to explore. The chance of meeting this objective was improved by the organisers' decision to invite people who were never part of the communist movement to make some of the short inputs which started each session, as well as making space available to former CPGB members who had opposed the decision to wind up the old Party.
The opening session, on the CPGB and the unions, provided some of the liveliest debate of the day. Financial Times journalist Robert Taylor acknowledged the effective approach of Party trade unionists, and their achievement in 'punching above their weight'. Mike Power's focus was on how the CPGB had used the potential for developing trade union struggles which it enjoyed. Whilst praising communists' contribution to developing forms of serious activism, Power bemoaned the key failure of the CPGB in not really linking industrial struggles to wider issues, a point well emphasised in discussion by Graham Taylor who remembered how 'class struggle' was usually defined narrowly as struggle over wages and conditions. Power also focused on the contradiction between the wider approach which the Party developed of trying to work in unity with the people on the Labour left, whilst 'industrial comrades' were often campaigning against them on narrower issues. Power's fellow DL member Wolf Wayne took serious objection to some of Power's points, insisting in particular that the CPGB — and the 'wider labour movement' — had been 'right to fight' against the trade union reforms proposed in Barbara Castle's 1969 White Paper In Place of Strife. In discussion, Nina Temple described the distances which had existed between the Industrial Department and other components of the central Party leadership during the seventies: the Department was operating as a 'secretive Leninist organisation' at the same time as the Party was trying to reshape its structures and culture in the spirit of working for the Broad Democratic Alliance; the Needs of the Hour publication was produced by Department leaders without ever coming to what Temple defined as 'the political side of the Party'; and industrial organisers were more interested in keeping in touch with officials in the hierarchy of the unions rather than attempting to win large numbers of ordinary trade unionists to new positions. Overall, Bert Ramelson's period as Industrial Organiser was characterised as being dedicated to the creation of a manipulative, secretive and bureaucratic machine.
The 'trade unions' session ran half an hour into the time allocated for what therefore became a hurried discussion on 'internationalism and race' — a detail which in itself can perhaps be taken as a comment on the enduring priorities of activists in this tradition. Nevertheless, varied inputs from Chris Myant on the lost world of left wing international solidarity work, from Trevor Carter on the experience of black activists within the British communist movement, and from Kate Hudson lamenting the passing of the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall and the CPGB, all raised interesting points and stimulated useful discussion.
New Times editor Rosemary Bechler opened a session on 'forms and cultures of organisation' with reflections on how political organisations might shape themselves around theories of knowledge, social change and conflict resolution which have been increasingly considered on the left in recent years, but have not yet led to changes in established patterns of practice and culture. Steven Twigg, the secretary of the Fabian Society and a Labour parliamentary candidate, focused on the points of contact, difference and similarity between the Fabian and communist traditions, in a way which suggested how the history of the CPGB politics might best be understood comparatively, in counter-point to studies of other Labourist, left and liberal traditions.
Relations between the CPGB and Labour were also a focus of the final session, aimed at identifying the shifting landmarks and various compasses which guided and confused Party activists in its last fifteen years. The discussion was opened by Steve Munby, key author of the 1996 DL pamphlet Arguments towards a Democratic Left, a publication which represents the organisation's first substantial attempt to move towards programmatic positions and includes some assessments of the record of the Communist Party in its latter years. He focused on the 'success' which the CPGB had in the seventies, 'which was a disaster', and on the 'failures' of the CPGB in the eighties, many of which were 'very useful'. The seventies 'success' was the strategy of communists helping to develop the Labour left, particularly through getting the Labour Party to adopt CPGB sponsored resolutions via the trade union block votes which Ramelson's machinery helped manipulate. Munby's point here was that a number of communists bore some of the responsibility for the rise within the Labour Party of the sectarian leftist politics which coalesced around Benn in the early eighties, and which became a factor in Labour's crushing 1983 general election defeat, and in the SDP split.
Conversely, some of the 'failures' of the eighties gave rise to useful consequences. The split in the CPGB was caused by and created space for the development of critiques of left fundamentalism and analyses of Thatcherism and of post-Fordist 'new times', associated in particular with the magazine Marxism Today which folded at the beginning of the nineties. Although he did not overplay this point, or make it in a sectarian way, Munby was surely correct to state that these communist-sponsored analyses are amongst the motors of the projects of modernisation and renewal which have shaped the Labour Party over the last ten years or so, and in so far as this is the case the main political tendency in the eighties CPGB can be considered to be continuing to enjoy a positive 'posthumous influence' on mainstream politics. Munby provided an important counter-balance to widespread understandings of the relationship between Marxism Today and the Party by pinpointing the ways in which a significant number of communist activists were at the forefront of forming the 'revisionist' and iconoclastic views then taken up and developed in the magazine... the story of the Party in the eighties was not only one of a widening gap between the intellectuals opening their glossy magazine to non-Party journalists and style gurus on the one hand and old fashioned card carrying cadre on the other: promising networks formed which brought together (comparatively) younger activists acutely aware of the crisis of all aspects of the communist political tradition, but also aware of the need to continue to develop and explore the possibility of new ways forward.
Nina Fishman described how she had journeyed from a point of considerable distance from the CPGB in the early seventies, when she was horrified by the CPGB's 'Euro-sceptic' politics, through to a stimulating and fruitful association with the Party in its last days and with DL now. Although some at the meeting felt resentment at her questioning of their motives for staying in the Party through the seventies and eighties, the main point of her input was taken as being that it was entirely possible to come towards the politics which DL is expressing now from backgrounds other than having been in or around the CPGB.
Willie Thompson, editor of Socialist History and author of the recent The Left in History (Pluto Press), gave what he described as a more 'prosaic' account of CPGB politics in the seventies and eighties than Munby or Fishman. His contribution succeeded in refocusing the day's closing discussion on the issues of what actually happened to the politics and organisation of the Party towards its end. Debates continue on whether and how any of the fragile remnants of communist analysis and practice might provide some of the 'radical roots' of an effective left politics for today and tomorrow.
