Communist Party's ong march to the right

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SAATCHI and Saatchi have seized upon the similarity of the Communist and Labour Party manifestos, in the hopes of witch-hunting the What the comparison really shows is how far to the right the Communist Party has evolved during its inglorious history since the mid 1920s.

Whatever purpose there was in the CP's publishing its Manifesto and running its handful of candidates in this election, it was certainly not to offer a left wing alternative to Labour. On the central issue of the economy both CP and Labour envisage a reformist programme restricted to more investment, planning agreements with private firms, and limited nationalisation within the capitalist economy. On most other questions, too, they agree.

And while the CP has no James Callaghan to stick the public boot into its public campaign, the recent record of its leading trade unionists on the TUC General Council and its militants in recent union conferences indicates that a sizable element of the Party is prepared to collaborate with, if not argue for a policy of wage controls in line with Labour's National Economic Assessment.

Reluctant

Given this congruence on almost every question between CP and Labour policies, it takes little imagination to see why workers have shown themselves profoundly reluctant to vote for candidates representing this dwindling, ageing and particularly pernicious party which offers a bizarre blend of bureaucracy, banality and (on the People's March) brutality.

Responsibility for the present rightward trajectory of the Communist Party is no longer to be laid, as in the past, directly at the door of the Kremlin bureaucracy.

Long decades of home-grown reformist and class collaborationist politics in the tiny British CP, with its disproportionate influence in the trade unions preserved by squalid political compromises with other sections of the reformist bureaucracy, have borne fruit in the form of an increasingly influential "Eurocommunist" wing of the Party.

The "Eurocommunists" are a current that emerged in the late 1970s within the international Stalinist movement who, under the pressures of preserving their own bureaucratic interests and relationships with the bourgeois parties in their own countries, have increasingly been prepared to distance themselves from and even criticise the actions and policies of the Kremlin leaders.

Recent developments have shown the extent to which the "Euros" now dominate the British Party's Executive Committee and have taken a firm grip on the CP's monthly journal, laughingly entitled. Marxism Today.

The magazine has focussed with dogged determination on the problems posed by the "rise and rise of the SDP" for those - like themselves - who seek a "broad alliance" against Thatcherism.

In amongst the very long and extremely boring articles on the SDP have Deen concealed little gems of Eurocommunist thought, arguing a case for a cross class coalition in which socialism is seen as secondary:

'The defeat of Thatcherism and the discrediting of the politics of the Right is the highest priority at the present time, and while the Left will wish to inflect this debate in the most socialist direction that is possible, it may have to recognise that the centre parties are a lesser evil who may need to be treated accordingly to stave off a worse one...

"What is certain is that any left strategy must now reckon with a plurality of class interests, and the difficulty of achieving power only on the basis, of Labour's traditional constituency."

"Experience in Italy, in the regions controlled by Communist governments or Communist-led majority coalitions, seems to have been that some cooperation from small private capital can be won Published by Socialist Forum for Southern Africa Solidarity.

Available (at 90p plus 20p post) c/o SO, 28 Middle Lane, London N8.

doo Fine by working class-controlled authorities that are committed to regional economic goals, and that are in any case the permanent, efficient and legitimate administrations of their locality. One object of regional government should be to achieve class coalitions in which capital's local interests oblige it to cooperate in socialist economic programmes."

(Mike Rustin, 'Power Provinces'. " Jan 1983).

(The tell-tale reference to the Italian Communist Party underlines the fact that the British CP could yet go on even further along the road to undisguised right wing policies. The electoral programme of the Italian Party makes Britain's SDP seem positively left wing in comparison).

Perks

Interestingly enough it is not this class collaborationist aspect of the politics of Eurocommunism which has proved contentious within the CP. That is a common line, shared by the old guard Stalinists and more "innovative" reformists such as Marxism Today editor Martin Jacques.

The differences have arisen on international issues such as Poland and Afghanistan, and when the trendies have raised questions which tread on the toes of the CP's cronies in the unions.

So when last September Jacques published an article by non-member Tony Lane which (among other things) pointed out the growing perks and privileges extended to leading shop stewards, he came under heavy fire from the traditional Stalinists.

Industrial Organiser Mick Costello was furious. It was too near the knuckle for his cultivated coterie of full time bureaucrats, convenors and careerist stewards.

Costello (author of many an admiring article on the "unions" in East Europe) denounced Lane's article in an interview in the Morning Star - whose editor, Tony Chater, is also an opponent of the "Euros"

But a fortnight later it was Costello himselt who was publicly denounced - by the "Euro" majority on the Party's Executive Committee.

An angry storm of correspondence followed in the pages of the Star - but the EC's position was upheld, and Costello eventually resigned "for personal reasons" as Industrial Organiser. He soon took up a journalistic post on the Star.

Bamboozle

His replacement as organiser was Pete Carter - a one-time militant turned full-time official in UCATT, who had endorsed the Lane article.

Further clashes followed when Chater used the editorial column on the Star to attack Labour's National Economic Assessment as "class collaboration" and declare:

"It is almost inconceivable that those on the left on the TUC General Council could have allowed themselves to be bamboozled into voting for this document on the basis of assurances that it did not mean wage restraint. "

(March 24) "left on the TUC" were two Stalinists, George Guy and Ken Gill. Guy's pained response in the letters column stressed the "pressures.. • to close ranks for the defeat of the Tories" which have consistently brought CP union bureaucrats to capitulate to the right wing and left reformists.

Guy's line of self-defence has in fact been a far more accurate guide to the line in •practice of Communist Party delegates and leaders in union conferences than the formal opposition to the National Economic Assessment in the pages of the Morning Star.

Significant in this respect was. the Stalinist assistance to the wholesale switch of policy in NUPE this year from opposition to all forms of wage controls to acceptance of Labour's latest "social contract" con-trick.

Nor is it simply on the wages front that CP industrial members have been surrendering to outright reformist policies.

Alliance

On March 10 Jack Adams -BL Longbridge convenor - gave a foretaste of the limited calls for nationalisation. in the CP's election manifesto when he mapped out a perspective to "save Britain's manufacturing base" which made no call at all for nationalistion in the motor or component industry, but focussed entirely on government taxation policy and investment cash:

"Ford could be assisted (!) again only on condition that the number of British built vehicles increased"

Of course if all you seek to do is institute reforms of this kind within British capitalism, and save "British industry" , then there is no need to build a specifically labour movement, socialist campaign. A "broad alliance" of the "people" against "Thatcherism" might seem to be a better idea.

And on such a broad alliance" both the "Euros" and the old-line Stalinists are unanimby the Stalinists.

In the mid-1930s, Stalin's Comintern issued directives to switch from an ultra-sectarian policy of branding social democracy as "social fascist" to the opportunist cross-class alliance policy of the "People's Front" including the "anti-fascist" elements of the bourgeoisie.

The results were catastrophic - and grotesque.

In Spain, the turn to the People's Front smashed the revolutionary struggle against fascism, with the Stalinists taking on the role of hangmen of the left. In France, the same policy implemented by the mass CP neutered the mass struggles of the working class.

In Britain too there was a turn• to grotesque forms of Popular Front though with less immediately obvious consequences.

The Young Communist League appealed for the calling of "mass conferences of all social, Christian and political organisations in the depressed areas." It convened "keep fit" conferences involving "Boys Brigade, scouts, Ramblers Association, Bible Class, Girl Guides, Trade Union Youth Advisory Committee, Young Communist League and many other youth organisations."

But of course friendly links with the Boy Scouts and Bible Classes do not come easy - still less, those sought by the adult CP with 'progressive Tories'. . To create conditions to hob-nob with these people, the broad movement' must be purged of class conscious socialist elements who might offend the vicars and businessmen.

So it is no accident that in Britain and abroad this desperate search for alliances with sections of the capitalist class ran alongside fevered witch-hunting Trotskyists as "agents of fascism" and support for Stalin's Moscow Trials. Yet in 1939, it was Stati who was to sign a formal treat! with Adolf Hitler himself!

After the betrayal of 1926 there was no revolutionary mas! struggle for the British CP ic betray in the 1930s: but the poison of the People's Front ha! lingered on in the cadres brough: into the CP and miseducated a that time, and the leaders who prostituted every Marxist prin ciple to pursue Stalin's policies.

The same policies of clas! collaboration made the Cr a ker wartıme strikebreaking force i Britain after Hitler's invasion o1 the USSR; and made the CP ir 1945 call for a continuațion ol the wartime coalition at the very time when Labour won its biggest ever majority.

Now the same bankrupi policies, dressed up in Eurocom munist flannel or Brezhnevite double-talk, are at the very heart of the CP's daily work and long term strategy.

Just as in the 1930s, the reac tionary notion of the broad alliance' runs flatly counter to the needs of the working class for a principled, revolutionary leader. ship and for policies that defend its independent class interests.

But the gangsterism of the CP marshals on the People's March is an indication that they are only Too aware that their 'no politics' line is far from popular' in the workers' movement - and least oi all among the unemployed who have suffered most acutely at the hands of the capitalist class and system.

While, for the lifetime of the march, brute terror and bureaucratic control can preserve the fiction of support for CP policies. the final rally on June 5 will open up a new period of well-deserved decline and crisis for a Party that has nothing progressive to offer the workers' movement.

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