Has the Communist
Party of Great Britain got a future after the collapse of the
Soviet Union? Paul Anderson talks to its
general secretary, Nina Temple
Strange as it
might seem to anyone unfamiliar with the recent history of the Communist Party
of Great Britain, its leadership is rather pleased at the way things have
turned out in the Soviet Union.
The CP condemned
the August 20 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, welcomed its collapse and even
backed the suspension of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, for so many
years its political master.
"I think it
is essential that the party's monopoly of power is broken," says Nina
Temple, the CP's general secretary. "When you're talking about the Soviet
Communist Party you're talking about a cross between a political party as we
know it and something like the Freemasons. The top level of the party was so
involved in the coup that it is impossible completely to distinguish the party
from the coup organisers, and the coup organisers have to be brought to
justice. We will be moved to protest if there isn't the development of a
climate of tolerance and pluralism in which legitimate left voices can be
heard."
For most of the
party's 70-year existence, such a response would have been unthinkable. Until
1968, when the CP condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the party
had loyally .supported every twist and turn of Soviet foreign policy, and it
was not until the early eighties that its criticisms of Soviet foreign policy
were more than half-hearted. Foreign policy aside, the party's programme
identified the "actually existing socialism" of the Soviet bloc as
essentially benign until the late eighties.
Yet the position
of the CP leadership should not really cause surprise. The seventies and
eighties saw the party drift further and further away from its traditional
pro-Soviet position. Last year, prompted by the collapse of "actually
existing socialism" in Eastern Europe, a special party congress abandoned
Leninism, opting to "transform" the CP into a non-vanguardist
organisation with a new name – Democratic
Left" if the leadership gets its way at a party
conference this November. One reason for the party leadership's enthusiasm for
the failure of the coup and collapse of the Soviet party is that it will have
the effect of reducing to impotence the resistance to the change of name.
Whether the CP
will get through to November without itself being reduced to impotence is a
moot point, however. The party was at its weakest ever even before the coup and
is unlikely to have been done any favours by the Soviet crisis. An obituary
might be premature, but it is certainly difficult to credit that for its first
50 years the CP dominated political life to the left of Labour.
It was never an
effective electoral force, winning only three parliamentary seats in all that
time, and it never really achieved a mass membership. Before the second world
war, at no time did it have more than 18,000 members. After peaking at 64,000 m
1942, at the height of popular enthusiasm for the wartime alliance with the
Soviet Union, its membership declined inexorably, hitting 45,000 in 1945 and
30,000 ten years later.
More than 10,000 members,
including most of the party's leading intellectuals, left after the Soviet
suppression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956. By the early seventies,
membership was 15,000 and still falling, and the CP had yielded its
dominance of the far-left to the 57
varieties of Trotskyism.
But the influence
of the CP was never primarily a matter of size or electoral success. Its
strengths were its ability to set the left's political agenda and its strong
organisation in trade unions.
In the twenties,
the arrival of the CP, singing the praises of a "successful"
socialist revolution in the Soviet Union, transformed British socialism,
effectively eclipsing the participatory democratic socialism, with workers'
control at its core, that had made the running among British socialists in the
first two decades of the century.
As John Callaghan
put it in his recent history of the left, Socialism in Britain, "Leninism
changed the radical socialist catechism. Henceforward the focus of Marxist
activity was party-building for the purpose of smashing the bourgeois state,
crudely understood as 'bodies of armed men'. Meanwhile, socialism rapidly came
to mean the system of power in the Soviet Union which, it was noted, was
perfectly compatible with the most barbarous practices developed in capitalist
industry."
The CP rapidly
established a power base in the trade unions despite the opposition of the right.
By the late thirties, with the economies of the capitalist world in crisis,
social democracy seemingly ineffectual and the Soviet Union apparently the
only bulwark against fascism, the CP's identification of the Soviet Union as a
beacon of socialist hope had become almost hegemonic on the British left.
Uncritical
pro-Soviet feeling on the non-communist left dwindled after the Hitler-Stalin pact
in 1939. It was revived by the wartime alliance, and then underwent a long
post-war decline with the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe after 1945, the
suppression of the Berlin workers' revolt in 1953, Hungary 1956, the building
of the Berlin Wall and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Yet, even as late
as the sixties, many, if not most, British socialists still saw the Soviet
Union as a model for a successful socialist economy, however much they disagreed
with its lack of democracy or its foreign policy. The CP retained a degree of
intellectual credibility.
The party's
economists were among the main proponents of the Alternative Economic Strategy
which became Labour policy in the early seventies. Communist industrial
organisation remained potent, though hardly as influential as was claimed by
politicians and the popular press right up to the beginning of the eighties.
The party played a
significant role in student politics in the seventies and a smaller one in the
peace movement in the early eighties. It lost a few members over the 1977 draft
of its programme, The British Road of Socialism, with a diehard
pro-Soviet faction defecting over some rather mild criticism of "actually
existing socialism" to form the New Communist Party (which distinguished
itself last month by backing the coup; but at the beginning of the eighties,
the CP remained a force to be reckoned with in British left politics.
Today, all that
seems very distant. The eighties saw the CP riven by feuding – first between
pro-Soviet advocates of "class politics", grouped around the Morning
Star newspaper, and the rest of the party, and subsequently, after the expulsion
of the Morning Star group (some of whom formed another Stalinist
breakaway, the Communist Party of Britain), among the various factions that
remained in the party.
Membership, long
in decline, began to plummet, and the party's trade union base shrank rapidly.
Outside Scotland, where the CP retained its influence in the Scottish TUC and
was instrumental in reviving interest in home rule, just about the only CP
success story of the eighties was its monthly magazine, Marxism Today, edited by Martin Jacques.
In mid-decade, Marxism
Today analysis of "Thatcherism" as a hegemonic project of the
Right played an important part in persuading the Labour left that it should
support the Labour leadership's attempt to shift Labour towards the centre.
Later, its advocacy of the idea that capitalism had entered a new era of
"post-Fordism", and that these "New Times" demanded a
wholly new response from the left, lent left intellectual credibility to Labour's
abandonment of the traditional socialist programme of nationalisation and
planning.
Ironically,
Marxism Today's success served to weaken the CP still further: as the
magazine moved away from Leninism, pressure grew from within the party to retain the word
"communist" in its title, and many in Scotland said they would create an
independent Scottish Communist Party if the name-change went ahead. After the
momentous events of the last two weeks, such voices have been less in evidence,
but even among supporters of "transformation" there are worries that
whatever emerges from the process will either lie directionless or insufficiently
politically distinct to survive.
Temple,
who has been general secretary since early 1990, when she look over from Gordon
McLennan, brushes aside such criticism. Democratic Left, she says, has a clear
purpose. "We're hoping to use our organisation and resources to give a
kick-start to a culture of progressive democratic left politics in Britain.
Labour suffers from a deep-rooted anti-intellectualism and is too tied to
electoral politics; Democratic Left will help to fill the gap.
"We're
not trying to do the same thing as the Labour Party," she says,
"There's a great need for Labour to win the next general election, and I
don't accuse the Labour leadership of betrayal. But as well as a progressive
government, you need people demanding change from below. I see Democratic
Left as a forum where people try to develop their politics and where they can
network together.
"I'm
not saying that all movements will come from Democratic Left but I do see it
as facilitating the development of broad, bottom-up campaigning
movements."
Even
Temple admits that there is plenty still to sort out about the whole project,
however. "Whether our objective is the creation of a new left party or
whether our role is to facilitate development of cooperation among existing
parties is still being discussed."
For
the time being, the priority is to seek out partners in other political
parties and organisations for discussions. No one left-of-centre is ruled out
but it is clear that the main targets are the Labour's "soft left",
the Greens, the Liberal Democrats and non-party social movements.
Whether
anyone will want to play ball with Democratic Left is as yet unknown, however.
There are few signs at present of much interest outside the CP. Another
problem is whether the CP's remaining trade union base will adapt to a more
amorphous structure. "We still have a lot of members who have positions of
responsibility within their unions," says Temple "But that's a
resource that hasn't been very effectively used in recent years.
"We've
rejected the old way of working in the unions – small groups of people meeting
in smoke-filled rooms deciding who they're going to put forward and what the
line is – but we've not found a new way. Part of the problem is that the party
has been organised on a branch basis. A lot of trade unionists weren't
involved in their local branch so they didn't have input into the party."
Meanwhile, CP membership now stands at
5,000, down 1,700 from the end of last year but up 1,500 from May. The party is
smaller than at any time since the twenties and short of cash. If it can gain
some solace from the argument that, after the collapse of communist power in
the Soviet Union, it would be even worse off if it had not decided to embark on
its present course, its future does not seem too rosy.
