The British Communist
Party has been taken over by self-styled 'Eurocommunists'. Many libertarians
view the occasion of Leninists falling out as a time for revolutionaries
everywhere to rejoice. Others cautiously welcome any inching away from Stalinism.
Have the changes in the CP gone far enough? Paul Anderson doesn't think so, and
here he tells why
If anyone had suggested in 1975 that in ten years' time a
monthly magazine published by the Communist Party would be making the
intellectual running on the British left, nobody in the know would have been
able to resist a snigger.
At that time, the CP had the air of a corpse that had been decomposing
for thirty years. It was losing its membership rapidly; its ideology seemed
neanderthal; and its practice consisted largely of bureaucratic manoeuvrings
within a few trade unions. Nothing about the CP was remotely appealing. And yet
in 1985...bright young (well, fortyish) boys and girls, wearing expensive
glasses and chic knitwear and calling themselves “Eurocommunists” (a term that went out of fashion on the continent several years ago), have revamped the
party magazine Marxism Today, and
even the Financial Times recognises
it as pivotal to current left debates.
What's more, these Eurocommunists have – with a little help
from CP apparatchiks anxious to dump some “awkward comrades” – removed the
Stalinist old guard (the “Tankies”) from positions of influence within the
party (though the Tankies still control what used to be the party's daily
newspaper, the Morning Star).
Rivalry between
diehards and Euros
It is too soon to tell whether the Eurocommunist takeover of
the CP and the success of Marxism Today will reverse the decline in CP
membership. There are nevertheless signs that the new look CP will prove
attractive to a wide range of people – those who find the Labour Party too
bureaucratic and traditionalist, the varieties of Trotskyism too authoritarian,
workerist or simplistic and the peace or women's movements lacking in broad
political perspectives. At first sight, the CP of the Eurocommunists seems
flexible, intelligent and modern, determinedly civil libertarian! committed to
democratic pluralism and feminism. It seems to have abandoned the worst of
workerism and pro-Sovietism.
Libertarian socialists can only welcome the re-thinking
within the CP. But there are good reasons to believe that this process has some
way to go before any self-respecting libertarian socialist could consider
completely trusting the party.
First, the Eurocommunists have at no time questioned the
organisational principles of the
“democratic centralist” Leninist party. Indeed, they beat
the Tankies and expelled their leaders from the CP in an essentially democratic
centralist power struggle. The Tankies were convicted of breaches of party
discipline – they had committed the “crime” of not following the leadership's
line.
Not one Eurocommunist has bothered to ask whether this is
the right way to go about politics. Not one has raised doubts about the right
of leaderships to define lines, let alone wondered aloud whether radical
politics really is a matter of the formulation of lines which, if "correct", the
masses will follow. It is rather difficult to believe in
the Eurocommunists’ stated commitment to the creation and maintenance of a
culture of genuinely plural discourse on the left.
Second, the
Eurocommunists have failed to engage in anything like an adequate critique of
the regimes of "actually existing socialism".
They have certainly raised doubts about the human rights
record of Soviet-type societies; they have provided (lukewarm) support for
opposition movements in such societies (on condition that theye do not overstep
the mark); and they have criticised certain “errors” in Soviet foreign policy
(such as the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan).
But they have refused to analyse critically and
systematically the harsh social reality of “actually existing socialism”:
instead, they clutch at straws, hoping against hope that one or another change
of leadership, one or another official hint of reform from above, will somehow
lead to the triumph of the “good” aspects over the “bad”. Even though this is
preferable to the party's position at the time of the Hungarian revolution of
1956 – when the CP cheered as the tanks rolled in – it remains lily-livered and
simplistic. Perhaps more important, it does nothing to dispel suspicion as to
the sort of socialism the CP would bring about if it ever had the chance.
Political limitations
of Eurocommunism
Third, the Eurocommunists’ abandonment of the old “workerism”
is a rejection merely of the way the old-style CP, by giving almost exclusive
priority to jockeying for position in the trade union bureaucracies, ignored important issues outside the sphere of production. The Eurocommunists, in
other words, see the battle for office as just one activity for good
Communists.
They have offered neither a critique of the ideology and
practice of bureaucratic corporatist union politics, nor an alternative model
of workplace politics (though this is hardly surprising given their reliance
for their majority in the CP on such figures as Mick McGahey).
This simply will not do. If we are to develop an adequate
workplace politics (which we must, even if we reject workerism) we have to
understand the ways in which the interests of trade union bureaucrats (even
those on the left) and the interests of those they claim to represent often
conflict.
We need to emphasise the importance of direct democratic
control of workplace struggle by those immediately involved. And we have to go
beyond the demands for more jobs and more money which characterise traditional
trade union militancy – forcing on to the political agenda projects for massive
reduction in working time, the disassociation of income from productivity, the
self-managment of production and the transformation of productive techniques.
This will not be an easy task: but that is no reason to shirk it.
Fourth, the Eurocommunists' medium-term strategy of creating
a “broad democratic alliance” to defeat Thatcherism is rather less exciting
than its proponents would have us believe. Insofar as the Eurocommunists are
arguing that the new right's attempts to make its ideology the common sense of
the age should be fought against on all fronts they make a sensible point. And
their emphasis on a plurality of oppositional social movements and the need for
coalition-building among these are also to be welcomed (with the proviso, of
course, that the Eurocoramunists' continued commitment to Leninism makes their
enthusiasm for pluralism rather unbelievable).
Unfortunately, their idea of the possible basis for such a
coalition is extraordinarily wide of the mark. Because they identify the
problem as “Thatcherism” they cannot but end up (in spite of their Gramscian
rhetoric) seeing the apotheosis of their political project as
everyone-to-the-left -of-Ghengis Khan “uniting to kick out the Tories”.
Now the Tories are very nasty and it would be nice to kick
them out. We should not, however, misidentify the problem; just as we stress
that you can't blow up a social relationship, we have to stress that you can't
vote one away either. The problem, in other words, is not “the Tories”, but
something deeper – our lack of control over the decisions that fundamentally
affect us. Rather than attempting to unite the social movements around a simple
anti-Toryism, we should be emphasising the potential for a far more radical unity
based on a common refusal of powerlessness in everyday life and the project of
generalised self-management.
