Tribune, 14 December 1990
The Communist Party of Great Britain decided not to disband
last week. But, writes Paul Anderson, it seems merely to have postponed its
collapse
The tiny Communist Party of Great Britain last weekend
looked death in the face – and then averted its gaze.
A vast majority of the 300 delegates at its 42nd Congress
at TUC Congress House in London rejected a proposal, put forward by Marxism
Today supporters, to dissolve the 70-year-old party into a loose political
association. A rather smaller majority rejected calls for "renewal"
of the party on Leninist lines.
Instead, the CP will continue, putting a change of name and
rules to next year's congress and encouraging the eventual emergence of a
"new political formation". But it is difficult to see how this fudge,
backed by the party's executive committee, can possibly stem the CP's decline.
It now claims 6,000 members (down from 30,000 in the sixties), some not paying
their dues, most of them inactive and many of them retired.
More important, the formal debate and informal discussion
at the 42nd Congress showed clearly that the few comrades who remain are
terminally disillusioned, with no coherent common political project. The party
has survived merely because Britain's communists are afraid of life without
it.
Saturday morning's debate was supposed to discuss the
general political situation in which the CP now finds itself, with an
executive committee document based on Marxism Today's analysis of "New
Times" as its focus.
Instead, after an opening speech from the party's general
secretary, Nina Temple, in which she declared that "1990 has seen the
Bolshevik era end in disaster", the debate concentrated on the legacy of
1917.
Delegates heard a string of stinging denunciations of the
whole Leninist tradition. One speaker told the congress: "The crimes
committed in the name of communism can never be explained away." Another,
attacking democratic centralist party organisation, announced blithely that
"Leninism helped to grease the skids for Stalinism".
Such sweeping dismissals of party tradition were too much
for some older delegates, who treated the congress to diatribes on the unchanging
nature of imperialism, but resistance was weak. No one was prepared explicitly
to defend the "actually existing socialism" that once inspired the
CP, and attempts to prevent the party from disowning its past were voted down.
That left the afternoon's session to determine the way
forward, but here proceedings almost ground to a halt. Everyone agreed that the
CP was in crisis, and nearly everyone backed a pluralist politics of “broad
progressive alliances", but no two speakers seemed to concur on what
should happen next.
One man, supporting the executive commitee's proposal that
the party be kept going for the time being, pinned his hopes on a Labour defeat
at the next election, which would lead to a "fundamental review of left
politics" in which Greens and Liberal Democrats would play a key role. Another,
also backing temporary continuation, said that the CP could help Labour win.
Yet another thought that a "renewed" CP, the
option favoured by (mainly London-based) Leninist hardliners, should throw in
its lot with the Socialist Movement and the Labour hard left. A woman advocate
of dissolving the party into a political association said that political
parties were a thing of the past; a male colleague saw the political
association as a means of providing strategic thinking for Labour.
In the end on Sunday the congress supported the executive
fudge by a large majority, but there was little enthusiasm among delegates for
their own decision. Many among the Marxism Today faction who favoured
dissolution voted for the compromise only to defeat the hardline Leninist
faction; many who didn't want change, particularly from the Scottish party,
backed the compromise only to defeat the liquidationists.
Far from resolving the crisis, the outcome of the congress ensures that the argument over the CP's
future will continue for another year, and many members, particularly those
who believe that the party should call it a day, have simply had enough. That
means that further resignations are on the cards, which in turn means that the
influence of the Leninist hard-line block, which increased its representation
on the executive in elections on Sunday, will grow still further.
As the CP's death agonies continue, last weekend will
almost certainly look like a missed opportunity for painless suicide.
