Unless there is a last-minute upset, the Communist
Party of Great Britain will cease to exist this weekend. Few win mourn its
death. Of course, many good comrades went through the CP. Even disillusioned
former communists talk warmly of the rare sense of comradeship they experienced
in the party. But in its three-quarters of a century existence, the CP has
caused a vast amount of harm to the British left. In the end it is difficult to
think of anything worthwhile it has done that would not have been done as well
by others in its absence.
Indeed, even without playing the game of "what
if”, the list of concrete CP achievements is short. In the thirties, it
organised the unemployed workers' movement and had a significant (although not
dominant) role in opposing fascism on the streets and in the corridors of
power. But it threw away nearly all its credibility with its acceptance of the
Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939. Since then, practically all it has to boast about
is some effective trade union organisation in the sixties and seventies, a
certain amount of influence over Labour economic policy at the time of the
Alternative Economic Strategy and an almost-successful monthly magazine, now
alas on its last legs, in the eighties.
Against this, there are the CP’s many failings. Most
sickening, of course, there is its long acquiescence in the crimes of its
Soviet master – Stalin's forced collectivisation of agriculture, the show
trials, the communist suppression of the radical left in the Spanish civil
war, the imposition of communist dictatorship on eastern Europe after 1946 and
its maintenance by brute force.
Only in 1968, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia,
did the British party first distance itself from Moscow; it now emerges that it
was still receiving substantial subsidies from the Kremlin as late as 1979.
But other, smaller things are almost as difficult to
forgive: the attempts to take over autonomous movements, the front
organisations, the ballot-rigging, the everyday lies, authoritarianism and manipulation
validated by the Leninist nostrum that the end justifies the means.
Enough, however, of the ashes. What of the phoenix
apparently rising from them, Democratic Left? It is certainly a very different
creature from the old CP. It is no longer a Leninist "democratic
centralist" party, and there is much in its programme with which anyone
from the democratic left – an older, larger and livelier political current than
that represented by today's "transformed" communists – could agree.
The new party (or non-party) looks as if it will be impressively open,
democratic, libertarian, environmentalist and feminist. Perhaps, if we were
starting to build British social democracy from scratch, we would start with
something like Democratic Left rather than attempting to create the hotch-potch
that is the Labour Party.
The
problem is that we are not starting from scratch: Labour already exists,
and, whatever its faults, they are not sufficient, at least in the eyes of most
of the democratic Labour Left, to justify demolition and rebuilding. The
ex-communists might be able to set up an interesting debating society and they
might be able to initiate some successful campaigns. But Democratic Left is
never going to attract sufficient support to become a significant electoral
force or even to play a major role in setting the left agenda. It is difficult
to see why the comrades did not simply dissolve the CP and join the Labour
Party.
