Stalinism, the Communist Party and the RCG's new turn

Editorial note. Transcribed by hand from the scan. Misprints are kept as printed and marked [sic]; [illegible] and a bracketed query mark words that cannot be read with certainty. Note references are printed in parentheses, (1) to (84), and are given so; the footnotes follow the article, as printed. The "[sic]" after "ferment splits" on p. 27 is the authors' own. Page headings give the printed page numbers.

Stalinism, the Communist Party and the RCG's new turn

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Introduction

Throughout the post-war period the official Communist Parties (CPs) have been an important and sometimes dominant force in the European working class movement. The years of capitalist boom, however, have fostered the national-reformist tendencies in these parties — tendencies which have come to the fore in the present capitalist crisis. All over Europe, the CPs have responded to the onset of the crisis by giving their reformist standpoint a more explicit character. The development of 'Euro-communism' and its explicit rejection of the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat is the expression of Stalinism in today's conditions.

In their efforts to win credibility as respectable reformist parties, the CPs have been compelled to distance themselves from the Soviet Union and emphasise their 'democratic' qualities. This compulsion, which has been felt most strongly by the larger CPs — those of France, Italy, Spain and Japan — has now also impressed itself upon the small Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). On the day that a new draft of its programme — the British Road to Socialism — was published, the CPGB's General Secretary, Gordon McLennan, told The Guardian how he saw the problems facing the party:

'He was afraid that the party's lack of electoral success over the past fifty six years was partly due to its identification with the Soviet Union. But the British road was independent, and guaranteed proportional representation, civil rights and an extension of democracy.'(1)

Through its 'democratic' criticisms of the regimes in Eastern Europe, and the USSR, the CGPB [sic] has joined the 'Euro-communists' by presenting an image of itself which is distinct from the Cold War appearance of Stalinism.

If the political expression of Stalinism has changed and has come to incorporate a new anti-Soviet stance, the consequences of its programme for the working class have not. A precondition for the training of a revolutionary vanguard in Europe is an all-out political struggle against the programme of the official communist movement. In order to carry out this task, revolutionaries must be armed with a scientific understanding of the history of Stalinism, its relationship to the Soviet bureaucracy and its contemporary expression.

The old RCG's theoretical workgroup on Stalinism had begun to gain such an understanding through critiques of the Western European CPs and the CPGB.

In sharp contrast to this, the position adopted by the majority faction of the RCG saw the recent developments in the CPGB only in narrow and tactical terms. Rather than seeking to develop the ideological basis for confronting the CPGB, the majority faction argued for 'intervening' in the debates of the Party in order to 'ferment splits' [sic]. In this document we reply to the political approach of the majority faction to the question of the CPGB.

In the RCG's short-lived debate on this question, Cde Dornhorst's article(2) served as a theoretical justification for the 'tactical' orientation of the majority faction towards the CPGB. His article was written as a reply to documents by Cdes Phil Turner and Frank Richards on the CPGB and Stalinism. Presenting the new turn towards 'intervention' in the debates of the CPGB in the guise of a position on Stalinism, Cde Dornhorst is forced to adopt a parochial standpoint that is very fashionable on the left today — namely, that Stalinism no longer exists as an international phenomenon and that the CPGB is no longer a Stalinist party. This document is also a reply to this standpoint.

This document will first deal with the distortions contained in Cde Dornhorst's reply. We will reply both in order to set the record straight and to clarify the real purpose of his document. We will then take up the political method which underlies Cde Dornhorst's arguments and demonstrate their distance from Marxism. By beginning to draw out the connections between the Stalinism of today and the Stalinism of the past, we will show the inadequacy of Cde Dornhorst's analysis. In the final sections we will draw out the political

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consequences of Cde Dornhorst's arguments and counterpose to them the revolutionary approach.

1. CDE DORNHORST'S CLEVER POLEMICS

It is unfortunate that Cde Dornhorst has clouded the issues at stake by distorting the arguments of Cdes Turner and Richards. It would be a diversion to take up these distortions point by point. Instead we will restrict ourselves to three examples of Cde Dornhorst's approach to polemics. It is necessary to do this for he attempts to develop his arguments through a critique of Cde Turner's article. In order to prepare us for a turn to the CPGB, Cde Dornhorst offers an alternative view of the political development of the CPGB to that of Cde Turner. Cde Dornhorst adopts the approach of replying not so much to Cde Turner's arguments, but to what he would have liked Cde Turner to say. The initial 'severe blow' which Cde Dornhorst delivers relates to the first sentence of Cde Turner's document:

'To understand the present crisis of world Stalinism and the beginnings of its reflection in the CPGB demands that we understand its history.'(3)

It might be thought that this was a straightforward introductory sentence. But wait! Cde Dornhorst has a profound observation to make. Immediately after quoting the sentence above, he asks:

'Is there an entity which can be described as "world Stalinism"? Is its crisis only now impinging on the CPGB? These assumptions are ahistorical. Why do we need to understand its history if it is the same as it was in the pre-war period?'(4)

Cde Dornhorst has generously provided Cde Turner with 'assumptions' he never had. Did Cde Turner suggest that the crisis of Stalinism is 'only now impinging on the CPGB'? Anyone vaguely familiar with the English language can see that Cde Turner is discussing 'the present crisis of world Stalinism'. Cde Dornhorst has begun the process of setting up a straw man for his 'debate'.

Rather than taking up Cde Turner directly, Cde Dornhorst prefers to establish his version of 'orthodox Trotskyism' and by implication attribute this standpoint to Cde Turner. For example:

'Another myth of orthodox idealism is that the CPGB carried out the so-called left turn of 1947 on the orders of Stalin. It is noticeable that these people never explain exactly when this left turn ended ... The "turn" was explicitly chauvinist in content.'(5)

Cde Turner is unambiguous on the point that no real left turn took place in 1947 and that the turn was 'chauvinist in content'. He wrote:

'The new militant line, however, barely concealed the reformism which continued to run through the politics of the CPGB ... The CPGB's propaganda was filled with the rankest chauvinism.'(6)

If Cde Turner does not explain on what day the 'left turn' ended, it is because he locates the possibility of a new shift in the politics of the CPGB in the previous period:

'The basis for a further turn to the right by the CPGB was, as I have tried to show, contained within the "left" politics of the Cold War.'(7)

In carrying out his mission, Cde Dornhorst makes countless attempts to score points. He suddenly declares that it is 'not true'

'that a commitment to building socialism in one country equals Stalinism. That is idealism. This underlies the statement in FR's document ...' [Cde Richards, Ed]

Unable to criticise a single sentence in Cde Richards' article for what it actually says, Cde Dornhorst can only criticise what supposedly 'underlies' his statements. And what is this statement which merits the charge of 'idealism'?

'The starting point of the Stalinist movement is the subordination of the Comintern to the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy. Today Stalinism appears as a "polycentric" movement containing conflicting interests. Today's result should not be confused with the starting point of Stalinism.'(8)

A simple statement contrasting the appearance of Stalinism today with its appearance in the past is transformed in the mind of Cde Dornhorst into a statement that a 'commitment to building socialism in one country equals Stalinism'. Cde Dornhorst explains neither the connection between the two statements, nor the seemingly psychic powers which allow him to tell us what Cde Richards is thinking at any one time.

We have not exhausted Cde Dornhorst's numerous distortions. However, these examples should suffice to show that Cde Dornhorst is not replying to Cde Turner, but is rather establishing a false target in order to provide himself with a convenient starting point.

2. STALINISM AND CDE DORNHORST

(a) Historical materialism versus reading history backwards

Cde Dornhorst claims that his 'reply' to Cde Turner 'seeks to lay the basis for a Marxist analysis of the CPGB'. As we shall show, however, Cde Dornhorst's method has nothing in common with Marxism. His analysis consists of starting from his conclusions and working backwards to prove his history. We shall outline Marx's approach to history in order to indicate how Stalinism should be analysed and thus illustrate Cde Dornhorst's inability to grasp the fundamentals of historical materialism. We are above all interested in the political consequences of Cde Dornhorst's approach. However, serious political debate cannot confine itself to an assessment of tactics, positions and programmatic statements. In order to demonstrate that an opportunist standpoint, in this case that of Cde Dornhorst, is not just an aberration, it is necessary to confront the method of approach that underlies the arguments. In this way, a revolutionary critique can show how a non-scientific method of approach necessarily leads to an incorrect political standpoint.

Cde Dornhorst did not accidentally stumble across his approach to Stalinism; it is a method of analysis that is most appropriate to the RCG's adaptation to the CPGB. He sets out to prove that the CPGB is not Stalinist, that the changing relationship between the Communist Parties and the Soviet Union is more or less irrelevant in shaping their development, and that the CPs are as

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different from each other as different social democratic parties. He concludes his analysis thus:

'In analysing the development of communist parties since the second world war, their relation to or more accurately, attitude towards the Soviet Union is a secondary question. What is primary is the analysis of their relation to their own working class.... The Communist Parties are not Stalinist — they represent specific forms of reformism. This differs from country to country — the PCI, the PCF and the CPGB are now as different from each other as the Italian, French and British Socialist Parties. This cannot be explained by supposing that they are still Stalinist.'(9)

Cde Dornhorst's conclusion is based on a one-sided and empirical recognition of the worldwide strengthening of nationalism within the CPs today. The changed appearance of the CPs has led many bourgeois and radical left writers to accept the CPs' own view of themselves — the view that they are no longer Stalinist. The same approach adopted by Cde Dornhorst has led the prominent East German dissident, Wolf Biermann, to declare that:

'Even the most stubborn Stalinists have changed — just read the book by Carrillo "Spain after Franco"! Carrillo himself has changed, he describes that very honestly, and even great old Dolores Ibarruri has finally stepped on a new road with her party.'(10)

The changed appearance of the CPs is taken out of its historical context and is therefore arbitrarily counterposed to its previous history. Today's historical result — the fragmentation of the official communist movement — is given as an explanation of the process that led up to it. Such an explanation cannot provide the basis for understanding the future development of the official communist movement. History's result is not its starting point. We must see the present as a moment in historical development. Separating the present from the past leads to viewing the present in a partial way, torn from the totality of historical development.

Marx looked at history from the standpoint of the present, but, unlike Cde Dornhorst, he did not abstract the present from the past. For Marx, the lower forms of historical development could only be understood by means of an analysis of the most developed social forms. He wrote:

'Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organisation of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allow insights into the structure and relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along within it, ... etc. Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known. The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient, etc.'(11)

In Capital, Marx presented his analysis not as a historical sequence, but by the relationship that his scientific categories have 'to one another in modern bourgeois society':

'It would therefore be unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development.'(12)

So Marx's presentation of Capital is not directly historical — it is historical-logical. The presentation of categories in their relationship to one another in modern bourgeois society is based on a method of historical abstraction, or a logical reconstruction of history. Marx starts from the present and looks at the past in order to draw out the specific form of development of each period. By seeing the present as 'self-superceding', his analysis of the past also sheds light on future development. It is vital to grasp that Marx sees present categories as being historically specific.

When he states that 'the bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient', Marx is quick to add: 'But not at all in the manner of those economists who smudge over all historical differences and see bourgeois relations in all forms of society'(13). Central to Marx's critique of political economy is the demonstration of the historical — and therefore transient — character of bourgeois social relations. Marx criticised bourgeois thinkers for reading the social relations of today back into the past:

'The so-called historical presentation of development is founded, as a rule, on the fact that the latest form regards the previous ones as steps leading up to itself, and, since it is only rarely and only under quite specific conditions able to criticise itself ... it always conceives them one-sidedly.'(14)

Because the present is seen as given and natural, the bourgeoisie can see only its own reflection in the past and in the future. Projecting the present into the past — that is, eternalising the present — is the way the bourgeoisie looks at history. Marx moved between 'history's point of departure' and the 'historical result' in order to work out the inner connections of the totality of tendencies that had moulded his object of investigation. On the basis of such an inquiry, it is possible to reconstruct history in terms of its logical development. Marx wrote:

'Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connection. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.'(15)

For Marx therefore, an adequate presentation of 'the actual movement' of his object of inquiry presupposed an analysis of its 'different forms of development'. Marx noted that the ahistorical categories of bourgeois economists can demonstrate how production takes place within capitalism, but cannot show how the relations which the categories reflect have come about. Ultimately, the bourgeoisie understands neither the present nor the past:

'The view outlined here diverges sharply from the one current among bourgeois economists imprinted within capitalist ways of thought. Such thinkers do indeed

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realise how production takes place within capitalist relations. But they do not understand how these relations are themselves produced, together with the material preconditions of their dissolution. They do not see, therefore, that their historical justification as a necessary form of economic development and of the production of social wealth may be undermined.'(16)

For Marx, the importance of 'history' lay in the fact that it showed how present social relations were produced and the tendencies that would lead to change in the future.

Although Marx's enquiry into the capitalist mode of production proceeded on a level of abstraction different from that appropriate to the analysis of a particular historical phenomenon, this logical-historical approach is essential to an understanding of Stalinism. It was the method of analysis adopted by Lenin in his struggle against opportunism.

Lenin's analysis of the collapse of the Second International provides an instructive example of how to approach the changing expressions of political tendencies. He presented his analysis of the collapse of the Second International by looking at the tendencies which had strengthened opportunism in an earlier period of capital accumulation:

'"Peaceful" decades, however, have not passed without leaving their mark. They have of necessity given rise to opportunism in all countries, and made it prevalent among parliamentarian, trade union, journalistic and other "leaders".'(17)

It was the impact of the First World War and crisis that reinforced already existing opportunist tendencies and changed their political expression into social-chauvinism — socialism in words, chauvinism in deeds:

'The war has changed this opportunism, which had been fostered for decades, raised it to a higher stage ...'(18)

For Lenin, social-chauvinism was a result not simply of the war. He outlined the historical tendencies which necessarily led to this changed expression of opportunism. In looking at the collapse of the Second International he asked the following questions:

'... what interests the socialist movement today is ... a study of the historical origins, the conditions, the significance and the strength of the social-chauvinist trend. (1) Where did social-chauvinism spring from? (2) What gave it strength? (3) How must it be combatted?'(19)

Through his analysis Lenin was able to show the connection between the opportunism of the previous period and social-chauvinism: how the war had changed opportunism — had 'raised it to a higher stage'. By presenting the historical process that led to the consummation of opportunism as social-chauvinism, Lenin could advance a method of combatting it. He could demonstrate that social-chauvinism was not an aberration, but the necessary expression of opportunism at a time of war and crisis. Revolutionary communists today, in a similar way, must demonstrate the historical relationship between the Stalinism of the past and its contemporary expression.

The development of national-reformist tendencies in the CPs took place at the expense of the old traditions of the official communist movement. Under the impact of the crisis, this process has been intensified to the extent that Biermann's words 'But even the most stubborn Stalinists have changed' make 'common sense'. However, the real significance of the programme of the CPGB can only be understood through an analysis of its history.

In order to comprehend the political expressions of opportunism in the working class movement today, it is essential to come to grips with the process that shaped them — what Lenin called 'the totality of opposing tendencies' — in order to discard 'subjectivism and arbitrariness in the choice of a particular "dominant" idea'(20). It is characteristic of bourgeois historians to separate a 'dominant idea' from the contradictory historical tendencies that have led to that idea being dominant at a particular moment. Cde Dornhorst too has abstracted some of the 'dominant' features of the present-day CPGB from the 'totality of opposing tendencies' that gave rise to them and has substituted this abstraction for a materialist analysis of that party. As we shall see, this ahistorical view provides the theoretical justification for the RCG's adaptation to the CPGB.

(b) Is Stalinism a 'secondary question'? The tendencies of development within Stalinism

Today, most West European CPs have assumed the mantle of radical nationalism and publicly denounce the Soviet regime in a way that is barely distinguishable from that of bourgeois liberalism. The view that these parties are no longer Stalinist appears to make sense. However, a closer look at the official communist movement shows that Stalinism and 'Euro-communism' are not two distinct phenomena. On the contrary, today's CPs are the necessary result of their Stalinist past. Here we can only provide a bare outline of this development(21). Given Cde Dornhorst's view that the CPGB is not Stalinist, it is necessary to show the links links [sic] between today's expression of Stalinism and its origins.

In order to understand the development of national reformist CPs in Western Europe we must start from the material conditions that prevailed in the Soviet Union after the 1917 revolution. The enormous pressures on the new workers' state — economic and cultural backwardness, civil war and invasion by imperialist powers, the physical destruction of a large section of the proletarian vanguard in the course of these wars, isolation — all these had a debilitating effect on the Soviet power. Following the failure of the revolutionary upsurge in Western Europe, the immediate survival of the Soviet state became dependent on the internal consolidation of the economy. These conditions provided the terrain for the rise of Stalinism.

Lenin had understood that the success of the socialist revolution in the Soviet Republic rested upon two conditions: firstly the victory of the socialist revolution in at least one advanced European country, and, secondly, a compromise with the peasant majority of the population. The latter, however, could be successful only on the basis of the former. It was understood that socialism could not be built by the efforts of the workers of one country alone(22). Thus the internal consolidation of the Soviet economy was necessary in

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order to provide a breathing space for the workers' state until assistance could be obtained from the victorious proletariat in Europe. The New Economic Policy (NEP) which above all represented a necessary compromise with the peasantry, coincided with the weakening of proletarian forces in the Soviet Union. Internal economic consolidation increased the role of the state bureaucracy. The growing role of the bureaucracy in a situation where large sections of the working class vanguard were physically destroyed in the civil war posed new problems for the workers' state. After Lenin's death, tendencies towards bureaucratisation were reinforced. The bureaucratisation of the Bolshevik Party and the gradual merging of state and party bureaucracies expressed the defeat and demoralisation suffered by the vanguard of the working class. By the mid-twenties the bureaucracy had raised itself above the masses and had managed to stifle all elements of workers' democracy(23).

The NEP did lead to a degree of economic reconstruction in the USSR. Its relative success sharply contrasted with the defeats suffered by the European working class. An empirical recognition of the successes of the NEP was systematised into a theory of building socialism through internal reconstruction: the enforced measures of compromise were made into a principle — the necessity of the NEP became a virtue. The bureaucracy's euphoria over the NEP meant that Lenin's first condition for building socialism — the international revolution — gradually came to be subordinated to the process of economic construction in the USSR. 'Freed' from the control of the working class and basing itself on the NEP, the Soviet bureaucracy came to adopt a national outlook more and more. Stalin's theory of 'socialism in one country' was the ideological expression of this process. By separating the building of socialism in the USSR from the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat worldwide, it rejected proletarian internationalism.

Lenin understood that the development of the forces of production adequate to the establishment of socialism could not take place within the confines of one country. Denying this, Stalin argued that the only obstacle to building socialism in one country was military intervention by foreign powers. This revision of the basic position of Marx and Lenin had two major consequences for the communist movement — consequences that were drawn out by Trotsky in 1928:

'The new doctrine proclaims that socialism can be built on the basis of a national state if only there is no intervention. From this there can and must follow ... a collaborationist policy towards the foreign bourgeoisie with the object of averting intervention, as this will guarantee the construction of socialism, that is to say, will solve the main historical question. The task of the parties in the Comintern assumes, therefore, an auxiliary character; their mission is to protect the USSR from intervention and not to fight for the conquest of power. It is, of course, not a question of the subjective intentions but of the objective logic of political thought.'(24)

The strategy of building socialism in one country did lead to the transformation of the Comintern and its sections. As Trotsky predicted, the Stalinisation of the Comintern assigned its sections a new role. This point was spelled out by Comintern ideologue Manuilsky:

'Today, the defence of the USSR determines the main line of policy of the world proletariat in relation to war; whereas in 1914, the best proletarian revolutionaries adopted the position of defeat of one's imperialist government in the war.'(25)

Manuilsky's suggestion that the 'defence of the USSR' had replaced the need to defeat 'one's imperialist government' indicated the role of class collaboration assigned to the Comintern sections. The pursuit of this collaborationist policy contained the seeds of fragmentation of the official communist movement. The parties of the Second International too, did not find it necessary to defeat their own imperialist government. As Trotsky noted:

'If it is at all possible to realise socialism in one country, then one can believe in that theory not only after but also before the conquest of power.' If socialism can be realised within the national boundaries of backward Russia, then there is all the more reason to believe that it can be realised in advanced Germany. Tomorrow the leaders of the Communist Party of Germany will undertake to propound this theory... The day after tomorrow the French party will have its turn. It will be the beginning of the disintegration of the Comintern along the lines of social-patriotism.'(26)

In the national-reformist standpoint of the bureaucracy there existed only the logical possibility of the disintegration of the Comintern along the lines of social-patriotism. Though national-reformist tendences [sic] were strengthened in the individual sections of the Comintern, their development as dominant characteristics of the CPs could not take place overnight. After 1928 the ideological weakness which had characterised the CPs since the foundation of the Comintern, coupled with the defeats suffered internationally by the working class and the consequent isolation of the local CPs all served to maintain the hegemony of the Soviet bureaucracy.

The Soviet bureaucracy's abandonment of internationalism led to the subordination of the Comintern to Soviet foreign policy. This transformation of the Third International had the effect of strengthening nationalist tendencies in the CPs. Although Stalinism developed on the basis of an international movement, its political foundation was the standpoint of nationalism — hence the possibility of 'disintegration of the Comintern along the lines of social-patriotism'. The CPGB's programme today is a result of the past development of opportunist tendencies which have been reinforced by the onset of capitalist crisis. Because Cde Dornhorst sees only the reflections of the present in the past, he cannot grasp the specificity of the CPGB today, or how the CPGB has come to be what it is. Basing himself in a formal way on Trotsky's analysis of Stalinism in 1938-39, Cde Dornhorst paraphrases Trotsky to note:

'The Soviet bureaucracy could no longer "dictate" policy to other Communist Parties in the way it could in the Third Period. It was no deus ex machina which could impose its own will on the laws of history. The growing reliance of the Communist Parties on their own bourgeoisies could only reduce their dependence on the Soviet bureaucracy.'(27)

This is correct if it is seen as a historical tendency. But revolutionaries have to show how this tendency

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expresses itself in a particular historical moment.

Trotsky, in his analysis, demonstrated the necessity for the 'growth of nationalist tendencies in the sections of the Comintern'(28); he showed how the existing material conditions reinforced the tendency of the CPs to become more and more dependent on their own ruling classes:

'The growth of imperialist antagonisms, the obvious proximity of the war danger, and the equally obvious isolation of the USSR must unavoidably strengthen the centrifugal nationalist tendencies within the Comintern.'(29)

Being a Marxist, Trotsky characterised the fragmentation of the Comintern in terms of nationalist tendencies. The tendency towards nationalism had not fully worked itself out and Trotsky warned against those who 'want to begin with the degeneration complete'(30). Trotsky's work shows only the necessity for the strengthening of the 'national' character of the CPs. It is up to Marxists today to analyse how the 'centrifugal nationalist tendencies' work themselves out in the changing material conditions of the post-war period. In the past, the view which saw the CPs as merely an extension of Soviet foreign policy was based on an empirical recognition of one tendency of development. Today, we find Cde Dornhorst recognising only the tendency towards strengthening national reformism, free from all contradictions — in an equally one-sided way. Hence, for him it ceases to be a tendency and becomes instead an 'iron law' of history.

Cde Dornhorst backs up with 'history' his argument that the relationship of the CPGB to the Soviet Union is a 'secondary question' for the CPGB today(31). In order to find 'evidence' for his argument he rummages through past events so as to establish the case for his non-Stalinist Parties. Projecting history backwards, he rewrites the CPGB's past, in order to find it in its present form from 1939 onwards. He attempts to argue that the CPGB's chauvinist anti-war turn of 1939 had little to do with the Stalin-Hitler pact. To substantiate this, he tries to show that this turn was not really anti-war; 'this change did not mean that the CPGB adopted an anti-war line, as Cde Turner and orthodox idealism suppose'(32). Cde Dornhorst argues his point by making the correct observation that the CPGB's opposition to the war was social-pacifist and social-chauvinist. Looking at the continuity of the CPGB's position, he states that:

'In essence, this [turn] is no different from the naked chauvinism of the 1930s. It has just been given a pacifist gloss. The option of support for a "democratic"war was left open.'(33)

If all that Cde Dornhorst wanted to prove was that the CPGB could not take a stand against the Second World War on the basis of revolutionary defeatism, we would have no objections. But to deny that the CPGB opposed the war in this period as a result of pressure from the Soviet bureaucracy is plain stupidity. The continuity of the CPGB's politics during the 1939-41 period, which Cde Turner himself outlined, does not explain why the CPGB took an anti-war position — albeit in a social-chauvinist and pacifist manner. The fact is that the CPGB did oppose the war, did counterpose itself to bourgeois public opinion, did argue for strikes against speedups which accompanied the war, and in consequence did isolate itself and lose a substantial portion of its membership. Did the CPGB have a 'national' and 'independent' inclination towards self-annihilation? We think not. It was precisely the contradictory relationship between the Soviet bureaucracy and the CPGB that formed the basis for this turn.

While, on the one hand, Cde Dornhorst suggests that the turn did not represent an anti-war line, on the other he is forced to concede that some kind of a turn did take place:

'The events of this period show that the Soviet bureaucracy no longer had unlimited powers to deal with foreign Communist Parties. The official slogans sanctioned by the Comintern denounced the treachery of the social democrats, and were summarised by the appeal: "Down with the Imperialist War". But the CPGB adapted it to prevailing national conditions, and thus rendered it more "moderate".'(34)

In the real world not even gods have 'unlimited powers'. Cde Dornhorst first attributes the Soviet bureaucracy with 'unlimited powers' in the previous period, only to show that in 1939-41 they no longer had them. Whether or not the Soviet bureaucracy had 'unlimited powers', we would expect the reformist CPGB to adapt its anti-war position to national conditions. The implication drawn by Cde Dornhorst — that this adaptation represented a departure from the position of the Soviet bureaucracy — is wrong. Every CP approached the war from a social-patriotic standpoint, the CPSU not excluded. The false distinction drawn by Cde Dornhorst between the position of the CPGB and of the Soviet bureaucracy on the war is paralleled by an attempt to minimise the significance of the CPGB's 'anti-war' turn. Cde Dornhorst writes:

'In the period from late 1939 to June 1941, it [the CPGB] undoubtedly gave this nationalism a radical twist. But this was as far as it was capable of going in responding to "orders" from the Comintern.'(35)

Impressed only by 'unlimited powers', Cde Dornhorst delicately characterises the CPGB's anti-war turn as a 'radical twist'. He assures us that this 'was as far' as matters went. By overestimating the break between Moscow and the CPGB at that time, Cde Dornhorst goes on to underestimate the significant changes in the relationship between the two in the post-war boom.

In an attempt to show that today's CPGB was already thriving in the forties, Cde Dornhorst argues that the CPGB's 'left turn' in 1947 had nothing to do with its relationship to Moscow:

'What prompted the change in the Party's orientation to the Labour government was not an edict issued from Moscow. It was its relationship to the British working class that had forced it to take a new stand. The CPGB did not need any assistance from luminaries in the Soviet bureaucracy to point out that the domination of American imperialism was a threat to any programme which envisaged a national road to socialism. The Party was quite capable of following its own chauvinist nose on this score.'(36)

To argue that the 'left turn' of the CPGB was due merely to its relationship to the working class is absurd. Working class discontent existed prior to the 'left turn', and the CPGB did its best to throttle the struggles prompted by this discontent. What was new was the onset of the Cold War and the growing attacks on the

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CPs throughout Europe. The bourgeoisie could now dispense with the CPs' services. The Cominform's call for a new policy corresponded to the growing isolation of the CPGB.

The new line did not come naturally to the CPGB; nor was its relation to the Soviet bureaucracy irrelevant, as Cde Dornhorst suggests. The identification of the CPGB with the Soviet and British war effort and socialism had been an important stimulus to the previous growth of the CPGB. At this time the CPGB could not fail to respond to the 'left turn'. Moreover, because the CPGB had also become accustomed to playing a role of left support for the capitalist state, it was pressure from Moscow that was decisive in bringing about the 'left turn' in 1947. Thus all the Western CPs made this turn at the same time — all responding to Cold War pressures upon them and to the attacks being made on the Soviet Union. The way this 'left turn' expressed itself differed from country to country, and depended on the relations between classes and the strength of the national CPs. However, for Cde Dornhorst the CPGB had already become a simple patriotic reformist party(37).

Entirely absent from Cde Dornhorst's 'history' is an understanding that the national-reformist tendencies of the CPs were actively promoted by the USSR. In general, CPs with well-established national credentials were useful for the foreign policy of the USSR — the policy of class collaboration. In 1943, Stalin justified the dissolution of the Comintern thus:

'(a) It exposes the lie of the Hitlerites to the effect that "Moscow" allegedly intends to intervene in the life of other nations and to "Bolshevise" them. From now on an end is put to this lie.

(b) It exposes the calumny of the adversaries of Communism within the labour movement to the effect that Communist Parties in various countries are allegedly acting not in the interests of their people but on orders from outside. From now on an end is also put to this calumny.

(c) It facilitates the work of patriots of all countries for uniting the progressive forces of their respective countries, regardless of party or religious faith, into a single camp of national liberation — for unfolding the struggle against Fascism ...'(38)

The dissolution of the Comintern was motivated in terms of the standpoint of patriotism — Cde Dornhorst's 'specific' brand for reformism! Not surprisingly, the CPs agreed that the dissolution of the Comintern would remove the 'misunderstanding' that Moscow had 'unlimited powers' to determine their policies. The response of the Central Committee of the Spanish Communist Party was typical of all the CPs:

'The dissolution of the International, which frees us from the obligations arising from its statutes and decisions, will still further reinforce the national character of the Spanish Communist Party and facilitate the unification of all Spanish patriots both within Spain and in emigration and so stimulate the development of all national forces in the struggle to recapture the freedom and independence of Spain.'(39)

The reinforcement of the 'national character' of the Communist Parties was the necessary development of Stalinism. When Cde Dornhorst looks at the history of the CPGB he can only ask: was it 'patriotic' or was it 'Stalinist'? Was Stalinism a 'primary' or 'secondary' question? But the CPGB did not and could not just 'say goodbye' to Moscow. The development of national-reformist tendencies was part and parcel of dependence on the Soviet bureaucracy. The crisis of 1948 strengthened both of these tendencies at the same time. Cde Dornhorst's one-sided appraisal of Stalinism cannot accommodate such facts and so he is forced to deny them. But, having underestimated the importance of the Soviet Union for the CPs after the Second World War, he is unable to grasp the 'specific form of reformism' which has emerged from the post-war boom.

(c) Stalinism in the post-war period

For us, the CPGB of 1947 is not the CPGB of today. The impact of the boom on the British working class has had important consequences for the programme of the CPGB. The sharp 'break with Moscow' which has been the product of the boom, however, obscures the connections between the Stalinism of today and the Stalinism of yesterday; obscures them to the extent that for Cde Dornhorst, 'the specific form of reformism' of the CPs appears so 'specific' as to have no connection at all with the politics of the past period. But on the contrary, what Cde Dornhorst suggests to be a 'specific' brand of reformism is inconceivable without the development of Stalinism in the thirties and forties. The process of fragmentation of the official communist movement that has been accelerated by the post-war boom has not spelt the end of Stalinism — it has clarified the reactionary nature of this movement.

The development of the conception of the 'national road' to socialism was the theoretical adaptation of Stalin's position of 'socialism in one country' to local conditions. The concept of the 'national road' for Western CPs was pioneered by Thorez, leader of the French CP. In November 1946 he stated:

'The progress of democracy across the world, in spite of rare exceptions that confirm the rule, enables one to consider other roads to Socialism than that followed by the Russian communists. We have always believed and declared that the French People, rich in a glorious tradition, would find its own way toward greater democracy, progress and social justice.'(40)

Thorez was clear about distinguishing his national road from that 'followed by the Russian communists', that is, the road of revolution — the Russian Revolution. A couple of months later, Togliatti, the leader of the PCI, made the same discovery. In January 1947, he said:

'International experience tells us that, given the present conditions of class struggle in the world, the working class can find new roads towards socialism, namely to develop democracy to its extreme limit, which is precisely the same as socialism — roads different from those for example followed by the working class of the Soviet Union.'(41)

The 'national road to socialism' is the common political underpinning of the official communist movement. The very fact that all the different CPs talk about a 'national road to socialism' expresses their relationship with the Soviet Union. Social Democracy has no need to talk of a 'national' road, for it is not embarrassed by any previous

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connections with the Russian Revolution and an international movement of some significance. Social Democracy does not have to prove its independence from the USSR — the CPs do. In striving to become respectable reformist parties, the CPs could only develop through asserting their independence from 'Moscow', the 'International' and even from each other. But this should not blind us to the programme they hold in common.

The development of national-reformist programmes leads logically to integration into the bourgeois state. But, precisely because the CPs were not just any old national-reformist parties — but were part of an international movement with definite ties with the Soviet bureaucracy — the integration of these parties into a bourgeois state had only a very limited character. After 1947, the bourgeoisie was not prepared to allow the CPs to participate in government, and, unlike European Social Democracy, the CPs were relegated to an oppositional role(42). In their capacity as opposition parties with a working class base, sections of the official communist movement have provided the form through which the reformism of the boom period has most coherently been expressed.

The post-war boom, which involved a tremendous increase in production and led to a rise in the standard of living of the working class in the advanced capitalist countries, reinforced reformism in the workers' movement. The CPs' programmes reflected the experience of the boom and its expression in the working class. The CPs were unable to understand the boom and to counter the bourgeoisie's views that capitalism had changed. The General Secretary of the CPGB, John Gollan, wrote to the party economists in 1960:

'...The difficulty which confronts the average comrade is that in the fifteen years since 1945, he has not seen a crisis of the nature of 1930-31, and this lends substance to the theories of the people who say that capitalism has changed.'(43)

But the dilemma facing Gollan was not just a British one. We find PCI leader Giorgio Amendola noting the strength of the boom, its impact in strengthening bourgeois ideas in the working class, and the inability of the PCI to deal with this. Writing in 1961, Amendola observed:

'Today still the weakness of our criticism and its lack of precision, enable the "economic miracle" to make a growing impact amidst the working people...

'Thus, in spite of our criticism, the influence exercised by the miracle succeeds in penetrating widely amidst the working class movement and even in the ranks of the Party itself. The view, for instance, that the monopolistic expansion will last out indefinitely ... is evidence of the influence exercised by the "miracle" within the working class movement.'(44)

The militant rhetoric of the CPs in days gone by seemed outdated to them in the era of the 'economic miracle'. Under the stimulus of a lengthy — albeit temporary — stabilisation of capitalism, the old dogmas of Stalinism came to be supplemented by a systematic revision of the fundamental positions of Marx and Lenin. International conferences sponsored by the CPs presented forums for revising aspects of Lenin's theory of Imperialism and Marx's theory of crisis(45). More and more CP theoreticians advanced views which accepted the bourgeoisie's arguments that 'capitalism had changed'. Thus in 1966, at an international meeting of CP theoreticians on State Monopoly Capitalism, Joye, a member of the Central Committee of the Belgian CP, noted that the tremendous intervention of the state under 'State Monopoly Capitalism' implies

'A basic change in the functions of capitalism, more profound than the transition from classical capitalism ... to monopoly capitalism.'(46)

Previously, the Stalinist movement had disguised its rejection of the fundamental principles of Leninism and proletarian internationalism under such phrases as 'the creative application of Marxism-Leninism to new conditions'. Under the impact of the boom the validity of these principles was questioned explicitly.

The revisionism of Bernstein was a break not simply from the vulgar Marxism of the Second International, but from Marxism itself. However, the development of Bernsteinism cannot be understood unless we have a clear grasp of the politics of the Second International. In the same way, what Cde Dornhorst suggests to be a 'specific' form of reformism is inconceivable without the prior development of Stalinism.

The capitalist crisis has had the effect of bringing to the surface the national-chauvinist tendencies that were nurtured during the post-war boom. In response to this crisis, Stalinism is expressed as a growing fragmentation of the official communist movement and as a growing criticism of the USSR by the CPs. In the simple world of Cde Dornhorst, this indicates that the question of Stalinism has been resolved — the CPs 'are now as different from each other as the Italian, French and British Socialist parties'. The CPs have indeed been transformed into distinct national-reformist parties, but they are not so different from each other as Cde Dornhorst suggests. If he had cared to look at the programmes of the different CPs he would have been struck by their similarities: 'national road to socialism'; 'advanced democracy'; 'left unity', 'anti-monopoly alliance', 'the multi-party system', 'autonomy' and 'non-interference' in party matters — the list could go on. How does Cde Dornhorst explain the fact that, with the onset of the capitalist crisis, all the major CPs have publicly reemphasised their rejection of the term 'dictatorship of the proletariat'? How does he explain the fact that the apparent militancy of the Portuguese CP in 1975 caused the Spanish, Italian and French parties considerable consternation? How does Cde Dornhorst explain the recent outburst of anti-Soviet criticism by most European CPs, and their preoccupation with 'socialist democracy'? For us, these things occur not because Western CPs are blind to the realities of national life, but because they all have to relate to their common heritage. According to the simple logic of Cde Dornhorst, these developments can only be a result of some strange coincidence.

The distinct brand of reformist [sic] which the CPs now share is how Stalinism presents itself today. But, precisely at a time when the political programmes of the CPs are going to have enormous consequences for the working class, Cde Dornhorst wants to forget about Stalinism — the force that provided the possibility for the development of today's CPs. Seeing Stalinism as a 'secondary question', Cde Dornhorst fails to grasp the political dilemma facing the CPGB today and frees it

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from one of the most important political questions facing it — the negative example of 'socialism' in the USSR and East Europe. The national standpoint inherent in Stalinism and the theory of 'socialism in one country' has necessarily forced the CPGB to become more and more dependent on its own bourgeoisie. The 'national road to socialism', defined in contrast to the path (and gains) of the Russian Revolution, represents the adaptation of Stalinism to local conditions. Despite its fragmentation, the official communist movement stands on the essentials of its past political programme.

This point is central to a revolutionary understanding of Stalinism today. Far from being a 'secondary' question, its relation to the USSR is a major political problem for the CPGB. In the past, the RCG recognised the important role that Stalinism played in strengthening reformism in the post-war period. As the Report of the Political Committee to the last Conference of the RCG noted:

'In the post-war period reformism has been reinforced by the capitalist boom. The case for communism was not seen as relevant by a working class which experienced a steady increase in its standard of living. The Cold War and the negative example of Stalinism allowed the bourgeoisie to portray communism as being synonymous with totalitarianism. These two factors served to make communism a foreign ideology in the labour movement.'(47)

The negative example of Stalinism and the USSR in the Western European working class is not a 'secondary question' for the CPGB. Because he rids the CPGB of this political problem, Cde Dornhorst is unable to understand the specific historical form of reformism expressed by the CPGB today. While it is true that the CPGB adapts more and more to reformism within the working class in Britain, in the eyes of the bourgeoisie and the working class the CPGB is still associated with the USSR. Even if its relationship with the USSR is only an embarrassed one today, it has had a major effect on the CPGB's recent evolution. The CPGB's desire to see the back of the Soviet Union is thwarted by the bourgeoisie, which is only too willing to refresh the memory of the working class(48).

Cde Dornhorst's method is to smudge over different historical periods and to view the present as the result of so many factors which can be ordered as 'primary', 'secondary', and so on. Like those bourgeois thinkers for whom 'the latest form regards the previous ones as steps leading up to itself', Cde Dornhorst gives us a narrow presentation of the CPGB, based only on its appearance at any one time. The result is that he cannot see more than one side of Stalinism in the past, during the post-war boom and today. In this respect his analysis of Stalinism has more in common with the method of the radical left than the method of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. In fact Cde Dornhorst's narrow definition of the Stalinism of yesterday is essentially the same as that of the radical left. He tells us that

'Stalinism in the international Communist movement expressed the dependence of the Communist Parties on the Soviet bureaucracy.'(49)

In the forties, the International Secretariat of the Fourth International (FI) wrote in a similar vein:

'The new reformist ideology of Stalinism is the most self-evident and cynical confession of the abandonment of the revolutionary class struggle by those parties and their complete submission to the aims of the Kremlin's foreign politics.'(50)

Succumbing to the apparent features of the CPs today, Cde Dornhorst recognises that the CPs are far from being submissive to Moscow — that is, the bureaucracy does not have unlimited powers — and declares that they are no longer Stalinist. According to Cde Dornhorst's 'history', 'edicts from Moscow' were replaced for the CP by a 'relationship with the working class' as long ago as 1947:

'At the beginning of 1947, the British economy was in a severe crisis, with over two million workers temporarily laid off. Working class discontent with the government started to appear. The CPGB could not remain unaffected by this...

'What prompted the change in the Party's orientation to the Labour government was not an edict issued from Moscow. It was its relationship to the British working class that had forced it to take a new stand.'(51)

Yet even the Fourth International has noticed that things do change. In the fifties the International Secretariat noted some of the changes in the CPs and attributed them to the 'power of the mass movement':

'As for the mass Communist Parties, their relations with Moscow are being subjected to conditions different from the past; the very power of the mass movement in their own countries, developing in the direction of revolutionary struggles, asserts itself increasingly.'(52)

Only a few years and a little enthusiasm separates the formulations of the FI from those of Cde Dornhorst. Underlying their different conclusions is a similar method of approach.

For revolutionaries, it is never an 'edict from Moscow' that determines the policy of a Stalinist party. The CPs have never been sealed off from capitalist society and have always responded one way or another to the struggles of the working class. Trotsky did not talk of Stalinist foreign policy as a primary question or the national development of the CPs as a secondary question. Rather, he looked at the way the relationship between different tendencies worked itself out in a given historical period. He warned those who advanced the argument about Moscow's 'unlimited powers':

'I cannot agree that the policy of the International was only a materialisation of the commands of Moscow. It is necessary to see the policy as a whole, from the internal and the international points of view, from all sides...'(53)

This conception of Stalinism is entirely foreign to Cde Dornhorst, who has 'liberated' the CPGB from its past development. Just as the policies of the CPGB yesterday cannot be understood as a result of an 'edict', the policies of the CPGB today cannot be seen as simple responses to the movement of the British working class. Cde Dornhorst can only grasp the visible expressions of social development. In this case it is the tendency that dominates the programme of the CPGB today — that of its increasing dependence on the British bourgeoisie. This tendency has developed in contradiction to the CPGB's ties with the USSR. But the fact that the boom and its reflection in the working class have reinforced the national character of the CPGB does not make this

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tendency a 'primary question'. Nor is the CPGB's relation to the USSR a secondary question. Marxists do not separate tendencies of development from each other, nor do they separate past development from its present historical result.

Revolutionary communists must establish the connections between the Stalinism of today and the Stalinism of the past in order to understand the 'specific form of reformism' taken by the contemporary CPGB. Only an analysis of the CPGB that starts from an understanding of Stalinism can deal with such questions.

3. THE CPGB IN THE WORLD OF CDE DORNHORST

(a) Independence and incomes policy

Having reduced the CPGB to an ordinary reformist party with no ties to the Soviet Union, Cde Dornhorst is forced to attempt to explain the basis for the existence of the CPGB. The explanation that is offered is based on the old method of reading history backwards. Cde Dornhorst has noticed that, in contrast to other reformist trends, the CPGB opposes wage restraint and incomes policy. Therefore what is distinct for him about the CPGB's form of reformism is its opposition to wage restraint. Basing himself on this superficial logic, Cde Dornhorst looks at history to find 'proof' for his thesis. And indeed the CPGB has opposed incomes policy in the past. Cde Dornhorst tells us:

'In 1948, the Labour Government instituted its first incomes policy as an essential step in reconstructing British capital. Living standards fell as inflation soared with the start of the Korean War. Opposition within the working class mounted, and reflected itself in conflicts inside the trade union bureaucracy. The CPGB became the spokesman for those sections of the bureaucracy which opposed wage restraint, since it had now achieved many leading positions in the official leadership.'(54)

The opposition of the CPGB to incomes policy in the forties is elevated by Cde Dornhorst to a supra-historical law — opposition to incomes policy becomes central to the CPGB's policy for all time:

'The CPGB became the organisational expression of opposition to incomes policy — it was this that ensured it would maintain its independent existence. It is therefore the case that the CPGB cannot revise its opposition to incomes policy; to do so would imply its dissolution.'(55)

Thus we have the conclusion that the 'independent existence' of the CPGB is based on its opposition to incomes policy. Indeed, Cde Dornhorst has made a novel contribution to historical materialism by arguing that the social basis of a party can be characterised through its opposition to a particular policy.

'The social basis of the Communist Party is that section of the bureaucracy which opposes state control of wages.'(56)

Through advancing a tautology — the CPGB 'became the organisational expression of opposition to incomes policy', therefore its social basis is 'that section of the bureaucracy which opposes state control of wages' — Cde Dornhorst tries to explain the 'independent existence' of the CPGB.

But is opposition to incomes policy an adequate explanation of the social basis of the CPGB? Even Cde Dornhorst is forced by the weakness of his argument to embellish his ideas:

'The trade union leadership has turned to the CPGB to express opposition to policies carried out by various Labour governments which threatened to erode its independence ... the extent to which the Labour Party had been integrated into the state machinery during and after the Second World War had rendered it too insensitive to working class pressure for the safety of the bureaucracy. The latter has been obliged to use the CPGB as a safety valve.'(57)

Without a materialist analysis of the development of the CPGB, Cde Dornhorst is driven to provide a subjective explanation of its role. Inhibited about opposing the Labour Government but anxious about their independence from the state, certain trade union bureaucrats have asked the CPGB to put on a 'militant show' and act as their safety valve.

According to this penetrating observation, the distinct features of the CPGB are its opposition to incomes policy and its function as a safety valve to the trade union bureaucracy. Cde Dornhorst has, through describing the role of the CPGB as the left cover of the trade union bureaucracy, 'explained' that the CPGB's distinctive role is to be the left cover of the trade union bureaucracy. But description and explanation only coincide in the idealist world of bourgeois thinkers. A Marxist would have to ask: why has the CPGB opposed Labour policies for such a length of time? Why has the CPGB given an organised expression to left-reformism within the working class? Why has the CPGB yet to follow yesterday's left-reformists into the camp of the Social Contract? Why has the CPGB maintained an organisational independence from the Labour Party?

The fact that the CPGB expresses left-reformist views in the working class movement and hence acts as a left cover for the trade union bureaucracy is not the result of a historical accident. The CPGB was established as an explicitly revolutionary party; its formation was intimately related to the gains of the Russian Revolution in the minds of British workers. It was on this foundation that the CPGB grew subsequently. Despite its degeneration into a reformist tendency, the CPGB was able to maintain its independence from mainstream reformism through its historical relationship with the Soviet Union. The independent existence of the CPGB was not based on its opposition to incomes policy: rather, it was able to articulate opposition to wage restraint clearly because it was organisationally independent of the Labour Party. This 'independence' can only be understood in terms of the CPGB's relationship with the Soviet Union. Through its close link with the Russian Revolution, the CPGB could advance itself as a distinct 'socialist tendency'. From 1948 onwards, the bans on CP members holding office in the trade unions were a recognition of the party's special links with the Soviet bureaucracy. During the Cold War the survival of the CPGB as a distinct political trend was based on its relationship with the 'Socialist World'.

There was nothing distinctive in the CPGB's brand of reformist trade union policy to guarantee its independent

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existence. In the past left-reformists from the ILP to the Bevanites have come and gone. The CPGB, however, has survived as an organisationally independent tendency precisely because of its relationship to the Soviet bureaucracy. Cde Dornhorst chooses to ignore the question of Stalinism and ends up explaining the survival of the CPGB by one of its policies.

His blindness to the historic relationship between the CPGB and the Soviet bureaucracy leads Cde Dornhorst to misunderstand one of the central problems facing the Party today. Since 1956, the CPGB has increasingly distanced itself from the Soviet Union. In attempting to become a bona fide national-reformist party, it has succumbed to bourgeois public opinion on the Soviet Union. But the CPGB has found itself in a dilemma: in the past its organisational independence was closely connected to a commitment to its version of the gains of the Russian Revolution. The CPGB could maintain its organisational independence even while arguing for 'left unity' and subordinating its identity to that of the Labour Party. The identification of the CPGB with the Soviet Union and other 'workers' democracies' gave the Party a distinct stamp even when it was playing the role of a poor relation to Labour.

In seeking to present a clear nationalist image, the CPGB is faced with the problem of finding an independent identity. Mass reformist parties like the PCI and PCF have strong roots in the working class — roots that ensure their future survival. The CPGB does not have a mass base and is therefore desperate to find an adequate foundation for its new 'independent' existence. Virtually every major policy statement made by the leadership of the CPGB in the present period attempts to provide a justification for the CPGB's existence as an independent organisation. In arguing against any 'tendency to operate merely as a "ginger group" to any part of the left', Dave Cook, the CPGB's National Organiser, exhorts CPGB members to recall that their organisation has a role to play:

'What are needed above all at this time are great blasts of Communist propaganda ... We need Communist arguments, theory, literature, meetings and initiatives — and Communist candidates in the May local elections. This is not a sudden sectarian switch away from our strategic objective of left unity. Of course our own initiatives and our criticisms of the left need to be framed with unity in mind. But we must not forget that left unity needs an input of communist politics, like real ale needs good yeast.'(58)

CPGB members should be forgiven for forgetting about 'communist politics', for the CPGB's positions are often indistinguishable from those of the Labour lefts. Cde Dornhorst's assurance that they have a distinct social base in trade unions is not likely to resolve the difficulty they have in finding a political role for the CPGB.

(b) The debate on 'Socialist Democracy'

The recent direction of the CPGB towards becoming an acceptable, home-made reformist party has raised doubts about its future political existence. The discussion on 'Socialist Democracy' that was launched by Gollan's article in the January 1976 issue of Marxism Today reflects the dilemma that faces the CPGB. The article attempted to work out a coherent framework for presenting the CPGB as a respectable reformist organisation. In order to reassure bourgeois public opinion, Gollan presented his ideas through a critique of 'Socialist Democracy' in the Soviet Union. As an indication of the CPGB's honourable goals, he stated:

'Our aim is the construction of socialism in Britain, in forms which would guarantee personal freedom, the plurality of political parties, the independence of the trade unions, religious freedom, and freedom of research, cultural, artistic and scientific activities.'(59)

This exposition of liberal democratic aims by Gollan necessarily had to take the form of a critique of the 'excesses' of the Soviet bureaucracy. The article paralleled similar statements made by Western European CPs in the recent period: the concessions that were made to anti-Soviet propaganda by European CPs in the past have recently taken on a much more systematic character.

In opposition to this trend, sections of the official communist movement have attempted to use the revolutionary phraseology of the past in order to counter the growth of explicitly social democratic tendencies. In particular, the Soviet bureaucracy has rediscovered 'proletarian internationalism' as a way of asserting its hegemony over the official communist movement. Thus, in a key statement attacking the standpoint of the liberal CPs, Soviet ideologue Zaradov argues:

'The latter-day conciliators do not even pay lip-service to the independence of the proletarian party. They would like to dissolve it in an ideologically amorphous organisation, in any alliance set up according to the formula "unity for unity's sake". This logic, however, is the same as of the Mensheviks.'(60)

The debate in the official communist movement as a whole finds its expression within individual CPs. It would be wrong to imagine that individual CPs could make a rightward shift, abandon their Leninist phraseology and attack the USSR without any oppositional tendencies developing. A strong party like the PCI, which is entrenched in the state machinery and the trade union bureaucracy and is the dominant party of the working class, can easily ignore opposition to attacks on the USSR. The CPGB has already gone part of the way along the road taken by the PCI. However, the CPGB is not the PCI, and its future is less than secure. For those sections of the CPGB associated with Sid French (the 'Frenchites'), the 'independence' of the past seems a more realistic alternative than the new revisionism. The debates in the official communist movement thus find their reflection in the CPGB. Given the significance that a break with the USSR would have for the future of the CPGB, it is not surprising that the debate on 'Socialist Democracy' is intertwined with other discussions taking place in it.

Cde Dornhorst is incapable of understanding the discussion in the CPGB. He writes:

'The differences have appeared in the debate on socialist democracy. The leadership approaches the question from the standpoint of its adaptation to the British state. Its view of socialist democracy complements

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its abandonment of the idea of the CPGB as a vanguard party ...

'The Frenchites see the defence of the Soviet Union as inseparable from the real issue at stake: the leading role of the Party.'(61)

Cde Dornhorst accepts the Frenchites' view of the discussion — 'the real issue at stake' is 'the leading role of the Party'. At the same time he cannot explain why the Frenchite wing 'see the defence of the Soviet Union as inseparable from the real issue at stake'. The real question at stake, the problem which is at the centre of all major discussions inside the CPGB is, as we have said, the search for a clear political identity for the CPGB. Gollan wrote his article not because he wanted to abandon the notion of the 'leading role' of the CPGB but because of the need to provide the ideological underpinning for a 'respectable' CPGB. In order to do this, he had to settle accounts with the CPGB's history of links with a 'one-party state'. He attempts to reconcile the CPGB with its past.

The Frenchite wing of the CPGB opposes the leadership not because of any preoccupation with the question of 'the vanguard party', but because it understands that the survival of the CPGB in the past has been bound up with its relation to the USSR. For Cde Dornhorst the question of the CPGB's relation with the USSR may be irrelevant. But the Frenchites can only express the CPGB's 'independence' through maintaining a close relationship with the 'Socialist World'.

In order to prove that the USSR is irrelevant to the CPGB today, Cde Dornhorst has to show that the doubts raised about 'the leading role of the Party' represent a new phenomenon. Having argued vigorously that the CPGB has been more or less the same since the late forties, Cde Dornhorst now reveals that even it is not immune to change. From the late fifties onwards, according to Cde Dornhorst, a shift in emphasis on the vanguard role of the Party took place:

'Given its reformist nature, the Party could react in only one way — by adapting. This took the form of revising its pretensions to an "exclusive" role in the labour movement — by abandoning its pretensions as a vanguard party.'(62)

Should there be any doubts, the CPGB does not use terms like 'vanguard role' in their revolutionary sense. The Frenchites' major discovery of the 'vanguard party' is similar to the Soviet bureaucracy's discovery of the concept of 'proletarian internationalism'. It is an attempt to fight today's opportunism with the opportunism of the past dressed up in the language of Marx and Lenin.

Cde Dornhorst takes the Frenchites' views so seriously that he goes through a string of quotations to 'prove' a shift away from the conception of the CPGB as a vanguard party in the fifties. Over the past forty years the CPGB has, in reality, emphasised or downplayed its 'leading role' as it has modified the extent to which it has acted as a servicing agent to 'left unity' (that is, to the Labour Party), and the extent to which it has attempted to present an independent face to the working class. Thus, in 1937, Pollitt had to remind the CPGB members that their party was different from the Labour Party:

'Certain Labour leaders and journals are now busily putting around propaganda that if the Communist Party were liquidated there could be unity in the Labour Movement ... Workers sometimes succumb to this type of propaganda because the role of the Communist Party is not understood...

'We sometimes hear the expression, "but there is hardly any difference between the Communist Party and the Labour Party, all you want to do is to ginger up and get a move on".'(63)

Because the distinctive feature of the CPGB was its association with the Russian Revolution, the expression 'there is hardly any difference between the Communist Party and the Labour Party' did not have the same consequences for the CPGB in 1937 as it does today. The CPGB could adapt to bourgeois opinion while still appearing as a distinctive workers' party. Similarly — despite Cde Dornhorst's selective quotations — the CPGB did not stop declaring its leading role in the period after the late fifties. A major pamphlet published in 1973 provides one example out of many:

'Carrying through revolutionary change requires a strong revolutionary party, a party capable of leading the people to challenge the capitalist class ... A party which understands the dynamic law of social change and is therefore able to chart the way forward at each stage of the struggle. Such a party is the Communist Party.'(64)

Thus we find that the CPGB could declare its 'leading role' even in 1973. The significant question today is not the 'vanguard role' of the CPGB, but its role as a distinctive political organisation.

Rather than seeing the discussion in the CPGB in terms of conflicting opportunist views, each of which attempt to resolve the crisis facing the CPGB, Cde Dornhorst introduces false issues like the 'leading role of the Party' in order to magnify the political differences within it. He has done this while ignoring the real political questions — those associated with Stalinism. Cde Dornhorst is forced to adopt the Frenchites' view of the discussion on 'Socialist Democracy' as a result of his simplistic understanding of Stalinism and its history. The Frenchites grasp — at least intuitively — why the issue of Stalinism is central to the discussion: but the question of why the debate necessarily takes the form of a critique of Stalinism and the 'Socialism' of the Soviet Union remains outside of Cde Dornhorst's brief.

4. CDE DORNHORST INTERVENES IN THE 'DEBATES' WITHIN THE CPGB

(a) Frenchites and liberals

With the 'specific form' of the CPGB's reformism reduced to its opposition to incomes policy, and the Frenchites' view that the question at stake is the 'leading role of the party' accepted, Cde Dornhorst proceeds to intervene in the 'debates' within the CPGB. Since, with his aid, the CPGB has managed to shake off its Stalinist past, these debates are about incomes policy and the leading role of the Party.

According to Cde Dornhorst there are three tendencies in the CPGB — the leadership, the Frenchites and the liberals. In this schema, the leadership and the Frenchites — in contradistinction to the liberals —

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adhere to the leading role of the Party. Since opposition to incomes policy has provided the social basis for the CPGB, Cde Dornhorst assesses the different tendencies in terms of their attitude to incomes policy. Cde Dornhorst argues that the logic of the positions adopted by the liberal wing would be to dissolve the Party altogether:

'The liberals draw out the logic of the leadership's position, a logic ... very fitting for their class position. Purdy's "quid pro quo" — a socialist incomes policy for more public control — would destroy the party ... The growing representation of the petty bourgeoisie within the Party ... has strengthened the tendency towards liquidation...'(65)

So the liberals represent a liquidationist tendency, in contrast to the Frenchites, who at least attempt to maintain the leading role of the Party — although only 'formally'. This contrast between the liquidationist liberals and the vanguardist Frenchites bears little relation to reality. The term 'liquidation' is usually associated in the Bolshevik movement with the liquidation of revolutionary politics. The CPGB is a national-reformist organisation and all its tendencies reflect various forms of the same radical bourgeois ideas. The distinctions that are drawn between the liberals and the Frenchites say more about the politics of Cde Dornhorst than the subject of his study. What they actually reveal is that Cde Dornhorst prefers the opportunism of yesterday to its contemporary expression. According to his logic, the Frenchites' stress on the independent role of the party makes them the most uncompromising opponents of incomes policy:

'The Frenchites ... contend with the leadership for the allegiance of the trade union base of the CPGB. They stress the independent role of the party ... They attack the leadership for its political compromises...'(66)

The only problem with the Frenchites is that they understand what they say only formally:

'The Frenchites see the defence of the Soviet Union as inseparable from the real issue at stake: the leading role of the Party. They counterpose their notion of the independent interests of the working class to the compromises of the leadership. Thus they support the purges of the thirties, since they defend the use of working class terror, and reject the leadership's bourgeois democratic notion of individual dissent. The problem that faces the Frenchites is that they can use concepts such as the leading role of the party only in a formal sense, since they accept the political premise which necessitated their revision — the national road to socialism.'(67)

Cde Dornhorst really does prefer yesterday's opportunism to that of today. In the old days, tendencies that 'support the purges of the thirties' and accepted 'the national road to socialism' used to be called Stalinist in the revolutionary movement. Cde Dornhorst would rather not use this 'unfashionable' phrase, for he wants to separate the past from the present and let bygones be bygones.

For many decades, tha [sic] official communist movement represented Marxism in the eyes of the working class. The fact that it used concepts 'such as the leading role of the party' 'in a formal sense' represented its historical betrayal of the working class movement. Opportunism in the guise of Marx and Lenin has been all the more effective in misleading the movement. We have every intention of fighting against the Frenchites' formal use of Marxism. Though Cde Dornhorst would like to forget the past, we have no such intention.

Like Cde Dornhorst, the Frenchites prefer the older, more palatable opportunism of the past. They want the CPGB to be more what they think it used to be — when the political consequences of their opportunism were not so explicit as at present. Thus the Frenchites refer back to the CPGB of a bygone age in order to bolster their case. In attempting to counter Gollan's brand of opportunism, Sid French stands for all his supporters:

'How are we faring in this situation? [ie in the present crisis, FR] The circulation of our paper is less than half prewar. Since the disastrous decision to change the name of our paper under the illusion that getting rid of the title Daily Worker would lead to the biggest advance in its history, the weekend extras have dropped by over half and are now just around 6000. 'The YCL has lost nearly three quarters of its members in recent years ... The considerable and rapid fall in our votes is very serious ... I won't dwell on the decline of the factory branches, of members paying dues, Challenge circulation and a host of other problems ...'(68)

The Frenchites' contribution amounts to recapitulating the CPGB's past, upholding a formal conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat and 'defending' the USSR — precisely the politics that have led to the political programme of the CPGB today. It is important to understand that all tendencies in the CPGB share the same political starting point. They all start from the premise of a national road to socialism and a national solution to the crisis. But for Cde Dornhorst, the hard, independent posturing of the Frenchites deserves special consideration.

For us, the 'debate' in the CPGB is not between the liquidationism of the liberals and the formal independence of the Frenchites. Rather, the Frenchites counterpose the opportunism of yesterday — a programme that guaranteed an identity for the CPGB — to the liberals' opportunism of today. The pro-Soviet attitude of the Frenchites is not incidental to this debate, for it is only through maintaining a close link with the 'socialist camp' that they can assert the leading role of the party and guarantee the independent existence of the CPGB.

(b) The political consequences of Cde Dornhost's [sic] intervention

Having ignored the Stalinist past of the CPGB, Cde Dornhorst can now forget that the liberals are the logical outcome of the Party's historical development. The explanation offered by Cde Dornhorst for the growth of this tendency is:

'The growing representation of the petty bourgeoisie within the Party (in 1959, 15% of Party delegates at the national congress were white collar workers or students; at the last congress, it was 30%) has strengthened the tendency towards liquidation; it is the petty bourgeoisie which provide support for the likes of Purdy.'(69)

We should note that Cde Dornhorst has used the changing social composition of the CPGB to explain the

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strengthening of liberal tendencies. This sociological approach fails to understand that it is petit-bourgeois ideology which plays an important role in the CPGB. The CPGB, like other national CPs, has always been dominated by petit-bourgeois ideas. The logic of national-reformism is precisely to develop a radical petit-bourgeois programme. It is crude sociology, however, to confuse the class content of ideas with the social composition of those who argue for them. That the CPGB should attract members from the ranks of the petit-bourgeoisie on the basis of a petit-bourgeois programme is no surprise: but the growth of the liberals can only be explained in terms of the fact that their ideas are a radical reflection of the reformist consciousness of the working class today. Purdy's 'socialist incomes policy' seems to provide an alternative to the dead end of free collective bargaining. Workers who have seen that the wages struggle of the sixties provided no solution, and who recognise the difficulty of struggling for higher pay in today's 'national crisis', may see a radical form of the social contract as an acceptable option. The liberals express the new opportunism of the CPGB — an opportunism that relates to the consciousness of the British working class today.

Cde Dornhorst's own opportunism leads him to see only one section of the CPGB as expressing radical petit-bourgeois ideas. He can thus dismiss the liberals not politically, but because of their social composition:

'Once the working class starts to move against the Labour government, and the Communist party is forced to place itself at the head of such a movement, the petty bourgeoisie will call it a day and scurry into safer niches.'(70)

Cde Dornhorst finds the Frenchites, however, more working class. Looking into his crystal ball, he predicts that because of their staunch emphasis on the independence of the CPGB the Frenchites will become the focus for working class opposition to the leadership of the Party:

'The criticism it [the Frenchite wing, FR] makes of left unity or the concept of the party held by the leadership will become a rallying point for workers within the Party.'(71).

Why workers should rally to the old Stalinist ideas of the Frenchites remains to be shown by Cde Dornhorst. We must conclude that he himself has illusions in the strength of their arguments.

For us, the debate in the CPGB is closely related to its search for survival. For Cde Dornhorst, however, 'the debates within the Communist Party are the debates going on amongst advanced workers'(72). Having elevated the discussion in the CPGB to a conflict between two distinct political tendencies, Cde Dornhorst now tells us that this is the discussion going on among 'advanced workers'. Thus we now find that 'advanced workers' are synonymous with membership in the CPGB. This is not a slip of the pen. Cde Dornhorst has found what every radical left tendency dreams of — a centrist current.

'... the conflicts between the Frenchites and the leadership will come into the open. In these conflicts exists the possibility of a split, with one tendency moving in a centrist direction.'(73)

In his search for centrist currents, Cde Dornhorst stakes everything on the Frenchites and on the future leftward movement of the CPGB. This is the point that Cde Dornhorst has been trying to make all along. We do not rule out the possibility of centrist currents rising out of the CPGB. But there is no reason to believe that the politics of the Frenchites today will provide the basis for centrist currents tomorrow. Our task is to struggle against the ideas of the CPGB as a whole — against the most consistent expression of left-reformism in the working class.

Cde Dornhorst has set himself a different task: to intervene in the debate within the CPGB — no doubt to encourage the development of centrist currents. He writes:

'The debates in the Communist Party will focus on the new draft of the British Road to Socialism, which will appear in January or February 1977. This will be a most significant debate for advanced workers. We have to be prepared to intervene in it.'(74)

Though Cde Dornhorst's intervention in the 'debates' of the CPGB is not clearly spelled out, we can see what he is getting at. In his version of the struggle between the 'petit bourgeoisie' and 'the workers', the RCG's role is to provide the arguments with which to beat the liberals:

'The inability of the leadership to defeat the petty bourgeoisie expresses the Party's inability to create an opposition to the Labour government.'(75)

Cde Dornhorst would like the RCG to play a role in defeating the 'petit bourgeoisie', that is, the liberals in the CPGB. We get a clue as to what kind of intervention Cde Dornhorst is proposing from the leaflet 'Marxism versus Reformism'. This was written by the Manchester branch of the RCG for distribution at CP meetings. Parts of it read like a paraphrasing of Sid French:

'It is the inability of the Communist Party to provide a clear political opposition to the Labour Government that has led to the fall in Morning Star circulation over the past two years.'(76)

This friendly concern with the fall in Morning Star circulation is no accident. We find Cde Dornhorst particularly worried about appearing sectarian towards the CP. He criticises Cde Turner in the following way:

'The CP does not argue at all that socialism can be brought about by utilising the existing capitalist state. It is a typical radical left slander that they do. Of course, in practice, this is what their programme amounts to. But to imply that their view of the state is less subtle than it in fact is will only lead us to be regarded as typical ultraleft sectarians.'(77)

So concerned is Cde Dornhorst with the subtlety of the CPGB's theory of the state that he would rather refrain from calling it by its right name. Cde Dornhorst is more worried about how the CPGB will 'regard' us than with exposing this reactionary tendency to the working class. He has forgotten that, in the past, the RCG confronted the ideas of the CPGB in order to train a vanguard, and not in order to appear 'reasonable' to the CPGB.

By ignoring the history of the CPGB and magnifying the political differences inside the Party, Cde Dornhorst has been able to dress the Frenchites up as his future centrist current. With Stalinism relegated to the level of a 'secondary question', he has tried to dismiss the reactionary point of departure of all tendencies inside

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the CPGB. From Cde Dornhorst's history we can only conclude that, some time after the Second World War, the CPGB was reborn out of the Britsh [sic] working class. He has thus jettisoned the ideological link between all the opportunist tendencies in the CPGB.

Cde Dornhorst's 'history' of the CPGB has not, as he claims, laid 'the basis for a Marxist analysis of the development of the CPGB'. Instead, he has found himself a path into the CPGB and in particular the Frenchites. The opportunist distinction drawn between the Frenchites and the liberals gives us an indication of the nature of his 'intervention' in the CPGB.

5. CDE YAFFE JOINS CDE DORNHORST'S INTERVENTION

Although Cde Dornhorst's document had not been adopted as the position of the majority faction of the split in the RCG, his ideas are taken up by Cde Yaffe's document A Turning Point — the document that was adopted as the position of the majority faction of the Political Committee. Cde Yaffe has taken good heed of Cde Dornhorst's advice on the need to be subtle with the CPGB. Indeed, Cde Yaffe has elevated sectarianism into 'a new danger to the group':

'Preaching to the CPGB, announcing our own purity on the question, will enable the CPGB to dismiss our criticism as ultra left and sectarian, and what is more to convince others that this is the case.'(78)

The tactical question of how to relate to the CPGB is the dominant consideration of Cde Yaffe. He has already assimilated Cde Dornhorst's wisdom, lock, stock and barrel. Indeed, 'sectarianism' is a danger for someone trying to adapt to the CPGB. The old RCG's pamphlet Ireland: British Labour and British Imperialism advanced a ruthless critique of the CPGB's position on Ireland: no doubt it was seen by the CPGB as 'ultra-left and sectarian'. But in those days the RCG was concerned with training a vanguard through ideological struggle and not with being subtle with the CPGB.

Cde Yaffe accepts a modified version of Cde Dornhorst's analysis of the tendencies within the CPGB. For Cde Yaffe, the Purdyites are 'a bourgeois tendency outside the ranks of the working class' while the leadership is characterised as 'opportunist' (79). This magnification of the differences within the CPGB necessarily gives credibility to the Party as a whole. The views of the CPGB as a whole are opportunist and anti-working class — the views of all the tendencies in the CPGB have the same dangerous consquences [sic] for the working class movement. It is wrong to characterise one wing of the CPGB as 'outside the ranks of the working class' as opposed to another wing of the CPGB which is just 'opportunist'. Does Cde Yaffe now believe that the CPGB leadership's positions on Ireland, import controls and racism do not constitute anti-working class views? No doubt he prefers the 'working class' chauvinism of the leadership to the 'petit-bourgeois' chauvinism of Purdy.

This spurious distinction between different opportunist tendencies — a distinction which is not based on political argument — provides Cde Yaffe with the 'political basis' for intervening in the CPGB. He writes:

'While sharply criticising them [the leadership of the CPGB, FR] we have attempted to ferment the split in the CPGB by urging them to fight against the views of the Purdyites ... That split has to be brought about to offer a revolutionary tendency like ours some fertile ground to argue our standpoint in the labour movement.'(80)

We can now see why Cde Dornhorst and Cde Yaffe make so much of political differences within the CPGB. Cde Yaffe's new tactic of 'fermenting' a split in the CPGB is justified by making these distinctions between its different opportunist tendencies.

Cde Yaffe is so eager to split the CPGB that he never bothers to give one political argument to justify this tactic. We are simply told: 'that this split has to be brought about to offer a revolutionary tendency like ours some fertile ground to argue our standpoint in the labour movement'. Why should this split offer 'some fertile ground' for revolutionary arguments? This is just another short cut to the 'labour movement', an organisational way of confronting the difficult problem of party-building. In the past, the RCG directed its propaganda at the CPGB because it recognised the necessity of confronting their ideas in the workers' movement. One of the central tasks which the old RCG attempted to carry out was the building of a Marxist tradition in the working class. In order to struggle against the opportunist ideas of the CPGB, the old RCG set itself the task of developing a thorough critique of the CPGB as a whole. The 1975 conference of the RCG approved the Political Committee's recommendations for future theoretical work, which included this:

'The second area that needs to be developed over the next year is on Stalinism, the CPs and the central question of the transition to socialism. By analysing and developing the relation between the theory of Socialism in One Country and the reformist 'national' politics of the CPs we can demonstrate concretely the links between the CPs' reformism and Stalinism. As many workers begin to see the inadequacy of the CPs' programme as the crisis deepens (Portugal is an important example) the connections need to be made between this and the reactionary nature of Stalinism overall.'(81)

Here we have a correct political approach to the CPGB — the drawing out of the relationship between 'the CPs' reformism and Stalinism'. Workers influenced by the CPGB will only be won to a revolutionary standpoint if the relationship between Stalinism, the transition to socialism and the reformist CPs is clearly drawn out.

Today's RCG has abandoned this approach for petty manoeuvres around the CPGB. The CPGB is seen not as an ideological obstacle to the development of a vanguard, but as 'fertile ground' for advancing the RCG's arguments. The task of systematically confronting the reformist consciousness of the working class is replaced by organisational short cuts to party-building.

Yet, at a time when the CPs of Western Europe are trying to extricate themselves from their history, it is all the more essential to draw out clearly the links between their programme and the history of Stalinism. We have to show the connection between the Stalinism of the past and its expression today. We have to demonstrate to the working class that the programme of today's CPs if implemented would have the catastrophic consequences

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of old. We have to argue that the opportunism of today's CPs follows logically from the more Moscow-oriented opportunism of the past. The refusal to confront this task leads Cde Dornhorst and Cde Yaffe to become a left cover for the CPGB.

The RCG's adaptation to the CPGB began in its 'subtle' and 'non-sectarian' reluctance to attack the ideas of the CPGB head-on. The manoeuvre of splitting the CPGB is based upon the opportunist political tactic of taking up only certain questions and certain tendencies in the CPGB. As we show in our reply to A Turning Point, Cde Yaffe's article on the CPGB and South Africa in Revolutionary Communist 5 is more concerned with demonstrating the inconsistencies of the CPGB's arguments than with providing a ruthless critique of its position.

This adaptation is further reflected in the different ways in which groupings within the CPGB are treated. Revolutionaries do make a distinction between different opportunist tendencies, but they do not support or favour one variety of opportunism against another.

Precisely at a time then [sic] the working class movement is in need of ideological clarity, the RCG's 'critique' of the CPGB's position on South Africa emerges as a set of rhetorical questions, turns of phrase and attacks on individual members rather than on the Party as a whole(82). The RCG has become more interested in intervening in the CPGB than in training a vanguard. The emphasis which the old RCG put on ideological struggle has been replaced by helpful reminders to the CPGB that their 'opposition to Apartheid' is inconsistent with having members who express 'anti-working class views in their journal'(83). As if the political programme of the CPGB could be anything other than an expression of anti-working class views!

Conclusion

For the past fifty years the official communist movement has come to represent Marxism to the international working class. Despite its reformist history, official communism has appropriated to itself the language of Marx, the gains of the Russian Revolution and the term 'communism'. For a whole historical period official communism has acted as a barrier to the development of a revolutionary vanguard in the working class. Today, the crisis is forcing Western European Communist Parties to abandon the language of the past more and more.

In order to train a revolutionary vanguard it is necessary to provide a materialist analysis of the history of official communism and a critique of its current doctrines. Revolutionaries have to show why the programme of official communism is bankrupt and relate this programme to the rise of Stalinism and the liquidation of Marxism in the workers' movement. The task that is crucial to the development of a revolutionary vanguard has yet to be confronted by the non-Stalinist left. Until now the radical left has repeated Trotsky's analysis or used historical examples like the French Popular Front of 1936 to demonstrate the betrayals of Stalinism. But official communism has to be taken up concretely in terms of its programme today. History can be used to draw out the possible consequences of Stalinism, but above all it has to explain the development of today's official communism.

As we have noted, in the post-war boom the official communist movement has become the most consistent expression of reformism in the European working class. A struggle against its views is a precondition for the development of an independent working class strategy. The old RCG took it upon itself to challenge the most consistent expression of left-reformism within the British working class — the programme of the CPGB — in an uncompromising fashion. The struggle against the ideas of the CPGB was not aimed at creating splits or finding 'fertile ground' in that organisation: the necessity of confronting the standpoint of the CPGB flowed from our understanding that this orientation was central to training a political vanguard. Today, the RCG has abandoned this strategy; the task of training a vanguard has been subordinated to 'fermenting splits' in the CPGB. In search of 'fertile ground', the RCG has begun to adapt its politics to the milieu of the CPGB. The underestimation of the questions of the Soviet Union by Cde Dornhorst, the fear of 'preaching' to the CPGB of Cde Yaffe — these trends show that the analysis of Cde Dornhorst is paralleled by political opportunism. Cde Dornhorst's document is the first major product of the Cde Yaffe's new conception of 'theoretical work' outlined in A Turning Point. In motivating the dissolution of the RCG's theoretical workgroup on the question of Stalinism, Cde Yaffe wrote:

'The work on the question (of Stalinism) must be directly related to our perspective for work in relation to the CPGB. Otherwise the work will have an academic character.'(84)

Cde Dornhorst's document is directly 'related to ... perspectives for work in relation to the CPGB' along the lines of the opportunism elaborated further by Cde Yaffe. The questions of the Soviet Union and Stalinism are 'academic' only for those who choose to ignore the historic defeats of the working class movement, the rise of Stalinism and the strengthening of reformism in the boom period. The CPGB will not be defeated if its political roots are ignored and if the terms of the discussion are restricted to 'incomes policy' and to its 'inconsistent' internationalism. Revolutionaries will not build a Marxist tradition in the working class through 'subtle' interventions in the CPGB.

For the RCT the question at stake in this debate is not merely the issue of Stalinism, but the necessity of training a revolutionary vanguard in the working class. As we have argued, principled ideological struggle against the ideas of official communism is central to the development of a vanguard — a vanguard which must itself be able to demonstrate the reactionary consequences of the programme of the CPGB, explain the rise of Stalinism and counter bourgeois propaganda on the question of the Soviet bloc. Short cut manoeuvres and subtle arguments against the CPGB will not provide the political basis for the training of the vanguard. Intervening in the CPGB in the way Cdes Yaffe and Dornhorst suggest means limiting politics to the existing debates within the Party. It means a diversion from the tasks of raising the ideological level of the movement. It represents a failure to provide the working class with an independent alternative to the CPGB. It is precisely the essential component of such an alternative

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— a critique of Stalinism — which has been subordinated to pragmatic considerations.

Today, revolutionaries must advance a scientific critique of the politics of the CPGB — a critique which clearly shows that the programme of the CPGB is the expression of Stalinism in today's conditions. To do this is to retrieve the gains of the Bolsheviks by concretely demonstrating that the programme of the CPGB has nothing in common with the politics of Marx and Lenin. Only such a critique of the dominant opportunist tendency in the international working class movement can provide the basis for training a vanguard. It is this task — the task of training a vanguard through struggling against the ideas of the CPGB — that the RCT will address itself to in its work on Stalinism.

Frank Richards and Phil Turner

FOOTNOTES

1 The Guardian, 2 February 1977

2 R Dornhorst, 'The CPGB — a comment on Comrade Turner's article', RCG, Internal Discussion Bulletin November 1976 (reprinted in Appendix), referred to here as 'The CPGB'.

3 P Turner, 'The Communist Party of Great Britain', in RCG, Special Discussion Bulletin on Stalinism, April 1976, p52

4 'The CPGB [sic] p50

5 Ibid p51

6 P Turner, op cit p75

7 Ibid p78

8 'The CPGB' p52

9 Ibid pp52-53

10 In Konkret, January 1977, p17

11 K Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin Books, 1973, p105

12 Ibid p107

13 Ibid p105

14 Ibid p106

15 K Marx, 'Afterword to the Second German Edition', in Capital, Vol 1, Lawrence and Wishart, 1974, p28

16 K Marx, 'Appendix: Results of the Immediate Process of Production', in Capital, Vol 1, Penguin, 1976, p1065

17 V I Lenin, 'Dead Chauvinism and Living Socialism', Collected Works Vol 21, Lawrence and Wishart, 1974, p98

18 V I Lenin, 'The Collapse of the Second International', op cit p243

19 Ibid pp241-3

20 V I Lenin, 'Karl Marx', op cit p57

21 For a more detailed examination of this question see F Richards, 'Capitalist Crisis and the Official Communist Movement', in RCG, Special Discussion Bulletin on Stalinism, April 1976

22 V I Lenin, 'Report on the tactics of the RCP, Third Congress of the Comintern 1921' in CW 32, Lawrence and Wishart, 1973

23 See V I Lenin, 'Political Report of the Central Committee, RCP(B), 11th Congress of the RCP(B), April 1922' in CW 33, Lawrence and Wishart, 1973

24 L Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin, Pathfinder, 1970, p61

25 D Z Manuilsky, Work of the Seventh Congress, Modern Books, London, 14 September 1935, p12

26 L Trotsky, op cit p72

27 'The CPGB' p51

28 See 'A Fresh Lesson', in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-9, Pathfinder, 1974, p71

29 Ibid

30 L Trotsky, 'On the history of the Left Opposition', op cit p262

31 See Footnote 9

32 'The CPGB' p51

33 Ibid

34 Ibid

35 Ibid

36 Ibid pp51-52

37 Ibid

38 Cited in F Claudin, The Communist Movement, Penguin, 1975, p45

39 J Degras, The Communist International 1919-1943, Vol III, O.U.P., 1965, p480

40 The Times, 17 November 1946

41 Cited in G Galli, 'Italian Communism' in J E Griffith, ed, Communism in Europe: Continuity, Change and the Sino-Soviet Dispute, Vol 1, MIT Press, 1964, pp305-6

42 The roles played in governmental coalitions in Finland and Iceland are exceptions to this tendency

43 Cited in 'Capitalism's Economic Prospects', Marxism Today, July 1961, p147

44 G Amendola, 'The "economic miracle" and the democratic alternative', in Rinascita, 9 September 1961. English translation in Foreign Bulletin of the Italian Communist Party, August-September 1961, p46

45 For a clear illustration of this revisionism see the discussion at the International Conference on State Monopoly Capitalism at Choisy-le-Roi, 26-9 May 1966 in Economie et Politique Nos 143-6, June-September 1966

46 See Economie et Politique Nos 145-6, p46

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47 'Report of the Political Committee', in RCG Conference Documents 1975, pp1-2

48 See John Torode, writing in The Guardian, 12 February 1977: 'I mean, here are your friendly neighbourhood Communists explaining how they intend to take power peacefully, extend "existing civil rights and democratic rights", allow all political parties "even those hostile to socialism" to operate freely and to "respect the verdict of the electors" by surrendering power peacefully if defeated at the ballot box.

'And there, behind the Iron Curtain, is this Communist regime imposed on the Czech people by Soviet troops persecuting and imprisoning some of the brightest and the best in Czech society for daring to ask for the sort of freedoms promised in the British Road to Socialism. It casts a certain amount of doubt on the sincerity of the British Communists' stance.'

49 'The CPGB' p52

50 'The Russian Question Today, Draft Theses adopted by the International Secretariat of the Fourth International', in Fourth International, November-December 1947, pp268-69

51 'The CPGB' p51

52 'The Rise and Decline of Stalinism, Resolution adopted at the Fourth World Congress of the Fourth International, 1954', in The Development and Disintegration of World Stalinism, Pathfinder, 1970, p25

53 L Trotsky, 'On the History of the Left Opposition', op cit p263, our emphasis

54 'The CPGB' p 52

55 Ibid p52our [sic] emphasis

56 Ibid p 54

57 Ibid

58 Comment, 27 November 1976, p378

59 J Gollan, 'Socialist Democracy — Some Problems: The 20th Congress of the CPSU in retrospect', in Marxism Today, January 1976, p28

60 K Zaradov, 'Lenin's Teaching on the Hegemony of the Proletariat in the Bourgeois-Democratic Revolution', Soviet News, 19 August 1975

61 'The CPGB' pp55-56

62 Ibid p 54

63 H Pollitt, It can be done, CPGB 14th Congress Report, May 1937, pp71, 73

64 J Woddis, Time to Change Course, CPGB, 1973, p136

65 'The CPGB' p55

66 Ibid

67 Ibid p56

68 S French, 'Socialist Democracy: Some Problems', in Marxism Today, December 1976, p385

69 'The CPGB' p55

70 Ibid

71 Ibid p56

72 Ibid

73 Ibid

74 Ibid

75 Ibid p55

76 'Marxism versus Reformism', in RCG, Internal Discussion Bulletin, op cit p15

77 'The CPGB' p52

78 D Yaffe, A Turning Point, p46

79 Ibid

80 Ibid

81 'Report of the Political Committee', op cit p12

82 See 'A Retrograde step for the Marxist movement — a reply to Cde Yaffe'

83 D Yaffe, 'South Africa: International Solidarity and the British Working Class', in Revolutionary Communist No 5, p60

84 A Turning Point op cit p47