Revisionism: the Politics of the CPGB Past & Present

Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line Revolutionary Communist League of Britain Revisionism: The Politics of the CPGB Past & Present First Published: RCL Briefing, 1989 Transcription, Editing and Markup: Sam Richards and Paul Saba Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above. Revisionism: The Politics of the CPGB Past & Present Foreword The articles in this briefing are initial contributions to an assessment of revisionism in Britain. It was recognition of the political damage of revisionism that bought forth a counter political current of anti-revisionist activists. Many of these received moral and ideological support from the Sino-Soviet Polemics of the early 1960s. In Britain, like elsewhere in North America and Europe, that Polemic did not see the political destruction of the o1d Moscow oriented parties. In Britain the anti-revisionist movement failed to unite with some activists expelled from the CPGB, and others remaining inside seeking to return the CPGB to Leninist basics. The new ML groups that were formed emerged largely out of the radicalised petty bourgeois youth with a sprinkling of communist veterans. Most of these groups back-dated their ideological birth to the Polemic on the General Line of the International Communist Movement. A source of strength to the adherents of such groups was Mao's China. That they acted as if Mao's China was Marxism-Leninism incarnate, with every statement made carrying religious weight, was a source of weakness. Those with contempt for theory were enthralled by the spontaneity of the struggle and confined themselves to the narrowest form of practical activity. Others confined themselves to the rarefied realm of understanding the world without the intention to change it. Between these two poles the early ML movement oscillated. The new self proclaimed "vanguard" were largely ignored: the failure to significant challenge the influence of revisionism and social democracy in the working class meant that in the industrial countries very few of the new ML parties acquired notable influence in the working class of their countries. Marxism-Leninism remains a minority tendency in the political constellation of the Left in this country. To understand the historically stunted development of the ML movement can provide some lessons to rectify that state of affairs. Some effort has been made already with the article in OCTOBER *3. (1) These articles are more narrow in their concern concentrating on various aspects of modern revisionism as represented by the Communist Party of Great Britain. The first, Revisionism in Britain, provides a useful beginning point to investigate, from the perspective of a participant, the state of the CPGB in the mid-1960s. The second, Notes on Revisionism, was written before the current disintegration of the CPGB and looks at the writings of John Gollan, if not the architect of the reformist party programme then a major promoter of 'The British Road to Socialism'. The third article looks at the CPGB's analysis and strategy for the 1990s. Without pre-emption of its conclusion, one can judge that for all its new style CP thinking has changed little since the first draft of BRS. As always, comments and criticism, to strengthen our critique of revisionism, are welcomed. (1) ' Eurocentrism --the "key" link in theoretical work' (1985) G. Lee The Decline of the British Communist Party Bradford 1988 INTRODUCTION A. Britain Today Perhaps one of the most surprising things about the last nine years has been the relative ease with which the government has been able to introduce policies that have so adversely affected so many sections of the community. Both the Labour Party and the trade union movement, with a few notable exceptions, have been virtually powerless to prevent, among other things, the reduction and even withdrawal of social security benefits from those most in need of them; the growth of homelessness particularly in London and the large cities; the infringement on trade union rights and restrictions on the use of trade union power and the gross under funding of the National Health Service (NHS), which led to the British Medical Journal using the leading article in a recent issue, to show that the NHS was literally moving towards terminal decline. What is even more surprising in this decade, which is now witnessing a tremendous polarisation in society, and where it is becoming so much easier to observe the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, and between private affluence and public squalor, has been the virtual slide into obscurity of the British Communist Party (CPGB). One might have felt that the fairly obvious political bankruptcy from a socialist perspective -of social democracy and Labourism under Kinnock, would have helped clear the way for the CPGB to play a much more active and noticable role in British politics, particularly among those who have been most harshly hit since 1979. With its long history of involvement in political and industrial struggles and its many varied experiences, both positive and negative, one might have thought the opportunity now exists for the CPGB to fill the vacuum that currently prevails on the left. Why it has not done so is the question to which my essay seeks to provide answers. Essentially the solution will be shown to lie in my view that since the time of the mid-forties, a fundamental revision of Marxism has taken place within the CPGB. However, it was not until the mid-sixties' that this had become sufficiently dear, particularly to those members who were growing increasingly critical of the leadership and the party's failure to advance. My essay will, therefore, commence with a brief description of some of the major events of the sixties in order to provide the reader with a background to what was going on within the CPGB around the time of its 29th Congress in November 1965. This will be followed by an initial explanation of what is to be understood by the term "revisionism" (and hence "anti-revisionism"), although it is expected that reading of the essay will help in illuminate this key element. It will then be necessary to look at the CPGB historically and also at the state of the communist movement internationally in the sixties before dealing specifically with events within the CPGB and its youth section, the Young Communist League (YCL). B. The Sixties Remembered The sixties will be recalled in different ways by all who lived through them. Politically, the start of the decade will be remembered by the massacre at Sharpeville when police shot dead 69 unarmed black protestors. In April 1961, the CIA backed an unsuccessful invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. I n November 1963, shock and mystery surrounded the assassination of President Kennedy. UDI was declared in Rhodesia in November 1965, while in the following year, the Cultural Revolution began in China. Two years later, hundreds of factories and schools were occupied as ten million French workers went on strike and students fought the riot police on the streets. In August 1968, tanks from Russia, East Germany, Poland and Hungary invaded Czechoslovakia, an event which coincided with the violent attack on young demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention by Mayor Daley's Chicago police. And throughout the decade the war in Vietnam continued. In April 1960, the Blue Streak missile project was cancelled after £100 million had been spent. June 1963 saw-the Conservative, government rocked by the Profumo affair. In October 1964, Labour came into office and Harold Wilson promised a White-Hot Technological Revolution. It was to be one that included wage freezes, cuts in spending on health, housing and education, devaluation of the pound and the emergence of the word redundancy as the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation, under Lord Kearton, proceeded to use taxpayers' money to finance mergers and create giant combines that changed the face of British industry. Enoch Powell made his infamous Rivers of Blood speech in Apri1 1968 and London dockers marched to Whitehall to support him. Two months later, a handful of women sewing machinists reduced the who1e of Ford’s Dagenham works to a standstill bringing the demand for equal pay back onto the public agenda. This brief review of ten memorable years is essential in order to help the contemporary reader, over twenty years later, get some feel for the times and for the political mood of a generation. The British Prime Minister himself, Harold MacMillan, could see that things were not going to remain the same in the years ahead, for he told the South African Par1iament: “The wind of change is blowing through the continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact."(I) Everywhere change was in the air and nowhere was this more so than in the international communist movement. The Soviet and Chinese communist parties engaged in along and bitter polemic which ranged over fundamental issues and it is against the background of a growing split of the communist world into two hostile camps that it is possible to begin to understand what was happening within the CPGS in the period 1963 to 1967. c. What is Revisionism? It is however necessary at this early stage to provide the reader with some idea of what is to be understood by the term “revisionism". This calls for two quotes, one from Lenin, who both sides would argue would have been on their side if he were still alive, and one from Mao Zedong, who was an active participant in the polemic.

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