The High Tide of UK Anti-Revisionism: a History

1 HIGH TIDE Reg’s Working Class Party Throughout its history there were only a few times when the organisational skeleton of a national ML force was in the making: McCreery in the initial break from the CPGB led the first occasion. With the demise of the CDRCU, it was the launch of the CPB (ML), led by former Communist Party Executive member, Reg Birch that saw the beginnings of a national ML force unchallenged for almost a decade until the late 1970s emergence of the rejuvenated and "bolshevised" Revolutionary Communist League. For the first half of the decade, it was the CPB (ML) that seemed the most promising organisation to make a political break through. The project initiated by Reg Birch could draw upon a lot of goodwill. Birch, with a pedigree of both trade union and communist activity, offered the chance of gathering the best forces of the ML movement around the standard he had raised. Those who were already disgusted with the inward‐looking squabbling, that seemed to dominate the activities of some groups, look forward to the opportunity for serious political work in trade unions and campaigns directed at winning working class support. Reg Birch was an initial asset to the formation of the CPB (ML) and not without confidence, he announced: “Small and new as it is on the British political scene the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist Leninist) is the only party which is genuinely a workers' party. It was founded by workers, serves only the working class and is unswervingly committed to the revolutionary task of smashing capitalism and all its institutions so that exploitation can be ended and workers can establish their own socialist state."1 He had the initial support of, not only his own engineering base, but also of probably the largest single organised Marxist‐Leninist group in the country, the Association of Indian Communist, those Maoists of Indian origin resident in Britain. It was quickly lost when trying to force the issue of transforming a broad‐ based national minority organisation into an adjunct of the CPB (ML), the support of this experienced cadre group was never again to be aligned to any single Marxist‐Leninist organisation. 1 The Worker June 1970 2 Even criticism by dissident members would acknowledge that when the party was founded it was undoubtedly Reg Birch who was responsible for the successes such as they were. He played a vital role in attracting other working class communists to support the party. Unfortunately many of these had a too uncritical respect for him, and this combined with other bureaucratic, anti‐ intellect traits brought with them from the revisionist party allowed a clique to develop around Birch. The London Communist Group was credited with the main responsible for elevating the respect for Birch to the heights of a personality cult.2 The CPB (ML) reflected its leader with similar strengths and weaknesses: basically militant trade unionist, anti‐intellectual in temperament and regardless of it professed allegiance to Marxism‐Leninism, almost non‐ideological, operating with a set of beliefs instead of theoretical analyses and political correction in the light of practice. The theoretical poverty of the organisation was ‘well developed’ in what was the largest Maoist organisation in Britain. However the Party was not without its share of intellectual talent whose names entered the public arena: ‘Bill’ William Franklin Ash, the writer, married to Ranjana Sidhanta Ash, freelance lecturer and writer of South Asian literatures, Roy Greenslade , an experienced tabloid news sub before going to Sussex University in 1974, and its share of teachers, Dorothy Birch and lecturers, Fawi Ibrahim at Willesden College of Technology, and the former LSE lecturer Nick Bateson. At the Party’s Second Congress in April 1971, the defining theoretical feature of the organisation was that it argued that were only two classes in Britain. The "unanimously endorsed" line of the Second Congress of the CPB (ML) was “The British Working Class and Its Party". Being good trade unionists, CPB (ML) were likely to endorse a line that struggles "denigrated as 'economic' is as organic and necessary to revolution as the gun", argued that "trade unions poses a serious threat politically and economically to the ruling class...the economic gains of all types of struggles are temporary and in the long run illusory. The true gains are political and consist in the ideological clarity that can be won in such struggles." Having identified the need for the "ideological development of the working class" there was a problem with the ideas promoted by the CPB (ML) most clearly expressed in its dogged insistence that were only two classes in Britain. There were no intermediate strata or other insignificant factors to consider. The 'two‐ class analysis' of the CPB (ML) described the idea of "Middle Class" as a "very convenient fiction'. As Chairman Birch would repeatedly stress, In this most proletarian of countries the intelligentsia (if such a term is even appropriate in the most literate of countries) is proletarian in its conditions of labour even if only newly proletarian in its class practice (and scarcely proletarian at all in its ideological development)." 2 See: "The Absolute Decline' of the Communist Party of Britain Marxist‐Leninist" 1976 3 Such simplistic assertions came to fruition in the theoretical poverty of arguing that in Britain "the oldest and most proletarianised of capitalist countries, all the intermediate classes left over by feudalism have been absorbed into the proletariat, as has the peasantry."3 Pivotal to the CPB (ML) strategy was the ideas contained‐ in the pamphlet "Guerrilla Struggle and the Working Class". Essentially it took the daily struggles involved in trying to survive economically under capitalism as evidence "that we admit the necessity of moving away". The line did note that "the most backward aspect of trade unionism is shown in their creation, the Labour Party." Political hostility towards social democracy was an established point of political belief within the CPB (ML). Labour was said to have done nothing "politically but to betray its class origins" The complementary document of the Congress "Burning Questions for our Party"" with its 'two‐class analysis' was said to have "provided the Party's ground for calling on workers to go straight for a working class revolution." At a time, when at its peak the CPB(ML) numbered a couple of hundred, and the organised Left in Britain was swamped by revisionist and trotskyist forces, there were delusions of grandeur ‐severe even for the standards of the ML movement. The membership of the CPB (ML) was told: “All previous revolutions ‐Russia, China, Vietnam or whatever ‐ will pale in significance. The achievement of a Socialist Britain will transform the world and truly put the seal on this epoch as that of revolution. It is in this light we should look at our Party."4 Self‐confidence abounds in the young enterprise: November 1971, The Worker had a front‐paged headline that read: ‘USSR 1917, ALBANIA 1944, CHINA 1949, BRITAIN NEXT?’ At a national conference of the CPB (ML) in January 1970, grandiose claims were made by Birch that, “We are the first Party started by the proletariat, however few…. Our paper ‘The Worker’ is sought out by every Marxist‐Leninist Party in the world and our party enjoys relations of fraternal equality with China and Albania.”5 One‐time Party member, Alexei Sayle has other recollections of The Worker: 3The British Working Class and Its Party :11 4 The Party In The Present Situation 1976 5 The Worker, February 1970 4 My wife (also a party member) used to try and reduce her enormous pile of papers by giving one each to her mother, father, brother and the cat, muttering that she’d put the three pence each in for them and they could pay her back sometime – they’d have nothing to do with this arrangement and each fortnight a violent scuffle would break out in the family’s flat as they struggled to stuff the papers back on to her resisting form. (The cat would have kept and read his copy but he had serious disagreements with the party line on the neo‐Syndicalists of Italy.)6 Jung Chang relates in her memoirs that sold millions of copies that: No foreign publications were available except The Worker, the paper of the minuscule Maoist Communist Party of Britain, and even this was locked up in a special room. I remember the thrill of being given permission once, just once, to look at a copy. My excitement wilted when my eyes fell on the front‐page article echoing the campaign to criticize Confucius. As I was sitting there nonplussed, a lecturer whom I liked walked past and said with a smile, 'That paper is probably read only in China. "7 A Conference on The Worker held in May 1970, set out the perspective that “we start where the workers of Britain are now in order to be able to communicate with them at all. We want to get to the dictatorship of the proletariat. But to set up goals without showing how they can be reached through the day‐to‐day‐ struggle, to use revolutionary language with no intention of beginning our revolutionary practice here and now in relation to the current situation is neo‐ revisionism” As an organisation, the CPB (ML) never produced a theoretical journal but continued to issue a ’written by workers’ paper, The Worker, on a monthly basis, sometime edited by Bill Ashe. So although nationally organised, led by a leading trade union leader, and having a workplace base in the engineering union, it suffered from being guided by a chauvinistic political line that made it impotent in terms of going beyond the dominant Labourist ideology of trade unionism.

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