The chief thing to realise about the Communist Party is that it isn’t. Whatever the party stands for (and it is not exactly easy to know), communism simply does not figure. You can go through reams of their paper, the daily Morning Star, and among the thousands of words you will be lucky if you find a mention of the word. Can you imagine reading an issue of the Socialist Standard which says nothing about socialism? Quite unthinkable. And also quite impossible, because we print our definition of socialism in every issue, irrespective of what the articles happen to be discussing in any particular month. What, you may ask, would be the point of a journal of the Socialist Party which kept quiet about socialism? What, then, can be the point of a communist party which keeps quiet about communism?
So let us make it clear from the outset that there really is only one communist party in this country, and that is the SPGB. We are, and always have been, the only party that stands for one thing only — the common ownership of the means of production. It makes not a scrap of difference whether you call that socialism or communism. Conversely, the form of ownership in the world today is capitalism, call it what you will. So another question that the so-called Communist Party has to answer (and this article will contain quite a number) is: why did you form your party at all? After all, your founders in the early 1920s were fully aware that there had been a party preaching communism in the country since 1904. One or two of them, like T.A. Jackson, had actually been members of the SPGB, so they couldn’t plead ignorance of the fact that a genuine communist party was already in being. It stands to sense that if you think that socialism/communism is the only answer to the evils that afflict society, then you join the party that stands for the establishment of that system. (The same applies, of course, to the proliferation of parties like the SWP and the IMG. Their founders did not join the already existing socialist/communist party, and there could only be one possible reason for that. They did not really stand for communism at all. They just paid lip service to a name. Their real objective must have been something else.)
The Communist Party’s raison d'etre was clear from the outset, and had nothing to do with communism. It was simply to act as the propaganda mouthpiece of the gang who had seized power in Russia and who called themselves communists. (They even changed the name of the country by adopting the equally fraudulent title, the USSR. One of the two ‘esses’ stands for Socialist; which one it is doesn’t matter because the name Lenin should have adopted was the Union of Soviet Capitalist Republics. But honesty was not one of Lenin’s most outstanding characteristics.) The new Russian ruling class, who had crushed the people who had crushed the Tsar, felt they needed parties who would support them in the various countries of Europe (and in the other continents too, soon enough). They founded them and funded them. And, paying the piper, they called the tune to which the spurious communist parties, including our own dear CPGB, danced.
When Moscow said form ‘united fronts’ with Labourites and Social Democrats, they enthusiastically did so. When their masters said that Labourites were ‘social fascists’ who should be physically smashed, they did that just as enthusiastically. When Stalin apparently wanted the Western powers to join him in an alliance against Hitler, our communists were there leading the red thugs who attacked the blackshirt thugs. And when Stalin made his infamous pact with Hitler in 1939 and so gave the green light for the outbreak of World War II, the communists denounced the war as an imperialist adventure and forgot to smash Hitler. When Hitler obliged his ally by launching his attack on Russia in 1941, the British ruling class had no more fervent supporters than the communists, who actually denounced trade unionists who went on strike as traitors to the great People’s War (it had changed to that overnight, you see).
It is necessary to point out here that when communists talk about their heroic deeds in smashing the British fascists in the heady days before the outbreak of the war, it was by no means only fascists that they smashed up. They were equally enthusiastic smashers of socialist meetings too. All this is quite understandable. After all, the state which has oppressed the Russian working class ever since Lenin seized power would not stop at breaking up socialist meetings. Anyone trying to make socialist propaganda in the so-called workers’ state would soon find themselves dealt with by the KGB and put into prison, or a labour camp, or the grave. The Communist Party of Great Britain merely aped their masters — and their paymasters too.
Anyone who doubts that can get some revealing information from the memoirs of the late Bessie Braddock who, before becoming a Labour MP after the war, was a leading member of the Liverpool communists. Yet even now there is precious little attempt to hide the fact that the Russian party subsidises the party here. It is only thus that the party can cope with the enormous expense of running the Morning Star. The bulk of its circulation goes to Russia and the satellite countries of Eastern Europe, where the ruling class pays well for the pleasure of filling their libraries (and doubtless their dustbins) with the rag. These days the majority of the Communist Parties of Western Europe call themselves Euro-communists and pretend to criticise (but rather quietly, of course; no demos, no breaking the windows of the Russian Embassy, nothing vulgar like that: that sort of thing is only for the American Embassy) such things as the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
If the CPGB has really ended its role as the puppets of their Moscow paymasters, can they — can anyone — say what they are supposed to exist for? To advocate reforms of capitalism while pretending to be communists who want to end capitalism? But there is a party called the Labour Party which is vastly bigger, much older, and has been doing that rather well ever since it started. The real truth is that without Russia, the communists would simply disappear. Their paymasters go on funding them because they realise that their Euro-communism is merely a veil to enable the CPGB (like their fellows in France and Italy and Spain) to appear to be not too close to the oppressive regime in Moscow.
Let us end with a couple more questions to the CPGB (our columns are open to them to reply — not that theirs would ever be to us, of course). In all the millions of words in the Daily Worker until Stalin’s death in 1953, can you show us one single word denouncing the red monster who slaughtered millions of innocent Russian workers (quite apart from those killed in the Hitler war)? Can you show us one single word in the Morning Star denouncing Russia as a capitalist police state which denies even basic trade union rights such as are available to workers here? And finally, why did you change the name of your paper? Was there some sudden feeling of guilt, some realisation that it was not a workers’ paper after all? It seems a small question. But it has never been answered.
L. E. Weidberg
No comments:
Post a Comment