‘The Gleam of Socialism’. By Robert Griffiths, Praxis Press, 2004.
Why is there still a Communist Party? Good question. After all, the main role of that party throughout its history was to win support amongst workers for the foreign policy of the old USSR and its rulers. In fact, that’s why that state helped the finances of the party until the late 1970s, either directly or by buying thousands of copies of the old Daily Worker and its successor, the Morning Star.
No doubt, the leaders of the party weren’t just useful idiots but had sincerely convinced themselves that Russia was on the road to socialism and that in serving the interests of the USSR they were furthering the cause of socialism. But it wasn’t socialism. Far from it. It was a one-party dictatorship, the aim of whose rulers was to develop capitalism, in the form of a state capitalism, as rapidly as possible; which inevitably involved the economic exploitation of the workers there through the wages system and the extraction of surplus value. But this is the view of those Griffiths describes as ‘ultra-left anti-communists’.
Griffiths is the current general secretary of the ‘Communist Party of Britain’ (CPB), formed as a breakaway in 1988 from the historic ‘Communist Party of Great Britain’ whose leaders were indeed coming to the conclusion that there was no longer a need for a party dedicated to taking a lead from the rulers of the USSR. When the state-capitalist regime there finally collapsed in 1991 they decided to change the party’s name, to Democratic Left. Confusing matters, a grouplet, opportunistically, immediately took up the name and still exists under that name, publishing the Weekly Worker. This current CPGB has nothing to do with the historic party of that name. The original CPGB’s legitimate political successor can be said to be the CPB and the Morning Star.
There is also a previous breakaway, for the same sort of reason, in 1977 to form the still extant ‘New Communist Party’ which might have been able to claim this if they had not decided to link up with North Korea.
Griffiths’s book is a collection of articles, some of them published previously including short pieces on various well-known past CP members, mainly from Wales, from where he himself hails. The more substantial part is a history of the old CPGB — and its various policy twists and turns — and is accurate enough factually. It’s the explanation for them that is at fault as he presents them as being made in response to changes in conditions in Britain rather than at the behest of Moscow. Nor is there any reason to doubt the accuracy of his blow-by-blow account of the struggle in 1980s between the Old Guard CPers, centred around the Morning Star, and the ‘Eurocommunists’ who had won control of the party apparatus and who wanted to turn the party into a coalition of social movements, a sort of democratic green feminist left, and who were indeed ‘revisionists’ and ‘liquidationists’ from the Old Guard’s point of view.
The main reason for accepting the CPB as the political successor of the old CPGB is the continuity of political analysis which Griffiths illustrates. The CPB still sees the old USSR as having been socialist and still analyses present-day capitalism as ‘state-monopoly capitalism’ and still sees the way forward as a broad alliance of all anti-monopoly elements led by the ‘united working class movement’ to elect a left-wing Labour government. The aim, in other words, is an economy with a state-capitalist sector and a fairly extensive private non-monopoly sector under a reformist government.
Perhaps surprisingly, Jeremy Corbyn is described as a ‘longstanding friend of the Communist Party’. Maybe he just sees them as general Old Labour left-wing reformists like himself.
Adam Buick
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