Reply to John Walkeer on MLL, 28 July 2000Comrades,
I've read some copies of the Weekly Worker both in print and on the Internet
and it's clear that they are Trotskyite in orientation. What Viktor
Bourenkov wrote about them is even more interesting.
With regards the SWP, way back in the 1970's, I recall their paper Socialist
Worker supporting dissident groups such as Charter 77 in what was then
Chezkoslovakia and the anti-communist Solidarnosc trade union led by Lech
Walesa.
Well, we can see the end result of their stand in the misery in the former
Soviet Union today, which they used to refer to as "state capitalist."
Fraternally
Charles
Viktor Bourenkov wrote:
================================================
Comrade Walker,
You are having deep illusions in the organisation called CPGB. Incidentally,
I came accross that insane grouping.
In mid-May, a comrade from Communist Party of Britain (CPB) informed me that
an article titled Auto-Labourism under attack appeared in issue 334 of CPGB'
s Weekly Worker. It was on the front page and was intended to support the
motion not to vote Labour party at the 45th Congress of the CPB in London,
22-24 May 2000. I am sorry to quote the two opening paragraphs from their
paper to this truly Marxist-Leninist list, but it is necessary to expose the
nature of their politics.
"Voting for New Labour has become so unpalatable that even the Communist
Party of Britain, the Morning Star's 'party', whose programme specifies the
road to socialism through a series of left Labour governments, is having
difficulty holding the (Labour) party line. Hitherto, the 'official
communists' have dogmatically called for a Labour vote, the only rare
exception being where it stands its own candidates.
Its April 22-24 congress (incidentally, there was a "fraternal" guest from
the anti-Semitic and chauvinist Communist Party of the Russian Federation),
saw an organised challenge to auto-Labourism which was only narrowly fought
off by the leadership. The Merseyside amendment relating to the Labour Party
and electoral work was defeated by 38 votes to 26 (Morning Star April 25).
."
Below are just several facts they managed to lie about in just two
paragraphs of the newspaper.
British Road to Socialism, the programme of the Communist Party of Britain,
did pay too much attention to parliamentary struggle in its early
revisionist editions. However, when CPB was established (as opposed to
revisionists in the old CPGB), the programme was re-written and a number of
positions were corrected (and I heard, a new edition is about to be released
shortly). Although the current edition is still described as revisionist by
the New Communist Party of Britain (a M-L organisation which has a positive
attitude to comrade Stalin), the first sentence in the article is a very
free interpretation of BRS with which the CPB members would certainly
disagree.
CPB's line is to vote its own candidates if they stand locally or Labour
party otherwise (i. e. in cases when the only other option is not to vote.)
However, they have not been dogmatic about this line. In the recent Mayor of
London elections, they supported Ken Livingstone, an independent candidate,
not the official bought-off Labour one, whom they should have supported by
the letter of BRS. (Not that Livingstone was significantly less corrupt and
pseudoleft than Labour, but he challenged Tony Blair and called for
nationalisation of the Tube (London underground).)
CPB's 45th Congress was lively and interesting on the whole, and most
decisions were taken by a landslide majority. Indeed, the chair had to count
the votes just two times. Weekly Worker is trying to create an impression
that the party almost split over the issue.
Marxists-Leninists should start their critique of the Communist Party of
Russian Federation (CPRF) with pointing out that the latter was opposed to
revolutionary change from its formation in 1993. CPRF does little to defend
the great Soviet past and takes an anti-Stalin position. Instead of opposing
and condemning the criminal post-Soviet privatisation in Russia, they called
for conducting it "legally". Their main purpose of existence was to get as
many seats as possible in parliament, local councils and other authorities,
and hence they often sided with the bourgeois régime in attacking the
radical left. In their ideology, they replaced progressive Soviet patriotism
with backward and delimiting Russian national-patriotism. Later this lead to
them being tolerant to nationalistic trends, including those present amongst
their leaders. Starting by saying that they are anti-Semitic is just copying
the bourgeois propaganda who want to identify communism with fascism, and
are hence indifferent to whether CPRF is communist or not.
Forget CPRF - there were no guests from the Communist Party of Russian
Federation at the Congress. CPB leadership decided that they would
deliberately not send an invitation to Ziuganov (CPRF) because of
anti-Semitism. The only representative from Russia was me, and I was there
as an observer for another organisation - the Russian Communist Workers'
Party (RKRP).
According to British Marxists-Leninists, such articles are very typical in
Weekly Worker. If you browse through their publications, you will find that
their style is ordinarily Trotskyist.
I am from Soviet Union and currently reside in Great Britain. As a fraternal
delegate from RKRP, I attended the 12th Congress of the New Communist Party
of Britain, London, 27-28 November 1999. One of their programme resolutions
was on progressive coöperation. It proposes to form a round-table between
the Communist Party of Britain, which concentrates on working in the trade
unions, and few smaller groups. Nobody has even thought of including CPGB in
that list.
Comrade Kaczynski has already stated some facts about CPGB. Two major groups
opposed to the revisionist leadership in old CPGB - the New Communist Party
of Britain (which was founded in 1977) and the supporters of Morning Star
who established the Communist Party of Britain in 1988. None of them could
use the of-Great-Britain name for legal reasons. However, it became spare
after the old CPGB was liquidated around 1991 by the trators who were out of
control. Those who published the Weekly Worker suddenly took over the name,
and this is the only reason why we see them called like that today.
It is not a custom to talk in numbers in politics, but reasonable people
would be embarrassed to call themselves a party with the membership they
have.
Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG), for example, is a small
Marxist-Leninist organisation, whose members have a tremendous record of
struggle against British imperialism and the pseudoleft. They are actually
bigger than CPGB, but prefer not to call themselves a party. They do not
deserve to have a reference to their material next to that of CPGB, comrade
Walker. Although they do not agree with most of comrade Stalin's actions,
their position is definitely for the Soviet Union. They support the Cuban
revolution unconditionally and admire at comrade Fidel Castro. Any critique
they may have over the past of the socialist countries hence does not
originate from the imperialist sources, which is the case for trotskyites
like CPGB. Their view should therefore be recognised by Marxists-Leninists
internationally.
CPGB makes a big fuss about CPB being pro-Labour. As a comrade from the RCG
explained to me, when SWP and CPGB formed the London Socialist Alliance to
stand in the London Assembly elections in May 2000, they were promising to
provide an alternative but not opposition to the Labour party. He also added
that by trying to provide that alternative to the New Labour or to Labour
government, they were effectively against just the right wing of the Labour
party and hence did not attack the Labour party as a whole.
This is just one of occasions where CPGB found it possible to collaborate
with anti-Soviet (openly), anti-Leninist (implicitly) and
anti-internationalist (implicitly but quite obvious) Socialist Workers'
Party (SWP). (As a matter of fact, some groups amongst trotskyites would
even argue that SWP is not trotskyist, but it is their problem.) SWP would
ignore the heroic anti-fascist struggle in the Second World War which they
would label as imperialist altogether. They hated the USSR so much that they
ended up supporting the right-wing demonstrations of vandals in Eastern
Europe in 1989-1991, in which free-market economy was promoted and a number
monuments to comrades Marx and Lenin were destroyed. CPGB did not mind that,
but only said trotskyists were "not critical enough". Moreover, CPGB
respects SWP and regards it as a progressive force. They tail behind SWP.
They tail, because their positions, while being very similar, are only more
extreme.
Weekly Worker's hypocrisy about Labour is nothing compared to their
ridiculous positions on issues like Yugoslavia. In London, there are still
some CPGB stickers left over from Spring 1999, which say: "Arm the KLA."
It is remarkable, that SWP accepts all the lies about the past and the
present in the bourgeois media. All it does is extend it. And CBGP goes
further. In the above example, SWP confirmed all the myths about ethnical
cleansing as reported by BBC. They extended them by "opposing" both NATO and
the Yugoslav powers. But what kind of opposition was it if the myth they
confirmed was used by NATO to justify bombing? Yet while SWP acted about as
expected in the anti-bombing campaign (as its M-L participants tell), CPGB
found the way to shock the rest of the campaign by the call quoted above.
There are just two principal differences between CPGB and SWP. 1) CPGB is
smaller. 2) SWP commits crimes against humanity under the banner of
"Marxism", whereas CPGB does it under the banner of "Marxism-Leninism".
They only exist because the bourgeois democracy allows to take the most
irresponsible and unconscious positions and remain unpunished.
Scoundrels like this should be ignored and their views not taken into
consideration when analysing any question in a Marxist-Leninist way.
With communistic greetings,
Viktor Bourenkov.
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