Day meeting on building a mass communist party Saturday 8 February
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In their reply Talking About Socialism quote Conrad as saying;
“My fear is that what they’ll produce is something at least along the lines of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. This is a maximalist programme that rejects all notions of reform, all notions of transition between capitalism with capitalist state power and communism.”
And
“The comrades in TAS are more inclined to the SPGB approach than what I would describe at least as the sort of classic Marxist approach”
Actually, TAS’s reply to the charge that it “rejects all notions of reform” is the sort of reply we might give (except of course that we don’t think that a socialist party should itself advocate particular reforms):
“‘Only when confronted by the power of the working class will the ruling class and its state be forced to make concessions (reforms), to temporarily appease the majority, fearful of losing complete control, only to take those concessions back when events become more favourable to them. The task of socialists is to strip away the veneer of impartiality from the State, to reveal its class content. While fighting for any reform or concession from the ruling class, the working class must always have its eye on the ultimate goal – fundamentally breaking the power of the capitalist class and the capitalist state and inaugurating the basis of a new society.’
You will find similar formulations throughout our material. Communists must fight for all reforms, to improve the position of the working class in society. But we fight against reformism as a political strategy. Our aim is not to reform capitalism into something that can work in the interests of the working class, that is impossible. We do not aim to manage capitalism but to abolish it.”
Another letter from us in this week’s Weekly Worker, on our attitude towards reforms:
Latest news: TAS break off the “unity” talks with the WW group. Not surprising really in view of the latter’s rigid Bolshevik-Leninism.
Another letter from a Party member in this week’s Weekly Worker:
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1545/letters/
Also, mention of us three or four times in Conrad’s attack on TAS:
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1545/one-step-back/
For example:
“In fact, as I feared, comrades Wrack and Potts have done little more than produce a soft-focus, banal, incoherent parody of the maximalism of the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s ‘What we stand for’.The TAS duo hate my coming out with any such a description. It is one of those ‘bad words’ they cite to excuse their break with FCU. Pathetic. The comrades plead that they do not reject reforms per se – indeed they don’t. Nor for that matter does the SPGB.”
I haven’t been able to find the alleged “soft-focus, banal, incoherent parody” of our “maximalism”, if anybody can.
‘Another letter from a Party member in this week’s Weekly Worker:
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1545/letters/
Great letter too.
Former member (now back in the CPB) Andrew Northall replied in last Thursday’s Weekly Worker to Robin’s letter. He puts the best case a Leninist can — that socialist minority seizes power and then uses its control of political power to educate the working class into becoming socialists and that when a majority have become socialists then socialism can be established.
It’s what the pre-Marxist Communists thought but which Marx moved beyond,insisting that the working class would have to emancipate itself — that a majority of the working class would have to want and understand socialism before political control could be successfully exercised to replace capitalism with socialism.
Anyway here’s his letter:
And from what Andrew Northall says in his letter, after that socialist minority seizes power, the ‘education’ of the working class and the production of sufficient wealth to satisfy all needs is likely to be decades in the making, during which time that minority will remain in power. Just how attractive a proposition is that? Also he pours cold water on the notion that we could quickly or immediately produce enough for everyone or that even today the means exist to produce enough for everyone’s needs. It’s true that there are different views on this and, as he correctly observes, a moneyless, voluntarist socialist society couldn’t necessarily use existing capitalist systems of production and infrastructure at the drop of a hat once a majority opts for socialism, so some adjustments will no doubt be needed. But the idea that such adjustments will take ‘years’ or ‘decades’ just doesn’t stand up. All sorts of figures get flung around but AT’s contention that there’s no real evidence that existing or potential production wouldn’t be able to meets all needs more or less immediately if used for that purpose just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. There’s all sorts of evidence for the opposite viewin fact. But just one simple example: the World Food Programme’s 2024 ‘Global Report of Food Crises’, which offers the most comprehensive account and evidence of annual global food production, finds that enough food was produced that year to meet the needs of 11 billion people (https://www.fsinplatform.org/report/global-report-food-crises-2025/). And if that’s being done within a system whose purpose is to produce to sell not to feed, how likely is it that we couldn’t feed everyone in short order if society sets about producing to feed and not to sell?
Robbo’s reply to Andrew Northall appears in yesterday’s Weekly Worker:
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1547/letters/
The letter that follows it, from a member of some Turkish group, makes the same point, with supporting evidence, as we do that Lenin’s distinction between socialism and communism is a distortion of Marx’s view.
In another article the WW group continue to accuse TAS of spgbism. Mike McNair writes:
“I remarked in my April 3 report of an online FCU meeting on March 30 that
‘… there is some danger of a ‘negative dialectic’ in which we in the CPGB understate the radicalism of our Draft programme, while, on the other hand, the TAS comrades drive themselves, in opposition to it, towards the position of the Socialist Party of Great Britain that all that can be done is to make propaganda for socialism until there is a clear majority for immediate general collectivisation.’I think this danger has, in fact, materialised – but with understating the radicalism of the Draft programme appearing within the arguments of TAS comrades themselves.
I should make the point that SPGB comrades have pointed out that (whatever their past views) their current position is to support trade union struggles, and so on – but not to have specific minimum demands in a party programme or election manifesto. Comrade Wrack says:
‘My argument is that the working class should not seek to come to power prematurely, before it can implement its programme. By that, I mean its maximum programme.
It is not enough for it to come to power and implement only a minimum programme that is compatible with capitalism, and then leave capitalism more or less intact.’On the one hand, this is close to the SPGB comrades’ view. There should be no shame in that; and, conversely, saying that the comrades’ position is close to the SPGB’s is not a misrepresentation or smear. It is perfectly possible that the SPGB comrades are right and the various tendencies that came out of the Second International left and Comintern are all wrong. I have given reasons last month for thinking that the SPGB comrades are wrong, in the form of the point that the working class needs to take power because declining capitalism threatens human extinction or generalised warlordism, in spite of possible ‘prematurity’ from the point of view of the rise of the working class.”
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1547/cold-war-economism/
The last point seems to be saying that, even though conditions aren’t ripe for establishing socialism (because most workers don’t want socialism) a socialist minority needs to seize power to prevent capitalism destroying civilisation.
We used to hear a similar argument from the original CND in its day that “we can’t wait for a majority to want socialism; we need to Ban the Bomb now before it destroys us all”. This of course begged the question by assuming that the Bomb could be banned while capitalism still existed. Mcnair is making a similar assumption.
Andrew Northall continues his attempt in the letters column of the Weekly Worker to demonstrate that the world is not yet ripe for socialism but must first pass through a long period of state capitalism that as a Leninist (Stalinist variety) he miscalls “socialism”. (A view, incidentally, exposed in a further letter from someone in some Turkish group as a distortion of what Marx envisaged )
Anyway here it is:
Two letters from Party members are published in this week’s Weekly Worker answering the claim of a member of the so-called Communist Party of Britain (the Morning Star lot) that the world isn’t ripe for socialism as enough capacity to produce food to feed the world’s population properly doesn’t currently exist and won’t for decades (as well as his defence of Lenin’s false distinction between socialism and communism where “socialism” is his name for state capitalism).
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