There were numerous sessions at the school, perhaps too many for the short period of time (in this I agree with CPGB criticisms that the sessions were too short for the debates to reach their natural conclusions). These ranged from sessions of enjoyable anecdotes from ‘68, to an interesting discussion on feminism and whether you can be both feminist and socialist, to an extremely important debate on the nature of the BNP and what our approaches to confronting the threat of fascism should be, particularly around no platform. This debate raised some interesting points and areas of disagreement which I hope will be revisited and debated more thoroughly at the Communist University in a fortnight.
Throughout these sessions openness and honesty dominated, but what most confirmed my assessment of PR was not just how the school was run- sessions were very open and every opportuni
ty was made by the chairs for free and fair debate- but the final plenary by Mark Hoskisson- ‘Can the left put revolution on the agenda again’. In his speech Mark detailed how the left was in the state it is in at the moment- fragmented, broken and quite frankly, useless. For me, his most hard hitting point was that the left should feel it has failed in its tasks not just because of the last ten years of cock-ups, but because we are now onto the 160th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto. 160th. That’s something to give food for thought. The ‘spectre of communism’ has been looming over Europe for 160 years and only once was there a “revolutionary victory”. In a 160 years. And look how that ‘victory’ ended up anyway.This led onto one of Mark’s most constructive points- we need to “rescue the real tradition of Bolshevism”. We need to look at how the Bolsheviks managed to come to power, but why and how the revolution and the Bolshevik party were destroyed in the ways they were. This is something almost unheard of in my experience of the left. Many groups will spout on about the Bolsheviks and how great they are- Judith Orr at Marxism this year even went so far to say that the SWP was the Bolshevik party. But they don’t attempt to evaluate the Bolsheviks to any real extent; all that is given is that Stalin ruined it all. However, as Mark said at the school, Lenin already sensed what was happening to the Party in the change from ‘cadre to commissar’, and that we need to carry on his work. No easy task, but a necessary one.
His other important point was his call for eventually, a new organisation. But again, the type of organisation he called for is almost unheard of- “an organisation of revolutionaries which is open, transparent and totally honest about its objectives for the revolutionary destruction of society”. First it has to be a revolutionary organisation, not the half-way houses that have plagued the left for the past ten years, that time and again have inevitably failed but have managed to produce yet another living corpse time and again. But also that this organisation has to be ‘open’ and ‘transparent’. This, of course, is a necessity for any organisation to be truly revolutionary in deed and not just in name. A ‘revolutionary’ organisation that is not these things is just a sect, no matter how big it is or what grandiose ideas it has.
The exact nature of how this organisation is to be built, is quite rightly, left open. For here we also have to have a re-evaluation, on the “the problems of party building” and, even more importantly, “the relationship of the party to the class”. How the party will operate precisely is also left open, due to the need to re-assess the ‘democratic centralism’ that was forced onto the Comintern and now pervades the left. This is a concept that particularly has to be given a new approach, a new breath of life. Many organisations claim to be democratic centralist, but still more-often-than-not, have policy and decisions forced on them by the leadership with minimal debate, followed by the requirement to gag yourself in public and sometimes even in private. This is not healthy and will not lead in any way to an organisation that is fit to lead our class or will ever have a hope of becoming a truly mass revolutionary party worthy of its name. This leads Mark into one of his more subtle points that the party needs to ‘lead’ not ‘control’ the class struggle. Again, a mark of a healthy organisation and one that is honest about its aims.
Mark’s conclusion is that PR is dedicated to these aims, and is willing to work with other people intent on these aims, whether they join or not. This again, is a refreshing sentiment and one that inclines me to work ever closer with PR at the present moment. For the revolutionary left really does need, above all else, to conduct a totally thorough analysis of its tradition and history, and have a fundamental evaluation of the many questions this throws up- on the nature of the party, on programme, on democratic centralism, on Bolshevism and the many theories this threw up, including Trotskyism. Only through this evaluation will the revolutionary left have any hope of progressing and finally achieving the aims laid down by Marx and Engels over 160 years ago.
