By Hand And By Brain

Quite a response to yesterday’s post on the airbrushing out of the Communist Party of Great Britain from the history of the twentieth century.

I am no Marxist, to say the very least. My political roots are proudly in the ultra-realistic and pragmatic municipal Labourism of County Durham, and through that in the trade union, co-operative, Radical Liberal, Tory populist, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and other non-Marxist roots of the Movement that gave this country social democracy both as a good in itself and as the successful prevention of a Marxist revolution here in one of the two countries that Marx himself said were most likely to have one.

That is why I warmly welcome Labour’s return to its historical norm as the voice and vehicle of a many-rooted social democratic patriotism in all directions, inclusive of social and cultural conservatives as well as of social and cultural liberals, inclusive of rural as well as of urban and suburban voices, inclusive of provincial as well as of metropolitan contributions, and inclusive of religious as well as of secular insights. The 2010 intake is very largely “classic Labour”, the boys in their dads’ suits having decided to sit out the hard work of Opposition. As a result, Labour has long enjoyed a commanding lead both in the opinion polls and at the actual polls.

But these things cannot be taken for granted. Someone needs to keep Labour on that track or else stand ready to replace it, although for the time being it confined itself to contesting local elections, list elections, elections to any new or reformed second chamber, and elections to the House of Commons where the Labour Party or the SDLP was in third place or below. In that last case, at least, those candidates ought not to face Labour opponents, as the litmus test of the sincerity of Labour’s return to its historical norm. In all cases, those candidates would deserve trade union funding.

We are living in the economy, society, culture and polity advanced in and by Marxism Today until it had penetrated even the skull of Tony Blair. It is notable that New Labour’s inspiration from within the CPGB came from a former theoretical journal which had deliberately turned itself into a lifestyle magazine. But it is also notable that, whereas Marxism Today has not come out regularly since 1991, and not at all since a one-off in 1998, the Morning Star, which enjoyed Parliamentary Lobby access throughout the Cold War, still comes out six days every week, and Ed Miliband recently addressed a hundred thousand people over an advertisement for it, at an event at which it was distributed for free. That day’s edition contained articles by two MPs drawn from the 2010 intake, both of whom were PSSes, as well as one by a Residentiary Canon of Durham Cathedral.

Those who followed the CPGB down the road of Marxism Today and its campus faux-radicalism ended up as Democratic Left, the CPGB’s proto-Blairite legal successor to which the party’s last office was seamlessly transferred. Thence it passed to the Blairites of the New Politics Network, and now to the Blairite flame-keepers of Unlock Democracy, in an unbroken succession. Remember that, as Blair seeks to stage a comeback. Attempts by the gulag and Holodomor revisionists of the Scargillite SLP to take over the People’s Press Printing Society, the co-operative that owns and publishes the Morning Star, have been singularly unsuccessful. But you will never hear any of the numerous Old Tankies of New Labour (there are also numerous Old Trots, and they are just as unrepentant) utter one word of remorse. Their stock response is John Reid’s “I also used to believe in Santa Claus.”

But there remain those who are attached to the name and to some of the symbolism of the Communist Party, while sharing our total rejection of Maoism and Trotskyism, and who share our approach to the former Soviet Union and allied states which balances a recognition of economic development, of full employment, of universally free education and healthcare, of affordable housing for all, of cheap and extensive public transport, of scientific progress (although see here), of cultural facilities, and of the rights of women and national minorities, with the most profound regret at the entrenchment of the bureaucratic-command system, at the integration of the Communist Party and the trade unions into the apparatus of the State so that they were rendered incapable of critiquing it, and at the fact that large numbers of innocent people to be persecuted, imprisoned and executed.

Since as long ago as 1951, those comrades have rejected violent revolution in Britain, in favour of the parliamentary, municipal, industrial and wider communitarian processes. With them, we share the strongest possible identification with those who have resisted enclosure, clearances, exorbitant rents, absentee landlordism, and a whole host of other abuses of the rural population down to the present day, instead obtaining, and continuing to defend, rural amenities such as schools, medical facilities, Post Offices, and so on. Those who have opposed the destruction of the national rail and bus networks, and who continue to demand that those services be reinstated. Those who continue to fight for affordable housing in the countryside, and for planning laws and procedures that take proper account of rural needs. Those who insist that government requires the clear electoral mandate of rural as well as of urban and suburban areas, so that any electoral reform must to be sensitive to the need for effective rural representation, as must any new or reformed second chamber.

The rural heritage is vitally important, as is its insistent definition in terms stretching all the way back through the Levellers and the Peasants’ Revolt to the Anglo-Saxon period in this country, and all the way back to the Old Testament prophets more broadly. No Marxist historiography there. It is no wonder that this land of miners, farm labourers and railwaymen was pre-eminent in maintaining ties to the exiles, internal and external, who kept up the anti-Stalinist and anti-Trotskyist struggles of the SRs, the Mensheviks and the “Old Bolshevik” “Right Opposition”. All three were blamed on “peasant influences”. You better believe it. And that has not gone away. It must never go away.

We must seek co-operation with those comrades, in order to secure an economy including a very substantial role both for workers’ co-operatives and for publicly owned enterprises run on behalf of the people, with the public ownership of key industries in order to boost the economy and raise the general standard of living, with massive investment by the State in key areas of the economy, and with a planned economy designed to increase the standard of living for working people, including the utilisation of this country’s vast reserves of coal. Co-operation in order to secure a substantial increase in public spending on education, healthcare, transport, housing, and recreational facilities, with the tax burden shifted onto the rich and onto large corporations, and with the reduction of direct taxes on working people’s incomes.

With them, we emphasise the importance of democracy and freedom in everyday life, with a particular emphasis on the freedom of the press and on freedom of speech, with full engagement in the battle of ideas at every level of cultural life and of the education system, with the refusal to consign or confine demotic culture to “the enormous condescension of posterity”, and with full participation in broad-based and inclusive campaigns for human rights and civil liberties, for peace (including nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological disarmament, and including against the arms trade), for environmental responsibility, and for the defence and extension of jobs, services and amenities. We are therefore most concerned to secure the continued publication of the Morning Star and of Tribune, to end the wider media’s discrimination against them, and to ensure our long and fruitful partnership with Independent Labour Publications.