Revisionism and the general election
The opportunism and dogmatism of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), and its predecessor organisation the Communist Party of Great Britain post 1951, is well known to all genuine Marxist-Leninists and anti-imperialists. The fateful decision taken in 1951 to advocate for supporting the Labour Party is one that has never been reversed and ultimately led to the destruction of the old CPGB in 1988, the new version that emerged since then has kept this fatal error in its updated version of the bible of British opportunism entitled The British Road to Socialism. As the working class has turned against the Labour Party in ever greater numbers over the years, the CPB remained absolutely committed to the line that the Labour Party must be supported in elections, even if they sometimes caveat this by running a handful of their own candidates or backing another opportunist party such as the Greens. At this election it is going to be extremely difficult to sell the idea of voting for a party whose entire leadership (not just Starmer) have supported the genocidal actions of the Israeli regime. Apparently realising this, the CPB leadership have deployed Andrew Murray to come up with a more ‘sophisticated’ argument for voting Labour. We should thank Comrade Murray for providing us with this because in doing so he has, perhaps unwittingly, revealed the utter bankruptcy not only of the CPB’s arguments but also of the Socialist Campaign Group (SCG) MPs he is calling for British workers to give their votes to.
Murray states that the movement in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle is “the most important factor in progressive British politics today.” On this point we agree with him but with an important addition, this movement has been powered by the most radical sections of the working class and the student groups. It is not a movement which has been pushed forward by the (so called) leaders of the Stop The War Coalition who have done their best, as usual, to monopolise the protests, driving them into a dead end resulting in demobilisation and demoralisation. Instead the movement has renewed itself through the actions of the student encampments. Murray is intelligent enough to know that he cannot advocate for a blanket endorsement of the Labour Party but is still advocating for the likes of Zarah Sultana, Richard Burgon and other members of the SCG. Murray claims that not voting for these characters is ‘ultra left’, but he actually confesses immediately as to why this is not the case when he states.
“The logic here is that any Labour MP will form part of a majority sustaining a Keir Starmer government which itself will offer no relief to the Palestinian people and will be headed by an outspoken supporter of Israel’s actions”.
Murray claims that this needs to be done in order elect “as many strong voices of opposition to imperialism, war and genocide”. But do these MP’s actually pass Murray’s own test? Each of them has spoken in favour of a ceasefire but has also been careful to denounce operation Al Aqsa flood, they have spoken in favour of a Palestinian state being established but this is hardly a radical anti-imperialist stance as Starmer himself is also in favour of this, as is Rishi Sunk, as is Joe Biden. What Andrew Murray is actually advocating for is support not for candidates who will actually challenge British imperialism but for what can best be called ‘gatekeepers’. The SCG are always (as was the case with Corbyn) the first to be put on platforms by the STWC and PSC; they are the ones whose political line is put forward as the ‘official’ position of the movement, and anyone who steps outside of that, as the Manchester committee of the PSC did, is promptly denounced and forced out. When these leftist gatekeepers are seen to have gone too far they are promptly given a rap on the knuckles by the bourgeois press, and a demand that they repent is issued. Richard Burgon dutifully performed the required genuflection in 2019 when he was found to have made accurate comments back in 2014 about Zionism being a barrier to peace in the Middle East. The customary demand for an apology was issued and Burgon dutifully grovelled. This isn’t just a matter of one man’s political weakness, but is symptomatic of the entire purpose of the Labour left. They are a left for the bourgeoisie and they are there to police the proletariat. This is why their position on Gaza consists purely of hand wringing and ineffectual pacifism, because this is the furthest left position allowed within bourgeois circles. The movement, that Murray acknowledges is vitally important, has already long surpassed the bourgeois politics of the Labour left and yet it is the position of the CPB to prop up the latter as ‘leaders’.
Murray also states that it is “not possible in this election to vote in an anti-imperialist government. That option does not exist – and pretending otherwise is fanciful”. Of course here Murray again gives away far more than he intended. It has never been possible to elect an anti-imperialist government in Britain: even as early as the first Labour government it was openly stated by Ramsay Macdonald and other Labour Party leaders that their ambition was to be seen as good administrators of the British empire. This has been true of every Labour government since then, and yet it has been the choice of the CPB and its predecessor party to recommend voting for the Labour Party at every election since 1951. Whilst we cannot elect an anti-imperialist government, we can at least do our best to weaken the party that has clearly been chosen by the ruling class to take over from the discredited Tories. This has traditionally been the role of the Labour Party, to take over when the Tories become too despised to be able credibly to carry out the business of the ruling class. This is when the ruling class turns to the Labour Party, as it is doing now, and it does this also to use the Labour Party’s link to the trade unions to divide the working class and squash any potential militant struggles. This is a fact that Murray himself openly concedes when he states that “1974 is a particularly clear example when Harold Wilson’s return to office was designed to and actually did divert and divide the mass working class action against Edward Heath’s Tories and, through the social contract and the incomes policies, demobilise the class struggle”. Murray goes on to add to the damning case he is making against himself and his party stating “The great strike wave of 2022 has generally abated and Labour ministers will probably move to extinguish it altogether through limited concessions”.
Murray continues to cling to the utterly discredited tactics of the British Road to Socialism, even as he has to concede that the assumptions underlying it have turned out to be false over and over again since 1951. With regard to imperialism though, we must also point out that Murray and the CPB’s view on this vital question is utterly inadequate and, in fact, has become opportunistic in the extreme. The revulsion felt by millions of workers towards the murderous criminality of the Zionist regime and its US sponsor has forced the leftist gatekeepers into at least verbal opposition to this. This is not the only war that British imperialism is intimately involved with though. The world is currently being fundamentally changed not only as a result of the heroic resistance of the Palestinian people but also by the Russian war against the NATO army in Ukraine. On the latter issue, where have Murray’s supposed champions of anti-imperialism been? Aside from one brief, feeble rebellion when some of them supported a letter calling for negotiations issued by the STWC, they have completely fallen in line behind Starmer’s rabid support for the actions of US imperialism in Ukraine and against Russia. This matches the politics of the CPB entirely who have issued disgraceful calls for the withdrawal of Russian forces from the Donbass which, as the Communist Party of the Russian Federation has noted, would only lead to genocide in those regions which rose up against the fascist coup in 2014.
Andrew Murray and the CPB are damned by their own admissions and their own actions. Murray fully admits that Starmer would be as supportive of the genocidal war waged by the Zionist regime as Sunak is and he further admits that Labour governments have been used to divide and destroy working class resistance domestically. What he is calling for is not the preservation of genuinely anti-imperialist forces in parliament but the preservation of the left wing of bourgeois opinion, the preservation of the leftist gatekeepers. Murray makes these calls because the CPB itself is part of this machinery which is there to police the actions of the working class and to make sure genuine anti-imperialism and militant working class struggle does not emerge in this next period. All workers should reject the advice of Comrade Murray and act to break the hold that labourism has over working-class politics.