Desperately seeking readers The troubles afflicting the ruling Communict Parties in Eastern Europe have found a faint echo in Britain. While Marxism Today has embraced marketisation and pulled the Communist Party of Great Britain with it, the sickly Morning Star looks closer to death than ever.
The Morning Star has announced plans to sack 25 workers and reduce the number of pages by one third in an attempt to survive. The irony is that it is a 50% cut in the paper's "sales' in the USSR which has dealt the latest blow when, in the divisions in the party, a key issue was its commitment to supporting the "socialist countries' uncritically.
It was in the Popular Front period (after 1935) and during the second world war -periods of extremes of class collaborationist policy in which the CP advocated alliances with the "progressive", "anti-fascist bourgeoisie, and then lent their support to Churchill's National Govemment in its war drive after 1941 - that the CP and its daily paper, established in 1930, saw their greatest growth. Since 1945 both have been locked into a long decline, membership of the party falling to less than a seventh of its peak level. LESTER LIGHT THE STARVED
The paper had less than a fifth of its peak sales even before the cut in the Moscow order.
There was only the occasional hiccup in the downward trend, and the apparently triumphant adoption of the latest British Road To Socialism was associated with a deepening of the crisis. The BRS mixed rhetoric about class struggle and socialism with a stress on democracy, reliance on parliament and the election of a left Labour government.
Both sides in the subsequent dispute have claimed to be the inheritors of the tradition of this programme. In reality the BRS passed in 1977 was a compromise, and was eventually supported by "democrats" like Marxism Today editor Martin Jacques and party bureaucrats like Mick Costello so as not allow the party to fall into each other's hands. Only a small minority remained in outright opposition.
It was significant that the CP Executive Committee was defeated at Congress for the first time ever in the same year, and the issue was the Morning Star. It was attacked for insufficient sharpness politically in its coverage of events in the labour movement, It was also insufficiently critical in its approach to the "socialist countries" and, increasingly importantly, failed to give sufficient attention to
LUW MIL LANCASARE YOUTH KPOOL ESTAN CONLE SE CONTINCENT & STARVATION?
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women and 'new social forces" were important to the who party's strategy. To cap this, it was badly presented. Tony Chater, the paper's editor, remained unresponsive to criticism, but, after the BC had been defeated twice at successive party congresses over the paper, other elements of the leadership including Gordon McLennan were persuaded that it must change. In fact it was the Morning Star which provoked the public dispute between the CP's warring factions, by promoting an attack on Marxism Today for publishing an article that was mildly critical of "traditional' trade unionism. Later the Morning Starchal- lenged the right of the CP to put forward a different policy for the Management Committee of the People's Press Printing Society, the nominally independent body which owned the paper. The paper has claimed to promote "class politics" as against those presented by Mar- xism Today. Yet its columns at the time the conflict broke out showed that this was not reflected every day in its news or even in fea- tures. It attacked the British ruling class far more often as bad stewards of the economy than as defenders of their own class interests. Thus Bert Ramelson, a defender of the paper, condemned the Tory economic strategy as: bound to pull us further in the "... economic mire, to keep us at the bottom of the 3rd division of industrial countries" import It also supported campaigns for were simply controls even when they nationalist or led by Tories. Official organisations of the labour move- ment, the Labour Party and the trades unions, and, above all, their leaders, have been the paper's central preoccupation. Labour MPs and union general secretaries could frequently be found writing in its pages and their public comments were a major part of its news coverage. Even Sid Weighell, then right wing rail union leader was allowed the use of its columns in the year in which his members got rid of him. Typical was the concem with the split in the Tribune group of MPs which led to the formation of the Campaign group. The Morn- ing Star echoed the line of those who wished that the split could be undone, and therefore, implicitly, that the differences of the Labour left were less. This was part of a wider interest in labour movement 'unity' on some un- specified basis. The implication was that the party and the TUC, with their existing leaderships, could be won to a new programme. 'Labour" must build the mass movement for radically dif- Page 30
FEATURES ferent policies':
Such an objective calls for clear policies free of all traces of class collaboration. It means mounting a major challenge over a wide front to big business. It means fighting to shift the balance of wealth and power in favour of the working-class.
The Morning Star's approach was close to Militant's in its abstraction from the actual conflicts of the moment, but lacked the ambition to put forward a specific programme.
A further key element in the paper's politics has been its commitment to the idea that conflicts can be resolved by negotiation, and many of its attacks on employers and govemments were for unwillingness to negotiate honestly. This attitude covered eveything from trade union struggles to, for example, coverage of the Falklands / Malvinas war, in which the United Nations was to play honest broker. A series was carried by Dave
Priscott suggesting that if Poland had a proper parliamentary forum and the leaders of Solidamose had learnt negotiating skills like those in the British unions, the unpleasantness of martial law could have been avoided.
Finally it is clear that the Morning Star and the leading figures associated with it have not been honest. Not only did it seck to avoid the real conflicts over strategy and tactics in the working class movement but bureaucratic methods were used to keep control of the paper. The arguments used to prevent the CPGB taking back control through the PPPS in the first part of the 1980s were stood upon their head in 1988, when Tony Chater delivered it into the hands of the newly formed Communist Party of Britain and tried to suppress the dissenting views of the outgoing Management Committee.
The rescue plans of the carly 1980s depended upon sales and print contracts in the union movement. That the paper still has friends was shown by the statement issued at the time of the last Socialist Conference by Campaign Group MPs, including Tony Benn, urging sales and support for the paper.
Yet with the recent collapse of the oldguard Stalinist regimes and the traditional "tankie' politics on which the Star has always been based, it is difficult to see any labour movement or Stalinist cavalry with the energy, resources or political confidence to ride to the rescue: much of the apparatus and the (largely opportunist) goodwill it once had have been lost. What remains is a group of desperate bureaucrats and a desperately boring reformist newspaper with a miserable political past and no political future.
Paul Hubert
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 22, March 1990
Gorbachev's USSR: is
Edited by Carf Finamore, Walnut Publishing 1989. Available from Socialist Outlook, £6.75 inc p&p. This unique collection, published by the US marxist organisation Socialist Action, provides an interesting insight into the history of, and prospects for, political revolution in the Soviet Union.
The book is divided into four sections: an analysis of Gorbachev's reforms, authored by Socialist Action itself, two sections on the relevance of Trotsky's ideas and the recent retum of Trotskyists to the USSR, including sections by Es teban Volkov, Trotsky's grandson, and Pierre Brou, Trotsky's biographer; and a concluding section on the sigSOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 22, March 1990
REVIEWS stalinism dead? nificance and rise of nationalism in the the soviet republics.
The political mainstay of this collection appears in the form of a resolution "The Crisis of