After the 1982 war in the South Atlantic, the Falklands Factor buoyed up an unpopular government, and on 9th May 1983, Margaret Thatcher called an election. Up until that time, I thought the UK had fixed parliamentary terms and I was utterly disgusted that this was possible and that the Conservatives would take advantage of it. That afternoon, I was walking up Rose Lane in Canterbury when a couple selling newspapers approached me and asked if I wanted to buy a copy of their paper, ‘The Worker’. Since they were a Communist Party, my reply, which rather startled them, was “definitely”. They were the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). They believed the only truly Communist state was Albania, which is a clue to their perspective. It’s possible they were Maoist, but they didn’t state this and I don’t recall anything to that effect in their publication. I do remember thinking it was odd that the woman was wearing lipstick, because this seemed like quite a concession to bourgeois feminine ideals. At that time, I strongly disapproved of makeup as a form of sexual objectification and an attempt to differentiate gender. I’ve changed a lot since then of course. I didn’t ever follow it up beyond that and came to regard parties like theirs as a complete pain and counter-productive.
The far left is notorious for being splintered, and as such it strongly resembles the Church. I can’t help thinking that similar processes are involved, but in the case of Communist parties this doesn’t work as well. A small denomination can believe they are the elect and that God will save them even if “he” doesn’t save anyone else, but a Communist party can only succeed if it finds a way of pulling the rest of society with it or simply believes that the inevitable processes of history will lead to the establishment of Communism without their intervention. There are of course extra-democratic actions which can be undertaken such as violence against the State or other forms of organised crime, but none of them are likely to succeed, and I presume party activists are aware of this. In a way, it isn’t even politics because on the whole politics involves allegiances and compromises to a common aim, and they tend not to do this very much. At the same time, their positions are often not what you’d expect from a party on the Left, and this is what makes them interesting.
Before I go on, I want to stress that I’m not endorsing or condemning these positions so much as attempting to describe them as the parties concerned see or have seen them.
I’ll start with the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) itself. This is a pro-Brexit anti-immigrant party. Many parties on the left are pro-Brexit. The CPB-ML were aligned with Nigel Farage’s Grassroots Out campaign. After Article 50 was revoked, they issued a statement calling those who opposed Brexit “the enemies of the people”. Here’s their statement in full:
Today the government gave formal notice that Britain will depart from the EU once and for all time. On 23 June 2016 we declared our intention to Leave. Now Article 50 has been invoked and the clock is ticking.
We are throwing off the shackles of the misnamed European Union, which seeks only to dictate and deny sovereignty. By March 2019 we must be out.
This day is truly one to celebrate.
In 1975 the British people did not believe we could run our own affairs. The referendum vote then was by more than 2 to 1 to throw in our lot with the European Economic Community, to ask it to please manage Britain for us (actually, for its own interests). Last June this woeful decision was finally reversed.
The people have shown we want a sovereign Britain. We have declared confidence in ourselves to determine the country’s future without any instruction from Brussels or Berlin.
We know that we can and must control our economy, our laws, our borders, and we expect the government to act accordingly. There can be no backsliding, no fudges. Only full independence will do. Push aside any who still wish to block it.
The blockers are fewer and fewer but they are dangerous enemies of the people and the country. They want to hand us back to foreign control. All who desire a successful Britain must unite to see this through, engage in the discussion and planning for the future, and act to carry it out.
The CPB-ML were unusual in allying themselves with Farage’s group. They also oppose immigration. They see the recent immigration from Eastern Europe to the UK as part of a deliberate plan by the Government to undermine the wages and conditions of British workers, and as placing a strain on the infrastructure. In this respect they’re as far as I know unique, unless one sees the BNP as a left-wing party as some do.
Another group, with as usual an annoyingly similar name, is the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). I’m going to abbreviate this to CPGB-ML. As far as I can tell, the reason they call themselves this is that they are in favour of Irish nationalism but oppose Scottish independence, so they believe in a unitary communist state covering the island of Great Britain but not Ireland. This is because they see the states of Scotland and England as set up by the ruling classes and united by them, but also see independence as a distraction from class struggle. Unlike the CPB-ML, they see immigration controls as an attempt to divide and rule the working class, but they are equally in favour of Brexit and support the Mouvement des gilets jaunes. They also support North Korea and are Stalinist. Their main emphasis is against imperialism, and they oppose the movement for queer liberation, and will expel anyone from their party who is in favour of LGBT+ liberation because they see that as something which will happen automatically after the revolution. I’ll come back to this because it’s particularly interesting, although it means I’ll have to break with my demarcation principle. They also saw the 2011 riots as positive but in need of leadership and direction. Unsurprisingly, they also want the state of Israel to be dissolved, and they oppose Western support for the Uyghur minority in China.
Back to their position on what I’m reluctantly going to have to call LGBTQIA+ issues. This is what attracted my attention to them recently. They state that they oppose racism and “discrimination on the grounds of sexual proclivity” but condemn identity politics and what they call “LGBT ideology” as a “reactionary nightmare” imposed by the bourgeoisie. This is rhetoric shared by the Right and Left, which on the Right has links to religious fundamentalism. They have been accused on being transphobic and justify it on remarkable grounds. Their claim is that the idea of trans identity is based on idealism rather than materialism, i.e. that it’s to do with the idea of the mind being separate from the body and as therefore having religious overtones, and since religion is to be superceded in a communist society, trans identity will also disappear. What I find remarkable about this is it’s similarity to Abrahamic accusations of so-called “transgenderism” as Gnostic, i.e. as seeing matter as evil and the spirit as good. Gnosticism too has stronger idealist tendencies than Judaism and orthodox Christianity. I should just briefly explain that idealism in this sense is a metaphysical position holding that the world is either a construction of the mind or actually is mind, the latter position being closer to my own panpsychism. Marx saw materialism as the mature approach to metaphysics, not encumbered by the psychological need and the political pressure to accept the notion of the supernatural. It should go without saying that gender identity issues have nothing to do with idealism and are frequently experienced by thoroughgoing materialists. The CPGM-ML also sees identity politics as focussing excessively on individual identity, and of course as a divisive distraction from class struggle.
Moving to the somewhat related issues of sexual orientation, Communist parties also have a history of homophobia. There’s an incident which I unfortunately can’t pin down more precisely of the predecessors of the SWP, Socialist International, engaging in beating up homosexuals. Maoist parties are as far as I know still homophobic, and of course allegiance with the Soviet Union would imply support for its homophobic legislation. The SWP were also opposed to unilateral nuclear disarmament even though they previously worked with CND. This is because they believed that it would make this country more powerful in its anti-imperialism. There’s also a strong tendency for those factions on the Left which emphasise their anti-imperialism to oppose CND because they see it as imperialist. They basically seem to want to see poorer countries with nuclear weapons.
I’m going to restrain myself from stating my own position on any of this, but I do want to point out the following list of positions which could feasibly be, and for all I know is, held by a genuinely communist party:
- Opposition to Scottish independence
- Opposition to immigration
- Pro-Brexit
- Opposition to promoting identity politics such as BLM and LGBT campaigning
- Support for British nuclear weapons
- Opposition to the existence of the state of Israel
A couple of thoughts about this. One is that I wonder how these positions are arrived at. Is there some kind of broad genuinely working-class based consensus decision-making process involved here? I honestly don’t know. I do feel there’s a tendency for them to see a need for consciousness-raising among the general population, but in a way which will lead to them agreeing with the perspective espoused by the party itself. Another is that they are decidedly not liberal, which is to be expected, but which is usually completely ignored by the Right. Finally there’s the stereotype that moving far enough to the Left leaves you on the Right.
I don’t agree with these positions of course, but it still interests me how much support would be available from the poorest people in this country for this kind of communist party if they knew about these positions. Maybe they do already but don’t trust them anyway, probably rightly. But this is like UKIP without the right wing flavour.
I don’t know what to think about this, except that it’s interesting and I wonder how widely-known it is.
A Box Of Chocolates 