Reclaiming Revolutionary Marxism from Eurocommunism: A Polemic Against Monty Johnstone

Peter Gowan responds to the Communist Party of Great Britain

In September 1977, comrades from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) debated the International Marxist Group (IMG), the British section of the Fourth International (FI), at the Marxist Symposium in London. Monty Johnstone, an advocate of the Eurocommunist trend rising in the Stalinist parties in the late 1970s, which would bring Johnstone onto the executive of the CPGB in the following years, opened the debate opposite FI leader Ernest Mandel.

Peter Gowan, a member of the editorial committee of New Left Review and one of the founders of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, contributed to the debate for the Fourth International. His comments start with a reply to a disingenuous contribution by Bea Campbell. Campbell tried to fit the Trotskyists into a legacy of "male heroism" and elitist Bolshevization, and the CPGB into the opposite. She's engaging with a straw doll resembling Stalinist ideas about the party, unlike Mandel's. Peter Gowan responds perfectly, and then moves on to address Johnstone’s comments.

A longtime supporter of the FI, and a key figure in the Fourth International’s work in Eastern Europe, Peter died in 2009. Obituaries and a selection of his writings can be found here: Marxist Internet Archive.

The Misrepresentation of Women's Liberation and the Legacy of Stalinism

The last contribution was interesting, and quite honestly, it was not a serious contribution to a party polemic against Trotskyism. For example, the comrade said that the IMG's position is that the oppression of women arises only with capitalism. Every single person in this room knows that that is not the IMG's position, not the Fourth International's position, and is not the position of anybody on the Marxist left, as far as I am aware, unless they are completely ignorant and stupid. I will just modify that statement one little bit, and that is to say this: the comrade knows, or ought to know, that along with the women comrades in the Communist Party, she will need the support of the women comrades in the IMG and the other socialist women comrades in the women's liberation movement against a very large part of our own party. For example, she will need the support of a very prominent member of the British Communist Party, like, for example, Fergus Nicholson, who writes, who writes that we have to ditch all this trendy, petty bourgeois radical cause like women's lib. And the comrade also knows that Fergus is not speaking for himself. He's speaking for massive communist parties in a massive area of Europe, because the fact of the matter is, the fact of the matter is that Stalinism has done [the] women in Eastern Europe no good whatsoever.

The Parliamentary Road: A False Path to Socialism

Comrade Johnson ended his speech by appealing to us to at least agree with the class consciousness of Carter and Kissinger. It was a strong point, but it does not get us all that far. I could quote to him the class consciousness and intelligence of The Times, because what did The Times say about the Italian Communist Party? I'll quote you what it said in an editorial. [It] said this: "In Italy, for instance, one can imagine a Christian Democratic-Communist coalition proving no less corrupt and impotent than the various other coalitions that have already been tried." That was The Times' view. It said, "Let's not have this coalition. Let's just have the Italian Communist Party in [power] and perhaps that will help to get rid of the corruption in Christian Democracy having a spell in opposition." I'm not saying The Times is right on that. I'm just saying it doesn't get us all that far, to quote the class consciousness of these people.

Secondly, let's get down to the serious debate. The comrades say, and Monty says, they're against the parliamentary road to socialism. They have never come out for the parliamentary road to socialism. Monty is right. I don't think you'll find a single quotation that says the British Communist Party is for the parliamentary road to socialism. Comrades say we combine mass struggle outside parliament with a struggle inside parliament. That sounds reasonable enough. We are in favour, in principle, of getting our comrades into parliament and engaging the struggle there, and we're also in favour of mass struggle outside parliament.

So what is the debate about? The debate is essentially about where the dominant forces, the decisive forces are that are actually going to destroy the bourgeoisie, and what form of organization is necessary and what forms of struggle are necessary in order to weld those forces together into the strike force that's going to destroy capitalism. And here we find, consistently in the tactics and strategy, and increasingly with the Italian Communist Party, in the program of these parties, a consistent tendency to subordinate the mass struggle outside parliamentary representative assemblies to the engagement in tactical maneuvers with other parties inside these assemblies that, in fact, has now in Italy, been theorized by the leaders of the Italian Communist Party. For example, Ingrao's book [Masse e Potere], which Monty will know quite explicitly, says that there is something new now in the Italian Communist Party. He says, "Our attitude towards elected assemblies and Parliament above all, constitutes one of the genuine new features of the present strategy of the Communist Party." And he goes on to say what this new feature is: to define representative assemblies as such [an] essential factor, an essential factor, unlike, in fact, the other factors, such as mass struggle; they regard it as the essential factor.

The Imperative of Soviet Power and Transitional Demands

OK, let's have an elaboration of this. What will the Soviet leadership's attitude be to the growing crisis of capitalism in Western Europe? Will it objectively assist the workers' movement in Western Europe, or will it not? Let's have [an] analysis of that now. We have other arguments come up [that are] the direct reverse of this. They say, "Soviets, we're against those not because they're no longer necessary, because of the changed balance of forces in favor [of] the working class, but because they're not possible, because the bourgeoisie [is] too strong."

That is the argument put forward by Korea. That's the argument put forward by other communists. But we've never had a really systematic and clear explanation of why Soviet power, why the struggle for Soviet power, and everything that goes along with that, in all our actions, in all our interventions, including in Parliament, strengthening the independent mobilization of the working class in every struggle like the Grunwick struggle, not simply putting forward immediate demands, but putting forward demands of a transitional character, objectively necessary to carry the thing forward. That means, in Grunwicks, we have to put forward demands like nationalization of Grunwicks under workers' control, demands of this sort; these are the kind of things that [are] necessary. I say to the Communist Party members who are here, go back to Leninism, because Leninism is now current and topical and contemporary to the situation here.