Clifi Slaughter The future of British Stalinism

OHN GOLLA Jeneral OHN GOLLAN, I Secretary of the Secretary of Communist Party Great munist Party of Britain, addressed • Party Britain. addressed a Building Conference in London on June 17 and extracts from his speech were published in the Daily Worker on June 18. His speech is a pathetic expression of the inability of the old-line leadership of the Communist Party to provide the policy and organization needed by the working class of Britain.

Instead of a programme of demands that will take the working class along the road to power, as the only road to socialism, Gollan presents purely reformist policy.

Gollan: pathetic ... inability Instead of action of the preparation to He says: 'In the long run, our political influence in the country is measured by our vote in local and parliamentary elections.' As for the Labour move ment itself, Gollan says that, 'the still greater change needed in the balance of forces in the trade union movement must express itself in changes in composition of the General Council, the Labour Party executive and the Parliamentary Labour Party in the defeat of the Right and the triumph of the Left-progressive forces.' the independent working , class in smash the power of the capit campaigneto Instead of of action in throw up struggle and a policy of into leading bureaucracy alists-—a win seats. a class programme industry which will new organs of a new leadership— pushing individuals positions inside the of the TUC and the Labour Party.

The Daily Worker, only four days later, had to announce the expulsion of three prominent members of the ETU by the London District Committee of the Communist Party. Is this 'party building'? • Have no lessons been learned from the ETU experience about the policy of capturing positions?

Is it not clear from this that the bureaucracy in the Labour movement is a tool of capitalism that must be fought as such?

The industrial struggle receives hardly any attention in Gollan's report. The factory branches are only discussed bureaucratically, from the point of view of Daily Worker sales and numbers of recruits, whereas they should be seen in a context of vital and urgent preparations for the tasks ahead.

In all industries, the workers urgently need a revolutionary Marxist leadership, conscious of the attacks being mounted by the monopolists and by the capitalist state. Just at this stage, the emphasis of the ' Communist Party is on elections, a new weekly i lagazine, and collaboration with so-called 'progressives' A Marxist leadership must find ways of swinging the lower middle classes behind the industrial workers, but they can only do this on the basis of a firm and fighting working-class programme. It is not true that the middle class can only be won by watering • down socialist policies.

It is precisely the sham of fake democracy and hypocrisy which turns the middle class to look for desperate and even fascist measures, if the working class cannot give a clear lead against the monopolists and bankers.

Gollan seems to assume that simply recruiting more : 'arty members will ersure against these trends and will strengthen the Left in the Labour Party. But how does he explain the position in France, where despite the existence of a mass Communist Party, the middle class have turned in large numbers to ultra-Right and fascist groupings?

Many militant workers in this country, in and out of the Communist Party, ask themselves: • How is it that enormous parties like the CP in Italy and France have been unable to lead the workers to power? ' Gollan will build nothing, for he cannot answer this question.

It is all very well to talk about a bigger Communist Party, strengthening the fight of the Left inside the Labour Party. But how can Gollan explain the Daily Worker's failure to campaign on the proscription of the Labour youth paper Keep Left and the threatened expulsion of national committee members of the Young Socialists? Is this building up the Left? Or is it not a combination of opportunist cowardice in order to preserve all sorts of pacifist and gentlemanly friends at the top, together with a sectarian fear that Gaitskell might be right, that the Young Socialists are very dangerous 'left-wingers' or even Trotskyists?

Gollan's report on Party building is made at a time when we really do need to build a true Marxist Party in Britain. This is being done