Re: marxism-digest V1 #3514

[Greg Schofield <gschofield@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I would add to this a little:

At 10:29  18/05/01 -0700, you wrote:
>Yes, members, sections of the rank and file, the base of these parties
>continued to wage heroic struggles, in spite of their leadership. The same
>happened in the Spanish Civil War. But, the policies of the CPs and their
>leaderships was quite clear.

Policy is only the most superficial aspect of politics, knowing what is
actually taking place means looking at the whole picture, it is a route
which denies easy answers and flies in the face of simple solutions. In
this the activity of the class is all important, the tendency to reduce
everything down to policy formulations is not a useful method.

Mike I am not saying this accusatively, but the communist movement must
move beyond fixations with formulations and aim more squarely at clarity
and this often means that even an obviously bad policy must be placed in
its context and the real issues spoken about clearly.

I was in a party for twenty years that had a superb rank and file and a
rotten leadership, fighting over policy formulations was their tactic (the
leadership), because they had no interest in moving real things forward
which gave them enormous range of policies they could promote and drop in
an instance. We the rank and file were out-manoeuvred in this every time
because we took policy formulations seriously and on face value, our
enemies did not.

The strategy which never occurred to me until it was too late, was to throw
out formulations altogether, simplify policy statements to their bare bones
and debate on the actual issue. In reality we spent all our time debating
the theoretical dressing and neglected the practical meat, which was the
whole point of the leadership's tactic.

Today I asses policy statements on a fairly concrete basis, I strip away
the verbiage, then the theoretical statements and look for the relationship
between the "problem", the balance of forces and the likelihood of
solution, given this context. I have found that most policies have this in
common - they say nothing at all.

When communists take up policy debates (external or internal) it is rare to
find anything other than a nothing opposed to a nothing, far more is
foisted on the debate than is actually there in reality - it is the worst
and most wasteful form ideological malaise.

What can be said of contemporary debates seems to hold on historical
debates, the better historians know how to use policies to throw light on
situations, that is not as determining factors but reflections of the state
of play. The policies of the PCF is just one factor and one that can never
be taken on face value. I do not know enough about the conditions to pass
any sort of judgment, but we must grow out of this policy fixation - it is
not a suitable historical tool and is a deadly menace to actual political
struggle.

Greg Schofield
Perth Australia