Revolutionary Choices

Weekly Worker is the choleric organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee) (CPGB (PCC)), not to be confused with the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), whose organ is the Communist Review, which is not to be muddled with the New Communist Party of Britain (NCPB), whose organ is The New Worker, nor with the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (CPB(M-L)), whose organ is Workers, which on no account should be mixed up with the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (RCPB (M-L)), whose organ is Workers’ Weekly. None of these, moreover, should be confused with the old Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), whose quarrelsome existence from 1920 and whose disputatious demise in 1991 has given us in no small part this wonderful array of communist parties.
.....As I say, Weekly Worker is the organ of the CPGB (PCC), and it shows all the sore sedition of its socialist forebears, and no fewer of their fantasies. Therein, for instance, a chap by the name of Peter Manson writes with all the bolshiness that a brat can bring to bear. Perhaps if daddy had bought him that pony for his thirteenth birthday, he would have turned out to be an altogether different man. Perhaps then little Peter wouldn’t have determined to continue his tantrum all the way into his adult life. What is certain, however, is that the now adult Mr Manson is angry at the West, and wishes us to glimpse a better world of solidarity, slaughter and socialist revolution:

Just as the ruling class knows who its main enemy is, so too do we. That is why we are for the defeat of the US-UK occupation [in Iraq] and, what is more, uphold the right of the peoples of Iraq to expel the invaders. However, we are not indifferent to the political programme of the Iraqi resistance. In fact there is not a single resistance: there are many resistances, including those who at present are not using the methods of armed struggle.

.....True, if we had to choose, we would prefer the victory even of the islamists or Ba’athists to that of the imperialists. But we do not have to choose between these two forces. We favour the imperialists being driven out at the hands of a working class-led movement, and, crucially, using the crisis caused by the occupation of Iraq to bring about regime change in both the US and UK.

Peter Manson, “Defend the ‘Traitor’ George Galloway”, in Weekly Worker, 589, Thursday, 11th August 2005.

As we have seen, however, we in the United Kingdom are rather spoilt for choice in our revolutionary vanguards. Doubtlessly Mr Manson believes that his particular brand of sedition should take the lead in regime change. Before I can make my choice, however, I would need to know where all the modern communist parties stood on the question of pipe-smoking: the briar or the meerschaum, the long-stemmed or the short-, whether it is a bourgeois reaction or a proletarian affirmation. It would be a terrible shame, however, if bitter deliberation and schism thereover were to result in the delaying of the revolution for another hundred years or so.