At a time when Britain is in the throes of its most severe economic and social crisis since the 1930s, the stagnation of ine communist farty stands in stark con trast to the expectations of its member ship. Nor can "more of the same again" recipes dished out by the leadership offer any way out of the impasse.
The fact that the hopes of creating an alliance with the left bureaucrats have Deen kickee in ine teen ov jack sone. - the chief architect of the £6 wage norm - was not an item for either discussion or analysis. Gordon McLennan, the CP General Secretary, reassuringly told Conress. at communists woula contue to argue with some of those who took lelt positons on oner issues but wne supported the £6 limit'. Star cast a cloud over last week's 34th Congress of the British Communist Party. The leadership's "brave' hope was to get back to the 1973 membership figures, thereby recovering the 1,242 who have left the party in the last two years. Although no circulation figures for the Morning Star have been issued, it is common knowledge that they are less than 45,000 - with about one third of these being sold in Eastern Europe and the USSR.
CP Secretary, Gordon McLennan action? This should spark off a real campaign, breathing new life into a movement that could spread right across the mausera scene.
Ine reason, or course, is unal sucn a campaign would bring the CP into conflict with many of the 'left' bureaucrats, disrupting the alliances it is so painstakingly trying to build. Thus the CP has deliberately retrained from using its streuetn in vanous centres io me encinering industry to start industrial action, in order to hold the Broad Left together in the AUEW. The day after the Congress, this subordination of the inde pendent struggles of the working class to electoral allances bore truit - the Broad Left got trounced by the right wing in the AUEW Executive elections!
Ensnared in parliamentary politics, the CP could offer nothing more "radical" on Ireland than a 'Bill of Rights' to be means that the capitalist state and its wrooos, wno unt now nave been ramp aging through the Catholic ghettoes in an orgy of death and destruction, will now suddenly prove amenable to demoratising' the Orange statelet. paign to get the troops out of reland -lett-wing Labour MPs - was carefully anored.
The cama campaign taken up by some of the more 'Left' loser Bob Wright and the submission of a £15 across-the-board national claim protected by a sliding scale of wages.
Belated
In the fight for jobs a massive fight must be opened up amongst the rank-and-file against Wilson's Tory policies. But the Broad Left has retrated so far that the EC is Right winner Terry Duffy the present policies and excuses of the Broad Left. It is only by winning the active support of the mass of AUEW members for socialist measures adequate to meet the present crisis that the right wing can once