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WHAT IS AN 'ANTI-MONOPOLY POSITION'?
It is important to bear in mind that Staniforth was able, when addressing Labour Monthly readers, to take certain things for granted and to write in a kind of short-hand or code. By moving the "large section of the people" that was made up of students "into an anti-Tory, anti-monopoly position" he did not mean that the CP was interested in developing the kind of common-or-garden anti-Tory sentiments that would bear fruit merely in an enlarged vote for the Labour Party. What he meant was that if students were moved into an anti-Tory position under the CP's leadership, it should be possible to move them ultimately into an anti-monopoly position.
By an "anti-monopoly position", Staniforth meant the CP's overall position on Britain and the British state. This would have been well understood by his readers but it may be entirely obscure to L&TUR readers twenty years later.
The doctrinal premise of the CP's action was the same in student union politics as in trade union politics. It was its characterisation of the economic structure of post-war Britain as 'state monopoly capitalism'. It was not socialism, of course, since the CP was not in power. But it was not state capitalism either, for a very convoluted set of reasons.
'State capitalism' was Lenin's way of characterising the state sector of the Soviet economy under the New Economic Policy after 1921, when the enterprises in this sector were subject to state ownership on the one hand but responsive to market forces – in place of the rigid state direction of the 'War Communism' period – on the other. It was not a concept that could be employed by the CPGB in the 1960s and 1970s, because the rise of the revisionist 'Market Socialist' school in the CPSU and within the CPGB had destroyed in the pro-Moscow Communist mind the distinction which Lenin had clearly made between state capitalism and socialism. And because the CPGB no longer knew the difference in Marxist theory between state capitalism and socialism, it was incapable of answering the argument of Tony Cliff and the International Socialism group that the Soviet economy n the Stalin period, when market forces had been superseded by command planning in the state sector, was 'state capitalist' rather than socialist.
Because it was incapable of answering this argument, the CP contented itself with heatedly denouncing it as rubbish. From the point of view of classical Marxism, Cliff's argument was rubbish, but the CP could never explain why it was rubbish. So it did everything it could to discredit the very term 'state capitalism', instead of showing how it was no longer applicable to the USSR. It could not show this, because it had been axiomatic for the CPGB since the 20th Congress in 1956 that Stalin was either a very great criminal or a very great madman and, because such a monster could not be credited with the construction of socialism, the fundamental change he made in the Soviet economy between 1928 and 1934 had to be forgotten about, and socialism had to be assumed to have been introduced in the Lenin era, and Lenin's own thoughts on the matter obscured.
By state capitalism Lenin had meant an intermediate stage between capitalism and socialism, and thus an advance on capitalism, a stage where socialists were in power and had already nationalised the large scale means of production but had not yet introduced planned economy – where, in short, they had begun but not completed the business of superseding capitalism with socialism. To employ Lenin's usage in respect of postwar Britain would have been to acknowledge that the Labour Party had, by establishing a large public sector and the welfare state, made a massive advance towards socialism. And this was something that the CPGB could not possibly afford to acknowledge, because it implied that its own existence and role were surplus to British (as opposed to Soviet) requirements.
On the other hand, the economic structure of postwar Britain was not simply monopoly capitalism. The economic structure of the USA could plausibly be characterised in this way, given the massive independent power of the corporations and the insignificance of state ownership. But the state sector of the economy in post-war Britain was huge and palpable. And so the CP took account of this fact by adding the adjective 'state' to the damning term 'monopoly capitalism', and by asserting that the massive development of public property which had been engineered by the Attlee government was a manœuvre carried out on behalf of private property.
Everything that had been done by government since 1945 was in the capitalist interest. The public sector had been established at the behest of the monopolies in order to subsidise the private sector. The NHS had been established because the monopolies now required healthy workers. And higher education had been massively expanded because the monopolies required educated workers. No advance towards socialism whatsoever had occurred. The ruling class was still firmly in the saddle, and the ruling class was as capitalist as ever. And the working class, although healthier and better educated than ever, and enjoying a better standard of living than ever, and governed by its own party for at least half of the time, was as far from political power as ever. And it followed from this that every Labour government between 1945 and 1970 had been, by definition, 'right-wing' as far as the CP was concerned.
This was the considered opinion of the CPGB. It underlay everything else it said and everything it did in the trade union movement and the 'student movement' twenty years ago. And because this outlook enjoyed massive influence on the Left in the trade unions and in the student movement, it comprehensively disabled the Left from thinking about how the cause of socialism in Britain might be advanced beyond the tide-mark of the Attlee-Bevin settlement, and made the destruction of the public sector by a genuinely right-wing government pro-capitalist government after 1979 inconceivable to it. It guaranteed that British socialism would be hopelessly disoriented in the face of Thatcherism, and easily routed by it. And it ensured that the destruction of most of the achievements of British socialism, while experienced as an inexplicable catastrophe by ordinary working people, would be shrugged off as virtually neither here nor there by a British Left that long ago withdrew from the business of giving political leadership to ordinary working people, as opposed to talking about them and trying to manipulate them for obscure and exotic ends.
A simple 'anti-Tory position' in 1972 was a pro-Labour position. But an 'anti-Tory, anti-monopoly position' was, objectively if not subjectively, a pro-CPGB position, that is an anti-Labour position to all intents and purposes, in that it rubbished Labour's historic achievements and opposed Labour's actual policies. And even if it was only objectively pro-CP, it was subjectively as well as objectively anti-Labour, and that was enough for King Street to be going on with.