Lenin scowls down at me. I stare defiantly back, but it’s always hard to win a blinking match with a poster. And I’m outnumbered. The small office I’m in is plastered with dozens of banners, commemorative plates and countless other paraphernalia depicting the hairless revolutionary. I’m at British Communist Party HQ, the heart of the coming revolution. Before me sits the jovial General Secretary Robert Griffiths, the first real-life Communist I’ve ever encountered.
To most young people in Britain today, Communism is an alien concept. It is seen as an ideology that died with the USSR, existing now only as a tourist attraction in Cuba or as a lie in an increasingly capitalist China. Many wonder how anyone could seriously hold such a view these days – didn’t capitalism win the Cold War? Given our shrinking industrial working class and generally high standards of living, I ask Mr Griffiths how Communism can have any relevance to modern British society.
‘As long as we have capitalism’ his gravelly Welsh voice replies ‘there will be the need for organisations to expose its intrinsic injustice and to put forward an alternative strategy as to how a society could be built to replace it. Of course capitalism changes and develops and has done throughout its history, but the essentials remain the same. It’s still a system based on inequality, oppression and crisis. Although that can take different forms at different times in different countries, nevertheless capitalism has not changed fundamentally.’
Marx prophesized the downfall of capitalism, but warned that it would not depart quietly. In this last prediction at least, he was correct. Communist revolutions have been bloody affairs wherever they have occurred. I wonder if Mr Griffiths condones such violence as an acceptable way of achieving political change.
‘There are times in history when violence is unavoidable,’ Mr Griffiths says as the bookshelves behind him struggle under the weight of forty volumes of Marx’s collected works, ‘and it’s not just communists that say that. Most people believe we were right to fight a war to defeat fascist Germany. So there are times when national liberation struggles and struggles for social justice have little or no option but to use force.’
While a nagging doubt forms in my mind that comparing Germany’s Nazi leaders with Britain’s contemporary wealthy elite is entirely fair, Mr Griffiths goes on to tell me that it’s not the Communist violence I should be worried about.
‘The British ruling classes have always been prepared to use force in order to maintain its privileges and uphold oppression and exploitation. The question will be whether the working class movement can produce a situation where we can minimise or eliminate the danger of violence coming from the ruling class trying to hang onto its privileges. That’s where the violence would come from. So no we’re not pacifists, there are times when force is unavoidable.’
Naturally no version of history can be entirely objective. On this side of the Iron Curtain the USSR has always been presented as a monolithic evil, a repressive giant without a redeeming feature in sight. ‘For many decades people in the West were presented with a negative propagandist view of the Soviet Union and everything in it,’ Mr Griffith says before going on (in a noticeably apologetic tone), ‘I would still argue that the positive features of the Soviet Union outweigh the negative ones. Over the period of its existence it transformed a society that had been a monarchist, semi-feudal dictatorship with large numbers of people held in awful conditions into a reasonably modern, multi-national state, with quite advanced services which benefitted the mass of ordinary people, despite the short comings.’
At this point I can’t help but feel that perhaps brushing over the deaths of millions in purges and forced labour camps as ‘short comings’ is a distinctly selective view of history, but then that could just be my Western propagandist education. When I ask about Communist China, where Mao’s regime was accountable for a body count of up to forty million, Mr Griffiths engages in a quite remarkable feat of cultural relativism.
‘Well all of these countries that have embarked upon some road to socialism have done so in their own particular way. The circumstances under which Mao led the Chinese communists to power were completely and utterly different to those in Russia, Eastern Europe or Cuba. We need to be very careful in Britain of passing judgement on other people’s progress and the paths that they choose. At the end of it, I think we should stand back now and say that what has been achieved in China, bearing in mind China’s history and China’s conditions, has undoubtedly represented a massive step forward for the ordinary people of China.’
Turning closer to home, I’m curious to get a Communist assessment of the economic crisis. Experts choke our airwaves with their diagnosis of where it all went wrong and what action governments need to take. Is this just another inevitable dip in the economic cycle or is a particular institution to blame?
‘Well what always causes periodic crises of capitalism is the drive to maximise profit, which eventually turns into overproduction, and then what’s produced can’t be sold at a profit. Therefore production is cut back and workers are put on the dole. This is another periodic crisis but it’s made worse by the fact that what should have been a periodic crisis in Britain five or six years ago was postponed by the government artificially maintaining demand in the economy. A lot of the resultant debt has been repackaged and sold on amongst the financial institutions in an utterly reckless and irresponsible way, which has only added to the instability of the system. So we’ve got a financial catastrophe on top of what would normally have been a fairly periodic crisis.’
Commentators and leading politicians alike have talked of the need for a ‘New World Order’, where financial institutions are tethered more securely in place by extensive government regulation and oversight. I ask if Mr Griffith believes there will be any fundamental change in the way our leaders approach the economy. His tone becomes soaked with righteous indignation.
‘No, the governments will not change. They’re still not willing to challenge the wealth, the power and the prerogatives of big business, including the banks. In Britain as we speak the amount of public money that has reached the financial markets is £1.2 trillion. This is an enormous amount of money – it’s ten times what we spend on the NHS every year, it’s fifteen times what we spend on education. It’s almost twice the level of total government expenditure. While this New Labour government, like governments across the Western World, will do anything to bail-out capitalism, what they won’t do is challenge the wealth and power of the major capitalist monopolies.’
With a membership of fewer than one thousand, the struggle of the British Communist Party against the oppression of capitalism is a brave and admirable one. Despite a somewhat skewed version of history, Mr Griffiths can at least boast unshakable faith in his convictions – a compliment which cannot be extended to many of our more mainstream politicians. Before I leave the office I take once last look up at that poster of Lenin, still glowering down in proletarian fury. He thought the noble flames of Communism would engulf the world, bringing in a new era of peace and plenty. History conspired against him, but in Britain at least Mr Griffiths still shields the candle. The flame is not out yet.
Communism Reloaded
