02.10.2025

Probabilities, not certainties

Should we refuse to take sides against our own ruling class because we lack absolute theoretical certainty? Should we downgrade the centrality of programme for diplomatic unity? Mike Macnair answers Jaques de Fouw

This is a reply to Jaques de Fouw’s polemic in last week’s paper, ‘Paved with good intentions’.¹ It is a personal reply, not one from the CPGB as a whole or from the CPGB’s Provisional Central Committee.

The central core of comrade de Fouw’s argument is that the CPGB’s conception of unity on the basis of a political programme, plus the acceptance of faction rights, does not prevent splits. The examples given are the failure of the abortive Forging Communist Unity discussions between the CPGB, Talking About Socialism and the ‘pro-talks’ faction of the online journal Prometheus; and, more in depth, the split of the Mandelite Socialistische Alternatieve Politik from the Netherlands Revolutionaire Socialistische Partij due to the RSP adopting a political position of opposition to Netherlands/Nato military support for Ukraine. Comrade de Fouw argues that putting to the vote in the RSP this position was sectarian and amounted to making a (debatable) theoretical position (that the war in Ukraine is an inter-imperialist conflict) part of the basis of unity.

He argues that instead the basis of unity necessarily includes theoretical positions, but on the other hand should only include indisputable theoretical positions, “such that any communist who is honest in their convictions has had the ability to follow the topic to such a degree that denying it would be like denying that the earth is round, denying it is a betrayal of the working class”.

War

I begin unavoidably with the Ukraine question: not least because the front page of The Times on September 29 carried the top story that the former head of the British Security Service (aka MI5), Lady Manningham-Buller, said that she agreed with ‘foreign policy expert’ Fiona Hill that “we’re already at war with Russia”.

In a previous article in response to an earlier stage of the debate with Netherlands comrades,² I made the point that, while selling arms to Ukraine would not make western states co-belligerents on the Ukrainian side, the application of public funds to support for Ukraine - including paying for non-military operations - did make governments that did so co-belligerents in the war, as a matter of the norms of international law that applied before the systematic perversion of these rules by lawyers acting in the interests of the USA. Supporters in Nato countries of ‘Arm, arm, arm Ukraine’ are, therefore, supporting our own states in wartime; and this is an obvious political fact, not an issue of theoretical argument.

Going along with this, in the UK at least supporters of the pro-Ukraine line are squirming on the political hook that they cannot unequivocally support proposals to cut arms spending or slogans like ‘welfare, not warfare’. This is clear in the responses of Anticapitalist Resistance and the ‘Atlanticists for Workers Loyalism’ (Alliance for Workers’ Liberty) to the Trade Union Congress vote to call for cuts in arms spending.³ Supporting your own government in war implies supporting the ‘sacrifices’ the working class are expected to make for the cost of the war.

It is a theoretical point that this is not merely an issue for inter-imperialist wars of the 1914-18 sort (though in my opinion we are sliding towards a new 1914-18, but this time between nuclear-armed powers). “Not one man! Not one penny for this system!” was Wilhelm Liebknecht’s slogan in relation to Germany.⁴ The policy it expressed began with Liebknecht’s and August Bebel’s abstention in the war credits vote for the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, before the development of German imperialism. I have observed elsewhere that, even for communists in semi-colonial countries, backing the semi-colonial regime’s war against an imperialist power may be a road to political defeat, as in the case of Trotsky’s line for the Chinese Trotskyists in the 1930s-40s, or the Argentinian Morenistas’ ‘victoryism’ in relation to the Argentinian military regime’s adventurism in the 1982 South Atlantic War.⁵

Further, and more generally, as I have argued repeatedly,

A party which is to defend the independent interests of the working class needs to defend those interests as universal interests - but also to be as disloyal to the states we inhabit as the parliamentary oppositionists who negotiated with the Scots to keep the Scottish invasion in northern England in 1640, or who invited a full-scale Dutch invasion in 1688.⁶

None of this implies absolutely automatic defeatism. It does imply that the necessary starting point on war questions for a politics that seeks the overthrow of capitalist class rule and the emancipation of the working class through the ‘cooperative commonwealth’/socialism/communism is Karl Liebknecht’s 1915 slogan that “the main enemy is at home”.⁷

Splits

Contrary to what appears to be comrade de Fouw’s view, it is not the CPGB’s view that unity on the basis of programme and faction rights can prevent all splits - or even all unprincipled splits. The argument is, rather, that unity on some basis other than political programme - whether it is to be the personality cult of Jeremy Corbyn, or ‘Cliff state capitalism’, or the tactical agreements that have been the basis of the unity projects of the sections of the Mandelite Fourth International - guarantees that there will be unprincipled splits.

The same is true of anti-factionalism - whether anti-factionalism takes the form of overt bans on factions, on ‘permanent factions’ or on ‘public factions’. And anti-factionalism may equally take the shape of other forms of speech control, like civility requirements, which function to defend those with existing power against minority views - and hence to maintain the power of the loyalist labour bureaucracy, and through it the capitalist class.⁸ Rejecting anti-factionalism is not a guarantee against unprincipled splits; holding on to anti-factionalism is a guarantee that there will be unprincipled splits.

In the first place, some splits are, in fact, principled. For myself, in the book Revolutionary strategy I wrote:

The split in the Second International was not a sectarian error on the part of the communists. It was required by the unwillingness of the coalitionist right to act democratically. Marxists have to organise in a way which is not dependent on unity with the right. We have to accept that the split in the Second International will not be reversed (unless Marxists altogether abandon our politics and accept the corrupt world of Blairism, etc) (p99).

This is a fundamental point of difference with the Mandelites. Since the 1980s their view has been that it is necessary to build ‘parties not programmatically delimited between reform and revolution’: that is, parties that include people committed to the politics of the state-loyalist and coalitionist right wing, but who oppose the immediate welfare cuts and so on. To preserve unity with these ‘official lefts’, the Mandelites insist on diplomatic formulas, and thus on speech controls.

It was already clear in 2006, when I wrote the series of articles that was published in a collected form as Revolutionary strategy, that this policy was useless and tended to reinforce the global drift of politics to the right. In the years since then, the evidence has accumulated over and over again that this judgment was correct. See, just for particularly clear examples, Syriza and Podemos.

In 2022 the Mandelites, by supporting Nato’s war effort in Ukraine, crossed from the camp of communism to the camp of the state-loyalist and coalitionist right wing descended from the social-chauvinists of 1914-18. Their argument of the primacy of the self-determination of nations repeats central arguments of socialist supporters of the Entente powers in 1914-18. They may still be able to reverse their course. But they certainly will not do so if their opponents pretend that this is a secondary ‘theoretical’ issue and that clear opposition to Nato’s war effort in Ukraine should not be put to the vote.

Secondly, it does not lie in the gift of majorities, or of organisational forms, to prevent all unprincipled splits. I argued this back in 2012 in relation to the split of Manchester comrades from the CPGB in favour of the Anti-Capitalist Initiative:

It is only possible to have a collective political organisation - as opposed to a series of top-down sects and a gravel of sects of one member (‘independents’) - if we have open disagreement within the organisation. Open political disagreement within the organisation depends on two elements: first, that majorities (or leaderships) do not kick the minorities or individual dissenters out, either for expressing disagreement or on factitious disciplinary charges of one sort or another; and, second, and equally important, that minorities do not walk out in search of fresh fields and pastures new.

I observed in that article that the CPGB “go on and on about” the aspect of the responsibility of minorities, and had (then recently) condemned the founders of Counterfire and several others for minority walk-out splits in face of severe provocation.⁹

Walk-out minority splits from the right wing are not uncommon, either. Henry Hyndman and his pro-war co-thinkers walked out of the British Socialist Party, when they lost control of the party at its April 1916 conference. In December 1920 at the Tours Congress of the Section française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO - French Socialist Party) the rightwing minority refused to accept affiliation to Comintern and claimed to be the ‘continuators’ of the SFIO. The 1981 split of the Social Democratic Party from British Labour was a response to an imagined triumph of the Labour left. And so on.

This sort of split by a former majority which has lost control was recently executed by the Mandelites in France in December 2022 - in essence, because the majority refused to accept that, as the largest minority, the Mandelites should retain control of the leadership and apparatus; but behind this defence of a bourgeois governmentalist norm, due to anti-factionalism (the overt ground of the Mandelites’ split) and a desire to enter fully into the project of the Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale popular front coalition (since broken up by the Parti Socialiste and the Greens over ‘anti-Semitism’ witch-hunting in response to the October 2023 Gaza prison-break, subsequently reassembled as the Nouveau Front Populaire, and again betrayed by the PS).¹⁰

The split of the Mandelites from the Netherlands RSP is obviously not such a ‘lost control’ split: the Mandelites did not have control of the group to start with. But comrade de Fouw assumes that it must have been the fault of the majority, led by the Communistische Platform, for putting to the vote a resolution characterising the Ukraine war as inter-imperialist. Given the history of the Mandelites, it is just as likely to be an irresponsible minority walk-out by the Mandelites. The proposal that the majority should not put to the vote a position opposed to the war, in order to avoid this split, is straightforwardly anti-democratic: the Mandelite minority is able to dictate the line to the anti-war majority. Of course, behind this Mandelite minority is the not-so-silent majority of the pro-war, pro-capitalist parties and media in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Nato.

Programme

Comrade de Fouw argues that it is not possible to separate differences on theory from differences on programme. “The party programme itself is a form of theoretical unity.” Hence, rather than basing membership on acceptance of a party programme adopted by majority vote as the basis for common action (which is the CPGB’s, and my, position) the approach should be that of the 1979 pamphlet by the pro-Albanian, post-Maoist Pacific Collective (Marxist-Leninist).¹¹ The tasks he poses, then, are to focus down immediate tasks on tactical agreements, while seeking to create a ‘real party’ in the long term on deeper theoretical agreement. Theoretical unity, he argues, should only be enforced (meaning, votes taken) on positions that “have been proved in practice; or, through very thorough political statistical research … such that any communist who is honest in their convictions has had the ability to follow the topic to such a degree that denying it would be like denying that the earth is round, denying it is a betrayal of the working class”.

The first point here is that the argument that “The party programme itself is a form of theoretical unity” is seriously slippery. On the one hand, it is true that party programmes make theoretical assumptions. For example, if we accepted that marginal-utility general equilibrium was a true description of market economic dynamics, we could not rationally support the existence of trade unions or any other aspect of communism.

On the other hand, a programme does not consist of the body of theoretical assumptions, but of operative conclusions based on these assumptions, which take the form of proposals for constitutional change, legislation and forms of local or sectoral action. And the operative conclusions can be accepted without agreeing the detail of the underlying theoretical assumptions. Here it is only necessary to point to the sheer range of disagreement among the students of Marxist economics; but the operative conclusions for political proposals (as distinct from judgments about likely future crashes, and so on) are common across many such students.

A specific and important example is from 1917. Trotskyists have promoted the idea that Lenin in April 1917 came round to Trotsky’s view of the “permanent revolution” on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, supported by the poor peasantry, as opposed to Lenin’s own advocacy of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”. This claim is pretty clearly false, as Lars T Lih has shown (and can be independently shown from Lenin’s post-October writing). It is equally (more obviously) false that Trotsky came round to Lenin’s view; though what the Soviet government did was initially closer to the arguments of Lenin’s Two tactics (which advocated land redistribution) than to those of Trotsky’s Results and prospects (which argued that Social Democrats should not adopt such proposals). Nonetheless, Lenin and his co-thinkers plus Trotsky and his co-thinkers were able to unite in a common party with the fusion of the Mezhrayontsi with the Bolsheviks at the 6th (Bolshevik) congress (July 26-August 3 1917), and this unification was plainly practically important to the victory of the October revolution.

I might add that even quite small left parties, like the British Social Democratic Federation - British Socialist Party before 1914, included people who had sharply distinct theoretical conceptions: one has only to compare Hyndman, Ernest Belfort Bax and Theodore Rothstein. The case is equally true for the old pre-1991 CPGB and is a fortiori for the mass pre-1914 social democratic parties and the mass communist parties after 1920. The levels of theoretical homogeneity found in the British Socialist Workers Party’s common commitment to Tony Cliff’s state capitalism, the Revolutionary Communist Party’s commitment to the ‘unbroken thread’ of theory running through Ted Grant, or the 1970s Maoists’ commitments to ‘Marxism-Leninism’ mark these groups off as decreasingly able to think.

Disputable

The second point is that “enforcing” “theoretical unity” only on positions that “have been proved in practice; or, through very thorough political statistical research …” is indefensible for two reasons. The first reason is that no such positions exist or can possibly exist. Perfect certainty is unattainable. The second and the flipside of the first is that we humans (and hence our collective organisations) are entitled and morally bound to act on degrees of probability less than certainty.

First, nothing is absolutely proved. I give as an example uniformitarianism/anti-catastrophism in geology and biology, which in the later 19th and early 20th centuries were taken to be as thoroughly proved a scientific theory as any theory could be. More recently the theory has been shown to have serious limits. In reality, nothing can be taken as absolutely proved in science; everything is open to disproof, when new evidence comes along. True, too, in the study of history.

Secondly, and conversely, precisely because we cannot have certainty, we are obliged to act on less than certainty. We are obliged to act because inaction has consequences as much as action. My inaction is perhaps morally neutral in relation to events in Japan, but it is certainly not morally neutral if, for example, I choose to do no maintenance on my car and the result is that the brakes fail and someone is injured. Since certainty is unavailable, we are obliged to act on degrees of probability.

And these vary with circumstances. Anglo-American law traditionally insisted on proof “beyond reasonable doubt” (which is still less than absolute certainty) for a criminal conviction, on “the balance of probabilities” (that claimant’s evidence is better than defendant’s) in a civil claim. It continues to be debated how far we should follow the “precautionary principle” in making innovators prove their product or technique is safe - and what degree of probability should be required. And so on.

The Pacific Collective (Marxist-Leninist) were in 1979 trying to get out of the trap which the 1970s New Communist Movement had landed themselves in by the struggle for unity of theoretical agreement - but without directly critiquing Lenin’s oversimplified tag, in What is to be done, that “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement”.¹² The attempt to get out of the problem by asserting that some bits of theory are ‘proved’ and thus to be ‘enforced’, while others are ‘unproved’, thus not to be ‘enforced’, manages both to combine dogmatism on what is thought to be ‘proved’ and to paralyse political action on issues which are not taken to have ‘proved theory’. The result is, though comrade de Fouw has not followed the SAP out of the RSP … more Mandelism.

1. The editors’ title, not the author’s.↩︎

2. ‘Principle not diplomacy’ Weekly Worker November 24 2022 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1420/principle-not-diplomacy).↩︎

3. anticapitalistresistance.org/wages-not-weapons (September 18 2025); Solidarity September 24, ‘TUC calls for higher taxes on the wealthy’: www.workersliberty.org/story/2025-09-15/tuc-calls-taxing-top-wealth.↩︎

4. www.marxists.org/archive/liebknecht-w/revolt/11-not-one-penny.html.↩︎

5. ‘Ditch the strategic illusion’ Weekly Worker November 8 2007 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/696/ditch-the-strategic-illusion).↩︎

6. ‘What sort of party’ Weekly Worker November 21 2024 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1516/what-sort-of-party).↩︎

7. www.marxists.org/archive/liebknecht-k/works/1915/05/main-enemy-home.htm.↩︎

8. A recent discussion is in my article, ‘They come with thorns’ (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1537/they-come-with-thorns). This is not just my or the CPGB’s view: see AB Mamo, ‘A Tale of two civilities’: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5291684 (June 2025); R Gay, ‘Civility is a fantasy’ New York Times September 24 2025. It makes no difference whether ‘civility’ norms are proposed as bureaucratic rules or as a ground of tactical self-censorship: in either case scabbing cannot be called out as scabbing.↩︎

9. ‘End the cycle of splits’ Weekly Worker May 23 2012 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/915/end-the-cycle-of-splits).↩︎

10. See, for example, tomasoflatharta.com/2022/12/14/france-nouveau-parti-anticapitaliste-npa-new-anticapitalist-party-divides-down-the-middle.↩︎

11. www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-8/pacific-collective/index.htm.↩︎

12. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/i.htm.↩︎