Although published some time ago it is interesting to read the book ' Which Road ' which is a massive of the 1978 'British Road to Socialism ' (BRS) of the former Communist Party of Great Britain . It can said the programmes of most parties on the so-called British left , are variants of the BRS in one form or another .
On the positive side it is well written and easy to read , although a lot of it does ape the style of the the SWP and Socialist Party or uses the Leninist's own jargon such as 'centrism ' and 'official communism ' ( which is never actually clearly defined by Conrad , one assumes it refers to the pro Soviet parts of the world communist movement or probably the pro Sovietists plus Euros , but what about the DPRK , China and various independent communist parties ? ) .
The strengths of the book are that it contains a very detailed critique of the 1978 BRS and even goes beyond that to include the CPB's updated version , the Euro's awful ' Manifesto for New Times ' and Militant's " What We Stand for ' . Conrad can be given credit for actually nailing down the extreme revisionism of the 1978 BRS on the issue of state power and monopoly capitalist rule , other opponents of the BRS did not manage to do this . Conrad then subjects it to a devastating critique . Reading I realised how far the BRS had strayed from Marxism-Leninism of any kind . Indeed the 1978 BRS borders on social democracy and even liberalism ! It is clear that one of the main reasons for the CPGB's sharp decline since 1977 which never levelled out let alone halted , was that with the adoption of the 1978 BRS the CPGB
ended up with a programme that had only virtually paper thin differences with old Labour , the result was that people left the CPGB for the bigger party .
Conrad also criticises other parts of the BRS such as on Ireland . Conrad trenchantly denounces the Labour party as a bourgeois workers party and criticises both Right and left reformism .
However it may have been a waste of time refuting the 'Manifesto for New Times ' of the rump CPGB as this was a self -evident pile of rubbish which had managed to go far beyond modern revisionism . The one useful point Conrad makes it is to point that Euro-communism unlike Labour reformism does not have a social basis in the UK . Indeed it can be added that any revisionist party in the UK is basically surplus to requirement from the point of view of the ruling class as they already have a reformist party in the form of the Labour party ,moreover the British ruling class is culturally anti-communist and ill-disposed to the existence of any kind of communist party .
Also the critique of the CPB's BRS is maybe a bit redundant and pointless as the CPB BRS was basically a warmed up version of the CPGB 1978 BRS , slight to the Left of it.
However Conrad does do an excellent job of exposing the reformism of the then Militant Tendency which became today stodgy Socialist Party which is really a variant of the Labour party .It was useful to be reminded of Militant's collaboration with the police.
There are a number of ways that the book falls down . Conrad does indulge in a lot of pedantry as well as sneering .Political and ideologically the book is full of eclecticism , some ultra leftism , dogmatism and certainly chunks of neo-Trotskyism . Conrad talks about 'unconditional defence of the socialist countries ' but then proceeds to rubbish them . Conrad took a very dim and dismissive of the socialist camp basically denying the superiority of socialism and drawing heavily on bourgeois sources . Reading parts of Conrad's book is like reading something by the SWP ! Conrad even appears to have swallowed Thatcherite and bourgeois propaganda about rising prosperity , workers buying their own homes etc as he takes the CPB to task for talking about the increasing poverty under Thatcher . In fact Conrad has missed the point , in Britain in the 1980s you saw both the growth of the labour aristocracy and the lumpenproletariat , but Conrad does not recognise this .
A massive blindspot for Conrad and the Leninist was anti-revisionism . The anti revisionist struggle of the WPK , CPC and others is airbrushed out of history by Conrad and it can be argued that in some ways Conrad's criticism of the BRS is basically 'reinventing the wheel '. In fact both Korean and Chinese comrades had accused the revisionists of 'prettifying imperialism ' which is basically what the ' British To Socialism ' does .
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