International Trotskyism

Platform of the International Trotskyist Current

2008-12-06T23:30:00.000-08:00

We the undersigned former members of the Trotskyist Tendency minority and others resolve constitute ourselves as a separate political entity, the International Trotskyist Current (ITC) on the following basis:

Platform of the International Trotskyist Current

1. We stand with Karl Marx: ‘The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. The struggle for the emancipation of the working class means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies but for equal rights and duties and the abolition of all class rule’ (General Rules of the International Workingmen’s Association, October 1864).

2. We recognise the need for programmatic development in order to understand the tasks of the contemporary period – programme first! as Trotsky said. Because the emancipation of the working class can only be the act of the working class itself, and because social-democracy and Stalinism have long since passed into the camp of counter-revolution, revolutionaries must organise themselves around a revolutionary programme both in Britain and internationally.

3. We see democratic soviets/workers’ councils as the instruments of participatory democracy which must be the basis of the successful struggle for workers’ control as the pre-condition for the revolutionary struggle for political power. So it is necessary to agitate for maximum workers’ self-organisation in struggle; every strike, occupation or action by the working class that increases their collective self-confidence is a step towards revolution and so bitterly opposed by capitalists and their apologists amongst the trade union bureaucracy. Soviet democracy, i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat, must be the basis of the organisational form of the workers’ state, a repressive but unavoidable transitional phase in the process of the development of communism where the workers defend their new state against counterrevolution and organise the production of life’s necessities so that want and oppression, rights and democracy wither away together with the repressive state and are no longer needed because of the free availability of all of life’s needs and wants; alienation in all its forms has finally been superseded by social and economic equality.

4. The capitalist state consists, in the last analysis, of armed bodies - like the army and police - which act in defence of the capitalist system and class. We acknowledge the need for a democratic Marxist Revolutionary Socialist Party to defeat this capitalist state and political system. The process of revolution is based upon democratic interaction between party and class. This interaction creates the political conditions for the self-emancipation of the working class. The process of economic success in transcending the alienating power of capital will also facilitate the political conditions to develop consent for the movement towards communism. The revolutionary process of transition to communism is based on the struggle to form an international federation of workers’ states. Such a federation is required in order to overcome the worldwide poverty and starvation caused by the domination of global free marker finance capital and end the threat of global ecological catastrophe.

5. We defend the heritage of the Russian Revolution and critically support the revolutionary thrust of the first four Congresses of the Third Communist International before the victory of the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy and the imposition of the theory of socialism in one country after 1924. We counterpose of the violence of the oppressed to the violence of the oppressor and critically defend the methods of Trotsky in the Civil War and in the taking of the Kronstadt Fortress in 1920. We oppose Libertarian Marxists, ‘Left’ communists, platformists and traditional anarchists on this question, although agreeing with them on the final goal of an egalitarian communist society based on the production of the superabundance of life’s necessities in conformity with a sustainable biosphere.

6. Following the collapse of the Second International the October Revolution ‘shook the world’ and, amongst other things, facilitated the formation of the Communist International. There were significant problems with the Comintern from the outset. The majority of German Communists saw the formation as premature and had concerns that the new International would be overly dominated by the Russian CP. Despite this, the early years of the Comintern represent a high point in working class organisation and remain an important point of reference for revolutionaries in the 21^st century. We critically support the resolutions and manifestos of the first four congresses of the Comintern, critical because, for instance, the Comintern (including Trotsky until 1928) failed to apply the theory of permanent revolution to all countries; they operated a mistaken ‘united front’ with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk which led to a massacre of Turkish communists (1920-22) and opened the door for the Stalin/Zinoviev confusion which led to the massacre of the Shanghai Soviet in 1927.

7. We support Trotsky’s Transitional Programme of 1938 in its context. We always practice the method embodied in that document because it is the Marxist method of mass work as advocated by Lenin in Left Wing Communism; an Infantile Disorder in 1920. Nationalising of the banks under workers control is the appropriate transitional demand in the current crisis. Open the books so committees of workers and consumers can determine where frauds and swindles have occurred and what part of the banking enterprises are simply parasitic. The anarchy of the capitalist free market produced this crises, the solution is to use public money to plan and organise production internationally for need and not for profit.

8. No to popular fronts with the political representatives of any capitalist class to ‘defeat fascism’, stop war or for any other reason and no to sectarian abstention from the class struggle. The Stalinists who subordinated the working class to a part of the bourgeoisie derailed the revolutions in both France and Spain in the 1930s. In Indonesia (1965) and Chile (1973) the results were the same. We defend working class independence under all circumstances.

9. Marxists counterpose the united front tactic to popular frontism in order to relate to reformist workers; placing demands on reformist leaders both to advance our class interests and to expose and defeat the reformist leaders before their membership in the course of struggles. Under no circumstance does a united front include a non-aggression pact. We always retain the freedom to criticise.

10. We recognise the necessity for revolutionaries to carry out serious ideological and political struggle as direct participants in the trade unions (always) and in the mass reformist social democratic parties despite their pro-capitalist leaderships when conditions are favourable. Rather than tail-ending, or seeking to become left-bureaucrats as the SP, the AWL, the ISG and SWP do we seek to build a rank-and-file movement independent of all bureaucracy, even its left variety as represented in Britain in the past by Arthur Scargill and today by Bob Crow, Mark Serwotka, etc. In the National Shop Stewards Network we do not want to ‘seize control’ from the current leadership around the SP, the SWP, or the RMT bureaucracy but to make it a real rank-and-file democratic movement that is independent of even left bureaucrats e.g. get rid of clause 3 which forbids intervention in the internal affairs of trade unions and make it open to all working class militants.

11. The British Labour party was never a socialist party. Clause 4, so beloved by left-reformists, was never more than a fig leaf. The Labour party remains a bourgeois workers’ party, that is to say, it is a pro-capitalists party based on the organised working class. So long as this remains the case, Marxists advance tactics it which may include both entryism and critical electoral support. We must not be part of the stupid, Stalinist third-period sectarian mistake the far left has been going through for the last 15 years or more; that because we understand that the Labour party and the trade union bureaucrats are class traitors the mass of the working also understand this and therefore the masses will come to us directly or we can con them by building a half-way-house, a more radical reformist Labour party Mark II. We advance tactics toward Labour party members as part of our united (rather than popular) front orientation, recognising the LP remains a type of workers’ party. That is we need to expose the existing leadership of our class: this is where the pro-imperialist misleaders live; it is far more than ‘tactics towards individual members’ of the LP, and is about the LP being an arena which is still intimately linked to the TUs and so a vital arena for the class struggle.

12. We recognise the urgent necessity for a programme for women’s liberation and prioritise work in defence of abortion rights, crèche facilities and equal pay. We fight for the creation of a working class women’s movement. We recognise the leading role women have played in past revolutionary struggles and we emphasise the contradiction of the underrepresentation of women on the contemporary revolutionary left. We fight for free abortion and contraception on demand, for equal pay, for free 24-hour childcare in well equipped nurseries and kindergartens. We are for the abolition of all laws relating to prostitution which always criminalise women and/or place them in danger of violence and death.

13. We aim to develop a programme for the emancipation of all the specially oppressed. We support the right of women, Black and Asian people, lesbians and gay men, bisexuals and transgender people to caucus inside the unions, in social democratic parties and in revolutionary socialist parties also. We fight racism and fascism. We support the right of people to fight back against racist attacks. Self-defence is no offence! We fight for an end to all discrimination against lesbians and gay men, bisexuals and transgender people, and against harassment whether by the state or by homophobic reactionaries. Abolish all laws used to persecute lesbians and gay men, bisexuals and transgender people - gross indecency, soliciting, obscenity laws, blasphemy laws, etc.

14. We oppose all immigration controls. International finance capital roams the planet in search of profit and imperialist governments disrupts the lives of workers and cause the collapse of whole nations with their direct intervention in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan and their proxy wars in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, etc. Demands for immigration controls are fuelled by the right-wing press, and imposed by Brown and the Enoch Powell-like immigration minister Phil Woolas to undermine workers organisation and collective solidarity. Big trade unions like Unite and the GMB who now supply 90% of Labour party funding and who could easily call the tune on this and on the anti-union laws, etc acquiesce to Brown on everything; we must demand they begin a real campaign in defence of immigrants to combat the media bias. We must unconditionally defend the rights of all workers to seek the best remuneration for their labour in the metropolitan countries and fight there the enemy which has destroyed their lives in their own countries. At the same time we support those workers in non-metropolitan countries in struggle against their imperialist employers, landlords etc! This includes workers in the west taking action in defence of their brothers/sisters in Africa or whichever part of the ‘third world’! We recognise and celebrate the US dock strike on May Day 2008, (the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) closed all the ports on the west side of the country, from California up through Oregon to Washington) against the war in Iraq as the most important way for workers to combat imperialist war.

15. We demand of all governments a world plan to combat climate change and the degradation of the biosphere which is caused by the anarchy of capitalist production for profits of transnational corporations. But we recognise this is a vitally important class question. Ecological catastrophe is caused by imperialism so to combat this threat we must redouble our efforts to forward the world revolution. But transitional demands on governments are crucial here; cheap and ultimately free nationalised public transport by trains and buses and a halt to Airport runway expansions as at Heathrow to reduce the carbon emission of cars, trucks and planes, wind, wave and solar power generated electricity, international and ultimately global energy and water networks, an end to rainforest destruction by a global ban on trade in hardwoods and other timber produced there, serious recycling programmes that reward rather than penalise, etc., whilst recognising that individual efforts make little difference and plastic-bag ecology is used by governments to guilt-trip individuals and avoid internationally co-ordinated actions which can alone reverse this drift towards disaster. We must therefore focus our demands on making the case for a global planned economy by a global federation of workers’ states, only this can prevent ecological catastrophe.

16. As revolutionary international socialists we support Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution and its applicability to the present era of globalisation. We also support Lenin’s differentiation of all nations into imperialist oppressor nations and oppressed colonial or semi-colonial nations. We are always and in all circumstances for the defeat of imperialism as the main enemy of progressive humanity even by non-working class forces in wars between imperialism and oppressed nations. In defending the strategy of permanent revolution in the semi-colonial world we reject both ‘two-stage’ conceptions and the idea of ‘socialism in one country’ as reactionary utopias.

17. We recognise that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the destruction of the Soviet Union (1989-91) represented a victory for the neo-liberal agenda of US and world imperialism. Whilst we are for the defence of democratic rights including the right to national self-determination we recognise that individual rights are bourgeois values which presuppose inequality and fail to defend the collective rights of the mass of humanity to food, water, housing, education, comprehensive health care, etc. We recognise individual workers and small impoverished nations are at the mercy of powerful imperialist corporations and nations so we fight for individual rights and national rights in a collective, that is in a class and not in a libertarian way; e.g. we fight for the ‘no platforming’ of fascists and oppose free market exploitation of small countries. We would curtail the democratic rights of capitalists and would replace the anarchy of the free market with an economy planned to satisfy human need and not profit. We do not always advocate separation of small nations despite recognising their right to form their own state if a majority desire it.

The betrayals of the discredited Labour government in the face of the growing financial and economic crises give the fascists of the BNP hope of advancement. They now have fifty eight local councillors in Britain (BBC estimates) and a member on the Greater London Assembly. But the rise of fascism in a period of capitalist crisis cannot be prevented without a fight encapsulating the basics of revolutionary struggle: anti-fascists need to be well organised and democratically centralised, independent of the bourgeoisie and with a revolutionary programme utilising the traditional method of No Platform. Here as elsewhere transitional demands do not necessarily lead all the way to the seizure of power – e.g. for now we are for the maximum independent self-organisation of the working class in the struggle against fascism: we are for the building of democratic, representative committees of the local and antifa working class charged with organising the prevention of the dissemination of fascist ideas/influence: that is a transitional demand because it takes us from where we are to a better place where the fighting capacity and abilities of the working class has increased, and it is in no way incompatible with the next step - in fact it should lead directly onto that next step. We need to combine these local transitional demands with the line of our international organisation. This is totally opposed to the popular front methods of appealing to the police and demands for a vote even for Boris Johnson against the BNP (Hope not Hate) and spreading dangerous illusions that the state protects us against the fascists as practiced by the SWP’s Unite Against Fascism (UAF).
We dissociate ourselves from the organisational methods of most post war Trotskyist groups. These can be characterised as a) bureaucratic centralist with a top-down elitist leadership, often with a single guru-like figure, and b) sectarian in the sense of wishing to control or destroy broad movements or campaigns. We are in favour of democratic centralism in an open democratic party with rights for factions and tendencies.

20. We are for the reconstruction of the Fourth International as the world party of socialist revolution and will fight for the fusions and splits necessary for this in our international work. We recognise the majority of those forces internationally who claim the name of Trotskyism as centrists, in the Marxist sense that they capitulate to bourgeois ideology but also tend to relate to aspects of the revolutionary method of the Trotskyist Transitional Programme at times and seek to peruse some of its method in however inadequate a form. These forces, despite their degenerate and cynical centrist leaderships, do contain the vast bulk of subjectively revolutionary socialists on the planet. ‘Soft’, reformist, moral pressure power of global networks will not work for climate change, poverty or rebuilding a revolutionary international. US and world imperialism can deploy ‘hard’ economic and military power and we must orientate to the forces who can also deploy hard power on behalf of the working class and oppressed internationally; workers’ organisation which can deliver hard power by strikes and mass mobilisations which can physically stop whole economies, the movement of war munitions and armies, etc. and so can place revolution on the agenda. It is by orientating to the ranks of these workers in struggle that we will win the forces from Trotskyist-centrist groups, and of course by working closely to regroup with those groups nationally and internationally who have made significant advances in breaking from that centrism. In this way we aim to assist in reconstructing the Fourth International.

Signed: Gerry D, Steve R, Pete B, Jim P, Patrick M.

Trotskyist Tendency Resolution on No Platform

2008-06-05T00:03:00.001-07:00

Trotskyist Tendency resolution on No Platform

The betrayals of the discredited Labour government in the face of the growing financial and economic crises give the fascists of the BNP hope of advancement. They now have fifty eight local councillors in Britain (BBC estimates) and a member on the Greater London Assembly. But the rise of fascism in a period of capitalist crisis cannot be prevented without a fight encapsulating the basics of revolutionary struggle: anti-fascists need to be well organised and democratically centralised, independent of the bourgeoisie and with a revolutionary programme utilising the traditional method of No Platform We therefore present this resolution:

The Trotskyist Tendency defends unequivocally the traditional Marxist

 position of No Platform for Fascists, viz:

We stand by Trotsky’s classical definition of Fascism; ‘The historic

function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its

organizations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find

themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic

machinery’.

Fascism has no fixed ideology of its own; it can be characterised globally

 as consistent reaction against the organised working class. Because their

 ultimate aim is to destroy the organised working class from the most

reformist trade unions to revolutionary socialism they also need to

destroy bourgeois democracy because this allows the working class to

organise themselves and allows revolutionary socialists to fight to lead

that class in revolution.

As Trotsky observed in Whither France, ‘The despairing petty bourgeois

 sees in fascism, above all, a fighting force against big capital, and believes

 that, unlike the working-class parties which deal only in words, fascism

will use force to establish more ‘justice’. The peasant and the artisan are

in their manner realists. They understand that one cannot forego the use

of force’.

As a group fascism depends vitally on mobilising the middles classes to

crush the organised strength of the working class, Whither France again,

‘The petty bourgeoisie is economically dependent and politically atomized.

That is why it cannot conduct an independent policy. It needs a ‘leader’

who inspires it with confidence. This individual or collective leadership,

 i.e., a personage or party, can be given to it by one or the other of the

fundamental classes -- either the big bourgeoisie or the proletariat’.

The emergence of the BNP signifies that a section of the British middle

class and some declassed workers have lost hope in the organised

working to solve their problems and, via the medium of the fascists,

are coming under the sway of the imperialist bourgeoisie, the BNP’s

ultimate masters.

Whither France again, ‘But the petty bourgeoisie can also find a leader

in the proletariat. This was demonstrated in Russia and partially in Spain.

 In Italy, in Germany, and in Austria, the petty bourgeoisie gravitated in

this direction. But the parties of the proletariat did not rise to their historic

task. To bring the petty bourgeoisie to its side, the proletariat must win its

 confidence. And for that it must have confidence in its own strength’.

It is therefore vital to use the tactic of the United Front of the organised

working class against the fascists and the reject the Popular Front as

advocated by Searchlight (Use your vote, Hope not Hate) and the

Socialist Workers Party (‘‘The strategy for anti-fascists is to unite

the broadest possible forces against the Nazis’) which ties the working

class to parliamentary democracy and even allows voting Tory

(as a last resort) to keep the fascist out.

Similarly we reject the CPGB/Communist Student position of opposing

 No Platform by ‘free speech for fascists’ as a libertarian excuse to

 avoid the class struggle necessary to defeat fascism and the capitalist

system which breeds it in its decline.

We are against all state bans on political parties, including fascist and

other far-right parties. State restrictions on what can and what cannot be

said in political debate must also be vigorously opposed. Any such bans

or restrictions would inevitably first and foremost affect the advanced part

of the working class.

Motivation by Gerry Downing Trotskyist Tendency Convenor

We need to analyse the causes of the rise to power of fascism in Italy (1922) and Germany (1933) to understand the threat the BNP poses today and how we might stop it. The appearance of the BNP signifies the decline of the capitalist system and the failure of the organised working class to achieve socialism through revolution. In Italy the Socialist Party betrayed the revolutionary upsurge around the factory occupations of 1920. The communist party was too new, too small and too steeped in Bordiga’s ultra leftism to understand how to relate to the working class via existing Socialist Party leaders.  By the time Nazism loomed as a danger in Germany the CP there characterised the SPD as social fascists, as the main enemy of the working class and the source of the counter-revolution. The German KPD saw fascism as merely another variety of reaction, the same mistake as the current CPGB leadership make about the BNP. Not only did the KPD discuss with the Nazis as early as Radek’s infamous Schlageter speech in 1923, they organised joint actions against the SPD like the infamous Red Referendum in Prussia in 1931 and the Berlin Transport strike in 1932. And here we see the rational for the No platform tactic, because as Trotsky pointed out it is ridiculous to say that there is ‘no difference between the Social Democrats and the fascists, that is, that there is no difference between the enemy who deceives and betrays the workers, taking advantage of their patience, and the enemy who simply wants to kill them off’ Leon Trotsky Against National Communism! (Lessons of the ‘Red Referendum’, August 1931).

The Bolsheviks were correct to make a united front with Kerensky against Kornilov in August 1917 because he was then the main danger. The united front Trotsky proposed in the early 1930s in Germany had many implications. In the first place not only did it reject the idea that the SPD were social fascists, it implied strongly that they were part of the organised working class, as the British Labour party is today. The SPD had perpetrated far more terrible crimes against the German working class than the LP has ever done in Britain. It had voted the war credits to the Kaiser on 4 August 1914 to enable the slaughter of WWI to begin, it had murdered Luxemburg and Liebknecht, the best leaders of the German Revolution, it had drowned that revolution in blood, it had, with the full support of the trade union leaders and  administered and legislated  the most appallingly repressive measures against the working class in defence of capitalism. Yet the German working class, like the British today, particularly its older, skilled and employed sections saw no electoral alternative to it. The SWP, the SP, Workers Power and others repeat the same Stalinist third period ultra-leftism today by proclaiming that the Labour party is no longer part of the workers movement, thereby leaving them with no strategy at all to fight fascism other than the pathetic vote for this or that new left reformist group we have set up to form their own labour movement and pretend they are not revolutionaries, correctly in many cases. The KPD won vast sections of the youth and unemployed and a vote of almost six million in November 1932. The new parties of recomposition combined get about one or two percent of that in Britain and still peruse the disastrous pre-1933 Stalinist tactics – those who cannot learn from history....

The crucial question here was for the KPD to demands the SPD leaders form common fighting militias to fight the Nazis. But this would have exposed the puerile nature of the alternative KPD ‘united front from below’ which demanded that the SPD members and followers simply abandon their leaders and join the KPD in fighting the Nazis. These workers still had democratic illusions in their leaders, they still thought that revolution was now impossible after the many failed efforts since 1918. Thy relied on the SPD for reformist advancement through parliament, whom they saw as the best of a bad lot. The AntiFa were communist street fighters who had lost hope in the KPD to ever do more than talk and set about fighting the Nazis. They had no political perspective like their squadist political descendants Red Action and the AFA in Britain today, whom others like Workers Power often tails with their own squadist orientation.  The KPD leaders had ceased to think for themselves and now only slavishly carried out the diktats from the Kremlin. Trotsky’s United Front tactic of placing demands for militant action on these misleaders in order to expose them before their membership as agents of the bourgeoisie within the ranks of the working class and so create the conditions for a new revolutionary offensive was rejected by the KPD because they were no longer revolutionary leaders but Stalin’s hacks.

Some try to confuse the United Front of the organised working class with the Stalinist Popular Front, the essentially right wing trajectory which they adopted in panic after the disaster of 1933, abandoning class politics and now seeking to find alliances with liberals, bishops, parsons and all and sundry, as the present Searchlight magazine and the SWP does. This is an equally if opposite disastrous trajectory which likewise facilitates the rise of fascism, as it did in France and more importantly Spain. In the Popular Front the communist must cease all talk of revolution and the class interests of the working class and speak only of ‘democracy’ and  ‘the people’ to present a view of a non-class outlook which will not frighten their new found friends. The language used by Respect and Respect Renewal are cases in point. The liberal bourgeoisie supply the ideology to the petty bourgeoisie.  But these come from the same social class as the base of a mass fascist movement. And whilst the fascists may cause grief, revulsion and disruption to the liberal bourgeoisie it will protect their private property and ensure their security if they acquiesce to the rules; the communists will expropriate them and end their privileged existence for ever; it is no choice in the final analysis.

We support Comrade Nick Roger’s resolution to the CPGB’s aggregate on 19 April and make the following points.  It is true that the fascists are not now the main danger to the organised working class but at a certain stage they may become so and at any rate they are a real danger now to immigrants, Blacks, lesbian and gays etc.  They are not a political party like any other but have as their fundamental goal the destruction of the organisations of the working class, and bourgeois democracy itself, which at least allows the workers to organise. So they must be physically and organisationally prevented from speaking or organising by whatever means necessary. Of course this does not mean suicidal adventures but it does demand taking the risk of injury or arrest to achieve this. As Trotsky pointed out the middle class is not adverse to violence when their fundamental interests are threatened (they supported Mussolini and Hitler) and neither will the working class go down without a fight even when pacifists shout ‘free speech’ and ‘law and order’ at them. The point is that organising this fight must be combined with a determined onslaught against capitalism itself and the misleadership of the working class if it is to succeed. Without this latter fascism must triumph when the crisis is deep enough.

Comrade Phil Kent speaks for the majority of the CPGB when he says ‘calling the BNP fascist is certainly not reducing its support. Yes, some members of the BNP would love to be fascists again, harking back to their old street-fighting days. But the BNP no longer organises fighting squads - the defining characteristic of a fascist party...The BNP is chauvinist, racist and reactionary, but not fascist. What wins it public support is its promise to put an end to migrant labour. If you seriously want to defeat such divisiveness, then you must tackle the mainstream parties first and foremost. It is their British nationalist policies which continually reproduces the sentiment upon which the BNP thrives’.

Just a suit and a tactical change of disowning violence ‘for now’ (as Nick Griffin said after his court case)is enough to fool these naive comrades. Comrade Rogers correctly points to its history of street-fighting violence to show that this is merely a tactic. The BNP is merely attempting to supersede its lumpen proletariat origins and win over the vital middle class to gain a mass base. But the middle class are respectable and opposed to violence we hear you cry. Yes, for now but it was the doctors, teachers, priests, farmers, the ruined shopkeepers and silk tied clerks that formed Hitler’s social base and they soon became very violently aggressive when they saw the organised working class as their main, or at least the most accessible enemy. The Jews were a surrogate for modernism in general, capitalism and communism, which bigoted Nazi ideology blamed for loss of WWI and the crises in general.

We support Comrade Roger’s point 11. ‘Communists are champions of democracy and free speech. We are against state bans on political parties, including fascist and other far-right parties. State restrictions on what can and what cannot be said in political debate must also be vigorously opposed. Any such bans or restrictions would inevitably first and foremost affect the advanced part of the working class. Free speech and the widest democracy provide the best conditions for Marxism to grow and flourish and for the formation of the working class into a future ruling class’.

Minbority Elaboration of the Trotskyist Tendency

2008-05-25T04:27:00.000-07:00

The Platform of the Trotskyist Tendency of the Campaign for a Marxist Party: Minority Elaboration

Platform adopted 1 March 2008

We stand with Karl Marx: “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. The struggle for the emancipation of the working class means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies but for equal rights and duties and the abolition of all class rule” (General Rules of the International Workingmen's Association, October 1864)
We defend the heritage of the Russian Revolution and critically support the revolutionary thrust of the first four Congresses of the Third Communist International before the victory of the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy and the imposition of the theory of socialism in a single country.
We see democratic soviets/workers’ councils as the instruments of participatory democracy to directly embody the dictatorship of the proletariat and for a successful struggle for workers’ control as the pre-condition for the revolutionary struggle for political power and the organisational form of the workers’ state.
We acknowledge the need for a democratic Marxist Revolutionary Socialist Party. The process of revolution is based upon democratic interaction between party and class. This interaction creates the political conditions for the self-emancipation of the working class. It is more difficult to economically overcome the alienating power of capital over labour than to politically repress the forces of counter-revolution. The process of economic success in transcending the alienating power of capital will also facilitate the political conditions to develop consent for the movement towards communism. The revolutionary process of transition to communism is based on the struggle to form an international workers’ state and such a state is required in order to overcome the domination of global capital.
We support Trotsky’s Transitional Programme of 1938 in its context. It is the Marxist method of mass work. No to sectarian abstention from the class struggle and no to popular fronts with the political representatives of any capitalist class to ‘defeat fascism’, stop war or for any other reason. We recognise the need for programmatic development in order to understand the tasks of the contemporary period.
We support Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution and its applicability for the era of globalisation. We are opposed to the idea of Socialism in one Country.
We recognise the necessity for revolutionaries to carry out serious ideological and political struggle as direct participants in the trade unions (always) and in the mass reformist social democratic parties when conditions are favourable and (always) to fight against, fascism, racism, sexism and all forms of reactionary and divisive bourgeois ideology.
We recognise the urgent necessity for a programme for women’s liberation and prioritise work in defence of abortion rights, crèche facilities and equal pay. We call for a struggle against racial and sexual oppression. We aim to develop a programme for the tasks of emancipation of the specially oppressed.
We are in favour of building a Trotskyist International. There are no differences in principle to keep Trotskyist groups separate. However we dissociate ourselves from the organisational methods of most Trotskyist Groups from 1938. These can be characterised as a) bureaucratic centralist with a top-down elitist leadership, often with a single guru-like figure, and b) sectarian in the sense of wishing to control or destroy broad movements or campaigns. We are in favour of an open democratic party with rights for factions and tendencies.

Differences have been declared on two questions and we will continue the debate on these questions.

The question of imperialism and oppressed and oppressor nations.

Position 1. We support Lenin’s differentiation of all nations into imperialist oppressor nations and oppressed colonial or semi-colonial nations. We are always and in all circumstances for the defeat of imperialism as the main enemy of progressive humanity even by non-working class forces.
Position 2. Careful economic and political analysis is required before deciding that it is possible to support an oppressed nation in its opposition to imperialism. It is not possible to arrive at a conclusion on this question without assessing what are the independent political interests of the working class.

The question of Social Democracy – specifically the British Labour Party

Position 1. Their adherence to the neo-liberal agenda has transformed reformist political organisations into instruments of global capital. This means that the question of work within New Labour is a tactic that is not generally applicable although it is possible for revolutionaries to critically support campaigns like that of John McDonnell for Labour Leadership.
Position 2. The Labour Party was never a socialist party. Its Clause 4 so beloved by left-reformists was never more than a fig leaf. The Labour Party remains a bourgeois workers’ party, that is to say, it is a pro-capitalists party based on the organised working class. So long as this remains the case, Marxists advance tactics towards Labour Party members which may include both entryism and critical electoral support.

Introduction

This elaboration will fill out our position on the first nine agreed points of the Platform and will be defending the minority position on the two questions on which differences have been announced. We support position 1 on imperialism and oppressed and oppressor nations and position 2 on the question of Social Democracy – specifically the British Labour Party.

Let us at the beginning reaffirm the revolutionary programme and method we seek to rediscover and reapply as testified to in 1939 by Robert Coulondre, French ambassador to the Third Reich, and Adolph Hitler as recounted by the International Communist Current (ICC).

Hitler had boasted of the advantages he had obtained from his pact with Stalin, just concluded; and he drew a grandiose vista of his future military triumph. In reply the French ambassador appealed to his ‘reason’ and spoke of the social turmoil and the revolutions that might follow a long and terrible war and engulf all belligerent governments. ‘You are thinking of yourself as a victor...’ the ambassador said, ‘but have you given thought to another possibility - that the victor might be Trotsky?’ At this Hitler jumped up (as if he ‘had been hit in the pit of the stomach’) and screamed that this possibility, the threat of Trotsky’s victory, was one more reason why France and Britain should not go to war against the Third Reich”. Isaac Deutscher rightly highlights Trotsky’s remark on hearing of this conversation: “They are haunted by the spectre of revolution, and they give it a man’s name” [1]

Point 1: The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves

As revolutionary socialists, we Trotskyists declare with Marx and the First Workingmen’s International in 1867, ‘the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves, the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule’. Only the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by the organised working class, led by a revolutionary socialist party based on the theoretical conquests of Marxism and Trotskyism (its modern form), can win a world planned socialised economy which will achieve full human liberation, the communist goal. This will end all human oppression manifest in alienation in all its religious and social forms. The violently oppressive capitalist state forces or those of the oppressive police/bureaucratic deformed workers’ states exist ultimately to protect and reinforce these relations, which are the fundamental ‘secret’ of continuing capitalist rule. Only when we ‘change the old conditions’ by revolution can we achieve the full economic and social equality of all human beings, develop our real species-essence as egalitarian co-operative co-producers of life’s necessities by winning economic and political control over our own destinies. With Marx we defend ‘The Necessity for the Communist Revolution’ as elaborated in The German Ideology:

Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.[2]

Point 2: The heritage of the Russian Revolution

Here we will confine ourselves to the defence of October, the Bolsheviks and the Left Opposition and Trotskyism up to 1940. The defence of the heritage of the Russian Revolution of October 1917 is very important because this is one of the most important ideological tasks facing us as revolutionary socialists. We stress that the Berlin Wall fell to the right, to the forces of capitalist counter-revolution, and not to the left, to the working class as the force of socialist revolution. There is great historical confusion on this point particularly among those on the revolutionary left who hailed, together with imperialism, the collapse of ‘communism’ and the victory of ‘democracy’. They were hailing their own defeat and marginalisation. In an atmosphere of triumphant free market capitalist reaction (e.g. Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay The End of History?) many have now abandoned the heritage of October entirely, many have denounced Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks and others have signalled their loss of faith in the revolutionary potential of the working class by entering popular fronts (the UK SWP in Respect) or by defending the ‘left’ bureaucracy where they have gained influence in or even control of union executives (SP and SWP).

In defending the heritage of October we critically defend the actions of the Bolsheviks in their main thrust before the victory of the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy based on the theory of ‘socialism in a single country’ after Lenin’s death in 1924. That is we say that the victory of the Stalinist state-based bureaucracy over the Bolshevik party represented a qualitative break with the struggle for world revolution, a counter-revolution against that great party and the revolutionary working class. And we defend the actions of the Left Opposition, again critically and in their main thrust, in championing that heritage until Trotsky’s defeat and expulsion from the USSR in 1929 and his subsequent struggle to found the Fourth International in 1938. Those so-called revolutionary socialists who fail to do this capitulate to bourgeois ideology in all its Anarchist, Libertarian Marxist, ‘Left Communist’ or straight liberal reactionary and conservative forms, concede to the class enemy the lie that bolshevism betrayed the working class and the Revolution, Leninism led to Stalinism, Trotskyism is no better than Stalinism and the working class is bereft of all ideological weapons with which to fight for a communist future. We see today many forces representing or influenced by at least some of these tendencies, as well as many who are opposed to them but in ways that are as yet confused for some and unorganised and/or not sufficiently theorised for others. And, of course, these conflicting tendencies will be reflected not just between individuals but also within serious thinking individual revolutionaries, particularly the youth

In an article in Marxist Voice No. 3 and in talks Simon Pirani attacks the Bolsheviks pre-1920 for having abandoned ‘democratic principles – the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, the primacy of the soviets of elected workers’ and peasants’ deputies, the rights of self-determination for colonised nations in the Russian Empire, free political association and free speech, and the abolition of the death penalty’, nonetheless their ‘room for manoeuvre was very, very limited’ because of the Civil War until 1920 when the economy improved and discussions began on how to build the new society’. We must first of all acknowledge that the conditions of Civil War forced a rigid militarization on the Bolsheviks which was theorised as Marxism when it should have been accepted as a temporary state of affairs which had to be abandoned as soon as conditions permitted.

The first ‘mistake’ he has charged against the Bolsheviks is the suppression of the Constituent Assembly. Although the Social Revolutionaries gained the majority in the Assembly in the November 1917 elections (17 million to just under 10 million) nevertheless the Bolsheviks won the cities by a very large majority, the SRs split before the convocation of the Assembly with the Left SRs sympathetic to the new Soviet power – most were later to join the Bolsheviks. Even by bourgeois democratic standards the Assembly no longer represented electorate amongst the peasantry, as the Left SRs, who represented the poorer peasantry, now supported the Bolsheviks but were almost unrepresented in the Assembly. The Assembly became a bastion of the counter-revolution for the Cadets, Right SRs, Mensheviks and others. In short the Soviets represented the socialist revolution based not only on the working class minority but also by then the majority of the poor peasantry whereas the Constituent Assembly represented the bourgeois counter-revolution based on the reactionary richer peasants, the landlords and the bourgeoisie. This was the political expression of the dual power which had co-existed since the February Revolution. Having seized power in the name of the working class in October the Bolsheviks could not cede it to a peasant dominated body representing capitalist social relations immediately after they had triumphed. The Bolsheviks correctly suppressed the counter-revolutionary Assembly. Rosa Luxemburg charged the Bolsheviks with abandoning democracy by suppressing the Assembly but even the ICC rejects this as theoretically incorrect, although of course her criticisms had nothing to do with Kautsky’s pro-imperialist line,

On “democracy” and “dictatorship”, there are profoundly contradictory elements in Luxemburg’s views. On the one hand, she saw the Bolsheviks’ suppression of the Constituent Assembly as negative for the life of the revolution, revealing a curious nostalgia for the outmoded forms of bourgeois democracy. On the other hand, the Spartacus programme written shortly afterwards called for the replacement of the old parliamentary assemblies by congresses of workers’ councils, which indicates that Luxemburg’s views on this point had evolved quite rapidly.[3]

However it is possibly to argue that this was a tactical error of timing only and that the Assembly should not have been abolished until later. Although this is wrong in our view it is not to be equated with those who denounce the dissolution from a bourgeois democratic standpoint.

The Left Communist Fraction was founded in 1918 and the Democratic Centralists was influential until the middle twenties. The Workers’ Truth Group was attacked by the Communist Workers’ Group’s Miasnikov in 1924 who said that by then the Workers’ Truth had nothing in common with them, and that they were ‘attempting to wipe out everything that was communist in the revolution of October 1917’ and were therefore completely Menshevist… (and) shares with Menshevism the vision that the revolution was premature. Most groups viewed the Workers Opposition as opportunist and were united to ‘oppose the Russian Soviet government’s New Economic Policy and United Front’. The Workers Opposition Group was led by ‘Left Communists’ Alexandra Kollontai, Alexander Shliapnikov and Sergei Medvedev and made many correct criticisms of the regime. For instance Kollontai’s 1921 pamphlet The Workers Opposition made an analysis of bureaucratisation which was later echoed by Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Despite agreeing with many of their criticisms of the regime we do not accept their workerist politics which concentrated on the needs of isolated groups. Very often these were skilled workers like the metalworkers in Moscow who demanded privileges for themselves which could only come from the surplus value produced by less skilled and organised workers. The material reality of isolation and poverty excluded the superabundance precondition for communism.

For instance ‘Left communists’ like Nichcolai Bukharin never showed any appreciation of the transitional method and his ultra-leftism consisted in infantile ‘class-against-class’ ultimatums which opposed the united front tactic at the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920 when Lenin had to declare himself on the right to make the case for demands on reformist Social Democratic leaders to expose them in practice and not just by sterile propaganda. The Left Communist line of ‘the united front from below’ was later adopted by the Stalinists to counter Trotsky’s demand for the workers’ united front and amounted in practice to the same sterile propagandism. Bukharin’s ultra-leftism transformed itself seamlessly into rightism, championing the rich peasantry under Stalin’s interpretation of the NEP, again rejecting the working class as the vital conscious class force which must be won to revolution, as his present day followers still do.[4] We reject as muddled nonsense the theories of Libertarian Marxists like Daniel Guerin who defines his current thus,

‘Libertarian Marxism rejects determinism and fatalism, giving the greater place to individual will, intuition, imagination, reflex speeds, and to the deep instincts of the masses, which are more far-seeing in hours of crisis than the reasonings of the ‘elites’; libertarian Marxism thinks of the effects of surprise, provocation and boldness, refuses to be cluttered and paralysed by a heavy ‘scientific ‘apparatus, doesn’t equivocate or bluff, and guards itself from adventurism as much as from fear of the unknown.’

In Left Wing Communism Lenin polemicised against other Left Communists like Herman Gorter, Anton Pannekoek, Otto Rühle, Karl Korsch, Amadeo Bordiga and Paul Mattick because they combined ringing revolutionary manifestos with an abject failure to engage with the working class in struggle in their trade unions and reformist social democratic parties by the united front tactic. But these were naive but sincere revolutionists who had not yet learned how to approach the masses and thought that it was sufficient to voluntaristically summons them to the barricades to make the revolution and there was no time to politically educate and raise their consciousness and confidence by intersecting with their partial struggles, as Lenin outlined in his famous polemic with them. Left wing communists today, like the ICC, reject the right of nations to self-determination and so objectively side with world imperialism despite their anti-capitalist intentions, see parliament and elections as nothing but a masquerade so are indifferent to the election of Tory governments and say ‘the various forms of union organisation, whether ‘official’ or ‘rank and file’, serve only to discipline the working class and sabotage its struggles’. This is indeed ‘an infantile disorder’, a backward workerist bourgeois ideology.

Comrade Pirani criticises the Bolsheviks for not allowing other Soviet parties political rights, for suppressing opposition to their rule and not allowing real measures of workers’ control of ‘non-alienated labour’. Comrade Pirani bases his arguments on the defence of the Factory Committees and opposition to the imposition of managers on factories by the Bolsheviks, similar to restructuring of the Red Army by Trotsky along professional lines where commands had to be executed without prolonged discussions and the officer was not elected. Quite simply the Civil War could not have been won or production revived without these methods.

In looking at the transitional period between a workers’ revolution and the future communist society we must firstly recognise that the social relations of production will continue to be bourgeois, even in a healthy workers’ state, although these will be progressively eliminated as material circumstances allow.[5] The Soviet Union was ‘a bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie’ in Lenin’s words. In a degenerate or deformed workers’ state these relations become permanent because the defence of the bureaucracy’s privileges necessitate national economic autarky and so denies the possibility of building socialism through world trade based on the international division of labour. Obviously the aspirations of the working class are to slough off the severe discipline of the bosses and their foremen and managers, to end sackings, low wages, and exploitation in all its form. But this necessitates the production of what Marx calls ‘super abundance’. Comrade Pirani makes a big deal about the lack of alienated labour in the USSR. In the section of The German Ideology called ‘The Development of the Productive Forces as a Material Premise of Communism’ this argument was brilliantly anticipated and fully answered by Marx,

This ‘alienation’ … can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an ‘intolerable’ power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity ‘propertyless,’ and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the ‘propertyless’ mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism (our emphasis).

In this passage we can see also direct anticipatory refutations of the theory of ‘socialism in a single country’. It contains the kernel of the main arguments Trotsky uses in The Revolution Betrayed in 1936. The first premise could not be met in Russia on its own; with its overwhelming peasant majority; ‘the great mass of (Russian) humanity’ certainly were not ‘propertyless’. And the second premise was not realised either; the Russian working class remained isolated and not in ‘their world-historical, instead of local, being’. This is a direct refutation of left Stalinists apologists for Stalin’s counter-revolutionary policies, up to his pact with Hitler in 1938 while the Spanish Republic was barely cold in its grave and Poland was awaiting its terrible fate.

Survival was the Bolshevik’s main goal from 1918 to 1920 and together this does explain, if not excuse, some of their excesses. However we would be guilty of historical falsification if we did not set these excesses in their historical context. Here again the IBT Platformism & bolshevism sets down these, citing Paul Avrich (The Russian Anarchists, Princeton 1967),

A few months later, relations between the Bolsheviks and the left-SRs and anarchists were severely strained by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk… Left Socialist Revolutionaries and a leftist Bolshevik minority faction, considered it a shameful capitulation... Partly in preparation for the anticipated guerrilla war against the Germans, and partly to discourage hostile manoeuvres by the Soviet government, the local clubs of the Moscow Federation of Anarchists had been organizing detachments of ‘Black Guards’, arming them with rifles, pistols and grenades…. After the stubborn anarchist campaign against the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the formation of armed guards and their underworld excursions came as the last straw. The Bolshevik leadership decided to act…On the night of 11-12 April, the Cheka (the Soviet security service) raided the anarchist headquarters and a furious gun battle broke out. According to Avrich, “A dozen Cheka agents were slain in the struggle, about 40 anarchists were killed or wounded, and more than 500 were taken prisoner.” In the months that followed, the SRs and anarchists sought revenge through assassinations and bombings. Lenin was shot and seriously wounded. On 25 September 1918, a joint left SR-anarchist squad blew up the headquarters of the Moscow Committee of the Communist Party during a leadership plenary. Twelve Committee members were killed, and 55 others were wounded.

It is easy to condemn with hindsight but surely we can understand why these groups were now banned. The revolution was not crushed by the mistakes of Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks nor by Stalin’s deviousness and cunning in outmanoeuvring Trotsky, though these did make their contribution, but by sheer grinding poverty and the despair it engendered in the masses (the working class primarily) when hopes of world revolution faded. Neither the German Social Democrats nor the Bolsheviks had knowledge of much of Marx’s early works on the question of alienation, although his short work of 1843 On the Jewish Question was available. So they lacked crucial insights into communism’s ultimate goal of human liberation. The surviving bits of The German Ideology (1845), was finally literally liberated from the ‘gnawing criticism of the mice’ only in 1932 as was The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. The Grundrisse was written in 1857-61 but was not published until 1939-41. As Trotsky explains in The Revolution Betrayed, his chief contribution to the Marxist cannon, when shortage arises at a market a queue forms, when severe shortages arise scuffles break out and a policeman has to be called. Stalin’s bureaucracy was the policeman of inequality whose main task was to say who got what. Those with that task never forget themselves. Material reality reproduced ‘all the old filthy business’.

Although we must lay part of the blame for this on both Lenin and Trotsky, however Lenin’s last struggle against Stalin’s bureaucratic methods on the Georgian question and Trotsky’s subsequent struggle to defend the heritage of October against Stalinist falsification until his assassination by Stalin’s agent in 1940 fully justifies for us their position, together with Rosa Luxemburg, as the twentieth century’s foremost revolutionary socialists.[6] Stalinism represented cowardly, right/ultra left centrist vacillations which cried ‘back’ at the point of revolution and ‘forward’ when it had suffered a defeat and so could not advance, e.g. Germany 1923 – Stalin urged restraint as the revolutionary situation developed and denied the defeat when the revolution was lost, ‘the revolution is not a bear, it will not run off into the forest’ he ridiculously proclaimed after the 1923 defeat..

From 1924 to 1933/5 the centrist Stalin based everything on defending the bureaucracy by the mantra of ‘socialism in a single country’ and abhorred world revolution as threatening to that bureaucracy. The gross errors in Germany, Italy, Britain, China, etc. are understandable only in that context. After the adoption of Popular Front right turn to class collaboration in 1935 we can no longer speak of Stalinism’s errors, now they definitively embraced counter-revolution in collaboration with capital to defend bureaucratic privileges. Stalinists consciously betrayed the Spanish Revolution to sign a pact with Hitler; they betrayed the working class in France and everywhere else, they consciously conspired and in WWII they actively collaborated with world imperialism in the mass bombing of the proletariat in urban centres from Warsaw to Berlin (by both ‘allies’), Dresden, Hamburg, Athens, Milan and Turin, after the latter two had been liberated by the Italian partisans, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The allied conferences at Potsdam and Yalta were in effect tacit agreements to betray and crush the post WWII revolutions.[7] The ‘Red Army’ did not call on Germany workers to arise and overthrow Hitler as help was at hand, they slandered all Germans as Nazis as Churchill and Roosevelt did, they brutally mass bombed, murdered and raped their way to Berlin as imperialism’s ally.

How might it have been had the German Revolution succeeded? The passage from Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme (demonstrating again the spurious nature of Louis Althusser’s ‘epistemological break’ between the early and late Marx) again can be negatively related to the USSR in 1920-24,

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

It takes but a moment’s reflection to see that ‘the narrow horizon of bourgeois right’ was not and could not have been ‘crossed in its entirety’ in this period in Russia and indeed it cannot ever be crossed in an isolated state (even one as rich as the USA) cut off from the great productive advantage which international trade based on the international division of labour affords to humanity in a globalised economy.

Neither could the Bolsheviks cede to the Kronstadt sailors in 1921, or to Makhno’s Anarchist Revolutionary Insurgent Army not only because of their links with the counter-revolution and the danger posed of imperialist invasion but because a settlement would have had to come from the surplus of workers elsewhere; there was not yet a privileged bureaucracy in command of the economy who were appropriating a disproportionate share of the economic wealth. Comrade Pirani concedes that ‘there is some evidence that counter-revolutionary forces wanted to exploit it to get at the Bolshevik government’ in Kronstadt but this completely distorts the case. Trotsky proved otherwise in Hue and Cry over Kronstadt in 1938.[8] Counter-revolutionary leaders were central to the revolt which took place in response to a nation wide strike wave which included Petrograd. However the vast majority of rank-and-file mutineers were sincere revolutionaries caught in a terrible bind of oppression and international isolation to which the Bolsheviks could supply no solution. From recent researched archive documents it is sufficient to note that all communists were imprisoned by the mutineers (‘Soviets without the communists’ was their slogan) and the commandant of the Kronstadt prison, an anarchist named Stanislav Shustov, was preparing to execute the leading Communists and had set up a machine gun outside the cell where the twenty three of them were held to do so but was baulked only by the advance of the Red Army across the ice (Spartacist No. 59).[9] Neither however can we endorse the manner of the suppression of the mutineers and the terrible fate meted out to those captured by the Cheka, prolonged torture and executions as recounted by Victor Serge, who nonetheless continued to defend the revolution.[10] It is clear that here the repressive state apparatus was taking on a role of its own (Lenin managed to save some Menshevik leaders when he learned of their impending execution), eventually to finds a true champion for the protection of the privileges and corruption of the bureaucracy in the person of Stalin.[11]

Of course comrade Pirani can point out that before Stalin’s triumph the Bolsheviks policed inequality and he makes big on the question of the inequality of rations. The crucial difference for us is that this was not a developed centrist not yet a hardened counter-revolutionary party; its mistakes and failings were discussed and fought against. However there is truth in the charge that bureaucratic methods were employed against loyal oppositionists, particularly the anti-political workerist currents, when political struggle would have been far more appropriate. This reliance on force is understandable as counter-revolution was using any political space afforded to it to rally for the overthrow of the Soviet regime. However space should have been found for these loyal oppositionists, and we must reject the concept of ‘objective counter-revolutionaries’ and strongly differentiate between sincere revolutionists and open counter-revolutionaries who fully deserved the revolutionary justice meted out to them in the Civil War and when they sought to overthrow the state. However blanket oppression with only the Bolsheviks allowed was the wrong approach as it facilitated the rise of Stalinism. Lenin’s secret ban on factions in the 10^th Congress in 1921 illegitimatised all opposition, even within the party. This clearly did facilitate the victory of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Point 3: The need for democratic soviets/workers councils

Human beings are political animals as Aristotle (almost) said. Only the direct participatory democracy prefigured by Athenian democracy, which however did not include women, slaves or other non-citizens, can liberate all from the tyranny of the few. Up to now only revolutions in the brief periods of the ascendancy of the oppressed have produced anything approaching participatory democracy. The masses, apart from women, Blacks and Native Americans participated in the New England Town Meetings of the War of Independence, in the Putney Debates Colonel Rainsborough famously asserted that ‘...for really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, Sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under...’. Gracchus Babeuf (1760 -1797), the great French Revolutionist famously proclaimed that ‘Society must be made to operate in such a way that it eradicates once and for all the desire of a man to become richer, or wiser, or more powerful than others.’ Marx’s The German Ideology and The Economic and philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 identified all forms of alienation with oppression which communist society would finally end. Alienation in its religious form has been historically produced by ignorance of the workings of nature but it has been constantly reproduced by class oppression; specifically today it is reproduced in all its forms by the division of labour under capitalism and social relations of production.

The Paris Commune of 1871 was the example of working people taking power. The freely elected council members were instantly recallable, paid an average wage and had equal status to other commune members. It was the first soviet or workers’ council to hold power. Marx recognised it as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Lenin agreed but said they had ‘stopped half way … led astray by dreams of … justice’; he thought their ‘excessive magnanimity’ had prevented them from ‘destroying’ the class enemy by ‘ruthless extermination’. In 1905 the first Petrograd Soviet produced the next and more widespread example of participatory democracy led by the working class. It was revolutionary and controlled by workers’ democracy with elected and instantly recallable delegates imposing its mass rule on the minority capitalist and landlord class. They reappeared in February 1917 beginning in the cities but spread throughout Russia, including the countryside. Soviets/workers’ councils appeared everywhere a serious movement of the working class challenged for power in Germany and Eastern Europe. However they did not last long, the Bolsheviks were unable and unwilling to sustain them when the tide of revolution ebbed. Their revolutionary character explains this.

We reject the left communist/anarchist theories that counterpose the revolutionary party to the class and to the soviets. It is inconceivable that the October Revolution would have triumphed if the Bolsheviks had not won the majority in the strategically important soviets in Petrograd and Moscow in political struggle from February to October. Left to the ‘spontaneous’ leadership of Cadets and Mensheviks or the vague semi-religious aspirations of the anarchists the revolution would have been lost. This was the fate of the Iranian shoras in 1979-80. The demand that the party does not substitute itself for the class does not imply that the party or some combination of revolutionary socialists must not win the allegiance of the vanguard of the masses to the need for revolution. This vanguard, whether or not they join a revolutionary socialist party, then in turn is the key to guiding the masses in revolution. When the tide of world revolution was thrown back in Germany bourgeois relations of production had to be restored to sustain the economy. Marx’s vision is ultimately only realisable on a world scale; the state can then progressively wither away as its tasks are accomplished in the transitional period after the workers have seized power until the full communist society of social and economic equality as the world revolution progresses. As the PR D is for Democracy puts it,

Society in this stage would be ruled and administered by workers’ councils: assemblies of delegates elected in every workplace and locality. Administrative tasks would be rotated to avoid the emergence of a permanent bureaucracy. No official could earn more than the average wage of a skilled worker, to prevent careerism and corruption taking hold. This sort of state would be only ‘half’ a state, since it would be made up of a large proportion of the armed population and thus unable to oppose and coerce the majority or demand privileges from it.

Yet even this form of working class democracy would continue to be state, that is, an instrument of coercion and thus a dictatorship. Of course, this time not against the working class majority but against the capitalist minority; the working class has not need to conceal this fact. It says openly and honestly that the capitalist would be denied the right to treat the means of production as private property, the right to sack workers, the right to control the media and the right to live in luxury while others do all the work. Faced with revolt from within or attack from without, a working class revolutionary dictatorship would not flinch from all the emergency measures of a war to prevent the capitalist minority from using force to recover their power, privileges and property.

Indeed, such a state would, after many decades of democratic socialist planning, be able to finally overcome the legacy of the division of society into classes, thus removing the necessity for a state apparatus of coercion altogether. The institutions of working class democracy could gradually be absorbed into society at large, as ever fewer of the functions required the use of authority. The classless society would therefore also become a stateless society – democracy would wither away.’

Frederick Engels put it thus in Socialism, Utopian or Scientific:

The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society—the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society—this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not ‘abolished.’ It dies out.

And with it, of course the soviets and democracy as there would no longer be any need to regulate the behaviour between human beings other than by social convention. But everything depends on the advance of the world revolution. The Russian Soviets died because that failed, not because of the mistakes of the Bolsheviks.

The prime and overwhelmingly dominating reason for the failure of soviet democracy was the defeats of revolution in the west, particularly in Germany in 1918, 19, 21 and 23, the subsequent isolation of the revolution, the crushing disappointment suffered by the working class and the Bolsheviks themselves at these defeats and the terrible material, social and cultural poverty of Russia combined with the immense devastation caused by WWI and the Civil War (1914-1920). This devastated the economy, down to a fraction of its pre-war capacity by 1920; this is why the factory committees and proper workers’ control could not operate and why eventually Stalinist bureaucracy crushed the Bolshevik party and the workers’ hope of real communism.

No good intentions could overcome that isolation, no revolutionary aspiration could supply the ‘springs of co-operative wealth’ in these dire circumstances. In 1918 most of the left joined the Bolsheviks, supported Lenin and Trotsky and became stalwarts of the revolution. Many right Mensheviks and SR did go over to the counter-revolution and then when it failed many later joined the party and supported Stalin against Trotsky. They only flocked to the assistance of the state to secure good jobs for themselves when Stalin had crushed the revolution and society looked somewhat like the one they had aspired to in 1917. Indeed we might speculate on what type of a society was envisaged by Lenin’s ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ and how many Bolsheviks must have envisioned this in Russia before October emboldened visions of the world revolution? In a sense comrade Pirani’s assertion that the Mensheviks and SRs could have done no worse than Stalin had they won power is misplaced because they did get to do their worst under Stalin, with the exception that by then they judged it unwise to restore the capitalist class to power, even though the working class was by now totally politically expropriated.

Soviet, that is workers’ council democracy, is the only really possible modern form of participatory mass democracy. This must be always and ever be a revolutionary phenomenon. If a national revolution is baulked in advancing to world revolution by defeats of the other national revolutions then communism is impossible, the best that can be achieved in national isolation is a degenerate workers’ state where the capitalists of world imperialism are denied the possibility of exploiting those workers, but the workers themselves are denied the possibility of advancing to communism through participating in the world revolution and the international division of labour. A communist society is totally out of the question at that stage and that is the type of society the leaders of Bolshevism settled for as soon as they realised after 1920-23 that the world revolution was lost for a whole historical period. But they should have spoken the truth and left us revolutionary socialists to pick up the banner they had been forced to drop by these appallingly adverse conditions.

Anyone who knows the history of the period realises that the revolutionary politics of the epoch was very like bourgeois politics in that it had great difficulty in making objective analysis outside of immediate struggles; those who won these struggles got to impose their historiography on subsequent events. Significantly it was when Lenin’s illness and enforced divorce from the immediate struggles that allowed him the space to begin the struggle against Stalinism. And likewise it was only when Trotsky lost high office that he began his serious struggle against the degeneration of the regime after 1926.27. We are fortunate that we have the works of Leon Trotsky to enable us to oppose the revolutionary perspective to that Stalinist status quo ‘socialism in a single country’ justification for the lost revolution.

Point 4. The need for a Marxist Revolutionary Socialist Party

We must acknowledge that the ultimate goal of human liberation from oppressive alienation imposed by capitalist social relations are the same for the best from the Platformist Anarchist/Left Communist tradition as they are from the Marxist/Leninist/ Trotskyist tradition. In particular we acknowledge a large measure of agreement on the final aims with those from the Platformist Mekhno, the Friends of Durruti, the International Communist Current, the Irish Workers Solidarity Movement traditions.

But the Platformist Anarchists and Left Communist fail ideologically in their perspectives for the winning of state power or when power passes into the hands of the working class spontaneously as in Spain in 1936; they do not support the necessity for a workers’ state. When Franco launched his coup in July 1936 the mainly anarchist workers defeated his army in Catalonia and many other places by heroic self-sacrificing struggle. From the IBT’s Platformism & bolshevism this is an account of what the leadership of the anarchist FAI/CNT did,

On 21 July 1936, after the working class had defeated the army’s attempt to seize power, leaders of the CNT/FAI were summoned to the palace by Catalonia’s president. Diego Abad de Santillán, a prominent FAI leader, reported that President Companys, who had no military or police apparatus, told them: ‘You are masters of the town and of Catalonia, because you defeated the Fascist soldiers on your own….You have won and everything is in your power. If you do not need me, if you do not want me as president, say so now, and I shall become just another soldier in the antifascist struggle. If, on the other hand, you believe me…then perhaps with my party comrades, my name, and my prestige, I can be of use to you…’cited in The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain, Pierre Broué and Emile Témime, p 130.

Santillán provided the following timeless example of the logic of ‘apolitical’ anarchism,

‘We could have remained alone, imposed our absolute will, declared the Generalidad null and void, and imposed the true power of the people in its place, but we did not believe in dictatorship when it was being exercised against us, and we did not want it when we could exercise it ourselves only at the expense of others. The Generalidad would remain in force with President Companys at its head….’ --Ibid. p 131.

Santillán was rewarded with the post of Minister of Economy in the Catalan government.’ [12]

Of course the Friends of Durruti (FoD) rejected this rotten capitulation to popular frontism. But they came close to advocating a workers’ state and so repudiating anarchism – they were accused of ‘bolshevising anarchism’ by the rest of the anarchists. When faced with the immediate necessity for a state to fight the fascists and having no theory of a workers’ state the majority capitulated to the bourgeois state but the FoD, with the Trotskyists, saw the necessity to fight on and so denounced the FAI/CNT betrayals of June 1936 and the May Days of 1937. But in reality the FoD sought to ‘anarchise’ bolshevism. Because they failed to understand that the workers need their own state, as the IBT pamphlet points out, they proposed a revolutionary army instead – a sort of untheorised semi-state. To whom could this army answer if not to a government of soviets? And will not this government be forced to organise the economy, set up a judicial system and a police force against counter-revolution? This could only be a workers’ state. However as anarchists they reject all ‘authoritarian’ bureaucratic structures. Platformists, like all anarchists, lump together the workers’ state and even the trade unions with the bourgeois state so they must inevitably capitulate to the bourgeois state if power ever falls into their hands.

And like all anarchists they fail to distinguish between a united front and a popular front, between military alliances against imperialism without conceding political support or definite agreements on short term aims without political capitulation to the bourgeoisie. In other words they reject the transitional method of the united front and anti-imperialism united front as the communist method of placing demands for class struggle action on the reformist leaders of the working class and for a real fight against imperialism by the self-proclaimed anti-imperialist leaders of the national liberation movements to expose both of them in practice before their followers and so prepare for the building of a mass revolutionary socialist party.

But the most telling criticism of Platformism is that outside of a world revolution which builds communism on a global scale how can any isolated national revolution survive? Even if it does repel the imperialist attacks and survive economic blockade is it not bound to degenerate like the USSR under Stalin because of sheer grinding poverty? Most left communists and anarchists (but not all) never look at these problems at all; those that do attempt to substitute an international political group for an internationalist political perspective. For them the most important arena is their own local struggle. If they had won in 1917 or 1936/7, supposing that were possible, they would have had to build their non-alienated nirvana as a privileged minority – anarchism in a single locality is worse that socialism in a single country because it is even further divorced from the reality of globalised capitalism. And communism must supersede the globalised division of labour by an international federation of workers states’ before all states can wither away in the communist future. If your aim is not world revolution via a world federation of workers states your fights will always end up like the FAI/CNT in Barcelona in 1936 and 1937.

Would the October revolution have triumphed without the Bolsheviks? Would the Bolsheviks have changed their programme from The Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry to All Power to the Soviets, Down with the Government of Landlords and Capitalists without the April Theses? Without the struggle against the betrayal of the German Social Democrats on 4 August 1914 would the October revolution been even in the position to launch the assault on the Winter Palace? The weakness of the Bolsheviks was that they were a national party only and not yet a part of a world party. Other revolutionaries might have been able help them to avoid or at least to modify some of the errors in the crucial years after the first flush of the revolution had spent itself.

As August Thalheimer argued in his 1930 work Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin, ‘Out of genuine revolutionary Marxism, both Rosa Luxemburg and also Lenin rescued the general conception of the proletarian dictatorship and the role of revolutionary violence within it. Rosa Luxemburg championed this conception… (against Bernstein and Kautsky) who opposed the proletarian dictatorship and limited the revolutionary struggle to the democratic-parliamentary-trade union struggle’. Luxemburg later correctly criticised the Bolsheviks for justifying in theory the measures they were forced to take in the Civil War. Germany and other western countries had a more mature working class and moreover one that was educated enough to exercise a democratic interaction with their revolutionary leadership. But she did not understand the crucial role of the party and she was wrong about the suppression of the Constituent Assembly and wrong about the banning of other opposition parties who had become openly counter-revolution. But she was right to oppose Lenin’s decree of 1918 abolishing workers’ control. And the ban on opposition parties should have been only temporary. Lenin’s ban on internal party factions at the Tenth Congress in 1921 was clearly wrong and a mistake that did assist the rise of Stalinism as we have observed above.

As for revolutionary violence in the Civil War period we have only contempt for those pacifists and Libertarian Marxists who denounce it, decry the restoration of the death penalty in those circumstances. They had no option but to fight with everything they had. To deny that is to take a cowardly bourgeois liberal stance and to accept the bourgeois myth that all ‘legitimate’ violence belongs to the slave owner and slaves are not entitled to use violence to burst their chains asunder. ‘We were now hard, cold and ruthless as our enemies had been since hostilities began. The British were met with their own weapons. They had gone down in the mire to destroy us and our nation, and down after them we had to go to stop them.’ Thus Tommy Barry justified the very undemocratic way in which the west Cork IRA meted out summary executions to Black and Tans, spies and informers in 1920-21. Revolutions are not schools of humanity and when Karl Kautsky attacked the Bolsheviks in 1918 from this bourgeois liberal stance in his book The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Lenin replied ‘burning with anger’ in his The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism (both given to all delegates at the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920) and Trotsky’s Social Democracy and the Wars of Intervention: Between Red and White (1920) are the three major works that attack Kautskyism and the Second International who were supporting the destruction of the Revolution. The three books each have one chapter devoted to the specific question of ‘democracy’; its class nature and the fraud of abstract pure democracy whilst defending the dictatorship of the proletariat and the use of revolutionary violence. They had not encountered the same animal in its ‘extreme’ CPGB form but it is clearly the same thing.

Point 5: Trotsky’s Transitional Programme

The idea behind transitional demands is simple, and should be non-controversial amongst serious Marxists: we must find a method to develop the current struggles of the working class and the reformist consciousness that goes with them towards revolutionary consciousness and pose the necessity for the overthrow of capitalism itself. Simply posing the stark alternatives of reformist demands and a revolutionary overthrow is a recipe for rejection and is the method of ultra-left sectarians – the Left Communists we examined above. We must find demands that seek to escalate the struggle in a way that poses the revolution, initially to a vanguard and thence to the broader masses. In this regard serious Marxists, As Plekhanov and James P Cannon did, distinguish between agitation and propaganda. We seek to advance the struggle by agitational demands for the broad masses: ‘land, bread and peace’ is a very famous example. But such a demand on its own can never make the revolution. Simultaneous propaganda demands are necessary to win the political vanguard. The most famous example is the April Theses. Neither of these was adequate on their own - in fact each individually was useless if not taken as part of the revolutionary process. If they are taken in conjunction, the vanguard can be won and that then becomes the key to the masses, gains their trust and by that can hold back the fight when only a section is ready or unleash it in the most favourable circumstances for victory - the restraint of the 1917 July days and the organisation of the insurrection in October were the result of that approach. Of course, we do not have revolutionary situations every day (or decade), but the method should be clear even in the dispiriting periods of capitalist booms. We would argue that it was this method of approach that distinguished the Bolsheviks from the German Social Democrats, even in the period between 1905 and 1914, although these differences were then untheorised. Lenin clearly had big illusions in Kautsky, as demonstrated by What is to be Done? He had ‘bent the stick’ in that polemic, he admitted in 1908.[13] Whatever he failed to understand in 1903 about mobilising the masses he had certainly learned by 1917.

Trotsky’s programme was directed at the organised working class in the factories and other workplaces. To call this ‘economism’ is to reject the traditional orientation of communism to the working class as the depository of the revolution itself. Those who reject work in the trade unions objectively reject the revolution. The revolution needs the cadres to lead the masses, but Trotsky certainly was not hung up on factory committees: his proletarian military policy, drafted in the Spring of 1940, was designed to turn his followers towards military training and war, because he knew that resistance armies would inevitably feature in the outcome of that war. Risibly comrade Conrad seeks to prove that Trotsky saw no further need for education and organisation, because ‘fighting to maintain existing conditions was all that was needed to ‘win the prize’’ and Trotsky was suffering from ‘a classic case of elevating trade union struggles to the level of socialist politics’.

The Transitional programme itself has been superseded by the post-war stabilisation of capitalism following the defeat of those revolutionary crises, but the method is still valid because it is the communist method in the epoch of imperialism - of the Bolsheviks, of Lenin and Trotsky. This rejected the maximum-minimum dichotomy of the old German social democracy with its illusions in capitalist democracy and its mechanical determinism which saw the march of socialism as an unstoppable force, and the subjective factor of revolutionary leadership were reduced to passive observers at worst (Bernstein) or at best to professional advisors to urge on this historical process (Kautsky).

Revolutionary socialists must, after all, believe that the subjective factor of revolutionary leadership will be the decisive factor in the final analysis even while rejecting the mechanical materialism of Plekhanov’s The role of the individual in history. The Bolsheviks also discarded (in 1919) the name ‘Social Democracy’ for ‘Communist’ because they rejected the last vestiges of illusions in the progressive role of ‘red republicanism’, which radicals saw as the main threat to 19th century bourgeois society, because even in England the political domination of the landed, albeit bourgeoisified, aristocracy reflected the fact that radical capitalism had not yet outlived its historically progressive role. But by 1917 the world had moved on from the pre-(modern) imperialist 1891 Erfurt programme, the great depression had intensified inter-imperialist rivalries, the domination of finance capital and the emergence of vast syndicates and trusts in Germany in particular and the robber barons in the US signified a different world order and with it different programmatic imperatives.

Now on the agenda was the mass insurrection for the seizure of power via a new and far more direct democracy signalled by the emergence of the 1905 soviets. By 1917 these were directly and immediately counterposed to the Constituent Assembly - the best example of the CPGB’s ‘extreme [bourgeois] democracy’. These elements of the Erfurt programme - illusions in parliamentary democracy combined with mechanical determinism and a lack of orientation to a new imperialism which had not yet fully matured - were products of their time. The Erfurt programme cannot be the model for the revolutionary programme for the modern, imperialist world because that world had not yet emerged in 1891. It is true that the 1938 Transitional programme is also outdated but it does address the tasks of a whole historical period of the modern imperialist world, whereas Erfurt largely addressed the pre-imperialist world.

Moreover Erfurt addressed a world where Marxist philosophy had degenerated at the hands of the German and Austrian Marxists to marginalise the dialectic. Not in vain did Lenin sweat over his Philosophical Notebooks in Switzerland from 1914 to recapture the dynamic and profound influence of Hegel on Marx. Read Plekhanov, Franz Mehring, Paul Lafargue or Abram Leon’s On the Jewish question to appreciate that, whilst the Second International’s non-dialectical and mechanical understanding of Marxism could produce some profound insights into the workings of capitalist societies – far better than any bourgeois commentators in most cases – nevertheless it inevitably produced profound errors as well. And, yes, this relative but historically profound backwardness did facilitate both the vote of the German Social Democracy on August 4 1914 for the Kaiser’s war credits and the capitulation by ‘the creeping revolutionary defencism of Kamenev-Stalin’ pre-October 1917 to the Provisional Government’s bourgeois democratic programme, as well as to the ideological form of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. That all these lessons should now be rejected so forcefully by comrade Conrad under the mantra ‘Back to classical Marxism’ demonstrated that this rejection is necessary for those who seek a third camp in communism between Stalinism and Trotskyism.

Let us first say what the Transitional Programme is not and then what it is. It was not a soothsayer’s guide to the future to enable revolutionaries to correctly place themselves in order to take advantage of the new situations, which only their leader could foretell. It was a programme designed to make the future: that is, to orientate those serious Marxists who understood the world situation to the revolutionary potential lodged in that situation and to educate them on how they might actualise that potential.

But let us now turn to the current political significance of transitional demands and the method of comrade Conrad and the CPGB. In attacking Trotsky’s thesis that mankind’s productive forces had stagnated (surely that was true in 1938?), he reveals his own philosophical idealist outlook. He is surprised that Marx’s famous Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (flawed in some important respects he says but does not tell us which ones) ‘can, after all, be read to mean that the material productive forces, not the class struggle, are the locomotive of history’ and Trotsky can therefore be excused for making the same mistake. What mistake? The class struggle cannot be the ‘locomotive of history’ (surely ‘motive force’ would be better?), because that immediately poses the question, what is the motive force of the class struggle? Marx explained, Trotskyists understand, but apparently comrade Conrad does not. It is the conflicts between the social relations of production and the productive forces that are the motive force of history and thereby the class struggle. Trotsky never regarded the ‘existing consciousness’ of workers as unproblematic - that was the whole point of transitional demands: we must approach the working class at its existing level of consciousness or accept that we cannot approach them at all, and thereby give up the struggle and reduce ourselves either to a propaganda sect or a reformist group.

The Workers Power’s article, The Transitional Programme fifty years on, makes the following valuable points which correspond closely with our own position; [14]

Minimum or immediate demands can, under certain conditions, be granted by capitalism as a means of pacifying the working class. Transitional demands, on the other hand, providing they really correspond to the objective situation, cannot be granted in full by capitalism. If they are fought for and even partially won then they raise class warfare to a qualitatively higher level, at once obliging the proletariat to move more and more against the very foundations of class society and at the same time creating the consciousness and organisation capable of a socialist solution. They pose a solution, a way forward from the impasse of normal immediate demands (reforms) and methods of struggle towards more effective ones, which organise working class strength so that it challenges the very logic of capitalist economy, as well as the capitalists’ control and direction of that economy.

These perspectives were short to medium term, not epochal—a matter of years not decades or half a century. They applied to the period—the pre-revolutionary period—Trotsky confronted. The beginning and end of such a period is determined by world historic events. The period on which Trotsky based his perspectives can, roughly speaking, be said to have begun with the victory of Hitler and ended with the victory of US imperialism at the end of the Second World War. For that period Trotsky’s perspectives were both realistic—they took stock of the enormity of the crisis facing mankind—and filled with revolutionary optimism. That is they counted, on the subjective side, on the will of the FI—embodied in its programme—to resolve that crisis in a revolutionary fashion. In the context of 1938 to have advanced any other perspective than Trotsky’s for proletarian triumph would have been merely an excuse for either treachery or abstentionism.

We recognise that to establish and maintain the class independence of the working class, only half-formed at present by the reformist class consciousness lodged in the trade unions and social democratic parties and the various centrist groupings that proclaim revolution, we need a revolutionary socialist party.

Therefore the transitional method is

The united front tactic and the series of demands and slogans we place on the reformist misleaders of the trade unions and mass reformist workers parties
The Anti-imperialist united front tactic is the limited tactical agreements and military blocs we may form with nationalist misleaders of anti-imperialist struggles to win the mass away from them.

To refuse all tactics, to fail to see the difference between united fronts and popular fronts, to foolishly seek to maintain the class independence of the working class by ‘Left Communist’ abstentionist sectarianism is to abandon transitionalism and to harangue the masses from the sidelines as the Spartacus League, the IBT and other do. That is the road to total marginalisation.

Point 6: Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution

Trotsky sums up his famous theory thus, ‘the Perspective of permanent revolution may be summarized in the following way: the complete victory of the democratic revolution in Russia is conceivable only in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, leaning on the peasantry. The dictatorship of the proletariat, which would inevitably place on the order of the day not only democratic but socialistic tasks as well, would at the same time give a powerful impetus to the international socialist revolution. Only the victory of the proletariat in the West could protect Russia from bourgeois restoration and assure it the possibility of rounding out the establishment of socialism’ (Trotsky, Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution, August 1939). As we have previously argued no modern revolution can be purely a national event – in fact this is true also for bourgeois revolutions from the seventeenth century – but globalisation today makes every country so interdependent that Stalinist ideology only finds its autarkic redoubt in semi-feudal-ruled North Korea.

We reject reductionalist notions from those like the International Communist Current that the world is not split into oppressed and oppressor nations, that ‘since the beginning of the 20th century, all wars are imperialist wars, part of the deadly struggle between states large and small to conquer or retain a place in the international arena…The working class can only respond to them through its international solidarity and by struggling against the bourgeoisie in all countries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/international_Communist_Current). Likewise we reject State Capitalist and all Libertarian Marxist theories which have historically refused to defend the USSR, Eastern Europe, China, Viet-Nam and Cuba as degenerated and deformed workers states.[15] We defend oppressed semi-colonial albeit relatively industrialised nations like Argentina and Iraq against imperialist attack and reject attempts to create new categories within Marxism like ‘sub-imperialism’. We reject the defence of any so-called ‘rights to self-determination’ of colonial settlers in the Malvinas, the North of Ireland, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Palestine, etc. These settlers cannot claim national rights because they specifically reject any attempts to define themselves as nations, affirming their ‘Loyalist’ status to their imperialist masters, as the North of Ireland Unionists and the Malvinas, Gibraltarian and Zionist settlers do. They are in most cases entitled to rights of cultural autonomy on the national territory of their host nations. We defend Trotsky’s theory as applicable to all semi-colonial nations, bourgeois of deformed workers states, and its method as applicable to all countries. As Indian Marxist M N Roy said at the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920,

We have to develop our parties in these countries in order to take the lead in the organisation of the united front against imperialism. Just as the tactics of the united proletarian front lead to the accumulation of proletarian strength in the Western countries and unmasks and discloses the treachery and compromising tactics of the Social-Democratic Party by bringing them into active conflict, so will the campaign of the united anti-imperialist front in the colonial countries liberate the leadership of the movement from the timid and hesitating bourgeoisie and bring the masses more actively in the forefront, through the most revolutionary social elements, which constitute the basis of the movement, thereby securing the final victory.

A Colonial or semi-colonial bourgeoisie is not capable carrying through a ‘democratic revolution’ to produce political democracy or solve the agrarian problems of semi feudal landlords and poor and landless peasants. Only the proletariat can achieve the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution but they cannot stop there. All genuine revolutionary upsurges, the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the German and Central European revolutionary upsurges that followed, the Italian Factory Occupations of 1920 and many others including the Iranian Revolution of 1979, produce situations of dual power because of the following contradiction. The initial revolutionary ‘democratic’ consciousness of the masses, the cowardice of the ‘left’ petty bourgeois representatives of capitalist socialist relations and the pressure from the working class and the fact that socialisation of the economy is the objectively posed task of the epoch. As Trotsky observed,

But the events have proved that without a party capable of directing the proletarian revolution, the revolution itself is rendered impossible. The proletariat cannot seize power by a spontaneous uprising. Even in highly industrialized and highly cultured Germany the spontaneous uprising of the toilers – in November 1918 – only succeeded in transferring power to the hands of the bourgeoisie. One propertied class is able to seize the power that has been wrested from another propertied class because it is able to base itself upon its riches, its cultural level, and its innumerable connections with the old state apparatus. But there is nothing else that can serve the proletariat as a substitute for its own party. (Trotsky, Lessons of October Chapter 1)

It is an iron law of history that unless a revolutionary leadership of the working class emerges which understands these objectively posed tasks and wins the vanguard of the class to its programme the revolution will be defeated and vicious, murderous reaction will triumph. This is a key feature of the theory of permanent revolution and one moreover that applies to all countries. Trotsky again,

Not only backward China, but in general no country in the world can build socialism within its own national limits: the highly-developed productive forces which have grown beyond national boundaries resist this, just as do those forces which are insufficiently developed for nationalization. The dictatorship of the proletariat in Britain, for example, will encounter difficulties and contradictions, different in character, it is true, but perhaps not slighter than those that will confront the dictatorship of the proletariat in China. Surmounting these contradictions is possible in both cases only by way of the international revolution (Perm Rev p.131).

In expropriating the capitalists the working class would have to socialise the economy, plan production for need and fight internationally for the world revolution, as only on the basis of an internationally planned economy could the economic, social, political and environmental crises of capitalism be overcome. This theory directly refutes Stalinist theories of ‘socialism in one country’ and the Anarchist/Libertarian Marxist illusions in local autonomy or producers’ communes divorced from the globalised class struggle. As against these we again say that the working class needs its own state, its own repressive apparatus, the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the transitional period between the seizure of power by the working class and the flowering of the communist society of the future based on the victory of the world revolution, the ending of economic want, super abundance and the liberation of humanity from all class oppression.

In the CPGB both the RDG, in an explicit form, and the Provisional Central Committee of the CPGB, in more sophisticated but nonetheless clear form, propose not a socialist but a bourgeois-democratic political revolution. That is a Kautskyite utopian scheme to render perfect modern capitalist society without overthrowing it. The RDG’s democratic republic is clearly a stage that will allow a socialist revolution (workers’ republic) to be fought for as the next stage in the indefinite future. This Menshevik position allows the PCC to appear far more orthodox than they really are by defending Lenin’s pre-1917 ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ condemning stageism, but crucially having the same governmental slogan for the democratic republic. The traditional Marxist understanding of the term ‘democratic revolution’ is that it equates with ‘bourgeois revolution’. At least that is how Marx, Lenin and Trotsky used it. We can see that this is not how the CPGB or the RDG use the term. Does some form of universal democratic consent (the magic 50% +) need to be given before they could accept the legitimacy of a revolution? But no, It is wrong to think a ‘democratic revolution is a revolution achieved in a democratic way’ witness the English, French and Russian revolutions, etc.’ But we have that democracy now or at least enough of it to hope that if we get a good leader, say John McDonnell, we will get a great deal more of it or even complete it. Hurray for McDonnell, the democratic revolutionist!

A political revolution in Marxist terms is counterposed to a social revolution, not to some supposedly non-political economic revolution. The very idea suggested by the RDG that removing economic power from the bourgeoisie is a non-political act, ‘economism’ is ludicrous. The 1830 and the 1848 revolutions in France were successful political revolutions because power passed between sections of the ruling class. The terrible fate of the working class who defended the unemployed workers’ centres in Paris in 1848 makes it clear whose victory it was. Social revolutions like the English, French or Russian ones transfer power from one class to another; they are events of world historical import, far more important than political revolutions. It certainly is not ‘economism’ to fight for a social rather than a political revolution. The latter is what the RDG advocates, it seems to us.

What is the purpose of this democratic revolution then if not democracy? Crucially does it transfer both economic and political power from the capitalist class to the working class? And this is a question for the entire CPGB. If its purpose is not to institute a planned economy as the first step (not stage) in a world revolution then it can only have this limited political goal. But if it aims to produce all its goods and services to look after the social and economic needs of global humanity and not for the profits of global corporations, increasingly now the finance capital ones, then we have a real social, socialist revolution. And if that is what is objectively posed, that is the perspective we should orientate all our forces towards. Than is why comrade Mike Mcnair’s ‘mixed economy’ is so problematic. Surely the first sweep of revolution would have to (undemocratically) seize control of the banks and all the other leading heights of the economy and abolish the stock exchange? Of course this does not include corner shops, small businesses or farms, although obviously there would be controversy about the dividing line between petty private enterprise and the large scale productive forces. The political signal this would give to the working class would be the equivalent of that given to the Parisian sans culottes by Robespierre’s reign of terror; it would establish that the leadership was serious about the revolution.[16] It would arm that revolution far better for the inevitable counterrevolutionary offensive of the bourgeoisie. That is where Salvador Allende failed, his illusions in ‘democracy’ (albeit of the non-revolutionary variety) meant that he defended the economic interests of capitalism and disarmed the workers and peasants before the final and fatal onslaught of the generals. The mixed-economy line ‘forgets’ who rules, the working class or the capitalists and would be seen as a half-hearted effort and would not mobilise any significant revolutionary fervour. McDonnell would not make that mistake, would he?

Comrade Conrad makes clear his stageist views in his article in Weekly Worker 548 Thursday October 14 2004,

In envisaging a third (workers’) revolution, socialists and communists in the US will, of course, learn from the Patriots of 1776 and the Radicals of the Civil War. What these revolutionaries began in terms of democracy the third revolution must complete. The third revolution must therefore arm itself, as a vital precondition for success, with a programme for a root and branch overhaul of the 1787 constitution...A single chamber of congress, elected annually, which has full legislative and executive powers, is what is needed. Congress delegates, or representatives, should get their democratic mandate from an equal constituency basis. The democratic case against the standing armed forces - grown to the point of hypertrophy since World War II - is surely unanswerable. A system of popular militias must be initiated.

Having rejected the socialist revolution he admits that,

Technically none of these demands in themselves go beyond the limits of capitalism. However, they do, taken together, provide the necessary salient from which the battle for democracy can be fought and won. Then the rule of the majority can be realised - not merely in form, but in substance. That is a truth we communists hold to be self-evident. Finish the American revolution

Is this not a stageist, bourgeois programme in the good old Stalinist tradition which would be a noose for the working class and leave them at the mercy of the same forces massacred the Shanghai Soviet in 1927? And does it not suggest that the method, at least, of Permanent Revolution applies to all countries? Trotsky on China,

‘All right,’ says the Communist of the East, hanging his head, ‘we will try to conceive of it exactly as Lenin, according to your words, conceived of it before the revolution… ‘But didn’t Lenin explain in 1918 that the democratic dictatorship found its genuine and true realization only in the October Revolution which established the dictatorship of the proletariat? Would it not be better to orient the party and the working class precisely toward this prospect?’ ‘Under no circumstances. Do not even dare to think about it. Why, that is the per-r-r-manent r-r-r-evolution! That’s Tr-r-rotskyism!’ (as comrade Conrad might say) (Perm Rev p.136).

Point 7: Direct participation in the Labour Movement

From its beginnings the British Labour party was reformist, it sought a ‘brotherhood of man’ socialism which blurred if not eliminated class lines. Its strongest influence was the old Methodist egalitarianism that reduced the class struggle to moral issues. But it was, and still is, a living contradiction, a bourgeois-workers party in Lenin’s famous analysis, capitalist at the top but uniquely built by and organically tied to the trade unions and so susceptible to pressure from its working class base. We should seek to be in the forefront of organising workers in TUs independently of the bureaucracy. In order to achieve this we assert,

Independent rank-and-file organisation is the best way to win in struggle against the bourgeoisie and/or their agents and
Workers organised for themselves in this way presents a harbinger of the future society of communist freedom that we should promote.

The currently organised rank-and-file and broad left bodies in the unions are almost useless - they fail to offer a viable alternative to the neo-liberal offensive of the bourgeoisie and their agents, they are inaccessible to the mass of TU members and they only appear at election time in order that the ‘permanent bureaucrat’ positions in the unions are filled by ‘left-wingers’. As is visible in every TU with a ‘left-wing’, they are virtually indistinguishable from the ‘right’. Standing in TU elections is a matter of offering a way forward to the mass of TU members against the bosses and against the misleaders - a fighting rank-and-file should seek elected office only on a principled basis of total transparency and accountability, which is how we demand the unions are run! Any full-time positions must certainly be electable, accountable and recallable, and the official should continue to receive the wage and any ‘perks’ that they did before election - i.e. the same as those they represent (meaning as well that only workers can stand for and gain elected position in the union)

Perhaps the best opening for Revolutionaries is the National Shop Steward’s Network (NSSN). Although dominated by the SP it is still open and democratic enough to permit struggle. The SWP Fighting Union network is patently a party front with the traditional lack of democracy. However the NSSN has its problems too. The founding NSSN Conference took place in Camden on 7 July. The objective tasks facing it were three; 1. To establish its independence from the left bureaucracy, Crow, Serwotka, etc. – and thereby from the union bureaucracy and bureaucratic methods as a whole, as a prelude to fighting for the class independence of the working class itself. 2. To link the struggles of all those fighting government austerity, CWU, PCS etc. and 3. From this to begin to organise regional and local branches of the Network to give a real lead in the fight back of the class itself. It failed or was severely inadequate in all three but nevertheless the fighting capacity of the class was on show at the conference in the form of reports from struggles so it is certainly a venue for intervention for working class activists and committed revolutionists.

Trade union membership has plummeted from fourteen million in the late 80s to over seven and a half now. Trade union leadership throughout the world have retreated in front of the bosses’ offensive in the ideological confusion that has reigned on the left following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But back in the 70s much of the militancy was simply on wages led by the LCDTU who had Stalinist aspiration that power might be won by left Labourism or the ‘Red Army’ and a socialist revolution led by the working class was not needed to get rid of capitalism. Despite the election of a whole raft of ‘left’ general secretaries and union executives in Britain, many containing self-proclaimed revolutionaries, showing a radicalisation of the working class, no viable strategy to combat this global offensive has been developed. The views of the Unite’s US partner, Andy Stern of the SEIU and the welcome for them given by Tony Woodley shows that there is a big danger of a further lurch to the right by the TU bureaucracies.

The appalling collapse to the right of so many lefts in the top leadership of the TUs in refusing to endorse and/or campaign for John McDonnell and the many that then endorsing Gordon Brown pathetically because ‘we do not need a glorious failure’ shows how much we need genuine Marxist perspectives for trade union work now. Any fundamental change in society in favour of the working class has to come from below, from the working class itself. Because shop stewards are directly elected representatives of the working class they feel the pressure from below far keener than top bureaucrats, many of whom simply posture to the left on occasion only ignominiously to collapse when their bluff is called (remember Gate Gourmet). Co-ordinating our struggles at rank and file level across Unions and workplaces will add tremendous strength to all disputes and would begin to open the road for a New Marxist Party.

The civil servants of the PCSU and the postal workers of the CWU are being misled by their left leaderships – including national executive committees with a majority of revolutionary socialists, members of the SP, the SWP and others – into a programme of ineffectual action, based on one-day token strikes, which can only lead to demoralisation and defeat.

Crucial now to taking this movement forward is the formation of regional and local branches of the network, linked to local community struggles and campaigns. We advocate an alternative strategy focussed on the development of workers control, which would foster widespread direct resistance to the attacks, by challenging management prerogatives. Workplace action committees would decide which aspects of excessive workloads would not be performed and would arrange the boycotting of work required to facilitate privatisation, and work transferred from closure threatened offices, together with picketing of privatised ‘competitors’. As self organisation and class consciousness grew, the workplace committees would make links with the struggles of other groups of workers, for instance those fighting the benefit cuts on the sick and disabled and the turning of the ratchet of oppression on unemployed workers, and those fighting deportations. Such an alternative strategy would inspire new, young workers and link the struggles of today with the communist future. This is what we expect of socialist leaders of our unions – nothing less will suffice!

We welcome the focus this campaign is giving to defeating the anti-union laws but we all know that the passage of the totally inadequate Trade Union Freedom Bill would make little difference. What is needed is mass defiance of the laws; Gate Gourmet was such an opportunity. And we are confident that had the Shop Stewards Network been integrated into that Heathrow workforce they would have been able to take the control of the dispute out of Woodley’s hands and would have driven several nails in the coffin of the anti-union laws.

But to do that we have to get rid of the rule that precludes us from interfering in the ‘internal affairs’ of trade unions, i.e. from challenging the right of trade union bureaucrats to betray these vital struggles in the name of preserving the funds of the union. In reality the majority of the trade union general secretaries and their immediate coterie in the top bureaucracies want to retain the anti-trade union laws because they protect them from their own membership. The Tories intended it that way and Blair, Brown and the majority of the Labour MP agree. Fat bureaucrats are even more comfortable when the movement is defeated.

We need international solidarity to defend jobs and we need to understand and explain how global capital works and how it is exploiting the working class of the world. One of our main problems is the Union leaderships who are in league with New Labour – and New Labour is in league with the international capitalist class. There will be no difference under Gordon Brown. Any fight-backs and defence of our conditions have to be seen in this political context. Our strengths are our ability to explain the world and then to take the necessary action to change it by forging national and international solidarity.

However the democracy in the NSSN is seriously flawed as pointed out above. This is no accident. Bob Crow, firstly on behalf of the left bureaucracy, Mark Serwotka, Billy Hayes et al. and then indirectly and maybe even inadvertently in some cases on behalf of the bureaucracy as a whole, knows what is best for the working class. The Socialist Party agrees with him and they promote the NSSP on that basis. Democracy would only get in the way of this paternalistic project; ‘ultra lefts’ would only put a spanner in the works by asking awkward questions and alienating the left bureaucrats so collapsing the movement, they must be silenced because ‘we all know’ really, despite all the revolutionary verbiage, that the working class are not capable of altering the balance of class forces in their own favour, we must do it for them, we must substitute for the dumb, stupid workers to advance the cause of socialism. This whole method of approach means that the prospects of building a genuine rank-and-file fighting organisation of the working class to throw back the capitalists offensive is primarily left now to the ‘ultra lefts’, that is those revolutionary socialist and sincere class fighters who understand the need to fight for the independence of the working class.

Point 8: women’s liberation and the specially oppressed

We politically agree with Workers Power’s pamphlet Marxism and Women’s oppression and will propagate and defend that line. We also agree with their pamphlet on LGBT liberation - Marxism and gay liberation

Point 9: A Trotskyist International

We are for the reconstruction of the Fourth International and will fight for the splits and regroupments necessary for this in our international work.

Point 10: Lenin’s differentiation of all nations into imperialist oppressor nations and oppressed colonial or semi-colonial nations

We are opposed to Popular Fronts with capitalist parties and formations nationally and internationally. This does not preclude episodic pacts for immediate military self-defence of for limited agreed goals, which can be concluded, in the words of Trotsky, ‘with the devil or his grandmother’.

This is how Workers Power defends the revolutionary Comintern in1986, [17]

Lenin’s theses (at the 1920 Second Congress of the Comintern) raise the possibility of an ‘alliance’ between the Communist International, and therefore national communist parties, and ‘national revolutionary movements’. Lenin stressed in his opening speech that this was possible because of the fundamental difference between an oppressor and an oppressed nation. The theses declared: ‘The Communist International should accompany the revolutionary movement in the colonial and backward countries for part of the way, and should even make an alliance with it, but must unconditionally maintain the independent character of the proletarian movement, be it only in embryo.’ 1 In Lenin’s original formulation he had talked about the CI entering into a ‘temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and. backward countries’.

‘A determined fight is necessary against the attempt to put a communist cloak around revolutionary liberation movements. The C.I. has the duty to support the revolutionary movement in the colonies

only for the purpose of gathering of the future proletarian parties in fact and not just in name - in all countries and training them to be their special tasks... of fighting bourgeois democratic tendencies within components communists the backward conscious of against the nation.’

For the Second Congress therefore there were two important conditions for the possibility of an alliance with the bourgeois nationalists: (i) that they were actually leading a struggle against imperialism, and (ii) that they placed no restrictions on the communists organising the workers and peasants in a revolutionary way against the imperialists.

There are a number of obvious differences with Iran today. Ahmadinejad leads a bourgeois nationalist government which has only tactical differences with US imperialism. However if a war with the US we must be for the defeat of imperialism. We cannot in this situation be sectarian or abstentionist. Trotsky gives this example of this wrong method, ‘the only salvation of the workers and peasants of China is to struggle independently against the two armies, against the Chinese army in the same manner as against the Japanese army.’ And Trotsky explains ‘to participate actively and consciously in the war does not mean ‘to serve Chiang Kai-shek’ but to serve the independence of a colonial country in spite of Chiang Kai-shek. And the words directed against the Kuomintang are the means of educating the masses for the overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek. In participating in the military struggle under the orders of Chiang Kai-shek, since unfortunately it is he who has the command in the war for independence—to prepare politically the overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek . . . that is the only revolutionary policy’.

Let us see how this struggle developed at the Fourth Congress and after as related by SK,

It (the AIUF) is a method of breaking the political hold of the nationalists over the masses. By fighting alongside and in these movements against imperialism, in temporary united fronts around concrete and specific demands and actions, the communists can expose, in struggle, the vacillating and treacherous leadership of the movement, winning the workers and peasants to their side. By abandoning this tactic we abandon this vital method of communist work.

Trotsky recognised that this could only be the case where the bourgeoisie’s ‘fundamental class aspirations are satisfied either by revolutionary means or in another way (for instance, the Bismarkian way)’. As long as this was not the case, as long as imperialism continued to divide and exploit the country, stunt the possibility of the bourgeoisie achieving its basic interests, them there was always the possibility of a section of this class ‘supporting the revolution again, or at least flirting with it.’

‘Let us repeat again that a military bloc does not imply at all the setting up of a united front: two classes facing each other cannot stipulate a non-belligerence treaty.’ And earlier, attacking groups ‘claiming to be Trotskyist which mistake the policy of temporary alliances with bourgeois national forces for a proper united front’. Since when has the united front been anything else than a ‘temporary alliance’? Since when has a united front been a ‘non-belligerence treaty’?

Of course, nine tenths of the bourgeoisie for nine tenths of the time will be an agent of imperialism against its own people. But there is that section of the bourgeoisie that deludes the masses with anti-imperialist rhetoric. Here the united front, providing it fulfils all the conditions of the united front - a clear, precise and limited object of real struggle with no confusion of banners (marching separately and striking together) – can expose the bourgeois party and win over its mass base. This tactic is not qualitatively different from the united front that could be used in the case of an oppressed nationality (which also has a bourgeoisie).

Comrade Torab Saleth has attacked Permanent Revolution as irrelevant today because he says all states are now bourgeois and, as the first part of Trotsky’s theory is concerned with the transition from the bourgeois democratic to the socialist revolution, it just does not apply today (How Useful is the Theory of Permanent Revolution Today?). He thereby blurs and seeks to eliminate Lenin’s differentiation of all states into imperialist and semi-colonial and colonial oppressed states. He claims that the other two parts of the theory; the uninterrupted character of the period of transition (no stages separated by long historical periods) and the necessity for the world revolution to complete the national revolution, were not unique to Trotsky and so we can largely ignore them. To begin with it is important to emphasis that the theory is an integrated whole. It cannot be broken down and dissolved into its constituent parts and then invalidated by repudiating one of them. The application of the theory today depends on the understanding of the integrated nature of the entire world economy and the worldwide division of labour. If we remove that from our considerations, and ‘that’ is world imperialism, then the question of why the democratic revolution is incapable of triumphing is lost. This stratagem is a means of dismissing world imperialism as the main enemy of humanity and focusing solely on Iran’s internal problems with a dismissive nod in the direction of world imperialism which is not treated at all in his article. ‘We need a socialist revolution here’ says comrade Saleth; ‘forget all that anti-imperialist nonsense, the main enemy is at home’ is the implication in an ideological capitulation to socialism in one country and to the left communists dismissal of ‘our main enemy is world imperialism’ and the whole concept of oppressed semi-colonial nations like Iran. As Trotsky observed,

‘The struggle of the epigones is directed, even if not always with the same clarity, against all three aspects of the permanent revolution. And how could it be otherwise when it is a question of three inseparable parts of a whole? They separate the national socialist revolution from the international. They consider that in essence the conquest of power within national limits is not the initial act but the final act of the revolution.; after that follows the period of reforms that lead to the national socialist society.’ (Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution, New Park, p9)

Comrade Saleth misquotes Trotsky when he claims, ‘The first aspect - according to Trotsky himself, ‘the central idea of the theory’ - deals with ‘the problem of transition from the democratic revolution to the socialist’. This is the actual quote from Trotsky,

The theory of the permanent revolution…pointed out that the democratic tasks of the backward bourgeois nations lead directly, in our epoch, to the dictatorship of the proletariat and that the dictatorship of the proletariat puts socialist tasks on the order of the day. Therein lay the central idea of the theory (Perm Rev p8).

The phrase, ‘the problem of transition from the democratic revolution to the socialist’ comes a whole page earlier, on page 7 of my New Park edition and IS NOT the central idea of the theory and Trotsky, or any serious Trotskyist since, has never claimed it was. I knew immediately it was not and it was this that prompted me to go back to the original text. It is impermissible to jumble quotations like this but it does point to a discrepancy in Trotsky’s formulations. We can understand this if we accept that the page 7 formulation was looking back at 1905 and 1917 but the page 8 formulation was looking forward and dealing with ‘the democratic tasks of (all) the backward bourgeois nations’. The Permanent Revolution group’s article on The Anti-Imperialist United Front on its website explains why this analysis is correct,

Its (the Comintern’s) perspectives for the revolutionary struggles in that arena remained flawed by its failure to generalise the lessons of the Russian Revolution with regard to the theory of Permanent Revolution. This should come as no surprise since even the author of this theory, Leon Trotsky, did not think this perspective was applicable to the colonial countries, and did not raise it as an operative guide for revolutionary strategy between 1917 and 1927…Trotsky’s… report on the Fourth World Congress to the Russian Party: ‘It is self-understood that the colonies - Asia, Africa… if taken independently and isolatedly, are absolutely not ready for the proletarian revolution. The growth and influence of communist ideas… can be assured not only by, and not so much by the role of the native communist nuclei as by the revolutionary proletariat of the metropolitan centres for the emancipation of the colonies.’

Moreover it is hopelessly schematic to base an entire article on a (misquoted) differentiation between the ‘democratic’ and the ‘socialist’ revolution. As we highlighted above the initial phrase of all revolutions will be spontaneously ‘democratic’. To the masses it will simply be ‘the revolution’. The Russian ‘democratic’ February revolution had and will have this in common with all revolutions. And despite the numerous quotes we can pull from Lenin and Trotsky pre-1917 that this approaching revolution will be ‘the bourgeois revolution’ they knew, and even Kautsky knew, that it was impermissible in serious theoretical debate, to make this absolute separation. Take the following from 1906.

To Plekhanov’s question: Is our revolution bourgeois or socialist? Kautsky had answered that it is no longer bourgeois, but not yet socialist, that is it represents the transitional form from one to the other. In this connection Lenin wrote in his foreword; ‘Is our revolution bourgeois or socialist in its general character? That is the old schema, says Kautsky, that is not how the question should be put. That is not the Marxist way. The revolution in Russia is not bourgeois for the bourgeoisie is not one of the driving forces of the present revolutionary movement in Russia. But neither is the revolution in Russia socialist’’ (ibid. p.55).

And Trotsky goes on,

On the other hand, I never denied the bourgeois character of the revolution in the sense of its immediate historical tasks, but only in the sense of its driving forces and its perspectives… in calling it a bourgeois revolution…The general sociological term bourgeois revolution by no means solves the politico-tactical problems, contradictions and difficulties which the mechanics of a given bourgeois revolution throw up.’ (Perm Rev, p56)

Contrast this sophisticated and dialectical approach to the coming revolution with the method applied by comrade Saleth to dismiss Permanent Revolution,

Trotsky, both in 1904-06 when he developed the theory and in 1928-29 when he was defending it against the Stalinist attacks, was obviously referring to pre-capitalist countries ruled by non-bourgeois classes. Why else should he say in 1906 ‘Russia was approaching the bourgeois revolution’ if indeed the bourgeoisie had already achieved state power? Thus in the eyes of Trotsky himself the whole concept of transition depends on the starting point of a non-bourgeois state. But, in how many countries of the periphery today do we have similar conditions to Russia or China of the early 20^th century? Who has seriously claimed that countries like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Iran, India, Philippine, Egypt, etc., are still dominated by pre-capitalist economies with pre-capitalist ruling classes? ‘

Having ignored world imperialism and misquoted Trotsky he then ignores that fact that the Chinese bourgeois revolution had already triumphed in 1911 in the form of the Kuomintang, Sun Yat-sin and Chiang Kai-shek and it was to this new world of semi-colonial nations that Trotsky was now applying his theory. It was here that the force and applicability of his theory educated a whole new generation of revolutionaries and enabled the theoretical struggle against Stalinism and ‘socialism in one country’ to be fought out for future generations.

Comrade Saleth says,

To cut a long story short, this fact alone is enough to claim therefore, there is hardly anywhere left in the world today where the first aspect of the theory of permanent revolution can be usefully applied. If you have a bourgeois state what you have ahead of you is called a socialist revolution and not a growing over or the transition of the democratic to socialist revolution.

On the contrary the theory applies to all semi-colonial nations fighting against imperialism, with Iran, Iraq, Palestine and Venezuela in the forefront. Why else would HOPI say ‘The main enemy is imperialism? The Iranian regime does not represent a progressive or consistent anti-imperialist force’ if but we can only fight it consistently on a world, i.e. Permanent Revolution perspective, and recognise the impossibility of defeating the regime in Iran and going on the construct socialism by a national socialist revolution. Permanent Revolution (the theory not the group!) recognised the HOPI launch conference even if many did not recognise it; some fought for its premises consciously, some unconsciously, and others, consciously or unconsciously, opposed it.

Comrade Saleth counterposed his theory of ‘combined revolution’ to Permanent Revolution on the basis that the only reason Trotsky called ‘the Russian revolution a bourgeois revolution’ was that ‘the immediate objective tasks of the revolution’ consisted in the creation of ‘normal conditions for the development of bourgeois society as a whole’. And that ‘at least Trotsky had a need for the term permanent to explain a ‘transition’ from this bourgeois revolution to a socialist one. What need does it serve today when you face combined anti-capitalist and democratic tasks against a bourgeois state?’ Comrade Saleth, in his ultra-leftism, forgets entirely the consciousness of the masses, the working class leading the peasantry, who must make the revolution. In correctly pouring scorn on the pseudo-Trotskyist, Gerry Healy, Jack Barnes and Ernest Mandel who objectified Permanent Revolution and the world revolution as unstoppable processes which moved through the semi-feudal Ayatollah Khomeini’s reactionary utopian Islamic Republic he dismisses the anti-imperialist of the Iranian masses themselves and the Iranian Trotskyists who did get it right,

When The Students Following Imam's Line took US Embassy personnel as hostages, even the bourgeois liberal politicians in Iran could see that the clerics were simply trying to consolidate their own position within this ‘post-revolutionary’ regime at the expense of the more liberal wing, but our Trotskyist generals were in fact calling on the masses to abandon their own real anti-imperialist struggles and come in front of US Embassy and passively watch this charade.

Indeed they should not ‘abandon their own real anti-imperialist struggles’ but we would respectfully suggest that the Imam hijacked and focused this anti-imperialism on the personage of Khomeini because they recognised that the masses did have an internationalist understanding that the main enemy was US and world imperialism. How should revolutionaries tackle this contradiction? It was made immensely more difficult in 1979-80 by the capitulation of the the Stalinist Tudeh Party, the Fedayeen guerillas, the Islamic leftist Mojahedinand the pseudo-Trotskyists to Islamic reaction which had immensely weakened the class consciousness of the vanguard, particularly in the shora struggles. These workers’ councils/soviets, before they were transformed into tools of the reactionary clerics were,

Based on general assemblies of all employees, assumed control over the Iranian economy. They ensured continued production amidst the revolutionary chaos, initiated radical reforms in work organisation and (in the course of 1979) developed into the focal point of a democratic restructuring of Iranian society from the bottom up. The shora movement, arguably the most comprehensive experiment of workers' control in a developing-world country to date, was also a major threat to the power of Ayatollah Khomeini and the sort of society he and his fellow Islamists were striving to establish (Iran: the hidden power, Shora Esmailian, Andreas Malm http://www.opendemocracy.net/trackback/4513)[18].

This was where the revolution was ideologically defeated by Stalinism, pseudo-Trotskyism and those to their right by capitulation to Khomeini. But to take the line of the pro-imperialist liberal bourgeoisie and refuse even critical support to the hostage takers was to side with imperialism. The correct transitional demand was critical support to set the base against the leaders by pointing out that their bogus ‘anti-imperialism’ was tied to the reactionary clergy who sought to destroy all the working class organisations, the only force that can defeat imperialism internationally. What Khomeini wanted then and what Ahmadinejad wants now is a new compromise with imperialism on terms far worse for the working class than before.

But an imperialist-neutral or even a pro-democratic-imperialist working class leading a ‘socialist’ revolution in Iran is a reactionary utopia, whose superficial attraction is that at least it appears more modern. If ‘Trotsky’s theory about the ‘transition’ from the democratic to the socialist revolution’… is ‘in fact is nothing but a proletarian revolution with combined tasks’ then we have no need at all to fight imperialism. This is not the Marxist way because it is not the path to winning the masses to revolutionary socialism with the programme of Permanent Revolution.

Point 11: The question of Social Democracy – specifically the British Labour Party

As we say above ‘The Labour Party was never a socialist party. Its Clause 4 so beloved by left-reformists was never more than a fig leaf. The Labour Party remains a bourgeois workers’ party, that is to say, it is a pro-capitalists party based on the organised working class. So long as this remains the case, Marxists advance tactics towards Labour Party members which may include both entryism and critical electoral support’. We reject the notion that the Labour Party has become a bourgeois party like the US Democrats and we are not fpr the building of a ‘new workers party’ along reformist lines such as Respect or the SP NWP. This is an avoidance of the prime political task of the epoch which is to intervene in the existing labour movement and fight the increasing bureaucratic stranglehold of the misleaders of the Trade unions over its membership. This includes the hounding and victimisation of militants, the diminution of democracy and using the anti-trade union laws as a cover for collaboration with New Labour. As proof of the falsity of this orientation to a new party of the working class we would point out the SWP and SP trade unionists act in almost the same was as traditional bureaucrats once they are elected to their union executives.

Appendix 1: Our stance on workers states

We defend the categorisation of the former Soviet Union, eastern European, China and Vietnam as degenerate and deformed workers’ states until capitalist restoration in the counter-revolutions of 1989-91. China and Vietnam abandoned autarky in the late 1980s, and with it they ceded whole areas of their economies to imperialist exploitation. This is not socialism via the international division of labour but enhanced imperialist rates of profit via exploitation of cheap labour policed by violently repressive bureaucracies. They have progressively integrated their economies into the global world economy resulting in appalling labour conditions for the export-orientated sectors dominated by US capital. They can no longer be considered deformed workers’ states in any real sense, apart from the continued domination of the communist parties. In this narrow and spurious sense some continue to defend China, Vietnam and North Korea but in what way can they now be said to serve the interests of the international working class by challenging the interests of imperialism? On the contrary China and Vietnam assist imperialism, the US in the first place, as a vital prop of world imperialism as suppliers of semi-slave labour producing or processing and re-exporting; e.g. US cotton as clothing for Wal-Mart. North Korea only now exists to defend the privileges of the semi feudal Stalinist bureaucracy and is indefensible except as any semi-colonial country must be defended by revolutionists against imperialism.

We continue to defend Cuba as the only deformed workers’ state left. Its economy has recovered from the ‘special period’ of the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union and has managed to circumvent the US/EU blockade by developing relationships with China, the Middle East and principally Venezuela, exporting medical services and developing tourism. Its relationship with Venezuela does represent a major new obstacle to US imperialism’s plans in the region. The regime still commands considerable mass support although household income has not kept pace with the rise in national income. Though poor by the standards of the western working class, its education system and health service are better than any other third world country and even than the USA in many ways. Realistically the Cuban working class understand that what awaits them on capitalist restoration is not vast increase in wages comparable to Europe and America but the fate of neighbouring Haiti, the poorest and most exploited country in the west. Here the Disney Corporation and other corporations have vicious Tonton Macoute-originated militias attacking the supporters of ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to keep unions out and wages low. Cuban workers are still prepared to accept the denial of many democratic rights to escape that fate. There is no possibility that Chavez will lead a socialist revolution and counter-revolution is still the most likely outcome of his stalinoid policies. The growing development of a Latin American movement under this dual influence does make space for a genuine socialist revolution in any one of several countries in the region with strong Trotskyist traditions. This makes it imperative to continue to defend the Cuban deformed workers’ state, albeit with all its bureaucratic deformations and dominated as it is by counter-revolutionary Stalinist ideology, and to fight for a political revolution to institute workers’ democracy and the communist programme for world revolution.

Appendix 2: No Platform for Fascists

To be added

[1] International Review no.103 - 4th quarter 2000, 1940: Assassination of Trotsky, http://en.internationalism.org/ir/103_trotsky.htm)

[2] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm#d4

[3] ICC The Russian Communist Left p65

[4] The Communist Left in Russia after 1920 - Ian Hebbes, http://libcom.org/library/communist-left-russia-after-1920-ian-hebbes

[5] By social relations here we mean the structure and forms of control and compulsion used to disciple labour so as to produce wealth.

[6] See the review by Martin Kopple of Lenin’s Final Fight in The Militant (US) Vol.59/No.22, June 5 1995 for a brief summary of this important record. The Pathfinder publication contains ‘everything Lenin is known to have written from Dec. 21, 1922, until his last letter of March 6, 1923, addressed to Georgian communist leaders’ http://www.themilitant.com/1995/5922/5922_21.html

[7] See Trotskyite economism? by Gerry Downing, Weekly Worker 651, Nov. 30 2006 for a fuller analysis.

[8] Trotsky, Leon, Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt, January 15, 1938, http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/russia/kronstadt/trotsky_hue_cry.html

[9] Spartacist English edition No. 59, Kronstadt 1921: bolshevism vs. Counterrevolution, Spring 2006, http://www.spartacist.org/english/esp/59/kronstadt.html,

[10] This 1945 article can be viewed at http://libcom.org/library/kronstadt-21-serge

[11] “I had just had a run-in with Semionov over two students the Cheka had arbitrarily seized. I got word to Lenin through Gorky (who was also at that moment intervening to save the Menshevik leaders). Once Lenin had been informed, we knew our friends were out of danger.” Victor Serge Kronstadt ’21.

[12] Platformism & bolshevism, IBT, April 2002, http://www.bolshevik.org/pamphlets/Platformism/platformism.html#7

[13] However he did not break it. His formulation was one sided, revolutionary consciousness does not simply come to the working class from outside; it is formed in a dialectical conflict between party and class as he later affirmed in self-correction. It certainly does not arise from the spontaneous struggles of the working class as the economists and their latter day apologists aver.

[14] Permanent Revolution No. 7, Spring 1988.

[15] See Appendix 1 for our position on workers states.

[16] It was not the superiority of the French cannon that won at the pivotal, if small battle at Valmy in 1792, it was the newly composed Marseillaise , the revolutionary spirit of the soldiery which resonated with the Austrian invaders’ soldiery and now turned every French army into a revolutionary force who wheeled from retreat to attack as soon as they realised the revolution was in earnest. Goethe, who was present in the battle, understood the change and told some of his Prussian comrades that "From this place, and from this day forth begins a new era in the history of the world, and you can all say that you were present at its birth".

[17] Stuart King, The Anti-Imperialist United Front, In defence of the revolutionary Comintern – 1986.

[18] See ‘The Shoras and the Shah’ Mark Hoskisson’s review of Workers and Revolution in Iran, by Assef Bayat (Zed Books, London 1987, 227pp, £7.95) in PR website; http://www.permanentrevolution.net/?view=entry&entry=2049 for details of this.

International Trotskyism: Radek's Schlageter speech in full

2008-01-17T07:38:00.000-08:00

International Trotskyism: Albert Leo Schlageter

LEO SCHLAGETER - THE WANDERER INTO THE VOID

By KARL RADEK

This is a speech made by Karl Radek at a plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in June 1923, in a translation first published in the September 1923 issue of Labour Monthly. The "Schlageter speech", as it became known, was published by the German Communist Party and widely circulated.

In the aftermath of the French occupation of the Ruhr, right wing nationalists in Germany had made some headway among the middle classes and to an extent the working class. Leo Schlageter, who had been shot by French troops while engaging in sabotage, became a national hero for his part in the resistance to foreign occupation. In his speech, which was directed at those influenced by German nationalism, Radek sought to address the reasons that had drawn a man like Schlageter to the nationalist right, arguing that the real defenders of the interests of the German people were the Communists.

Below is the original editor’s introduction from 1923.

(We have pleasure in printing the full text of the already famous speech of Karl Radek on the German Nationalist hero, Schlageter. This speech, delivered on June 21, is likely to become one of the historical documents of the European revolution. At the very moment when Fascism and Communism were on the point of coming to grips for the soul of the tortured German masses, Radek, on behalf of the Communist International sent forth this message into the heart of the Fascist camp-a message of sympathy and comprehension for the ideals and heroism of the Nationalist struggle, inspiring the followers of Fascism among the masses, hut relentlessly exposing the double dealing anti-nationalism and subservience to Big Business and the Entente on the part of their leaders and showing that the only way for the realisation of their hopes and ideals and the freedom of the German nation lay through the proletarian revolution. This contribution has aroused controversy throughout the Fascist camp at the moment of their projected coup. We find the columns of the Fascist press thrown open to Radek for the purposes of controversy, and we find Count Reventlow entering into discussions in the Communist press. No more striking blow was ever delivered for defeating the tricks to yoke the nationalist-minded masses to the interests of Capital, or for turning politics into their real class meaning.)

CAN neither supplement nor complete the comprehensive and deeply impressive report of our venerable leader, Comrade Zetkin, on International Fascism,¹that hammer meant to crush the head of the proletariat, but which will fall upon the petty bourgeois class, who are wielding it in the interests of large capital. I could not even follow it clearly, because there hovered before my eyes the corpse of the German Fascist, our class enemy, who was sentenced to death and shot by the hirelings of French imperialism, that powerful organisation of another section of our class enemy. Throughout the speech of Comrade Zetkin on the contradictions within Fascism, the name of Schlageter and his tragic fate was in my head. We ought to remember him here when we are defining our attitude towards Fascism. The story of this martyr of German nationalism should not be forgotten nor passed over with a mere phrase. It has much to tell us, and much to tell the German people.

We are not sentimental romanticists who forget friendship when its object is dead, nor are we diplomats who say: By the graveside say nothing but good, or remain silent. Schlageter, a courageous soldier of the counter-revolution, deserves to be sincerely honoured by us, the soldiers of the revolution. Freksa, who shared his views, published in 1920 a novel in which he described the life of an officer who fell in the fight against Spartacus. Freksa named his novel The Wanderer into the Void.

If those German Fascist, who honestly thought to serve the German people, failed to’ understand the significance of Schlageter’s fate, Schlageter died in vain, and on his tombstone should indeed be inscribed: “The Wanderer into the Void.”

Germany lay crushed. Only fools believed that the victorious capitalist Entente would treat the German people differently from the way the victorious German capitalists treated the Russian and Rumanian people. Only fools or cowards, who feared to face the truth, could believe in the promises of Wilson, in the declarations that the Kaiser and not the German people would have to pay the price of defeat. In the East a people was at war. Starving, freezing, it fought against the Entente on fourteen fronts. That was Soviet Russia. One of these fronts consisted of German officers and German soldiers. Schlageter fought in Medem’s Volunteer Corps, which stormed Riga. We do not know whether the young officer understood the significance of his acts. But the then German Commissar, the Social Democrat Winnig, and General Von der Golz, the Commander of the Baltic troops, knew what they were doing. They sought to gain the friendship of the Entente by performing the work of hirelings against the Russian people. In order that the German bourgeoisie should not pay the victors the indemnities of war, they hired young German blood, which had been spared the bullets of the Great War, to fight against the Russian people. We do not know what Schlageter thought at this period. His leader, Medem, later admitted that he marched through the Baltic into the void. Did all the German nationalists understand that?

At the funeral of Schlageter in Munich, General Ludendorff spoke, the same Ludendorff who even today is offering himself to England and to France as the leader of a crusade against Russia. Schlageter was mourned by the Stinnes press. Herr Stinnes was the colleague in the Alpina Montana, of Schneider-Creusot the armourer, the assassin of Schlageter. Against whom did the German people wish to fight: against the Entente capitalists or against the Russian people? With whom did they wish to ally themselves: with the Russian workers and peasants in order to throw 6ff the yoke of Entente capital for the enslavement of the German and Russian peoples?

Schlageter is dead. He cannot supply the answer. His comrades in arms swore at his graveside to carry on his fight. They must supply the answer: against whom and on whose side?

Schlageter went from the Baltic to the Ruhr, not in the year 1923 but in the year 1920. Do you know what that meant? He took part in the attack of German capital upon the Ruhr workers; he fought in the ranks of the troops whose task it was to bring the miners of the Ruhr under the heel of the iron and coal kings. The troops of Waters, in whose ranks he fought, fired the same leaden bullets with which General Degoutte quelled the Ruhr workers. We have no reason to believe that it was from selfish motives that Schlageter helped to subdue the starving miners.

The way in which he risked his life speaks on his behalf, and proves that he was convinced he was serving the German people. But Schlageter thought he was best serving the people by helping to restore the mastery of the class which had hitherto led the German people, and had brought such terrible misfortune upon them. Schlageter regarded the working class as the mob that must be governed. And in this he shared the view of Count Reventlow, who calmly declared that no war against the Entente was possible until the internal enemy has been overcome. The internal enemy for Schlageter was the revolutionary working class. Schlageter could see with his own eyes the results of this policy when he returned to the Ruhr in 1923 during the occupation. He could see that even if the workers were united against French imperialism, no single people was able to fight alone. He could see the profound mistrust of the workers towards the German government and the German bourgeoisie. He could see how greatly the cleavage in the nation hampered its defensive power. He could see more. Those who share his views complained of the passivity of the German people. How can a defeated working class be active? How can a working class be active which has been disarmed, and from whom it is demanded that they shall allow themselves to be exploited by profiteers and speculators? Or could the activity of the German working masses be replaced by the activity of the German bourgeoisie? Schlageter read in the newspapers how the very people who pretended to be the patrons of the German nationalist movement sent securities abroad so that they might be enriched and the country impoverished. Schlageter certainly could have no hope in these parasites. He was spared reading in the Press how the representative of the German bourgeoisie, Dr. Lutterbeck, turned to his executioners with the request that they should permit the iron and steel kings to shoot down sons of Germany, the men who were carrying out the resistance on the Ruhr, with machine guns.

Now that the German resistance, through the rascally trick of Dr. Lutterbeck, and still more through the economic policy of the possessing classes, has been turned into a farce, we ask the honest, patriotic masses who are anxious to fight against the French imperialist invasion: How will you fight, on whose support will you rely? The struggle against Entente imperialism is a war, even though the guns are silent. There can be no war at the front when there is unrest in the rear. A minority can be kept under in the rear, but not a majority. The majority of the German people are the working men, who must fight against the poverty and want which the German bourgeoisie is bringing upon them. If the patriotic circles of Germany do not make up their minds to make the cause of the majority of the nation their own, and so create a front against both Entente and German capital, then the path of Schlageter was the path into the void, and Germany, in the face of foreign invasion, and the perpetual menace of the victors, will be transformed into a field of bloody internal conflict, and it will be easy for the enemy to defeat her and destroy her.

When, after Jena, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst asked themselves how the German people were to be raised from their defeat, they replied: only by making the peasants free from their former submission and slavery. Only the free German peasantry can lay the foundations for the emancipation of Germany. What the German peasantry meant for the fate of the German nation at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the German working class means at the beginning of the twentieth century. Only with it can Germany be freed from the fetters of slavery-not against it.

Schlageter’s comrades talked of war at his graveside. They swore to continue the fight. It had to be conducted against an enemy that was armed to the teeth, while Germany was unarmed and beaten. If the talk of war is not to remain an empty phrase, if it is not to consist of bombing columns that blow up bridges, but not the enemy; that derail trains, but cannot check the armoured trains of Entente Capital, then a number of conditions must be fulfilled.

The German people must break with those who have not only led it into defeat, but who are perpetuating the defeat and the defencelessness of the German people by regarding the majority of the German people as the enemy. This demands a break with the peoples and parties whose faces act upon other peoples like a Medusa head, mobilising them against the German people. Only when the German cause becomes the cause of the German people, only when the German cause becomes the fight for the rights of the German people, will the German people win active friends. The powerful nation cannot endure without friends, all the more ‘so must a nation which is defeated and surrounded by enemies. If Germany wants to be in the position to fight, it must create a united front of workers, and the brain workers must unite with the hand workers and form a solid phalanx. The condition of the brain workers cries out for this union. Only old prejudices stand in the way. United into a victorious working people, Germany will be able to draw upon great sources of resisting power which will be able to remove all obstacles. If the cause of the people is made the cause of the’ nation, then the cause of the nation will become the cause of the people. United into a fighting nation of workers, it will gain the assistance of other people who are also fighting for their existence. Whoever is not prepared to fight in this way is capable of deeds of desperation but not of a serious struggle.

This is what the German Communist Party and the Communist International have to say at Schlageter’s graveside. It has nothing to conceal, for only the complete truth can penetrate into the suffering, internally disintegrated masses of Germany. The German Communist Party must declare openly to the nationalist petty bourgeois masses: Whoever is working in the service of the profiteers, the speculators, and the iron and coal magnates to enslave the German people and to drive them into desperate adventures will meet the resistance of the German Communist workers, who will oppose violence by violence. Whoever, from lack of comprehension, allies himself with hirelings of capital we shall fight with every means in our power. But we believe that the great majority of the nationalist-minded masses belong not to the camp of the capitalists but to the camp of the workers. We want to find, and we shall find, the path to these masses. We shall do all in our power to make men like Schlageter, who are prepared to go to their deaths for a common cause; not wanderers into the void, but wanderers into a better future for the whole of mankind; that they should not spill their hot, unselfish blood for the profit of the coal and iron barons, but in the cause of the great toiling German people, which is a member of the family of peoples fighting for their emancipation. This truth the Communist Party will declare to the great masses of the German people, for it is not a party fighting for a crust of bread on behalf of the industrial workers, but a party of the struggling proletariat fighting for its emancipation, an emancipation that is identical with the emancipation of the whole people, of all who toil and suffer in Germany. Schlageter himself cannot now hear this declaration, but we are convinced that there are hundreds of Schlageters who will hear it and understand it.

1 Published in the August issue of the Labour Monthly

CHAPTER 3: WHY PLANNING HAD TO FAIL IN THE USSR

2008-01-16T02:32:00.000-08:00

I am posting this because it is a materialist analysis on why the planned economy in the USSR eventually had to fall. Not lack of democracy, either bourgeois of soviet, but the sheer illegitimacy of the bureaucracy, the fact that the whole method of planning had to be based on lies to protect the privileges of that bureaucracy and therefore could not allow any democracy in planning, any workers’ democracy in the closed autocracy that Stalin built. An excellent chapter from an excellent book

PLANNING The Future

by Brian Green
at http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/pages/Theory/Brian.html

Gerry Downing

We can now turn to look at what happened in the Soviet Union. The economy in the Soviet Union manifested elements that were both higher and lower than capitalism.

It was essentially this contradiction that brought down its economy.

Following the October Revolution in 1917, during which few people died, the major powers fostered and financed a counter-revolution that would rage until 1921 and claim many millions of lives. By 1921 the people were exhausted, the vanguard of the working class was depleted and the economy crippled. The failure of the German revolutions of 1921 and 1923 was not only a tragedy for the German workers, but represented the last chance to revive the revolution in Russia itself.

The revolution degenerated, giving rise to an increasingly powerful bureaucracy, at whose head stood Stalin. Its policy of socialism in one country meant the abandoning of world revolution, and therefore the possibility of building a world socialist economy based on the most advanced economies. It meant a break with Marxism. Instead, it proposed to build socialism successfully in what was one of Europe’s most backward economies. This opportunism was to give rise to a deformed economy that had little in common with a real socialist economy.

The economy began to be organised around this new political caste. Its method of exploitation was to differ from capitalism. Under capitalism, the primary power of the ruling class rests on private property. The surplus of society is divided up in accordance with this capitalist private property. The bourgeois state exists primarily to guarantee that this property is not threatened. Accordingly, the capitalists tolerate multi-party democracy as long as the state continues to protect and expand private property and does not fundamentally interfere with its distribution.

In the Soviet Union, where private property in production was largely abolished, it could not be used to attract the surplus of society nor regulate its distribution. Individual bureaucrats did not own productive private property. They were not a class of property owners, merely an insecure caste of political bureaucrats.

In the absence of private property only the state could be used to redistribute the surplus of society. This meant the bureaucracy had to monopolise state power. They could not allow multi-party democracy, for if they lost the vote, they would in effect be voted out of office, and would have to return to the working class to become labourers once more. Hence the banning of parties other than the official party, the use of the secret police, the labour camps, the terror. Instead ot the state withering, it grew more powerful to ensure that this caste could appropriate the surplus of society through political compulsion.

Within this state hierarchy, individual bureaucrats’ privileges depended on how high they could rise within it. Competition and intrigue were rife within its ranks. The Bolshevik Party, which had led the revolution, was now used to organise and bring order to the bureaucracy. The Party became the brain, the nervous system and the fist of the bureaucracy. The most successful party in the history of the working class, bloodied and steeled in the class struggle, was now lost to revolution for ever.

This caste began to develop an interest apart from the working class. Entering the Party and using it as the stepping stone into the bureaucracy meant escaping a world of poverty, and entering a world of privilege. Rising above the rest of society, this caste had only one interest, to oppress the mass of workers and prevent them challenging its privileges.

By the end of the 1920s this caste had defeated its two main enemies. First was any opposition to its rule in the working class – the Left Opposition. Secondly, in this largely peasant-based society, any emergence of capitalist restoration – the kulaks. With its command over the surplus absolute, the bureaucracy implemented its first Five Year Plan in 1929.

These initial Five Year Plans did rapidly industrialise the Soviet Union. They probably represent the most rapid industrialisation the world has ever seen, and were the reason this agrarian society was able to defeat Hitler’s fascism less than 15 years later (the equivalent of just three Five Year Plans). They demonstrate how the abolition of capitalist private property can set free society’s productive potential. In this sense they represented a form of organisation higher than capitalism.

However, these first plans already contained the seed of the future collapse of the economy. The fundamental flaws in these plans were two-fold.

First, they were based on quantitative goals – so many tons of steel, so many metres of cloth, so many litres of chemicals etc. This planning by physical quantities, we are about to see, was actually a step back from capitalism, not a step forward.

It was primitive. It led to waste on a vast scale. Anything and everything that could be used to meet or exceed targets was used without regard to cost. As local bureaucrats’ jobs depended on achieving or exceeding these goals, they had no interest in curbing this waste. Instead of reducing costs, this rush to meet targets raised costs through the misuse and abuse of materials and labour.

Under capitalism, with all its faults, production is qualitative. Capitalists do not produce for the sake of producing, but to make profits. That means keeping costs under control and constantly reducing them. Only under conditions of crisis do the capitalists waste their investments, as the old capital is destroyed to make way for the new. But in the Soviet Union waste was endemic to the system. In this sense, economic activity was of a lower order than that found within capitalism itself.

In short there was no economy of labour time in the economy of the Soviet Union, whereas under capitalism there is.

Secondly, the workers were the victim of this plan, not its architect. The plan was superimposed on them Instead of a plan to fit their needs, they needed to fit the plan. This meant repression for questioning any directive, extraordinary hard work and cutting corners to stay ahead of targets. At first workers did act as a moderating influence on the more imbecilic aspects of the plan, helping to reduce waste, but in time, ground down by its demands, they increasingly gave up. Now there was nothing to prevent the plan running away from society..

This quantitative setting of goals was not an aberration. In an undeveloped economy with little education and few skills, quantitative goals are the easiest to set, implement and police. They are therefore a bureaucrat’s dream. Stalin and the centre could issue these clear goals and reward or punish their lower ranking bureaucrats and workers depending on how well they fulfilled them.

This top-down setting of targets could not be questioned by the lower down bureaucrats. Instead they manipulated these targets for their own ends. They understated the productive capacity of their plants in order to reduce targets. When these targets were not only met but comfortably exceeded, one could become a hero, be rewarded and promoted. Alas, it did not take time before the planners became aware of this mischief, and set higher targets.

This constant guerilla warfare between local bureaucrats and central planners made it even more difficult to know what was happening in the economy. It made planning extremely difficult, if not impossible. Any planning has to involve honesty, clarity, lack of fear and participation, exactly the opposite of what was happening. Instead of being informed the centre was misinformed. It was only the ever present terror that made things work. Behind every glowing statistic lay a drop of blood.

WORSE WAS TO COME

As Trotsky said, the success of the plan was measured statistically rather than economically. No real attempt was made to cost production. Accordingly, pricing became chaotic. This chaos was no accident, it served the interest of the bureaucracy.

The financing of the first Plan rested on two supports. The first was stripping the countryside of its agricultural surplus in order to feed the new cities. This forced collectivisation, in effect a war on the countryside by the despotic city, led to the deaths of millions.

The second was mvsive inflation, which defrauded the working class of its surplus. The rouble, which was equal to 14 French Francs in 1924, fell to just 3 in 1935 and 1.5 shortly thereafter. Rapidly rising prices boosted the turnover tax by means of which the state appropriated the surplus of society, both for investment and its own consumptive needs.

The rouble became increasingly worthless. It could not be used to measure the economy of planning. It corroded economic life. Little wonder Trotsky and the Left Opposition called this debauching of the currency and subsequent inflation "the syphilis of a planned economy".

This inflation, recognised by workers as an attack on their standards of living and ability to consume, further alienated workers from planned production. With prices increasingly meaningless, workers could not see the point of diligent and efficient work. The very knot that binds socialist economy, transparent and accurate pricing, was cut. It demoralised workers. Hence the famous dictum which encapsulated this whole tragedy, they pretended to pay us arid we pretended to work.

Once again this was a retreat from capitalism. Under capitalism, workers recognise their contribution to their company, to its income and profits, hence the struggle for a fair day’s wages. But under Stalin, it did not matter if one worked hard or not; it had no financial consequences.

As a result Stalin resorted to the worst practices of capitalism, enforced piece rates. i.e. payment by results. Piece rates, where physical quantity determines reward, fitted perfectly into a plan that was itself based on physical targets – physical targets for each worker and physical targets for society. All it needed was the ever present policeman to enforce them.

This movement came to be know as the Stakhanovite movement, and represented a dark time for workers. It failed. The mass of workers saw in the Stakhanovite movement the drive by the bureaucracy to increase their work targets. If the Stakhanovites could double production, then that was what was expected from ordinary workers. In order to defend themselves workers sabotaged these efforts, and even attacked representatives of this movement. And of course it led to huge waste, as the Stakanovites cut corners and monopolised the best production sites to bolster their output.

Despite the growing evidence of waste and inefficiency, the bureaucracy could not bring economy into planning. They could not cost and introduce accurate pricing. This was not due to technical inexperience, but to political imperatives.

In order to hide the surpluses produced by workers from the workers themselves, the books of account had to be closed. In addition, to disguise its parasitism, the bureaucracy engaged in false accounting right from the beginning. They lied to the workers and they lied to each other. Just as the bureaucracy hid their special shops from view, pretending they were not there, so they made prices pretend to be what they were not.

Nor did the plan lend itself to costing. If meeting physical targets is the prime directive, then costing can turn out to be obstructive to achieving this. The fact is that it often costs more to complete a plan than not to.

In a democratic society, it would be easy to say: look, it is more cost efficient to complete only 90% of the plan rather than 100%. If we complete the last 10%, we will need to use more expensive materials because we have run out of the cheaper ones, or we would not have time to repair and maintain the machinery, or we would have to lay on extra shifts of workers. To squeeze every ounce out of production can be very costly indeed.

In the absence of workers’ democracy in the Soviet Union, the opposite happened. When the introduction of economy into planning obstructed the achievement of targets, it was sacrificed, regardless of the cost to society as a whole. The contradiction between economic production and maximising production was always resolved on the side of maximising production. This contradiction reflected real life. Had workers been in control, treasuring their labour and seeking to economise on it, that contradiction would have been resolved the other way.

Nor did the relation between the various plants act as a discipline. They were unable to refuse inferior inputs. To do so meant they had no chance of reaching their own targets. Better inferior inputs than none at all. Without the circulation of these low quality products, the plan would have collapsed.

Here lies the secret of why the Soviet Union could not develop the consumer industries. These industries were given the lowest priority by the bureaucracy, demonstrating its contempt for workers and the siege mentality socialism in one country fostered. Actually, they should have had the highest priority, because in the end, the main reasons the Soviet Union collapsed was the far higher standards of living of workers in Western Europe and the USA.

The low priority given to the consumer sector meant that all the shoddiest goods were dumped there. The best steel was reserved for the armaments industry, the high tech industries and heavy industry. The crap steel went into housing, utensils and even the machinery that made consumer goods like cotton spinning. The recurrent breakdowns and obsolescence meant output here always lagged behind the rest of the economy.

Often plants ran out of inputs altogether, even shoddy ones. When this happened they began to barter amongst themselves. A crude market developed, punishment for the excesses and gaps in the plan. An informal economy began to coexist alongside the formal one. Like scaffolding, it served to support the foundationless plan.

Finally, the world bore witness to the ultimate productive insult in a society stripped of any economy, the madness of producing the fewest products to meet targets. For example if the target was 1000 kilos of nails per day, it was quicker to produce thousands of large nails than millions of small nails. And so society was flooded by large nails when it needed a variety of different sized nails. In this way the bureaucratic plan fragmented society instead of uniting it, as each productive unit sought to achieve its target regardless of the consequence to the rest of society.

Of course, if workers were in control of production, this madness would never have arisen. Workers do not produce for the sake of producing. It is their labour, after all, that is consumed in producing these things. But, oppressed and alienated, they were removed from decision making over their own life force. They acted out the instructions of the bureaucracy, regardless of whether they agreed with it or not. At the bottom of the suggestion box in the Soviet Union was the labour camps.

THE FAILURE OF FINANCIAL TARGETS

Towards the end of his life, Stalin began to realise the limitations of quantitative planning. This was due to the slowdown in production following post-war reconstruction. Workers’ enthusiasm was waning, consumer goods production virtually non-existent, the military needed better quality, and so on.

The response of the bureaucracy to the lack of economy in the Soviet Union was predictable – they increasingly introduced capitalist methods and techniques. Actually they tried to bolt them on to an economy whose laws no longer corresponded to capitalism, because production was now directly social. Capitalist technique could no longer be applied to an economy where exchange had been abolished in the main part of the economy.

They tried to introduce the profit motive. But as we have seen, the profit motive exists only on the basis of unequal exchange. This meant that in the Soviet Union, if the profit motive were to work, it would have to rely on one enterprise exploiting another. That would have required enterprises freely buying and selling their products as commodities around an average selling price. This would have made the bureaucracy redundant and ushered in private property. In fact all this happened much later, from 1989 onwards.

Instead, the bureaucracy adopted the profit motive as an accounting convention. It was purely symbolic. Enterprises were allowed to add a percentage profit to their cost base. Part of this profit they could keep, the rest would be taxed. Indeed, tax on profits became one of the main sources of revenue for the state in later years.

Alas, this profit motive had the opposite effect to that desired by the bureaucracy. Instead of leading to efficiency, it led to inefficiency. The reason is not hard to find. If an enterprise raises productivity it reduces the cost-base of its operation. For example this may fall from 500 million roubles to 400 millions. Now if the profit was based on adding 20% to the cost base, then the total profit would fall from 100 million roubles (500m x 20%) to only 80 millions (400m x 20%).

Instead of more profit, it produced less profit. The only thing that prevents the same thing happening under capitalism is the exploitation of less efficient firms through the market price, which means efficiency is rewarded with higher profits. The bureaucracy found that profit was counter-productive. It could not reorganise society, nor motivate its members.

The only alternative would have been for the bureaucracy to substitute itself for the market. Instead of the invisble hand of the market redistributing profits from the less efficient firms to the more efficient firms, the state could instead use the visible hand of taxation to remove profits from the less efficient enterprises and pass them on to the more efficient ones. It would take with one tax hand and give with another.

This would have reduced the standing of the bureaucracy. Instead of occupying the commanding heights of the economy and planning it, the bureaucracy would have assumed the diminished role of arbitrating between the affairs of the enterprises. It would have led to the more efficient enterprises swallowing up the less efficient ones. The enterprises, and therefore the plant directors, especially the efficient ones, would have been in control, which is one step removed from private property. It would have led to economic civil war as the less efficient enterprises sought to defend themselves from the aggression of the more efficient ones. This economic fragmentation would have torn the bureaucracy apart.

The failure of the profit motive explains another phenomenon. In the Soviet Union replication of factories rather than innovation was the norm. We found the phenomenon of the same factory being built over and over again, rather than the tireless quest to produce newer and better factories. The economy grew sideways rather than upwards, falling technically further and further behind the West.

Once again there was an economic logic to this, as well as a political logic. By duplicating factories, bureaucrats duplicated the number of workers at work. This had the effect of duplicating the total labour time at their disposal.

Furthermore, assuming that each worker continued to produce the same quantity of surplus labour, this meant duplicating surplus labour time as well. As this surplus labour was the source of their profit mark-up, they ended up duplicating their profits. It all made economic sense.

This could not happen under capitalism. Because of exchange, any reduction in labour times by competitors would reduce prices, and penalise companies that preserved their labour times. Duplicating factories would therefore lead to bankruptcy, as the gap between the more efficient and the less efficient companies opened up.

Hence, in the USSR, the profit motive led to duplication, whereas under capitalism it leads to innovation. The same motive, but opposite results.

At the political level, it is quicker and easier to replicate the same factory. It therefore disrupts production far less, making it easier to meet targets. New factories require mastering new techniques, which requires the retraining of workers, solving all the teething problems associated with new technology, and mastering new supply lines needed by this technology. New technology is risky, and there is no person more cautious than a bureaucrat

The real tragedy is that some of the best research institutions in the world existed in the Soviet Union. It led the world in many areas of technology. Many of its patents were taken up in the west. Unfortunately few of these ideas found their way past the bureaucracy and into industry.

THE ABSENT LABOUR MARKET

Nor could imposing labour discipline on workers provide the solution. By the time of Stalin’s death, the social weight of the working class had grown. Huge cities were populated by millions of increasingly educated and cultured workers. The fact that Stalin’s heir was not another Stalin, but a Khruschev, owes everything to this new reality.

This confirmed Trotsky and the Left Opposition’s view that the only way to regenerate the Russian working class was to industrialise the country. New industry would mean new workers, and new workers kept alive the promise of completing the socialist revolution.

Given the weight of the working class, the bureaucracy increasingly had to rely on incentives rather than terror. However, the dearth of consumer goods made the promise of higher wages meaningless. Very often obtaining everyday goods depended on who you knew rather than the size of your wage packet. Queues became an everyday experience for the majority of workers. They were the constipation of daily life, and a tremendous distraction from production.

Nor could the bureaucracy introduce a labour market. Under capitalism it is this market, created by a surplus of workers, that is the bedrock of labour discipline. The more unemployed workers there are, the greater the fear of unemployment is, the greater the control by management.

In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, there was always a shortage of workers. Enterprises actually hoarded workers. Surplus workers were seen as the only solution to the inefficiency of the economy. Extra workers could repair the machinery that always broke down, they could produce certain inputs when these were in short supply, they could work extra shifts if the enterprise was falling behind the plan. They were the only resource that could be used to compensate for the lack of resources in the rest of the economy.

Holding on to workers preoccupied the management of enterprises. They began to treat their workers as in a fiefdom. They provided housing, education, health-care, even holidays to their workers in order to bind them to the enterprise. This created the impression that management was dependent on the workers, rather than the workers dependent on management, as happens under the rule of capital.

Unable to discipline workers, and unable to motivate them, the bureaucracy lost complete control of the labour process. Waste increased. This waste became more unbearable the higher the technique of production. A substandard metal plate can be used to sheath a locomotive, but it cannot be used to sheath a jet plane never mind a rocket.

Waste grew in proportion to the growing need for quality. It ate away at the investable surplus of society. Ultimately, with little to invest, reproduction became impossible. The economy ground to a halt.

By the late 1970s the USSR was faced with a stark choice: either workers would make political revolution and free the economy of its caste of bureaucrats, or it would fall back into capitalism as the bureaucrats stripped the economy to finance their private property. Unfortunately, workers did not make the revolution, allowing the bureaucracy to complete the counter-revolution. Today capitalism raises its ugly head from the ruins of the degenerated workers’ state, with terrible consequences for the workers.

Workers failed to make their revolution because they believed in the market rather than planning. They were intoxicated with the success of the market in Western Europe and the USA. There they saw the market providing a high standard of living for workers, higher than those enjoyed by even the more privileged layers of bureaucrats in their own country. There was more freedom, and more possibilities for personal achievement.

At the heart of the false consciousness of the workers in the USSR and Eastern Europe was the belief that planning must give rise to a bureaucracy. The logic was as simple as it was wrong. Planning, it was said, requires lots of calculations and therefore the need for a whole army of calculators. Such an army amounts to a bureaucracy, the weight of which must stifle any economy and frustrate any initiatives

Not for the first time the world had been stood on its head. Instead of a bureaucracy giving rise to a misplanned economy, the plan had given rise to a bureaucracy. With the world turned upside down, where left and right is inverted, predictably workers ended up marching in the wrong direction, towards the market.

Actually, the number of managerial and supervisory workers under capitalism most probably exceeds those in the USSR. The fact that they are split up into many companies tends to obscure that fact. It would be quite a useful academic exercise to count all the managers in, say, the USA, and compare the total with that in the USSR.

But this is beside the point. The market works because the consumer is king under capitalism. In the world of luxury goods production, this was always so. Every whim of a prospective Rolls Royce car owner was catered for. Since 1973 and the outbreak of recessions with its more competitive environment, this due care has been extended to cheaper and cheaper commodities. Today the most successful companies are those which listen best to consumers and cater for their changing needs. More is spent on delivering service and quality, and relatively less on telling consumers what they need.

In the Soviet Union, enterprises produced crap and remained producing. In the world of capital, producing crap means a failure to sell, which means no new cash. No new cash results in bankruptcy and the loss of all one’s capital. Obviously the discipline of the market prevents this.

Now imagine a society where the consumer is not only king, but is the producer as well. Imagine a society where there is no separation between production and consumption. In such a society the needs of consumption will form the basis for the organisation of production. That is, incidentally, why we need world revolution, so that consumption will not be subordinated to the needs of war or a siege economy.

Planning is the unity of production and consumption. Planning is the conscious division of labour of a society in order to satisfy the expressed needs of that society. Through it the activities of millions of producers are joined, co-ordinated and synchronised in one co-operative effort.

To organise social production requires individual participation in planning. It is based on workers’ control of production. Capitalist democracy never extends into the workplace. But working class democracy, society’s ultimate form of democracy, is concentrated in production, society’s highest activity and the source of its life, culture and civilisation.

In this transparent world, where constructive criticism is the language of the plan, workers will be free to say what is possible and what should be corrected. Any arrogant or incompetent planner will swiftly be returned to the shop floor. So soon as it is possible, we stand for the rotation of every worker between planning and working. This marks the definitive end to the division between mental and physical labour.

Planning only becomes bureaucratic, i.e. alienated from the workers, when its purpose is to remove the surplus product from the working class so that it may be consumed outside the working class. So long as workers are in control, so long as the surplus of society is put to the needs of that society, bureaucratisation of the plan will not be possible. In the Soviet Union the bureaucracy preceded the plan. Indeed, had the bureaucracy not smashed the Left Opposition and the kulaks by 1928, to become masters of society, they would not have been in a position to initiate the First Five Year Plan.

Just as planning has got a bad press in the East, so under capitalism its virtues go unnoticed. The bigger the capitalist corporation, the more carefully and meticulously it has to plan its operations. At the very least, every department head has to submit budget plans. Looking further down the ladder we find that even the smallest entrepreneur has to provide the bank with a business plan when seeking a loan.

It has been the rising technique of production that has been the midwife for planning. Today, common computer platforms link companies and their suppliers. They all work collectively on the development of new products. The Boeing 777 was designed in concert by Boeing and its thousands of component suppliers. It meant the plane was designed in less time and with fewer problems. Without this level of planning it is unlikely this complex plane would ever have got off the ground.

Then there are the cost savings flowing from planning. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than "just in time" production. This means that assembly points do not store any stocks. These arrive only when they are needed from suppliers. It is as though the conveyor belt has reached beyond the factory perimeter itself, to extend to a network of suppliers, some hundreds of miles away. Such precision takes lots of planning and lots of computing power.

And here comes the rub. All this has required more workers’ control of the shop floor. Management has been forced to cede more day to day decisions to work teams at the cutting edge of production. Of course, all this delegation of responsibility requires class peace. It cannot take place amidst class conflict, which means that in the future, when class conflict erupts, this method of organisation will rupture at every turn, demonstrating all the better the need for complete workers’ control. The transitional demand of "all control to the work teams" needs to be included in any action programme.

Equally with just in time production, strikes, and therefore the threat of the disruption of supplies, will force companies to stock up and rely less on goods arriving at the last minute. It, too, will shatter this gain for modem management techniques.

At the political level, this explains the growing tendency by the state to impose discipline, to sweep away liberal conventions and ideas. The increasingly sophisticated economy requires more harmony for its fulfillment, which imposes a requirement on the state to police the family, police education and police the workplace more diligently. In inverse proportion to the withdrawal of the state from economic life, so it intervenes more emphatically in social life.

These developments expose the growing strain between the growth in the forces of production and the relations of production. The growing technique of production demands an end to class conflict and disruption by the market. It demands workers control of production, and through it planning.

The recession in the early 1990s took place in the dark shadow of the collapse of the USSR and Eastern Europe. Now, after a decade, the next severe recession will cast the spotlight on how fragile the foundations of these new management methods are, just how vulnerable and intolerant they are of the market.

TO CONCLUDE

In conclusion, many Marxists have made the lack of democracy the key reason why socialism failed in the Soviet Union. This methodology is unscientific. A phenomenon, any phenomenon, must be explained not by what is missing but by what is present, for only in that way can we understand its peculiar form.

Instead, we have sought to explain the limitations of planning by means of quantity, We have explained why the bureaucracy could not find a financial incentive to bring economy to its planning. Above all, we have explained why the profit motive, the driving force of capitalism, could not function in an economy that was now directly socialised.

Through so doing we have established that there is no viable exploitative mode of production beyond capitalism, or what is the same thing, between capitalism and living socialism. This is a very positive note, and the most important lesson to take away from the tragedy that was the Soviet Union.

Once we get rid of capitalism there is only socialism. Without it, society cannot finally be taken forward to escape the gravity of exploitation. There must never again be a repeat of socialism in one country. It will take all the resources of capitalism to build socialism. The consciousness of the working class must be raised beyond that of the nation, the ancestral home of capital, to take on the planet as a whole. There must be one world, one working class, one consciousness, the international consciousness of the proletariat.

The experience of the Soviet Union has weighed terribly on the consciousness of the international working class. Like an ideological landslide it has temporarily blocked the way forward. Fortunately, the instability of capitalism does ensure that landslides become dislodged. There will come a time when the market will be seen, not as the final solution to the economic plight of humanity, but as a threat to society’s future.

The debate on planning has not ended – it has only been interrupted. It is the most significant debate of all, for on its outcome hinges the future of mankind. Without it there can be no alternative to capitalism, and therefore no hope of our liberation from economic exploitation. Through planning, an emancipated working class can, and will, close the bloody chapter on class warfare, and usher in a golden epoch of real human development and fulfilment.

Luxemburg or Lenin? – No, and Lenin!

2008-01-16T01:32:00.000-08:00

‘No socialism without democracy’ as Luxemburg famously proclaimed means the working class themselves must defeat reaction and fascism and only it can institute the socialist society. But the working class does need a revolutionary party to lead it and for that we need the legacy of both Lenin and Luxembourg.

Today Die Linke is limited to defending the German ‘social market economy’ and differs from the SPD only in opposing neo-liberal capitalism. This is similar to the recently-split British SWP’s Respect’s policy of rejecting Tony Blair’s New Labour by harking back to ‘Old Labour’ – bring back the good old days of Willy Brandt and Harold Wilson! Oscar Lafontaine’s populist politics have seen him flirting with racism and xenophobia against immigrants; he wants to withdraw citizenship from all those who ‘don’t speak the German language, don’t pay their share of taxes or help finance the social state’. This is similar to Gordon Brown’s ‘British jobs for British workers’ and plays straight into the hands of the Nazis by echoing their policies and giving them respectability. But the working class is on the move. The national rail strike in November 2007 led by the Gewerkschaft Deutscher Lokomotivführer (GDL) showed that the fight back against the privatisation of the rail is strong. However the DKP, the German Communist Party, has refused support in reality because the GDL action challenged the sweetheart deals and privatisation plans of the other main railway unions; Transnet Gewerkschaft (Transnet) and Verkehrsgewerkschaft (GDBA). Die Linke is badly split on the issue. Although it is clear that the GDL leader Manfred Schell has compromised the fight against privatisation in private negotiations with Deutsche Bahn, (coordinated contracts were clearly preparing privatisation and Schell seems to have accepted them at last) and the issue is reduced to the size of the wage settlement nevertheless the militancy of the train drivers has revived the labour movement significantly.

Currently 5,000 German troops in Afghanistan assist the US and Britain by policing the oil wealth of Tajikistan. As Karl Liebknecht, co-editor with Rosa of Rote Fahne, famously proclaimed in opposing the first inter-imperialist war and rescuing revolutionary Marxism from the dead hands of Kautsky, ‘the greatest enemy is at home’. To its credit Die Linke are for the withdrawal of these troops. However both Lothar Bisky’s Die Links.PDS and Oskar Lafontaine’s Labour and Social Justice – The Electoral Alternative (WASG) come from a thoroughly reformist and counter-revolutionary tradition, although there are many sincere revolutionary socialists in its ranks.

Many in today’s LLL demonstration want to reduce it to two Ls, to drop Lenin and say that his methods were responsible for Stalinism or even Nazism. This month also marks the 75^th anniversary Hitler’s chancellorship. How did such an appalling catastrophe befall what was the best organised and cultured section of the international working class in its time? The SPD’s Noske, Scheidemann and Ebert did the dirty work for the capitalists when the Freikorp murdered Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and later Leo Jogiches in 1919, preparing Hitler’s rise. These are Lafontaine’s antecedents. In November 1932 votes in millions were; KPD 6, SPD 7.2; in the main from organised workers, not the ‘human dust’ of Nazi petty officials and clerks; who only got 11.7 million. This showed that it is a lie that the German working class supported Hitler. The Antifa and SPD militias were powerful fighting organisations which could have smashed the Nazis. However lunatic ultra-leftism of the KPD led them to deride the threat from the Nazis and identify the SPD as the main enemy – ‘after the Nazis us’ was the idiotic cry even after Hitler had taken power. This meant that the Antifa were never organised for the fight, though it and many others many still fought heroically. This bogus ultra-leftism was quickly replaced by the Popular Front strategy, the basic class collaborationist line of every Stalinist formation since 1935. This is Bisky’s tradition.

Only Leon Trotsky presented a programme of the Workers United Front (SPD and KPD) to stop fascism before 1933, ‘fascism is … based on the uprooting of all elements of proletarian democracy within bourgeois society... [it plans] to demolish all the defensive bulwarks of the proletariat’ and ‘Fascism is a specific means of mobilising and organising the petty bourgeoisie in the social interests of finance capital’. Today’s Nazis, based mainly on lumpen working class youth cannot conquer power, although they can do terrible damage in setting a reactionary agenda for Merkel to exploit. This takes us back to Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht. We must assimilate their individual strengths and oppose their weaknesses, much of which arose from adapting too much to their own circumstances because they lacked a real revolutionary socialist world party.

As August Thalheimer argued, ‘Out of genuine revolutionary Marxism, both Rosa Luxemburg and also Lenin rescued the general conception of the proletarian dictatorship and the role of revolutionary violence within it. Rosa Luxemburg championed this conception… (against Bernstein and Kautsky) who opposed the proletarian dictatorship and limited the revolutionary struggle to the democratic-parliamentary-trade union struggle’. Luxemburg correctly criticised the Bolsheviks for justifying in theory the measures they were forced to take in the Civil War. Germany and Britain had more mature working classes than Russia but ones that were steeped in reformism without the vital experience of the failed 1905 revolution and its new soviet forms of workers’ rule. However their maturity and education in workers’ democracy meant that they would be more capable of exercising democratic interaction with and control over their revolutionary leadership.

he murders in 1919 and the ‘Bolshevisation’ of the KPD and rejection of a revolutionary perspective prepared the terrible conditions for the victory of Hitler without an organised struggle. ‘Bolshevisation’ (in reality the craven acceptance of zigzagging dictates from the Kremlin) gutted the party of its critical thinking political leaders and left sycophantic Stalinist yes men like ErnstThälmann in charge. Here is why Luxemburg’s legacy is so vital. ‘No socialism without democracy’ as she famously proclaimed means the working class themselves must defeat reaction and fascism and only it can institute the socialist society. But the working class does need a revolutionary party to lead it so we must reject those who counterpose Luxemburg to Lenin – we need a revolutionary party to give voice to, to guide and direct the revolutionary aspirations for human liberation of the masses and for that we need the legacy of both Lenin and Luxembourg. This is the real revolutionary tradition we should celebrate today, not Die Linke’s reformist capitulation to capitalism.

We are a group of comrades in the Campaign for a Marxist Party who are in the process of forming a Trotskyist tendency. This is out first public intervention. E-mail adds: revolutionsozialismus@yahoo.co.uk and gerdowning@btinternet.com. See blog at International Trotskyism.

HOPI German intervention at the LLL Veranstaltungen

2008-01-16T00:32:00.000-08:00

Comrades of HOPI,

Three members of HOPI, Steve Revins, Jim Padmore and Gerry Downing went to Berlin at the weekend (Saturday 12^th January – Monday 14) to attend events around the commemoration of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Lenin: the “LLL Veranstaltungen”. We took one thousand of the main HOPOI statement, which is at the website in German.

At Stansted airport on the way out of the UK, we were stopped by officials who found the leaflets in Jim’s bag and called the airport police, who gave their badge numbers as PC 1012 and PC 1503. We held us up for about forty minutes, more than enough time to miss our flight had we not been very early. They subjected Jim to a long interrogation as they found other left wing literature in his bag. They did not get a translation of the HOPI and asked Jim about its content and his political views on the Middle East and many other questions. They checked our passports against their records by mobile and took our names and addresses and who our employers were. The campaign may well feel that an official complaint is in order against this type of harassment.

The LLL demonstration was about seven thousand strong with strong youth contingents – Rebel (WWW.rebell.info) was one of the biggest and liveliest and there were many Turkish and other Middles Eastern groups with all manner of banner extolling Marx, Lenin Stalin and Mao. The usual suspects also attended, Die Linke, the KPD, the Sparts, the IBT and Workers Power German group. There was no sign of Revo, the youth group that Workers Power and Permanent Revolution fight over, though we did look for them. The leaflet was well received and hopefully will produce some contacts for the Campaign.

Albert Leo Schlageter

2008-01-15T23:50:00.000-08:00

In his ‘Firm in Principle’ article in WW 703 Benjamin Klein seeks to defend his (and the CPGB’s) position that no platforming fascists whenever possible is not always correct. This position says we should seek to destroy the fascists’ arguments in democratic debate just as the communists did in Germany in the early 20s. Let us first say that it is of course wrong to demand that the state bans the fascists, though we would not rush to their defence if it did. We would oppose legislation to take away civil rights to free speech etc. for the good reason that we know that it would be used almost exclusively against the left. Historical experience has shown this to be correct. So it is not the fascists rights we defend against repressive legislation but our own and those of the organised working class.

Comrade Benjamin can only cite one instance in defence of his debate the fascists position; ‘in the early 1920s the Communist Party of Germany actually organised debates with German fascist groups, including the Nazis, attracting large numbers. This tactic led to an increase in influence for the communists, to the recruitment of many who were impressed not only by its power to mobilise, but by their arguments. And, believe it or not, members of the far right would themselves be won over’.

Aside from the fact that it is impossible to prove that even short term this tactic worked it legitimises what was one of the worst errors of the early Comintern. In a speech delivered on 21 June 1923 to the plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International Karl Radek sought to conciliate the fascists on the grossly opportunist grounds that both Communists and Fascists were opposed to the Entente and the fascist Leo Albert Schlageter, who was executed by the French in April for opposing the occupation of the Ruhr, was really a hero who ‘sought to serve the German people’.

The editors of Labour Monthly, (Vol. 5 No 3 September 1923), in reprinting Radek’s speech say “Radek, on behalf of the Communist International sent forth this message into the heart of the Fascist camp – a message of sympathy and comprehension for the ideals and heroism of the Nationalist struggle, inspiring the followers of Fascism among the masses, but relentlessly exposing the double dealing anti-nationalism and subservience to Big Business and the Entente on the part of their leaders and showing that the only way for the realisation of their hopes and ideals and the freedom of the German nation lay through the proletarian revolution”. This was surely the wrong united front; it was neither anti-imperialist nor anti capitalist. Surely the allies needed by the communists were the workers who supported the SPD, this was the united front called for in the circumstances. What were these older, more conservative but highly organised class conscious workers to think of this speech? It could only be seen as a pact against them, particularly as their leaders Ebert and Noske had recently crushed the communist revolution in1919 and then successfully called them out on a general strike to defeat the fascist Kapp Putch counter revolution of 1920.

Is that really the example we want to follow? This is some of what Radek had to say, “If those German Fascist, who honestly thought to serve the German people, failed to understand the significance of Schlageter’s fate, Schlageter died in vain... against whom did the German people wish to fight: against the Entente capitalists or against the Russian people? With whom did they wish to ally themselves: with the Russian workers and peasants in order to throw off the yoke of Entente capital for the enslavement of the German and Russian peoples? … His comrades in arms swore at his graveside to carry on his fight. They must supply the answer: against whom and on whose side?”

They were to ‘throw off the yoke of Entente capital’ but Radek certainly was not asking fascists, the stormtroopers of finance capital, to overthrow German capital. That would be plainly silly. Anyone could supply the answer with the benefit of hindsight but the Comintern really should have had a bit more foresight. Trotsky’s fight against Stalin’s failure to understand fascism was severely undermined by his own history on this; Lenin was already bedridden. The Stalin-Hitler pact does not seem so strange when we look at Radek’s speech. The German Stalinist’s mistakes in advocating ‘after the Nazis us’ even after Hitler had taken power and was preparing the concentration camps is understandable if we look at this history. It is clear that comrades even today do not understand fascism and entertain ridiculous libertarian notions like trying to recruit some of them by democratic debate. Forget it comrades, do not give the fascist space to live and breath while we still can before they control the state and give us no space to live and breath.

Comradely Gerry Downing

All-American hero

2008-01-01T07:02:00.000-08:00

AJ Byrne reviews Andy Stern's Getting America back on track: a country that works

From San Diego up to Maine ,
In every mine and mill,
Where workers strike and organize,’
Says he, ‘You’ll find Joe Hill,’
Says he, ‘You’ll find Joe Hill.’

Another great hero has emerged in the American labour movement. Andy Stern, leader of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), has a great mission - and now he has written a book making sure we all know about it.

When Transport and General Workers Union general secretary Tony Woodley spoke at the TGWU delegates’ conference on July 11 2005, he welcomed his future international partner in their new global union: “That’s why I am delighted to welcome here today my friend and comrade, Andy Stern, president of our sister union, the SEIU. What a leader. What a visionary this guy is.”

So who is this “visionary”, Andy Stern? He and the Teamsters’ boss, Jimmy Hoffa, led a 40% split in the AFL-CIO in 2005, forming the new Change to Win federation. He never made any mystery about what changes he wanted. First, he wanted to recruit more members - his union has tripled its membership over the past several years to 1.8 million today. However, he also wanted to ‘rationalise’ the union’s base by negotiating the handing over of workers who more properly ‘belonged’ to other unions. And, as well as wanting the unions to “become more democratic” and “improve the relationship with individual members”, he hoped to “find ways to persuade business leaders to work in partnership with them” (p37).

He speaks of workers “self-managing their work lives” and predicts that “one in four workers will be contingent employees [!] or self-employed by 2010. Individuals want more flexibility in their jobs” (p38). We would suggest that the “contingent employees” would give a great deal to have far less “flexibility” and more security.

As for international questions, Lech Walesa and his “brave trade unionists” had demonstrated the need for “free, democratic unions, in contrast to the government-dominated unions of the communist dictatorships” by winning the cold war and “destroying all obstacles to market capitalism” (p38).

Strangely in the preceding chapter he recounts his visit to China and the lavish reception given to his delegation by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). He says: “The ACFTU’s willingness to transform itself to effectively counter the impact of globalisation has far-reaching implications for the workers everywhere” (p28). This is because they have resorted to traditional American tactics of ‘blacklisting’ foreign-owned enterprises that defied Chinese labour laws. Clearly the ACFTU cannot be one of those dreadful “government-dominated unions of the communist dictatorships”, as it is entirely in favour of “market capitalism”.

So much so in fact that it had to ask Wal-Mart to put up a token show of resistance when it initially requested the right to ‘organise’ its workers. This entirely bogus organisation of 150 million members makes sure that these stores and factories are not organised - the state itself is guarding Wal-Mart against the workers. Wal-Mart will not tolerate unions in its US stores and only concedes recognition in countries where the movement is strong enough to impose its will.

There must be some problems, however, because the Communist Party of China itself decided to organise two branches in Wal-Mart - more professional state informers on militant workers were needed. It is therefore sickening to see a left publication giving an uncritical report of Jimmy Hoffa’s visit to the ACFTU under the headline “China’s unions organise Wal-Mart” (News Line June 11). Apparently, “The Chinese government has also drafted a law strengthening the union, so it can better protect workers.”

Hoffa is reported as saying: “We left China with a commitment to continue our discussions with Chinese organisations on how best to promote the rights of workers here, there and everywhere in the world.” The discovery this week of some 500 brick kiln slaves, including children, who were put to work with the collusion of the local Communist Party, speaks volumes of the effectiveness of ‘Chinese labour laws’ and how the CPC ‘promotes the rights of workers’. Strange bedfellows indeed - Change to Win, the ACFTU and News Line.

But maybe that’s just China. After all the book is subtitled Getting America back on track. Stern is a true-blue patriot of the American dream, so maybe he fights to the death for his own workers. An article by Alan Benjamin in the January-February 2007 issue of San Francisco newspaper, The Organizer, puts us straight:

“In his interview with The Wall Street Journal, Stern explained his reasons for seeking healthcare partnerships with the employers: ‘We must try to be partners with our employers, who have told us we should change and understand their competitive issues and try to add value, not create problems,’ Stern said. ‘Unions need to appreciate there are ways in which we add value and can be helpful. This is especially the case in relation to health-care. The employer-based healthcare system is dead. It’s a relic of the industrial economy, and it makes corporations unable to compete fairly when America is the only country that asks its employers to put the price of healthcare on the cost of its products.’”

These are not just empty words. Stern has been working overtime offering his ‘helpful’ services to some of the most anti-union and retrograde sectors of big business in this country. Stern and Wal-Mart have announced a healthcare partnership “aimed at attaining universal healthcare coverage”. The partnership also includes Intel Corp, AT&T Inc and Kelly Services Inc, a temporary staffing agency. According to an earlier Associated Press release, “no specific policies were proposed to achieve this goal. Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott said that Wal-Mart is not committed to spending more on healthcare or making any immediate promises to provide health coverage to more workers” (February 7).

Marnie Goodfriend of Labor Beat in Chicago has lambasted Stern for “rubber stamping” Wal-Mart’s empty-rhetoric support for universal healthcare: “Stern should be putting intense public scrutiny and pressure on Wal-Mart for its exploitative and degrading work conditions,” Goodfriend noted, “not using Wal-Mart’s paper-thin public support for healthcare to undermine his own campaign against the company.”

In January governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced a new healthcare plan for California. Politicians and corporate heads immediately applauded the proposal and said it could become a model for ‘healthcare reform’ in states across the country.

However, the response from the trade union movement varied sharply. Unlike Stern, Art Pulaski, secretary-treasurer of the California Labor Federation (AFL-CIO), was highly critical. He stated: “This proposal will be a boon to insurance companies, but a bust for most workers. This plan requires all Californians to buy health insurance with no guarantee that it will be affordable or that coverage will be adequate. We are concerned that the plan creates an incentive for employers who currently provide healthcare to drop coverage and instead pay only a minimal tax … This is a plan that Wal-Mart can love and Wal-Mart workers will hate. The proposed employer contribution is so low that even Wal-Mart, a corporation known for its minimal employee healthcare coverage, already exceeds the requirements.”

The following extract from Stern’s book shows the actual direction the Change to Win federation is taking: “I realised our priority should not be to make unionised employers non-competitive by raising the wages and benefits they offered their employees over the non-union company’s wages in the market. Instead, our priority should be to contribute to our employers’ success by organising all their competitors. Only then would we be able to bargain contracts that set the same minimum standards for all the competing employees and then take the wage differentials off the table” (p58). It sounds in many ways like a naive 2007 version of Robert Owen’s utopian socialism until we recall that Stern’s god is Lech Walesa’s market capitalism.

The book is full of this absolute nonsense ad nauseam. We learn that in California he struck a deal with Kaiser Permanente over organising their nursing homes using these ‘principles’, but the California Nurses Association foolishly “still critics the arrangements” - they objected to the no-strike clauses, amongst other things, and have just joined the AFL-CIO.

Other points of interest include Stern’s admiration for that arch-reactionary, Newt Gingrich (p99 et seq), despite his attempts to cripple union political campaigning back in 1998 by taking away their right to make donations and use their funds for union education in the infamous ‘pay-check protection’ ballots. Stern has boundless admiration for the organisational skills of the US army - they could do with his advice in Iraq (p100-01) - and, most bizarre of all, supports the fundamentalist ‘megachurches’ that have grown up in recent years as examples of good care in the community. He even lists four best-selling books from these bigots amongst his favourites in the ‘non-fiction’ category (p104).

Stern would like his union to be an ‘outsourcer’: that is, like construction, where “employers outsource benefits administration to the union - a defined per-hour contribution for healthcare and pensions benefits - while workers are employed on the construction projects … this system provides benefits to both employers and employees. Employers gain flexibility and workers gain continuity in the management of their funds” (pp108-09). Of course, the workers do not gain “continuity” in their jobs - but he has already accepted this as a fact of life and does not intend to combat it. And the unions will gain a nice little earner, he forgot to add.

The actual plan which is going to get America “back on track” is a juvenile piece of drivel about the information superhighway, smaller schools, more taxes on corporations - all of which is more of a prayer than a practical action plan. Why on earth would they listen to a union movement that spends its time grovelling to them like Stern does? The conclusion is just plain embarrassing: “America needs every citizen to speak out and see their collective voices transformed into the winds of change. Only then can their leaders best steer” (p182) - ‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ I’d say if I wasn’t an atheist.

Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson were elected as a reaction against the company unionism of the Bill Morris/Roger Lyons era, yet Andy Stern has a far more rightwing project than that. It is clear now that the split with AFL-CIO was to the right - and that is some achievement, given how bureaucratically reactionary that organisation was and still is. But already it seems that Stern’s views are being discussed and could well be put into practice by the Woodley-Simpson leadership of Unite, the new merged union this side of the Atlantic.

According to Harry Kelber of The Labor Educator, “The line-up of pro-business publications that eagerly gave Stern a forum to enhance his personality and promote his views includes The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, The Washington Post and a number of influential dailies around the country” (November 2006). Stern himself states: “Like most traditional labor leaders I have been trained to be distrustful of and antagonistic with ‘the boss’ and I brought that attitude to the relationship. The distrust can be rightfully earned [apparently there are some reactionary employers], but this class struggle mentality was a vestige of an earlier, rough era of industrial unions [Chinese brick kilns?]” (p70-71).

It is very clear why you won’t find Joe Hill at Andy Stern’s side.

Why is the British working class more class conscious that the American?

2008-01-01T06:47:00.000-08:00

Why is the British working class more class conscious that the American?

By Gerry Downing

In the current debate about the lack of revolutionary consciousness in the British working class it is useful to contrast the class consciousness of the British and American working class. Following Trotsky’s advice the slogan ‘build a Labor party’ has long been accepted in America and various attempts have been made to break the trade unions from the Democrats and build a workers’ party. Few serious socialist would disagree with this tactic, though, of course, how it should be put into practice is controversial; should American unionists try to build a reformist party or should revolutionaries use the slogan as a transitional demand in a conjunctional way to allow the character of the party to be determined in struggle? We would argue the latter, however, as the break with the lib-lab orientation of the trade unions to the Liberal party happened in Britain more that a hundred years ago the task now is to build a revolutionary socialist party to intervene in the existing labour movement and not seek to build our own, new labour movement, a left, real or old version of the Labour party. Moreover even if appropriate this would require a real movement in the working class to succeed, attempts by so-called revolutionaries to don the cloths of reformism in order to gain electoral support presumable with the intention of revealing their nakedness on the eve of the revolution are totally misguided, why should anyone believe them then? We will examine the development of class consciousness in the two nations up to WWII to make the point that those who cannot defend existing gains will never make new ones. The essay is adapted from two Open University essays.

Trade unions were illegal in Britain under the Combination Acts for the first quarter of the nineteenth century. E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class postulates that in this period the working class through its struggles became class conscious; that is they became aware of their own separate interests as a class and the need to fight collectively for that. The overwhelmingly presence of artisans and the working class in the mass demonstrations in 1831-32 in the struggle for the Great Reform Act testifies to this as does Chartism (1839-48), the world’s first truly national mass working class movement which fought for political rights such as adult male suffrage and annual parliaments. However much its detractors might point to the continued popularity of rural nostalgia and liberal radicalism in some of its propaganda it lent a political orientation and mass struggle to Robert Owen’s utopian socialism and feminism and looked forward to a new world. This was the movement that Marx and Engels addressed in their 1848 Communist Manifesto. It had weapons of mass propaganda to assist it in changing attitudes, the mass-produced leaflet and pamphlet and the radical press like the Northern Star and the Poor Man’s Guardian.

In America at the start of that century ‘The possession of some property by almost all white male adults meant that not only few, if any, were poor, but that equally few were rich…’ though this very much changed with the mass Irish, Germans and Chinese immigration at mid-century and the emergence of the robber barons at the end of the century. The native working class and trade unions were patronised during the Civil War, though the new immigrants suffered cruel exploitation from the forties, the Irish and Chinese on the 1860s railway construction for example. Post war the anti-Irish nativist Know Nothings (1854-56) first used the tactic of divide and rule which was to become so detrimental to American trade union organisation. Ira Katznelson in Working class formation… (Studies, p.173) theorises that ‘In the United States… a split consciousness came to divide the working class: as labourers in their work place and as ethnic or residents of this or that territory in their residential community. In England, by contrast, there was no equivalent divided consciousness, nor was class seen as a category of social understanding limited to the realm of work and labour’. She maintains that ‘the differences between these states’ organisation and public policy’ made for ‘the key difference in class formation’ between Britain and America (ibid. p.175). James Holt’s article demonstrates that trade unions were not defeated by lack of militancy but suggests that ‘technical changes (in American industry) had undermined the importance of member’s skills which remained critical in the technically less advanced steel mills of Britain’ (Trade Unionism… Offprints 2, p.15). However these are only partial explanations; the central factor governing changing attitudes to trade unions between Britain and America was surely the fate of crucial industrial disputes and why they were won in Britain and lost in America.

The central factor governing changing attitudes to trade unions between Britain and America was surely the fate of crucial industrial disputes and why they were won in Britain and lost in America

The Bryant and Mays match girls (1888) and the struggle for the Dockers’ Tanner (1889) disputes were won because a more mature working class had learned the value of solidarity and painful historical lessons on the nature of the state how to fight it. The British lost most of their illusions in the state after the Peterloo massacre in 1819. In the US the Homestead Strike near Pittsburgh in 1892 and other similar disputes like the 1894 strike by the American Railway Union against the Pullman Palace Car Company near Chicago were lost because Carnegie and other magnates commanded huge recourses compared to their British counterparts, national unions were of necessity widely dispersed and the strikers were naive about the nature of the state and its attitude to the strikers. This crucial struggle against Carnegie’s steel mill was enormously violent but had huge public and even establishment press support. The armed strikers seemed to have won when they forced the surrender of the two hundred Pinkerton agents only to concede to the deployment of state troopers in the belief that they had come to support them. Clive Emsley’s Police and Industrial disputes… (Studies, pp. 112-131) points to the reasons for this; local deputy sheriffs often sympathised with strikers whom they knew and to whom they might be related. The egalitarianism of the Constitution and the universal male franchise led to false expectations of the benefits of citizenship and state impartiality.

We will see how craft unionism affected the developments in both countries and why in Britain the unskilled organized successfully in the big industrial conflicts of the 1890s and why the American attempts largely failed. We will view the organisation of the unskilled as the vital step in developing class consciousness and therefore the key to understanding why the British trade unions successfully built the Labour party and why similar efforts in the US failed.

We will view the organisation of the unskilled as the vital step in developing class consciousness and therefore the key to understanding why the British trade unions successfully built the Labour party and why similar efforts in the US failed.

The vicious repression used in the post-Russian Revolution Red Scare in America holds the key to understanding why the paths of the two movements diverged so sharply at this point; the British movement also suffered post war reaction but survived in far better shape because of its past gains and because it could fight more successfully on both the industrial and political fronts.

Britain’s New Model Unions were craft dominated from the demise of Chartism at the end of the 1840s to the revival of the movement by the mobilisation of the unskilled at the start of the successful strike wave of 1889-92. US labour had revived after the civil war but it was localised these unionists were typified by the Irish Catholic-dominated Molly Maguires based in the Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania and other coal mines. They wrecked instant and bloody retribution against mine owners and their agents who had treated them badly. The Mollys were crushed and ten leaders hanged in 1877. The US strike wave of 1889-92, almost contemporaneous with the British, ended in crushing defeats. These events highlighted and exasperated the differences between the two movements. Royden Harrison identifies three big differences. Complementing the British unions he lists the Co-Operative movement, Labour Churches, socialist Sunday schools and working men’s clubs as constituent parts of the labour movement. The lack of such auxiliary institutions in America meant setbacks and defeats were far more costly to it. The second difference identified by Harrison is that the British TUC ‘survived all the struggles between the old trade unionists, representing a privileged stratum of skilled workers and the bold new unionists enrolled under Kier Hardy for the eight hour day and the Socialist Commonwealth’. The American movement did not develop a single, integrated leading centre which encompassed all the diverse strands within the trade unions until after WWII.

The Taff Vale judgement of 1901, which made striking effective illegal, whilst depressing the level of strikes, did not deal a crushing blow to the British trade unions but turned them towards political solutions. The unions flocked to join the Labour Representation Committee and the 1906 general election saw 54 Labour MPs returned. They founded the Labour party, the third difference identified by Harrison. Campbell-Bannerman, the new Liberal Prime minister, was obliged by the pledges given by his MPs during the campaign and mass pressure to enact the TUC’s own Trade Disputes Bill. This ensured that trade unions could not be sued for damages caused during a strike, which immunity lasted until 1971. In the US there was no such legal protection; a hostile judiciary handed out injunctions against them at will. Strike breaking agencies like the Pinkertons were supplemented by company police forces and by state and federal troopers who could and did shoot to kill if the unions looked like succeeding. The American labour movement’s political achievements peaked in 1912. Although Eugene V. Debs also got almost a million votes for the Socialist party in 1920 whilst in jail for opposing the war, it was from a much bigger electorate. But to what extent he could be said to represent the movement is questionable, following his departure from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, 1905 – c1925) in 1908 and his rejection of, and by, the AFL.

The Knights of Labor (1869 – c1900), claiming 702,000 members in 1886 and the IWW, who claimed 100,000 members in 1923, were really militant trade unions. However they were fundamentally different from the British labour movement. The Knights and the IWW were anarcho-syndicalist politically, that is they held to those theories of the rights of the individual peculiar to the nobility-dominated rural societies of Italy, Spain and Russia and the anti-political syndicalist ideas developed in France, which sought to overthrow capitalism by strikes and sabotage and replace it with trade union structures. They sought only localised workers’ control of factories and regions with no real idea of what the Co-operative Commonwealth might be or how it might function, especially after the IWW split with their most political members led by Daniel DeLeon and Debs in 1908. Charges of unamericanism were commonly used against them. Both were ultra-left critics of Samuel Gompers’s AFL (1886) and scorned the task of fighting within the AFL. This thoroughly confusing and directionless half-way ideology was mediated through rural populism. It directed much of its work at black Southern share croppers, the ‘timber beasts’ of the logging camps of the Northwest and Southern Appalachians and the increasingly marginalised small farmers of the Midwest. It inevitably folded before severe repression. It was typified by William J Bryan, whose famous ‘Cross of Gold’ speech to the Democratic Convention of 1896 was the purest of demagogic humbuggery.

The British Labour party was always reformist, it sought a ‘brotherhood of man’ socialism which blurred if not eliminated class lines. Its strongest influence was the old Methodist egalitarianism that reduced the class struggle to moral issues. But it was, and still is, a living contradiction, a bourgeois-workers party in Lenin’s famous analysis, capitalist at the top but uniquely built by and organically tied to the trade unions and so susceptible to pressure from its working class base. The Knights and the IWW had organized women, blacks and the unskilled and were egalitarian in outlook. Gompers’s AFL increasing allowed discrimination against women, blacks and the unskilled and became the bastion of elitist craft unionism.

Serious WWI labour shortages enormously increased the bargaining power of the British trade unions. War-time collaboration by the likes of Henderson, the first Labour cabinet member, was bought at the price of increased participation of the trade unions in the production processes, which became far more centrally controlled and planned. The extremely high British death rates in the trenches killed off the high spirited patriotic enthusiasm with which Britons went to war. The length of involvement meant that this advantage had sufficient time to be institutionalised in the structures of the unions, enhancing the power of the shop floor relative to the top trade union bureaucracy. Pre-war American labour was far more migratory, being composed largely of immigrants who often sought to earn enough to return home and buy a plot or others who sought to buy property in the US; the spirit of individualism lived on based on perceived prospects of upward mobility still seen as greater than anywhere else in the world at the time (the American dream) so many were not interested in strikes which might only benefit them in the long term whereas self-help for the British working class meant ‘the friendly society, the trade union and the co-op’, according to Harrison. US Labour was subjected to far greater and more rapid technological changes and it entered war-time production at a lower level of organisation and with the craft-dominated AFL far more hostile than the TUC to organising the unskilled on an industrial basis. See Harry Quelch’s Evidence to the Royal Commission on Labour, 1892. This makes it clear that many employers accepted the closed shop even then; this strength was undreamt of in America.

The American Constitution was designed to supply a permanent defence for individual liberty against popular enthusiasm and personal dictatorship. The splitting of the sovereignty did not especially interfere with the purpose of a conservative party but to a party of social and industrial reforms it offers a disheartening obstacle. In the US not one but fifty separate campaigns must be waged to enact progressive legislation and then the President may veto it or the ‘nine old men’ of the Supreme Court (state of federal) may just find it unconstitutional. The late entry of the US to the war in 1917 and its relatively rapid conclusion meant that anti-German hysteria and anti-union propaganda (the enemy within, fifth columnists, etc) were combined under the banner of patriotism and there was not the great slaughter of American soldiers to enable wider layers of the population to see through this and at least sympathise with American labour – always a minority, unlike in Britain. Anti-Kaiser hysteria quickly became anti-Bolshevik against labour and all immigrants in the post-war strike wave. The biggest of these massive confrontations was the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 in the southern West Virginia coalfields where up to 15,000 miners and strike-breakers fought with guns for ten day in the largest battle since the Civil War. This was US labour’s biggest ever confrontation. Both the police chief and the mayor of the little rail town of Matewan in Mingo County were killed fighting on the side of the miners.

Immigration tailed off due to war-time disruption from 1914 and post war isolationist legislation encouraged blacks from the south to migrate northwards in increasing numbers, about a million by 1930. They sought work in the northern factories, mines and mills, leading to charges of undercutting pay rates won by white workers. Worse; when walkouts left the factories and mines idle, blacks were recruited as strike breakers, leading to the worst race riots in US history in the Red Scare year of 1919. ‘The scale of the (race) violence deserves emphasis: in both Tulsa and East St Louis black sections of the city were virtually eliminated’ (Jenkins, p.206). The revived Ku Klux Klan, who were ‘between four and eight million strong by 1924’ led these riots (Jenkins, p.211).As well as southern bigots many of the new movement were urban Protestant white workers from the mid-west and up to Maine. Lynchings of blacks were down from over a hundred a year at the start of the century but was still running at between fifty and sixty in these years (Time Line of African American History, 1901-1925). The Klan supported Prohibition and motherhood, opposed divorce, Catholics, Jews, blacks and all immigrants. This could not but have a crippling effect on the trade unions. It destroyed the electoral prospects of the US Socialist party.

Post war saw big set-backs for British labour; after the 1919 humiliation one disaster after another followed culminating in the defeat of the General Strike in 1926 and the fiasco of the Ramsey McDonald 1929 government, who sold out the movement so spectacularly in the formation of the National Government of 1931. Wage and welfare cuts to preserve the gold standard and the split in the Labour party left the movement on its knees until it revived after 1936. In the US the Great Depression following the Crash of 1929 ushered in Roosevelt’s New Deal politics (1933-37). This revived the America Labour movement primarily because the National Labour Relations Act of 1935 decreed that employers had to allow collective bargaining. The Teamsters union successfully fought two long strikes in 1934 led by Trotskyists in Minneapolis which eventually unionised truckers throughout America. ‘Within the framework of the…AF of L our Local (574) has evolved methods of organisation and forms of activity which go far beyond the traditional craft-union methods and ideas’ proclaimed the Daily Strike Bulletin of 18 August 1934 (James P Cannon, Notebook of an Agitator, p.90). Significantly these methods involved the mobilisation of the wives of the strikers and whole communities, learned from recent strikes in the coalfields. The Flint strike against General Motors in 1936-7 led by the UAW was the turning point in organising the unskilled across craft lines in the US; a half a million work days were lost that year in sit-down strikes. Union membership in America almost doubled between 1936 and 1937 (Documents 2, pp.49-52). Encouraged by the revival of the American movement and the heroic resistance to Franco in Spain in 1936 the famous Battle of Cable Street took place. This was the most important successful confrontation between the British labour movement and the state pre-war. Up to 300,000 anti-fascists prevented 10,000 police from opening a path for 3,000 fascists to enter the East End to attack the Jewish shops and homes in the area (Price and Sullivan, Workers News, March-April 1994). How far from the US race riots of 1919!

We can recall Ira Katznelson comments about the split consciousness of the US working class. This was indeed the crucial difference between the movements which led to all the other manifestations of differences, outlined above. It was the central debilitating issue for the craft-orientated AFL and this dreadful backwardness contributed to the growth of the Ku Klux Klan, and the huge race riots that destroyed the post WWI strike wave in the US. The CIO’s industrial unionism was successful pre WWII but by permission of the government in many ways and the movement was quickly ‘reamericanised’ after WWII; the British movement revived itself. Though there was anti-Irish and anti-Semitic racism in Britain in this period nevertheless, the Irish tended to join unions as they settled and became the most militant leaders, so they were an asset to rather than a dividing factor in them. The British labour movement protected the Jews in 1936 and has always successfully fought racism within its own ranks. This egalitarianism, inherited from earlier radicals like the Diggers, Levellers and Chartists, has endured in the British body politic. In America there is always a new ‘other’ (Muslims and Latino immigrants today) to bolster a divisive patriotic/racist consensus, so detrimental to the American Labour movement. Jack London was a racist as well as a (white!) socialist. His famous definition of a scab in 1903 ends; ‘Esau was a traitor to himself, Judas Iscariot was a traitor to his Lord, Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country. A strike breaker is a traitor to his god, his country, his family and the working class’. Note the quintessentially American priorities; no serious British socialist would have seen things in that way even then. We really do need to appreciate what the British working class has won historically in order to advance and not allow our frustrations at Blair’s New Labour to lead us into an adventure which writes them off.

Bibliography

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Cronin, J, et al, Book 4, Social Class and Social Reform, OU 2001, Milton Keynes

Centralia Massacre, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_Massacre_%28Washington%29 Accessed 25 August 2006.

Englander, D, (ed), Britain and America , Studies in Comparative History 1760, OU 1997, Milton Keynes .

Jenkins, Philip, A History of the United States , Second Edition, Palgrave Macmillan, New York , 2003.

London Dock Strike, Encyclopedia Britannica Article, http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9048835, accessed 6 August 2006

Marwick, A, et al, Teaching Units 7 and 8 Book 4, Social Class and Social Reform, OU 2001, Milton Keynes

Price, Richard and Sullivan Martin, The Battle of Cable Street : Myths and Realities, Workers News, March-April 1994

Revell, Geoff, The Story of the Taff Vale Railway Strike, National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, Feb, 2006.

Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class, (OU set book 1980s) Penguin Books 1968 (first pub. 1963, London

1896 at Vassar College, http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/crossofgold.html

http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/History/Cable.html, Accessed 25 August 2006. Accessed 26 August 2006 .

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Time Line of African American History, 1901-1925, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/aap/timelin3.html

Accessed 28 August 2006 .

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Understanding Comparative History , Britain and America from 1760, Offprints 2, OU 1997, Milton Keynes

International Trotskyism

Platform of the International Trotskyist Current

Platform of the International Trotskyist Current

Trotskyist Tendency Resolution on No Platform

Trotskyist Tendency resolution on No Platform

Motivation by Gerry Downing Trotskyist Tendency Convenor

Minbority Elaboration of the Trotskyist Tendency

Platform adopted 1 March 2008

Introduction

Point 1: The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves

Point 2: The heritage of the Russian Revolution

Point 3: The need for democratic soviets/workers councils

Point 4. The need for a Marxist Revolutionary Socialist Party

Point 5: Trotsky’s Transitional Programme

The Workers Power’s article, The Transitional Programme fifty years on, makes the following valuable points which correspond closely with our own position; [14]

Point 6: Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution

Point 7: Direct participation in the Labour Movement

Point 8: women’s liberation and the specially oppressed

We politically agree with Workers Power’s pamphlet Marxism and Women’s oppression and will propagate and defend that line. We also agree with their pamphlet on LGBT liberation - Marxism and gay liberation

Point 9: A Trotskyist International

Point 10: Lenin’s differentiation of all nations into imperialist oppressor nations and oppressed colonial or semi-colonial nations

Point 11: The question of Social Democracy – specifically the British Labour Party

Appendix 1: Our stance on workers states

Appendix 2: No Platform for Fascists

[4] The Communist Left in Russia after 1920 - Ian Hebbes, http://libcom.org/library/communist-left-russia-after-1920-ian-hebbes

[7] See Trotskyite economism? by Gerry Downing, Weekly Worker 651, Nov. 30 2006 for a fuller analysis.

[12] Platformism & bolshevism, IBT, April 2002, http://www.bolshevik.org/pamphlets/Platformism/platformism.html#7

[14] Permanent Revolution No. 7, Spring 1988.

[18] See ‘The Shoras and the Shah’ Mark Hoskisson’s review of Workers and Revolution in Iran, by Assef Bayat (Zed Books, London 1987, 227pp, £7.95) in PR website; http://www.permanentrevolution.net/?view=entry&entry=2049 for details of this.

International Trotskyism: Radek's Schlageter speech in full

LEO SCHLAGETER - THE WANDERER INTO THE VOID

CHAPTER 3: WHY PLANNING HAD TO FAIL IN THE USSR

PLANNING The Future

by Brian Greenat http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/pages/Theory/Brian.htmlGerry Downing

Luxemburg or Lenin? – No, and Lenin!

HOPI German intervention at the LLL Veranstaltungen

Albert Leo Schlageter

All-American hero

AJ Byrne reviews Andy Stern's Getting America back on track: a country that works

Why is the British working class more class conscious that the American?

London Dock Strike, Encyclopedia Britannica Article, http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9048835, accessed 6 August 2006

by Brian Green
at http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/pages/Theory/Brian.html

Gerry Downing