We believe the EC has revised the Marxist theory of value through its de facto rejection of The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPF) in relation to capitalist crisis. The main argument in favour of the LTRPF has already been made in the documents “What is the Cause of the Current Capitalist Crisis” and “In Defence of Marx’s Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit To Fall”. This document seeks to explain the deeper underlying reasons for the EC’s rejection of the Law and its subsequent effect on our programme, as well as the wider issues that this debate has revealed with the methods of the EC.
Democratic Discussions
Peter Taaffe (2010) wrote: “The CWI operates on the basis of democratic centralism with full rights for all its members and sections with, in fact, a greater emphasis at this stage on the need for discussion and debate rather than the formal aspects of centralism. The present split in the IMT has been kept under wraps – hidden from some of their members – up to the present time of writing. Yet all the political disputes in the CWI on a number of issues in the 1990s and the ‘noughties’ were public discussions, and documents were made public while the discussion was going on. Current debates are publicly aired, for instance, in our journal ‘Socialism Today’ on such issues as China. This is done in order to allow all workers to see and, if needs be, to participate in the discussion of vital issues. Nothing like these democratic discussions takes place in the IMT.”
From this brief passage, one would get the impression of a lively and democratic culture of debate, discussion and clarification of ideas within the CWI, and specifically the Socialist Party. Unfortunately, Peter does not appear to heed his own words. This current discussion on the cause of capitalist crisis and the political implications of rejecting Marx’s Law is not public, and neither are any of the produced documents, except for the EC’s pre-emptive reply which is published online. At the time of writing this document, the editorial of our journal Socialism Today appears to be self-censoring articles related to economics. The last article written specifically on the crisis of capitalism was published back in July 2013.
Additionally, throughout the duration of this debate, members of the EC and Party full-timers have constantly informed us that this debate is to remain internal, that is, closed off to the working class, and have put up various roadblocks to stop the circulation of some of our documents. For example, we submitted our second document “In Defence of Marx’s Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall” on 15th November 2013, yet there was a refusal by the EC to circulate it on the basis that “it is not a Marxist approach to separate economic analysis from political conclusions”(!), indicating the EC would not circulate it until we had produced our third document. Exactly how the EC came to the conclusion that separating the economics from the politics is “not a Marxist approach” isn’t clear. It is especially bizarre, given Marx’s separate publications of “The Communist Manifesto”, followed later by the three volumes of Capital. Another example is Trotsky’s separation of his economics analysis from the political with “In Defence of Marxism”, containing articles and letters by Trotsky dealing with dialectics and economics in relation to the class nature of the Soviet Union, and “The Struggle for a Proletarian Party”, written by Cannon following the split where, in taking up a defence of their organisational forms, he draws out the political conclusions, based primarily on the previous articles written by Trotsky.
It also demonstrates that the EC have a very static approach to debate, as opposed to a dialectical one, where the arguments and points are made and replied to as an ongoing exchange. Only through genuine democratic and honest debate can we clarify our ideas as a Party and come closer to the objective truth. This search for the truth should be an ongoing, continuous process within the Party. Lenin understood this very clearly, which is why Bolshevik newspapers like Iskra regularly carried differing views and polemics. We will come back more on this later.
Democratic Centralism
The EC’s undialectical approach towards discussion of theoretical differences was highlighted to one of the authors of this document when he requested a branch debate on the cause of the 2007/8 crisis earlier in the year. It was then suggested by a senior member of the Party that the branch should subsequently take a vote on the branch position of the cause of crisis immediately afterwards! This shows a complete failure to understand that democratic centralism prescribes unity on the basis of action, such as programmatical action and activity, and not unity on theory. It is completely absurd, not to mention anti-Bolshevik, to have an agreed “party line” on the cause of capitalist crisis! For example, Lenin and Luxemburg disagreed on this very issue, but their differing views were published and discussed publicly. They also had differences in organisational methods, and even Trotsky publicly polemicised against Lenin’s “What Is to Be Done?” with his “Our Political Tasks”, at a time when Trotsky held a nominally Menshevik and Lasallean approach to Party building and organisation.
Of course, certain theoretical positions may imply, or favour, certain actions. For example, depending on how you classify the Chinese state (as deformed workers’ state or capitalist) could partly determine the approach for comrades in China. It is not unrealistic to state that we have comrades in our international who disagree with the EC on this question. However, as long as those comrades agree to unite on our programme on China, then open and democratic debate between differences is acceptable, and should be encouraged. This remains completely in line with the Bolsheviks conception of democratic centralism and shows how genuine debate flourished in Lenin’s Party, allowing the various ideas held by the working class to be tested in both the field of debate and in practice.
Freedom to Criticise
Unfortunately, it is clear the Party leadership do not hold this view. For example, in the pamphlet “Anarchism or Marxism?” by Vincent Kolo (2007), Vincent claims that, as opposed to anarchism, “[m]arxism prefers to speak with ‘one voice’ in order to win the confidence of the working class’”. Whilst it is absolutely correct that comrades should advocate the agreed programme and carry out the agreed actions that have previously been reached through a “healthy culture of debate, criticism and discussion” (ibid), it is not correct to read from this that speaking with “one voice” implies never raising differences or disagreements publicly: In effect, self-censorship.
Lenin rejected this approach. In his letter “Freedom to Criticise and Unity of Action” (1906), which was a reply to the Menshevik-controlled Central Committee of the RSDLP, he pointed out the bizarre situation where “at Party meetings, members of the Party have the right to call for action that runs counter to congress decisions; but at public meetings they are not “allowed” full freedom to “express personal opinions”!! .” Lenin goes on:
“Those who drafted the resolution have a totally wrong conception of the relationship between freedom to criticise within the Party and the Party’s unity of action. Criticism within the limits of the principles of the Party Programme must be quite free (we remind the reader of what Plekhanov said on this subject at the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P.), not only at Party meetings, but also at public meetings. Such criticism or such “agitation” (for criticism is inseparable from agitation) cannot be prohibited. The Party’s political action must be united. No “calls” that violate the unity of definite actions can be tolerated either at public meetings, or at Party meetings, or in the Party press…. The resolution of the Central Committee, however, creates an impossible situation.”
In the light of the Party’s failure to adopt the Bolshevik method of genuine democratic centralism, the EC maintains a monolithic stranglehold on theoretical ideas: Only the leadership of the Party has the correct road to revolution and everyone else who dares to disagree is wrong. This creates a dangerous amalgam between the ideas of the Party and the leadership itself. Any serious criticism of a political or theoretical position held by the EC is therefore seen as a threat or an “attack” on the leadership personally. Ordinary members are encouraged to adopt this outlook, spurred on by pressure within the branches from full-timers, peer pressure and groupthink, and therefore tend to defend the leadership’s position as a matter of “faith”. As a result, many of the arguments used against the signatories of this document have been emotionally irrational, with terms such as “dogmatist”, “ultra-left” and “fetishist” thrown around.
Some older comrades have even expressed their “outrage” that this debate had partially taken place in public, on the internet! We would respectfully point out to these comrades, concerned about the perils of the internet, that social media, blogs etc are simply the modern equivalent to newspapers and other publications that the Bolsheviks used a century ago. It should also be noted that since the Party leadership does not encourage open and democratic debate in its public publications, comrades have had little choice but to resort to other means in order to get their ideas across to a wider audience, both within and outside the Party, which is their right under democratic centralism. It should be obvious that a Party apparatus containing full-time salaried employees, editorial controls over all publications and administration of official Facebook groups starts from a significant advantage over any opposition to their position. It is therefore disappointing that some comrades have claimed we are trying to “hog the limelight”, or that the Party is conducting the debate “at considerable time and expense”.
We are sorry that some comrades feel the clarification of theoretical and political ideas is an expensive and unwelcome diversion from building the Party, but we believe it is precisely this approach that is essential if we are to build a Party along Bolshevik lines with the best ideas. Criticisms and polemics are not “attacks” on the Party or individuals, but a method of ascertaining the best ideas to equip the Party for the tasks ahead.
The Marxist Method: The Polemic
Despite accusations of uncomradely behaviour against us, there are many examples where the “tone” of the debate in the history of Marxism has been far sharper. One needs only to use the example of Lenin’s attacks on Trotsky to understand that the “tone” argument falls flat. Lenin (1911) attacked Trotsky in terms that would shock us today. He attacked Trotsky in print literally dozens of times. The most memorable example is revealed in the headline: “Judas Trotsky’s Blush of Shame”. It isn’t even necessary to read this to discover Lenin’s polemical style- just look at the title.
Why do we use polemics and why do sharp exchanges play such an important role in the history of Marxism? To understand why Lenin used this method, and in particular why he used extremely cutting language, we can look for evidence and insight at the example of the early Social Democratic movement in Russia, and the world of Lenin and his newspaper Iskra (‘The Spark’), and his early foes in the revolutionary movement. Lenin’s polemics reveal not so much a style, but an unrelenting search for the truth. A quick glance at Lenin’s works is enough to reveal his biting polemical attitude. However, it may be even more revealing if we look further afield and examine what Lenin’s contemporaries thought about him.
Vladimir Akimov was a revolutionary Social Democrat and a contemporary of Lenin. To take the Akimov example as an illustration: “Akimov saw Iskra as the inheritor of this arrogant attitude towards workers. He cites a case where ‘Iskra’ ridiculed a letter by workers as illiterate.” (Lih 2008, p241). Iskra was seen as arrogant and uncomradely, even ridiculing letters written by workers on account of their poor grammar, something that we would object to today, but this was not an isolated incident.
Boris Krichevskii, another opponent of Iskra, also attacked it for its style and its tone. Krichevskii, a polemical target of Lenin in “What is to be done?” would later become his great friend, but the expert ‘Lenin historian’ Lars T Lih reveals “… Krichevskii wrote to Kautsky about “’a method and tone of polemic hitherto unknown in the Russian revolutionary literature’”(ibid, p297). We will come back more on Krichevskii later. However, we believe the debate on tone disguises deeper issues. Polemical debate reveals a dedication to rooting out any inconsistencies within Marxism. Why such attention to detail and why was there no artificial papering over theoretical differences? Were Lenin and the other Russian Marxists pedantic or, more likely, did they just have a rigorous method of examining the theory?
Dogmatic Internet Warriors
The authors of this document have been accused of being dogmatic. Some of our opponents have used the colourful but misleading epithet “internet warriors” to discredit some of the content of personal blogs and Facebook interventions. The accusation is that the arguments we have presented are too concerned with theory, are too dogmatic and not concerned enough with the practical realities of building the workers movement.
The charge of dogmatism is a serious one, but more so the charge that theoretical debates are a distraction to our activities. Does this charge really stand up when we look at the importance of theoretical clarity within Marxism?
Karl Marx’s famous quotation, in the letter he wrote to Bracke (1875), has been used as supporting evidence to justify the “stop this distraction from the important tasks” argument. Marx wrote; “Every step of the real movement is more important than a dozen programs” in the Preface to the Critique of the Gotha Program. However, those who use this quote most freely forget that the Critique of the Gotha Program itself was written as an acerbic polemic. The Gotha Program was a proposed platform for the unifying party congress that took place in the town of Gotha in 1875. The Eisenachers and Lassallean factions were about to form a united party (later to become the German Social Democratic Party). The draft platform for this united party was sent to Marx for his comments. What Marx wrote was certainly not a long epistle about the need for “left unity” or to move the new party forward in practical ways. Such a big step forward in the history of the German working class was not greeted with congratulations. The founding document of the new workers party was put to the sword by Marx.
The Critique of the Gotha Program stands as the clearest exposition Marx ever wrote on revolutionary strategy. It is one of Marx’s shortest yet most important works. Clearly the Unity Congress was a landmark for the German working class, but this did not stop Marx from subjecting incorrect ideas to crushing criticism. “Critique” and criticism is the method by which ideas develop. If we simply brush theory to one side for the sake of what some see as urgent practical tasks, then we are profoundly mistaken in our understanding of how we get closer to the truth. If we label debate as “petty social intrigue”, especially as everyone knows that there is a major theoretical issue being debated within the party, we are not following in the tradition of Marxism. We are asking members to trust the leader to sort out this “intrigue” and we are disarming the party. The Critique of the Gotha Program is a work that we recommend that members read to understand an important part of Marx’s method, the method of the Critique. This method of critique is used by Marx in many of his works as well as the “Gotha Program”: “The Holy Family: Critique of Critical Criticism”,” Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, “The Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy”, “A Contribution to Critique of Political Economy”, and “Capital: A Critique of Political Economy”.
Lenin himself recognized the tendency of some to incorrectly downplay theoretical discussion at the expense of “practical tasks.” In “What is to be Done?” Lenin (1901) counters precisely this type of quotation from Marx “We can judge from that how tactless Rabocheye Delo (‘Worker Cause’) is when, with an air of triumph, it quotes Marx’s statement: “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.” To repeat these words in a period of theoretical disorder is like wishing mourners at a funeral many happy returns of the day. Moreover, these words of Marx are taken from his letter on the Gotha Programme, in which he sharply condemns eclecticism in the formulation of principles. If you must unite, Marx wrote to the party leaders, then enter into agreements to satisfy the practical aims of the movement, but do not allow any bargaining over principles, do not make theoretical “concessions”. This was Marx’s idea, and yet there are people among us who seek-in his name to belittle the significance of theory!”
Workers are Interested in Theory!
The EC position has an inherent arrogance towards those workers who are trying to get to grips with Marxist ideas. It is as though only a couple of leaders have the ability to interpret Marx and Lenin correctly for the rest of us. This debate on the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall is such an example. The leadership have said that this discussion brings “more heat than light”. The substitution of a free discussion of Marx’s ideas in favour of an alternative view- that only a select group of people with a “feel” for the ideas, those who can somehow mysteriously feel the secret Marxist vibe- only those chosen few can get to grips with the multi-faceted intricacies of Marxism, is mistaken. The conclusion is that we should let the “leaders” deal with the difficult theoretical stuff while the rank and file get on with the practical tasks. This is wrong. We should look at Lenin’s view of workers’ capacity for theoretical understanding. Above we have seen one of Lenin’s polemical targets was the Rabocheye Delo newspaper. Another rival for the ear of Russian workers was Rabochaia Mysl (‘Worker Thought’).
Rabochaia Mysl was published from 1897 until 1902. It was as long-lived as Iskra, and represented the views of the St Petersburg Social Democratic committee. By 1899, Rabochaia Mysl had become a significant voice in the growing workers’ movement in Russia. The reason for its success can be put down to the working class contributors who provided a picture of life on the factory floor through articles and in particular letters.
“Ironically these workers’ letters sometimes contained criticism of ‘Worker Thought’ for being overly intellectual and over the heads of ordinary workers- the same kind of criticism later levelled at ‘Iskra’.”(Lih, p247). All Social Democratic newspaper, but Iskra in particular, contained a high level of theoretical debate. Lenin, however, criticized Rabochaia Mysl for too much dumbing down! Lenin (1899) talks about their views thus; “Rabochaya Mysl, by ignoring these facts, is moving backwards and fully justifies the opinion that it is not representative of advanced workers, but of the lower, undeveloped strata of the proletariat.”
Lenin knew that workers were more interested in theory than ‘Worker Thought’ gave them credit for. In a stunning piece of this article, he cites the absolute requirement for theoretical discussion of the entire party and the necessity for not giving workers a simplified version of Marxism under the assumption that their level of consciousness is ‘insufficient’: “At a time when educated society is losing interest in honest, illegal literature, an impassioned desire for knowledge and for socialism is growing among the workers, real heroes are coming to the fore from amongst the workers, who, despite their wretched living conditions, despite the stultifying penal servitude of factory labour, possess so much character and will-power that they study, study, study, and turn themselves into conscious Social-Democrats—“the working-class intelligentsia.” This “working-class intelligentsia” already exists in Russia, and we must make every effort to ensure that its ranks are regularly reinforced, that its lofty mental requirements are met and that leaders of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party come from its ranks. The newspaper that wants to become the organ of all Russian Social-Democrats must, therefore, be at the level of the advanced workers; not only must it not lower its level artificially, but, on the contrary, it must raise it constantly, it must follow up all the tactical, political, and theoretical problems of world Social-Democracy. Only then will the demands of the working-class intelligentsia be met, and it itself will take the cause of the Russian workers and, consequently, the cause of the Russian revolution, into its own hands…The average worker will not understand some of the articles in a newspaper that aims to be the organ of the Party, he will not be able to get a full grasp of an intricate theoretical or practical problem. This does not at all mean that the newspaper must lower itself to the level of the mass of its readers.” (ibid).
Iskra’s opponents firmly believed that its “obsession with dogma” meant it was constantly engaged in a witch-hunt to look for non-existent deviations from Marxist theory. There is no trace at all in Lenin that “too much” theoretical debate for the rank and file was a form of petty intrigue or a distraction. The concept of a one-way theoretical conveyor belt from leaders to workers is the real nonsense.
We believe there is a real need for open, unhindered and uncensored discussion of ideas within the Party. We propose the Party should have a theoretical journal, perhaps published quarterly, dedicated to the discussion of ideas, with contributions welcome from all members of the Party and International. Additionally, this document should be published online, just like our newspaper The Socialist and our monthly magazine Socialism Today. Such a document would help create a space where ideas can be proposed, explored and criticised as part of the Party structures. Thus, it would minimise the need for comrades to resort to alternative methods of publication, such as blogs or social media, to put their views across. Finally, we should not hide exchanges of theoretical ideas or critiques. Workers, and especially young people, are thirsty for new ideas and thrive on lively debate and discussion. And on that note, we will now move on to the political critique of the EC’s position.
Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, or to Rise?
Based on the overwhelming amount of evidence referenced in our previous documents, we believe that the average rate of profit throughout the advanced capitalist countries has trended downwards since the end of World War 2 and that, whilst the rate of profit made a partial recovery in the 80s, the ‘neoliberal’ boom came to an end in the late 90s with the advent of the Asian monetary crisis and the dot-com bubble crash. The post-2001 upswing saw another partial recovery in the rate of profit, only for it to peak in 2005 and then decline until the 2009 trough. These movements in the rate of profit and subsequent crises can be explained through Marx’s Law.
The offensive of the neoliberals certainly led to some high profile defeats for the working class and a curtailing of the trade union movement’s ability to protect workers from attacks. The economic logic behind this offensive was the historic fall in the rate of profit in the advanced capitalist countries. The capitalists had to restore it at the expense of the working class in defence of their system. This offensive had short term results for the capitalists, allowing them to boost productivity and curtail wage increase in the advanced capitalist countries. Yet this process must be kept in proportion. The unions were not “smashed”, and the neoliberal offensive was only partially economically successful. The rate of profit never rebounded to the heady levels of the 1950’s or 1960’s as Lynn has argued.
There were increases in both productivity and the rate of profit, but the jury is out on how sustained this was. Marxist analysis, on some measures, suggests that there was a restoration, never reaching the level of the post war boom, between 1982-1997. After this, the US rate of profit is calculated to have gone into a downward phase again (Roberts, 2009). On the other hand Kliman (2012) calculates that, despite some short term surges in the rate of US profit, it did not rebound significantly, and was in effect trendless, meaning it showed no significant average recovery.
While the major defeats of the working class during the 1980’s certainly gave the appearance of a global universal bourgeois triumph, its real effects have been exaggerated. Wage growth, prior to the 2007-9 crisis, slowed down but did not plummet as has been suggested by the EC and others. While the wages as a share of GDP in the advanced capitalist countries did decline, real wage rates actually increased, although they progressively slowed, as did capital accumulation.
At root this process was driven by a historic fall in the rate of profit. It supports the argument that the determining element in the income of the working class is not specifically trade union membership or power, but market forces themselves. Capital needs labour and the general demand for labour is a crucial contributor to wage levels. For example, in the second half of the 1990’s there was a period of boom in the US and employment levels were quite high. Demand for scarcer labour itself pushes up wages. This also explains why, after the credit crunch, wages increases in both the US and the UK have been below the rate of inflation and in some cases have been cut. The capitalists can achieve this because of the increase of the reserve army of the unemployed scrambling after fewer available jobs.
We cannot understate the importance of this, because the EC seem to have adopted a false method of explaining economic crises purely in terms of the Trade Unions, class struggle and wages: They explain the crisis of the 1970s using the “profits squeeze” thesis i.e. that wages were “too high” due to powerful Trade Unions, and then they explain the 2007/8 Great Recession due to underconsumption (“lack of money-backed demand”), where wages are now “too low” due to weakened Trade Unions. This is a purely romantic, subjective account of economic crises and might at first seem “common sense”, but as we have shown in our previous two documents, is at odd with the facts. Now, this should not be interpreted as a defence of the bosses and wage restraint, but rather a revealing of the limits of traditional Trade Union bargaining in the context of a dying capitalism. If anything, it highlights the urgent need for occupation and control of the workplace as the foundation for the revolutionary socialist transformation of society.
In our view, the falling rate of profit is an indicator that capitalism is unable to produce enough surplus value, and therefore unable to fulfil its historic mission of expansion of capital value. Since the end of the ‘neoliberal’ boom, crises are becoming deeper and increasingly frequent in occurrence. In our opinion, this is one of the major proofs that capitalism is a historically outmoded system ripe for replacing. The only way out of this living nightmare for working class people is through the political act of revolution, the subsequent expropriation of the capitalists as a class and workers’ control and ownership of the means of production, where production is based on use-value rather than exchange-value. In short, value production is done away with.
The EC’s rejection of the Law is based on their erroneous belief that the rate of profit has, on average, been rising since 1983. They believe that the capitalists have no problem creating surplus value. The problem, according to Lynn and the EC, is that the full potential of the existing mode of production (i.e. of value production and generalised commodity production) is not being realised due to high inequality and the huge amounts of value lying idle. If only workers could get their hands on this wealth and put it to use! But if capitalism is capable of producing ever increasing amounts of value, then how can we seriously claim capitalism is a historically outmoded form of production? Why abolish it, when instead we can simply control the banks to direct investment and redistribute wealth more equitably?!
The Husson Method
In their defence of a rising rate of profit, Peter and Lynn produce a single graph from a single ‘Marxist’ source, the French economist Husson. However, as Andrew Kliman (2013) has already pointed out, Husson’s measurement of profit (i.e. surplus value), endorsed by the EC, is not consistent with the Marxist definition. Husson bizarrely includes the income of self-employed as “profit”, thus greatly inflating the rate of profit, as Kliman explains:
“In addition, the “private enterprise income” that Husson, Taaffe, and Walsh treat as profit includes the income––all of the income––of self-employed people (sole proprietorships and partnerships). But as the U.S. Bureau of the Census (www.census.gov/econ/smallbus.html) notes, “About three quarters of all U.S. business firms have no payroll. Most are self-employed persons operating unincorporated businesses ….” Now, if they have no payroll, they have no paid employees. And even when unincorporated businesses do have employees, the owners get some of their income through their own work, rather than by exploiting their employees. Consider, for example, small shopkeepers and plumbers who have one or two assistants. Will Taaffe and Walsh please explain why they think that all of the income of self-employed people who either have no employees or just a few employees should be counted as profit?”
At the time of writing this document, Peter and Lynn have so far failed to answer this point. Capitalists obtain surplus value, in monetary form, because they employ workers to produce commodities and provide services but do not pay them for the full extent of the value they create. Thus surplus value, or profit as understood by Marxists, can only be created through the exploitation of labour. It should be quite clear that a person who is self-employed is unable to “exploit” themselves, because on average they receive the full value of the commodities they produce. They are akin to the artisan commodity producers that have existed for thousands of years. Does the leadership of our organisation really consider a contracted brick layer, plumber or IT consultant a capitalist? Of course they don’t, but their sheer desperation to show a rising rate of profit has led to them to cling to any poorly researched lifeline for supporting evidence, regardless of the method employed.
The EC’s position on the cause of crisis does not imply revolutionary conclusions, but rather reformist ones. It is identical to Kautsky’s view that crisis occurs because capitalists “suffocate in their own surplus”. This incorrect economic analysis was but one of the factions that led Kautsky to abandon the revolutionary conclusions of Marxism. Below we shall consider the programmatic aspects of the Socialist Party that have been compromised as a result of the erroneous position on crisis.
Bank Nationalisation
As we previously explained, Lynn and the EC have been advancing a two-stage approach to nationalisation in Party material, most recently in Hannah Sell’s “The Case For Socialism” (2013) pamphlet. We highlighted this in our first document, and we reproduce some of the content below, starting with a quote from an article written by Lynn:
“Workers are questioning the legitimacy of the capitalist system. What is required is a clear alternative. This means for a start, taking over the banks, not merely to subsidise their losses but to reorganise the banking system to act in the interests of society. This would be the first step towards a socialist planned economy, run under workers’ democracy.” (Our emphasis Walsh, 2012c)
A similar position is also put across in the Party’s latest pamphlet “The case for Socialism” (2013), published this year:
“So what is the alternative to dictatorship of the markets? As a start we call for the nationalisation of the big banking and finance companies…That is why a crucial step towards solving the economic crisis would be to take into democratic public ownership the 125 or so big corporations that control around 80% of Britain’s economy.” (Our emphasis)
Again, the Socialist Party EC presents the case that the banks should be nationalised first, and then the next “step” would be to nationalise the economy, after an undefined amount of time. The Socialist Party EC justify this position because they claim it is in line with the transitional programme and the transitional method. However, in our view, this shows a failure to understand the transitional method itself.”
We made the point that Lynn “believes that the banks should be nationalised first, and this would ‘unavoidably pose the question’ of nationalisation of the rest of the economy after an undefined amount of time”. Lynn responds by saying; “This is a ludicrous misrepresentation, a wilful distortion of our actual position”. But is it? Unlike Lynn, we have attempted to avoid wilfully distorting anything by carefully following the content of Lynn’s arguments as they are written. What does Lynn’s text say and what does it mean? For example, Lynn has repeated the content of a review of a book by Paul Krugman in Socialism Today:
“The banks and finance houses would have to be nationalised (not bailed out and propped up at public expense), and run under democratic workers’ control and management. This would ensure the credit required to develop all sectors of the economy. There would also have to be capital controls to prevent any flight of capital. Such measures would undoubtedly meet the entrenched resistance of the capitalist class. State intervention in favour of the working class would unavoidably pose the question of the takeover of the commanding heights of the economy, to form the basis of a democratic plan of production (run by elected representatives of the workers and the wider community).”
Surely this cannot have any other meaning than that Lynn proposes: that the banks are nationalised on their own as a first step? It then “poses the question” of the takeover of the commanding heights of the economy!
How on earth can this be regarded as anything else other than as a staged approach to the implementation of the socialist programme? How can we be accused of distorting anything? Indeed, Lynn confirms this by quoting from another article he wrote in 2012:
“87. Another quote from an article by Lynn (Spain: Bank Bailout Can’t Stop Euro Death-Spiral, The Socialist No.722, 13 June 2012) calls for taking over the banks “for a start”, as “the first step towards the socialist planned economy…” This does not in any way imply stages, where one stage has to run its course before we can move on to further measures.”
We are tempted to resist being pedantic, but what do the terms “for a start” and “the firsts step” mean other than a series of stages? The meaning of the word “step”, amongst others, is “one of a series of actions, processes, or measures taken to achieve a goal” and, more concretely “a stage in a process”. By definition this involves a gap between the next “step” of a period of time unless it is simultaneous.
Lynn can, of course, claim that we are wilfully distorting his position provided we have misread him, but the content of his position is absolutely clear, not in a publication for general agitation, but in the theoretical journal of the party!
In the Transitional Programme, Trotsky was absolutely clear: “However, the state-ization of the banks will produce these favourable results only if the state power itself passes completely from the hands of the exploiters into the hands of the toilers.”
Given that the nationalisation of the banks could only take place where the working class have taken state power, unless Lynn sees another political situation where this could happen, we question the logic of Lynn’s argument that the banks have to be seized as a first measure? This is not a question of the order or prominence of demands due to worker’s anger at the bankers and the financial elite in our opinion. This is a secondary question.
For example, the Editorial of The Socialist (2012) puts forward a different formulation to Lynn: “Does this mean we should retreat? No! But it poses the need to go further with the demand for nationalisation, under democratic workers’ control and management, of the banks and the summits of the financial system together with the big monopolies that dominate the great majority of the economy.”
What is it to be? The simultaneous nationalisation of the banks and the whole of the economy, as is proposed above, or a series of stages which begins with the nationalisation of the banks and finance? Lynn may plead a misunderstanding on our part, but our contention is that the compulsion over the nationalisation of the banks as an initial measure has a number of worrying implications. We find no surprises that it gels with the demands of the left bureaucracy in the trade unions and the remnants of the left in the Labour Party. A whole raft of left-reformists and radical Keynesians call for the nationalisation of the banks.
Their ludicrous argument is that the bankers were responsible for the crisis, and that state control of finance would somehow mitigate further financial crisis and lay the basis for bringing the economy out of the doldrums as an alternative to capitalist austerity. This notion is completely utopian. Attempting to appeal to the fact that there is widespread working class anger against the bankers is a cop out. Whilst the collapse of the banks triggered the crisis, we cannot describe 2007/8 as simply a monetary crisis rooted in the malpractice of “greedy bankers”, but rather one rooted in the low rate of profit of capitalist production. It is this low rate of profit in production that led the capitalists to invest in an orgy of financial instruments, including the infamous sub-prime mortgages. The driving forces behind this were the laws of capital, not the psychology of individuals.
Lynn does, of course, finish with a clarion call for a socialist plan of production on an international scale, but this can be equated with the equivalent of referring to the old Clause 4 of the Labour Party. The Transitional Programme is a bridge to the socialist revolution, not to a plan to reinvigorate the diseased capitalist economy with some type of eventual move towards socialism.
TUSC and Left-Reformism
This separation of bank nationalisation from the nationalisation of the means of production into two steps is uncomfortably close to the position held by others within the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) who have a reformist agenda. Theoretical clarity is very important for our party as we enter into agreements with other political groupings. If the Socialist Party stands for two stages of nationalisation, then our position will come under attack from those in TUSC who stand for only the first stage of nationalising the banks.
Lynn believes that it is ok to present our programme in such a way where bank nationalisation “poses the question” of taking over more of the economy, because “[t]here was – and still is – furious anger at the role of the banks and at the huge bailouts at the public’s expense.” However, this shows a failure to understand the method of the Transitional Programme, as Trotsky (1938) explained:
“We have repeated many times that the scientific character of our activity consists in the fact that we adapt our program not to political conjunctures or the thought or mood of the masses as this mood is today, but we adapt our program to the objective situation as it is represented by the economic class structure of society. The mentality can be backward; then the political task of the party is to bring the mentality into harmony with the objective facts, to make the workers understand the objective task. But we cannot adapt the program to the backward mentality of the workers, the mentality, the mood is a secondary factor – the prime factor is the objective situation.” (our emphasis).
Therefore, whilst we recognise that there is indeed “furious anger at the role of the banks”, our task as revolutionaries is not to pander to this subjective mood, but rather to pose questions and demands that help the workers understand the objective situation in order to best equip them for the tasks of the socialist revolution. As we have explained, the banks and corporations are not sitting on piles of money simply waiting to be taxed by a future TUSC government, but rather they are seriously in debt. Therefore, nationalising the banks and implementing a wealth tax will not only fail to expropriate enough wealth to implement the programme of an elected left-reformist government, but it will also further exacerbate the crisis of the low rate of profit, such that corporations will go on strikes of capital and/or leave the country!
It seems ironic that we correctly point out the failure of left-reformism in, for example, Allende’s Chile and Chavez’s Venezuela, yet we promote exactly the same approach in practice. Our current programme, along with that of TUSC’s, is a path to disaster for the working class. Only the achievement of state power by the working class (after smashing the bourgeois state) and by expropriating the capitalists as a class can we plan production for use rather than profit. Such a revolution would act as a spark for revolutions in other countries, and thus the beginning of the world revolution.
In Defence of the Genuine Transitional Approach
This does not mean, however, that we simply need to repeat slogans like “one solution, revolution” and “smash the state” and hope to one day make an impact. The Transitional Programme is a bridge to the objective situation. Thus, the demands we raise around nationalisation and workers’ control are absolutely correct at this stage. However, we should also not seek to deliberately mask our desire for revolution; no matter how “unpopular” we think that may be, as Trotsky said:
“The reformists have a good smell for what the audience wants as Norman Thomas – he gives them that. But that is not serious revolutionary activity. We must have the courage to be unpopular, to say “you are fools,” “you are stupid,” “they betray you,” and every once in a while with a scandal launch our ideas with passion. It is necessary to shake the worker from time to time, to explain, and then shake him again – that all belongs to the art of propaganda. But it must be scientific, not bent to the moods of the masses. We are the most realistic people because we reckon with facts which cannot be changed by the eloquence of Norman Thomas. If we win immediate success we swim with the current of the masses and that current is the revolution.” (ibid)
However, the Socialist Party Scotland EC in their erroneously entitled “In Defence of the Transitional Programme” claim the exact opposite to Trotsky: “The idea that we don’t articulate that anger [against the banks] and see it as an important development of consciousness in our programme by advocating wealth redistribution, wealth taxes, increased wages etc. as part of our programme would leave Marxism as a dry, arid concept, completely divorced from the realities of working class life.”
We must teleport ourselves into the minds of the Scottish EC to try to fathom where on Earth they got the idea that we think we should not be in favour of demanding the seizure of capitalist wealth, progressive taxes on the rich or increased wages and, horror of horrors, the nationalisation of the banks? Even the Communist Manifesto (1848) made such demands over a century and a half ago for “[a] heavy progressive or graduated income tax” and “[c]entralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.”
Even so, a socialist plan of production is not, will not, and never will be a plan simply for the “redistribution of wealth”, which raises the idea in the minds of the working class that we are merely opposed to the unfairness and inequality of capitalism, no matter if accompanied with revolutionary rhetoric. This doesn’t articulate working class anger but reflects back an inchoate misunderstanding as to the true nature of capitalist exploitation. Our task is to patiently explain the objective true reality of the nature of capitalism.
We do, of course, point out in a propagandistic way the evils of inequality, exploitation and oppression of capitalism. We recognise the difference between our programme and our slogans we might use at particular times. For example, the Bolsheviks used slogans like “Peace, brand and land” and “All power to the Soviets”, but their programme was always one based on the principles of scientific socialism.
However, the key element is that revolutionary Marxists must patiently explain that the need for socialism is not due to these common evils of capitalist society, but is due to an inherent flaw built into in the very fabric of the capitalist mode of production itself. This flaw leads, through logical necessity, to capitalism being unable to develop the productive forces beyond a certain limit, hence the need for the revolutionary transformation of the relationships in the economy and society to overcome these limits.
It is this objectively scientific understanding that can answer all the illusions held by wide layers of the working class, that there is an alternative to the overthrow of capitalism. But, more importantly, it can answer the lies and distortions of the bourgeoisie and their reformist agents amongst the working-class with the razor sharp logic of our arguments.
This is the real importance of Marx’s Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall; Not a technical theoretical argument, but the lifeblood of the class struggle. Lest comrades believe this to be an abstract question, we’ll leave the last word on the question of wealth redistribution to another “academic” doctrinaire sectarian:
“I have dealt more at length with the “undiminished” proceeds of labour, on the one hand, and with “equal right” and “fair distribution”, on the other, in order to show what a crime it is to attempt, on the one hand, to force on our Party again, as dogmas, ideas which in a certain period had some meaning but have now become obsolete verbal rubbish, while again perverting, on the other, the realistic outlook, which it cost so much effort to instil into the Party but which has now taken root in it, by means of ideological nonsense about right and other trash so common among the democrats and French socialists.” Marx (1875a)
In our view, the pronouncements of the CWI leadership on the financial sector and the plan to redistribute wealth through the expropriation of the banks are all so much “verbal rubbish” and not based on a scientific Marxist analysis of the crisis.
The Danger of Political Liquidationism
The lack of a culture of open debate within the Party, the low level of theory, erroneous economics analysis and the mainly uncritical approach to the Left Trade Union leaders raises the spectre of political liquidationism: the dissolution of the revolutionary Party into a broader, non-revolutionary formation. This has happened previously, with the majority of the Scottish CWI dissolving into the Scottish Socialist Party, for example. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that a similar scenario could occur with our Party in relation to TUSC.
Of course, we do not discount the need for a broader left formation, like the Labour Party used to be, to act as a “stepping stone” used by workers from reformism towards Marxism. The issue is around our approach to such a formation.
Polticial liquidiationism is one of the most extreme forms of opportunism, where the long-term aim of building the revolutionary Party is sacrificed because of either 1) the perception that more gains can be won for “the movement” by uniting with reformist or bourgeois elements, or 2) the unconscious drift away from Marxism due to a decline in the level of theoretical understanding of the membership and/or leadership.
Marxists are not opposed to working alongside reformist or even bourgeois elements, but it must always be done on a principled basis, where the independence of the revolutionary Party is guaranteed in order to advance the Party’s programme and openly criticise, where necessary, the non-revolutionary elements of the “alliance”, or United Front. The trend towards liquidationism is therefore facilitated when these rights are not maintained and exercised, and where the theoretical foundation of the Party is weak.
The Irish Socialist Party (2011) has written on the subject in their exchange of letters with the SWP, with regards to forming the alliance that became the United Left Alliance (ULA). These letters were printed in the pamphlet “The United Left Alliance & the SWP”, subtitled “Socialist Party debates with the SWP on forming a left alliance in Ireland & the role of socialists”.
In the letter ‘Socialist Party response to SWP’s first contribution to the debate’, under the heading ‘Reformist direction of the SWP’, the Irish Socialist Party correctly criticises the SWP on the issue of liquidationism. We feel it is necessary to reproduce the bulk of this text, as follows:
“It is important that those who claim to be revolutionary socialists play a role raising the consciousness of the working class on political issues. The SWP, in their reply to the Socialist Party, advocates a “radical left alliance” with a number of proposals including the following:
“The basis of such an alliance should be the minimum that revolutionary socialists can accept and the maximum that activists coming from a left reformist background can accept. Specifically, it should be built on a left programme which includes such demands as that the rich must be made to pay for the economic crisis; that Ireland’s natural resources must be nationalised; that there can be no coalition or alliance with right-wing parties.”
Of course, it is necessary to take account of workers’ consciousness in formulating a programme and demands. However, as socialists we skilfully raise our programme. If a conference or meeting were organised to initiate a new party or alliance, the Socialist Party would argue strongly for the new alliance to adopt a socialist programme as the best programme [to fight] against cuts, news taxes etc, but crucially linking these day to day issues with the need to fight capitalism. If we were not successful, we would not walk away as long as we could stand over the programme that was adopted. We would, however, continue to fight and argue our ideas inside the new party or alliance and hopefully win people to our ideas.
The attitude of the SWP is to not even raise the issue of socialism, but to argue for the building of an alliance on a reformist programme. This is an important point which is not about words, but about raising and fighting for socialist ideas – the reality is the SWP have lowered their banner dramatically in recent years. In Britain and to some extent in Ireland they have engaged in a form of political liquidationism where they throw themselves into broader formations such as the Scottish Socialist Party, Respect Coalition or even the People Before Profit Alliance at the expense of building a revolutionary socialist organisation.
The SWP are in favour from the outset of forming an unprincipled non-socialist block because they feel that people will not support socialist ideas… What is the logic in trying to fill the vacuum that has emerged from the capitulation of Labour to the capitalist market by launching, from the start, a new reformist party?… It is vital that socialist policies, which are the only solution to the crisis, are advocated as broadly as possible as soon as possible.”
It should be obvious to comrades in our Party that the same criticisms made against the SWP could easily apply to our approach in TUSC, e.g. “The attitude of the SWP is to not even raise the issue of socialism, but to argue for the building of an alliance on a reformist programme.” A peruse of our TUSC literature online, created by our Party, shows in nearly every instance no reference to socialism. In effect, the TUSC literature and platform is promoting the illusion that it is possible to have a reformed, nicer capitalism with no cuts. For example, the TUSC leaflet for the Eastleigh by-election in February 2013 stated:
“Austerity and cuts are not working and they’re not necessary either. Recent scandals involving companies such as Amazon and Starbucks show how corporations routinely avoid paying tax on their profits. The Public Service Union PCS estimates that up to £120 billion is avoided or underpaid by wealthy individuals. On top of this there is currently £750 billion squirreled away in bank accounts which big business is refusing to invest in the economy. There is no shortage of money to create jobs, build necessary affordable housing, improve transport and other infrastructure etc - It’s just not being used for our benefit. It’s time that we had a voice representing us. TUSC aims to be that voice. Vote TUSC to help all of us shout louder.”
This sort of language would not look out of place if it came from the Labour Left or the Green Party. This is not a programme that is transitional to socialism, but a reformist one. It flows from the incorrect approach our Party has towards the United Front, as pointed out above, but also from our false economic analysis.
Whilst skilfully opposing every cut and highlighting every wasteful hypocrisy, and while potentially proposing, for example , the use of council reserves as a stop-gap while a campaign is built, the blunt idea that “cuts aren’t necessary” is a completely false line of logic and shows an utter failure to grasp the cause of the economic crisis. The economic crisis was fundamentally caused by an insufficient rate of profit for the capitalists in the advanced countries to invest at a sufficient rate. The rate of profit remains historically low (compared to the 1950s-60s) due to the high accumulation of capital and the high organic composition of capital. The rate of profit can be restored by devaluing either constant capital or wages. From the capitalist’s point of view, it is far more preferable to cut wages, because a devaluation of constant capital in a 1929-style crash would lead to a 1930s-style depression and have severe social, economic and political consequences, including raising the spectre of socialist revolution which the capitalists clearly want to avoid. Therefore, the capitalists have opted to cut wages in order to reduce their costs and raise their rate of profit. Additionally, the state, by reducing the social wage through cuts in state spending, can subsequently reduce corporation tax, raising the capitalist’s post-tax rate of profit.
The low rate of profit that plagues the advanced capitalist countries means that the objective, material basis for reformism, or a programme of reforms beyond anything of a trivial nature, is no longer a viable or realistic programme. Of course, we recognise that the subjective consciousness of most workers at this stage is still mainly reformist. But then our task is not to sow illusions in the possibility of reformism, but to help workers understand the severity of the crisis of capitalism and the need for the revolutionary, socialist transformation of society.
Trotsky on the Trade Unions and the United Front
Another aspect of our work that is affected is our approach to the Trade Unions. Trade Unions are the basic unit that class struggle takes the form of on the industrial plane. It is essential that revolutionaries engage in all struggles within the Trade Unions. However the orientation we are taking towards sections of the Union leaders is incorrect.
“The sections of the Fourth International should always strive not only to renew the top leadership of the trade unions, boldly and resolutely in critical moments advancing new militant leaders in place of routine functionaries and careerists, but also to create in all possible instances independent militant organizations corresponding more closely to the tasks of mass struggle against bourgeois society; and, if necessary, not flinching even in the face of a direct break with the conservative apparatus of the trade unions. If it be criminal to turn one’s back on mass organizations for the sake of fostering sectarian factions, it is no less so passively to tolerate subordination of the revolutionary mass movement to the control of openly reactionary or disguised conservative (”progressive”) bureaucratic cliques. Trade unions are not ends in themselves; they are but means along the road to proletarian revolution.” Trotsky (1938a)
Unfortunately, recent experience in Unite, and the invitation of Billy Hayes to Socialism 2013, our organisation is overly oriented towards this very Trade Union bureaucracy, rather than the rank and file membership. Our independent and revolutionary programme has been diluted somewhat to the perceived need to bloc with the reformists in a “United Front”, and thus our criticisms of the bureaucracy are severely reduced. The tactic of the genuine United Front is to win the workers to our revolutionary programme by pointing out the short-comings of the reformists, not to bring the politics down to the lowest common denominator in the name of unity. Trotsky was very clear on how the Party should conduct itself in the Unions:
“The party can gain influence in the life of the trade unions only to the extent that its members work in the trade unions and carry out the party point of view there.…
The minds of all Communists must therefore be completely purged of reformist prejudices, in accordance with which the party is regarded as a political parliamentary organization of the proletariat, and nothing more. The Communist Party is the organization of the proletarian vanguard for the ideological fructification of the labour movement and the assumption of leadership in all spheres – first and foremost in the trade unions. While the trade unions are not subordinate to the party but wholly autonomous organizations, the Communists inside the trade unions, on the other hand, cannot pretend to any kind of autonomy in their trade-union activity but must act as the transmitters of their party’s program and tactics.” Trotsky (1924)
Unite, McCluskey and Grangemouth
The EC’s erroneous approach to the Trade Unions has clearly been highlighted by recent events. The strategy of the Socialist Party leadership in relation to Unite has badly backfired. This has had serious implications in the dispute in Grangemouth.
The role of comrades in Unite has not been the issue. The problem lies in the mistaken position taken at leadership level which has left workers at the plant disarmed in the face of a disastrous capitulation of the Unite leadership. The sacking of the senior steward and the signing of a 3 year no-strike deal was the price paid for an unconscionable strategy. We believe it is still possible to rescue this situation, and mistakes can be rectified. However, we must look seriously at where we went wrong in relation to this dispute if we are not destined to repeat the same mistakes. We also need to look at our endorsement of Len McCluskey in the Unite election.
Although couched with some caveats, our support of Len’s candidacy was posed in positive terms, despite his unequivocal adherence to Labour. Jerry Hicks’s program was similarly unclear and unable to provide a serious strategy for Unite members, like Len’s. Hicks is also seen by many as ultra-Left. However McCluskey appears to be tied much more closely to the bureaucratic apparatus. His organic link to Labour, despite his prevarication on this issue, has been unmistakeably confirmed. Although certain progress has been made under McCluskey’s leadership in the past period, this was badly damaged with his disastrous attempt to reclaim the Labour Party.
McCluskey and Unite’s policy of signing up members to the Labour Party to win Parliamentary selection contests was a disaster. The Labour leadership was able to lead an assault upon Unite, including use of the police, in order to keep the union in line. Also, the Unite convenor at Grangemouth was targeted by the employer Ineos. They saw Labour’s attack on the Union as a green light for victimisation of a Union steward. This precipitated the action which led to the suspension of the steward, and has resulted in the workforce being held hostage by the owners and a no-strike deal agreed. Apparently, talks were held between McCluskey and our General Secretary, Peter Taaffe. This was a factor that led our Party to give him critical support in the Unite General Secretary election. While we have no illusions in Hicks, our support for pro-Labour Len McCluskey has brought us no credit within the trade union movement, and serious questions must be asked about the value of discussions of our General Secretary with McCluksey.
The leadership of the Scottish organisation, clearly under the tactical and ideological direction of our General Secretary, committed another serious error. The Scottish paper (2013) says “In the absence of a fighting strategy by Unite to save the plant, including the occupation of the site and the building of a mass campaign across Scotland to demand that the Scottish/UK governments nationalise Grangemouth, the pressure proved too great for the shop stewards to resist. Nevertheless we recognise the commendable role the stewards and union activists have played at Grangemouth over the last years in defending trade union rights and conditions at the plant, which was emphasised by the successful strike in 2008.” (our emphasis).
While on the one hand correctly commending the stewards and union activists, we are implying that, in reality, they are to blame for lacking the mood to fight. But, never mind blaming the Unite leadership for not calling for occupation; our organisation did not pose occupation concretely. It has also been raised that the Unite leadership in the person of Len McCluskey did tentatively take up the idea of an occupation but discovered that the workforce were not ready and unprepared. This raises contradiction upon contradiction. Did McCluskey raise the idea of occupation? And why therefore did we then choose to use the much weaker and rather token slogan of “prepare to occupy”? Also, why did we, in our paper, as evidenced by the quotation above, criticise the Unite leadership for failing to provide a fighting strategy if we did not go further? Our position has more twists than McCluskey’s.
Occupy, or Prepare to Occupy?
The article also states “Following the announcement of the closure of the petrochemical plant Socialist Party Scotland wrote: “The next hours and days are vital in ensuring the building of a mass campaign to fight to save the Grangemouth plant and retain the jobs and terms and conditions of the workforce. An urgent mass meeting of Unite members at Grangemouth should be organised. The shop stewards at Grangemouth should draw up a plan of action to put to the workers to seek to defeat this act of corporate vandalism by Ineos. Decisive action by Unite, including the occupation of an appropriate part of the site, would gain mass support and apply huge political pressure on the Scottish government to carry through the nationalisation of the plant. Unite should now demand the nationalisation of Grangemouth.”
So there we have it. Occupation was posed only after the announcement of the closure! We should have used the slogan of an occupation as a rallying call and announced our views loudly and clearly- and before the closure was announced and before the workforce were further pressurised. Even after closure was announced, it might not have been too late, but only if we had consistently argued for an occupation.
On Friday we said “Prepare to occupy”, and on Sunday we still continued with that line when comrades were told “[t]here was no mood for occupation”. So it is disingenuous if we are informed we held the line of an occupation throughout this dispute. This is not true, and attempts to hide history in order to rewrite it later are not the Marxist method. We must not hide our own shortcomings behind a defence of the Unite union which came under attack from the state, the media and capitalist political parties. If we had posed the issue of occupation clearly in the first instance, of course, workers may not have agreed with us. But it would have been the right slogan as it represented the reality of the objective situation. Occupation as part of a mass campaign was a necessity. Events would have confirmed the strength of this demand as a concrete guide to action. The issue of closure was always a possibility. This would have “prepared” the workers far more than a call to “prepare”.
The slogan of occupation is clear in the minds of workers, yet the very best interpretation of our slogan was it was posed in a very unclear way. For example: initially the slogan was “prepare for the occupation of Grangemouth”. We don’t think this is adequate as a slogan. Either you call for an occupation or you don’t. That slogan is a half-way house. “Prepare for occupation” is only a useful slogan if it lists the preparations to be made. An example of preparation might be a call for communication with workers in other Unions to engage in immediate secondary action and for physical preparation, such filling up of thermos flasks, packing of sleeping bags and sandwiches and checking on any urgent health and safety issues. The abstract “Prepare to occupy” used in this context was a catch-all phrase that looked 2 ways. It wasn’t sufficiently strong to differentiate us from elements in the leadership of Unite, which appears to have been its intent, but it gave the misleading impression to workers that immediate occupation wasn’t an urgent priority. Also it tried to give the impression that we were serious to our own Party members and those at the forefront of the strike, without calling for any action. It hides our real position. We thought that the workforce wouldn’t go for an occupation.
It appears we thought raising the issue concretely would put us out of step with the Grangemouth workers, the stewards and the Unite leadership; that this would isolate us and make us “untransitional”. We were afraid of looking “ultra-left”. We seemed to be obsessed about measuring the consciousness of the workers. But this is abdication. And consciousness can change within hours. Woolly slogans like this were clearly thought through. Apparently, every word was carefully weighed before we printed the leaflets.
We have to ask the comrades involved, when they asked the workforce to prepare, exactly what preparations did they expect Unite members to make? The slogan was weak, disarming, incorrect and deeply ambiguous. When the idea of occupation was raised on the Socialist Party facebook group, the Secretary of Socialist Party Scotland said that this wasn’t a high priority at this stage, that “there was no mood for occupation”.
Over the same weekend, the website raised the issue of occupation, but again it was placed as a future event and was buried at the bottom of the article and given no prominence. This was because we underestimated the seriousness of Ineos. Why? Because we were talking up the idea that Ineos was one of the companies we identified in our national perspectives as drowning in profits. Why would a company shut down a profitable enterprise?
The confusion continues later in the article when we write “The potential for a mass campaign, similar in its scale to the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders sit-in in the early 1970s was inherent in the explosive situation that existed around Grangemouth today.”
We are not sure if even the author of these words understands what this means. If the potential was there, why wasn’t it realised? We could have placed ourselves at the forefront of such a sit-in, instead of passively calling upon workers to “prepare”.
Open The Books
The article has another pearl of wisdom: “During these events at Grangemouth, Socialist Party Scotland has consistently demanded the opening of the books of Ineos and all its subsidiaries to scrutiny by the trade unions.” This slogan has become prominent in our material. But again, this is a cover for a cock-up. So utopian is this slogan it barely merits comment, but there are important myths to be busted. The slogan of “open the books” may or may not be appropriate at certain times. Does Ineos, in fact, possess any books to be opened? The entity that is Ineos is almost 50% owned by PetroChina. It is entirely utopian to think that the brutal Chinese Government are going to bow to an honest demand to provide financial details. The idea also that workers are going to be poring over the financial ledgers of a corporation that has, in all likelihood, parcelled out its debts and assets using deliberately complex and opaque accounting systems, perhaps verging on fraud, is similarly not useful.
As a Reuters report outlined back in 2011: “We still view Ineos’ financial risk profile as “highly leveraged,” with sizable gross debt of EUR7.4 billion (at end-September) and adjusted debt to EBITDA of about 5x under our scenario. Other risk factors are concentrated ownership, group complexity, and limited disclosure on the ultimate parent company.” Although the report also highlighted the liquidity (cash) held by the company, the huge debt overhang is the key feature. Ineos certainly has surplus cash estimated at about EUR0.8 billion at Sept. 30, 2012. Aside from the short sighted cry of “open the books!” to find out where Jim Ratcliffe’s missing pot of gold is, opening the books may reveal profits but they may also reveal even larger debts. Remember the scale of the debts hidden at Enron, which was a manufacturing company. Just looking at available accounts does not resolve anything. Enron’s accounts were great- a great work of fiction.
Greedy Bosses?
Later on in the Scottish article we say “…this wasn’t a ‘normal’ dispute and it’s clear that the Unite leadership was not prepared for an all-out struggle that was needed against this particularly vicious and brutal capitalist employer.” The idea that a “normal” dispute does not entail ferocious attacks from the employer and came as a surprise to the Unite leadership is a strange concept. Len McCluskey himself had been present at the recent Mayr-Melnhof Packaging (MMP) lockout of staff in the Bootle print factory. MMP permanently closed the Bootle carton printing factory as a result of another “abnormal” industrial dispute.The Austrian-owned company gave McCluskey a foretaste of things to come informing workers of its decision not to re-open the factory.
In a statement, Unite said: “The conduct of the company is among the most shameful it has encountered. MMP has waged a war against the workforce, firstly locking them out of the factory, then sacking 53 workers in a concerted effort to break the workforce’s spirit and get them to accept poorer redundancy terms.”
Shameful behaviour by the company- yes! Waging war against the workers- yes! So our soft-pedaling on McCluskey, that he was completely unprepared due to the “strange abnormality” of the Grangemouth dispute and the equally strange ferocity of the employers, does not wash. Len McCluskey, to his credit, visited the MMP factory workforce. The point is, however, that his total unpreparedness and his inadequate industrial strategy was based on concession bargaining and a fantastic conviction that capitalists who close factories are “particularly vicious and brutal”.
The Scottish paper correctly points out that concession bargaining is a faulty strategy, but it does not explain why, other than that the “Socialist Party Scotland fully understands the huge pressures on trade unionists in this situation of savage capitalist austerity.” So it is the capitalists who have decided upon a policy of austerity? No –it is the state which is carrying out austerity. The state is imposing austerity to repair its bankrupt finances. The capitalist class on the other hand are supposed to be, according to our leadership, drowning in profits. Why should the bosses wish to “impose austerity” if they are drowning in surplus? Why close factories if they are creating such vast profits? This is a ridiculous notion and this ambiguous, confusing and lazy phraseology has been generously applied to cover up an erroneous assessment of the period we are in.
If we really believed that the bosses have never had it so good and that somehow the nature of the capitalist class has changed under neoliberalism to create a greedier class of meaner capitalists, then we will obviously view a dispute like Grangemouth as being about a division of the profits- not a life and death struggle for workers at the plant. If the company really is drowning in surplus, then it is hardly likely to shut down a profitable part of its operation. Ratcliffe, the owner of Ineos, took a call on his yacht in the Med during the dispute. This is supposed to be a telling insight into the nature of the Super mean bosses. But is he acting any differently to capitalism since its beginnings? Can we imagine a Carnegie or Rockefeller or even an Ian MacGregor behaving differently? Merely to pose the question provides the answer.
Systemic Crisis of Capitalism
The objective reality is that capitalism, as a system of value production, is in big trouble. We are in a period where the system is generating, overall, a low rate of profit. The rate of return in the refining industry is also notoriously low. Certain companies may have above average profits, but overall capitalism is struggling to generate enough profits as a system to prevent it from escaping crisis. This is a permanent feature of the crisis. Industrial struggles will now take a much sharper aspect and we must be prepared to advance bold solutions to the working class. But if we try to stay “in tune” with Union officials and dress this up as being in tune with workers we will be mistaking a transitional approach for another capitulation.
German Social Democracy had a minimum program and a maximum program. The minimum program was aimed at the day-to-day struggles of workers, while the maximum programme was a summary of what the future socialist society would look like. Trotsky saw the shortcomings in this approach and drew up the Transitional Programme. This was a series of demands or an approach that encouraged Marxists to view their program and their intervention in the working class as a bridge from the present consciousness of workers to the socialist revolution.
Unfortunately, this concept has been much misunderstood. Trotsky did not mean that we should base our slogans and program on the most dispirited sections of the working class, as usually these are just a reflection of the most dispirited sections of the bureaucracy. Trotsky insisted that all demands must reflect the objective situation. We have to recognize that, if we are in a period of crisis, the faulty slogans of Grangemouth derive from a faulty assessment of the crisis of capitalism and an incorrect application and understanding of Marxism.
Who’s Zoomin’ Who?
The closeness of our Party to the General Secretaries of many Unions, particularly CWU’s Billy Hayes, who was given an uncritical platform at Socialism 2013, and Unite’s Len McCluskey, who thankfully did not make an appearance at Socialism 2013, does not bring forward the day when we create a new workers’ party. In fact, Hayes and McCluskey are only too eager to cover themselves with the socialist shield provided by the Socialist Party. But in the words of Aretha Franklin, who’s zoomin’ who? We are not influencing the Trade Union leaders. Rather, they are influencing us.
The reliance on Left Union leaders like Bob Crow is not an alternative to creating clearly defined Left organisations in these Unions. The present generation of Left union leaders do represent a step forward. But if Len McCluskey or any other Left Union leader has promised to consider the creation of a new workers party after the election of Milliband and the implementation of his subsequent austerity program, this is a strategy lost on many workers. Kneeling before Labour and delivering Unite members to a Labour Government to somehow teach them a lesson is a mistake. Supporting McCluskey in the vague hope he may decide to create a new workers party in the indeterminate future after a “betrayal” by Labour is a hostage to fortune and profoundly wrong.
We mislead our own members when we don’t fully explain the ramifications of McCluskey’s program. An independent program is the best strategy and is in fact essential, even if the tantalising prize is the promise of a conference to set up a new workers party. The blunting of our criticism of McCluskey is seen as part of this “transitional” approach. But this approach is not transitional - it is reformist and intensely pessimistic. It judges that the consciousness of the working class is still affected by the collapse of Stalinism over 20 years ago.
Workers Are Ready to Fight
The creation of a new workers party is seen as a step forward in the long process of transforming consciousness. A recent poll of Conservative voters told us that over 50% were in favour of nationalisation of the energy companies. The idea that even the advanced layers of the working class have to be taken through the tortuous process of “developing consciousness” to a point where they will consider taking serious action is a mistaken application of the transitional approach. Workers are looking for a way of fighting back. It is their leaders, like Len McCluskey, who have, due to their pessimism, failed to provide any strategy for victory. We cannot blame setbacks on the supposed backwardness of the consciousness of the working class. It is a question of leadership and of Party independence from these leaders.
Workers are ready to fight, but what are they fighting? Are they fighting against an ideological offensive by the bosses, drowning in riches, who just want to become richer? Or are they fighting against a capitalist class that is fighting tooth and nail to defend its very existence? The false premise that capitalism has uncovered an historic new stage of capitalism called neoliberalism to exploit workers even more relentlessly than in the past is palpable nonsense. Capitalism is in crisis. Crisis causes the system to lash out at workers to save its own skin.
This crisis of capitalism is fundamentally brought on by the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. The falling rate of profit has meant public debt has built up enormously, and private companies have to fight to restore their profits. This is a crisis of too little profit, not too much. This crisis will see many more Grangemouths as the capitalist system fights to save itself at the expense of the working class. The savagery of their attacks will intensify as the crisis proceeds. Desperate attempts to appeal to the bosses to see sense, like the Unite demonstration outside the homes of Ineos Executives, fail to highlight the seriousness of the crisis. The room for compromises by the employer class has become massively eroded. It is becoming more difficult to win concessions from a system with little left to give, other than austerity, wage cuts and redundancies.
In conjunction for a fighting strategy for the Unions, a new mass workers party does not have the luxury of an upswing similar to the boom at the turn of the 20th century that accompanied the rise of the Labour Party. British capitalism was then the world’s superpower with immense riches and could afford a degree of reform. Today, capitalism is mired in a severe downturn. The room for reforms is evaporating as quickly as the printing presses turn to sustain the artificial boom. A new mass party of the working class is a crying historic need but it will not repeat the same path of Labour’s rise. We have to assess this period of history accurately and urgently as the crisis is far more serious for the capitalists than we, so far, admit. Capitalism is weak. We can put socialism not just on the agenda but make it reality with the correct strategy and tactics. The Grangemouth dispute highlights this historic task. We must not fail the working class in the next period.
The Faux-Transitional Method
The so-called “low level of consciousness” of the working class - the view that working class consciousness is insufficient to deal with the challenges that it faces - is not just an historical curiosity from the annals of Russian Marxism. We saw this arrogant attitude on display at our Party event Socialism 2013. In discussing the reasons for the defeat of the workers at Grangemouth, our General Secretary Peter Taaffe had this to say: “We have to take a sober attitude towards the struggles of the working people. Ours is not to laugh nor to weep but to understand. To better prepare the better to be prepared for the struggle that is coming. The main weakness in Grangemouth was that the Unite membership and the working class, we have to be honest about this, had not been fully prepared by the events before. By that we mean the consciousness of the working class was insufficiently developed by the events previous to Grangemouth, and by the leadership as well who have a responsibility in this situation. That gave the excuse to Ratcliff to pull the house down. He gave a very valuable lesson to the working class…the only way to defeat the blackmail is by mobilising all the powers of the working class.”
Without doubt, the role of the Unite leadership was a major factor in the dispute. It is the ABC of Marxism that not just the Unite leadership, but in fact the trade union leaders in general are obstacles in the raising of consciousness. That is a truism. But what does Peter Taaffe mean when he says that the leadership of Unite have a responsibility to raise the consciousness of their members? Despite McCluskey’s well-established and supine adherence to New Labour, our General Secretary bemoans the fact that he has failed to raise the level class consciousness of his own members! But why does Peter further compound his error and also lay the blame at the door of the workers themselves? Oscar Wilde defined a pessimist as someone, who when confronted by a choice of two evils, chooses both. So, blame Unite’s leadership and the workers insufficiently high level of consciousness!
When our General Secretary says “the consciousness of the working class was insufficiently developed by the events previous to Grangemouth” and that the “Unite membership” had not been “fully prepared by the events before”, he is unaware that this is an echo of events and debates that we have discussed above. History repeats itself as tragedy, but the fact Peter can come out with such rubbish is reminiscent of farce. Again, this reflects the view of the Scottish Secretary who unfortunately said that “there was no mood for an occupation”. But the role of Marxists is precisely to give a voice to this mood. That is the role of a revolutionary party.
A recent Unite Executive Council Report, in part contradicting Peter, claims that “[t]he UNITE workforce did in fact consider occupation but immediately ruled it out on safety and security grounds alone.” But the very next paragraph states: “It was learned that a significant number of highly skilled technicians - UNITE members - have left in disgust leaving serious staff shortages on safety critical functions on the site. There is no way this plant can be run safely and efficiently without mutual cooperation and trust between the Company and the workforce and trade union.”
To use “health and safety” as an excuse to refuse an occupation is scandalous. It seems that the Unite leadership, however reluctantly, accept workers on site when there are “serious staff shortages on safety critical functions on the site”, but not when there is an occupation to defend said jobs and conditions! It is hardly surprising a “mood for occupation” did not develop with this approach from Unite.
Peter said “Ours is not to laugh or weep but to understand.” However, Marxists must not complain about “insufficiently developed” consciousness, but give the workers at the plant and across the country the tools, the slogans the strategy and the vision to see a way to win. Within the early Marxist movement in Russia there was a huge debate over the role of “consciousness”. ‘Credo’, a document authored by Russian Marxists Kuskova and Prokopovich, tended to side with the revisionist Bernstein and was considered heresy by almost all Marxists in Russia. However, the ‘Credo’ is important for us to look at today because its view of how the consciousness of the working class develops chimes so harmoniously with the views of our General Secretary. Credo’s tactic was to bring the workers’ movement to struggle for immediately realisable aims. This was defined as “economism” by Lenin. In reality it was a type of reformism. Credo was a key text in Russian Social Democracy because it was so roundly condemned for its economism.
Economism
Economism as a theoretical concept was a reformist import into Social Democracy/Marxism. It is quite difficult to compare it to any political trend within Marxism today as its program was related to the political possibilities under Tsarist autocracy. However Lenin’s definition is extremely relevant. Below is a lengthy quote from Lenin (1901), but we have used it because it describes Economism, not just as an historical series of demands, or a long-dead position on autocracy, but more importantly as a political method; A method which diminishes the role of a revolutionary political party in shaping the consciousness of the working class:
“Can a connection be established between primitiveness as growing pains that affect the whole movement, and Economism, which is one of the currents in Russian Social-Democracy? We think that it can. Lack of practical training, of ability to carry on organisational work is certainly common to us all, including those who have from the very outset unswervingly stood for revolutionary Marxism. Of course, were it only lack of practical training, no one could blame the practical workers. But the term “primitiveness” embraces something more than lack of training; it denotes a narrow scope of revolutionary work generally, failure to understand that a good organisation of revolutionaries cannot be built on the basis of such narrow activity, and lastly — and this is the main thing — attempts to justify this narrowness and to elevate it to a special “theory”, i.e., subservience to spontaneity on this question too. Once such attempts were revealed, it became clear that primitiveness is connected with Economism and that we shall never rid ourselves of this narrowness of our organisational activity until we rid ourselves of Economism generally (i.e., the narrow conception of Marxist theory, as well as of the role of Social-Democracy and of its political tasks). These attempts manifested themselves in a twofold direction. Some began to say that the working masses themselves have not yet advanced the broad and militant political tasks which the revolutionaries are attempting to “impose” on them; that they must continue to struggle for immediate political demands, to conduct “the economic struggle against the employers and the government” (and, naturally, corresponding to this struggle which is “accessible” to the mass movement there must be an organisation that will be “accessible” to the most untrained youth). Others, far removed from any theory of “gradualness”, said that it is possible and necessary to “bring about a political revolution”, but that this does not require building a strong organisation of revolutionaries to train the proletariat in steadfast and stubborn struggle. All we need do is to snatch up our old friend, the “accessible” cudgel. To drop metaphor, it means that we must organise a general strike, or that we must stimulate the “spiritless” progress of the working-class movement by means of “excitative terror”.Both these trends, the opportunists and the “revolutionists”, bow to the prevailing amateurism; neither believes that it can be eliminated, neither understands our primary and imperative practical task to establish an organisation of revolutionaries capable of lending energy, stability, and continuity to the political struggle.
We have quoted the words of B-v: “The growth of the working-class movement is outstripping the growth and development of the revolutionary organisations.” This “valuable remark of a close observer” (Rabocheye Dyelo’s comment on B-v’s article) has a twofold value for us. It shows that we were right in our opinion that the principal cause of the present crisis in Russian Social-Democracy is the lag of the leaders (“ideologists”, revolutionaries, Social-Democrats) behind the spontaneous upsurge of the masses. It shows that all the arguments advanced by the authors of the Economist letter (in Iskra, No. 12), by Krichevsky and by Martynov, as to the danger of belittling the significance of the spontaneous element, of the drab everyday struggle, as to tactics-as-process, etc., are nothing more than a glorification and a defence of primitiveness. These people who cannot pronounce the word “theoretician” without a sneer, who describe their genuflections to common lack of training and backwardness as a “sense for the realities of life”, reveal in practice a failure to understand our most imperative practical tasks. To laggards they shout: Keep in step! Don’t run ahead! To people suffering from a lack of energy and initiative in organisational work, from a lack of “plans” for wide and bold activity, they prate about “tactics-as-process”! The worst sin we commit is that we degrade our political and organisational tasks to the level of the immediate, “palpable”, “concrete” interests of the everyday economic struggle; yet they keep singing to us the same refrain: Lend the economic struggle itself a political character! We repeat: this kind of thing displays as much “sense for the realities of life” as was displayed by the hero in the popular fable who cried out to a passing funeral procession, “Many happy returns of the day!”
One of Credo’s authors, Prokopovich, sided with Bernstein and his supporters like Edgar David who thought that the important thing was not theory, but in giving practical advice and understanding the insufficient level of class consciousness amongst workers: “We conquered the sympathy of the masses by practical activity that responded to the needs of the day. The revolutionising of minds will get us only a few students. We can’t get the sympathy of the masses by awakening hopes for the future in them or by ideas that are not so easy to understand. The revolutionising of the mind doesn’t start from the mind but from the stomach.” (Lih, p226)
The lesson for us today, and the clear parallel, is the underestimation of the consciousness of the advanced layer of the working class, not the overestimation, is our greatest danger. Yet this is the road the Socialist Party Executive Committee have taken.
Pessimism in the working class
Plekhanov took Prokopovich and the Bernsteinians to task for the same fault: “Prokopovich wants to say that the awareness of the masses always falls behind the development of social relations. This is more or less correct. But the only logical conclusion that follows from this is that the “revolutionary bacilli” should use all means in their power to ensure that the awareness of the worker falls as little behind the development of real relations in a given society. The task of the bacilli is precisely the fullest development of the self-awareness of the proletariat.” (Lih, p227). If the consciousness of the working class is lagging behind events, the job of Marxists is to lay out a way forward for them, even though it may not “chime” with the existing consciousness of the working class.
In the ‘Credo’ Kuskova said that she and Prokopovich thought that the low level of consciousness was “depressing and capable of plunging the most optimistic Marxist into gloom.” (Lih, p239). Plekhanov quotes Kopelzon, who said that Kuskova and Prokopovich’s view was “to talk to the worker mass in Russia about the abolition of capitalism, about socialism and indeed the abolition of the autocracy in general (was) absurd and an unproductive waste of time.” (ibid).
This pessimistic view of the consciousness of the working class was an unfortunate feature within Russian Marxism and was of particular concern to the ‘Iskra’ group. Our friend (and Lenin’s friend) Boris Krichevskii makes a comeback here. His “step-by-step” approach is uncannily similar to the position held by the EC over Grangemouth and what they consider to be the transitional method: ““Krichevskii (around 1900) advanced his soon-to-be notorious ‘stages theory’…Workers advanced to political class awareness through a series of predictable stages… Krichevskii did not argue that the Social Democrats should wait until the workers themselves worked out this or that interest…What he did advocate was a ‘pedagogical’ approach to bringing these ideas…The task of the revolutionary Social-Democrat is only to accelerate objective development by his conscious work, not to obviate it or substitute his own subjective plans for this development.” (Lih, p294-5)
In other words, for the “economists” the task of Marxists was not to substitute their ideas for the existing consciousness of the working class. The “step by step” or “pedagogical” approach was condemned by Lenin and should have been confined to the dustbin of history. But this approach has been resurrected by the EC in the twin forms of the “low level of existing consciousness” and the erroneously named “transitional approach”.
“Semen Kanatchikov, a Bolshevik full-time worker talks about how ‘Rabochaia Mysl’ and ‘Iskra’ were viewed by workers and how they differed in their conception of what the working class was capable of understanding: “Sometimes individual issues of the journal Rabochaia Mysl would come our way, and we would read them with great interest…The mass of workers would, as I would later have many occasions to learn, eagerly swallowed this ‘shop-floor bait’, but still their political development failed to advance.” (Lih, p341)
In 1901, a group of Social Democrats in internal exile wrote a ‘Letter to Russian Social Democratic Press’ where they robustly set out their disagreements with Iskra. Lenin (1901a) published the letter that was critical of him along with his response.
The letter says: “The principal drawback of the paper, which runs like a scarlet thread through its columns and which is the cause of all its other defects, large and small, is the exaggerated importance it attaches to the influence which the ideologists of the movement exert upon its various tendencies. At the same time, Iskra gives too little consideration to the material elements and the material environment of the movement, whose interaction creates a definite type of labour movement and determines its path, the path from which the ideologists, despite all their efforts, are incapable of diverting it, even if they are inspired by the finest theories and programmes.”
It is worth quoting more from this letter as Iskra’s ferocious debating style had so many critics: “Thoroughly imbued with the sectarian intolerance so characteristic of ideologists in the infantile period of social movements, Iskra is ready to brand every disagreement with it, not only as a departure from Social-Democratic principles, but as desertion to the camp of the enemy. Of such a nature is its extremely indecent and most reprehensible attack upon Rabochaya Mysl, contained in the article on Zubatov, in which the latter’s success among a certain section of the working class was attributed to that publication. Negatively disposed to the other Social-Democratic organisations, which differ from it in their views on the progress and the tasks of the Russian labour movement, Iskra, in the heat of controversy, at times forgets the truth and, picking on isolated unfortunate expressions, attributes to its opponents views they do not hold, emphasises points of disagreement that are frequently of little material importance, and obstinately ignores the numerous points of contact in views. We have in mind Iskra‘s attitude towards Rabocheye Dyelo.” (ibid)
The same Letter also says that Iskra should: “… wait until the workers will have gathered sufficient forces for this struggle”. (ibid)
The message from the authors of the Letter was that the consciousness of Russian workers was greatly overestimated by Lenin and Iskra.
The problem of consciousness informs our whole approach. If we think that the consciousness of workers is insufficiently developed we will make serious errors when we approach workers with our slogans and strategy. We will “taylor” our message to suit what we think is the prevailing mood (level of consciousness) of the working class. This is not the transitional method. This is adapting to what we mistakenly think is what the working class is capable of understanding.
A final witness from history is Nadezhdin (Man of Hope), who finished his career as a supporter of terrorism. Nevertheless, he was a Social Democrat before he became disillusioned. His view of Iskra is illuminating nevertheless:
“Iskra’s idea of ‘political agitation’ was to write down learned articles at a time when it should have turned to the mass of workers with direct calls for action.” (Lih, p361) He says “…middle workers simply did not read Iskra and Zaria and …therefore the message was not getting through.” (Lih, p369) Lih makes the point that Nadezhdin’s newspaper ‘Svoboda’ “became for Lenin ‘an emblem of vulgarised ‘literature for workers’”(Lih, p 370).
It is clear that we should not dilute our message. Inserting the mantra “transitional approach, transitional approach” does not mean inviting representatives of the ilk of Billy Hayes to our platforms in the forlorn hope of winning over a layer of organised workers. If we aim as low as this for the working class then we will hardly be seen as socialists, never mind revolutionaries.
Conclusion
The leadership of our organisation claim to uphold Marxism and Trotskyism, yet in reality they have a false interpretation of the matters discussed in this document. They justify their moulding of Marx into a Keynesian by deriding us as “dogmatists”. They justify their accommodation to the Trade Union bureaucracy by declaring us as “ultra-left” and “cut off from the working class”. They prevent the robust and serious criticisms we make through the use of inflexible methods and distorting democratic centralism. The debate is closed down due to the “tone” in order to put comrades off from engaging in the actual content.
On this basis, our party can only offer the working class a stagnant political perspective, based on a stagnant economics analysis. The false methods of the Socialist Party Executive Committee on these issues are failing our comrades and the working class. We believe that these pessimistic, anti-Marxist ideas represent a major block to building a mass revolutionary party. It is time that comrades face up to the tasks of building a revolutionary party in the 21st century. We believe our critique is a starting point for this necessary reorientation.
References
Editorial from the Socialist (2013) Austerity… Anger… Action! http://www.socialistworld.net/doc/6182
Kliman, A. (2012) The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession Pluto Press
Kliman, A. (2013) Whole Lotta Mistakin’ Going On: A Reply to Taaffe, Walsh, and the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party (England and Wales) http://akliman.squarespace.com/
Kolo, V. (2007) Anarchism or Marxism? Socialist Party Australia
Lenin, V.I. (1899) A Retrograde Trend in Russian Social-Democracy Lenin’s Collected Works http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1899/dec/trend.htm
Lenin, V.I. (1901) What is to be Done? Lenin’s Selected Works http://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/i.htm
Lenin, V.I. (1901a), A Talk With Defenders of Economism Lenin Collected Works http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/dec/06.htm
Lenin, V.I. (1906) Freedom to Criticise and Unity of Action Lenin Collected Works https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1906/may/20c.htm
Lenin, V.I. (1911) Judas Trotsky’s Blush of Shame Lenin Collected Works http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1911/jan/02.htm
Lih, L. (2008) Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context Haymarket Books
Marx, K. (1848) Manifesto of the Communist Party Marx/Engels Selected Works http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
Marx, K. (1867) Capital Volume I Marxist internet archive http://www.marxists.org/
Marx, K. (1875) Marx to W. Bracke In Brunswick 1875 Marx/Engels Selected Works http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_05_05.htm
Marx, K. (1875a) Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx/Engels Selected Works http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/
Reuters (2012) S&P summary: Ineos Group Holdings S.A. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/30/idUSWLB151620121130
Roberts, M. (2009) The Great Recession: Profit cycles, economic crisis A Marxist view Lulu Enterprises
Socialist Party Ireland (2011) The United Left Alliance & the SWP
Socialist Party Scotland (2013) Trade unions must learn lessons from Grangemouth setback http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/17639
Taaffe, P. (2010) The Permanent Revolution Today Introduction to new Urdu edition of ‘Permanent Revolution’ by Leon Trotsky http://www.socialistworld.net/doc/4113
Trotsky, L. (1924) On the United Front The First Five Years of the Communist International volume 2 http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/ffyci-2/08.htm
Trotsky, L. (1938) On the Transitional Program Fourth International http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/tpdiscuss.htm
Trotsky, L. (1938a) The Transitional Program Bulletin of the Opposition http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/index.htm
14 Comments
Alan Gibson
I think that this is for the most part a very good critique of the reformism that characterises the concrete political practice of the CWI.
However I would make a couple of points.
Firstly you claim that there is a “right under democratic centralism” for minorities to publish their ideas in public:
“It should also be noted that since the Party leadership does not encourage open and democratic debate in its public publications, comrades have had little choice but to resort to other means in order to get their ideas across to a wider audience, both within and outside the Party, which is their right under democratic centralism.”
The historical evidence you use to back this up is unfortunately flawed as the 1906 quote you provide refers of course to the RSDLP when it was a unitary organisation containing the entire spectrum of reformist to revolutionary politics as opposed to the revolutionary organisation, separate from the reformists, built by Lenin and the Bolsheviks following the historic betrayal of the reformist opportunists at the outbreak of WWI.
For a revolutionary party there is no “right” of a minority to publicly publish their views. Any such decision is a collective one and like with any other political activity the minority will accept the majority position on whether to go public on any particular question or whether to keep that discussion internal.
If a minority feels that the issue is of strategic programmatic importance then of course they may have to break discipline but that is a different matter.
Of course it seems that you have a problem in that the CWI does not have a vibrant internal political culture that encourages and facilitates substantive discussion and debate, including by those with ideas divergent from those of the leadership. But that is no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water.
You give a very good critique of the CWI leadership’s use of the demand for nationalisations, calls for “redistribution of wealth” and general economistic approach. I would just note that where nationalisation is raised it is important to link it with the need for expropriation of the bourgeoisie as a way to avoid the reformist trap.
Which leads into your critique of the way the CWI leadership misuses the method of the Transitional Programme. This is mostly accurate but is missing one critical aspect - their position on the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state. It is clear from the original TP document, and the argumentation by Trotsky in support of it, that for the TP to act as a bridge to the seizure of power it must include the need for working class organisations that point in the direction of a workers’ militia that can oppose, to some degree, the actions of the repressive apparatus of the state in enforcing the rule of capital.
Not only does the CWI exclude this from its public material but they go one step further and promote the explicitly reformist position of community control of the police.
In all my material produced for distribution at mass political rallies of working people I have attempted to get across this idea in the current Irish context in various ways that engages with current consciousness - a couple of examples being:
“Worksite occupations are an obvious response to economic disintegration. At the end of January, workers at Waterford Glass, facing an immediate plant closure, occupied the premises for seven weeks. This provides an inspiring example of the sort of action that, if carried out on a wide scale and broadly supported, could help turn things around.
“The Waterford workers faced a squad of mercenaries hired by the boss. Such private ‘security’ forces, along with the Gardai, are the first resort of capitalists seeking to restore ‘order’ – in other words, market-generated anarchy. In response to this, workers need to organise effective self-defence bodies that are capable of resisting the violent attacks of fascists or thugs hired by employers.
(“Make the bosses take the losses! For a General Strike in Ireland!”)
“The campaign should be committed to defending non-payers from state retaliation by both legal and extra-legal means. The government will not be able to prosecute everyone, but we can expect that they will target particular activists. We must prepare to vigorously resist such repression by organising legal and financial assistance as well as planning for direct mass action against attempts by the Sheriff and bailiffs to seize property. A successful campaign will also need effective tactics to prevent the installation of water meters – perhaps by denying installation teams access to estates. This kind of direct action will overlap with defence against property seizures and house repossessions by credit card companies and banks. Non-payment campaigns, militant mass demonstrations, strikes and work-place occupations are all necessary and legitimate means to resist economic destitution. We can expect that any serious mobilisation of the collective power of workers will be met by furious resistance from the capitalist parasites, who will call on all branches of the state apparatus (bureaucracy, judiciary, military and the Gardaí) to defend their privileges and wealth. The draconian fines threatened for non-compliance with the household charge are a foretaste of what is to come. In response, working people will need to create effective bodies for self-defence – not only of our homes and possessions, but also our demonstrations, strikes and occupations.”
(“Defeat the Household Taxes! Smash all austerity attacks on working people”)
I have of course been lambasted by SP members in Ireland for this supposed “ultra-leftism”. But what is particularly interesting is that none of these comments are about the way I have raised this issue (and I am always open to suggestions for how to better get this essential idea across) but rather that I have dared to raise it at all!
Peter Glover
Alan Gibson writes, “The historical evidence you use to back this up is unfortunately flawed as the 1906 quote you provide refers of course to the RSDLP when it was a unitary organisation containing the entire spectrum of reformist to revolutionary politics as opposed to the revolutionary organisation, separate from the reformists, built by Lenin and the Bolsheviks following the historic betrayal of the reformist opportunists at the outbreak of WWI.
For a revolutionary party there is no “right” of a minority to publicly publish their views. Any such decision is a collective one and like with any other political activity the minority will accept the majority position on whether to go public on any particular question or whether to keep that discussion internal.
If a minority feels that the issue is of strategic programmatic importance then of course they may have to break discipline but that is a different matter.”
This is totally wrong. You say that the RSDLP wasn’t a revolutionary party. So why was Lenin a member? Why didn’t he just leave this “reformist” party and set up his own of a revolutionary variety? If he remained inside the RSDLP, that makes him a reformist too doesn’t it? You refer only to the period after 1914. So what on earth was Lenin doing until 1914? He must have been in bed with the Mensheviks! I think your views in general reflect the intolerant and erroneous views of any political parties you have been a member of. Lenin was often in a minority position even within his own faction- and the Bolsheviks were a faction remember. Trotsky said of the Bolsheviks “Freedom of criticism and intellectual struggle was an irrevocable content of the party democracy. The present doctrine that Bolshevism does not tolerate factions is a myth of epoch decline. In reality the history of Bolshevism is a history of the struggle of factions. And, indeed, how could a genuinely revolutionary organization, setting itself the task of overthrowing the world and uniting under its banner the most audacious iconoclasts, fighters and insurgents, live and develop without intellectual conflicts, without groupings and temporary factional formations? The farsightedness of the Bolshevik leadership often made it possible to soften conflicts and shorten the duration of factional struggle, but no more than that. The Central Committee relied upon this seething democratic support. From this it derived the audacity to make decisions and give orders. The obvious correctness of the leadership at all critical stages gave it that high authority which is the priceless moral capital of centralism.” The idea that Marxism approves of one line on theory set by a party leader has been rightly consigned to the dustbin of history by Lih.
Alan Gibson
Peter,
Prior to the historic betrayal of 1914 the generally Marxist understanding of the nature of the party was that it would include all the socialist trends across the reform to revolution spectrum.
This changed after 1914 with the revolutionary Marxists coming to the understanding that it was necessary to organise separately from the reformists. The theoretical basis for that is best codified in the documents on the social roots of opportunism written by the Bolsheviks, primarily Lenin and Zinoviev, in the post-war period. I presume you are aware of this material. How do you explain the conclusions that these giants of our movement come to and the practical organisational consequences that result from it?
The discipline appropriate for an RSDLP all-socialists type party and that for a post-1914 Bolshevik revolutionary type party are obviously quite different. Why do you see the need to conflate the two?
This issue is completely different from the issue of the need for the highest degree of internal democracy, including the rights of factions - for all the reasons you outline. Why do you think I am disputing any of that?
As you mention Lars Lih I would refer you to his piece in relation to use of the term “democratic centralism” by the Russian socialist movement - http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/957/democratic-centralism-fortunes-of-a-formula
Looking at all the examples of party organisation described with either the term “democratic centralism” or “the party principle” they ALL refer to democratic rights WITHIN the revolutionary organisation.
I also note that you made no comment on my points about the method of the TP - does this imply agreement with my critique of the CWI leadership about this?
bruciebaby
Alan Gibson distorts the history of Bolshevism in these comments. He says for example:
“The discipline appropriate for an RSDLP all-socialists type party and that for a post-1914 Bolshevik revolutionary type party are obviously quite different. Why do you see the need to conflate the two?”
There is, in fact, no conflation. What Alan tries to do is to create a dichotomy between the RSDLP prior to the revolution of 1917 and Lenin’s Party of a New Type after it. However this just isn’t the case.
The RSDLP was never an “all-socialists type” party. The RSDLP was always supposed to be a revolutionary Marxist party. The fact that reformists existed within it does not detract from this fact.
However it is just untrue that Lenin pursued his vision of a separate party development against the reformists throughout the history of the RSDLP. In fact there were periods when both main factions of the party almost ceased to exist and there was almost complete fusion.
In the wake of the 1905 revolution all social democrats adopted militant tactics and in 1906 Lenin’s view was that the differences with the “reformists” was so slight to be irrelevant. “Chance wrinkles on the brow of the revolution” he called it.
There was even talk of the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions being wound up.
What lies behind Alan’s idea that disagreement on principled questions should only be “within” revolutionary parties? Even after factions were banned in the CP of the USSR in 1921 there was still the publication of journals (openly available) that criticized party policy and positions.
I think the main reason is that in Alan’s group, which is tiny, no such open discussion in front of the class would be allowed and if he followed the example of the CWI critics in proudly defending a Marxist position, he would be given the order of the boot.
Alan would argue, I’m sure, that his grouplet has the “correct” class line democratically agreed on within it? Hence he abides by “disciplne”.
Amazingly Alan ends up agreeing that the CWI leadership is correct in saying we are breeching the discipline of democratic centralism. On the contrary we are upholding it. It is the CWI leadership that is breaking it!
Alan Gibson
Bruce, Where did I say, or imply, that “Lenin pursued his vision of a separate party development against the reformists throughout the history of the RSDLP”?
What I actually said was that “This CHANGED after 1914 with the revolutionary Marxists coming to the understanding that it was necessary to organise separately from the reformists.” (This comment does need a slight clarification in that the split into separate organisations actually occurred in 1912 in Russia - however it was not until after the betrayal of August 1914, especially by the leadership of the German SDP, that the Bolsheviks generalised this as being necessary in all countries.)
Now perhaps it could be argued the Bolsheviks were wrong to make this change in response to the events of August 1914 but to deny that this change took place seems completely out of step with actual concrete history. The Bolsheviks themselves certainly seemed to think that there had been a change. How do you explain the documents written explaining the reasons for this change? How do you explain the organisational expressions of that change - not least the setting up of a separate international organisation?
Even before they came to realise the necessity for a split the Bolsheviks understanding of the nature of the Social Democratic parties seems to be in line with my own. See for instance:
“In our Party Bolshevism is represented by the Bolshevik section. But a section is not a party. A party can contain a whole gamut of opinions and shades of opinion, the extremes of which may be sharply contradictory. In the German party, side by side with the pronouncedly revolutionary wing of Kautsky, we see the ultra-revisionist wing of Bernstein.”
“Report on the Conference of the Extended Editorial Board of Proletary” (July 1909)
After 1914 you would surely agree there is no possibility that Lenin would have advocated the model of a party which included anything like a Bernstein wing (and of course he also updated his view of what Kautsky represented). In fact after 1914 Lenin was explicit in recognising the necessity of a break with the “old theory” of an RSDLP or SDP style party:
“The crisis created by the great war has torn away all coverings, swept away all conventions, exposed an abscess that has long come to a head, and revealed opportunism in its true role of ally of the bourgeoisie. The complete organisational severance of this element from the workers’ parties has become imperative…. The old theory that opportunism is a ‘legitimate shade’ in a single party that knows no ‘extremes’ has now turned into a tremendous deception of the workers and a tremendous hindrance to the working-class movement. Undisguised opportunism, which immediately repels the working masses, is not so frightful and injurious as this theory of the golden mean…. Kautsky, the most outstanding spokesman of this theory, and also the leading authority in the Second International, has shown himself a consummate hypocrite and a past master in the art of prostituting Marxism.”
“The Collapse of the Second International” (May-June 1915)
I apologise if I gave the impression I believed that “disagreement on principled questions should only be “within” revolutionary parties”. I am not here arguing for any particular division between keeping discussion internal and making it public. I am merely making the point that any decision on whether to make any discussion public is a collective one - just like with all the other political activity of members of a revolutionary Marxist organisation. Therefore there is no “right” for a minority to go public if there is a majority decision to keep a discussion internal.
I would like to point out that I am currently not a member of any political group. However it is true that the IBT, which I used to be a member of and continue to be a supporter of, does, at this time, have a fairly strict default position of keeping virtually all discussions internal. However the IBT has no rule that discussions can never be made public just that to do so would have to be the result of a democratically decided collective decision.
It is true that I currently agree with the IBT that the general default position should be to keep discussions internal to a revolutionary organisation. However I recognise that there can be a range of opinions on how strictly to apply this and also that concrete situations can change. Therefore any revolutionary organisation I am a member of in the future may at various times take a different view on the default internal/public split than my current personal opinion.
The actual amount of internal vs. public discussion is not a question of principle for me. What is a political principle is that such decisions are made democratically by the organisation and that once made those decisions are binding on any minority.
It seems pretty clear to me that you are indeed breaking the discipline of the CWI.
However given that the leadership of the CWI represents a reformist bloc to socialist revolution I would argue that you are perfectly correct to break their discipline. Democratic centralist loyalty is premised on its adherents being convinced that their organisation represents the core strategic perspectives of revolutionary Marxism. Loyalty to furthering the programme of revolutionary Marxism trumps organisational loyalty. As the CWI leadership do not represent the core strategic perspectives of revolutionary Marxism you are perfectly entitled to break their discipline in my opinion.
Ray Rising
Alan, latest, says this:”.. The actual amount of internal vs. public discussion is not a question of principle for me. What is a political principle is that such decisions are made democratically by the organisation and that once made those decisions are binding on any minority.
It seems pretty clear to me that you are indeed breaking the discipline of the CWI. ..” - Pardon me Alan, when Peter Taaffe (reasonably presuming as representing the minority views of Executive Committee of SP/CWI) writes this below, what is the ‘discipline’ orientation of the ‘organisation as a whole’ regarding their own declared responsibilities. - From the opening, at top of page; “..Taaffe (2010) wrote: “The CWI operates on the basis of democratic centralism with full rights for all its members and sections with, in fact, a greater emphasis at this stage on the need for discussion and debate rather than the formal aspects of centralism. The present split in the IMT has been kept under wraps – hidden from some of their members – up to the present time of writing. Yet all the political disputes in the CWI on a number of issues in the 1990s and the ‘noughties’ were public discussions, and documents were made public while the discussion was going on. Current debates are publicly aired, for instance, in our journal ‘Socialism Today’ on such issues as China. This is done in order to allow all workers to see and, if needs be, to participate in the discussion of vital issues. Nothing like these democratic discussions takes place in the IMT.” - It would appear that there is principle and discipline here ONLY in regard to the SP’s EC attitude to IMT (2010), but NOW not in regard to the SP itself.
Alan Gibson
Ray, I do not think the internal organisational processes of the CWI fall within the framework of democratic centralism as I understand it. But still they have their own rules and procedures including those regarding discipline even if I personally consider those to be a bureaucratic caricature of democratic centralism. As far as I know the dissidents are breaking that discipline. Whether or not the dissidents have a right, or even a responsibility, to break that discipline (which I think they do) is a different issue - however that is premised on the reality that they are breaking the CWI’s discipline.
Of course Taaffe is playing games by pretending, in that context, to be an ultra-democrat. But like any bureaucrat he can just as easily play the ulra-centralist when it suits him. The fact that the CWI lets this kind of duplicity exist tells us a lot about them as an organisation.
More on democratic centralism | revolutionaryprogramme
bruciebaby
Alan raises some interesting points but confirms my prediction of what he would say however we must, at least, get the facts right. Alan says:
“(This comment does need a slight clarification in that the split into separate organisations actually occurred in 1912 in Russia – however it was not until after the betrayal of August 1914, especially by the leadership of the German SDP, that the Bolsheviks generalised this as being necessary in all countries.)”
This isn’t true I’m afraid. The Bolsheviks did not establish a separate “party” in 1912. They constituted the majority of the politically organized worker’s in Russia at that time but did not constitute themselves as a separate party until 1917. In 1912 the Bolsheviks expelled the liquidators from the party, those who were in favour of winding up the underground party organization, but did not constitute themselves as a separate or new party. They still regarded themselves as a faction and as defending the genuine RSDLP in which other factions could exist. In fact the Bolsheviks appealed to anti liquidationist Menshevilks to defend the underground organization of the RSDLP.
Even during the early days of the revolution after March there were moves towards conciliation and the Bolsheviks were only one faction, though by far the largest, amongst Russian social democrats. Trotsky, as we know was a member of significant group of social democrats in Petrograd, the inter district group or Mezhraiontsy. They fused with the Bolsheviks after the July days I believe when Trotsky declared solidarity with the Bolsheviks.
So Alan is incorrect to state: “Now perhaps it could be argued the Bolsheviks were wrong to make this change in response to the events of August 1914 (that is to be in favour of excluding social chauvinists etc) but to deny that this change took place seems completely out of step with actual concrete history.” Lenin made a call for a break with the social chauvinists on an international scale but it was a “call” it did not become concrete until after the successful revolution in October 1917.
However while Lenin was opposed to reformists being inside the party of the working class he certainly was not opposed to the existence of factions and did not consider the Bolsheviks to constitute “the party” prior to the revolution.
If anybody is “out of step” with the history it’s Alan. Paul le Blanc makes the same mistake in Lenin and the Revolutionary Party.
However Alan seems to think that history has certain points when the practice of democratic centralism changed because the party changed in form (at the wrong time).
There was no fundamental change in Lenin’s position when he was in favour of open and, if necessary, public disagreements over policy or action in 1906 and his position right up to 1917.
Historical research has illuminated the myth making around the development of the Bolsheviks. In an article Lars T Lih points out Le Blanc’s mistaken interpretation of events:
“In his Lenin anthology, Paul Le Blanc writes:
The RSDLP was hopelessly divided by factions of liquidator and non-liquidator Mensheviks, Leninist and anti-Leninist Bolsheviks, and others - including a faction against factionalism led by Trotsky! Lenin and those around him conclude that effective revolutionary work could not be accomplished by such an entity, and in 1912 they reorganised themselves as the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, distinctive from all other entities bearing that name … (p198).
Le Blanc explicitly rejects the ‘party of a new type’ interpretation. Nevertheless, his words might be read (incorrectly, I believe) as implying that Lenin regarded a multi-factional party as per se ineffective, so that he made sure that only one faction remained in his new “reorganised” party. Le Blanc fails to make clear enough that Lenin’s case was rather that party work was made ineffective, not by the profusion of factions, but by the doings of one particular group: namely, the liquidators.
Lenin recognised that there were many people in the party who were opposed to the liquidators, but who disagreed with the necessity of excluding them - or perhaps simply disagreed with his method of excluding them. These people had to make a choice, but Lenin was nevertheless perfectly happy to have them in the party and he cannot be said to have excluded them in any meaningful way.”
Actually Lenin did not consider that the Bolsheviks could constitute themselves as a party in 1912 because he did not believe that a faction could become a party and wrote this about the process of organising the Prague conference that expelled the liquidators: “In all, 20 organisations established close ties with the organising commission convening this conference: that is to say, practically all the organisations, both Menshevik and Bolshevik, active in Russia at the present time”.
In other words Lenin still believed in a unified single working class party in Russia, the RSDLP. Even after the outbreak of war Lenin was opposed to those leaders of the working class movement who were supporters of the imperialist war being part of the Marxist movement but not to other sections who did not support it whether they be Mensheviks or not.
I could go on further but the 1912 “split” is a myth that was bolstered later by the development of the Communist Party and the rewriting of party history by Zinoviev and the Stalinists.
This minor historical blip cleared up I would definitely like to go on about the right to have public disagreements in a revolutionary party but I think ray has already made a good fist of it
. http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/912/a-faction-is-not-a-party
Alan Gibson
Bruce, I accept you can make a good case for saying that the Bolsheviks did not split from the RSDLP in 1912 and they projected themselves as representing the true continuity of the pre-1912 RSDLP - with the Mensheviks in effect being the splitters who set up a new organisation. But surely what cannot be disputed is that after 1912 there were separate Bolsehvik and Menshevik organisations in Russia (along with the much smaller Mezhraionka which took an intermediary postion and argued for unity between the two main organisations). It is unclear to me why you believe this separation into two (or three if you count the Mezhraionka) organisations to be a “myth” - it is just an historical fact.
You say “Lenin was opposed to reformists being inside the party of the working class”. Do you accept that this is only in the context of the post-1912 (or post-1914, or post-1917 - whichever decisive point you want to say the split became concretised) organisation and before that he did see reformists as forming a wing of the party uniting all socialists? If not how do you explain the 1909 quote I referred to?
I don’t dispute that the Bolsheviks in 1912 “still believed in a unified single working class party in Russia” (I agree with you if you are using the term “myth” to refer to those who argue that this changed in 1912), rather that is was a Russian exception and that the German SDP organisation, uniting all socialists, from revolutionaries to reformist opportunists like Bernstein, remained the model. Therefore I largely agree with the Lars Lih in his dispute with Paul Le Blanc over what 1912 represented.
It was not until after the betrayal of August 1914 that the Bolsheviks generalised this and came to the understanding that there was a need for a break with the “old theory that opportunism is a ‘legitimate shade’ in a single party that knows no ‘extremes’”. In effect that it was necessary to create a “party of a new type” - what came in the ensuing period to be called Communist parties.
I am therefore not sure why you think there is some importance between the Bolshevik’s *call* for an international split from the reformists in 1914 and the concretisation of that call not occurring until after 1917. Surely what is relevant to our discussion is the change in understanding of what kind of organisation was necessary. What is important to recognise is that after August 1914 there was an explicit rejection of the “old theory” about the type of party required.
On the issue of “factions”. I would argue that there is a qualitative difference between what the term “factions” in the unitary RSDLP and those in the post-1914 organisation meant. In the former the “factions” were based on differences between the politics of reform and revolution while in the latter they are groupings within an overall organisation that was much more like would have been understood as the Bolshevik faction in the old RSDLP.
This is because after August 1914 the Bolsheviks were indeed creating a “party of a new type” - a Communist party (even if it took them a few years to take on that exact name).
Lars Lih has another article on post-1914 developments in the nature of the party (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/914/how-lenin-s-party-became-bolshevik). I have critiqued one element of that on my blog (http://revolutionaryprogramme.wordpress.com/2014/01/29/review-of-lars-lihs-how-lenins-party-became-bolshevik/) and a couple of paragraphs of my blog piece seem particularly germane to our discussion here:
“As Lih documents in the first few paragraphs of the “View on the ground” section of his article this new party was overwhelmingly dominated by the Bolshevik faction of the old RSDLP. In effect the new party was a fusion of the Bolshevik faction with the Mezhraionka (the “Interregional Group” who vacillated between the Bolshevik and Menshevik groupings in the old RSDLP and whose membership included Trotsky) and the very small number of Menshevik Internationalists prepared to break with the bulk of the Mensheviks.
“This was a fusion on the basis of the programme of the Bolshevik faction and whatever the individual former factional grouping its members may have been affiliated with in the old RSDLP they were now all Bolsheviks as a result.”
How do you explain that my understanding that the discipline appropriate to these “parties of a new type” (that had moved beyond the “old theory that opportunism is a ‘legitimate shade’ in a single party that knows no ‘extremes’”) is consistent with all (at least as far as I am aware) the resolutions discussing the issue in the post-1914 organisations established on that basis?
The 1921 Comintern resolution on exactly this issue should stand as our guide:
“In their public appearances members of the Party are obliged to act at all times as disciplined members of a militant organisation. If there are disagreements on the correct method of action on this or that question, these should, as far as possible, be settled in the Party organisation before any public activity is embarked upon and the members should then act in accordance with the decision made. In order that every Party decision is carried out fully by all Party organisations and Party members, the largest possible number of Party members should be involved in discussing and deciding every issue. The different levels of the Party apparatus must decide whether any given question should be publicly discussed by individual comrades (in the press, in pamphlets), in what form and to what extent. If the decision of the organisation or leading Party body is in the view of certain other members incorrect, these comrades must not forget, when they speak or act in public, that to weaken or break the unity of the common front is the worst breach of discipline and the worst mistake that can be made in the revolutionary struggle.”
As regards the historical record of the degree of open discussion in the post-1914 Bolshevik organisation I would refer you to Doug Lorimer’s excellent piece which does a pretty good job of outlining, with many concrete examples, that the perspective of the 1921 Comintern resolution is an accurate reflection of the reality of how they operated (http://links.org.au/node/58).
Alan Gibson
Bruce, I accept you can make a good case for saying that the Bolsheviks did not split from the RSDLP in 1912 and they projected themselves as representing the true continuity of the pre-1912 RSDLP - with the Mensheviks in effect being the splitters who set up a new organisation. But surely what cannot be disputed is that after 1912 there were separate Bolsehvik and Menshevik organisations in Russia (along with the much smaller Mezhraionka who took an intermediary position and argued for unity between the two main organisations). It is unclear to me why you believe this separation into two (or three if you count the Mezhraionka) organisations to be a “myth” - it is just an historical fact.
You say “Lenin was opposed to reformists being inside the party of the working class”. Do you accept that this is only in the context of the post-1912 (or post-1914, or post-1917 - whichever decisive point you want to say the split became concretised) organisation and before that he did see reformists as forming a wing of the party uniting all socialists? If not how do you explain the 1909 quote I referred to?
I don’t dispute that the Bolsheviks in 1912 “still believed in a unified single working class party in Russia” (I agree with you if you are using the term “myth” to refer to those who argue that this changed in 1912), rather that is was a Russian exception and that the German SDP organisation, uniting all socialists, from revolutionaries to reformist opportunists like Bernstein, remained the model. Therefore I largely agree with the Lars Lih in his dispute with Paul Le Blanc over what 1912 represented.
It was not until after the betrayal of August 1914 that the Bolsheviks generalised this and came to the understanding that there was a need for a break with the “old theory that opportunism is a ‘legitimate shade’ in a single party that knows no ‘extremes’”. In effect that it was necessary to create a “party of a new type” - what came in the ensuing period to be called Communist parties.
I am therefore not sure why you think there is some importance between the Bolshevik’s *call* for an international split from the reformists in 1914 and its concretisation not occurring until after 1917. Surely what is relevant to our discussion is the change in understanding of what kind of organisation was necessary. What is important to recognise is that after August 1914 there was an explicit rejection of the “old theory” about the type of party required.
On the issue of “factions”. I would argue that there is a qualitative difference between what the term “factions” in the unitary RSDLP and those in the post-1914 organisation meant. In the former the “factions” were based on differences between the politics of reform and revolution while in the latter they are groupings within an overall organisation that was much more like would have been understood as the Bolshevik faction in the old RSDLP.
This is because after August 1914 the Bolsheviks were indeed creating a “party of a new type” - a Communist party (even if it took them a few years to take on that exact name).
Lars Lih has another article on post-1914 developments in the nature of the party (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/914/how-lenin-s-party-became-bolshevik). I have critiqued one element of that on my blog (http://revolutionaryprogramme.wordpress.com/2014/01/29/review-of-lars-lihs-how-lenins-party-became-bolshevik/) and a couple of paragraphs of my blog piece seem particularly germane to our discussion here:
“As Lih documents in the first few paragraphs of the “View on the ground” section of his article this new party was overwhelmingly dominated by the Bolshevik faction of the old RSDLP. In effect the new party was a fusion of the Bolshevik faction with the Mezhraionka (the “Interregional Group” who vacillated between the Bolshevik and Menshevik groupings in the old RSDLP and whose membership included Trotsky) and the very small number of Menshevik Internationalists prepared to break with the bulk of the Mensheviks.
“This was a fusion on the basis of the programme of the Bolshevik faction and whatever the individual former factional grouping its members may have been affiliated with in the old RSDLP they were now all Bolsheviks as a result.”
How do you explain that my understanding that the discipline appropriate to these “parties of a new type” (that had moved beyond the “old theory that opportunism is a ‘legitimate shade’ in a single party that knows no ‘extremes’”) is consistent with all (at least as far as I am aware) the resolutions discussing the issue in the post-1914 organisations established on that basis?
The 1921 Comintern resolution on exactly this issue should stand as our guide:
“In their public appearances members of the Party are obliged to act at all times as disciplined members of a militant organisation. If there are disagreements on the correct method of action on this or that question, these should, as far as possible, be settled in the Party organisation before any public activity is embarked upon and the members should then act in accordance with the decision made. In order that every Party decision is carried out fully by all Party organisations and Party members, the largest possible number of Party members should be involved in discussing and deciding every issue. The different levels of the Party apparatus must decide whether any given question should be publicly discussed by individual comrades (in the press, in pamphlets), in what form and to what extent. If the decision of the organisation or leading Party body is in the view of certain other members incorrect, these comrades must not forget, when they speak or act in public, that to weaken or break the unity of the common front is the worst breach of discipline and the worst mistake that can be made in the revolutionary struggle.”
As regards the historical record of the degree of open discussion in the post-1914 Bolshevik organisation I would refer you to Doug Lorimer’s excellent piece which does a pretty good job of outlining, with many concrete examples, that the perspective of the 1921 Comintern resolution is an accurate reflection of the reality of how they operated (http://links.org.au/node/58).
bruciebaby
Alan’s latest reply is interesting. He says:
“I am therefore not sure why you think there is some importance between the Bolshevik’s *call* for an international split from the reformists in 1914 and the concretisation of that call not occurring until after 1917. Surely what is relevant to our discussion is the change in understanding of what kind of organisation was necessary. What is important to recognise is that after August 1914 there was an explicit rejection of the “old theory” about the type of party required.”
It is important to stick to the facts of when real political groupings are formed because the call for a new party that did not have a place for reformist traitors in 1914 and its actual formation in 1917 and the creation of new communist parties took place under radically different circumstances from when they were conceptualised. That said we could get bogged down in the nuance of historical facts when the main theme coming out from Alan is his sticking point about the authors of this document “breaking” CWI discipline.
“I do not think the internal organisational processes of the CWI fall within the framework of democratic centralism as I understand it. But still they have their own rules and procedures including those regarding discipline even if I personally consider those to be a bureaucratic caricature of democratic centralism. As far as I know the dissidents are breaking that discipline. Whether or not the dissidents have a right, or even a responsibility, to break that discipline (which I think they do) is a different issue – however that is premised on the reality that they are breaking the CWI’s discipline.”
According to this argument the actions of revolutionaries is deemed to be breaking discipline on the basis of the rules that exist in the party they are in no matter what they are?
However I agree with working within discipline and the rules when those rules are clear. However in respect of this disagreement I have stated that it is the leadership who are breaking democratic centralism and this is why.
When I challenged the position of the leadership in March 2013 a debate was agreed and it was agreed that the documents of that debate be made public precisely as in the criticism of the IMT made by Peter Taaffe cited by Ray:
“Yet all the political disputes in the CWI on a number of issues in the 1990s and the ‘noughties’ were public discussions, and documents were made public while the discussion was going on. Current debates are publicly aired, for instance, in our journal ‘Socialism Today’ on such issues as China. This is done in order to allow all workers to see and, if needs be, to participate in the discussion of vital issues. Nothing like these democratic discussions takes place in the IMT.”
In fact the decision of the Scottish NC in March 2013 was that a debate would go ahead between myself and Taaffe and that I would produce a document and so would Taaffe. After the debate both documents would be published on the Scottish website.
This was reiterated to me in a mail from the Scottish secretary over the issue of not publishing a review that I had written:
“We will, as agreed back in March, put both your contribution and that of the IS on the website as soon as we have it. As for the review, let me work on something over the next few weeks and hopefully we can put something up soon. As you know it’s not a book that has just been released, so we have time I think.”
When a document that was endorsed by 11 comrades was produced the SP published an article on their website attacking Kliman and me but the Scottish secretary then refused to publish our critical document!!
In other words there was agreement to publish my document but when it was produced and endorsed by more than one comrade they unceremoniously refused to publish it.
So who is breaking “discipline” Alan? You can come out with as many Comintern statutes as you like but the rules of the CWI as far as the process for disagreements go is decided on the basis of a telephone call between Philip Stott and Peter Taaffe.
I think I could also point to practically every other existing small revolutionary organisation on the planet where the same hypocrisy exists.
The point being of course that in the days of Lenin and Trotsky we were talking, not of small groups or parties, but of mass movements of the working class and in the shape of mass communist parties. Not miniscule leadership groups who basically call the shots where conferences rubber stamp the utterings of the leaders.
And I’m not just thinking of the CWI in this regard.
As for Lorimer’s “excellent” article he makes this point:
“What was in the “rules of conduct for building” Communist parties that was adopted by the Fifth Congress of the Comintern in July 1924 that departed from Bolshevism’s organisational norms? In its call for the “Bolshevisation” of the Communist parties, the Fifth Congress defined the “basic features of a genuine Bolshevik party” as:
1. The party must be a real mass party, that is, it must be able, both when legal and illegal, to maintain the closest and strongest contacts with the working masses, and express their needs and aspirations.
2. It must be capable of manoeuvre, that is, its tactics should not be sectarian or dogmatic …
3. It must be revolutionary Marxist in nature, working undeviatingly towards its goals …
4. It must be a centralised party, permitting no factions, tendencies or groups; it must be fused in one mould.
5. It must carry out systematic and persistent propaganda and organisation in bourgeois armies
Of these five points, it is only part of point 4 beginning with “permitting” that was contrary to Bolshevism’s organisational norms. Here is the actual distortion of Bolshevik organisational norms introduced under Zinoviev’s leadership of the Comintern—transforming the temporary ban on factions, organised tendencies and platform groups adopted by the Russian Communist Party at its Tenth Congress in 1921, into a permanent and universal requirement for all Communist parties.
When Riazanov moved that the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party make the ban permanent, Lenin objected, arguing that such a measure was “excessive” and “impracticable”, adding that if “fundamental disagreements” were to arise in the party, when it came time to elect delegates to the next party, “the elections may have to be based on platforms”.
The purpose of the “Bolshevisation” campaign was to remould the leaderships of the foreign Communist parties into unquestioning agencies of the foreign policy goals of the Stalin bureaucracy (with whom Zinoviev was at that time allied), and this required that the parties become politically “monolithic” (as Zinoviev on one occasion termed it).”
Amazingly Lorimer just moves on after this to look at party discipline.
However Leninist norms were for the existence of factions, tendency’s and groups. When, during the course of this disagreement attempts have been made to enquire about such rights it has been met with complete silence.
So I’m going to state for the last time IT ISN’T US WHO ARE BREAKING DISCIPLINE OR DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISM but the leadership of the CWI.
I would imagine such similar hypocrisy exists in the IBT. In effect all so called revolutionary parties I know of believe in having one “mould”.
Alan Gibson
Bruce,
Ok - I can accept your reasoning that because the CWI leadership lied and bureaucratically suppressed discussion of your ideas that they have therefore broken the discipline that exists in the CWI. But I am not sure how this helps us. What does this mean about the nature of the CWI internal regime when the leadership can lie and treat critical elements of its membership in such a bureaucratic way? All this does is reinforce my contention that it is not useful to describe the organisational framework of the CWI as “democratic centralist”.
But it also seems clear that you have decided to go public without this being a collective decision of the CWI (in whatever distorted ways it makes collective decisions). In that sense you are yourselves also breaking the discipline of the CWI.
I have argued you are justified in breaking that discipline because of the reformism in practice of the CWI leadership and their bureaucratic restrictions on your ability to present your views to the rest of the CWI membership. But a justified breaking of discipline is still a breaking of discipline. I realise it may not be helpful for you to publicly make such an assessment as it would be used by the CWI leadership to justify their bureaucratic moves against you to the rest of the membership, including some who might be wavering in their adherence to the leadership, but I still believe the point it valid.
This discussion thread started in response to me critiquing a specific position put forward in the document “Building A Revolutionary Party in the 21st Century - A Critique of the Socialist Party Executive Committee’s Methods and Perspectives” - a document which I think for the most part represents a very promising step in breaking from the reformism in practice of the CWI.
My critique was about the claim that the organisational framework, norms and culture that we know by the term “democratic centralism” includes the *right* of a minority to go public with their views. I dispute that there is any such *right* and have presented arguments as to why this is the case but instead of a proper discussion around this specific issue the discussion has gone down side alleys around specific dates of developments in the creation of a separate revolutionary Marxist organisation in Russia and details of the CWI leadership’s bureaucratic abuses against you.
Looking at your latest response it seems the confusion between us arises because you actually really believe that the organisational framework, norms and culture of the CWI are more-or-less consistent with those of a healthy revolutionary Marxist organisation and stand in the tradition of the organisational framework, norms and culture applied in the best periods of the history of the revolutionary Marxist movement - which we all, with our slightly different appreciations of the term, call “democratic centralism”.
My problem is of course the I do not believe that the CWI is a revolutionary organisation as judged by its actual practice and programme - it is consistently reformist in its concrete political practice.
The CWI also does not have a healthy internal life based on the fullest possible democratic discussion across all layers of the organisation - of which the bureaucratic moves against you are merely the latest example.
The CWI also does not give a high enough political priority to political education of its membership as compared to organsing endless activism for them - of which there are numerous examples, not least some of the inane comments about study of political theory made by CWI loyalists on your facebook page.
I believe this is what lies behind your problems in requesting your rights as a tendency/faction that are part of the healthy organisational norms known as “democratic centralism”. It is because the CWI is not a revolutionary Marxist organisation and does not have an internal regime appropriate to a revolutionary Marxist organisation. You on the other hand believe, or at least it seems to me you must believe, that the CWI is and does. The problem for you is just that there is a bad leadership who are reformist and bureaucratic.
I do note that your document “Building A Revolutionary Party in the 21st Century - A Critique of the Socialist Party Executive Committee’s Methods and Perspectives” actually comes quite close in its content to what I have outlined but it seems you draw back from making similar conclusions about the overall nature of the CWI, including therefore its internal regime.
So I am left with the conclusion that for the purposes of this discussion if indeed you are correct and the organisational framework, norms and culture of the CWI can be accurately described with the term “democratic centralism” (just with a bad leadership) then I am therefore left with no option but to say that I am opposed to “democratic centralism” and will have to find another phrase to describe the organisational framework, norms and culture that would characterise the type of organisation I believe it is necessary to build.
This does not of course alter the content of my original points about “Building A Revolutionary Party in the 21st Century - A Critique of the Socialist Party Executive Committee’s Methods and Perspectives” and I would still be interested, despite our apparent disagreement over the nature of the CWI’s internal regime, in what you, and any other readers of these comments, have to say about them.
1. That the organisational framework, norms and culture of a healthy revolutionary Marxist organisation would not include the *right* of a minority to go public with their disagreements if there was a democratic majority decision to keep that discussion internal.
2. That where the demand for nationalisation is raised it is important to link it with the need for expropriation of the bourgeoisie as a way to avoid the reformist trap that the CWI leadership falls into.
3. That for the method of the Transitional Programme to act as a bridge to the seizure of power it must include the need for working class organisations that can oppose, to some degree, the actions of the repressive apparatus of the state in enforcing the rule of capital and that point, if only in embryo, in the direction of a workers’ militia. Not only does the CWI exclude anything about this idea from its public material but they go one step further and promote the explicitly reformist position of community control of the police.
Poric
I am tempted to jump into this discussion on the history of the Bolsheviks which is an important issue but it will only divert us away from the absolutely central mistake that Alan is making. He argues that “a healthy revolutionary Marxist organisation would not include the *right* of a minority to go public with their disagreements if there was a democratic majority decision to keep that discussion internal”. The problem with this peculiar rule is that not only is there no historical justification for this position from the Bolsheviks before their success in leading the Russian Revolution but that it is completely impractical to implement.
If an organisation has a general rule that the views of the minority will be kept within the organisation unless the majority takes a conscious decision to publish them, there will always be a tendency not to publish them, as the majority will naturally want their view to be seen as the undisputed policy of the organisation. Remember also that in a factional dispute the leadership are usually a non-declared faction with all the advantages of control of the organisation’s media, personnel etc. Through this they are constantly putting their views to a wider audience outside the organisation, a right that they usually deny to the minority faction. In this situation the minority who are in a much weaker position with less resources and so on, are likely to feel highly frustrated. The aim here should be to keep the minority in the organisation and to feel that they have an equal right to have their views heard. In doing so we have to recognises that the natural instinct of any minority will be to publish their views anyway, or for them to leak out to non member contacts. This happens in virtually every dispute on the planet! Who wants to be silenced? All the vain appeals to bolshevik discipline cannot stop the tendency of people to express themselves to working people. And why should the wider population not hear the discussions going on inside the revolutionary movement anyway? This is actually the Bolshevik tradition not the bastardised idea of democratic centralism that became injected into the movement from 1921 onwards.
Let me continue with the implications of this weird policy of silencing minorities. What then inevitably follows is disciplinary action being taken against the minority and usually ends up with some of them being expelled and the rest leaving. Thus what could have been a useful and enriching exchange of differences is turned into a disciplinary dispute and a split. This process has been repeated tens of thousands of times throughout the revolutionary movement and largely accounts for the ameoba-like tendency of all the democratic centralist organisations to split into ever smaller fragments.
It is just not possible to build a revolutionary organisation of any size with this organisational policy. The development of publicly known factions is an inevitable aspect of the health development of a mass movement. Otherwise you will always remain a purist sect splitting again and again whenever internal differences arise..
Even more impractical is trying to implement such a policy of denying minorities the right of a public voice in the modern online world when people can anonymously publish their views far and wide at the click of a button. Thus it becomes a rule that is impossible to enforce, although to try and avoid this some groups have attempted to introduce bans on the use of emails, blogs etc. How ridiculous.!
That said, if the whole emphasis of this rule was reversed so that minorities normally had the right to publish their views outside the organisation and that only in exceptional cases could an appeal be made for the minority not to do so. Well that would be a reasonable approach and one that could work through the force of moral pressure. Beyond that is just laying the basis for more and more splits.
Poric