Die Neue Zeit
14th February 2012, 14:27
http://johnriddell.wordpress.com/2011/08/14/the-cominterns-unknown-decision-on-workers-governments/
The call for a workers government emerged from German workers struggles in 1920 as a way of posing the need for workers power in a context where no alternative structure of revolutionary councils, or soviets, yet existed.
[...]
The most basic tasks of a workers government must consist of arming the proletariat, disarming the bourgeois counter-revolutionary organisations, introducing [workers] control of production, shifting the main burden of taxation to the shoulders of the rich, and breaking the resistance of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie.
[...]
The Communist International must consider the following possibilities.
I. Illusory workers governments
1. A liberal workers government, such as existed in Australia and may exist in Britain in the foreseeable future.
2. A Social-Democratic workers government (Germany).
II. Genuine workers governments
3. Government of workers and the poorer peasants. Such a possibility exists in the Balkans, Czechoslovakia, and so on.
4. A workers government with Communist participation.
5. A genuinely proletarian workers government, which, in its pure form, can be embodied only in the Communist party.
http://johnriddell.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/a-workers-government-as-a-step-toward-socialism/
There were at that time three previous examples of workers governments, none of which fit neatly into this five-point schema. Thus:
The Paris Commune, an elected revolutionary workers government at war with a still-existing bourgeois regime.
The early Soviet republic: as noted, a coalition regime based on revolutionary workers and peasants soviets.
The revolutionary governments of Bavaria and Hungary in 1919, where, as Chris Harman and Tim Potter have noted, bourgeois power virtually collapsed. The workers government came into being and afterwards had to create the structure of proletarian power.
The resolution also said nothing regarding the government that might result in the colonial and semi-colonial countries from the struggle for an anti-imperialist united front. This question was urgently posed in the years following the congress in China, where a mistaken Comintern policy resulted in a calamitous defeat. In the year of that setback, the United Opposition in the Bolshevik Party, led by Trotsky and Zinoviev, formulated a governmental proposal for China based on the Bolshevik strategic arsenal from the years before 1917: a revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. Trotsky was soon to repudiate the concept. Nonetheless, it remains among the possible variants of a workers and peasants government.
Comments:
The way I see it, there are two kinds of workers government that can be supported by revolutionary socialists without a call for a political revolution. These are 1) revolutionary socialist government, and 2) democratic socialist government.
[...]
A democratic socialist government is one that is committed to better outcomes for working people. It does not recognize the necessity of abolishing Capitalism in order to produce better outcomes for working people, but will challenge Capitalism when it is clear that this is the only way to achieve better outcomes for workers. The ideology of this type of government may be summed up as socialism if necessary, but not necessarily socialism. It does not mind if it passes policy that leads to the destruction of Capitalist businesses, or entire sectors of the Capitalist economy, if the state or non-profit sectors of the economy are able to carry out any necessary functions formerly performed by these capitalists (ex. food distribution).
The foreign policy of this kind of government may be problematic It will generally not participate in imperialist wars, but may cooperate with repressive regimes as a means of securing the national interest.
This kind of government also generally believes that the power of the capitalists can only be legitimately challenged via the legislative process, and in the event that workers try to defeat the capitalists on their own, such a government will generally side with the capitalists.
This kind of a government is supportable for two reasons:
1) This kind of government will ultimately recognize that the only way to improve outcomes for working people is to challenge the power of the capitalists. Extra-parliamentary activism can generally be quite effective in getting this kind of a government to implement policies that benefit working people and challenge the power of the capitalists.
2) In the event that the working class truly begins to win the global class struggle against capitalism, this kind of government would be unlikely to prevent the working class from finally overthrowing Capitalism.
Obviously, this kind of government needs to be criticized if and when it implements policies that are not in the interest of working people yet the essential character of such a government determines that criticism ought not to descend into outright opposition unless the essential character of the government is deemed to have changed.
Why did the Comintern have a slippery definition of workers government? Because it moved away somewhat from propagandism and because workers government was a good slogan to use.
Lets take a step further back, near to the beginning, in the Communist Manifesto:
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
No so-called bourgeois workers party that lays claim to Labour or Social-Democratic or even Democratic Socialist labels aspires towards any of the three goals above, while petit-bourgeois workers parties do not aspire towards the last goal and seek to replace bourgeois hegemony with some other form of non-worker hegemony. For obvious reasons, vulgar vanguardists and their philosophical or conspiratorial circle-sects dont bother with the first goal and substitute themselves for the working class in the third goal.
In modern parlance, the first two goals are the transformation of the working class in itself into a class for itself and the establishment of worker-class hegemony at the expense of bourgeois hegemony. The third goal expresses itself in the implementation of the recovery-in-progress Marx-Engels minimum program, whereby individual demands could easily be implemented without eliminating the bourgeois state order, but whereby full implementation would mean that the working class will have expropriated ruling-class political power in policymaking, legislation, execution-administration, and other areas. This Marx-Engels minimum program can be implemented without workers councils at all, though it cannot be implemented without worker-class party-movements as big or bigger than the pre-war SPD.
So what exactly is this Marx-Engels minimum program in todays terms? Something like this:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/class-strugglist-democracy-t112390/index.html
I suggest a better term right from Marx and Engels themselves, one that cant be sloganeered but one that can drive home the point more accurately: Proletarian-Not-Necessarily-Communist or Proletocratic-Not-Necessarily-Communist.
[Also consider: http://communiststudents.org.uk/?p=524]
http://johnriddell.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/workers-government-the-realities-of-our-era-are-different/
John has documented the Cominterns development of the demand for a workers government as an element of the united front approach (I think the term class-struggle government (CSG) is a better term to use today). Although there was confusion in the 1922 Comintern discussion and resolution, its best element involved the demand to form a government of working-class forces in a capitalist state that would launch a resolute struggle at least to achieve the workers most important immediate demands against the bourgeoisie. Such a government would result in a bitter struggle with the bourgeoisie. This might lead to revolutionary struggle for socialist democracy.
The call for a workers government emerged from German workers struggles in 1920 as a way of posing the need for workers power in a context where no alternative structure of revolutionary councils, or soviets, yet existed.
[...]
The most basic tasks of a workers government must consist of arming the proletariat, disarming the bourgeois counter-revolutionary organisations, introducing [workers] control of production, shifting the main burden of taxation to the shoulders of the rich, and breaking the resistance of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie.
[...]
The Communist International must consider the following possibilities.
I. Illusory workers governments
1. A liberal workers government, such as existed in Australia and may exist in Britain in the foreseeable future.
2. A Social-Democratic workers government (Germany).
II. Genuine workers governments
3. Government of workers and the poorer peasants. Such a possibility exists in the Balkans, Czechoslovakia, and so on.
4. A workers government with Communist participation.
5. A genuinely proletarian workers government, which, in its pure form, can be embodied only in the Communist party.
http://johnriddell.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/a-workers-government-as-a-step-toward-socialism/
There were at that time three previous examples of workers governments, none of which fit neatly into this five-point schema. Thus:
The Paris Commune, an elected revolutionary workers government at war with a still-existing bourgeois regime.
The early Soviet republic: as noted, a coalition regime based on revolutionary workers and peasants soviets.
The revolutionary governments of Bavaria and Hungary in 1919, where, as Chris Harman and Tim Potter have noted, bourgeois power virtually collapsed. The workers government came into being and afterwards had to create the structure of proletarian power.
The resolution also said nothing regarding the government that might result in the colonial and semi-colonial countries from the struggle for an anti-imperialist united front. This question was urgently posed in the years following the congress in China, where a mistaken Comintern policy resulted in a calamitous defeat. In the year of that setback, the United Opposition in the Bolshevik Party, led by Trotsky and Zinoviev, formulated a governmental proposal for China based on the Bolshevik strategic arsenal from the years before 1917: a revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. Trotsky was soon to repudiate the concept. Nonetheless, it remains among the possible variants of a workers and peasants government.
Comments:
The way I see it, there are two kinds of workers government that can be supported by revolutionary socialists without a call for a political revolution. These are 1) revolutionary socialist government, and 2) democratic socialist government.
[...]
A democratic socialist government is one that is committed to better outcomes for working people. It does not recognize the necessity of abolishing Capitalism in order to produce better outcomes for working people, but will challenge Capitalism when it is clear that this is the only way to achieve better outcomes for workers. The ideology of this type of government may be summed up as socialism if necessary, but not necessarily socialism. It does not mind if it passes policy that leads to the destruction of Capitalist businesses, or entire sectors of the Capitalist economy, if the state or non-profit sectors of the economy are able to carry out any necessary functions formerly performed by these capitalists (ex. food distribution).
The foreign policy of this kind of government may be problematic It will generally not participate in imperialist wars, but may cooperate with repressive regimes as a means of securing the national interest.
This kind of government also generally believes that the power of the capitalists can only be legitimately challenged via the legislative process, and in the event that workers try to defeat the capitalists on their own, such a government will generally side with the capitalists.
This kind of a government is supportable for two reasons:
1) This kind of government will ultimately recognize that the only way to improve outcomes for working people is to challenge the power of the capitalists. Extra-parliamentary activism can generally be quite effective in getting this kind of a government to implement policies that benefit working people and challenge the power of the capitalists.
2) In the event that the working class truly begins to win the global class struggle against capitalism, this kind of government would be unlikely to prevent the working class from finally overthrowing Capitalism.
Obviously, this kind of government needs to be criticized if and when it implements policies that are not in the interest of working people yet the essential character of such a government determines that criticism ought not to descend into outright opposition unless the essential character of the government is deemed to have changed.
Why did the Comintern have a slippery definition of workers government? Because it moved away somewhat from propagandism and because workers government was a good slogan to use.
Lets take a step further back, near to the beginning, in the Communist Manifesto:
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
No so-called bourgeois workers party that lays claim to Labour or Social-Democratic or even Democratic Socialist labels aspires towards any of the three goals above, while petit-bourgeois workers parties do not aspire towards the last goal and seek to replace bourgeois hegemony with some other form of non-worker hegemony. For obvious reasons, vulgar vanguardists and their philosophical or conspiratorial circle-sects dont bother with the first goal and substitute themselves for the working class in the third goal.
In modern parlance, the first two goals are the transformation of the working class in itself into a class for itself and the establishment of worker-class hegemony at the expense of bourgeois hegemony. The third goal expresses itself in the implementation of the recovery-in-progress Marx-Engels minimum program, whereby individual demands could easily be implemented without eliminating the bourgeois state order, but whereby full implementation would mean that the working class will have expropriated ruling-class political power in policymaking, legislation, execution-administration, and other areas. This Marx-Engels minimum program can be implemented without workers councils at all, though it cannot be implemented without worker-class party-movements as big or bigger than the pre-war SPD.
So what exactly is this Marx-Engels minimum program in todays terms? Something like this:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/class-strugglist-democracy-t112390/index.html
I suggest a better term right from Marx and Engels themselves, one that cant be sloganeered but one that can drive home the point more accurately: Proletarian-Not-Necessarily-Communist or Proletocratic-Not-Necessarily-Communist.
[Also consider: http://communiststudents.org.uk/?p=524]
http://johnriddell.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/workers-government-the-realities-of-our-era-are-different/
John has documented the Cominterns development of the demand for a workers government as an element of the united front approach (I think the term class-struggle government (CSG) is a better term to use today). Although there was confusion in the 1922 Comintern discussion and resolution, its best element involved the demand to form a government of working-class forces in a capitalist state that would launch a resolute struggle at least to achieve the workers most important immediate demands against the bourgeoisie. Such a government would result in a bitter struggle with the bourgeoisie. This might lead to revolutionary struggle for socialist democracy.