Die Neue Zeit
23rd February 2013, 03:45
http://cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/950/comintern-review-not-a-school-of-strategy
Last September John Riddell, on his blog, discussing the question of government as it (apparently) faced Syriza in Greece, characterised the Communist International as a “school of socialist strategy”. This would be a pretty good reason for socialists shelling out for the Haymarket edition of Toward the united front and ploughing through its 1,300 pages. The book is an excellent one and study of it is valuable. But the idea that the early Comintern is a “school of socialist strategy” is a mistake.
[...]
The slogan of the “workers’ government”, or “workers’ and farmers’ government” adopted at the Fourth Congress was ill-thought-through. Subsequent lefts have been unable to make sense of it under the conditions for which it was intended - of serious crisis of capitalist states. What was missing was a minimum programme which would provide the basis for defining conditions under which communists would be prepared to participate in, or support, governments. Government participation wrecked Rifondazione Comunista in Italy in 2006. The Danish Enhedslisten seems to be on the road to discrediting itself by support for the austerity budget of a ‘social-liberal’ government. The question (in the event, illusory) of a Syriza-led coalition government in 2012 has been debated within the SWP and among others, for example in comrade Riddell’s blog post cited above.
[...]
The idea of ‘transitional demands’, though it originated with the Germans, was at the Fourth Congress a fudge to deal with Bukharin and his co-thinkers’ opposition to the need for Comintern to adopt a minimum programme. It has since licensed among Trotskyists, the only communist trend to adopt it, both a regression to the ‘left economism’ of Ryazanov and (independently) Trotsky in 1904, and a variety of sub-minimum programmes severely politically weaker than the old 1891 Erfurt programme of the SPD.
[...]
This issue relates back to ‘Bolshevisation’: if communist party unity involves the absence of public criticism, it becomes impossible to justify to socialist or Labourite workers why united-front unity is possible in the presence of sharp criticisms of their leaders.
If, in the face of this problem, the right to criticise and therefore to split is prioritised, the result is ‘third period’ sectarianism; if unity is prioritised over the right to criticise, the result is to make the communists merely bag-carriers for the ‘official lefts’ or whoever else is the target of the unity policy.
Comrade Riddell’s article on the origins of the united front policy could not begin with the December 1921 Comintern executive committee Theses on the united front,15 but started - in fact - with the First International. But to attach Comintern’s limited united front tactic to the First International is to silently misinterpret both the evolution of Marxist policy on unity before 1914, and the united front tactic itself.
We have to begin in the same place, or rather even earlier: with the famous statement in section 1 of the Communist manifesto:
In what relation do the communists stand to the proletarians as a whole? The communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working class parties [meaning by ‘other working class parties’, as is clarified in section 4, only the Chartists in Britain and their sister organisation, the National Reformers in the US] ... 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.
The meaning of “formation of the proletariat into a class” is given, as an objective process, towards the end of section : “organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently, into a political party”.
In other words, the immediate aim of the communists in the Communist manifesto - shared with the [left] Chartists and the National Reformers - is the formation of a single political party of the proletariat with the aim of the proletariat taking political power.
This aim of a single political organisation of the proletariat - more than just unity in action, but unity in forming political policy - was shared by the 1864 Inaugural address written by Marx for the First International [...]
Meanwhile in Germany, the General German Workers’ Association (ADAV) was launched in May 1863, with Ferdinand Lassalle as its first president. Its single immediate aim was universal male suffrage, with the ulterior aim of winning state-supported worker cooperatives: the ADAV initially counterposed this policy to support for trade unions. It was, nonetheless, an independent political party of the working class, and Marx and Engels celebrated it as such in spite of their criticisms of Lassalle and his politics.
[...]
In 1875 the SDAP and ADAV fused at Gotha to form the Socialist Workers Party of Germany (SAP). The Gotha unification is today primarily remembered on the left for Marx’s Critique of the Gotha programme. But its immediate impact was very different. It fused two small organisations - 15,322 mandates from the ADAV and 9,121 from the SDAP - on a compromise political platform, but on the SDAP’s conceptions of party organisation and relations with the trade unions: not a single central dictator, but an elaborate scheme of sovereign annual conference, central executive with limited powers, and wide local autonomy; not party-controlled, but organisationally independent trade unions. The unification produced ‘take-off’, with SAP membership and press circulation doubling in a year and continuing to grow afterwards, and votes growing even under illegality between 1878 and 1890. The SAP was on the road to the mass workers’ party that the SPD became.
[...]
It is for this reason that the RSDWP was not a general workers’ party with no political preconditions, a Labour Party - which the ‘liquidators’ sought to create in 1908 and after. Like the SPD, it was founded on a short general political programme. But equally, like the SPD, it was characterised by promoting independent trade unions, by wide practical autonomy of the local organisations, and by public internal debate.
First, the German party and trade union right broke with the model. The ‘revisionists’ had in a sense already abandoned the idea of an independent workers’ party, shared by the Eisenachers and Lassalleans, in favour of that of broader ‘left’ coalitions. The collapse of the majority of the party left and centre in Germany left them in control. From the beginning of the war they collaborated with the state to enforce the Burgfrieden or anti-strike policy, resulting in increasing controls on local organisations. By late 1916 they were unwilling to tolerate growing internal opposition and in January 1917 expelled the group which formed the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD).
[...]
The rigging of Soviet elections in order to get the Brest-Litovsk peace through, and effective if incomplete suppression of opposition parties from autumn 1918, meant that the Bolsheviks were ruling as a minority.
The capitalist class rules in parliamentary regimes with broad suffrage through a number of mechanisms. Particularly important in day-to-day politics are the duopoly of parties of corrupt ‘professional politicians’, who can pose radical while out of office but govern in the interests of capital when elected, and the corrupt character of the advertising-funded press and other media.
[...]
‘Bolshevisation’ failed to achieve its aim, just as the ban on factions and membership purges spectacularly failed to deal with the problems of petty bourgeois influence, patronage and corruption (blat) in the Russian communist party. The bureaucracy which had to enforce these measures turned out to be, if anything, more prone to corruption and patronage than the majority of those purged; and the ban on factions worked against accountability of these bureaucrats and of the elected representatives. In effect, it constituted a return to the labour monarchism of Lassalle: expressed in the personality cults of party leaders.
However, on these problems it is clear from the subsequent history that Comintern simply got the answer wrong. It does not help to attempt to cast the mantle of 1917 over this mistake, as Alex Callinicos does; or to blame Grigory Zinoviev for wrong decisions to which Lenin and Trotsky were parties, as several authors do; or to suggest that we start again on a Bakuninist (‘network’) or Bernsteinist (‘broad party’) basis. Bakuninism has failed over the last 140 years as repeatedly as ‘Leninism’; the ‘broad party’ idea rests on the illusion that the official labour bureaucrats who (for example) purged Socialist Party militants in Unison, are somehow more democratic than the leaders of far-left sects. Our starting point - necessarily, not our finishing point - has to be the partyism which Bolshevism, before ‘Bolshevisation’ and ‘Leninism’, inherited from the SPD.
Also to consider: Programme and Party: Broad bad, mass good (http://cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/950/programme-and-party-broad-bad-mass-good)
Last September John Riddell, on his blog, discussing the question of government as it (apparently) faced Syriza in Greece, characterised the Communist International as a “school of socialist strategy”. This would be a pretty good reason for socialists shelling out for the Haymarket edition of Toward the united front and ploughing through its 1,300 pages. The book is an excellent one and study of it is valuable. But the idea that the early Comintern is a “school of socialist strategy” is a mistake.
[...]
The slogan of the “workers’ government”, or “workers’ and farmers’ government” adopted at the Fourth Congress was ill-thought-through. Subsequent lefts have been unable to make sense of it under the conditions for which it was intended - of serious crisis of capitalist states. What was missing was a minimum programme which would provide the basis for defining conditions under which communists would be prepared to participate in, or support, governments. Government participation wrecked Rifondazione Comunista in Italy in 2006. The Danish Enhedslisten seems to be on the road to discrediting itself by support for the austerity budget of a ‘social-liberal’ government. The question (in the event, illusory) of a Syriza-led coalition government in 2012 has been debated within the SWP and among others, for example in comrade Riddell’s blog post cited above.
[...]
The idea of ‘transitional demands’, though it originated with the Germans, was at the Fourth Congress a fudge to deal with Bukharin and his co-thinkers’ opposition to the need for Comintern to adopt a minimum programme. It has since licensed among Trotskyists, the only communist trend to adopt it, both a regression to the ‘left economism’ of Ryazanov and (independently) Trotsky in 1904, and a variety of sub-minimum programmes severely politically weaker than the old 1891 Erfurt programme of the SPD.
[...]
This issue relates back to ‘Bolshevisation’: if communist party unity involves the absence of public criticism, it becomes impossible to justify to socialist or Labourite workers why united-front unity is possible in the presence of sharp criticisms of their leaders.
If, in the face of this problem, the right to criticise and therefore to split is prioritised, the result is ‘third period’ sectarianism; if unity is prioritised over the right to criticise, the result is to make the communists merely bag-carriers for the ‘official lefts’ or whoever else is the target of the unity policy.
Comrade Riddell’s article on the origins of the united front policy could not begin with the December 1921 Comintern executive committee Theses on the united front,15 but started - in fact - with the First International. But to attach Comintern’s limited united front tactic to the First International is to silently misinterpret both the evolution of Marxist policy on unity before 1914, and the united front tactic itself.
We have to begin in the same place, or rather even earlier: with the famous statement in section 1 of the Communist manifesto:
In what relation do the communists stand to the proletarians as a whole? The communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working class parties [meaning by ‘other working class parties’, as is clarified in section 4, only the Chartists in Britain and their sister organisation, the National Reformers in the US] ... 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.
The meaning of “formation of the proletariat into a class” is given, as an objective process, towards the end of section : “organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently, into a political party”.
In other words, the immediate aim of the communists in the Communist manifesto - shared with the [left] Chartists and the National Reformers - is the formation of a single political party of the proletariat with the aim of the proletariat taking political power.
This aim of a single political organisation of the proletariat - more than just unity in action, but unity in forming political policy - was shared by the 1864 Inaugural address written by Marx for the First International [...]
Meanwhile in Germany, the General German Workers’ Association (ADAV) was launched in May 1863, with Ferdinand Lassalle as its first president. Its single immediate aim was universal male suffrage, with the ulterior aim of winning state-supported worker cooperatives: the ADAV initially counterposed this policy to support for trade unions. It was, nonetheless, an independent political party of the working class, and Marx and Engels celebrated it as such in spite of their criticisms of Lassalle and his politics.
[...]
In 1875 the SDAP and ADAV fused at Gotha to form the Socialist Workers Party of Germany (SAP). The Gotha unification is today primarily remembered on the left for Marx’s Critique of the Gotha programme. But its immediate impact was very different. It fused two small organisations - 15,322 mandates from the ADAV and 9,121 from the SDAP - on a compromise political platform, but on the SDAP’s conceptions of party organisation and relations with the trade unions: not a single central dictator, but an elaborate scheme of sovereign annual conference, central executive with limited powers, and wide local autonomy; not party-controlled, but organisationally independent trade unions. The unification produced ‘take-off’, with SAP membership and press circulation doubling in a year and continuing to grow afterwards, and votes growing even under illegality between 1878 and 1890. The SAP was on the road to the mass workers’ party that the SPD became.
[...]
It is for this reason that the RSDWP was not a general workers’ party with no political preconditions, a Labour Party - which the ‘liquidators’ sought to create in 1908 and after. Like the SPD, it was founded on a short general political programme. But equally, like the SPD, it was characterised by promoting independent trade unions, by wide practical autonomy of the local organisations, and by public internal debate.
First, the German party and trade union right broke with the model. The ‘revisionists’ had in a sense already abandoned the idea of an independent workers’ party, shared by the Eisenachers and Lassalleans, in favour of that of broader ‘left’ coalitions. The collapse of the majority of the party left and centre in Germany left them in control. From the beginning of the war they collaborated with the state to enforce the Burgfrieden or anti-strike policy, resulting in increasing controls on local organisations. By late 1916 they were unwilling to tolerate growing internal opposition and in January 1917 expelled the group which formed the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD).
[...]
The rigging of Soviet elections in order to get the Brest-Litovsk peace through, and effective if incomplete suppression of opposition parties from autumn 1918, meant that the Bolsheviks were ruling as a minority.
The capitalist class rules in parliamentary regimes with broad suffrage through a number of mechanisms. Particularly important in day-to-day politics are the duopoly of parties of corrupt ‘professional politicians’, who can pose radical while out of office but govern in the interests of capital when elected, and the corrupt character of the advertising-funded press and other media.
[...]
‘Bolshevisation’ failed to achieve its aim, just as the ban on factions and membership purges spectacularly failed to deal with the problems of petty bourgeois influence, patronage and corruption (blat) in the Russian communist party. The bureaucracy which had to enforce these measures turned out to be, if anything, more prone to corruption and patronage than the majority of those purged; and the ban on factions worked against accountability of these bureaucrats and of the elected representatives. In effect, it constituted a return to the labour monarchism of Lassalle: expressed in the personality cults of party leaders.
However, on these problems it is clear from the subsequent history that Comintern simply got the answer wrong. It does not help to attempt to cast the mantle of 1917 over this mistake, as Alex Callinicos does; or to blame Grigory Zinoviev for wrong decisions to which Lenin and Trotsky were parties, as several authors do; or to suggest that we start again on a Bakuninist (‘network’) or Bernsteinist (‘broad party’) basis. Bakuninism has failed over the last 140 years as repeatedly as ‘Leninism’; the ‘broad party’ idea rests on the illusion that the official labour bureaucrats who (for example) purged Socialist Party militants in Unison, are somehow more democratic than the leaders of far-left sects. Our starting point - necessarily, not our finishing point - has to be the partyism which Bolshevism, before ‘Bolshevisation’ and ‘Leninism’, inherited from the SPD.
Also to consider: Programme and Party: Broad bad, mass good (http://cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/950/programme-and-party-broad-bad-mass-good)